The new gear was pretty much the old one, just not destroyed. I got a new anti-radiation armor suit, which still looked like a work suit, a fresh assault rifle, a short shotgun, two guns, three hand grenades, and a backpack full of vortex bombs. Everything looked like Isabella brought it for me on her plane.

  While I wanted more supplies for Francesca, I didn’t dare to ask.

  Takezo, on the other hand, got nothing. He came to the portal exactly the same as he left his house this morning, the katana hanging by his waist.

  So, I was the pack mule.

  He wasn’t even that much higher level, and was an untiring demon on top of that.

  But no, I had to carry all the stuff.

  We gathered in front of the portal underneath the Yamato Tower, all the usual soldiers gone, just the four of us in there.

  “So,” Isabella said. “The demons must have had help from Earth to get there. There are three ways to find out what help. The first one is the portal site, which is under a collapsed skyscraper. You can’t get there. The second one is the ship, to which you also can’t get. That leaves the third one, capturing one of her lieutenants to get the information out of them.”

  A lieutenant? Was she crazy? Well, yes, but usually not in this way. “How are we supposed to find, identify, and capture one?”

  Saito cleared his throat. “Identifying one isn’t difficult. There are three of them.”

  Wind blew around him and formed three misty portraits in the air. One woman with wicked horns and a trail of scales running down her face, a man in a suit and a shirt, with short brown hair and features so sharp he looked as if chiseled from granite, and another man, with a gaunt visage, narrow face, and overgrown hair.

  “These are the three lieutenants of Kallisto. Hell Anne, Siegfried, and Salieu. Siegfried is likely on the ship, organizing everything. But both Anne and Salieu are likely to be hunting around, she hunts for people to torture, he for people to experiment on.”

  “How do you know their lieutenants, and what they look like?” I asked.

  Isabella rolled her eyes, gracing me with the shut-up glance. “Demon princesses and their high demons are pretty well known. They don’t change much, if ever at all. We know what they look like because we have contacts from Hell, who know them personally. Anne is her huntress, so she’s likely moving around a lot. Salieu does her research, so he will have a laboratory somewhere.”

  Takezo shook his head. “Then you also know how powerful they are, even individually. These aren’t opponents we can fight.”

  “Which is why you have a backpack full of vortex bombs. You prepare a trap out of the bombs, bait one of the targets into the trap, and blow them up. They will survive it, but it should weaken them enough for you to capture them.”

  That sounded like she actually thought about it. I liked the idea, especially since the alternative was her spending the entire night partying with the succubi, and then making this plan up in fifteen minutes in the morning.

  I tucked the shotgun by my belt, flung the assault rifle’s strap over my shoulder, and headed for the portal.

  Takezo joined me, and we walked through the orange disc of light.

  “Wait,” Isabella snapped.

  We both stopped and turned towards her.

  “This will happen in two steps.” She reached into her jacket’s pocket to produce a small, steel pyramid. “First, Peter goes on, turns this on, waits for two minutes, and returns.” She lobbed the pyramid at me.

  I caught it, shrugged, and entered the portal.

  No demons around, so no reason to pay much attention to the city. I turned on the pyramid. The lights behind it started lighting up. One. Two. All of them. I waited.

  The pyramid turned off.

  It was probably done.

  I returned through the portal and carried the pyramid back to Isabella. “It either finished or it broke.”

  She took the pyramid, examining it. “Looks fine.” She returned it to her pocket.

  Takezo and Saito stared at us, clearly completely out of the loop.

  Isabella drew her phone. She unlocked it with her fingerprint and then furiously swiped all over the screen. “There we go. I’ve sent the navigation info to your phones, containing the detected locations of the lieutenants. The scans found three signatures that match high demons, so either of those would do.”

  Takezo and I both looked at our phones. I got an email with a map of Tokyo. Three areas shone with marks. “Got mine.”

  “Me too,” Takezo confirmed.

  “Peter’s map should update as his phone connects to the deployed drone network. It’s not terribly precise though, since someone didn’t bother deploying even half of the required number of drones.”

  Yeah, well, in my defense, I almost died the first two times I went in there. The third time, too, actually. But this time was going to be better. “Anyways,” I said. “Can we go now?”

  “Eager, aren’t you?” Isabella smirked. “Good. Go get yourself severely wounded, again.”

  How motivating. I walked through the portal.

  Takezo joined me in a moment.

  We came out the other side into the ruins of Tokyo, but it was worse than before. The sky was a sickly orange, shrouded by clouds that moved like living things. Buildings leaned against each other for support, windows blown out, streets buckled and choked with detritus.

  And it was quiet. Too quiet. Even the wind sounded like it was tiptoeing.

  We took a calm walk.

  “So,” I said. “Any idea where we could be going? We’ve got rough locations, but the city is massive. Knowing something about them would be useful.”

  “I know the places from before the city got nuked. No way to tell what’s there now. We could ask Francesca though.”

  I shook my head. The idea of seeing her made me smile, but this wasn’t the time. “If we ask her, she will want to go with us. This is an absurdly dangerous mission, so I don’t want to involve her.”

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  “Why are you coming then?”

  Touche. Unlike him, I wasn’t a pseudo-immortal demon. “Because it’s meaningful. This could potentially save the lives of millions. And I’ve got nothing better to do. Nothing else that has any meaning.”

  He shrugged. “Find a woman, start a family, raise kids, retire. That’s the usual human template for life.”

  “I’d be more into that if I saw it working. Mom tried to do that, but it hasn’t gone well for her. The older my brother and I grew, the less often I saw her happy. She was either worried, anxious, sad, or depressed, just never happy. Maybe if my father had stayed around, it would have been different, but I didn’t see that. I do see Isabella having the best time of her life every day though.”

  Takezo snorted. “I can see where that comes from. Have you had sex with her yet?”

  I blushed slightly. I wasn’t ready for the direct question. “No,” I blurted. “Once, I had the thought, and her knee struck my balls in the next second.”

  “She’s not into boys, I guess.” He formed a smug smirk. “She does like me though.”

  For a few seconds, I stared at him in disbelief. “You cannot be serious.”

  “She’s ridiculously hot.” Takezo sped up a bit.

  “That’s you liking her. How is that supposed to work in the other direction.”

  “She enjoyed humiliating me. That’s a good start.”

  Like, how was that supposed to work? I didn’t bother asking. Lost for words, I matched his pace. I would not have described Isabella in that way, but this wasn’t something to argue over.

  We’d gone three blocks when a bottle whistled past my head and shattered against a lamp post.

  “Oi, boys!” Francesca’s voice shouted from above. “You aren’t even trying to sneak around, as if you were the only two guys in town.”

  And her shouting around was the pinnacle of stealth. The urge to rub my face with my palm passed through me, but it just didn’t feel the same when a helmet covered my entire head. I craned my neck and spotted her, perched on the rim of a bombed-out bus stop, legs dangling, a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle of vodka tucked behind her belt.

  She dropped down, staggered a little, and grinned at us. She looked less dead than usual. The supplies had definitely helped.

  “Nice to see you,” I said, trying to keep the warmth in my voice. “How’s the city treating you?”

  “Like shit, as always. But at least it’s not boring.” She looked Takezo up and down. “Takezo, right? Good to see you. You haven’t been here in a while.”

  “My syndicate couldn’t decide how to approach the portal. Our organizations are collaborating now though, so we operate together. We’re on a mission now. It’s dangerous. You should stay out of it.”

  Francesca snorted, coughed, and spat a loogie that nearly hit my foot. “Boring. Whether I die here slowly or today makes no difference, so I’m coming with you.”

  Takezo’s eyes narrowed. “We will find a way to get you out, but you need to be alive for that.”

  Francesca shrugged. “There’s no way. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. So, what’s our mission for today?”

  She had a point. We didn’t have a way to get anyone other than the two of us through. If there was a way to use either of us to bring others through the portal, Isabella would have found it already. “We’re hunting a lieutenant. We’ve got a location.” I showed her my phone. “Do any of these spots ring a bell?”

  Francesca stumbled over to me and leaned against my back, looking over my arm. “Yeah, sort of. That’s where they bring the survivors they catch. Haven’t seen many lately. The western spot is really annoying to go to, because there’s a large open plain around there, and there.” She pointed at the screen. “The other one is around a huge pile of destroyed skyscrapers. They’ve got a like a laboratory there or something along those lines. It’s much easier to sneak around there.”

  I glanced at Takezo.

  He turned in the direction of the second spot, the laboratory. “I hate open spaces.”

  The three of us made an odd group. Takezo in his immaculate suit, me in a weird armor and suit mixture, and Francesca in a hoodie three sizes too big and jeans. We moved through the city, no demons in sight. No fires either, just wind whistling through destroyed buildings.

  The battle had wrecked the eastern part of the city worse than the rest. The ground sloped down into what used to be a financial district, now a churning pit of demon architecture and demolished skyscrapers.

  Actually, no, it wasn’t the most wrecked city part, just the one to which the explosions moved the buildings and debris from other city parts.

  When we got close to what looked like a giant pile of destroyed buildings, I spotted a glowing sigil on the side of a toppled skyscraper, pulsing blue-black. Blue, heh? Demons knowing other colors than black, red, and orange surprised me. Then again, both mine and Takezo’s syndicate combined could fit into the color palette of black, white, and red.

  The color wasn’t the largest surprise though. Scaffolding built from debris surrounded the skyscrapers, filled with demons. And they were… building something.

  Francesca ducked behind a pile of car husks, then motioned us to join her. “There,” she whispered, pointing with her chin.

  A group of four humanoid demons in classic samurai outfits walked by the buildings. Two men and two women, each with a medieval-style weapon.

  I pulled on my strength and filled my eyes with it. System skills didn’t work here, behind the gate, but the normal ones should have.

  The world’s colors flipped to my gaze. The four figures now shone with a magical aura, each wrapped in what was clearly a complex shielding spell. I glanced at my companions.

  So did Takezo and Francesca. I was the only one around without shields. By the colors’ intensity, the strongest shields were the ones around the demons, then at Francesca, with Takezo being in a distant last place.

  So, we were the absolute bottom of the food chain in here. Well, at least I had the backpack full of vortex bombs.

  I felt the drain of the spell on my strength, so I cancelled it.

  The group of four vanished among the skyscrapers.

  Takezo slipped out from our hideout. Francesca and I followed him.

  We took a roundabout way to get to the sea of destroyed skyscrapers, avoiding the places the four demons took.

  We threaded our way through the collapsed floors of the garage, then up a service stairwell that reeked of ammonia and demon spoor. At the top, we emerged onto a rooftop.

  Things looked worse than elsewhere. In this area, the city was scarred, black veins running through the concrete, and at the center was a dome-like construction built from the wreckage of a dozen buildings. This wasn’t in other areas.

  Francesca leaned over the ledge, squinting. “The demons sure love domes, don’t they?”

  Takezo’s face went hard. “Hide.” He slid behind debris, signaling that the danger came from behind.

  Francesca and I scrambled to hide behind debris ourselves.

  Steps echoed from where we came, and a new demon emerged onto the rooftop. He looked like a Japanese man, dressed in a classical samurai outfit, but he had six horns snaking up from his head, his hand resting on the hilt of a long katana.

  I remembered Francesca mentioning a six-horned demon. Damn it.

  I pushed power into my eyes. The world’s colors flipped, but he had no aura, no shields, absolutely no hint of magic.

  Fuck.

  The strongest demons weren’t the ones with the shiniest aura, but the ones without any.

  Takezo threw a chunk of debris at the demon and jumped off the ledge.

  Francesca and I bolted from our spots. We jumped after Takezo just as the six-horned demon casually caught the chunk of debris with his hand and dropped it aside.

  We fell from the roof through broken windows on the side of a lying skyscraper and landed onto a former office floor. I fell into a roll, which didn’t go well due to the backpack, so I ended up crashing into a burnt stack of tables.

  Takezo pulled me to my feet, and we bolted across the floor.

  The six-horned demon landed behind us before we even left the offices.

  He wasn’t rushing though, just calmly walking in our direction.

  We ran down the stairs, turned, and entered a corridor. The debris blocked most paths, so we could only run straight.

  The six-horned demon appeared behind us just before we took a turn.

  The only walkable path offered no options. We ran through a long corridor, taking every forced turning, until we faced an opening.

  Ahead of us, the path ended in what looked like an arena. Made from debris and scavenged parts of burnt skyscrapers, tribunes rose up above, circling the barren pit at the bottom.

  “Hide,” Takezo snapped. “He might be chasing just me.” He stepped towards the arena.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Francesca pulled me to the side and started squeezing me into a hole in the debris. I wanted to shout and scream. But that would make things worse.

  Damn you, Takezo.

  I pushed myself into the hole in the debris, and Francesca snuck in.

  She pressed herself against me.

  A cheer echoed from the arena.

  Damn it.

  I squeezed into the hole as hard as I could, trying to create as much space for Francesca as possible.

  A blade pierced the metal near my head. A sword, slim but curved. The blade cut through the steel and debris like butter and circled through the wall around us.

  Blood froze in my veins as I watched the sword cut out our hideout. Its front fell into the corridor, and the six-horned demon stood there, holding the sword.

  With his head, he slightly motioned towards the arena.

  Fight him, or try our luck?

  Francesca slipped from my grasp and pulled me up to my feet. She led me to the arena.

  The six-horned demon let us go and only pulled the gate from the wall to seal the corridor behind us.