Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 7 - Chapter Pr

Prologue

A small passenger aircraft soared through the clear blue sky. Only one passenger sat aboard: a man wearing sunglasses and a black suit. Sweat poured down his pale face as his eyes anxiously darted around the empty aircraft. Hunched over like a child afraid of a nighttime wind, he clutched a pistol in both hands as if it was his good luck charm. The man, a mafioso, had just escaped from a certain powerful organization by the skin of his teeth.

Knock, knock.

He heard a sudden knock, then looked in the direction of the noise to find that it was coming from outside the window.

There was a boy outside.

He was around fourteen or fifteen years old and had a smile on his face. Unfathomable—they were over fifteen hundred feet in the air, on a plane in mid-flight.

“Yo. Hope you don’t mind if I join ya,” said the boy, although the man could only see his lips forming the words.

“It’s—it’s the Sheep King!” the mafioso shrieked.

He jumped back just as the boy kicked the window in, shattering it in the process. A powerful vortex rushed through the aircraft, and then the difference in atmospheric pressure sucked out all the air, causing the plane to violently shake. But the mafioso paid no mind to the rush of wind nor the shaking. He crawled on the floor, doing whatever he could to escape the intruder. The boy stepped on his back and pinned him down.

“You’re part of the Port Mafia’s weapons transport, and this scares you?” the boy scoffed, a note of amusement in his voice.

His dark green leather biker jacket complemented his reddish-brown mane. He proceeded to rip a nearby chair out of the floor with his bare hands, then threw it at the broken window. The chair acted like a lid, stopping the violent wind from rushing through the inside of the craft.

“P-please forgive me!” the mafioso begged as he squirmed under the boy’s foot. “I—I’m sorry I messed with the Sheep’s turf! I didn’t have a choice!”

“Yeah, I bet you didn’t. No way you Port Mafia bastards knew what you had comin’. You hit us, we Sheep hit back and then some. But don’t sweat it—I already killed all the other guys involved in your little ambush. Rest assured I’ll be givin’ you the same send-off as your friends.”

The mafioso reached out for his gun that he had dropped, but he couldn’t reach it. In fact, he wasn’t even able to lift a finger. His face twisted, bones cracking as his body was pushed into the floor. All he could manage was a moan. And yet, the boy had only a single foot on his back.

It was gravity. The boy was using gravity to make his foot exceedingly heavy.

“Impressive. I guess that’s the Port Mafia for ya,” the boy observed amusedly. “Even with all this gravity crushing you, you’re still thinking of ways to fight back… Okay, then. Try your luck. But first, answer me this: Why did you attack our turf?”

“I didn’t…want…to attack it!” It sounded as if every last breath was being squeezed out of the mafioso’s lungs. “I didn’t have a choice… Our arsenal…was destroyed…by that calamitous god—by Arahabaki! The black flames…have returned from the pits of hell…!”

“‘Arahabaki’?”

The boy’s smirk vanished. The gravity weakened, albeit for a split second.

This was an opportunity. The mafioso seized that moment to roll away, grab his gun, and aim it at the boy. He was clearly very experienced with firearms.

The boy simply kept his hands in his pockets and fixed the mafioso with an icy glare.

“Go ahead—shoot me. See what happens.”

“Die… Die, Sheep King—Chuuya Nakahara!”

He pulled the trigger.

Hands still in his pockets, the boy unflinchingly spun to one side and kicked the bullet. The moment it collided with his foot, the bullet ricocheted, piercing the mafioso’s throat. Blood spurted out of his neck as he collapsed backward.

The boy swung back around and announced:

“I’m gonna kill every last member of the Port Mafia.”