Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 - Chapter 3.8

The elevator’s motor sounded. Chuuya’s expression didn’t change, even after being separated from his friends. He simply shoved his hands in his pockets and observed N’s face as if he were staring at a clock on the wall.

“You really thought you could trick me like this?” Chuuya said after a few moments passed. His voice was dry, hollow.

“I’m not trying to trick you at all. I was simply looking out for you.”

“Just so ya know, I’m gonna fill my boss in on whatever you show me,” he replied apathetically. “I don’t give a damn about any national secrets or whatever.”

“Be my guest.” N flashed a suggestive smirk. “Who knows if you’re going to still feel that way after learning the truth, though.”

The elevator faintly rumbled while they descended before eventually stopping.

The door opened. There was a short hallway up ahead. While the interior was no different from the facility above, the dirt and dust piled by the corners of the floor showed the area’s age. At the end of the hallway was another door with various notices plastered on it such as QUARANTINE and DESIGNATED SEALED DEPARTMENT BY ORDER OF THE DIRECTOR OF INTELLIGENCE. The edges of the old papers were tinged yellow.

N tore off the notices one by one. Chuuya watched him out of the corner of his eye.

“Just tell me already,” Chuuya suddenly said as if he didn’t care about the answer. N turned around. “Just tell me. It’s not like it’s gonna scare me or anything. I’m not human, am I?”

N didn’t answer Chuuya’s question but simply looked silently back at him instead.

“After hearing you ramble on like that for so long, I’d be stupid not to realize it,” Chuuya continued brusquely. “I’m the product of Project Arahabaki. In other words, I’m a singularity with a will of its own, and I was made using the same method Verlaine was created with. Right?”

N smiled uncomfortably. “What would you do if you were? The truth is behind this door. Are you afraid to find out? Would you rather I tell you now, so you can go home without having to see it for yourself?”

Chuuya didn’t reply. He just glared wordlessly back at N.

“I’m fine with that if that’s what you want. The only thing important to us is to have Verlaine believe that you know everything. You don’t actually have to know everything, though.”

Chuuya stared at the man while apparently racking his brain over something, but before long, he spoke up once more with firm resolution in his voice.

“Piano Man and the others tried to investigate to see who I really was, and because of that, they got killed.”

There was something reflecting in his eyes that was not there. It was a past memory—he was looking at his friends from behind.

“Take me inside. I have an obligation to know everything for their sake.”

There was no hesitation in his voice, and there was no possible way to ever get him to change his mind. That was what the power behind his words was conveying.

N grinned. He then opened the door in place of a reply.

On the other side of the door was what appeared to be a large factory so massive that the back wall couldn’t even be seen. Between the floor and the ceiling was a mesh foothold that acted as a second floor of sorts that Chuuya was standing on.

The mesh flooring creaked. Chuuya’s knees buckled, but he managed to grab onto the railing to prevent himself from collapsing.

“Are you okay?”

“I know this place,” responded Chuuya with a pale expression, ignoring N’s question. “I know this place, damn it.”

“I know you do.”

Sweat began to drip down Chuuya’s forehead. His eyes remained focused on his surroundings. After emotionlessly looking down at Chuuya, N began to speak in a monotone as if he were reading numbers from the phone book aloud.

“This is Research Facility B. It was modeled after Research Facility A, which was located in the Settlement. The layout is exactly the same. This is the closest thing we have to your birthplace since the explosion destroyed the other facility.”

Phantasmal voices echoed in Chuuya’s head.

“Intruder!”

“Seal off doors eight through fifteen!”

“I want the Ops Division equipped with class A gear and prepped for an ambush!”

Before he even realized it, Chuuya was walking.

It looked exactly the same. The same sights he’d been so used to staring at all those years and years.

Soldiers and researchers came and went. Armed soldiers ran past Chuuya.

It was an illusion. There was nobody there. It was simply a memory from his past.

“How many intruders? Are they armed?”

“Two intruders, both unarmed!”

Screams echoed in his head. It was a memory of that day. The last time Chuuya ever saw this place from that view. His legs eventually carried him to a specific location.

“You were inside here.”

It was a black cylinder that extended to the ceiling, roughly wide enough for three adults to wrap themselves around it. The surface appeared to be glass, but it was opaque and black, making it impossible to see what was inside.

However, Chuuya knew. He knew what this was.

He turned to face it. It was something he was intimately familiar with.

This cylinder had been his whole world—at least, so he’d thought. A bluish darkness. A cradle to separate him from the outside world—and to protect him from it.

But that cradle was suddenly destroyed by an unknown illusion. The cylinder shattered as someone’s hand grabbed Chuuya.

Chuuya remembered that hand. It was Arthur Rimbaud’s. And next to Rimbaud was Paul Verlaine.

“Your existence is miraculous, Chuuya,” N marveled as if in song. “In the end, we were unable to repeat the same phenomenon here as we did with you.”

Those words dragged Chuuya back to reality. It was just N and him. The cylinder was still intact.

Chuuya placed a hand on the cylinder’s surface. It was neither cold nor warm. It was a temperature he knew very well.

“…So?” Chuuya faced N after managing to regain his composure. “What kind of national secret does this place—?”

Bam!

Something had suddenly hit the glass from the inside.

Chuuya froze.

There was an outline of a hand right next to Chuuya’s that was touching the glass. It was around the same size as his, but only the palm was visible. The rest was hidden within the bluish darkness.

He immediately came to a certain realization. The glass itself wasn’t black; that wasn’t what was making it impossible to see inside. The vessel’s glass was actually clear, and the cylinder was filled with a bluish-black liquid, obscuring the contents from view.

“Is somebody in there?!” Chuuya shouted at N. But N did not reply; he simply fixed him with a calm gaze.

“Answer me, damn it! Who’s in there?!”

The hand was almost the exact same size as Chuuya’s.

“No need to rush. I’m about to introduce you.”

N took out a remote control from a pocket in his white lab coat, then turned one of the many knobs.

The sound of wastewater draining could be heard as the bluish-black liquid began to bubble. The water level slowly lowered from the top of the cylinder.

Chuuya took a step back as he stared in mute amazement. “Is that…?”

What appeared from inside the liquid…was Chuuya.

His eyes were closed. All he was wearing was a plastic lab garment. He was ghastly thin, which made him appear slightly younger than Chuuya himself. Both ankles were shacked with silvery-white chains attached to something deep within the water.

“Allow me to introduce you to the original you.”

Chuuya stared in a daze.

“The owner of the self-contradicting skill. Other than his skill, he was an ordinary boy born in a hot spring district in the San’in region. This special vessel was calibrated so he wouldn’t be crushed to death by the singularity’s gravity. That’s the only reason why he’s still alive.”

The boy in the cylinder suddenly began violently coughing in agony. It looked like he was having trouble breathing. Before long, he bent completely over while vomiting so painfully that it seemed like he was going to hack up his organs. The cylinder vessel, however, muffled the sounds within.

“Hey! He’s in pain! Is he gonna be okay?!”

“Of course not,” N replied calmly. “He just lost the amniotic fluid that was keeping him alive.”

“What?!”

The boy inside writhed on the floor of the vessel while screaming something and violently hitting the glass, although Chuuya could not hear what he was saying.

“What the hell are you doing?! Save him!”

“There’s no need. He already fulfilled his role long ago—his role to bring you to life.”

The boy went into convulsions on the floor while vomiting an unbelievable amount of blood.

Chuuya’s complexion instantly changed. He grabbed N by the collar and pulled him forward. “Fill that tank with water again!” he screamed. “This instant!”

“Why?” N’s expression didn’t change.

“Do it, or I’ll kill you!”

N shrugged. “Very well. Here.”

He then held out the remote he used to drain the water, which Chuuya immediately ripped out of his hand. It had three black knobs, three black buttons, and one red button. Chuuya turned the knob—the one that had drained the water—back in place, but nothing happened. He pushed several buttons, but still nothing happened.

The boy continued to suffer. His body trembled while dark-red blood gushed from his mouth. His face turned bluish purple due to the blood in his lungs making it impossible to breathe.

Chuuya desperately pressed every button combination he could think of until he heard a clank, and the vessel began to tilt sideways. It then leaned forward as if it were bowing until the front half of the vessel popped open, releasing the liquid inside along with the young boy.

Chuuya lifted the boy’s body off the floor. “Don’t die on me!”

The boy gasped in Chuuya’s arms, his chest contracting and expanding aggressively as he still struggled to breathe. His face was no different from Chuuya’s, but his eyes were a little kinder and much feebler. The boy grabbed Chuuya, his gaze pleading. He opened his mouth as if to say something. His lungs filled with a puff of air.

And that was it. His life had come to an end.

His grip weakened, and his hand dropped to his side. His eyes clouded over after losing focus. The now-useless air in his lungs was expelled like a sigh, signaling the end.

Chuuya watched in a daze as the boy’s body began to deteriorate. His skin peeled off as his flesh melted—until they eventually turned into a puddle of that same bluish-black liquid.

There was no way to stop it. His flesh fell to the floor, leaving only his skeleton. All that was left was the young boy’s small white bones, his garment, the bundles of transfusion tubes and measurement cords still attached to him, and the bluish-black sludge at Chuuya’s feet.

Chuuya laid the skeleton on the floor, then violently grabbed N.

“What is wrong with you?!”

But N didn’t even blink.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I was your father,” N stated flatly, as if he were reading from a set of cue cards. “I designed your body. I tweaked your genes so you’d be able to withstand Arahabaki’s power.”

That was when the unbelievable happened. N effortlessly pulled Chuuya’s hand off his clothes.

“What…?!”

Chuuya tried to punch him, but he couldn’t. In fact, he couldn’t even stand. His knees wobbled. His body grew heavy. N wasn’t strong; Chuuya was growing weak. He’d felt this way once before.

“This is…the same as when…”

It was a year ago, at the cemetery by the cliffside. This was the same feeling as when Shirase stabbed him from behind. What was it that Shirase said that day?

“I wouldn’t squirm so much if I were you. The blade was tipped with rat poison… Your arms and legs are gonna be numb for a while, so you won’t be able to move like normal.”

His voice was far away yet strangely prominent. Chuuya dropped to his knees. His hands were too heavy. But why? Why now?

“I designed you. That’s why I know all about you. I know how physically strong your body is, yet how you’re just as weak to poison as any ordinary person.”

“‘Poison’…?”

Chuuya searched his memory. Poisoning him was not an easy task. He would’ve immediately realized it if he had been attacked.

That was when it hit him.

It happened before they entered the facility when they were told they needed to have their belongings checked and their blood tested.

The blood-drawing kit. The needle.

“The syringe from when we got here…!”

“I invited you here in order to tell you the truth because I believed we could avoid being assassinated by Verlaine that way,” N casually admitted as he adjusted his shirt and smoothed out the wrinkle left by Chuuya’s grip. “But that strategy had an element of uncertainty. There’s no absolute proof that Verlaine would give up if we simply told you the truth. That’s why we decided to take a more reliable approach.”

Chuuya struggled in an attempt to stand, splashing the bluish-black sludge at his feet.

“Do you get it? If you die, Verlaine will have no reason to stay in this country.”

“I’m gonna kill you!”

Chuuya exploded with rage. He leaped to his feet with a surge of emotion, no physical strength involved, and swung at N.

N calmly took out a gun and shot Chuuya. The point blank hit ricocheted off his forehead and knocked him backward until he fell to the ground. His forehead was bleeding, but the bullet hadn’t reached his brain. It simply slid across his skin and continued to soar past him. He had focused every bit of his skill to redirect the bullet before it struck his head.

Showing no emotion, N continued to shoot Chuuya as he lay on the ground. Chuuya was unable to deflect all the bullets as a few hit him in the chest and stomach, sending blood and bits of flesh into the air. He let out a voiceless scream.

“I’m sure you think I’m an awful person, but I’m not doing this merely because I don’t want to die. I’m doing this to continue our research. In other words, I’m doing this for our country.”

N took a container out of his lab coat pocket. He then opened it, revealing a syringe that he thrusted into one of Chuuya’s fresh wounds.

“I am committing a fiendish act for the sake of my organization. You can sympathize, right? After all, you’re part of a large organization, too.”

“Eat…shit…,” Chuuya growled. He lifted his hand, but it never reached N. It fell to the floor.

And then there was darkness.