Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 - Chapter 4.1

 O grantors of dark disgrace

An excerpt from Rimbaud’s journal:

Date:  

DGSS Operations Division, Special Operations Command Undercover Agent:  

Fair weather. Evening. Waning moon.

The mouse scurries ahead.

A shadow amid the gray evening.

The noble female mouse scurries ahead.

A gray shadow in the darkness.

I gaze up at the moon with a pipe in my mouth,

delighting in the leisure.

Only when the pipe has cooled will I go.

Once I leave, and my hollow footsteps are no more,

perhaps all that remains will be death, bodies, blood, agony, and an unfortunate end.

Date:  

DGSS Operations Division, Special Operations Command Undercover Agent:  

Rain. Midnight. Waning moon.

I am writing this after crawling out of the mouse hole.

I am in a leaky brick house. I can hear the rain seeping in from somewhere. The lantern by my bedside is too dark to even see my wine. My handwriting must be close to illegible once again. But as of right now, I don’t mind it.

Because I want to write about what transpired.

Up until only two hours ago, I was in the rebel forces’—the May Uprising’s—hidden cellar. Everything is over now. The results were exceptional. That is, if you’re one of the higher-ups.

I, on the other hand, do not consider this mission a success. The moment I stepped into the cellar, the rebels were already there together. And in the end, he died.

I referred to all the members as “he” because there was actually only one member in this rebel group. It was their leader, a skill user known as Pan.

We battled. He was strong. Furthermore, he had a secret weapon: an artificial skill-derived life-form known as Black No. 12. He had created it all by himself. It was a monster capable of manipulating gravity at will and nullifying any physical attack. Pan could control this life-form by giving it any command he pleased.

But our intelligence bureau did a wonderful job this time around. (I wish they were always this good.) They discovered beforehand that Pan was inputting commands via a special type of metal powder, so all I had to do was destroy the machine emitting said powder.

Upon being emancipated from Pan’s mind control, Black No. 12 immediately attacked his creator.

It was a chilling sight. Black No. 12 simply made a fist, and half the cellar was gone…along with Pan’s upper body as well.

After Black No. 12 lost consciousness, I carried him out of the cellar. He is currently resting at this cheap hotel.

I wonder what will become of him now. Will the government dispose of him?

It is terrifyingly chilly. The hearth’s flames feel so far away.

Date:  

DGSS Operations Division, Special Operations Command Undercover Agent:  

Fair weather. Noon. Strong winds from the east.

I am writing this after putting on my thermal underclothes, fur gloves, earmuffs, and heavy overcoat.

I just spoke with my contact at a café and was given orders on how to handle Black No. 12. I was so taken aback by what I heard that I had the contact clarify the details three times.

The government apparently believes Black No. 12 could be a valuable asset because he had the entire rebel forces’ network hammered into his head when he was Pan’s guard dog. France wants to make him a spy. They want me to train him and keep an eye on him.

Me? Train him?

Am I even capable of such a thing?

I can’t form relationships due to the nature of my work. Friends and lovers alike are liabilities to spies. Both my parents and my previous paramour think that I died in prison.

Can a person like me truly guide someone?

I do not know the answer to that question. But what if I could do it?

Me, someone known only by a code name after throwing away my past and given name. Me, doing something for another person, for a nation, for a friend who had been reborn. The thought alone is surprisingly exhilarating.

My life and death will not go down in the history books. All that will be given to me in death will be a cracked, unmarked grave. But that is fine…so long as I can leave something for someone before I die.

My first mission is to assign Black No. 12 a new code name. And I already have one in mind: Paul Verlaine. It was my real name, the one given to me by my parents.

Paul: The day you read this journal will be the day you learn your secret. I pray that moment will bring you true happiness.

Date:  

DGSS Operations Division, Special Operations Command Undercover Agent:  

Cloudy. Midnight. No visible moon.

I cannot believe it. I finally managed to decipher The Secret of the Gentle Forest. That is where a beast from hell itself slumbers.

And that is where Verlaine’s

(The page is ripped, making it impossible to decipher the rest.)

The small moon illuminated one corner of the blue twilight. Ougai Mori was asleep on a train.

Outside the train car window, an azure nightscape hung over the dark woodland, its trees whispering to one another. The tiny city lights of Yokohama faintly glowed in the far distance as if it were another planet millions of light-years away.

There were no other passengers inside the train. Only empty wooden seats that seemed to go on forever. Ougai Mori leaned his shoulder against the armrest by the window, his head drooping as he dozed off. Faint dark creases under his eyes conveyed his exhaustion.

He was on the run—escaping an assassin.

Chances were good that he’d be detected if he tried to escape by car. This assassin was a former spy and an extraordinary one at that. He had been trained by a European government, so outmaneuvering him was Mori’s only option. That was why he purchased an entire station and train for himself and cut all the surveillance cameras, thus creating a train line that didn’t exist.

It would be tomorrow morning before he arrived at his hideout. An announcement on the intercom informed him that the train was approaching the station, and the train car gradually began slowing down. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about this particular train. It had to look like any ordinary locomotive that arrived at and departed the station on time. The only difference was nobody would be getting off or on.

The train pulled into the station. Mori’s eyes were still closed. The next time he would open his eyes would be somewhere where he was finally safe. Or perhaps he would never open his eyes again.

Only the gods knew the answer to that.

“S-someone, help! Please—let me down from here!”

A man’s screams echoed through the night sky.

“You want me to let you down? Why?” another man asked gently.

The dry wind blowing past the tall structure carried their voices.

They were on top of a tower crane.

The crane was being used to carry material for a high-rise building in the middle of construction, located right in between the suburbs of Yokohama and where aircrafts flew by.

“I never tied you up. I didn’t even beat you until you could no longer walk. If you want to get down, then be my guest.”

The man with the kind voice was Verlaine, who was casually sitting at the end of an iron jib while his eyes were focused on the beautiful nightscape.

“Don’t be ridiculous! No ordinary human can just walk down this tower to safety!”

N, pale in the face, was clutching onto the iron frame with all fours for dear life. The wind would hit him if he lifted his head even a little, and that could knock him off-balance. There was nowhere safe for him to go.

After kidnapping N from the research facility, Verlaine used his skill to walk him all the way here. He walked up the side of the tower as if he were casually crossing the street.

“It’s a nice place, isn’t it?” Verlaine asked softly. “The perfect place to go whenever you want to talk in private.”

N couldn’t even lift his head. It took everything he had to make sure his sweat-drenched hands were holding on to the iron frame.

“What do you…want to know?” N weakly managed to ask, out of breath.

“Tell me everything you know about The Secret of the Gentle Forest.”

The wind was strong and cold as it roared between them, but Verlaine’s kind, well-projected voice was not cut off even a little by it.

“I can’t.” N looked up at Verlaine while still clutching the frame. “That information is the only thing keeping me alive. Once I tell you, you’ll kill me.”

“I’m going to kill you either way,” replied Verlaine while chewing a pear that he had taken out of his pocket.

N’s face froze. Verlaine then got to his feet and looked down at N before saying in an icy, hollow tone:

“You should know the title The Secret of the Gentle Forest. It was the title of the last chapter in Pan’s manual for creating artificial skills. I got a glimpse of the manual after the government got their hands on it, but six pages of the last chapter had been omitted. The government was probably intentionally trying to cover something up. You, however, received a stolen unabridged copy from your intelligence network, which means you should have read it in its entirety. Now, answer me. What was written on those six pages missing from The Secret of the Gentle Forest?”

“If I explained everything to you…,” N replied, his voice taut. “Would you believe me?”

“Depends on what you tell me.”

“What if I told you the last chapter was already missing from the manual I read and that I don’t know a thing? You still wouldn’t believe me, would you?”

“Then why did you even bring up The Secret of the Gentle Forest? You mentioned it because you knew it was important. Am I wrong?”

N lowered his gaze and replied, “The pages were intentionally omitted. It was clear there had to be something, so I just used it to my advantage.”

“Enough joking around.”

“I was standing between life and death. I would’ve said anything to save my life. Even surprised myself.”

Verlaine looked down at him in silence as if he were staring at the remains of a dead insect.

“I see,” he eventually replied, then approached N before lightly placing a foot on his shoulder.

“W-wait!” N desperately clung on to the frame as his body shifted to the side. “I really don’t know! The only one who does is the person who got rid of that entry! It was a spy named Rimbaud who apparently did it!”

Verlaine’s foot suddenly froze.

“What?”

“After getting the original report, Rimbaud disposed of those pages before submitting it to the government. That’s why he’s the only one who knows what was written in them. That’s what a mole in the French government said. That’s why I really don’t know anything!”

“It was Rimbaud…?” Verlaine lowered his foot. His eyes scanned the past. “That’s impossible. He wouldn’t hide anything from me.”

N looked up at Verlaine while trying to calm his breathing.

“He’s the last person who would do something like that. He trusted me.” Verlaine’s gaze wandered empty space. “He gave me a name when I was nothing more than Black No. 12. He gave me his name. He then changed his code name to my original name—to Rimbaud. We traded names. It was his idea.”

Verlaine took off his hat. Written in small print on the inside of the brim was the name Rimbaud.

“He was strong. He was the only one with a skill that rivaled mine, even out of everyone in the organization. We were partners. No, not just partners. I was his closest friend, he told me. And to be perfectly honest, it was an honor.”

Verlaine gazed up, the night sky outlining his profile. He then added:

“But I didn’t like him.”

A cold breeze suddenly blew past him as the stars silently sparkled.

“You didn’t…like him…?”

Verlaine stared down at N with a cold gaze, then put his hat back on.

“I’ve said too much.” He looked away as if he had lost all interest in the researcher. “I wish we could have talked some more, but I’m a busy man. I’ve still got a rush job to take care of. I have to kill my last target before Dazai finishes his preparations. That’s why we’ll continue this conversation when I get back. Until then, please enjoy the nighttime view.”

Verlaine then turned around and began walking away.

“W-wait…! At least help me down from here!”

“Help you down?” Verlaine looked back as if he’d just been told the strangest thing. “You’re free to get down yourself. It’s simple. All you need to do is take one single step.”

All the blood had left N’s pale face. Verlaine then stepped forward without turning around again and disappeared into the darkness below.

The train’s operator peered into the darkness with one hand on the controls. He was a veteran with twenty-seven years under his belt. Through rain, wind, and earth-shattering bombs during the great war, he had kept his hand on those controls in front of him.

But even for him, today’s job was unusual in every sense of the word. First, his client somehow purchased an entire railroad company in a single night—and the trains and their schedules as well. Furthermore, the train in question was going to be transporting only a single passenger. When he complained to his boss, he was simply told to stop asking questions and just do the job, that things would be even worse for him if he tried to get out of this.

The operator focused his gaze back on the view in front of him. The trees were sinking into darkness. All he could see were the silver rail tracks and the train’s yellow headlights. That was everything he had to guide him ahead.

His boss was most likely telling the truth. This was Yokohama, the city of demons, after all. Anything could happen. The operator never once got the urge to go speak with the solo passenger. If he did, he would end up with his own severed head in his hands.

All of a sudden, he felt as if he saw something move in the endless sea of darkness. His well-trained eyes locked onto it in the distance. Was it some sort of animal? No. Perhaps a tree was rustling in the wind? No, not that, either.

It was a person. Someone was standing on the tracks.

Before he could even think of the dangers, he was already pulling the brake lever. Compressed air was released as the harsh sound of metal reduction gears echoed, but he didn’t make it in time. The train hit the person on the tracks.

However, that individual stopped the train on a dime.

A powerful force sent the locomotive pitching forward, swinging the tail and derailing the train onto its side in the woods. The train moved like a raging iron snake that dug into the surrounding earth, knocking over countless trees before eventually coming to a stop.

The person who had watched the event play out—Verlaine—smirked with evident satisfaction. He had stopped the train head-on without even a scratch.

He began walking toward the car that Ougai Mori was in. He leaped over the train buried halfway in the ground and got past the electrical fire that had started until he reached his destination.

Ougai Mori was lying on the ground facedown. The entire train was on its side: The walls were now the floor, the ceiling and floor having taken their place. Mori had his back to Verlaine. He was stock still, a pool of blood slowly seeping out from under him.

Verlaine had investigated his target’s skill in advance. There was no secret a former spy couldn’t uncover. Ougai Mori didn’t have a skill that could save him from such an impact.

“That was too easy,” muttered Verlaine while approaching his target.

He would never be so foolish as to leave without confirming his target was dead. He was always prepared to finish them off on the small chance that they could still somehow be alive.

Verlaine rolled Mori’s body over. His eyes opened wide.

It wasn’t Ougai Mori.

It was a man he had never seen before who was wearing clothes and a wig to look like Mori. But Verlaine was far from careless when it came to work. He had hooked up a hidden camera at the previous station that showed footage of the real Ougai Mori. When he grabbed the man to check his identity, Verlaine suddenly felt a hand against his chest.

“This was too easy.”

The skill’s powerful repulsive force sent Verlaine flying backward until he smashed through the train window and fell into the muck outside. He kept rolling, scattering dirt in the process, until his back slammed into a tree, stopping him.

“…Impressive.”

Verlaine placed a hand against the tree and stood up, wiping the dirt off his clothes while he sank into thought. He caught a brief glimpse of the man’s face. That plus the repulsive force led him to believe the impostor was most likely the Port Mafia member Ryuurou Hirotsu.

A body double.

The Mafia knew about the hidden camera Verlaine had set up, which was why they had Ougai Mori appear so they could swiftly switch him with a body double. In other words, they saw through Verlaine’s plot. Verlaine knew only one person in this country who could outmaneuver him with such dexterity.

“Hey, Verlaine.”

A small-framed man was seated on the edge of a toppled cart.

“Dazai,” said Verlaine as he picked up his hat off the ground by his feet. “I’ve heard people say that intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with age, but what you possess is extraordinary.”

“You messed up this time,” Dazai said dryly. “You let your emotions get the best of you. Anyone could have predicted your next move. Why are you so obsessed with Chuuya?”

“What’s so strange about a man being concerned for his younger brother?” Verlaine replied while wiping the dirt off his clothes.

“Everything about this is strange,” Dazai insisted. “Do you seriously believe you’re even his brother?”

“…What?” Verlaine narrowed his eyes.

“You saw what happened to Chuuya’s original self. There was nothing but bones left when he died,” Dazai added while dangling his legs off the side of the cart. “He looked almost exactly like Chuuya, and his skill was extremely similar, too. Not to mention there are plenty of other similarities between them. So what if that was the artificial skill-derived life-form, and the original is actually Chuuya, still alive and kicking, his only redeeming feature being his endless supply of energy? Would a layman who’s only read some old research papers be able to tell?”

“He isn’t the original.” Verlaine shook his head. “I’m not a fool. I wouldn’t mistake my target during an undercover mission. What I stole from that research facility nine years ago was, without a doubt, an artificial life-form just like me.”

“Either way, we can easily confirm with a quick check,” Dazai replied breezily. “Fortunately, the researchers back at the facility gave a demonstration on how to overwrite the character set inside Chuuya. I’m sure a few of them would be thrilled to teach us exactly how to do that once the Port Mafia kidnaps them. Then we’ll finally have our answer. We have plenty of time as well, fortunately.”

“You sound like you’re certain he’s human.”

“I am.” Dazai sighed, smiling. “There’s no way I could hate a man-made character string this much.”

After letting out a sigh, Verlaine began to walk toward Dazai with heavy steps as if he were about to finish a tiresome job.

“I would love to hear you kindly explain the evidence you’ve found that proves me wrong, but you have another job to do,” insisted Verlaine as he effortlessly walked up the hill that he had just rolled down a few moments ago. “You need to tell me where the real Ougai Mori is. It’s a tough job, I know. Real backbreaking work—literally.”

“In other words, you don’t plan on backing down, huh?”

“Exactly.”

“All right,” replied Dazai as he aimlessly stared into space. He even looked a bit disappointed as he added:

“Then, you lost.”

A bullet from a sniper rifle directly hit Verlaine’s head.

His upper body bent back wildly until he hit the ground and tumbled into the muck. After rolling three times, he lifted his head and glared sternly at Dazai.

“A sniper? Do—?”

But before he could even finish his sentence, the sniper shot another bullet at his forehead. Verlaine placed his hands on the ground, catching himself before being knocked over sideways.

“Your skill only works on things you touch,” commented Dazai, looking down at Verlaine and swinging his legs. “That means bullets will actually hit you. Sure, you’ll instantly stop them when they land. But if we use a large-caliber sniper rifle, which fires several times more quickly than the average gun, we can physically hit you the moment you stop the bullet with your gravity like this. And…”

Dazai casually raised a hand, and immediately, bursts of fire appeared within the darkness.

Atop the hills, among the trees, within the muck, among the canopy of large trees—over fifty snipers had fired their rifles in unison at Verlaine. He howled as each bullet struck.

He tried escaping into the woods and manipulating gravity to protect his body. But just as he did, he was hit in the back by a sniper. When he tried to hide in a ditch, he was hit by a sniper on top of a tree. There was nowhere for him to run.

“How was he able to get this many snipers…in such a short period of time…?!”

A bullet pierced Verlaine’s clothing and dug its way into his skin. It didn’t injure him enough to make him bleed, but the number of snipers was overwhelming. There were ten shots per second, followed by twenty, and it only increased from there. It was as if the air around Verlaine had turned on him.

All Verlaine could do was cover his head and curl up on the ground, making himself as small as possible.

“You messed with the wrong guy, Verlaine,” Dazai said with a faint smirk. “I know exactly how to deal with someone who can manipulate gravity. Day in and day out, I’ve spent every waking and sleeping moment think about how I can annoy Chuuya.”

“Don’t get so cocky!” Verlaine grabbed a nearby tree and pulled it out of the ground while the bullets rained upon him. “Do you honestly think you can kill me just with a few pebbles?!”

He lifted the tree in the air to throw it at a sniper under the cover of darkness in the distance, but his arm stopped before he could finish…because the tree had been sliced into countless pieces.

“Oh my. You really do look like one of my subordinates close-up.”

It was the graceful koto-like voice of a woman. She had flaming-scarlet hair and eyes the same color. Japanese maple leaves decorated her red ombré kimono.

Most striking of all, however, was the masked demon by her side, also wearing a kimono. It was tall with long hair and was effortlessly raising a blade around the length of a child into the air as if it were weightless. Its golden kimono appeared to be melting from the knees down, making it clear that this being lacked a corporeal body.

“It was very selfish of you to try robbing me of one of my men. I’ll be willing to forgive you once I take one of your limbs. After I finish, you’d best leave my sight.”

Kouyou Ozaki, a gifted young swordswoman in the Port Mafia and Chuuya’s superior. She wielded a skill-derived life-form, a beautiful beast called the Golden Demon.

She spun her vivid peony-red bamboo parasol over her shoulder while twisting and pulling its handle, revealing a glittering silver blade: a cane sword.

“A skill user with the Port Mafia, huh?” Verlaine sneered like a wild beast. “But what can one skill user and two swords do against gravity?”

He lowered his stance to pounce at Kouyou.

“Who said I was alone?”

Verlaine’s body sank into the ground. Astonished, he looked down at his feet to find the ground slowly swallowing them like snakes crawling up his legs. The stunned Verlaine nullified his gravity and jumped onto a nearby tree trunk lying on its side. However, even the sturdy tree trunk turned into liquid under his shoes and tried to swallow him.

“Hmm…”

He jumped once more, but the spot where he was planning on landing was already opening its mouth as if the sludge had a mind of its own, waiting for him.

“Gah-ha-ha! Run, boy. Run. The only reason a kid like you has survived this long is for my entertainment. Now, hurry up and die. I want that head of yours.”

A colossal tree trunk of a man emerged from the darkness of the woods. He donned a faded military uniform full of rips and tears, a judo belt, and tall wooden clogs. His hair was bristly like needles, and his arms crossed in front of his chest were dense like hundred-year-old trees.

One of the Port Mafia’s aces and a soldier who had survived the great war, he was known within the organization as the Colonel.

He raised a treelike arm in front of him and squeezed his hand into a fist. The earth immediately began to rumble. The liquefied ground, trees, and collapsed train all rushed toward the airborne Verlaine.

“His skill can liquefy mass and manipulate it…!”

Verlaine kicked off the first bit of liquefied ground that reached him and jumped back, but that area was already liquefied as well. Even if he tried to change directions to escape, everything above and below him was liquid. Even as he blasted it away with gravity, more liquefied earth simply took its place, giving Verlaine no chance to counter. To make matters worse, snipers shot him from every angle whenever they saw an opening.

“Tsk…!”

Verlaine increased the density of some faint dust in the air and used it as a foothold to jump even higher. He was trying to create distance. The Colonel’s matter-manipulation skill generally didn’t work on things out of sight; that was why Verlaine intended to hide in the woods, weigh down a boulder with gravity, then throw it at his opponent.

That was when he caught sight of something bizarre.

It was a watch. There was a watch floating in the air.

It looked like an ordinary pocket watch: numbers on the face, hour and minute hands, a stem, and internal moving gears peeking out from the edge of the face. What was odd, however, was the size—about as large as a grown man’s torso. And it was turning to face Verlaine as if it were surveilling him. Verlaine, who had a wealth of knowledge on skills, immediately recognized how dangerous this watch was.

He ripped a button off his jacket sleeve, increased its weight by a few dozen pounds, and then tossed it at the watch. The meteor-like button, which had enough force behind it to take down an entire building, simply shot right through the watch. It destroyed the trees behind it and disappeared into the darkness.

“You can’t break it,” uttered a gloomy voice.

When Verlaine glanced in its direction, he noticed there was a young man sitting on the ground, pathetically wrapping his arms around his knees while looking up at him.

“There’s no point. It sees everyone. It sees me. It sees you. Eventually, you’ll have to die. It watches you until, one day, it’s caught right up you. I’m talking about time. It’s the enemy of us all.”

Both his voice and complexion were gloom itself. His clothing was ill-fittingly long, and the hems were frayed. His disheveled hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed for months, making it impossible to determine its original color. Anyone could see how bony he was even through his clothes. He looked up at Verlaine while curling his finger as if to beckon him.

The floating clock’s hour and minute hands moved with a clink until they were both pointing at twelve. The next moment, the watch was drawn toward Verlaine until it was literally sucked into his chest. Verlaine tensed, searching for the vanished clock, but nothing was happening—nothing he could see, that is.

The liquefied ground latched onto Verlaine’s leg. Taken aback, he used gravity to push it off, then looked around. He was already far from the Colonel, yet the liquefied earth had caught up to him. It was bizarre.

Immediately, he was hit. A sniper’s bullet bounced off his head, sending him spinning through the air. He planted his feet into the muck, digging into the ground to stop himself.

Strange—the bullets were getting faster, which meant they were being deflected with a proportionate amount of energy when they struck him, even though he was stopping them with gravity.

Did the enemy switch to a more powerful firearm? No. This was…

The ground liquefied. Verlaine leaped out of the way before it could engulf him, but the tentacle-like liquid gave chase even more quickly than before.

He swiftly checked his surroundings. A leaf was falling from its stem due to the shock wave caused by the sniper’s fire. But it didn’t flutter in the wind. It fell straight down, piercing the ground. The attacks weren’t getting any faster.

“My time is getting slower…!”

“Everyone always dies, leaving me behind.” The gloomy young man glared at Verlaine with a perplexing grudge in his eyes. “My brothers, my parents—everyone. Time killed them all. But I can escape it with this special power of mine.”

A skill user who could manipulate time.

A cold sweat began to drip down Verlaine’s forehead. Time-manipulation skills were not only extremely powerful—they also defied common sense. As far as Verlaine knew, only a few people possessed such a skill with the most prominent perhaps being H. G. Wells, a former skill user engineer. Wells rose to notoriety as the worst terrorist who ever lived after creating the skill weapon known as the Shell and simply vanishing without a trace.

Time manipulation tampered with the fundamental principles of this world and overwrote them however the user wished. Time and space were equal from the universe’s perspective, after all, and time-manipulating skills had the potential to be as dangerous as Verlaine’s gravity-manipulation skill—they could reshape the world.

Soon after Verlaine’s movement grew sluggish, a surge of Mafia attacks followed in the form of bullets, blades, and liquefied ground. Even though he tried to evade, he moved as slowly as if he were underwater. Verlaine’s face tensed.

Dazai leisurely observed the roars and gunfire echoing through the woods. He looked down at the hellish war zone as relaxed as if he were enjoying the night breeze.

“This is how the world works,” Dazai intoned. “It’s an absolute truth no matter when or where you go. Groups are stronger than individuals. People with special powers are stronger than groups. And…”

He smiled as the explosive blasts of battle gently caressed his cheeks.

“Groups of people with special powers are stronger than individuals with special powers. There’s strength in numbers.”

Verlaine enhanced his gravity laterally as much as he could, swiftly sending himself away from battle with enough force to overpower the skill that was slowing him down. His bones creaked from the extreme acceleration.

Verlaine’s judgment was not impaired, even in the face of danger. The situation was not completely hopeless. He was going to get as far from the wave of skill attacks as possible, regain his footing, then repel the enemies’ bullets back at them, sniping one skill user at a time. That was how he could win this.

There were still only three skill users. He was at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t dire—

Just then, Verlaine’s skin suddenly started bleeding.

He looked down at his sleeve, only to realize that his skin was peeling off and revealing the muscle underneath. Nevertheless, there was only a small amount of blood, and he hardly felt any pain, either.

He reflexively planted his feet on the ground, but the skin on his heels peeled off in his shoes; he could tell by the slippery sensation. But he still hardly felt any pain.

He immediately realized this was a new skill attack.

Verlaine could see his breath. His skin was freezing over; frost dangled off his eyelashes.

“Embrace the freezing love. Embrace the frozen flower’s petals as they scatter in full bloom,” came a shrill voice—yet another skill user.

She had long white hair and was wearing a white shawl. Even her breath came out white. Only the crimson rose on her chest had color. Each breath she took caused the nearby trees to freeze, crack, and shatter due to the frost heave.

Verlaine immediately recognized her skill. She could cool the temperature.

His skin was peeling off because it was sticking to his clothing after being exposed to the freezing air. In just the blink of an eye, his body had turned ice cold. It wouldn’t be much longer until his muscles and bones were frozen as well.

This skill was extremely dangerous. An attack that froze its target didn’t need to physically hit them, which meant it couldn’t be blocked through manipulating gravity, either. It was Verlaine’s natural enemy.

A sniper’s bullet pierced Verlaine’s shoulder, causing him to moan in agony. The bullet was cold; it froze the moment it came into contact with his skin, forming a column of ice that only continued to grow. The cold temperature slowly seeped into his wounds, eating away at his flesh.

The enemies’ attacks—slowing down time, freezing, and sniping—were a perfect match. They clearly devised a strategy that focused on hindering Verlaine’s strengths and exposing his weak points.

There was something else strange as well. Even though he’d retreated from the battle zone relatively quickly, the snipers’ attacks still didn’t stop. It was as if they knew exactly which way he was going to run. A target moving at this speed through a wooded area at night would usually be able to evade a sniper’s scope and avoid getting shot. So how were these people doing it?

“Kee-hee-hee-hee-heeee! What a sweet face. Hey, I promise I won’t tell anyone, but if you cry, drool, and apologize, I’ll sneak you outta here.”

The voice was nearby. Extremely nearby.

Verlaine looked in its direction, but there was nobody around—no people, that is.

He saw a coin-size hole floating in empty space. It was as if the space had been burnt and was caving in on itself, leading to another dimension. On the other side of the hole was a black pupil quietly staring at Verlaine.

“Yep. It’s me, buddy. You’re bein’ watched. You’re never gonna be safe now. Even when you lock the bathroom door behind you, I’ll be watchin’. Kee-hee-hee-hee!”

The hole was small, making it impossible to see the speaker’s entire body. But that eye alone was enough. It was filled with evil. It was observing, tracking, and constantly reporting Verlaine’s location.

He reflexively launched a roundhouse kick at the hole.

“Wuh-oh.”

It closed and disappeared before the kick connected.

“Over here.”

The voice was coming from behind. Verlaine looked back to find a hole open in another location, staring at him—at its target.

This skill could connect space. The skill user was most likely in another, safer location observing the battle by linking different points of space. He himself didn’t attack, and he would immediately close his hole if attacked, so destroying him or the hole with gravity wouldn’t be possible.

Just how many skill users were sent here to battle?

“Kee-hee-hee! Here’s a present from all of us at the Port Mafia, filled with love!”

Peach flower petals shot out of the coin-size hole before surrounding Verlaine. The petals then began glowing white, which was another skill—

The instant Verlaine swiftly tried to evade, the petals exploded in unison.

Dazai had a good view of the explosion even from his seat on the train car. The white light chopped down trees and burned an afterglow of itself in the night sky. Dazai watched with a faint smirk.

“How does it look, Dazai?”

A middle-aged man appeared from inside the train. It was the man dressed in the boss’s attire—Hirotsu, the body double.

“Things are going smoothly, as you can see. It’s almost boring.”

Dazai pointed ahead. Explosions roared in the distance, and trees collapsed to the ground. Flashes of light followed by low-frequency pops from the sniper rifles continued without end. After removing his wig, Hirotsu put his usual monocle back on and narrowed his eyes.

“I’m impressed.”

“There’s no way it wouldn’t go smoothly after all the time I bought us,” said Dazai while elegantly crossing his legs like royalty. “Chuuya and I almost didn’t make it against Randou, so I made sure to thoroughly prepare this time. Four hundred and twenty-two of the Mafia’s best fighters and twenty-eight skill users—I checked that everyone in the Port Mafia who was currently available would be here to kill the so-called king of assassins.”

Cold mist and explosions lit up the scenery in the distance. Verlaine slipped between the trees to escape, but yellowish-white rays of light scorched the night sky and blocked his path. A new skill user had appeared.

It was an extremely simple strategy: set traps and wait. Chuuya and Adam had previously mapped out a similar plan to defeat Verlaine, and this plan that Dazai came up with was essentially the same. He predicted the assassin’s next target, set up a trap around said target, and waited for Verlaine to arrive to attack from behind.

The sole difference between the two plans was the scale. Dazai had the entire Mafia lying in wait. The overwhelming number of combat units was the key component to the trap, and it tipped the odds completely in the Mafia’s favor.

“This battle is going to last all night,” Dazai whispered to Verlaine in the far distance. “Verlaine, you are the perfect assassin. Your skills are unparalleled. I’ll bet you’ve never been caught and surrounded even once. You would never make that mistake. That’s why you’ve never been cornered by an entire organization of skill users. Randou himself was deeply concerned about your dangerous perfectionist streak, too.”

Dazai had suddenly taken out Randou’s leather-bound notebook. It detailed Verlaine’s birth and the circumstances around him.

“I will mourn for you, Verlaine,” he began, placing a hand on the journal as if in prayer. “I won’t mourn your death, but your birth. I doubt anyone else will, after all. The only one who’s pained by your birth is you. That’s why you fight. And yet…I think you’re amazing. You resented having been born, you resented the power that you possessed, and you resented the world. And because of that, you tried to accept this meaningless life. That’s something truly incredible. I don’t have that kind of courage. I wish we could have talked more… But it’s already time to say good-bye.”

Dazai stood up, turned his back to the battle, and began to walk away.

“Dazai, sir?” said Hirotsu.

“Call me when it’s over.”

Dazai’s voice listlessly dropped to the ground. He kept walking.

And the very next moment, a black wave swallowed the battlefield.

Verlaine observed the outside world through his muddied consciousness. Blades, bullets, liquefied ground. Cold temperatures, flashes of light, waves of heat. Poison mist and a barrier of sound. Every kind of attack was destroying Verlaine from all directions.

The soil liquefied wherever he landed, crawling up his legs until he was forced to push it away with gravity. Every breath he took froze his throat shut. The flashes of light temporarily blinded him while the sound waves reduced his hearing to nothing. Whenever he stopped moving, a shower of sniper bullets rained down on him. Even when he turned objects into high speed projectiles by manipulating their gravity, the demon’s long blade cut them all down. Every single one of these attacks worked together like precise machinery under the command of a young man with devilish intellect: Dazai.

This was what it means to be human. This is what humans are capable of when pushed to their limit. This is what I tried to become a part of but couldn’t in the end.

Verlaine inwardly laughed.

Look at them flaunt their humanity. Very well. Then it looks like I’ll just have to show them, too—show them what it means to not be human. I’ll show them the color of darkness this hell is buried in my heart—this hatred that not even Rimbaud could comprehend.

Verlaine opened his mouth, and the hatred immediately began pouring out along with a verse.

“Your hate, your set torpors, your weaknesses, your spite,

All the brutalities you suffered long ago,

You return to us, all without evil, O Night,

In an excess of blood that every month will flow.”

The wind stopped. The rustling of the trees ceased as if they were trying to escape something. An invisible wave rippled through the air.

Thoughts crossed Verlaine’s ever-condensing consciousness.

Nobody understood that I’m not human. Nobody understood that I wasn’t blessed by any god, that I wasn’t birthed by a person—I was born from nothingness.

Rimbaud himself didn’t understand this loneliness, even at the very end.

I hated him, but not because he didn’t understand. I hated him because he pretended like he did.

Black snow-like mist began to dance around Verlaine—but it wasn’t snow. It wasn’t even matter.

It was darkness bursting into nothingness. A tiny universe.

Allow me to show them the hatred of something not human, the emptiness of being born without God’s blessing. I will show them the hell that slumbers within my truest self, within my core—and within the depths of my soul.

Verlaine howled. His roar transformed into black surging waves that began to compress the forest into nothingness. Verlaine’s hat flew off his head and vanished into the trees.

Dazai yelled into his radio to escape, but even his voice was swallowed by the shock waves. The nightmare had already taken shape.

The trapper—the skill user who could connect different points in space by boring coin-size holes in them—heard Dazai’s voice through the radio, telling everyone to run. That was also the moment he realized, peeking through his hole, that Verlaine had suddenly been swallowed by darkness and vanished.

“What’s going—?”

Those were his final words.

The gravitational waves expanded in the blink of an eye and seeped through the trapper’s portal, making their way into the Mafia’s hideout. The abrupt twisting of space pulled his body through the hole. There wasn’t so much as a second for him to grab onto anything. The trapper’s face slammed into the hole, and even then, the gravitational pull didn’t cease. His skin touching the portal was slowly pulled to the other side. The gravitational wave grew even stronger until his flesh, bones, and clothing were sucked away like water spiraling down a drain. Eventually, nothing was left.

The hole in space vanished the moment the skill user died, returning the hideout to silence.

Verlaine floated in the sky.

He hadn’t jumped. He wasn’t gliding like a bird. He was ignoring gravity and hovering in midair. Mysterious runelike symbols surfaced on his skin and began wriggling as if they were alive. Explosion after explosion filled the air. Once one burst, another took its place.

Black particles softly fell to the ground like powdery snow.

Verlaine cackled. His laughter was far from anything human. The sound was closer to thunder, metal being sawed, or trees being split in twain.

It was a beast—a malevolent one.

The evil being—Verlaine—raised its right hand and materialized a black sphere. The sphere floated, sucking in the air and gradually expanding.

Dazai’s expression grew stern the moment he witnessed the black anomaly that appeared in the woods in the distance.

“What is that?” Hirotsu asked fearfully by his side.

“The Gate’s been opened.”

Dazai’s voice was hoarse as if he were having trouble breathing. The very next moment, something black shot out from the space where Verlaine was floating.

“Get down!” shouted Dazai.

It came at him like a cannonball before landing on the caboose, approximately four cars away from where he and Hirotsu were standing. The two of them clung to the train as it violently shook like there was an earthquake. By the time the train car stopped shaking, it was a completely different shape.

Half of it was demolished while the rest was bent up like a crumpled piece of paper. It almost looked as if a giant had sloppily ripped the train car into pieces. The hill behind the train had been completely gouged out in a straight line along with any soil, rocks, or trees in its path. The destruction was far greater than what a single skill should be capable of.

“What on earth…just happened…?” muttered Hirotsu.

“It’s the same,” observed Dazai, his expression tense. “It’s just like when he escaped the research facility by instantly creating a hole through the ceiling all the way to the surface. It’s also the same phenomenon that happened two days ago when Chuuya leveled an entire city block. Apparently, Verlaine said he was ‘opening a Gate,’ and that right there is what’s on the other side. Take a good look, Hirotsu… That power’s in a class of its own.”

Dazai watched as the black sphere in the forest rapidly started expanding once more. The wind began to howl—a harbinger of destruction.

“No… What is that…? What is that?!”

The gloomy young man, who controlled the pocket watch in the sky, could do nothing but clench his trembling jaw in fear at the destruction hanging over his head.

A monster was controlling the black spheres.

One had dropped to the surface only a moment earlier, and that alone killed three snipers. The skill user who could produce rays of light died as well. But it wasn’t just any death. Their bodies were pulled apart like clay simply because they got too close to the sphere. They screamed as their flesh, blood, and bones—everything—got sucked into the black orb. No part of them remained.

Glaring down at the surface like a god was Verlaine. His eyes were not human. There wasn’t a glimmer of thought within. They showed no signs of strategizing or calculating. This being was reflexively destroying anything vaguely hostile in its environs—nothing more.

Two more black spheres emerged—one on each side of Verlaine about as wide as an adult human was tall. They were surrounded by faint aureoles glowing red.

The gloomy young man instantly knew that touching one of those meant death. No—simply being near one meant death.

“No… Why…? Why?!”

When he immediately turned around to run away, he saw a woman standing right in front of him.

It was the skill user with white hair and a white shawl who could freeze anything. She was idly staring up at the calamity in the sky, not alarmed in the slightest. She expressed neither fear nor animosity. All she could do was follow orders; the only time she felt something was when she was given orders.

A black sphere of destruction slowly descended upon her, but she didn’t run. She simply gazed at it as if she were admiring its beauty.

“Karen!”

His body was moving on its own before he could even process what was happening. The young man pushed the skill user named Karen away with his slender, frail arms, and the very next moment, his upper body was torn off at the waist by the gravity.

The black sphere quickly devoured his lower body while he was pulled upside down into the sky. He followed Karen with his eyes as she rolled off the cliffside he had pushed her over. She was out of the sphere’s range of destruction now.

Thank goodness, he thought with a smile, but even that smile was sucked into the sphere and disappeared only a second later. Nothing of the man remained.

Dazai was receiving rapid updates on the battle via radio:

Squad Three, annihilated. Squad Five, no survivors. Squad Eight, unresponsive.

He listened to the reports with his eyes closed, then stood, listening carefully as if it were music. His face was blank, emotionless.

“Dazai, sir. It’s time to leave.” Hirotsu waved Dazai over, urging him to run.

“It’s no use. There’s no escaping that power,” Dazai said languidly with his eyes still closed. “Verlaine was strong but not invincible. As extraordinary as his skill was, he could only manipulate the gravity of whatever he touched. That’s why we were able to overwhelm him with nonphysical skills like frost, light, sound, and time. But that Verlaine is different. Those black hole projectiles can crush people into dust even from a distance. They’re spheres of gravity that have condensed space to its absolute limit, and as long as gravitational waves can affect space itself, then no shield or wall can protect us from them. That right there is this world’s ultimate spear.”

He sounded as if he were singing an old nursery rhyme. Then he raised his hands in the air, perhaps so he could feel the presence of destruction with his entire body, even if only a little.

“Plus, he removed the persona directive restraining the skill and surrendered ownership over his body. That Verlaine no longer has the will of a human. This creature can’t be threatened or even reasoned with anymore; psychological warfare won’t work. It’s a demonic beast, pure and simple—and undoubtedly the strongest enemy the Mafia has ever faced.”

“Unbelievable…”

Hirotsu gulped audibly as he watched. He witnessed hills being hollowed out, trees being engulfed, and the terrain transformed. Screams of Mafia soldiers followed.

“And…” Dazai projected his voice as if he were reciting the final stanza of an ode to destruction.

“…everything is still going according to plan. We will stand victorious if our next attack succeeds.”

High above Yokohama, the passing clouds covering the night sky like a lid glittered white in the moonlight.

Beneath those clouds were explosions, booms, and the sounds of the earth splitting. Screams of the dead and dying could be heard as well.

A propeller plane was flying between the cruel world below and the utterly serene world above the clouds.

“Master Chuuya! We will be arriving over the battlefield shortly!” Adam shouted so his voice was audible over the engine.

They were on a two-person, single-engine aircraft. Although the fixed-wing plane wasn’t that fast, it was relatively nimble. It was not, however, mounted with any sort of weapon. Adam was sitting in the cockpit while Chuuya was seated behind him, sternly looking down at the surface.

“Take a good look. A single skill user should not be capable of such sheer destruction!” Adam yelled as he gazed at the catastrophe below while recording it. “More importantly, the duration until its evaporation is several orders of magnitude greater than any ordinary black holes created through physical processes. Are you certain you want to land on top of that?”

Chuuya didn’t respond as he coldly glared down at the surface.

“My risk-evaluation module is recommending we retreat,” Adam said sternly. “Simply avoiding that black sphere is not going to be enough. Do not be fooled by its appearance. It looks black because it is absorbing light and preventing it from escaping—however, those sucked into the sphere will not merely be crushed to death. Their bodies will be torn to shreds until there is nothing left. You see that wavering red halo of light around the sphere’s surface—specifically, the light outside the event horizon? That aureole is the concentration of light around the sphere by means of a gravitational lens. The redshift, which is attributed to the Doppler effect, is making it appear red. Put simply, you could even call that thing a hit box. Once you get close enough to touch it, the tidal force—that is, the difference between the gravity close to the black hole and the gravity far away from it—would tear you to bits until you died.”

“You’re puttin’ me to sleep, damn it,” barked Chuuya, still staring down at the surface. “One look at that thing makes it obvious that it’s dangerous. I’ve experienced it myself, after all.”

Light illuminating the past glowed in Chuuya’s eyes. Only two days ago, Verlaine had grabbed him at the roadside and forced the Gate open inside him. That alone made an entire building crumble into nothingness in the blink of an eye.

The same thing was happening now, but in continuous succession. It was hell on earth.

Over half the trees in sight had been destroyed, turning the forest into a wasteland. Had this battle happened in the heart of Yokohama, then there would have been thousands, if not tens of thousands, of casualties. That was why Dazai chose this remote area as the battleground.

“This really pisses me off. Everything ended up going just how Dazai planned it,” Chuuya spat. “But there’s no goin’ back now. Verlaine has to pay, and I’m the only one who has a shot at making that happen, since we have the same skill.”

“Please be careful,” Adam said with a nod. “Even with your skill, if you make direct contact with that sphere of gravity, you will not be able to fully neutralize the effects. If possible, approaching the enemy from directly above without being noticed would be—”

His voice vanished midsentence, then was followed by a scream:

“Watch out!”

Not a moment later, the sphere of gravity was already right before their eyes. Adam swiftly pushed the yoke back to evade, but the violent gale, created by the extraordinary suction force, was causing him to lose control of the aircraft. The plane was doomed; there was no escaping this onslaught.

Adam pulled the ejector-release device on his seat as quickly as he could, launching both Chuuya and himself out of the aircraft. The gravitational sphere immediately tore the aircraft into pieces and swallowed it.

They both flew through the air. Adam then grabbed onto Chuuya’s wrist. There was a sudden pop, followed by two parachutes opening.

“This isn’t gonna work! We’re basically sitting ducks! Adam, cut the parachute lines!”

“But—”

“Do it!”

Adam pulled the automatic pistol out of the holster at his waist and fired four consecutive shots, each precisely cutting a paracord. After a brief delay, Adam and Chuuya were free-falling toward the ground.

“Impressive.” Chuuya grinned. “Now, let’s do this! Adam, calculate the orbit of our free fall!”

“Very well.”

Adam slipped behind Chuuya, then pulled a cord out of the port in his waist. This was normally used to connect another port with a wired communications device, but he wrapped it around Chuuya’s waist and shoulders, then tucked it back into his own waist. The two became one single bullet falling through the night sky.

“Initiating gliding phase.”

Adam pressed both of his sides, and protrusions popped out, which he immediately pulled. A silver sheet suddenly appeared that formed triangular bat-like wings from his arms to his waist. The wings picked up the nighttime wind, transforming Adam and Chuuya’s free fall into a diagonal glide.

“These artificial patagia were created for chasing after fleeing criminals at a high altitude,” he explained while still staring ahead. “I will maneuver our orbit; you should focus on neutralizing the opposing gravitational force!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

The roaring wind rushed past Chuuya’s ears. But despite the high wind pressure blowing against his eyes, he didn’t even squint. His eyes remained locked on the target. Chuuya and Adam were flying right into the enemy like a shooting star.

“Damn you to hell, Dazai! I’m gonna string ya upside down once we get back!”

Two hours earlier:

Dazai was hanging upside down. His legs were tied together and wrapped around the end of a street lamp.

“Which is why we need to have you, Chuuya, leap out of an airplane to get near Verlaine and defeat him.”

Despite hanging upside down, Dazai’s expression was no different from usual: sleepy-eyed and slightly annoyed.

“Uh-huh.”

Chuuya took a seat in a chair while hostilely glaring at Dazai. Adam glanced between them, perplexed.

“Er… What exactly is going on here?”

They were on the side of a runway at an air depot located in a ravine far from the city’s hustle and bustle. It was so quiet you could almost hear the stars twinkling in the dusky sky. Two mechanics were working on a propeller aircraft in the hangar, but their voices couldn’t be heard from this distance. Chuuya was holding a rope wrapped around Dazai’s waist multiple times like a spinning top.

“We’re saving time this way, Mr. Robot Investigator.” Dazai smiled indifferently.

“This is being economical with your time?”

“Yep. After all, the ambush of our lifetime is about to begin.”

Adam looked back and forth between Dazai and Chuuya once more. “Humans truly speak in riddles. I could not find a single analogous phrase in my database for comparison.”

“Look, don’t worry about it. Humans don’t understand him, either,” said Shirase, who was standing a short distance from Chuuya with his arms crossed. He looked utterly defeated.

Chuuya silently tugged on the rope. He pulled and pulled before standing up and walking backward, pulling some more. The rope around Dazai began to unravel as he spun around and around. Nevertheless, he continued explaining his strategy.

“We’re going to use a body double for Mori and lure Verlaine out. Once we do that, we’ll have every fighter in the Mafia strike, and if we manage to drive him into a corner, he’s probably gonna open his Gate as a last resort. Once that happens, we’ll have Chuuya approach him by plane,” he said as he slowly twirled, his voice getting louder or softer depending on which way he was facing. When the rope had been pulled as taut as possible, and Dazai was hanging diagonally, Chuuya let go.

“Once Chuuya gets close…” Dazai spun.

“…Verlaine’s probably…” And spun.

“…going to attack…” And spun.

“…but that’s…” And spun.

“…exactly what we want…” And spun.

“…because Chuuya’s going to use…” And spun.

“…his ability to neutralize gravity…” And spun.

“…until he’s close enough…” And spun.

“…to touch him.” Dazai stopped spinning. “And once that happens, we win— Blergh.”

He vomited.

Adam watched almost as if he pitied him. “I am still having trouble comprehending what is going on.”

Chuuya returned with more rope, which he began tying around Dazai’s waist. “I’m gettin’ my revenge while he explains the plan.”

“Uh-huh…”

“I have every right to, considering what he did. He’s the one who leaked info about N to Verlaine to buy time, knowing that I’d be tortured. The detective died as a result of that, too, so there’s no way I’m lettin’ this bastard off scot-free,” Chuuya explained, shooting Dazai a menacing glare. “I’ve got a hundred and ninety methods for exacting my revenge on him, and this is the second mildest out of ’em all. If I went with just about anything else, he wouldn’t be able to work the control tower during the upcoming fight. Pisses me off, but I had to compromise somewhere.”

“Uh-huh.” Adam’s neck faintly moved as if he didn’t know whether to nod or tilt his head to the side in confusion. “I understand no better now than before I heard the explanation.”

“Don’t sweat it, Adam, old chap. I didn’t catch a lick of that either!” Shirase said, patting Adam on the shoulder in encouragement.

“‘Old chap’…?”

“Allow me to continue,” said Dazai with his ever-unchanging expression. “Once Verlaine fully opens his Gate, a singularity monster will be controlling his mind. He’ll be asleep, essentially, and this monster will automatically attack anything hostile. That’s what we’ll be exploiting. Verlaine won’t be able to make any rational judgments in this state, which means he won’t react to any nonhostile contact. That’s why we’re going to have one group attack and act as a decoy while Chuuya approaches him unarmed.”

Dazai paused, then smirked with a sense of grim destruction.

“Then we slowly feed him poison—tenderly, lovingly, like giving candy to a child.”