Baccano! - Volume 19 - Chapter 9

Chapter 9 The Hitman Doesn’t Hesitate

Claire Stanfield had been dead for several years.

At the end of 1931, while working as a conductor on the Flying Pussyfoot, a transcontinental express, he and a coworker had been killed by a terrorist in a shockingly cruel way: They’d had their faces ground off (although the specific method wasn’t clear).

That was what the police records said at least.

His corpse had actually belonged to somebody else. Claire had taken over a name from a hitwoman he’d just happened to get acquainted with. He was alive and well as “Felix Walken.”

The “Felix” name had originally belonged to a certain hired killer. When that man had retired, he’d handed over all traces of himself—his name and residence, as well as his fame and notoriety—to someone else. These things had passed through the hands of several professional killers in the space of a dozen years.

However, none of this really interested Claire, the current Felix.

Originally, he’d had an established rep as a hitman named Vino. As far as he was concerned, he’d lucked into a fresh start and a new place to belong. He didn’t give it much thought beyond that.

That said, he was planning to keep the name “Felix” from getting around too much. Only a few people knew Claire was Vino, who would continue his life in the underworld as a mystery hitman.

That was how it was supposed to be.

“You’re Felix Walken, aren’t you?”

When a complete stranger flagged him down on the street, Felix—Claire—looked a little fed up as he turned around. He’d stressed his name change to Firo and his other friends tons of times, telling them, “The name’s Felix, not Claire,” but of course he didn’t go around loudly introducing himself to people he didn’t know.

It was the beginning of 1935. Half a day before the uproar at Firo’s casino.

It had been only a few years since he’d changed his name, and he’d done practically nothing to make himself stand out. At this point in time, anyone who saw his face and called him Felix was probably bringing him trouble.

Pain in the ass, Claire thought, but as his eyes found the guy who’d spoken, he didn’t show the slightest trace of fear. The guy was a total stranger.

Or rather, the guys were total strangers.

The group wore dark suits, and they were ostentatiously brawny. Their bulging muscles stretched their suits enough to create outlines in the fabric, and every one of them looked as if they’d been designed specifically to be intimidating.

“You’ve got the wrong guy. See ya.” Giving them a casual wave, Claire walked away indifferently.

One of the toughs grabbed his shoulder firmly. “You’ve gotta know that ain’t gonna throw us off, pal,” the guy said with a snort.

Claire glanced back. “It looks like you know me pretty well…” Knocking away the big man’s hand, he slowly turned to face the group. “In that case, you know I’m not somebody you can strong-arm or threaten, right?”

He hadn’t made his voice particularly intimidating, but as far as he was concerned, the words were a warning. He’d decided that, if these guys really did know him, then they’d know that trying to force him was pointless.

If they change their tune and ask politely, maybe I should at least hear them out, Claire thought. However, the men chose a simpler route.

“You’re still coming with us,” said the man who’d grabbed his shoulder. There was a dangerous edge to his words.

“Gotta say, you fellas ain’t exactly my idea of a good time. Where am I supposed to be going?”

“You don’t need to know.”

The men’s attention was focused on Claire, their surroundings, and several cars that were stopped by the curbs. They were planning to muscle him into a car by force.

“Just so’s you know, resisting is pointless,” one of them said.

“Doesn’t life get boring if everything you do has a point?” Claire gave a little sigh, then smiled at the big guy.

At the same time, he knocked the thug’s thick ankles out from under him.

It had been a light sweep, and it shouldn’t really have had the power to move anything. However, Claire’s left hand had been on the man’s shoulder, and he’d simultaneously applied pressure there. Thanks to the multiple forces at work, the big man’s center of gravity had shifted, and he flipped, pivoting around a point near his waist.

In the next moment, while the man was airborne and horizontal, Claire set his right foot against the side of the thug’s head—and stomped down.

“Bwuh…gah…”

The guy’s spin accelerated rapidly, and his head slammed into the pavement. After a brief spasm, he was unconscious.

Without so much as glancing at him, Claire turned to the remaining men. “Sorry. It looks like he didn’t understand, so I’ll say it again: Force and threats won’t work on me. Understand?” Nodding in response to his own comment, Claire added, “Well, I did strike first, so I’ll cut you some slack and spare your lives. But listen, if I were you, I’d head home before I got hurt.”

“…!”

In the span of a second, the brawny men had learned a lesson.

They’d heard that this man did anything, including murder, but the way he’d just moved… The leg he’d used to scoop his opponent’s feet out from under him hadn’t touched the ground before he’d raised it again, then stomped the man’s head in midair. It really hadn’t seemed like a maneuver an ordinary person could pull off.

They all gulped, and their thoughts went to the objects in their jackets.

The moment they started to wonder whether they should draw their heaters, their target—Handyman Felix—saw it coming and headed them off. “Uh, just FYI, if you’re gonna use guns, I won’t be able to go easy on ya. I mean, I could, but is it really worth the effort?”

When the men heard that, their hands all froze partway into their jackets.

Felix had been wearing an easygoing smile, but they’d picked up on the deadly intent beneath. His words were dripping with it.

The men had begun to sweat. The Handyman glanced at their faces, shrugged lightly, then looked at the cars. Noticing there were multiple shapes behind the windows, Felix crooked his index finger at them, calling the occupants over.

“Heeey, c’mon out. You don’t want your precious underlings to bite the big one here, do you?”

A few seconds after Claire’s taunt, there was movement in the row of cars.

The rear door of one car opened, and a lone man in aviator goggles stepped out. His hair was generously streaked with gray, but his face didn’t seem that old. No sooner was he out of the car than he gave a brief gesture, ordering the goons to stand down.

As the big men beat a hasty retreat to one side of the road, Claire picked up on something odd.

There’s nobody around.

He’d been walking down a lightly trafficked street a fair distance from central Manhattan, but still, there were almost no average Joes in sight.

Any normal person would have found this unsettling, but Claire didn’t bat an eye.

I see. So I’m dealing with a bunch who can clear the street, although probably not the buildings.

Did that mean they were feds or members of one of the big mafia outfits? As he weighed various possibilities, Claire called to the white-haired man. “Hey there. Are you the boss of these fellas?”

The white-haired man threw back his slumped shoulders, straightening up. His spine cracked audibly. “Me, the boss? Perish the thought. I’m just a middle manager, Mr. Felix Walken.”

“You’ve got the wrong guy. We’ve never met, have we? How would you know my name?”

“I heard it from someone who knows you.”

“I see. Makes sense. Sorry for lying, sir. I’m Felix Walken. Your boys got a little too cheeky for me, so I knocked one of them down.”

Claire (or Felix) suddenly adopted a much politer attitude, apologizing with startling ease.

The white-haired man wasn’t sure how to respond to this. He hesitated for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Hmm. It’s hard to say whether you’re a liar or an honest man. Either way, it’s a privilege to meet you, Handyman Felix.”

Claire flashed a dauntless smile at the man. “No, the pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Bartolo Runorata, supreme leader of the Runorata Family.”

“……”

“……” “……” “……”

At Claire’s words, the white-haired man and the big men who stood behind him silently exchanged looks. There was a chill in the air.

After the space of a few breaths, the manager responded, sounding troubled. “No… I’m not Mr. Runorata…”

“…”

“…Hello?”

“Nah, sorry about that. I was just irritated that people kept guessing my name right, so I said something random. Oh, guess that means I don’t actually have to be polite? So, who’re you, pal?” Claire returned to talking casually.

The white-haired man was taken aback, but only for a moment. Composing his face into an expressionless mask, he introduced himself.

“I’m Salomé… Salomé Carpenter.”

“Sorry, not familiar. You seem like you’re older than me. Should I be respecting my elders, at least?”

“No need. I don’t intend to be polite with you, either.” On the contrary, the man’s voice held a faint trace of hostility. He examined Claire over from head to toe. “…You don’t deviate from human standards; that’s quite obvious. Did you really beat Christopher Shaldred?”

“Christopher?” At first, Claire wondered what the guy was talking about, but that name sounded familiar. After a moment, he smacked his hands together in realization. “Oh! Yeah, right! That guy! The red-eyed fella with the fangs!”

“…Precisely. I heard you’d defeated him at the Mist Wall building, when he was fighting in earnest.”

“That’s about the size of it! So what about him?”

Claire’s answer had been excessively hearty. Salomé smiled thinly and ground his clenched teeth. “Well, he is our creation… A top-tier influential member of Lamia. It’s quite hard to simply believe he was defeated.”

“You should trust people, you know. Fellas who don’t end up like this guy.” Claire looked at the unconscious goon at his feet.

“No, no, I only believe what I’ve personally observed.” Even as Salomé spoke, the big men backed up farther, beginning to disappear from the edge of Claire’s vision.

“……?”

Claire almost asked what was going on, but he shoved the question back down. He’d already figured out the answer on his own.

Seven… No, eight of them?

He could sense there were more people around him now.

It wasn’t that he had superpowers. He’d made the call based on the faint footsteps his ears had picked up.

That said, considering the fact that he’d managed to pick out faint noises made by people more than five yards away, any ordinary person might have thought it counted as a superpower.

Slowly turning around, he scanned his surroundings. There really were about eight new figures on the once-deserted street.

“What’s with you fellas? You’re a lot more colorful than that group of generic mooks back there.”

The men and women Claire had spotted looked a bit different from ordinary civilians. They weren’t exactly grotesque, but to a degree that put the earlier men in black suits to shame, they clearly weren’t upright citizens.

They were a motley group. There was a man in a swallowtail coat who might have been headed to a dance; another who was naked to the waist; a young woman in an elegant gown with beautiful tattoos on her face and arms; a girl who was all bundled up, with a stocking cap pulled down so low it covered her eyes; and an individual in a skull mask who could have been any gender.

Even surrounded by this bizarre crew, Claire wasn’t anxious, and he didn’t scoff at their odd looks.

Instead, he reminisced.

They sorta remind me of the circus crowd. After all, it was more a collection of oddballs like these guys than a regular circus. I wonder how they’re all doing.

As Claire basked in nostalgia, Salomé spread his arms and spoke slowly. “Like Christopher, they are members of Lamia. I hear they have a few thoughts regarding your defeat of their comrade.”

“Huh. Yeah, they seem like a crew who would.”

“Do you have anything to say to them?”

Salomé’s expression betrayed no anxiety. He seemed to believe he had an absolute advantage.

Claire could tell these weren’t just people in funny clothes. They were probably all at the top of their fields, whatever those happened to be. Even there, they were very similar to his companions from his circus days.

He felt a little kinship with them, and he gave them a smile. “Uh… Who was it again, your comrade Christopher? Yeah, I thrashed him.” He scratched his cheek, a little bashful. “It’s kinda embarrassing, but if you want to compliment me, I’ll gladly accept it.”

“……?” “?” “?”

The eccentrics seemed bewildered. Spreading his arms wide, Claire spoke in an extremely friendly way—with zero intent to taunt them.

“All right, go on. Praise me to your hearts’ content.”

On top of an old apartment building

On the roof of a six-story building, a figure was watching the Handyman, the researcher, and the members of Lamia, who’d frozen while their quarry talked. “So he’s the one who defeated Christopher?”

“It looks like it.”

“From what Leeza and Sham told me, I thought he’d be more of a monster. He looks surprisingly normal.”

Grinning and enjoying himself, a man with black hair and golden eyes looked down at the redheaded Handyman. He was neatly dressed, but he had a bandage over one eye, which made for an odd combination. His name was Huey Laforet.

Beside him stood another man with a bandanna tied over his head. “He’s the type who proves you can’t judge a book by its cover,” he said. “I bet that traumatized Leeza, too. He calls himself Felix Walken, but it’s probably a pseudonym—”

“Claire Stanfield.”

“…What?”

Huey had murmured the name out of nowhere. Tim, the captain of Huey’s hand-trained unit Larva, frowned slightly.

“That is the young red-haired fellow’s real name. According to official records, though, he’s already dead, so it might be better to call him Felix,” Huey said.

“……” Crafty bastard. He knows more about this than I do. Keeping his grievances bottled up, Tim sighed instead of objecting. Then he stared at the members of Lamia below. “…I see some unfamiliar faces.”

“Yes, some of them haven’t been added to Larva yet. I’ll introduce them to you someday…as your new subordinates.”

“As bosses go, I’m a figurehead. I bet I don’t have the right to refuse.” This time, Tim didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

“That’s not true. If you’d rather not have them, they’ll simply be fired. Granted, the thought of turning them out in this recession does pain me a bit…,” Huey replied, without an ounce of pain in his voice.

Tim was about to feel even more irritated with him, but he pushed that away. He thought, Well, maybe I should just be glad he didn’t say, “We’ll simply dispose of them.” Deciding there was no point in letting his personal grudge get any bigger, he slowly got his anger under control. “So what are you going to do with the Handyman?”

“That’s a good question. What will happen to him?”

“Are you screwing with me?”

“Not at all. He isn’t my subordinate. It would be presumptuous of me to do anything about him. I can put pressure on him, but what will he do in response…? In a way, my goal is the very act of observing the results. Although, that’s true of most things, not just him.” Giving a faint smile, Huey went on with lukewarm enthusiasm. “I really would have preferred for Adele, Frank, Chi, and the rest to be there as well. However, it would be problematic for you if he ended up taking them all out of commission, wouldn’t it?”

So he didn’t mind if everyone who was down there now did get taken out of commission. It didn’t seem like a great thing for an employer to say. Tim frowned. “Look… What is it you want to do?” It was a rather unusual way of speaking to a superior.

Huey didn’t seem bothered. He responded casually. “I just want to know all sorts of things.” Then he quietly added, “Like that twisted ‘demon’.”

“…Demon?”

“It’s nothing. My driving principle is the thirst for knowledge, nothing more.” Huey smiled, and Tim shook his head slightly.

“No. There’s something beyond that for you.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve got some other, clearer goal, and that’s why you’re trying to learn everything. That’s what it feels like anyway.”

“I rather like that keen mind of yours.”

Huey shrugged, complimenting his subordinate, and shamelessly evaded his question.

“Well, it’s a personal matter, so we’ll say it’s a secret.”

He was like a boy hiding the fact that he had a girlfriend.

Ordinarily, Huey wore a smile with no feeling behind it, but there almost seemed to be some sort of emotion in this one.

That smile convinced Tim it would be pointless to ask anything else. Wordlessly, he looked back at the scene below them.

Just then, with impeccable timing, things began to move.

The alley

A minute or so before Tim looked at the group in the alley from the roof…

“…That’s a shocker. Who’d have thought you’d resort to cheap provocation at a time like this.” Salomé shrugged as he spoke. Meanwhile, although the bizarre Lamia members had been standing there stunned, anger began to show in their expressions.

Claire scanned the group, cocking his head as if he was mystified. “This isn’t what I was told,” he commented briefly.

“…What isn’t, Mr. Handyman Felix?”

“Well, when that Christopher fella came and picked a fight with me, I asked him what was in it for me if I took him up on that fight? What would I get out of beating him?” Claire sounded annoyed at the others’ anger toward him as he forged ahead. “And he told me, ‘If you beat me, you can brag about it to the rest of Lamia.’ So I figured I could do a little bragging and get some compliments, y’know? After all, he said I’d get something out of this. If you just get mad about it, I’m not getting anything good unless I’m a masochist. Right?”

“……” “……” “……” “……” “……” “……” “……” “……” “……”

The other nine people present all went silent at once.

Most of them were looking at Claire, wondering, Is this guy an idiot?

Speaking for the group, Salomé candidly divulged his own feelings. “Christopher is a problem as well, but…is that the reason you engaged him in mortal combat?”

“Hmm? Oh, he came to kill me, but I didn’t need to kill him, so you can’t really call it ‘mortal combat,’” Claire answered. “Ah, sorry, that was nitpicky. Frankly, yeah, I did fight him for a reason like that, and I won, so I don’t appreciate getting bawled out.”

At that, one of the members of Lamia—the woman with the tattooed face—broke her silence. “You went a round with Chris so people you’d never even met would compliment you? Are you nuts?”

Pivoting toward her, Claire spread his arms and made a declaration to the whole group. “Of course! I love getting compliments! Even if they’re insincere or downright lies! That means killing me with compliments actually works. Besides, if that Christopher guy is such a special comrade to you, shouldn’t you at least compliment me superficially, so you don’t make him a liar?” Claire kept talking nonstop, like a professional storyteller. Then, suddenly, he seemed to remember something; he pointed an index finger skyward and gave them a caveat.

“Oh, but I hate being called a genius, so watch that one. I’ve got the abilities I have now through hard work, not talent. Genius doesn’t sound good; it makes you picture some lazy bum who’s tough without putting in any effort. That’s bad, see?”

He rattled off, assuming compliments were a foregone conclusion. The members of Lamia had no idea what to do. His words alone seemed to have dragged them into his orbit. Looking at them, Salomé sighed deeply. “Enough. Let’s begin the experiment. Don’t kill him, though. Our job is to bring him in, nothing more.”

Salomé was acting as if there was no room for argument, and Claire shrugged. “Just ask me politely. Nobody has to get hurt that way. And by ‘nobody,’ I mean you.”

“That wouldn’t be much of an experiment. Besides, you may all end up working under the same person after this. It would be good to see who ranks higher, wouldn’t it?”

As Salomé finished speaking, the surrounding mood changed. Claire had befuddled Lamia, but they seemed to have remembered their job—and that he was their enemy.

“You’re kind of a jerk-off. Hey, fellas, working for somebody like him must be rough. You’ve got my sympathies,” Claire said. “That being the case, lemme ask: Are you really okay with this?”

“?”

“I know that guy wants to see what I’ve got, but you don’t stand a chance. If I beat you here, you’ll just be losers. You could do the unexpected and side with me instead. What do you say?”

The Handyman had openly invited them to secede, right in front of their boss.

The proposal seemed to have come out of left field for the group. A few of them looked bewildered—but the rest clearly hated him now.

“Beating Christopher seems to have given you a swelled head,” the tattooed woman told him.

“You think? Nah, I was like this before I flattened him.”

“…You’re selling us pretty short. You don’t think one of us might be stronger than you?”

“Hmm, could be. I’m really strong, and I’m confident I won’t lose to anybody. And of course I gotta be stronger than everybody for my baby Chané, but… Well, I won’t deny the possibility itself.”

Claire seemed to be looking back over his own life.

“But let’s say, hypothetically, that one of you was stronger than me.”

He surveyed the men and women around him, and there was a hint of contempt in his eyes as he continued speaking.

“You’d gang up on a guy who was weaker than you, eight to one? …Isn’t that embarrassing?”

On the roof

“…Why are they all just standing there?”

Watching the people below, Tim tilted his head, perplexed. He’d figured they’d have a brawl on their hands in no time, but for some reason, nobody was moving.

He’d thought Salomé might have been giving one of the long speeches he was known for, but even so, this was weird. Tim’s face, which had been sullen to begin with, grew even sterner.

From beside him, Huey said, “This is intriguing. It seems he’s more than a wild animal.”

“Not necessarily. He might be begging for his life.”

“That would be its own kind of intriguing, so I wouldn’t take issue with it.” Huey sounded aloof.

Tim raised an eyebrow, getting ready to complain—but then he decided that whatever he said would have no effect, so he just returned his attention to the alley.

The alley

“Hey, Salomé. Can we kill this guy? We can kill him, right?” asked the tattooed woman.

The murderous hostility in her voice was clear, but the Handyman responded before Salomé could.

“Well, simmer down. There’s another reason I want to avoid doing this eight-on-one.” Claire folded his arms, nodding away with arbitrary conviction. “If we go through with this, I’m going to demolish you. In simple terms, I’ll work you over. If you lost to me all on my own, you’d lose face.”

“……?”

The others looked as if they were wondering, What the hell is this guy talking about?, but the Handyman kept going. “So let’s do this instead! We’ll count the guy with goggles over there and split our group into two teams for a five-on-five match! That way, whichever team wins, we can say it was on the level, that we fought fair and square! Woohoo!”

The Handyman grinned with satisfaction. He seemed to think he’d hit on a terrific idea, and at that, the people around him finally caught on.

This man hadn’t been saying and doing weird things to provoke them. He was genuinely just speaking his mind.

It was as if he was describing a fate that would inevitably come to pass in order to make the situation more fun for himself.

This was no mere world ruler. He spoke with the arrogance of an absolute god, one who determined his own destiny. Although his proposal sounded utterly daft, if he actually had the skills to back it up, its significance would change drastically.

At the very least, this wasn’t a cheap trick to unsettle them. While it would have been great if he were a garden-variety delusional idiot, they’d already heard that he’d defeated Christopher, so they knew he wasn’t pulling their leg.

Someone had been selling somebody short, but it wasn’t the Handyman. It was them.

Up until that very moment, they’d thought Christopher’s loss had been some sort of fluke or that one of his peculiar whims had made him do it. However, they were the ones who hadn’t been thinking. They hadn’t considered the possibility that this man might actually be a formidable foe.

Trained soldiers might not have been so careless.

However, Lamia—and particularly the members who were there—had never fought anyone with greater physical abilities and combat skills than theirs. Chi and Sickle had experienced defeat, and if either of them had been there, things might have been different.

“It’s too bad Chi and Sickle aren’t here. I bet Chi would say, ‘That’s all that matters,’ and wrap this up.” The tattooed woman tsked in irritation. She and the rest of the group were no longer angry at Claire. Instead, a sharper hostility filled the alley.

They had an accurate handle on the situation now. The man in front of them was a kind of enemy they’d never faced before.

The savage atmosphere grew thicker and more viscous, coiling around Claire from head to toe. When he spoke to Lamia, he was wearing a smile that was different from the type he’d worn a moment ago. “Okay, then. You, you, you over there…and you. You’re on my team.”

He was genuinely planning to split the group into teams. He picked four individuals at random: the man in the swallowtail coat; the character in the skull mask; the bundled-up girl with the stocking cap; and the tattooed woman in the formal gown, the one who’d shown him the most hostility.

However, the Lamia members were no longer bewildered by what he said. They simply waited for their orders. Salomé, whose face was perfectly expressionless, raised a hand.

He’d probably realized it wouldn’t be possible to keep his subordinates from fighting to kill at this point.

Erasing his emotions as much as possible and preparing to observe every moment of the scene that was about to play out, Salomé called:

“Let the experiment begin.”

He murmured the words in a detached way. No sooner had he finished than several members of Lamia launched themselves into action. Fire exploded in the alley they’d cleared of people.

Claire slowly spread his arms.

In the storm of hate-filled determination—he spoke as if even their drive to kill him was precious to him.

“Welcome to my world.”

He was wearing a ferocious smile that made anyone who saw it feel a bottomless chill.

“…Bring it on, extras.”

On the roof

“There they go. Finally.” With his eyes on the group, Tim exhaled wearily. “Let’s just hope nobody dies.”

“You think Lamia is at a disadvantage, Tim?”

“No clue. I mean, I don’t even know those guys.”

“You aren’t going to let that go, are you? Take this opportunity to learn about them, if you would.” Lightly deflecting the sarcasm, Huey also focused on the melee that was unfolding below.

And then he picked up on something—it was indeed a melee.

“Oho.” He chuckled.

“Huh…? What’s up?”

A few seconds after Huey, Tim noticed it as well. According to the plan, the eight Lamia members—everyone but Salomé—were supposed to pin down Felix. Instead, the situation seemed to have gotten rather complicated. “Infighting…? No, that’s not it…” What was happening didn’t make sense.

After all, while the Handyman was definitely fighting members of Lamia, for some reason, he was fighting only four of them.

Being up on the roof with a bird’s-eye view of the situation was what let Tim understand how strange it was.

All eight members were attacking the Handyman as a group. However, while the Handyman turned aside all their ferocious attacks, he was striking back against only four specific opponents.

Salomé was standing a little distance away. If they included him in the count, it looked as though two teams of five had begun by fighting each other, and then one team had fractured and was now attacking one of its members from behind—

That was what had made Tim assume it was infighting. The Handyman and Lamia had never been a team, though, so that word couldn’t possibly apply.

Huey was gazing at the alley, looking rather entertained. Tim ignored him, and as he realized just how eerie the Handyman was, his eyebrows drew together.

“What the hell is going on down there?”

In the alley

Although the situation was confusing to Tim, to anyone who’d been listening in on their conversation, it was quite simple.

Claire had arbitrarily designated four Lamia members as “teammates.”

Of course, those four were also trying to attack him, but he evaded skillfully, striking back at the four he’d designated “enemies.”

Naturally, the members of Lamia weren’t just punching and kicking. There was one who fought with a foreign martial art that was almost unknown in America at that time, and another who used his abnormally long legs as if they were hands, and yet another who used their inhumanly good kinetic vision to read Claire’s movements, then they flung multiple throwing knives at the places where those movements seemed likely to take him.

However, Claire’s motions and judgment calls surpassed all of them. They were beyond the pale of common sense.

Although the blades flew at him as if they could tell where he was going, he not only evaded them but sometimes caught them and hurled them at different opponents.

On top of that, in situations where the Lamia members he’d designated as allies would be hit if he evaded, he protected them by knocking the projectiles out of the air instead.

Not only did he avoid attacking the people he’d arbitrarily claimed as teammates, he was diligently protecting them.

While his behavior was shredding Lamia’s pride, the members couldn’t even afford to care.

Am I really fighting one guy? Cold sweat broke out on the tattooed woman’s back.

She’d been fighting for less than a minute, but she’d already built up an extraordinary amount of fatigue. It felt like taking on a whole band of powerful martial artists at once.

The mental pressure did more to shake her desire to fight than her physical fatigue did. She even briefly considered the delusional idea that they were facing a ferocious animal shapeshifter.

Dammit. If Miz Sickle were here… After that thought passed, she felt a pang of shame for thinking of an absent companion during a fight.

The tattooed woman twisted her torso. Making full use of her extraordinarily elastic muscles and flexible joints, she turned more than 180 degrees, and then, blade in hand, she unwound herself, using her momentum to slash at the Handyman’s back with the speed of a whip.

However, he dodged by a hair and vanished.

“!”

Where is he?!

She and the other members of Lamia darted their attention from one way to the next, trying to find their opponent. In time, their eyes fell on the Handyman as he stood behind the girl with the stocking cap, whom he’d picked as a teammate, with his hands on her shoulders. He must have been pressing some sort of muscular or nervous pressure point; he was holding the girl’s shoulders lightly, but her arms just hung there, trembling. She didn’t seem to be able to raise them.

The Handyman smiled gently. “Poison’s not allowed.”

“?!”

“If you diffuse it from there, you’ll take out your teammates.”

“…!”

The girl with the stocking cap hid her eyes, but everybody could tell she was aghast.

She wasn’t the only one. The members of Lamia knew about her unique ability, and they were just as shocked.

Her special technique involved scattering a variety of poisons that she’d hidden under her thick clothing.

However, the only ones who knew this were her comrades in Lamia and Rhythm, the research team Salomé led. Huey Laforet probably knew about it from reports he’d been given, but there was no possible way this guy should have known about it, especially since she hadn’t made any actual moves yet.

“How…did you know?” The girl’s voice was so faint it was practically inaudible, but Claire responded.

“Huh? Well, with your build, it didn’t seem like you’d be using martial arts or a big clunky gun, so I figured it was either bombs or poison. Then I saw you were trying to stay upwind from me all the time, so I figured it had to be poison.”

Salomé had been observing from a distance, and when he overheard, the look in his eyes changed. In less than a minute of mayhem, the man had spared attention for such subtleties. Not only that, but he’d also shut her down just as she was about to use it. Salomé was now sure this man was completely different from any specimen he’d ever encountered.

A perfect human.

That cheap phrase crossed the researcher’s mind, but he immediately rejected the idea as a misguided delusion.

Still, he had to admit the fellow was extraordinary.

Christopher is my masterpiece, and in terms of basic physical abilities and reflexes, the people here aren’t his inferiors.

And yet… Am I to believe a human is fighting eight of them at once, under a special self-inflicted handicap no less, and he’s still surpassing them? That’s ludicrous. He’ll destroy the definition of human.

The other Lamia members had stopped moving as soon as the Handyman had pinned the girl in the stocking cap. They hadn’t been trained as cold-blooded assassins, which meant they didn’t have it in them to abandon a companion for the sake of defeating an enemy. On the contrary, the guinea pigs of Lamia were more conscious of being part of a team than most humans, and even attempting to teach them to fight like that might have been pointless.

Repressing the various thoughts that ran through his mind, Salomé gave the man an indifferent and rather ironic compliment. “Good lord. I never dreamed you’d be such a troublesome test subject. One would think you were a genuine vampire.”

Claire smiled, making small talk in the middle of such deep hostility coming at him from all angles. “There was a guy in my circus who called himself a vampire, but he looked normal compared to the lot of you. The most he did was wear a suit and a sparkly hat.”

Salomé smiled thinly. “I know nothing about the sartorial preferences of vampires. Now then…you and I are on opposing teams, correct?” Turning that faint smile toward the ground, Salomé slowly spread his arms. “If I don’t join the game soon, they’ll accuse me of negligence.”

Then, looking around at the members of Lamia, he shook his head regretfully. “Still… I failed badly in my selection of test equipment. It looks as though I should reset the experiment.”

On the roof

“This is going nowhere… And hey, whoa, Salomé—!” Tim had been watching Salomé’s movements from the roof, and there was real anxiety in his voice.

That maniac researcher—is he going to do that?!

What does he think we cleared people out of here for anyway?! The hell’s wrong with him?!

Tim knew what the man was about to do, and he knew what the results would be.

Is that bastard planning to break the Lamias along with the target?! What if the Handyman is the only one who survives, huh?! What then?!

No, it’s even worse than that—if we stay here, he’ll get us, too!

He screamed the words silently, but he had a feeling shouting at Salomé would do nothing. He said out loud, “Not good! If he pulls that, the Bureau of Investigation is definitely going to catch on…” He had to tell Huey they needed to make tracks—for now, at least. He whipped around—

—but no one was there. Only the bleak roof spread out in front of him.

“Huh?”

Huey—did he take off without me?!

Tim’s cheeks tensed. Hastily, he looked left, right, up, and down, then promptly realized his error.

Out of the corner of his eye, for one brief moment, he glimpsed a figure. As he turned to look—he saw that figure drop into the space between the building and its neighbor.

“Hu— Huey?!”

Flustered, he leaned out and saw Huey casually plummeting from the roof as lightly as a drifting feather. As he fell, he kicked window frames and projections in the walls, skillfully breaking his momentum.

He wasn’t falling. He was descending by the fastest available method. Understanding this, Tim turned his gaze to heaven and clutched his head.

What happened to watching how this played out?!

He spat his next complaint through gritted teeth:

“Besides, what’s the point of having you on the front line?!”

A few seconds earlier In the alley

“—?!”

When they saw what Salomé was doing, the members of Lamia tensed.

Claire was still holding the shoulders of the girl in the stocking cap, and he felt her start to tremble with fear.

He’s up to something, huh. Claire narrowed his eyes.

The tattooed woman shouted, “Hold it, Salomé! What are you doing?!”

Behind Salomé’s goggles, his teary eyes were filled with remorse. “It’s all right. I love all of you… Yes, I do love you! So don’t worry!”

This is bad. I bet he’s going to pull something nastier than poison, Claire thought.

Naturally, the idea that Claire might die here didn’t even occur to him. However, he decided it was going to be tough to completely protect the four members of Lamia he’d designated as allies. They might have been enemies to begin with, but Claire thought that not following rules he’d set for himself was a shameful thing, and he tried to come up with a way to save them.

In less than a second, he’d made up his mind.

I guess I’ll crush him before he does anything.

Claire moved fast. Releasing the girl’s shoulders, he tugged on her arm lightly.

She was holding a little bottle of the poison she’d been planning to use.

“Oh…”

The girl made a small noise, and Claire apologized in a whisper.

(“If this stuff is lethal, I’m sorry.”)

He wasn’t planning to use it on her, but he might end up killing her boss.

Apologizing for that in advance, Claire swiped the bottle out of the girl’s hand. Fear had loosened her grip, and he didn’t give her a chance to argue. The bottle held a powder; she’d probably been planning to seed the wind with it. He tensed, preparing to lob the container directly at Salomé’s face—but at the last second, his peerless kinetic vision and reflexes aborted the throw.

He’d realized that Salomé had frozen and that he was watching a point above Claire’s shoulder—in other words, something behind and slightly above Claire—with a shocked expression on his face.

Claire didn’t know specifically what the man had been attempting to do, but something had obviously happened.

With the little bottle still in his hand, Claire whipped around and saw a slim man. He’d appeared in the alley abruptly and was wearing a mechanical smile.

“Wha…?” “That’s nuts…” “Why is he here?”

The members of Lamia had spotted the man soon after Claire did, and they all sounded startled.

The slim man shot a casual glance at them, then spoke to the man who was farthest from him. “Salomé, you mustn’t get violent.”

His tone had been mild, but Salomé’s eyes widened, and he made a hasty apology. “I…I’m terribly so— Terribly sorry!” His composure had vanished without a trace; his face was pale and shiny with sweat.

From Salomé’s attitude, Claire realized the newcomer must have been the mastermind behind this incident. However, before he pursued that issue, he asked about something that had been bothering him. “Fella… Did you come down here from up there?”

“Yes. Long ago, I wore a mask and played at being an acrobat. I’m used to it.” For reasons unknown, this admission seemed to have some emotional significance for the man. Then he focused on Claire—and in a firm yet gentle tone, he apologized. “Speaking as their employer, please forgive my subordinates for their rudeness.”

When they heard the apology from Huey Laforet, their boss, the tattooed woman and the other members of Lamia trembled.

As always, his voice had been almost pleasant. However, those who knew he was a terrorist and national public enemy couldn’t help suspecting that, behind that smile, there was nothing but an endless void. One might have called it a cool pressure. The kinder Huey’s voice, the colder the sweat that trickled down their spines.

The Handyman’s instincts were preternaturally sharp. No doubt he’d gauged Huey’s true nature in the blink of an eye.

Despite Master Huey’s power, the tattooed woman was certain that even he couldn’t tame this guy.

Handyman Felix was abnormal. He believed, deeply and sincerely, that the world was his. There was no way any threat would work on somebody like that.

This Felix guy might just manage to permanently kill Huey’s indestructible body. As far as mankind was concerned, this guy was a singularity.

The ruler and the immortal—no matter who won, the ending would be costly.

Both were about to bet everything they had and try to take everything from their opponent.

She and the others were going to have to witness the results, no matter what they were.

Her group had been created as incomplete immortals, those who drifted aimlessly between these two concepts: human and inhuman. How should they live? This fight might show them.

Swallowing hard, the members of Lamia took a step back from Felix, deciding to watch the situation play out.

An unsettling wind blew through the spaces between the buildings.

Once the wind died down, Handyman Felix spoke. “Those eyes. Your face…”

“?” “?” “???”

Question marks rose in the minds of Salomé and the rest of the audience. They hadn’t been expecting an opener like that at all.

“You wouldn’t happen to be…Chané’s big brother?”

That was the last name they expected to hear.

“Chané” was the name of Huey’s daughter.

Because they knew this, the tattooed woman and the others grew even more confused.

Before his bewildered subordinates, Huey boldly pointed out the other man’s mistake. “No, I’m her father. People do often assume I’m young, but…I’m simply immortal. My apologies.”

The Handyman’s reaction to that statement was dramatic. He stood up straighter and held out his right hand like a diplomat. “I’m Felix Walken. It’s an honor to make your acquaintance, sir.”

His former arrogance had vanished, and he took the hand of the man in front of him—his future father-in-law—as if he were just a regular guy. “Really, thank you, sir. Thank you so much for bringing Chané into my world!” He shook his hand firmly, effusively expressing his gratitude. He actually seemed a bit more worked up than an ordinary man would have been. “Your daughter is graciously allowing me to court her. Frankly, I don’t think marriage is too far off.”

“Well, well. She’s far from perfect, but I hope you’ll treat her well,” Huey responded with a smile. Then, still wearing that smile, he broached another topic. “By the way, Handyman Felix. I would like to engage you for a job.”

“Well, how about that. May I ask what it is?” In high spirits, Felix started talking business.

Huey looked around. “This isn’t really the place for a discussion. Shall we find a different venue? You are my daughter’s first beau. Do let me treat you to dinner.”

“Gladly, sir!”

“Then… Is there room for the two of us in your car, Salomé?”

Finding himself abruptly addressed, Salomé came to himself with a jolt. He cleared his throat, adjusting the tail of his coat and the position of his goggles. Then, completely switching gears, he walked to the car with measured steps. Opening the rear door, he stood by courteously.

“All right. Let me convey you to your dinner engagement.”

Salomé was acting like a butler, and they didn’t keep him waiting. Huey and Felix started toward the car. They passed by the petrified Lamia members as if nothing had happened.

Pausing beside the girl with the stocking cap, Felix put the bottle of poison back in her hand, folding her fingers around it. “Thanks for the loan. Poison’s dangerous, so be careful how you handle it, all right?”

“Huh…? Oh, yes…”

The girl’s response seemed to satisfy Felix. Humming, he walked off with Huey.

“What was it about Chané that attracted you?”

“Everything.”

“My goodness.”

Continuing their amiable conversation, the two climbed into the car. Leaving almost everyone else behind, they nonchalantly faded from the scene.

“……”

“………”

“……………?”

“? ?! ??? ? ……?!”

The members of Lamia were stunned.

After Huey and Felix had gotten into the car, Salomé had taken the front passenger seat, and they’d pulled away without a single word for the crew they were abandoning at the scene. The Lamia stood there in silence.

The development had been far too much, and they weren’t able to get the situation straight in their heads. For a little while, they couldn’t move.

From beside them, a voice spoke.

“Hi there. I’m Tim. I manage Larva. Nice to meet you.” He wore a bandanna tied around his head, and he pushed his glasses up. “As your new boss, I’ve got one brief note regarding the results of this maneuver.”

The words he said next almost seemed to be directed at himself.

“Assume everything about that ginger was a nightmare and forget him. That is all.”