Durarara!! SH - Volume 4 - Chapter Pr

PROLOGUE

Bargain Sale

Future site of a large shopping mall, Saitama Prefecture

Gunshots echoed back and forth.

Explosions rolled and roiled.

The sky over Saitama was rife with destruction and clamor.

A major shopping mall was nearing completion, and the empty retail spaces simply waited for their tenants to move in. There was the massively tall building open in the center from the ground to the third floor, the length of multiple baseball parks from end to end. Construction was nearly finished. Some stores were already working on their interior installations.

And at this moment, within the unfinished mall, there was a massive sale on violence and bloodlust.

Whoa, whoa, whoa!

As the gunshots clattered and boomed throughout the building, one shadow raced past without a word.

It wove through the gaps between muzzle flashes and gunpowder exhaust, a dark and striking figure within the pure white mall interior.

How did it come to this?

The pitch-black motorcycle’s roar of the engine sounded more like a horse whinnying. The bizarre figure on the bike rode on the walls and even the ceiling in ways that should have been impossible, but despite the unreality of the display, it was the Headless Rider who was more confused than anyone else present.

Let’s see—there was the burglar at Anri’s shop…and the fact that I resumed working as a courier…

The Headless Rider caught any oncoming bullets with her shadow, which contained a mass of its own, stopping the projectiles cold and tossing the flattened metal away.

Is this situation actually connected to Anri’s problem in any way? Are Yahiro and his friends wrapped up in this, too?

Her thoughts were occupied with the woman who ran the antiques shop. The young woman had been an acquaintance for the last several years, and the teenagers were even more recent acquaintances.

Nonetheless, the two sides still would not connect in her mind. They were people who had some level of contact with the darker underside of Ikebukuro, but not to the point that you would expect to see them in the middle of a hail of bullets from some action movie scene.

She was living with a black-market doctor, working as a courier for criminal organizations, and not even human to boot—and she had still only been in classic shoot-outs like this a handful of times in the last twenty years.

Who’s involved and to what extent? Shizuo’s not going to show up, is he?

Please tell me Izaya isn’t pulling strings behind all of this again.

Those two were the definition of “messy.” Situations like this were common between the two of them. The Headless Rider reached out with her hand and extended a shadow to catch a grenade coming her way. She expanded the shadow briefly, and a muffled boom followed. The shards of the grenade did not escape the shadow’s grasp.

Such a violent event was abnormal in peaceful Japan. The Headless Rider did her best to cool her heart to think, since she didn’t have a head.

Who was the first to get ensnared?

And how in the world did my job and the burglar at Anri’s place intersect?

Desperate to find the hint that would break the stalemate, the urban legend Celty Sturluson did her best to recall every event from the last few days. She realized that she was much calmer than she had imagined; she easily blocked a hail of submachine gunfire to her left side.

I guess bullets and grenades don’t startle me anymore. And I know from experience that I can handle being shot from a helicopter and pounded by an anti-matériel rifle.

As the lead rounds scattered to the ground, spilling from her shadow, Celty found herself in a rather self-deprecating mood.

I guess there’s no wonder that humans call me a monster.

People had pointed guns at her several times in the past, and she knew from past events that such weapons could not kill her. Of course, she still felt pain, so obviously she would use her shadow to block everything. No innocent bystanders were around to witness it, and after a particular incident a few years back, she’d lost all sense of shame about being seen by the public anyway—so if needed, she had no qualms about using her strength.

The main thing is, this isn’t going to resolve on its own. Can I hold them all down with shadow?

But if someone’s hiding somewhere around here, they might get away… I should probably look for a possible leader and pin them down…

Pin them… Pin… P-p-p-p-pin… Pin…?

Her mind shuddered and froze in place.

She had noticed another shadow making its way through the smoke from the entrance of the mall. Of course, if that were the only detail, she might find it odd—but not to the point of losing her train of thought entirely.

The problem for Celty was that the figure was the polar opposite of her, riding a white motorcycle instead of a black one.

Wh…wha…? Huh?

Why?!

Why are you here?!! This is Saitama!!

She extended her shadow into umbrellas that caught all the bullets coming from either side, an action that was mostly unconscious at this point.

In the span of just a few seconds, Celty’s mind had moved on entirely from the gun-toting attackers all around her.

Her name was Celty Sturluson, and she was a living urban legend making her home in Ikebukuro, an immortal Headless Rider who manipulated her own shadow with mysterious power.

Now that she had conquered her fear of bullets, she had the right to earn the title of “monster.”

But even a monster has objects of fear—sources of terror that do not fade with time and experience.

Many vampires fear garlic and wooden stakes, for example. Werewolves fear silver bullets forged from the melted key of their own family home. Frankenstein’s monster fears loneliness.

And the Headless Rider’s greatest fear was right before her eyes.

“Looks like you’re really makin’ a mess of things…you monster.”

The motorcycle police officer, Kinnosuke Kuzuhara, surveyed the furor and billowing flames inside the mall, his eyes sharp and glinting behind his sunglasses.

“So how much of this mess is your doing?”

Facing her natural enemy, Celty Sturluson repeated her earlier question to herself.

How did it come to this?