Maohden Vol. 2 by Hideyuki Kikuchi Read Free Book Online Page B

a sharp stinging around his neck.
    The shrill cry that followed was not one of pain, but Kunishige Yamada’s kiai .
    It hardly seemed possible, for the lasso Gento had thrown was the same as Setsura’s titanium devil wires. But Yamada’s hands and feet flashed like steel and severed them like cotton string.
    “I take it you haven’t seen my Dimensional Blade?” Yamada declared. He brimmed with confidence as he prowled forward like a cat stalking an unwary mouse.
    Parting the air with enough speed to leave a vacuum in its wake created a scythe of wind that could lacerate exposed flesh. Yamada’s hands moved like the cracking of a whip, many times faster than the speed of sound. Faster than the human body should be capable of.
    The vacuum in the air spawned a dimensional dislocation that swallowed up anything entering into its space—even devil wires—and rent apart when the void slammed shut.
    This was the cutting edge of the Dimensional Blade. Aside from Setsura Aki, the man who wielded it might well be the most fearsome enemy Gento Roran had ever encountered.
    “A friendly warning,” Yamada said, fixing Gento in his sights. “Unlike any weapon made of metal, the Dimensional Blade is not confined by length. That hollow shell and the real you, that pretty prize as well—I shall deal justice like Solomon and cleave them all in two.”
    Mayumi’s naked body rested unmoving on the platform.
    Yamada shifted his stance, severed the charging Siegfried in two, top to bottom, and then similarly bisected Gento behind him. Victory was his—
    But it was his own head sailing into the air. Looking down he saw his own blood gouting onto his torso. And the young man—standing next to the second corpse—smiling up at him.
    As his consciousness dimmed into oblivion, Yamada realized that the second victim was the Baron.
    Gento Roran had made more than one dead man dance, a truly fearsome talent. Sharing the shadows with the Baron’s body, and then convincing Yamada that Gento was behind the charging Siegfried, he’d made the critical substitution at the last second.
    With all his senses focused on the battle before him, Yamada hadn’t anticipated a third ambush waiting in the wings. Penetrating the void in the careless moment he believed he’d triumphed, Gento instead dispatched him to the great beyond.
    The smell of blood wafting on the breeze, the stands still as a cemetery, this battle belonged more in nightmares.
    “I have indeed beheld your Dimensional Blade, but you will be a lot more useful after this.” Gento stretched out his right hand. Yamada’s head fell with a thump onto his palm. “And now, my seal.”
    As he strode toward the platform, an equally confident inquiry stopped him in his tracks.
    “Perhaps I could trouble you for a rematch, for as long as I am not me ?”
    Setsura Aki’s words rang out like black pearls, made all the more beautiful by the darkness.

Part 3: Angel in Chains

Chapter 1
    Gento didn’t turn around. The battle was already on. Setsura could have taken his head had he not given him a fighting chance.
    “A chivalrous man,” Gento said, though with neither sarcasm nor surprise. The simple truth. He might have even harbored an honestly grateful thought in that moment.
    “You can keep that head you have,” Setsura said softly.
    Had they been two men standing around talking in the darkness, such a statement could only be taken at face value. However, the one stood in the gloom outside the ring of light, while the other bore in his right hand a dripping, severed head.
    Nobody around them budged. To the spectators and the people running the show, it was as if the stage had suddenly shifted to a separate precinct of Hell.
    “Well, that’s a dilemma,” said Gento. “I don’t want to lose either. Another twenty paces and the seal is mine. Waste not, want not.”
    “I couldn’t agree more,” Setsura said, in what could only be an invitation to the Death Match of the