Free Maohden Vol. 2 by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page A

on such a graceful countenance. The beauty of both of them upset the common sense of the world.
    “Hey,” said Setsura, slapping Mephisto’s right hand with his left. Though it might have looked more like the one lay atop the other.
    Mephisto’s smile rose to his lips like a pair of rose petals. “What a heartless man you are. Is there not someplace in that you of yours that would be taken by some part of me ?”
    “ I am only taken by the fact that you are taken by me .”
    Setsura continued on his way, leaving Mephisto’s hand, the affectionate turn of his fingers, suspended there in the air.
    The door opened and closed. The sudden draft buffeted Mephisto’s pale face. The dusky shadows were beginning to fade, the night in its final throes.
    “So little time to woo one’s dearly beloved.”
    The Demon Physician gazed forlornly out the gray window, before turning to the computer display of the refrigerator containing the body parts he’d retrieved from the Coliseum.
    Walking down Yasukuni Avenue, like wending his way through murky ocean depths, Setsura recognized several figures in front of him. He heard them before becoming aware of their brisk movements, the sound of nails being pounded into wood.
    Staring through the breaking dawn, he murmured to himself, “Night of the Falcon?”
    The cut of his features was unchanged, but this was the nonchalant mien of an ordinary senbei shop owner. Not slackening his pace, he passed by the construction site. The men in work clothes were silently erecting what looked like an altar.
    Two hours earlier, when Mephisto strode down this same road toward the hospital, the street had been empty. Already the structure was three feet high by ten feet long and wide.
    These were fast workers, wearing mask-like expressions as they concentrated on the task at hand, laying down a board, hammering down the nails with a single blow each. Two seconds, two nails. With the metronomic precision of a machine.
    Setsura paused. Masked by the echoes of the hammers, he heard something else.
    A feral roar.
    It came from directly before him. Then from his right, coming down Yamate Street, an exchange of howls.
    “Two-headed dogs having breakfast, eh?”
    Setsura scratched his head. A second later, from the other side of the lane of asphalt reaching towards Yotsuya—from Yoyogi and Harajuku—from every direction this “boardwalk” seemed intended to reach—they steadily approached.
    Four-legged beasts. Dogs. The number of heads didn’t match the number of bodies. The two-headed dogs of Shinjuku were the most famous of the strange fruit sprouting from those genetic repositories unleashed by the Devil Quake.
    Six feet long, some growing as big as nine feet. Brutal in disposition, the natural enemies of all other living things, specializing in unrelenting attacks. Their rugged jaws and diamond-hard teeth could crush concrete. The gouges left in the south wall of the New Isetan department store—where they sharpened their fangs—were testament enough.
    Even worse, each of the two heads acted independently from each other, and with a keen intelligence. One could attack from the front, and the other from the side. If a foe faced them from the rear, guaranteed one would be baring its fangs in that direction too.
    The dogs formed packs that hid out in abandoned buildings and caverns beneath the piles of debris. Some proved even too violent for the pack and were driven out. These man-eating rogue males prompted extermination drives, though in the more remote neighborhoods and street corners the legs and arms of torn-apart human beings could still be found.
    Even commando police in full riot gear could at best hope to inflict enough wounds to discourage them.
    Barking and howling in a choir of feral call and response, thirty dogs all but flew down the avenues. A normal person could hold them off for five seconds at most, before being devoured down to the marrow of their bones.
    Setsura glanced at the