Chapter 2

Jun recognized the error of wearing solid black scrubs the moment that he exited the locker room. He looked important and stood out from the other doctors dressed in bright pink, red, and blue clothes like a sore thumb.

Under strict orders from his dean to take a much needed break he declined a dozen pleas for help as he waded through the thick crowd of people wounded in the explosion at Toyama Station. Even almost ten hours after the initial blast the hospital remained in complete chaos. Every gurney, chair, and cubicle was occupied and still more patients stood waling and bleeding out in the halls. Jun felt sick with himself every time he coldly shrugged those people away.

So now he sat alone at a booth in the hospital cafeteria staring blankly at the small side salad on the table before him and feeling strangely full. He had not eaten since the morning prior and knew that after his exhausting night spent in surgery that he should have been famished. But all the same he was not hungry. If anything he felt vaguely dizzy, a problem which he attributed solely to his lack of sleep, and his feet were mildly sore.

Despite his physical aches and pains he could not tear his mind from his last procedure. An eight year old girl had been wheeled into the room with devastating wounds to her head and she died after hours of painstaking labor. Jun was upset, not because the girl had died or because the team had spent so much time working to save her, but because he had once been in her place and found it entirely unfair that he had survived only to be forced into wielding armor for which he felt no particular connection in order to protect Japan from the untold horrors of the netherworld.

He dropped his chin onto his right hand and poked listlessly at the salad with the fork brandished in his left, so lost in his dismal thoughts that he scarcely heard a jovial cry from across the room.

"Good morning, Porkchop," said a high pitched female voice and Jun looked up in time to see its owner sit with a bounce on the bench opposite him. She grinned broadly because she could see how much Jun hated the pet name, given to him by his classmates for his immaculately toned physique and complete modesty for the subject. He thought she looked stupid sitting there and in that moment thoroughly regretted his single attempt to bed her several months prior. "Looks like we have a busy day ahead of us," she continued happily. "Salad for breakfast?"

Jun groaned his response, laid his fork down, and turned his gaze back to the tabletop. It seemed that the girl noticed his mood because when he glanced back up at her several minutes later her smile had been replaced by a worried frown that wrinkled her forehead like an old woman. Jun wondered how desperate he could have been to have tried for her.

"Double shift?" she said flatly.

"Triple."

"Atsuko let you work a triple?" she said incredulously and louder than Jun would have liked. "You've already worked what, forty hours this week, and now a triple on top of it? You're supposed to be part-time, you know."

"I'm fine, Chiharu," Jun said firmly. "I'm on break and I'm going to go sleep once I'm done eating."

"You had better be," said Chiharu. She had obviously picked up on the frustration in Jun's voice because she grasped her tray and stood up. "I guess I'll leave you to yourself. Call me later, okay? We should go out once exams are done and maybe we can blow off some steam together."

Jun held back another groan as a thousand ways to ditch her rolled through his brain. "Yeah, sure," he said, and hated himself for his inability to get rid of her for good.

Chiharu found a new seat at a table crowded with people who Jun recognized from several of his classes, though he could not have named any of them for any price. As she sat her friends shot him interested looks but turned away as soon as they realized that he was paying attention. Jun felt oddly as though he were back in his high school cafeteria where people were too afraid to let anyone know that they were interested be caught staring. He wondered if the rest of his life was going to be some variation on the theme of people trying to gape at him without his knowledge.

Before long his mind drifted back to morbid thoughts of death and children, and as he continued to poke at his food without eating it he fumbled around in his pants pocket and fidgeted with his yoroi ball. The orb, which Jun carried at all times and used to call forth his slightly unconventional armor, felt pleasantly warm and as he peeked at it in his palm its character of fortitude glowed a soft black light from its core.

He found this somewhat odd. The orb did not flare unless one of the other five samurai troopers was around and almost never radiated heat. Jun wondered if the strange behavior of his orb had been caused by the disaster at Tokyo Station and if perhaps the disaster had been caused by some malicious being. It had been a while since there had been any trouble of that kind, after all, and Jun had always worried that past enemies might hunt him down again.

Specifically, Jun worried about a youja called The Arbiter of Souls, a spirit who had caused a significant level of mayhem a year prior. The Arbiter had brought Jun out of years of solitude, years spent away from Nasté and the five troopers, by capturing the five through manipulation and deception and calling Jun to a last minute rescue for which he had been woefully underprepared. It was in that time that Jun had been forced unceremoniously into wielding what had now been dubbed kage no yoroi, the armor of shadow, and he had utilized the armor clumsily and imprecisely.

It had taken weeks for Jun to realize the full potential of his armor, that rather than a ballistic sure-kill its power rested in a summoned shade that could fight alongside the wielder of the armor and, in certain desperate situations, act as a flawless decoy. Jun had used the shadow of his armor to relentlessly mock the Arbiter and cause enough distraction to free the troopers, but he had been almost completely useless in the ensuing battle. In fact, he had been sorely wounded in the encounter with the Arbiter and was forced to rely on the other troopers, armed with the ridiculously powerful Kikoutei, to finally win the fight.

A nagging and unspoken doubt tugged at the edges of Jun's mind from that day forward. Every other youja that he had destroyed in that time had burst into a mist of fine black particles and disappeared but the Arbiter had simply vanished. Jun had watched the Inferno's Rage connect solidly yet there had been no mist and no body after the fact. He worried that the Arbiter had escaped.

It was with that fear in his mind that Jun began scheduling the other troopers for personal training sessions at Nasté's home. If another battle was to come he wanted to be as well prepared as he could, he wanted to lend a hand in the fight, and he wanted the troopers to see that he was as much of an asset to the team as any of them.

For the most part he had been successful in his efforts; under the strict tutelage of Ryo and Seiji he had learned the proper way to wield the massive arced dual bladed glaives that were the sole physical weapons of his offensively balanced armor. Through many insightful conversations with Shin and Toma he had learned the most effective ways to participate in the dynamic team's battles, when to hold back and defend and when to step forward to fight, and how to efficiently and wordlessly communicate with the others in times of stress and fatigue. And Shu remained the best motivator and morale booster of the five, answering questions that the others could or would not, offering partnership for strenuous training sessions, and keeping the other troopers at bay when it was plainly obvious that Jun needed a well-deserved break. More than once in the last months Jun had found himself sitting quietly in Shu's apartment near Yokohama for a weekend of solitary study.

But things had been calm since the Arbiter was defeated, at least until last night, and Jun continued speculating as to the cause of the disaster. Tokyo authorities had yet to respond to press questions and had released only a very brief statement which said that investigations were still ongoing and several hundred people remained wholly unaccounted for. Despite the terrifying situation it seemed that everything was normal, or at least as normal as a massive explosion could be, and had not been caused by youja of any kind.

So when the yoroi ball gave a sudden flare and burst of heat, Jun gave a startled jump, dropped the orb to the ground where it landed with the clink of glass on tile, and stared at it dumbly as it rolled to rest. When the realization that the orb was sitting out in the open finally hit him he leaned down to pick it up, grasped it hidden in his palm, and gazed around the room to see if anyone had noticed his strange movement.

He felt some relief when he saw that no one was staring at him but when his eyes came to rest on the doorway his heart skipped a beat and his blood ran suddenly cold. A young girl stood there, her long black hair hanging straight around her face, staring at him with cold and expressionless eyes. She wore a bloody hospital gown and left thick red footprints on the ground where she stood.

Jun blinked hard and tried to hide his expression that bordered somewhere between terror and revulsion. He recognized her face as clearly as he had seen it hours before. It was Akiko Nagano, the eight year old girl that had bled out on the table, and she was standing plain as day and very much alive in the cafeteria doorway.

"What the hell," he said quietly and blinked a few more times before rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands. He knew that she could not be standing there, she had been pronounced dead before his very eyes, but even after a number of blinks and eye rubs and head shakes she remained.

He stood and strode toward the door with quick, deliberate steps and tried as hard as he could to look as though nothing was wrong, like he was responding to an emergency page or had forgotten an important appointment. But his eyes never left the girl standing in the doorway and after five steps toward the door she turned and bolted down the hallway, her tiny footfalls sounding as bloody slaps on the shiny white floor.

"Wait!" Jun cried and before he could think twice about what he was doing he darted after her.

He followed her at breakneck speed through the winding corridors toward the hospital foyer where patients stood in a queue that stretched from a line of doctors near the check in desk all the way out the front doors, ignoring all of the many strange looks and calls that came his way from classmates and colleagues. When the corridor finally opened into the enormous and crowded entrance hall he stopped suddenly, having lost Akiko's tiny form amongst the writhing mob, and surveyed the room.

Jun heard his name being shouted above the noise of patients and doctors, apparently Chiharu and her friends had taken pursuit but had fallen far behind; Jun was a runner after all, and it was no secret that when he sprinted anyone would be hard pressed to catch him.

He heard several pairs of footsteps running behind him at the same moment that he saw a flash of wild black hair dart between two patients. He was off again, sprinting as fast as he could through the crowd. He barreled through the queue, knocked two wounded men roughly to the ground, and emerged from the other side with a dozen angry doctors and twice as many patients cursing and giving chase. But Akiko was in sight again, rounding the corner that led toward the clinic.

He followed her through the clinic, through pediatrics, up two flights of stairs, and through two more hallways before he realized that something strange was happening. He could not fathom why she was running from him or why he was even seeing her in the first place. But when she ducked into the utility stairwell the whole place changed and his racing thoughts died away.

The threshold of the utility stairs marked the end of the hospital and the beginning of what Jun could only conclude was the netherworld, or the netherworld as he had once known it. The walls of the hospital gave way to a wide orange sky and far in the distance a line of ancient Japanese structures rose into the clouds. He could see the vague outline of a river meandering through lines of squat barracks and ships that looked like tiny dots flowed serenely along its surface.

Presently Akiko led Jun up a winding wooden staircase that creaked and swayed with every step and had no discernable end. He took the stairs three at a time, clutched his burning yoroi ball tight in his right hand, groped at a stitch in his side with his left, all the while damning himself for not eating or sleeping to keep his energy up. If only he had rested in the last day and a half he would have caught up with Akiko a long time ago, but his wit was dull and his body responded as he imagined an old rheumatic man's might.

Jun made a note that he needed to watch his rest. There was no telling when he might be called to fight and being exhausted would more than likely get him killed.

At last Jun came to a landing high in the air that looked as a rooftop of ancient structure. A single solid beam ran down its middle and on either side of the beam a long mat of brick colored tiles sloped downward at an extreme angle. Near the edge of the rooftop the beam turned up in a ninety degree curve which ended in a flat platform no more than a foot square in size.

Jun sprinted across the beam with balance and ease until, at its end, he hopped up onto the platform. A chill breeze blew past him and as he looked down he could see that he was standing above a river channel. Across from him, over a fifteen foot gap, rose another building similar to that upon which he stood. On its rooftop stood Akiko with her arms wrapped around her bloody gown to fight away the cold while her matted black hair whipped around her face. Beside her stood another figure, a young and petite woman with black hair and a slender sword strapped to her belt.

Jun recognized this woman immediately and felt a sudden overwhelming sense of despair. Her name was Mai. He had destroyed her corrupted spirit moments after the troopers had defeated the Arbiter and for months afterward he had felt inexplicable guilt and remorse.

"You're dead!" Jun cried through gasps for air, speaking as much to Mai as he was to Akiko.

But Mai did not respond. Instead she looked down at the girl standing at her side, as if expecting her to say something, but the place remained quiet.

"What do you want?" Jun demanded. He felt his yoroi ball pulsing with intense heat in his palm and thought more than once about calling forth his armor. His head was spinning with thoughts of battle and worry of how his extreme fatigue might prove to be a disaster.

Mai did not show any hint of emotion as she stared at him. Her eyes were as blank and empty as Akiko's and the two girls looked eerily similar as they stood still in the wind. But then, after a long moment spent in quiet, Mai stepped forward and rested her wrist on the hilt of her sword.

"Alter your path," she said firmly, "or the others will forsake you. And then they will die."

Jun was dumbfounded by the statement and stood overcome with dread. He could not think of what to say or how to make Mai clarify her perplexing warning.

"Jun!" came a cry from behind. "What the hell are you doing?"

Jun jumped and whirled about on the spot, his eyes wide and his chest heaving with panicked breath. Before him, standing on the same thick wooden beam that he had just crossed, was Hatsuharu Atsuko. He was flanked by Chiharu and two other doctors, both men of fantastically bulky builds, and the lot of them looked irate.

"Alter your path or you will be forsaken!" Mai called, and Jun turned to face her once again. He could not reconcile how she was standing on one side of him while his colleagues stood on the other. How had they entered the netherworld? Could they not see that Mai was standing there? Could they hear her yelling across the wind?

"Jun," Atsuko said again and this time his voice was very quiet, as if he were addressing a wounded and unpredictable animal. "You need to come down from there and tell me what's going on."

Jun turned to face Atsuko again and watched the man's expression shift from anger to confusion to concern. He was stepping forward now, inching along the beam as though he were afraid that Jun might jump, with his right hand outstretched and his fingers beckoning Jun toward him.

Jun did not move. He looked between Mai, still repeating her warning, Atsuko as he shuffled forward, and the three angry and terrified doctors that stood behind. His brain racked with confusion; he could not understand how they had gotten to this place, he could not understand how he had gotten to this place himself, and he could not fathom how Mai might have reformed her destroyed spirit.

But then he was struck with sudden realization and as soon as the thought entered his brain he recognized the strange sensation that he had been feeling. It was as though his mind was split between two separate realities, between the hospital and the netherworld, and he could see what was happening in both places at the same time. He felt as though he were in the midst of a vivid and intense daydream though he could not discern whether Atsuko or Mai was the figment of his imagination. It was the same sensation that he felt when utilizing the shadow of his armor but he had not called it forth and could still feel the yoroi ball blazing in his closed palm.

"Atsuko-sensei," Jun said quietly and closed his eyes tight, "I'm having a hallucination."

"What?" Atsuko demanded sharply.

"I'm hallucinating," Jun said again and he heard his voice quivering with what might have been fear.

When he opened his eyes again Atsuko was staring at him blankly and the others were looking as incredulous as anyone Jun had ever seen. Behind him Mai's calls were still echoing forth and any time he looked over his shoulder, which he did quite frequently, he could see her and Akiko standing side by side.

"What do you see?" Atsuko said.

"I can't say," Jun replied. He could not mention the netherworld to Atsuko or the doctors assembled before him. Not only would they think that he was insane but it could put them in danger if they ever found out that he wielded a mystical armor. There would be too many questions, too much exposure, and Jun was not ready to handle such attention.

"You're on the hospital roof," Atsuko said informatively, "you're about two inches from a twelve story fall."

Jun nodded curtly, closed his eyes, and stood still until he felt Atsuko's calloused hand close on his wrist. His head swam with worry and fear and he barely registered when two more pairs of hands grasped his arms and shoulders and pulled him gently down from the ledge on which he had been standing. He felt his legs buckle under his weight and heard himself give a quiet grunt as his descent was halted by a rough pull on his arm.

He felt himself being lowered to the ground where he sat with his hands folded in his lap.

"Chiharu," Atsuko commanded, "PPN drip in my office immediately. You two, get him downstairs. Take back halls and avoid the crowds. We don't need any more excitement for tonight."

With a chorus of 'yes sir' the group followed their respective orders, Chiharu bolting off down the stairs to prepare a mineral rich supplementary intravenous drip while the two males, each holding one of Jun's arms delicately over his own shoulder, escorted him down the stairs. Atsuko remained on the roof for a long moment afterward, staring out at the dawn and trying to decide what to do next.

First he would have to take a second look at Jun's timecard for the week. Then he would have to call Nasté.