Free Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 2 by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page B

head was full of steaming muck. The bright face of that college coed was planted there like an orchid in his mind. Even granting that she’d gotten in way over her head of her own accord, she’d tasted Ryuuki’s terrors at his shop and then voluntarily stuck with him all the way to the hospital, where she’d met a much worse fate.
    There was no way he could just walk away from her now. It was possible that other victims like Takako were multiplying somewhere in this city at this very moment.
    What made vampires so truly terrifying was their ability to reproduce so quickly in such a fashion. Once bitten, the victims became vampires as well, and then turned on their friends and family without mercy.
    Demon City Shinjuku was like a cancerous cell in the body of the peaceful world. The bloody flower bloomed in the darkness, and before anybody knew it, was wafting its pollen into the air and gently coaxing open the petals in another garden. There was no way to predict what manner of annihilation awaited them.
    Whenever the thought crossed his mind, the roiling impatience made his eyes glow with an ominous light and brought a thin smile to his lips. The labored stride of this young man—who alone understood the true terrors of the situation—concealed the inner strength and resolve necessary to stand against the darkness.
    Approaching a row of prefab houses, he stopped in his tracks. In a crook in the road, where the main thoroughfare hung a dogleg to the right, an expected pall of silence suddenly fell.
    These prefab houses were vacant. A poisonous miasma hit his nostrils.
    The effects of the Devil Quake were not limited to plants and animals, but worked their way into the air and soil. The miasma that had emptied out the residential district in Arakimachi was one such result.
    These changes occurred at the molecular level. The earth absorbed the phantom winds and coughed out the gasses in an unending stream. To make matters worse, it didn’t happen until a year after the residences were rebuilt, and seemed to target the people living there.
    Miraculously, the gasses contained no components harmful to human life. On the contrary, they proved quite effective at eradicating certain monster species. But the stinging acrid smell couldn’t be filtered or treated or sealed off. In a month, everybody had moved away.
    Only one man remained behind. Setsura found such half-crazed bullheadedness amusing. But he hadn’t fully considered the source of such bullheadedness.
    A possibly fatal blunder for a Demon City P.I.
    The house he was looking for was the same as all the other prefab houses. Except that it had that particular air of being lived in. Setsura still wasn’t aware that about an hour before, an old man with white hair and a white beard appeared in front of that house and slipped like a shadow into the foyer.
    Several seconds later the house had swayed and shook and collapsed without a sound. Standing in the midst of the rubble, the old man dropped a small cube at his feet. Smoky liquid streamed out as if from an atomizer and enveloped the entire house and the ground it once stood on.
    The box trembled like a living thing. In a twinkle it grew to the size of the house, reproducing its exterior walls as an exact duplicate, down to the location of the windows and doors and the preexisting damage to the walls.
    A short while later, the old man himself appeared at the front door. He smiled a malicious smile. At the end of the walk he turned right and disappeared down the street.
    After the front door closed, leaving just a hairline crack behind, a faint, honey-like odor wafted up around the house for several yards in every direction.
    Setsura stopped a dozen feet from the house, the brakes applied by a sixth sense that had steered the manhunter clear of many bloody obstacles before. He didn’t understand exactly why, but a fog of danger surrounded the house.
    Still, he kept on going. An odor he