XCEL

“Am I petty for getting disproportionately irritated at traffic?” Never before had such a tense silence gripped a space so small. Gus Ishimatsu’s right eye twitched. Large fingers drummed on a powerful knee. Trunk-like legs splayed over the seat’s entire width, the man leant his head back against the leather at the far end of the limousine and sighed through gritted teeth—a growl from a mountain lion with a pin stuck in its foot.

“It’s vexing, certainly.” Zuisaya Nori didn’t answer the question. The woman had both arms and legs folded, eyes shut. Her snakelike nostrils flared as though nursing the twinges of a headache. She sat halfway down the stretch, occupying a much more conservative area than the vehicle allowed.

The four of them were spaced at awkward intervals away from one another. The passage had been almost entirely in silence. Most parties were far too busy eyeing one another for any sudden movements to bother with idle chatter.

“Your restraint is considerable—or is it complacency?” The CEO of JPRO grumbled through the side of his mouth, as though chewing on his own teeth. “We have not moved an inch in fifteen minutes.”

Their isolated cabin was peacefully isolated from the dreadful car horn concerto occupying this inauspicious Tokyo intersection. The JPRO limo was sandwiched halfway through four lines of jam-packed vehicles, a line mirrored on all four stretches of road approaching. Gridlock in its worst form. A thumping in his head made Gus groan, a vile pounding against the inside of his skill. He covered one eye with his palm, as the unwanted voice boomed around the recesses of his subconscious.

“And you’re going to let the masses impede you? Pathetic.” A wicked man adorned in battle armour obstructed the corner of his eye, glaring inward. The spectre had a grip on his soul, large hands clenched tight around his throat. He resisted, but that was all he could do. He had been just resisting for so long. “The rivers do not ask for permission for the channels they carve into the land. Yet, here you sit, motionless. Your flow has ceased. You are idle. Stagnating. Regressing.”

Be quiet.

Gus came to, chest heaving. He fought to keep it under control, clamping his jaw tight shut. His teeth ground against themselves. Sinews flexed in his throat, twinges of tension rippling down his back. He felt his muscles seize up, and he doubled over with a grimace.

“Is the Tyrant compelling you to act rashly again?” Nori asked, opening one eye.

Gus glared at her. “That scourge has not shut up in nearly twenty years.”

“Would you like me to administer another temporary shutdown of the orbitofrontal cortex?” As she made the offer, the skin at the tips of her fingers split, and bundles of grotesque, hair-like tendrils extended with eerie serpentine undulation.

Gus’ lip curled. “I need no panacea. Do you mock my self-control?”

A jubilant chuckle resounded from the other end of the car. “Take it easy on her, boss! She’s only trying to show compassion, in her own strange and… weirdly fetishistic kind of way!” Yugo Chisori wore his botoxed, presenter’s smile on yellowed, leathery cheeks in just the same jaunty fashion as his necktie. His mousy hair was askew, and his broad shoulders in a two-piece suit looked strange in the absence of white. “If we’re talking about annoyances, I dropped my toothbrush down the drain this morning! Had to merge my arm with half a length of grotty piping just to find the whole thing covered in soap scum!”

Nori bared her teeth like a horse, but Gus chuckled. “You should have gone into stand-up. You would have made a fortune on Saturday evening casting.”

“Too tough a crowd, boss.” Chisori waved away the suggestion with a triangle-shaped grimace and tugged at his shirt collar. “My skin’s not that thick!”

Gus’ glare roved around the car’s interior, through the dividing screen to check the man hadn’t weaselled his way next to the driver to be spared social interaction. It didn’t take long. You literally couldn’t overlook him if you tried. “Tekkori didn’t join us in the end,” he noted.

“There’s a surprise for you!”

“Please excuse me, Mr Ishimatsu. I had meant to pass on his message.” Tan’in Mokuzo sat across from Dr Nori, cleared her throat and adjusted one of her hairpieces. “Mr Tekkori sends his regards to everyone ‘besides the witch’ and regrets to inform that he can’t attend on account of being preoccupied ‘doing literally anything else’ and that he would rather ‘castrate myself with a plasma cutter’ than ‘sit in a meeting with some of the most vile people in the country outside of JPRO Biologics.’” She finished her air quotes and sniffed daintily, her composure miraculously intact despite having unearthed some of the most vitriolic sentiment known to man.

Shocked silence reigned for far too long. Mokuzo gracefully suffered under Nori’s daggered eyes and Gus’ heavy glower.

Chisori began, “Did he say you could—”

“Quote him on that? Yes. Explicitly so.”

The man erupted into fresh belly laughter.

“I am going to kill him. I am going to kill him,” Nori seethed, and repeated that mantra to herself at least twice more under her breath.

Gus forced a chuckle. “I like that man. He never minces words.” His attention returned to Mokuzo. Her shoulders stiffened. “Have the preparations been made?”

“Yes, sir.” Mokuzo placed a delicate finger to her temple, opening her third eye. A ripple of psychic resonated through the cabin, met with the response of twenty distinct signatures. “Everyone’s in their proper places.”

“Good.”

Gus’ grin, unfortunately, didn’t last. The engine of the limousine continued to grumble in anticipation, as did JPRO’s increasingly more exasperated CEO. The man’s chiselled jaw and hands both clenched to ungodly extremes. With every minute that passed, he grew visibly more agitated. A vein throbbed on his temple with such visceral intensity that Mokuzo opted to shuffle further away, lest it erupt and spray blood all over her nice trousers. Small muscle movements—anything larger prevented by sheer force of will—kept his brow furrowed and worming across his face, burying his narrowing eyes deeper into the shadow of stress.

“You are stagnating.”

Eventually— “I’ve had enough of this.”

Gus Ishimatsu lashed out with one arm, and jettisoned his right-hand door clean from its hinges with an explosive backhand. The discarded steel plate lodged itself in the neighbouring vehicle like a throwing star, bifurcating an unfortunate passenger whose gravest sin was happening to be anywhere near the CEO in a rage.

The screams erupting inside the wounded car faded into the backdrop as Gus wrenched himself from the limo, tearing off a hunk of metal in the process, and stormed down the street. The scourge filled his head with triumphant laughter. It made him seethe even further. Psychic energy crackled through the man, a entire power grid’s worth of potent, otherworldly electricity contained within the world’s angriest strongman. Footsteps left miniature craters in the tarmac. Windows and headlights burst in showers of glass. Wing-mirrors folded and broke. As he marched between them, bodywork of entire cars crunched and compressed to either side to allow the man passage. The monotone, blaring cacophony intensified behind him as fellow pedestrians voiced their ire.

Gus turned, eyes maddeningly wide.

“Be quiet.”

A mighty roar rumbled the air with enough tremor to rupture some eardrums. A few engines sputtered and gave out. A couple even started fuming black from under the bonnet. Bystanders exited their own vehicles and gazed on in wonder and horror as this man among men marched right up to the central blockade. Knocking on the door to a jet black delivery truck, that through no fault of its own was blocking off three whole lanes of traffic by itself, mid-turn, Gus politely folded both hands behind his back.

The driver rolled down his window, the agonisingly motion made time tick even slower. “Hey, what do you—”

“You have five seconds to exit your vehicle.” Gus immediately started counting down.

The poor truck driver didn’t even have time to finish parsing the command, before his vehicle became the first HGV to break the sound barrier. Gus’ chambered punch hit the truck with enough force to completely plasmify the first layer of metal: a movement with such explosive force, the air itself didn’t have time to make way. The fluid compressed in on itself, vibrating white hot.

An ear-splitting boom shook the intersection. Every piece of glass within in a quarter of a mile radius shattered into a wave of lacerating dust. The shockwave ploughed the vessel through an entire kilometre of backed up traffic, atomising it in the process. The neighbouring cars crunched inwards, flung into their neighbours or flipped into the air. The direct impact drove a crater through the tarmac In the wake of such devastation, the roads remained blissfully empty. The air hung still. The sonic boom reverberated through Tokyo’s orderly streets; an ominous bell.

Tan’in Mokuzo observed the scene from the hole that had been ripped in the side of the car. The faceless crowds was a euphemism. Of course they had faces, but each individual by themselves was one tree in a larger forest. They each had their uses, of course, but very few opted to make use of themselves. They had gathered en masse. Some took pictures, the apertures of both their smartphone camera and eyes yanked wide with horror. Some jabbered into their receivers. Calling who, she wondered: friends? Family? Some simply pointed and stared. They exchanged glances with their neighbours, verifying the sight. A stormy buildup, just as the clouds rolled in overhead, as the man trudged forth, parting the urban sea. It had happened in an instant. The man struck like lightning. A flash of impact, and the rolling terror of the sound reached them some seconds later. Surely something so apocalyptic could only be a hallucination? Then again, it wasn’t long ago several thousand had fallen into the sky.

She caught her dim reflection in a car window: an alarmed face of chilling unease. Her skin, bleached, her teeth clenched and grinding, her eyes, antelopine. She looked back into the car. With her at one end, the JPRO entourage witnessed the carnage in a sliding scale of dispassion. Yugo Chisori stared over the driver’s shoulder in fascination, eerie Cheshire grin still stapled to boyish cheeks. Zuisaya Nori chose not to watch at all. Her limbs were still crossed, entirely unfazed. A sinking dread trickled down Mokuzo’s spine like rainwater. Actual rainwater speckled her face, as the clouds decided now would be an absolutely perfect time to deluge. She stuck her head back into the car, just as Chisori knocked on the driver’s window.

“The Boss is calling. You don’t want to leave that man hanging.”

Sure enough, Gus Ishimatsu had cleared a nice, neat path of utter obliteration between him and the limousine. Crouching to the floor, he picked up the handful of ash that had once been the truck driver. He held it out to the wind, and let it drift through his fingers. Pressing those fingers to his lips, a tear rolled down his cheek.

“Such a shame.”

Turning back to the car, his eyes hardened.

“Let’s go.”

Fury dissipating into the ground like static with every step, he marched directly down the highway in opposition to anyone who would dare oppose, and straight towards the National Diet Building.