Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 - Chapter 3.5

Our journey brought us before a certain door. After pressing the call button next to it, the guard stated the purpose of his visit.

“Come in,” said a voice as the door automatically opened. It was the same voice that took over my vocal mechanism once before. A disgraceful voice.

Behind the door was a spacious office. The window in the back was a computer-generated view of the beach, despite the fact that we were underground. The walls were completely hidden behind floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases. Technical books from around the world dutifully lined the shelves.

At the back of the room was an antique desk with a man lying sprawled out in front of it underneath a large box. He seemed to have crawled under the box and was doing something, but I could not see his upper body. All I could see were his lower body and the soles of his shoes pointing toward the ceiling.

“Sorry. Give me a second, okay?” he requested. “Adjusting the experimental isolation tank is taking a little longer than I thought. This tub was made to induce an altered state of consciousness and raise the output of special powers, but the gauge, the most vital function, is interfering with the tub’s magnesium sulfate solution. So right now I’m trying to exchange the positron decay gamma ray detector with something more precise.”

“Why not simply implant an active marker in their blood vessels instead of relying on noninvasive measurements?” I suggested.

“I tried that,” came the cheerful reply. “But that presented us with a new problem. The subjects’ skill activity potential gets all staticky. The human body can be very nonsensical at times, unlike yours… All right, that should do it.”

The shoe soles—and the wearer of said shoes—crawled out from under the coffin-like box before wiping his hands and smiling at us.

“Now, where should I begin? I’m sure you have plenty of questions, right? And I can answer all of them. You could basically say this is the final destination of your journey.”

That face. There was no question about it.

“You… I’ve seen you before,” Master Chuuya said tensely.

“I figured you’d say that first.”

Master Chuuya took a picture out of his pocket and stared at the man. It was the photo of him at five years old at the beach while holding hands with a young man in a linen yukata. The young man was smiling cheerfully, squinting from the bright sun.

“I was in charge of Project Arahabaki, and N was the nickname the military gave me. N being the first initial of Nakahara. In other words…”

The young man in the picture looked identical to the researcher in front of us.

“…I’m your father.”