No sooner had the words left his mouth than the elevator doors before them twisted violently out of shape. A gigantic black mechanical hand punched through the thick metal panels and hurtled straight at Johnny's face.
Everything seemed to enter slow motion. The doorway warped open like a blooming flower, fragments and sparks scattered through the air, and the instant, ear-piercing screech of metal became a drawn-out high-frequency roar.
Before the elevator reached the top-floor room, Adam Smasher had already been waiting outside. He had planned it well: tear open the elevator and trap everyone inside, as easily as opening a can and eating the meat within.
But his intelligence had been lacking, because the Johnny Silverhand standing before him was no longer the one from back then.
"Smack!"
A silver hand firmly caught his black fist. Time seemed to resume its normal flow at that instant, and then an incomparably immense force struck him. The man known as Smasher flew backward, bouncing dozens of meters away like a rolling gourd.
Deathstroke pressed the damaged elevator doors back into shape, stepped out of the iron box with Johnny's face, and rolled his neck from side to side.
"We're here. Go get what you want. We don't have much time."
The top floor of Arasaka Tower was extremely spacious. It was as though an entire traditional courtyard had been moved into the sky. There were rooms enough to house hundreds of people around it, partitioned by traditional-style doors of paper screens and wood, while the central area held an elegant courtyard with a fishpond, stone lanterns, and deer scarers.
A few electronic cherry blossom trees were planted sparsely throughout the courtyard. That was the style of such gardens, after all—the trees had to be planted thinly.
These so-called electronic sakura trees