Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 - Chapter 4.3

The footsteps of Armageddon gradually approached the city as the night progressed. Guivre squashed the suburban highway’s entrance and exit ramps underfoot. The road’s bridge supports, the road signs, and the median strip were compressed in an instant. Everything happened so quickly that it hardly even made a sound.

The few cars that witnessed this reversed through the traffic lanes and drove away as quickly as they could. However, the beast breathed a beam of gravity in their direction, annihilating them along with the surrounding terrain until nothing remained.

Chuuya and Dazai watched the approaching demonic beast. They were atop a large spherical gas tank installed outside of town to store city gas. The highest platform, which they were standing on, was taller than any other building around. They were almost eye to eye with the distant, advancing beast.

“Looks like we have about thirty minutes until the heart of Yokohama is completely flattened,” muttered Dazai, staring idly at the beast.

“We’ll never have to see that happen, though,” Chuuya said, hat in hand. “Because either we’re gonna win or we’re gonna be dead.”

“Ew. No, thank you. Dying with you is the last thing I want. Looks like I’m going to have to take things seriously this time.”

“Good. ’Cause I don’t plan on dying, either. After all, I still gotta become an executive before you so I can work you to the bone.”

“Wow. You sound pretty confident. The jewel business, right? I heard things have been going well for you lately.”

“It’s already too late for you to play catchup, too. My distribution channels, couriers, shops, and appraisers are the best Yokohama’s got to offer.”

“Yeah, I know. I was the one running that gig before you got it.”

“What?!” Chuuya turned his astonished gaze in Dazai’s direction. “So you’re the old leader who set up those distribution channels?!”

“Maybe you should worry more about that big guy over there right now. It’s almost in position.”

Dazai pointed at Guivre with his chin. The demonic beast’s footsteps got closer, and its crimson eyes locked onto them.

After staring at the beast for a few moments, Chuuya looked up and shouted, “I can’t believe I got Dazai’s sloppy seconds! Damn it!”

“Just drop it already.”

The beast crushed the roadside trees and snapped the power lines. Gravity irregularities made road signs and bicycles left out on the street float before crushing and pulverizing them to dust.

“You remember the plan?”

“Yeah.”

Their clothes fluttering in the high winds, Chuuya and Dazai stood side by side while facing the beast.

“The main thing we need to watch out for is the unknown. Who knows what’s going to happen when we unleash Arahabaki on Guivre. The world could be blown to smithereens for all we know.”

“The world isn’t gonna blow up.” Chuuya smirked. “Verlaine used this method nine years ago and survived.”

Dazai had come up with a plan. The plan was to open Chuuya’s Gate and unleash Arahabaki’s boundless energy on the beast.

“I already know how to open your Gate, Chuuya. The control incantation N used was, ‘O grantors of dark disgrace, do not wake me again…’ That should initialize the seal command. That alone won’t open the Gate, but your hat should take care of the rest.”

The black hat in Chuuya’s hand was the one Verlaine had been wearing—the gift Verlaine received from Rimbaud with skill metal embedded inside. With this hat, the wearer—Chuuya—would be able to control his Gate as he pleased. It was what allowed Verlaine to freely open a Gate and harness the power of a black hole.

“It’s almost time. Chuuya, get ready to jump, open your Gate in front of that monster, and unleash every bit of power you can on it.” Dazai stared straight at the beast and raised his radio with one hand. “I’m going to give my crew orders to prepare for battle. Are you ready?”

“Of course I’m ready.” Chuuya glanced at Dazai. “Why even ask that?”

Dazai didn’t immediately respond.

He wore an unusual expression, like he was thinking of what to say and how to say it as he tossed the words around in his head. It was an expression Dazai would never make.

“There is one problem, though,” Dazai said hesitantly, breaking the silence. “Unrelated to the success of the mission. It’ll need to be dealt with eventually, but…I might need some time to make a decision.”

“The hell are you even talking about?” Chuuya stared at him and raised an eyebrow. “Quit playin’ games and tell me what the problem is.”

“It’s the incantation to open your Gate. Remember how I said it’d initialize the seal command inside you?” Dazai’s voice was oddly strained. “Once that happens, the past command logs are going to be erased. In other words, even if there was a command sequence to erase your memories in the past, that log is going to be erased as well.”

“Huh?”

“The command to erase your memories. I told you that, in order to determine whether you’re really human, we needed to check if there were any records of your erased memories, right?” Dazai had never looked at Chuuya like this before. His eyes were serious. “Basically, if we use the incantation, we’ll lose the only method we have of checking if you’re a persona made of a string of characters or an ordinary human. Forever.”

Time stopped. Chuuya was facing Dazai with his eyes opened wide, but he wasn’t looking at anything. A breeze blew between them, yet even then, he didn’t so much as blink.

“Verlaine turned into that beast because he was tormented by the curse of knowing he wasn’t human. That’s how serious this is—this issue of being human or not.” Dazai took out a pocket watch and glanced at it before continuing, “We can delay the mission for another two minutes. I’ll put my men on standby. You should take this moment to think. Alone. Because I’m sure you won’t be able to think clearly with me here.”

He turned his back to Chuuya and began walking toward the hatchway, leaving Chuuya behind.

Dazai’s eyes were fixed on the pocket watch. Two more minutes. Nowhere near enough time to decide how to live the rest of one’s life, but that was all the time they could spare. Dazai’s mind was already forming a backup plan at an incredible pace just in case Chuuya decided not to go through with this.

He walked six steps until he reached the hatchway, then began to descend. Right as he had made his way down three steps, he heard a refreshing clank from behind. It sounded like someone had just leaped off a metal plank.

The moment Dazai realized what the sound was, he looked back in surprise.

There was nobody on top of the platform anymore.

After staring in mute amazement for a brief moment, his lips eased into a smile.

“Show-off.”

It was an annoyed yet relieved smile. He then promptly began giving orders into the radio.

“Everyone, prepare for battle. Chuuya is heading toward the target.”

* * *

Chuuya Nakahara soared through the air like a bird of prey, manipulating gravity as the gale below blew in his face. He confidently narrowed his gaze.

Being human. Not being human.

He tightly held the hat with one hand so it wouldn’t fly off his head and opened his mouth.

Chuuya remembered his friend who was now gone.

“I get to protect you. I couldn’t ask for more.”

“O grantors of dark disgrace, do not wake me again…”

Humans have souls. Machines do not.

Then what is a soul? My friend’s final words… What if those were merely the words of a soulless command? So what?

Black particles began hovering around Chuuya. His black jacket fluttered like a pair of wings. Energy condensed as the night sky began to crack.

Black flames manifested, and an enormous amount of heat distorted the surrounding landscape.

Dazai stood on top of the gas tank, squinting as he watched Chuuya soar through the air from afar.

“O grantors of dark disgrace,” he whispered so softly that only he could hear. “‘Disgrace,’ huh?”

A black light erupted before his eyes.

It closely resembled Verlaine after he fully opened his Gate and triggered Brutalization.

Black snow began fluttering around Chuuya. Red scar-like runes crawled across his skin. He ignored the laws of physics, hovering in the sky as he glared down at the beast on the surface. Intense heat caused by the gamma radiation filled the air. The night was scorched, and the scenery warped.

Chuuya sliced through the air at the speed of sound until he crashed into Demonic Beast Guivre’s face. The great beast’s roar shook the land; that single attack alone blew off around a third of Guivre’s head. The gravitational spheres of the damaged areas cracked and spewed black flames.

Chuuya, now the embodiment of gravity, flew out of the hole he created in the beast, then turned around and shot toward the monster again, piercing its frame once more. The creature roared in agony as bits of flesh burst from its body, only to turn into black particles and disappear into thin air.

“Incredible,” a dumbfounded Dazai muttered as he watched from the top of the gas tank. “So this is the power of Arahabaki.”

The beast firmly planted its feet on the ground so as not to fall over, crushing the gas station below. Guivre’s heat ignited the fuel in the tanks and created an explosion.

The land was bathed in crimson light, which appeared to have stimulated Guivre. Waves of heat burst out of its entire body. Black flames of hatred spewed from its wounds and instantly covered its damaged flesh, regenerating any injuries. Arahabaki Chuuya calmly gazed at the hatred and parried.

As Guivre opened its mouth, a gravitational sphere of darkness started forming. The massive orb was so large that it obscured the beast’s entire face. It swelled bigger than the rest of the orbs in sync with Guivre’s rage before firing in a straight line with a roar.

Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

The wave of darkness was heading right for Chuuya in the sky.

He held out both hands and formed a black hole of his own. The condensed gravity—the ruler of all creation—was wrapped in a crimson aureole. This, however, was different from the black holes Verlaine had used. Chuuya’s black hole rotated at warp speed, then flattened into an oval wrapped in light.

Chuuya raised the rotating vortex into the air and launched it at the incoming black beam. The extraordinary forces collided in the sky.

Gravity is the primordial force that composes this world, one of the four original forces of nature that came into being with the birth of the universe. It is the distortion of both time and space, and the distortion of time and space is synonymous with mass. In other words, gravity is the world itself.

The primitive powers clashed.

The violent impact and shock waves caused the air to explode in spherical bursts. The roads rippled, then detached from the earth and came crumbling down to the ground.

Dazai, some distance away atop the gas storage tank, had to grab onto the handrail to keep himself from getting blasted backward. He covered his face with one arm and cautiously peeked at the battlefield.

“They canceled each other out…?”

The powers collided in the air and disappeared, releasing violet lightning before returning to the nothingness in which it came.

“Ha-ha-ha. It worked.” Dazai’s trembling lips curled into a smirk. “Looks like he was right. Verlaine really did show him how to do this.”

Normally, a collision between two black holes in space would cause them to merge and create an even larger black hole. Chuuya’s black hole, however, was spinning rapidly while generating light in the direction of its rotation. This ring of light was known as the ergosphere. Space-time inside the aureole was being sucked in faster than the speed of light while still simultaneously remaining stationary with respect to space-time outside the aureole—an impossibility that gave the aureole’s interior negative energy.

The negative energy canceled out the energy Guivre unleashed, causing them to destroy each other.

In other words, this was the sole method that could defeat Guivre, an infinitely generating singularity life-form. Only the singularity life-form Arahabaki could devour and destroy the monster.

The beast roared with spite, and Arahabaki gave a thunderous roar back. The colossal demonic beast and the tiny god of destruction began their fight to the death.

As Chuuya’s fist slammed into Guivre’s jaw, the beast’s front leg smacked him with a wave of gravity. Guivre’s roar was like a massive explosion, knocking Chuuya backward. He used gravity to brake in midair, smirking fiercely as blood dripped down his temple. Then he dove forward once more, generating a rotating black hole with both hands before carving up the beast with its negative energy.

Each attack had the power of some sort of mythological weapon behind it. The opponents’ strikes created shock waves that made fissures in the earth, burst the air apart, and blew the clouds away.

Furthermore, every attack tore through the other’s flesh without fail, whittling away at their strength. The negative energy of the ergosphere’s halo ripped into the demonic beast’s body, weakening it with each hit. But Guivre’s attacks were generated from the singularity’s unlimited amount of energy; there was only so much Chuuya’s physical body could take.

Arahabaki’s calamitous power was too much for its vessel, Chuuya. His body was bloodied and covered in numerous lacerations, his bones were shrieking in pain, and his right shoulder was dislocated. Both fighters were wounded and damaged—however…

“Chuuya’s wounds are deeper,” noted Dazai, clenching his teeth as he observed the battle.

A trail of blood followed Chuuya in the air when he howled. Arahabaki was roaring at the humiliation from within Chuuya.

Guivre opened its mouth and generated around twenty black orbs that rapidly swelled almost in conjunction with the beast’s breath until they were larger than any black hole so far. All twenty were much bigger than Chuuya’s rotating black holes.

“This isn’t good,” muttered Dazai.

That same moment, banded waves radiated out of the black hole: twenty rays of despair capable of destroying all forms of matter.

The rays dispersed not in straight lines but in a radial pattern like a gaping maw. Half of them tore into the earth while the other half flew off toward the sky.

In the center of its cone-shaped range was Chuuya. The rays gradually engulfed and trapped him inside like the jaws of death. There was nowhere to run. A simple graze meant his life was forfeit.

Arahabaki Chuuya formed a rotating black hole and held it in front of him like a shield just as the twenty black rays struck. They clashed against the ergosphere’s aureole, producing a radiant light of particle annihilation.

The energy waves emitted from the annihilation arced backward through the air, razing the earth below. Roads, utility poles, and abandoned cars melted and then evaporated. The sky lit up as if it were already midday.

Arahabaki Chuuya resisted the onslaught. He kept on resisting. He raised his shield and fought back, but Guivre’s dark rays were limitless. They showed no signs of weakening. The heat produced from the annihilation began scalding Chuuya’s flesh. He vomited blood, and the ring of black rays closed even further.

All of a sudden, the ring fell apart. All the rays changed course and rained down toward the surface. Bursts of crimson fire bloomed like flowers in Guivre’s face.

“Squad Two, fire!” Dazai’s voice traveled through the radio. “Don’t worry about firing simultaneously! Just shoot as quickly as you can!”

They appeared from buildings, cars, and the street: Countless mafiosi rested massive weapons on their shoulders and fired them at the beast.

They were ground-to-air shoulder-launched homing rocket launchers, the strongest weapon a single person could carry. These were powerful enough to turn aircrafts, tanks, and enemy facilities into dust with a single blast. Lock on the target, pull the trigger, and the homing rocket automatically pulverizes its target into a fine powder. The explosions made by grenades or even grenade launchers couldn’t hold a candle to these.

The Mafia had gone through a secret channel to purchase these rocket launchers from an import weapons merchant and create a decent-size fleet. Only a select few powerful skill users could survive a single hit.

But once the smoke cleared, Demonic Beast Guivre was unscathed.

“Don’t worry! It’s working!” Dazai shouted into the radio. “Just keep distracting it!”

The beast’s rays of darkness mowed down the surface in retaliation. The darkness carved into the earth, obliterating the Mafia attackers before they could even scream. But they still didn’t retreat or flinch. The surviving members started launching new rockets at the monster.

The demonic beast, an embodiment of energy itself, was not capable of coherent thought. Every movement it made was automatic. It was nothing more than a pool of hatred that attacked anything hostile. That was why it was unable to judge who was most dangerous or which target it should prioritize. Therefore, it focused on the swarm of mafiosi on the surface, and that allowed Chuuya to free himself.

Chuuya floated all alone in midair, bleeding from head to toe.

His body couldn’t take much more. Not only would Guivre’s attacks overwhelm him physically, but soon his frail body wasn’t going to be able to withstand his own powerful gravity, either. Bruises, dislocations, muscle tears, and broken bones—he was manipulating gravity to keep his body together, albeit just barely.

He was the loneliest being in the world. His eyes moved until he saw another lonely being: Demonic Beast Guivre.

Chuuya fell forward, then continued accelerating. He flew toward the demonic beast’s chest as if it were drawing him in, piercing its outer gravity—its outer armor—before reaching the turbid stream of time inside it. Waves of raging darkness immediately washed over his body, practically tearing it apart.

Arahabaki howled.

A black hole began to form between his arms almost in an embrace. It spun and increased in size while swallowing the muddy stream, then produced a massive ring of light.

Gargantuan forces led to one annihilation after another. Storms of intense heat, empty space, and time ravaged Chuuya’s environs.

He watched as his consciousness was on the verge of fading. Through opening the Gate, his body was already in Arahabaki’s control. All he could do was observe the battle. But even then, amid this unfathomable clash between a god and a demon, his consciousness was merely a faint glimmer about to disappear.

The darkness cried.

It sounded as if someone were weeping—the sobs of the loneliest person in the world.

The voice was almost drowned out by the black torrent of hatred. But as Arahabaki’s glowing aureole devoured Guivre’s energy, Chuuya was finally able to hear it.

Make it end. That was what the voice said.

This monster is the voice of my emotions. Why create someone who wasn’t supposed to be born in the first place? With a question that had no answer eating away at me, I came to resent my existence. Being an assassin was the only way I felt alive. I am a pathetic, pitiful soul.

Make this end, my dear brother. With your own two hands. Put an end to this lonely soul—the soul of a man who couldn’t trust the world or its people like you do.

I know, Chuuya answered as he gradually faded out of consciousness. You couldn’t stand the loneliness. That’s why you came to Japan. But that’s not a bad thing. You rolled the dice and lost. It was a stroke of bad luck, and you rolled a one. But the pips came out different when I rolled. I was blessed with wonderful friends. That’s all. I could have been in your situation, and you could have been in mine.

Besides, what you have isn’t just hatred. You don’t actually despise the world. That’s why you showed me that memory. You taught me how to defeat Guivre. I’m right, aren’t I, Verlaine?

Chuuya thought he saw someone’s light twinkling like at star in the depths of the dark storm.

His Gate opened even wider. The spinning black hole grew even bigger. The aureole was now so large that it overwhelmed space itself.

Behind Chuuya, a black gravity control rod appeared in midair on either side of him. It was the beast Arahabaki’s tail—a manifestation of the black flaming divine beast.

This time, however, it sprouted from Chuuya’s back like a pair of wings.

“Uwoooooooooh!!”

Chuuya yelled while raising his hands into the air, and the swirling black hole instantly expanded in response. Its aureole shone like a supernova, splitting the beast’s torso in twain from within.

The flattened, rotating black hole and its glittering aureole dwarfed the beast, filling Yokohama’s night sky with a blinding light.

“So that’s Arahabaki’s—that’s Chuuya’s true form,” Dazai muttered feverishly as he stared up from the surface.

A pair of hands reaching to the sky. The horizontal ring of light above them illuminating the ground. The fiery black wings on his back. Chuuya’s face, eyes closed.

This was the god of destruction’s incarnation. The black divine beast.

Guivre began crumbling to pieces as it was drawn into the light. Positive infinity and negative infinity seemed to be canceling each other out. The behemoth was disintegrating, its flesh turning into fine powder that gently floated toward the aureole’s center.

Since the flow of time slows down in areas of high gravity, the beast’s demise looked painfully sluggish but graceful.

It no longer roared. The beast merely opened its mouth and fell silent, perhaps accepting its fate, before standing perfectly still.

The aureole around its torso swallowed the beast’s chest and waist, then its arms and legs, and then finally its head.

It didn’t make a single noise.

Its annihilation was tranquil, like the end of a terribly quiet night under the moonlight.

And before long, the aureole’s lifespan came to an end as well. The rotating black hole released heat waves as it broke down; the heat intensified as the hole shrunk until eventually it became a giant glowing sphere full of intensely hot rays of light. The black hole was releasing electromagnetic waves while it disappeared.

This second sun that lit up the sky eventually vanished, quietly and delicately. After limply floating in the air for a few seconds, the wings on Chuuya’s back vanished, and he slowly began to fall.

Until Dazai caught him.

Dazai’s ability to nullify skills activated the moment he touched Chuuya. The self-contradicting skill, which was supporting the energy of the singularity, started to retrogress, weakening the singularity’s output. It wasn’t long before it returned to its normal state, and the Gate closed. The crimson runes covering Chuuya’s entire body slithered away. Eventually, even the gravitational field vanished as well, returning everything to still silence.

“Sleep well, Chuuya.” Dazai faintly smiled at him. “I forgot to bring a pen with me, so I won’t draw on your face this time. You’re welcome.”