Durarara!! - Volume 1 - Chapter 6

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Chapter 6: Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, Upper Management

Somewhere between Ikebukuro and Shinjuku, in a location outside of the pleasure district of Mejiro, there was a quiet laboratory building. It was a three-story complex surrounded by fences and trees, the grounds quite spacious for Tokyo real estate, even when the long distance to the nearest train station was factored in.

This was the testing and research facility for Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, one of the elite corporations in that industry in the Kanto region around Tokyo. But the “elite” status was now a relic of the past, and the company’s share was steadily shrinking with little sign of improvement.

Around the time their stock began slipping, an American business came with a merger offer. It was a conglomerate named Nebula, with a century of history behind it, active in shipping, publishing, and even biotechnology. Thanks to the bedrock of their business acumen, rumors abounded of unspoken understandings between Nebula and various politicians, but everything was kept secure through legal power.

For a merger, Nebula offered quite favorable terms that promised very little in the way of layoffs and restructuring, but some within the company—particularly the members of the Yagiri family itself, including the president—balked at certain conditions.

The most resistent member of the company was the young lab chief of the Sixth Development Lab, aka Lab Six, Namie Yagiri. She was only twenty-five years old and was the niece of the company president.

Her fast-track career course was not simply nepotism from her family’s control of the company; her intellect and skill were exceptional. However, her blood was indeed a factor in her current position—not in terms of rank, but assignment.

It was the subject of that very lab that the Yagiri family secretly suspected was the driving force behind Nebula’s merger offer.

Lab Six was not studying a new pharmaceutical, to be precise. On paper, it was developing new immune system substances for clinical trials…but what it actually contained was not of this world.

Twenty years ago, her uncle returned from an overseas trip with a taxidermy head that was modeled to look like a human’s. It was as beautiful and still as if it were still alive, just sleeping. The pretty girl’s head was tasteless, to be sure, but it was oddly tranquil, not barbaric. It seemed to anyone who looked at it like the head was an entire living thing all its own.

Though Namie did not know this at age five, the item had been smuggled into the country and would certainly have been seized at customs if declared properly.

Whatever the reason that her uncle had procured the head, it was treated like a Yagiri family heirloom. When he had time, he would lock himself in his study, gazing upon the head, even talking to it.

As a child, Namie visited that house often to spend the night with her cousin, and she found her uncle to be creepy, but that feeling faded over time as she grew accustomed to him. The only problem she had was that her younger brother, Seiji Yagiri, was even more attached to the head than her uncle was.

The first time Seiji saw the head was when he was ten. Namie snuck him into the study when their uncle wasn’t around to show him the odd trophy. Even now, she terribly regretted this decision.

It was from that point on that Seiji slowly came undone.

He asked to go to Uncle’s house more and more often. Whenever he could slip past Uncle’s guard, he would stare at the head. With every passing year, Seiji’s infatuation with the head grew stronger, until three years ago—the moment that Namie earned a job with her uncle’s pharmaceutical company—he said to her, “I’m in love with a girl.”

The girl her brother loved didn’t have a name. Or a body below her neck.

The emotion that stole into Namie’s heart at that moment wasn’t the pitying sympathy for her brother’s unrequited sexual fetish—it was the dark red and rusted flame of sheer jealousy.

Namie’s parents were originally supposed to be next in line to inherit Yagiri Pharmaceuticals. But when Seiji was born, a large business deal went south because of a mistake on their part, and they lost face and authority within the company. After that, the love of their marriage went cold, and with it, the love of their daughter and son.

If anything, it was their uncle who offered more care and attention to Namie and Seiji. Their parents had no comment when they went to Uncle’s house. It wasn’t out of any implicit trust of him. They just didn’t seem to care what happened.

On the other hand, their uncle’s intention was to raise them as pawns of the family’s interests. He cared for them as he would for his employees, not with the love reserved for one’s family.

Eventually, Namie sought in her brother the kind of close family kinship that she was lacking elsewhere. That grew over time to eclipse the standard bounds of familial love into a twisted one-sided mockery of romance.

That was why Seiji’s professed love for the head was so displeasing to her. Rather than returning the love she showed to him, Seiji chose to love a head, something that would never reciprocate his feelings. She knew that feeling jealousy toward a head was crazy, but she decided that she would sneak in and destroy it anyway.

But when she took the head out of the glass case, intending to discard it, the sensation on her fingers told her a terrible truth.

That soft skin was not the result of taxidermy. It had the warmth of any other person.

The head was still alive.

The years passed after that, and Namie convinced her uncle to let her study the head at the company lab. He informed her that this head belonged to a fairy known as a dullahan.

What a ridiculous story. Since when was a severed head a fairy rather than the usual winged human-bug things? But no matter the form it took, the important thing was that they had in their hands a being that transcended the normal concepts of life and death. This was a chance they couldn’t let slip through their fingers.

Namie put the living head through a number of experiments. Half of her drive came solely from the jealousy surrounding her brother. She treated the thing as a “test subject” without remorse or reflection. She assumed that as long as the head was kept safely in the lab, Seiji would be unable to approach it.

The first problem was that Nebula contacted them as soon as she started the research. Despite the fact that the research team was extremely limited and tightly guarded, the American company’s demands—complete control over the lab and its work—made it clear that they knew about the head.

Just when Namie was most paranoid toward the other members of the staff, fearing a traitor in their midst, the second incident happened. Her keycard, which she took home with her out of mistrust toward everyone else, was stolen.

The incident happened that night. Someone infiltrated the lab, used a stun baton on the three security guards, and took the head out of the building and nothing else.

What a colossal failure, Namie thought. Everything’s over. But then she had an epiphany. She knew of exactly one person who was aware of the head’s presence, desired it, and could steal the keycard from her…

But at almost the exact same time, she got a call coming from the apartment of the thief.

“Sis, I think I might have killed someone. What should I do?”

This cry for help came the night before Seiji’s first day of high school. A girl who’d been stalking him had broken into his apartment and seen the head. He crushed her skull against the wall.

Namie did not feel terror at the fact that her brother had committed murder or anger that he had stolen the head—it was sheer joy she felt.

Her little Seiji was looking to her for help. He needed her. When she realized how much happier this made her than anything else in the world, she came to a firm decision.

She would protect her brother. Using any means necessary.

{Do you know about the Dollars, Setton?}

[I’ve heard the name, but that’s all. Weren’t you talking to Kanra about this earlier?]

{Oh yeah, we did. I forgot, sorry about that.}

[No big deal.]

{A friend of mine was telling me about the rumors today. They sound pretty wild.}

[Hmm. I’ve never seen them in person. I wonder if they actually exist.]

{Meaning they could be nothing more than an Internet rumor?}

[I don’t know for sure, but you could easily go about your normal life and never come across a team that you know for a fact exists.]

{I suppose you’re right… }

[You ought to keep your distance from them anyway.]

—KANRA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—