Free Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition by Hideyuki Kikuchi

first day she visited Shinjuku.
    She heard Suiki say something. From the far-away sound of his voice, he must be leaving.
    â€œThis terrifying enemy that Master Ra spoke of not long ago—he hasn’t shown up yet, apparently.”
    Sayaka was amazed—that these creatures would refer to something as “terrifying.” And an enemy —perhaps—
    â€œI do not know. Whatever sort of chap he is, in the face of my powers he will fare no better than these humans.” Doki spoke in unabashedly confident tones.
    â€œThat is true too,” Suiki chuckled.
    Listening to the laughter of the two demons, Sayaka felt a spark of hope begin to grow in her chest. He was coming!
    With her on his shoulder, Doki went through the turnstiles and climbed the stairs to the exit.
    Then on the once-again tranquil station platform, a solitary figure appeared. Shorty. He’d been conscious since the demons appeared, but had played it safe and pretended to be dead.
    â€œ Damn . Monsters. Killed Ichi and Sav, and snatched the cutie as well. No way I’m letting that slide on my turf. You hold on there, Miss. I’ll rescue you.”
    Muffling his footsteps, Shorty trailed after Doki.
    Inside the Sanchome station on the Tokyo Metro Marunouchi line, where his two companions had been felled by magical means unimaginable and unconstrained, a deathly silence returned to the lifeless platform.

Part Four
    Kyoya was in Waseda. From his home in Mejirodai, he’d taken the Tsurumakicho bridge into Demon City. It was two in the morning. Just an hour before, Sayaka had been hauled away by a pair of demons. But of course, Kyoya knew nothing about that.
    Right now he was burning with indignation. “I don’t believe it! All the hotels are closed. What, they afraid the monsters are gonna carry off their daughters? They’re the ones I came here to face off against.”
    His anger was somewhat misplaced but not necessarily far off the mark.
    Despite its reputation, not everybody in Demon City was a criminal or yakuza. Some of those who’d escaped the jaws of death at the time of the Devil Quake had returned to their homes. Some whose family members or relatives had been killed moved into the abandoned houses. As a matter of course, they avoided those locations where the rowdier element held sway. Making up for the dearth of law enforcement in Demon City, they banded together to form self-policed areas.
    The former grounds of Waseda University was one such safety zone.
    The especially dangerous places in Shinjuku Ward—the shopping districts around the train stations, the Kabuki-cho and Hanazono neighborhoods—were rarely talked about in the outside world. At best, the heavily armed and equipped commando police made the rounds once a month. And then there were the rumors of reporters and television crews who’d snuck in and were never heard from again.
    As a result, the mainstream media either wildly speculated or confined their reporting to the nominal safety of places like Waseda and Ochiai.
    A video camera the size of a mole could be glued to the body and carried anywhere. The problem was, images from Shinjuku promising to show the thrill and danger simply didn’t. In the past, spy cameras had been smuggled into the High Street over and over. But all anybody ever saw on the screens were vast canvases of gray.
    The demonic spirits inhabiting Shinjuku—Demon City—coveted their privacy such that nothing transmitted by radio waves was allowed in or out.
    Through the virtual worldwide pipelines created by communications satellites and light fiber networks, the information society of the twenty-first century delivered to computers in every home more data in a day than any normal person could digest in a lifetime.
    Perhaps no place on earth better epitomized these digital achievements than the Tokyo megalopolis. Thus the irony that smack dab in the middle of this most modern of post-modern