Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 2 by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page A

warming. In the next moment, Setsura had sunken through the floor up to his waist. A strange noise rang down from the ceiling. The moment he knew that something was amiss, he’d thrown out a strand of devil wire for support, looping it around the light fixture.
    It wasn’t the sound of the ceiling boards ripping apart. More like the sound of flesh being torn through from within.
    Like a sinking ship, one half of the squirming floor heaved up while the other half plunged down. The floor moved like a storm-tossed ocean. As did the ceiling. The synthetic sheetrock turned black and silver, laced with blue and green, and stirred together like a spreading oil slick.
    Setsura didn’t look at either. He’d sensed this room’s true nature the moment he’d detected that “off” sensation on the soles of his feet. Instead he fixed his eyes on Niwa.
    The stubborn geezer had to be already dead and was up and around only as bait to lure Setsura into the trap. Now the old man reached up to his face and ripped it off. A fissure opened all the way down to his throat. A sweet, honey-like liquid erupted out of the crack.
    It lashed the floor and ceiling into a frenzy of desire. Pieces of the floor peeled off in strips and whipped through the air. Blue-green snakes. Beady eyes stared coldly at Setsura. Thread-like tongues flicked from grinning mouths.
    Something like a slab of meat fell from the ceiling onto the back of his neck. He reached up and slapped it away. It resembled a cross between a flatfish and a sea slug. Its cool and bluish translucent body was speckled with dark red dots. It was rapidly growing.
    From feeding on Setsura’s blood. This was the first giant vampire leech he’d seen, even in Shinjuku. Another one sprang at him. He batted it away.
    The wriggling leech was swallowed up by the floor. Though by now the “floor” was anything but. The thousands of intertwined “ropes” wound, unwound and zigzagged back and forth. The “ropes” were snakes.
    Setsura looked up at the ceiling. It resembled the surface of a heaving ocean, a sight to freak out any normal person, no matter how evenly disposed. Leeches. Just like the one that had sucked his blood. They were packed so tightly together that they formed a single mass, heaving and rolling in a nausea-inducing motion covering every square inch.
    But not every square inch. In China for four thousand years, with all the time in the world on their hands, and this is the best he could come up with? That was the sardonic thought passing through Setsura’s mind.
    The snakes wriggled all around him. The giant leeches rained down from the ceiling. Setsura didn’t know it, but these were deadly poisonous zheng-zhe snakes.
    They were a little over two feet long—not terribly large, but their bite could fell an ox. The volume of snake venom injected was as bad as the toxicity. There was some hope for the victim as long as the amount was slight, but there was nothing “slight” about the legendary bite of these snakes. It was all or nothing for the prey.
    And yet they did not attack.
    The leeches on the ceiling were called naruko . They were said to swarm out of the mountain forests from November to early summer of the next year. Their bite was hardly a pinprick. A man with a strong physique could ignore it entirely. But after ten paces or so, the rapid blood loss would keel him over. The Chinese characters for naruko meant “crying child,” because that was the shrill sound its victims made as they lay dying.
    Along with the zheng-zhe , they were ready to conduct a thorough war of extermination, just as they had four centuries before. So why did none of them make the first move?

Setsura’s right hand moved slightly. His body shot upwards right through the middle of the “floor.” He bounded up a good yard above the clump of snakes. Lurching forward, he quickly found his footing, swaying back