Maohden Vol. 1 Read Online Free PDF

devoted to a game center, a massage parlor, and other diversions. The fifth floor and up held the offices of the Sanbo Group.
    The building wasn’t just another ferroconcrete structure. It was earthquake reinforced and equipped with blast walls that would withstand a direct hit from the latest handheld “Dart” missiles, the preferred weapon of choice in the terror trade.
    A little over an inch in diameter and ten inches long—the size of an emergency flare—two or three could be hidden in a loose-fitting jacket. Equipped with the frequency agile radar option, they could evade electronic jamming and hit targets two miles away with precision.
    For the old-school yakuza who located their headquarters in well-established buildings and locations, they were a terrific nuisance. As a result, gangs either relocated outside Shinjuku or rotated their operations among several safe houses on a daily basis. Or went totally mobile via high-speed data uplinks.
    In any case, an office nailed down to a single location was definitely not the current fashion. Sanbo Group was one of the few remaining brick-and-mortar outfits.
    Meaning that the outside walls were three layers thick, laminated with armor plating that could repel an attack with a missile or RPG. The radar site on the roof would calculate the coordinates from where the attack originated, and respond with surface-to-air and air-to-ground missiles launched from vertical silos.
    Out of sight of pedestrian traffic, two installations of large-bore, triple-barrel, auto-targeting laser cannons would spit out invisible beams of searing light.
    But what wrapped the building in an ominous air was not its defensive weapons systems, but a demonic aura that arose out of the miasmas lurking between the very molecules in the air. Or it was the miasma itself.
    Which suggested as well that the earth had been cursed from its very creation. At three o’clock in the morning, those miasmas were all the denser and pervasive. This was the time when the human metabolism sank to its lowest ebb, when hopes yielded to despair, love to loathing, joy to sadness.
    The time when Setsura Aki arrived.
    He silently approached the lobby. The crunching from beneath his feet sounded like he was treading on frosty ground. With every step, sparkling stardust fell from the soles of his boots. The ground had turned to glass—the result of being heated to tens of thousands of degrees. Not a gradual process but in a single burst.
    Scars left behind by a burst of laser power. The blast walls showed similar physical changes. Paint covered the damage left behind by older assaults, evidence of an ongoing arms race between offense and defense.
    Paying it no mind, Setsura pushed open the glass doors and stepped into the genkan . The hardened steel shutters hadn’t been lowered.
    If a rival gang caught sight of this situation, the Sanbo Group would have been wiped off the face of the earth in two seconds flat.
    The lobby lights glowed brightly inside the lobby, as if welcoming him. The whole thing was beyond belief. Only two reasons sprang to mind: the guards that night abandoned the building, or they’d given up trying to defend it. Either way, they’d bear the blame the rest of their lives.
    Into the situation, at three o’clock in the morning, stepped Setsura Aki.
    The first floor game center was empty. The garishly-painted American-style pinball machines and video arcade cabinets plastered with posters sat there like haunted tombstones in a grotesque graveyard.
    Setsura crossed the room to the elevators at the back. The power was on. He pushed the up button. The doors opened, as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He got on. A few seconds later, he arrived at the seventh floor.
    The hallway was filled with light.
    Setsura walked with muffled footsteps. Quieter than any rubber soles. Silence uninterrupted by even a breath or a heartbeat. It was like a brilliant watchmaker had poured moonlight into the veins of a doll,