Devastation
Chapter three
Kenji
Sighing, I opened my eyes.
Reo had been watching me the whole time. He saw it land on my face. "The Lion will deliver?"
"He will. The only question is how much." I went over to the other table, picked up my mask, and looked at it.
The Wanyūdō mask bore the face of a demon judge sent to drag sinners toward hell.
Charred black wood covered the surface while thin gold fractures split across the cheeks like trapped fire. The mouth stretched wide in a skeletal grin filled with iron-colored teeth. Deep ember-red eyes watched from beneath heavy carved brows.
Japanese legends claimed Wanyūdō once walked the earth as a cruel samurai who delighted in suffering. After death, hell refused to let him rest. His soul fused with a burning ox-cart wheel and he became one of the jailers of the damned.
Now, he rolled through the streets at night collecting sinners for punishment. Mothers in Kyoto warned their children never to be outside after dark when they heard wheels scraping across stone.
But for me, the mask represented punishment.
Final judgment.
The moment mercy ended.
And that was the only thing my brother and father deserved.
I looked up at Reo. “The craftsmen did good with the masks.”
“I agree, especially in such short time.” He came over and picked up his.
Tsuchigumo.
The ancient spider demon who lured warriors into hidden webs beneath the mountains and fed on them slowly. Legends described him as patient, intelligent, and impossible to escape once he marked his prey.
Black wood shaped the face into narrow predatory angles while thin gold webbing spread across the forehead and cheeks in jagged fractures. The eyes slanted sharp and half-lidded beneath heavy carved brows. Small ivory fangs rested at the corners of the mouth.
Reo checked his watch. “We need to get everyone in position.”
“Any word from Tokyo?”
“Akiro's men are loading, but they haven't all taken off yet.”
“What do they see?”
“Four helicopters, Black Hawk, transporting thirty armed men each. Two have already taken off. Five more attack helicopters, Apache class with door-mounted heavy weapons and rockets. Those are loaded with men too and are presently waiting.”
I gritted my teeth.
“One small recon helicopter from the scout class is already heading our way.”
“Get that shot down immediately.”
“That’s the order. Our men are waiting.” Reo nodded. “Then, we have the five large transport planes, C-130 Hercules class. They carry 60 to 90 men each.”
“Approximate total?”
"Roughly six hundred armed men and fifteen aircraft incoming. If Akiro is smart, he’ll have them land in three waves."
“Akiro didn’t have this much firepower before.”
“Neither did the Fox.”
“I bet there are pretty little French flowers on those wings.”
“Could be.”
“When we win this war and count the dead in the morning, confirm if the Butcher gave my father any of this.”
“I will.” Reo sighed. “Akiro’s private jet is being loaded too. He has not left the hotel yet, but men are loading it.”
“Good. My father will be jumping on that jet with him.” I headed off and barely made it three steps before the war room changed.
The wall of televisions flickered all at once. Every screen. Every channel. The same thing.
A Scale near the monitors went still. Then another. Conversation died across the room as one head after another lifted toward the wall, and I turned with them.
NHK. TBS. Fuji. CNN. BBC. Every feed carried the same orange bloom against the same black Tokyo sky.
Goddamn it, Lion.
Hotel Gajoen burned. My father lay in a bed somewhere inside that elegant old corpse with tubes in his arms, and the Lion had just set it on fire from the heavens. Of course that part was good.
But the Lion had not stopped at the hotel.
The camera pulled wide, and my stomach dropped.
The whole block was gone.
What the fuck?!
A second explosion lit the feed, then a third, walking down the street in a line of fire, and the screens jumped to a different angle—a traffic camera, maybe, or a phone—and I watched a row of shops and apartments fold inward like wet paper.
Glass rained down across a crosswalk. A car alarm screamed under the roar.
Then the feed cut to Meguro.
No. Not Meguro too.
The Meguro River, the one tourists photographed under the cherry blossoms every spring, ran past a strip of restaurants and galleries a few blocks from the hotel.
Now smoke poured off the water. A famous wedding hall on the bank had its entire face blown out, and people streamed away from it into the street, hundreds of them, running, falling, dragging each other.
My heart broke.
A woman ran past the camera with blood streaking down her cheek.
A man carried a child who was not moving.
The chyron crawled along the bottom of the screen in fast white Japanese. “Multiple coordinated explosions. Central Meguro. Casualties unknown. Authorities urging residents to evacuate.”
The English feed on the next screen over said it colder. “brEAKING: Dozens feared dead in series of Tokyo blasts. Number expected to rise.”
I stared at the screens and did not move.
Bombs only know how to explode, not to differentiate.
The Lion had told me that.
And now a man on the screen was carrying a child who would not wake up.
On the feed, the death count appeared as a small number in the corner.
Then it changed. Then it changed again. Each time it climbed, a fresh wave of murmuring moved through the war room, low and uneasy, men who killed for a living watching their city die and finding they still had something left in them to be sickened by.
I felt all of it.
The boy who would not move. The woman with the blood on her face. The surely packed wedding hall. The block that folded like paper. Every soul under that rubble who had done nothing tonight except live in the wrong city near the wrong old hotel where the wrong old man hid in a wrong old bed.
I felt every single one of them land somewhere deep in my chest and lodge there.
And I let none of it reach my face.
The Dragon could not flinch in front of his men on the night of his war. So I held my jaw still. I kept my eyes flat and open on the screens. I made my face into the mask I had not even put on yet—the demon judge, the one who dragged the damned toward hell, the one for whom mercy had already ended.
Yet. . .inside, I was screaming.
Dear God. . . .
"Turn it off." Reo yelled. "Now!"
The screens went black, one after another, until the wall was dark again and the orange light was gone from the room.
The murmuring stopped.
Reo stepped close to my shoulder and remained silent.
There was nothing to say that would not make it worse, and we both knew it. He had warned me.
Yet. . .for one moment his eyes met mine, and everything we were not saying sat there in the space between us.
Was it worth it? Will it ever be worth it? And how many more before sunrise?
I held his gaze and buried the horror for now—the boy, the woman, the rising death toll, and the block.
"Get everyone in position." My voice came out cold. "My father will be on that jet soon."
Reo studied me for one more breath and then signaled to the Fangs, Claws, and top Scales to follow. “Let’s go.”