Durarara!! - Volume 10 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Rotten Apples Spoil the Barrel

Outside the hospital, night

“…”

Kadota’s second surgery was successful, and his vital signs were active and stable, much to Anri’s relief. But he was still unconscious, so she checked in on his good friend Karisawa instead.

“I’m going back home to take a shower and clean up,” she said, “so you should do the same, Anri. When Dotachin wakes up, I’ll make sure to tell him that if he’d recovered a bit faster, he could have seen a sexy fallen angel maid with a big rack and glasses!”

She laughed and got up to console Azusa and the rest of her friends. Anri felt she didn’t have a right to intrude on that, so she said good-bye and exited the hospital.

I want to talk to someone, she thought, suddenly very worried, and she pulled out her phone. It felt like a rebound after being in the waiting room with so many people praying for Kadota’s health; the moment she stepped outside, she abruptly felt very, very alone. This never happened before…

Until she’d met Celty in the Saika incident, that loneliness had completely shut off her mind, removing her from reality—“the other side of the painting”—and making her a passive observer of everything that happened.

But now things were different.

The loneliness she felt now was on this side of the painting, a tangible emotion that she didn’t just register but actually felt—and it had a dramatic effect on her state of mind. Alarmed that she could sense herself missing even the endless voices of Saika within her, she decided to reach out to someone to make herself feel better.

She wasn’t ready to talk to Mikado yet, and Masaomi seemed to have a different phone number now, so she couldn’t contact him if she wanted to.

It doesn’t seem fair to only reach out to them when I need something, though…

She decided on a number to call. Someone who had been a friend for a long time, even back when she had been shut off from the world and only had the slightest crack through which to relate to others.

A girl who hadn’t been particularly close recently due to her own relationship but someone who still called Anri a friend: Mika Harima.

But no one was picking up. The ringtone just droned on.

“I wonder if she’s out somewhere…”

Perhaps she was with her boyfriend, Seiji Yagiri. If so, calling her would be an interruption of their private time, so Anri accepted that she would just have to be lonely and headed home.

But at the moment, she was unaware. She had no way of knowing.

As of that very day, Seiji Yagiri and Mika Harima had both vanished from their homes.

Ikebukuro, night

The Special Forces traffic officer Kinnosuke Kuzuhara—he of the infamous white motorcycle—turned off his engine in an alley.

It was the place where the hit-and-run had happened a day earlier. On a light pole nearby was a sign asking for eyewitness accounts, which a woman was reading.

Kuzuhara had finished his patrols for the day and was on his way back to the station to process the tickets he’d written over the course of his shift. But while he was a very talented officer, he wasn’t always strictly by the book, and he’d decided to take a little shortcut. Once he made sure it was legal to stop on this street, he called out to the woman.

“Hey, Maju. Are you off duty today?”

“Oh…Uncle!”

“Apparently, there was a hit-and-run here. It didn’t turn into a whole big thing since there wasn’t a fatality, but it’s caused a lot of talk around the station,” Kinnosuke said to his niece, who was in plainclothes. He glanced around the scene, which still bore minor scars from the incident, and snarled, “Can’t believe people think they can pull this kind of stunt on my beat and get away with it.”

“We’re just lucky we didn’t catch a body. But it seems like things are going to get rough… It was pretty wild at the station today.”

“Yeah, it was a big shot in one of the street gangs that got hit,” Kinnosuke agreed. He’d written tickets for Togusa’s van on multiple occasions, but he didn’t realize that the guy who always sat in the passenger seat was the victim of this incident.

“It’s a very strange, unique gang—one called the Dollars. All the folks over in Juvenile were on edge, saying there might be a war about to break out. I haven’t been into the office today, so I don’t know for sure, but in town everyone’s talking about Shizuo Heiwajima being arrested. I’m sure it’s been crazy over in Community Safety.”

“Shizuo Heiwajima? Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him. I spot that bartender getup every now and then while I’m on patrol.”

In fact, that one Horada shithead was talkin’ up Heiwajima, too.

Not that long ago, a busted-up car with a broken street sign embedded into it ran up alongside Kuzuhara’s motorcycle in traffic. After he’d arrested the occupants, they had wailed something like “It’s not us! It was Shizuo Heiwajima who broke the sign! We only tried to run you over because we thought you were the Black Rider!”

“You may not know this, Uncle, but he’s extremely famous in Ikebukuro. They say he’s got connections to the Dollars, and I’ve even heard stories that suggest he’s friends with the Headless Rider you’re always chasing around.”

“…Oh? That monster?” Kinnosuke Kuzuhara grinned, unaware that monster was a term the Black Rider usually used to refer to him. He asked his niece, “So he’s in booking now?”

“You were the one who was at work today, Uncle. You’d know better than me.”

“That’s a good point. Speaking of which, I’d better get going. Thanks for the update,” he said in closing and then proceeded toward the station. “So even that monster has human relationships, huh?” he grumbled, as the air of the city swallowed him whole.

“In that case…you shouldn’t be riding with such a damn death wish, you idiot.”

Night, Sunshine Street, Ikebukuro

The night Shizuo Heiwajima got arrested, Vorona was in a foul mood.

Her inability to understand and process why she was so irritated only stoked her irritation further. It put her into a spiral of uncomfortable annoyance that she could not escape.

Normally, when she walked around in public, she was the constant target of pickup artists and talent scouts, but they must’ve sensed the fierce look in her eyes from a distance, because nobody bothered her tonight.

“Hey, don’t get too worked up. He’ll be out real soon,” said Tom Tanaka gently, walking a few steps behind her in recognition of her mood.

She didn’t seem to be aware that he had been trying to cheer her up at all. She raised an eyebrow and said, “The progress of my understanding is at a standstill. What kind of connection can exist between Sir Shizuo’s apprehension and arrest and the upset condition of my mind?”

“Okay, so you do recognize that worked up means ‘mad’ in this context…”

Vorona’s Japanese was always very hard to parse, despite her perfect pronunciation. The president of Tom’s company once theorized, “She’s probably just stringing together as many fancy, stuffy words as she can in a row, thinking that makes it beautiful Japanese or something.” But not only was it not beautiful Japanese, it was almost impossible to have a conversation with her until you got used to it.

“And yet, and yet, there is no end to seeds of suspicion. Why Sir Shizuo…?”

The police brought Shizuo in that evening. It wasn’t a formal arrest with a warrant but instead an agreement by all parties. His arrest was for suspicion of assault on a civilian.

When the notice of damages was submitted, the police quickly arrived at the building where Shizuo worked. One detective in plainclothes and five uniformed officers was unprecedented for such an arrest, which spoke to how infamous the name Shizuo Heiwajima was to the department.

The company president told him, “We’ll go through our lawyer, so deny all charges,” but Shizuo simply confessed, “I can’t claim I’m being framed here. I’ll be fine,” and went peacefully with the officers.

“Before he started working with us, there was a time he got arrested for something he didn’t do. They suspended his sentence, so he didn’t get jail time, but he was put in a holding facility for a while, I hear,” said Tom as they walked.

“It is inconceivable,” said Vorona. “Despite the clarity of his innocence, the sentence was still executed upon him?”

“They knew he was innocent of the first crime. But when they caught him, he snapped and threw a vending machine at a cop car and all this other stuff. So he got nabbed for destruction of private property and obstruction of justice. From what I hear, he was lucky he didn’t get attempted murder.”

“But the possibility is more high ranking that he is under observation for a different matter,” Vorona insisted.

In her mind, Japan had some of the strictest police observation and legal order in the world. With the illegal activities and possession of weapons that she’d been engaging in, it had taken all the tricks of the trade for her to hide her tracks from the cops. So it was shocking to her that Shizuo could tear out guardrails and light posts and not get arrested.

Tom sighed and looked up at the night sky over the city. “Whenever he breaks something, the boss pays the cost of the repairs for him. So each time, Shizuo owes him more money and has to work even harder to pay it off.”

“Is it not a violation of law to demand labor due to personal debt?”

“Technically, there’s some fine print about subtracting a percentage of what he owes from his salary, which is apparently allowed. But on the other hand, this debt collecting we do is actually supposed to be carried out by a lawyer. So it’s kinda shady all around.”

“Then it is even more impossible to understand. Why should Sir Shizuo…?”

“Do you want him to be arrested?”

“No, that possibility is nonexistent,” she stated flatly.

Tom shrugged and grinned. “If they try to make a case against Shizuo for destruction of property, there are disadvantages to them, too,” he said, relating something the boss had told him.

“?”

“For example, let’s say you’re bringing your case to a judge who’s never seen Shizuo’s strength in person. If you tell them, ‘This suspect broke a power line pole out of the ground and swung it around like a weapon,’ how are they supposed to take you seriously?”

Vorona started to nod her head in agreement, then paused. She wondered, “It is mysterious. Would they not be able to provide any amount of evidence? It should be possible to ascertain with video footage. Besides, I cannot think he would deny any crime he is responsible for.”

“See, that’s a problem in its own right. Let’s say Shizuo really did tear out a guardrail. The people who don’t realize that Shizuo’s just uniquely special that way are going to think, Are these guardrails made with material so weak and shoddy that a person can break them barehanded? Is this the kind of sloppy workmanship our tax money is going toward?”

“…!”

“Nobody says that the buildings Godzilla knocks down are just cheaply built, but the world treats Godzilla as a fictional creature. Shizuo’s strength belongs in the realm of fiction. And how much do you think it would cost to install streetlights and guardrails that even Shizuo can’t break?” he asked, smiling slyly at Vorona.

Her expression was a mixture of both understanding and unwillingness to accept what he was saying. “Is this a valid philosophy for a policing organization?”

In a sense, she really didn’t know that much about the workings of the police department back in Russia, either. The books and newspapers held reports of past scandals and corruption, but they contained no information beyond that. And Vorona was not well suited to inferring the reality of a situation from what was written.

As she mulled this over, Tom replied lightly, “Who knows? I basically trust the police about halfway, and I don’t have a problem helping them with an investigation. On the other hand, there’s a tendency for police in any country around the world to look at a dead body that is obviously fishy and willingly classify it a suicide. So I guess there’s no legal body that perfectly executes justice. Guess we’ve just got to pray that Japan’s police are gonna take their job seriously.”

“Then why did it happen to him today of all days…?”

“Oh, that’s easy. They couldn’t arrest him on destruction or vandalism, for the reasons I just said, so they were searching for a way to get him on assault. See, the types Shizuo’s usually hurling and punching around are the guys who have good reasons not to get the police involved, even if they wanted to report him. So the fact that someone actually pressed charges against him was kind of like their big chance to nab him, if you want to put it that way.”

Then he sighed and continued, “I’m not gonna believe any story that says Shizuo beat the crap out of a woman for no reason. Either it’s some stupid misunderstanding, or someone’s trying to set him up again.”

Suddenly, his expression turned even grimmer.

“What I’m worried about…is that in the middle of questioning, he’s gonna snap and start trashing the police station. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

After that, Tom asked Vorona if she wanted to pop into Russia Sushi, but she was feeling apprehensive about seeing Simon and Denis still, and so she wriggled out of it as diplomatically as she was able.

On her way back from the office to the apartment she was given to stay in, Vorona considered what might happen to Shizuo now. If he really did start struggling inside the police station, wouldn’t it be rather easy for him to break free? He could probably smash the bars or walls of the holding cell with his bare hands or snap off the cuffs as easily as candy.

The Japanese police wouldn’t open fire on an unarmed person—and in Shizuo’s case, he might be perfectly fine even if they did.

Sir Shizuo, the wicked criminal who escaped. I could challenge him to a proper fight in self-defense. But I do not believe I have advanced to a winning level. And I have not paid him back for the can of coffee. Or the time he took me to the establishment with delicious cake…

Without realizing it, her expression clouded. Why am I looking for reasons not to fight with him?

The reason she hung around with him was that he represented a kind of goal for her entire life. He was, unlike the monstrous Headless Rider, an example of whole, completed human strength.

Once the two of them could engage in destroying each other to their hearts’ content, her long-held questions might finally find answers.

Is the human being a brittle or hardy creature?

Unable to see anything but physical strength, the realization that there was a desire not to fight inside her was baffling, impossible to understand. And thus, she walked home in the dark, a frown on her face, as she grappled with this unknown haze that hung over her.

…Until a large figure blocked her path.

“It’s been a while, Vorona.”

“……?!”

The appearance of the large silhouette set every nerve in her body on edge, revving her muscles into combat status immediately.

But at the same time, she realized she knew the man standing before her.

“Slon?!”

He was well over six feet tall, with a sizable aluminum cane to match. Almost all his exposed skin was covered in bandages, making him look like a mummy, but the overall figure and atmosphere of him was enough for Vorona to be positive that this was her former partner.

A few months earlier, during a period of hostility with the Awakusu-kai, both Vorona and Slon had been apprehended. But thanks to a deal between the Awakusu-kai and some Russian arms dealers, Vorona was set free, and Slon was taken to another location associated with the yakuza group.

“Your survival was possible?! In what place have you been doing what actions until the present moment?!”

While Akabayashi had told her Slon might be alive, she didn’t have any clues to his whereabouts, and he had never been anything more than a work partner, so Vorona never had much reason to do anything but pray for him. Still, the sudden meeting took her by shock, eliciting a rare wide-eyed look from her.

“Yeah, some stuff happened,” he said, reaching up to his mouth and pulling out a denture plate with a good ten false teeth in it. He started talking as he put it back. “I loss abou teng oee teefh buh eh…let me go.”

She couldn’t make out what he said when the denture plate had been out, but she got the idea. It was easy to imagine that all over his body were particular kinds of scars that one would never suffer through ordinary circumstances.

Slon took a step toward Vorona, jabbing the tip of his cane into the asphalt as he dragged his foot closer. “The Awakusu-kai essentially dispatched me to be an assistant of sorts to an information broker. I should be dead, but somehow I’m still alive—I’ve no idea what kind of secret deals went on to make that happen.”

“I see… I am relieved to confirm your life.”

“It’s a bit too early for relief.”

“?”

She gave him a quizzical stare.

“You ought to stay away from this city for a while,” he warned her. “This place is going to be very dangerous for you.”

“Unable to understand. I feel this town is exceedingly gentle. Absurd to compare to conflict areas. Elements suggesting danger are essentially nonexistent.”

“That’s true. But I’m not saying the city is dangerous. I just mean, you’re being used like a cog in a brewing conflict now. You and me, in fact.”

“Cog?” she wondered, so curious about Slon’s concern that she momentarily forgot her joy in their reunion. “Then I desire it. If they seek to plunge me into a vortex of intrigue, I shall make them embrace regret over the sheer difficulty. Who is the agitator? I shall dispense with them immediately.”

“You can’t handle it. Especially not now.”

“What does it mean? I request explanation,” she demanded, slightly irritated.

Slon’s mouth curved into a sneer. “You’ve felt pleasure in the tepid warmth of this place. You can’t fight like you used to anymore, can you?”

“…! You dare expose me to such vituperative obloquy?!”

“I…don’t even know what that means,” he said.

Sensing that she’d been insulted, Vorona began formulating a plan to knock Slon out cold, when a voice from beside them dashed her aggravated nerves.

“You shouldn’t tease her like that, Slon. Often a nice lukewarm bath is better for you than hot or cold. Perhaps lurking in this peaceful atmosphere has made her far more dangerous than she was before.”

“…Did you follow me just to tease us?” demanded Slon.

The young man shrugged, glancing at Vorona, and said, “Hardly. I’m just curious about your former partner.”

She asked Slon, “Who is this?”

Instead of Slon, the man himself gave her a friendly bow. “Actually, I hired you to do a job for me once, but I guess I didn’t see you in person, did I? Izaya Orihara. I run a unique kind of information-dealing agency that exists to help those who need to know things.”

“Izaya…Orihara,” she repeated, realizing she recognized that name. She turned to him. “I remember you.”

“Ooh, you remember the names of all your clients? Very professional of—,” he started to say, until a vicious kick from Vorona came rushing toward his nose. “Whoa!”

He dodged out of the way just in time, fell several steps backward as he caught his balance, and slipped behind Slon. “My goodness! I’m hard-pressed to say whose kick is fiercer, yours or Mikage’s! Has she lost any of her edge after all, Slon? Why was she trying to kick me anyway?” Izaya wondered.

“Sir Shizuo’s eternal, unchanging blood enemy. So I have heard of you. By finishing your life here, it is possible to return the debt I owe him. Hatred of you is nonexistent, but I desire your ruination. Accept your destruction.”

“Well, well… So Shizu’s made friends not just with kids who love giant monsters but girls close to his own age, too.” Izaya laughed with interest. But Vorona, who had observed many people over her years, detected that there was almost extreme aggravation behind his smile.

“But anyway,” he continued, “I’m very interested to see whose pawn you end up being, given my interest in human observation. Also, I’m quite generous and merciful. Even if you are on the side of that metal-boned monster, I’m perfectly content to love you as much as any other human being.” He followed this up with a delighted cackle.

Vorona recalled how Shizuo Heiwajima had called this man “vermin” and found herself agreeing with his assessment. He is a man like an insect. He smiles, but it is just an insect mimicking a human.

She smoothly stepped away from him, finding him eerie. She understood why Shizuo had warned her to stay away from the man now. He was like a termite: He devoured the foundation of where people lived, until the house collapsed with the owner still inside.

When she worked for her father in Russia, she had seen a number of men like this. One of them had been a senior member of the Russian mafia, the recollection of which only increased her wariness of Izaya Orihara.

“Hmm. She doesn’t seem to like me very much. Let’s go, Slon.”

“…Go? Where? I finished all my work.”

“There’s been some funny stuff happening, and now I can’t get in touch with Namie. I think someone may have gotten the jump on us,” he told Slon, his cackling at odds with the seriousness of the situation.

Despite the fact that Vorona was right there listening, he told Slon, “Let’s wrap this all up by tomorrow morning. That way, the former partner you’re worried about won’t wind up as a pawn in their scheme.”

It wasn’t that he didn’t mind her overhearing it—he was choosing his words intending her to hear them. A deep furrow ran through Vorona’s brow. I do not like it. What is with this man?

She didn’t detect obvious malice from him, but the sensation was palpable that his very presence was harmful. Perhaps that was just a sign she was being influenced by Shizuo, Tom, and the entirety of Ikebukuro itself. But if so, she didn’t recognize that it was happening. She glared at Izaya with outright hostility.

He grinned back at her, practically basking in her hatred, and then left the alley. After he was gone, Vorona’s expression remained hard.

Something was happening in Ikebukuro. And it was somehow connected to their presence here.

“…”

The scene from a few months ago, when the man named Akabayashi easily held her down, flashed into her head. There had been some secret agreement between her father and the Awakusu-kai, without her knowing about it—and that humiliation, of knowing that her life had been in the palm of others’ hands, sharpened her thoughts.

I won’t let that happen to me again. If anyone dares to try to use me to his own gain, he had better know that I will extract the price from him.

Ice enclosed her heart. Her features were looking more like they did when she first came to this place. Shizuo Heiwajima served as a kind of brake on Vorona’s tendencies. Just as Kadota served to slow down Yumasaki and Karisawa, so did Shizuo Heiwajima represent a goal, a purpose that burned and bubbled within her.

And now there was no man to stoke the fires of her heart.

Was this intentional or coincidental?

The taunts of Izaya Orihara, the man Shizuo called vermin, poured their cold venom into Vorona’s veins.

Ruined building, 2F, Tokyo suburbs

“You don’t mind, do you, Mikado Ryuugamine?”

The man’s unexpected appearance completely changed the complexion of the scene.

“Huh…?”

No longer did Mikado merely stare with suspicion. Now his body froze.

The man did nothing special. All he did was speak the name.

But his bearing, his breathing, the weight hidden behind his voice, the inconceivable fact that he knew Mikado’s name on their first meeting, the eerie inscrutability of his tinted sunglasses—all these things combined to form pressure and put Mikado Ryuugamine into an impossibly nervous state.

More than when he faced Seiji Yagiri’s sister during the Dollars’ first meetup.

More than when he heard Anri had been attacked by the street slasher.

More than when Celty took him to the old factory, and he saw Masaomi bruised and scarred.

More than when they escaped from the motorcycle gang in Kadota’s van.

More than when Aoba and his friends exposed his secret identity.

More than when he was attacked by Ruri Hijiribe’s stalker, that being of pure violence.

The terror he felt in this moment far surpassed anything that had come before it.

An unfamiliar man coming out of nowhere called his name. That was all. That was what caused Mikado’s body to scream danger alarms of a kind he’d never heard before.

Because the man’s voice was like countless serpents, tearing at the skin of his body and wriggling through his veins to strangle his entire physical form.

I’m going to die. This is bad. What is? I don’t know. But I’ll die.

Why? No. I don’t want to die. This is bad.

 Who is he? It’s dangerous. I’ll die. Gotta run.

Who? Oh God. He’ll kill me. I don’t want to die.

 There are still things for me to do. Oh no.

I don’t wanna die oh no oh no oh no oh no I don’t want to die here I want to live I want to run away I want to escape I need to get away but I can’t but I have to stay here but I can’t afford to die I have to do something do something do something something something something—

He didn’t even know why he sensed death or why he felt so afraid. All he knew was that his instincts were screaming at him.

“…! …Ah…”

But the extreme tension sucked all the moisture out of Mikado’s mouth, leaving him unable to speak properly. Instead, sweat oozed out of every pore, and his jaw flapped uselessly—until the man rapped his cane against the asphalt.

The crisp sound struck Mikado’s eardrums, and the mysterious man gave him a lilting grin. Unlike just a moment ago, there was no feeling of suffocation in the air.

“…? Oh, uh…”

Realizing he was free from his bondage, Mikado examined the other fellow again. The man in sunglasses snatched up the cane and tapped it over his own shoulder. “Well, I’m relieved.”

“?”

“At least you’re able to freak out when the right signals are sent.” He chuckled and took a step closer. “If you were the kind of crazy asshole who looks unaffected when shit gets real, I’d be forced to do something about it.”

This threat finally seemed to put things into a perspective the Blue Squares could understand. They sauntered forward.

“Hey, what was that, old man?”

“Don’t you know we rented out the place?”

Several of them converged on him, and one even reached out to grab his shirt.

“Make them stop, right this instant,” Celty typed into her PDA and showed it to Mikado.

“Huh?” he grunted—right as the boys surrounding the man began to fly into the air, one after the other. Of course, they weren’t doing this of their own accord.

“?!”

Neither the baffled boys nor the people who’d been watching from a safe position understood what had just happened. All they knew was that they landed on their backs, hard, and were too stunned to get up again.

“Was that some psychic power?” Mikado wondered out loud. Normally, no one would ever assume such a thing could be true, but it helped when you were in the presence of Celty, who was also a being that couldn’t be true.

The man burst into laughter. “No, no, stop that. It’s just a technique. If I could use superpowers, I’d already be a…be a…ya know? What should I be, courier?”

Celty wasn’t expecting to be put on the spot like this. “Don’t ask me,” she typed. “It depends on the power, I suppose.”

“I suppose that’s true. Guess I oughta keep thinking about that one.”

Mikado couldn’t see the PDA screen from his position, but it was clear from the way they were acting that it was like idle banter. “Um, Celty, who is this gentleman?” he asked, awkwardly formal.

Celty thought it over and asked Akabayashi, “Should I tell him?”

“I don’t mind. If I wanted to hide, I wouldn’t have shown up here.”

With his permission, Celty turned to Mikado and Aoba and revealed, “This man is Mr. Akabayashi. He’s an officer with the Awakusu-kai.”

“The Awakusu-kai? You mean…”

“Yes, he’s one of…those people.”

Mikado’s spine trembled at each word.

When compared to the name of their parent syndicate, the Medei-gumi, the Awakusu-kai was a much more obscure one—but in all his travels over the Internet looking for information about Ikebukuro, Mikado couldn’t help but spot it here and there.

He was well aware of what the Awakusu-kai did for a living. He thought he was prepared for the consequences. And he also hoped that this moment would never come.

But the appearance of Akabayashi was like a fairy come to warn him of his own death. The Dollars were digging into the seedy underbelly of the city, trudging too deep into its darkness.

Aoba gave Akabayashi a fierce stare, too, but his hand darted up in a signal to his companions not to do anything more.

The man at the center of all this tension and nervousness merely smirked and rested against a pile of construction materials next to Mikado. “This is quite a coincidence. I happen to be familiar with this place. Perhaps you learned about it after the big brouhaha that happened here a while back?”

“?”

Mikado didn’t know what he was talking about, but Aoba did. He looked away self-consciously. Akabayashi spotted the change in his attitude, but he didn’t comment on it.

“Well, we can set that aside for the moment. Mikado Ryuugamine, do you wonder how it is that I know your name?”

“…No. It’s because you’re, uh…”

“Listen, it’s fine. You can come out and call me a yakuza, all right? It’s just that the term doesn’t come from good origins. There are others in my line of work who would be angry if you called them that to their faces. Be careful.”

“…Thank you for the warning. So…well, I assumed that being a…yakuza, it would be easy for you to find out who I am…”

Mikado understood how much power organized criminals had as a whole, if not the Awakusu-kai specifically. Just their ability to track down people who vanished from loan sharks alone was enough to tell Mikado that they had investigative capabilities that he could only dream of.

In this case, however, the Awakusu-kai’s organizational ability had nothing to do with it—Akabayashi had bought the information off Izaya Orihara, that was all. But Mikado couldn’t have known that.

“I see. It’s good we’re on the same page. Basically, some friends of mine by the name of Jan-Jaka-Jan trailed you kids here, which is how I found you. Even I’ve gotten a surprise with it all—I never suspected you’d be friends with this courier here,” he intoned sagely, glancing at Celty. “But I digress. Surely you know what it means that a guy like me is here, right? You do?”

Mikado swallowed hard. “Are the Dollars…causing you trouble…?” he croaked.

I’m scared. I don’t want to consider the worst-case scenario…but these people aren’t like Yagiri Pharmaceuticals at all.

He stifled his trembling and clenched his fists, determined to face the truth. Ever since he first saw the power of the Dollars at that IRL meeting, he’d had a feeling that those people who made their living on the underbelly of society would eventually come after them.

But Mikado chose to cling to a faint, optimistic hope that things would work out in that regard. After that initial crowd scene, he couldn’t help but feel that the Dollars were invincible and omnipotent.

The attack by Toramaru in the spring put cracks in that illusion, and the appearance of this man now completely shattered it. He’d heard that mobsters these days were getting more into white-collar crime, and fewer of them were identifiable on sight.

If you ignored the facial scars and clothes, this man wouldn’t seem all that dangerous or violent. He definitely didn’t come across as an office worker, but he could probably pass as a music producer, for example.

Even still, the moment he said the name Mikado Ryuugamine, the boy felt an undeniable omen of his impending death.

I have to do something… Will he demand some kind of tribute payment? Or will he just try to crush me? I have to avoid either of them at all costs…

He considered having Celty stand between them, but he didn’t know what kind of relationship she had with the Awakusu-kai and couldn’t force her to do something she didn’t want to.

Meanwhile, Akabayashi continued in his lilting way, “Well…I don’t know if I’d call it trouble. I can’t speak for my coworkers, but on a personal level, I don’t wanna do anything to normal civilians.”

“…Okay.”

“I guess it’s like…how do they say it in manga or news programs? The light side and the dark side of the city? My job is to watch over the boundary between the two.”

“…Okay,” Mikado repeated. He couldn’t say anything else.

“So mostly what I do is, when someone starts wandering over onto our side of things, we give ’em a little kick to send them back where they belong. But if they still insist on coming this way, we either bring them into the fold on our team, or we crush them.”

Akabayashi rapped his cane again, staring Mikado right in the eyes through his sunglasses. “So which is it going to be? You can get flattened under our heel, or you can join us.”

“…”

Silence covered the building for a long moment. What felt like much more than just a few dozen seconds passed, until Mikado slowly and firmly said, “Couldn’t there be a third way?”

“You don’t like either option? That’s your right. Let’s hear your idea,” Akabayashi said. He essentially had Mikado pinned now that he’d expressed his resistance to the suggestions offered.

“The Dollars will walk along the borderline. We’ll get into little fights and have some meetings in town, but we won’t, under any circumstances, cause trouble for the Awakusu-kai… Would that be possible?”

“That’s a real fine line you’re talking about. Trouble comes in many forms.”

“In that case, could you explain in more detail? We have no intention of getting in your way. We just…want a place for ourselves.”

“A place, huh?”

Tak.

Another rap of the cane. He was testing Mikado.

“You’ve got plenty of places for yourself on the light side of town, don’t you? I see that determination in your eyes, Mikado, but it doesn’t make you as cool as you think. That’s the same look gamblers have when they’re in too deep and refuse to see it. All you have to do is stop making bets, but then you start saying that being in the midst of the thrill is where you belong, and they all drown in the end.”

“…”

Even Mikado couldn’t tell himself that Akabayashi’s examination was wrong. He understood that it was a dangerous path he was walking at this point in life. But there was still something he wanted to keep safe: that illusory, idealized version of the Dollars that he witnessed on the night of their first meeting.

He knew it was just a fantasy, but he couldn’t stop the rush of emotion that churned within him. He was trying to make that fantasy a reality—walking a boundary line in a different sense from the one Akabayashi described.

“Then I want your advice on how not to lose my bet.”

“You don’t bet. That’s it,” Akabayashi said crisply. “You don’t look like the kind of guy who’s clever enough to walk that tightrope. But I’ll oblige you. I know a bit about the Dollars now. I can see that if I take you out of the picture, it’s not as though the Dollars are going to stop whatever they’re doing. So I’ll just have to go after the ones that stand out to me.”

He got up from the scrap pile, and Mikado opened his mouth to hold him back. It wasn’t that the fear had left his system—if anything, the thought of leaving without another word frightened him even more.

“Um, sir!”

“What?”

“L-let’s say…that people from the Awakusu-kai tried to kill some of our friends, for no good reason. Would trying to save them count as causing trouble? If you were selling drugs, would warning our friends not to buy them count as causing trouble?”

For just a moment, the leer vanished from Akabayashi’s face. “You think our guys would just beat the shit out of an ordinary civilian for no good reason?” he asked, eyes narrowed.

Mikado clenched his fist harder and said, “But…you’re yakuza, aren’t you?”

“Mikado!” Celty typed into her PDA, but he didn’t notice. His eyes were fixed to Akabayashi’s.

The two men glared at each other for a moment.

The threatening energy coming from Akabayashi was far beyond what he had exhibited at his entrance, but Mikado didn’t look away. Then Akabayashi’s face crinkled up again, and that simpering leer returned.

“Ha-ha. You’ve got a point. And I did say you were allowed to call me that. I guess you’ve got one on me there. Fine, fine, we’re yakuza,” he said and tapped his forehead with the cane. “And if you see your guys getting the shit beat outta them, you go ahead and report it to the cops. You don’t even have to get yourself hurt.”

“Huh? Uh, a-all right.”

“And rest easy. We’re not a drug outfit, and if anyone out there is trying to deal bad stuff on the street…I’ll be the first one to get rid of them,” he said with a chuckle, but Mikado didn’t miss the flare of fury behind it—even if he didn’t understand what it meant.

Akabayashi glanced between Aoba, who had been silent the whole time, and Mikado. Lastly, he flipped a glance at Celty. “Well, today was more of a warning than anything. I’m not here to get in your ear about this and that. Just sending a message to let you know that folks like me are watching with interest now.”

“…I see. Thank you for being considerate.”

“There you go. Humility is a good thing. Honestly, if you just stepped away from the Dollars, everyone would be much happier. Your parents would be very sad if they found out you were a big shot in this gang…and there’s that girl you’re good friends with, right? What was her name? The one with the glasses…”

“Sonohara has nothing to do with this!” he shouted, not realizing how much force he was putting into it. Instantly, his expression changed from desperation to aghast disappointment.

“Just goes to show how important she is to you, eh? You should learn to mask your expressions. Not going to be so easy to walk that tightrope, is it?”

Naturally, Mikado had no idea that Anri and Akabayashi went way back. The fact that he’d given up her name (Sonohara) and his affection for her to a member of a mob organization was the worst disaster of the day so far.

Akabayashi continued, “Did you even know I’ve been a member of the Dollars for months?”

“?!”

“How is a guy who doesn’t even have a grasp on what’s happening in his own organization going to tell how he is or isn’t causing trouble for us, huh? So young, so naive.” Akabayashi chuckled and headed for the stairs. “Tell you what, Headless Rider, I’ll ask you for more details at a later time.”

“Very well. But Mikado isn’t stupid enough to pick a fight with you guys.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“I believe in him.”

Akabayashi read her reply, nodded, and stopped just before he descended the stairs.

“I want to ask something of you—speaking as a member of the Dollars,” he said.

“?”

“A friend of mine’s having some trouble related to the group.”

He turned toward the stairs and shouted down to the first floor.

“Hey, Niekawa! You can come up now!”

Niekawa?

It was Celty who recognized the name. In fact, she knew of two people whom it fit, and it was not a common name by any means.

That was why it was no surprise when, as another figure hurriedly climbed the stairs seconds later, she recognized him.

“Th-this innocent-looking kid? Really?” the man said when he saw Mikado.

“Yeah. At the very least, he’s the closest to a leader within the Dollars right now,” Akabayashi explained.

Celty hastily typed up a message. “Mr. Niekawa! You’re the Niekawa from Tokyo Warrior, right? What are you doing here?!”

“Uh…wh-whoa! Th-the H-Headless Rider!”

“I already told you my real name earlier! It’s Celty Sturluson!” she snapped, which was neither here nor there at this point. “Why are you here?! Do you know Mr. Akabayashi?! If you’re going to run a story on what Mikado’s doing, don’t expose him please! It would really hurt some people!”

“N-no, no, I’m not following a story…,” Niekawa stammered. Neither one seemed to understand where the other was coming from, which only made Mikado even more confused.

“Do you know him, too, Celty?” he asked.

“Well, I talked to him once for a story involving Shizuo,” she explained.

Niekawa brushed the PDA out of the way and bowed to the boy who could have been his son in terms of age. “If you know more about the Dollars than anyone else, then please help me find my daughter who’s run away from home… Haruna is supposed to be in the Dollars!”

Celty felt like her senses were drifting away from her.

Haruna was the one who was really tied to Saika. And now she’s…with the Dollars?

Each new face and name in this conversation was a further pillar of her past that she tried to process, but all she really wanted right now was to get away from this place, to go back home and see Shinra again.

Help me, Shinra. Help me. I think…I might be stuck in something really bad right now, Celty thought rather belatedly.

Thus, the Headless Rider and prominent member of the Dollars could only lament her situation.

Late night, Tokyo

Yumasaki finally noticed the person trailing him when he was getting close to home and the presence of people around him was thin.

His apartment was quite a ways from the center of the city. When he had work, he walked to the train station, and on days that he hung around with Kadota’s group, Togusa would usually pick him up in the van—so it was rare that he was walking home alone late at night on a day he wasn’t working.

His already squinty eyes narrowed further as he considered who might be following him.

(1) A hot vampire girl?

(2) A mysterious monster? (Then I get saved by a flame-haired, burning-eyed beauty.)

(3) A girl from another world who looks to me for help?

Under normal circumstances, these were the only three options he would consider. But in the present situation, he was mulling over two different possibilities that would otherwise never occur to him.

(4) Did the Yellow Scarves follow me home from the karaoke place?

(5) Is the person who ran over Kadota following me next?

He surreptitiously changed his route, taking him past a twenty-four-hour parking garage, which he headed directly into. It was an unmanned garage—any vehicles still here were going to be there until the morning, and there was no booth guard handling tickets.

The choice of a location with security cameras was to get a possible look at whoever was trailing him, of course—and also to lower the chances of any crazy business happening to him. On the other hand, if it really was option five, he would be the one attempting the crazy stuff.

“…”

Yumasaki stood in the middle of the second floor and waited. All was quiet for a while, and he was beginning to think that maybe he’d been mistaken.

But a few seconds later, there was a dry, clattering, scraping sound in earshot. It was metal scraping against asphalt, coming up from the first floor of the garage, steadily approaching, until a man appeared around the top of the ramp.

“…?”

This only made Yumasaki more confused. First off, he didn’t look like one of the Yellow Scarves. If it was someone he’d never seen before, that put option five in the realm of possibility—but Yumasaki thought he recognized this man somehow.

He also learned the source of the scraping sound: The man had a long-handled construction hammer in his hand, and he was dragging the head along the asphalt like a child scraping the tip of his umbrella on the ground.

A mysterious man lugging a hammer around. But as soon as he spotted Yumasaki and spoke, the mystery all but vanished.

“It’s been a while…a real long while, hasn’t it? You punk-ass otaku bitch…,” he said, delight and hatred present in equal measure.

“…! Are you…Mr. Izumii?!”

“…Mr. Izumii. Mr. Izumii, huh? Mr. Izumii, Mr. Izumii, Mr. Izumii…”

Izumii repeated his name incessantly, the ends of his mouth curling into a smile.

“The asshole who burned my face and arm still has the gall to call me ‘Mister,’ huh? Gosh, the respect just fills me with such joy…bitch.” Despite the smile, his voice was full of rage and loathing.

Yumasaki gave him a long, hard stare and said, “Just one thing. I want to ask something first.”

“What?”

“Were you the one who ran over Kadota?”

“…Ahh, I see what you mean. Yeah, that traitor got run over and sent to the hospital, huh?” Izumii laughed with pure delight.

Yumasaki’s expression did not change. “You have one big car, don’t you, Mr. Izumii? Did you use that to hit him?” he demanded, really more of an accusation.

Izumii had a strong grudge against Kadota, who once betrayed the Blue Squares and led to their downfall. If Kadota’s hit-and-run was intentional and not just a spontaneous accident, Izumii was the natural first suspect.

But Izumii reacted by wiping the smile off his face and snarling, “My car…?” His temples pulsed, and he abruptly lifted the hammer. “You ruined that car when you burned it out with that goddamn Molotov!”

All his pent-up rage exploded in that moment, and he hurled the hammer right at Yumasaki with a bellow. Yumasaki yelped and jumped to the side of the weapon, which hurtled past him like a boomerang. It missed (barely), but the force was enough for Yumasaki to lose his balance and topple to the ground.

“Hah! Moron!”

Izumii lunged forward to close the gap between them. Somehow, he had another smaller hammer now, one made of vulcanized rubber. He made to immobilize Yumasaki by swinging a kick at the younger man’s head.

Yumasaki curled up on the ground just in the nick of time, causing Izumii’s toe to catch him on the shoulder instead. “Urgh!”

It was only the shoulder but a full-force toe kick. He was lucky it didn’t dislocate the joint entirely. Yumasaki struggled to get up, withstanding the shock that rolled through his body—but Izumii placed his foot on Yumasaki’s side and pressed down.

He leered down sadistically at his helpless opponent. Then he recalled what had happened just before Yumasaki and Kadota betrayed him the first time and uttered a callback line much like what he’d said then.

“So here’s your question. After I kill you, whose head am I gonna go smash like an egg…?” He bent over while maintaining the pressure on Yumasaki’s side and then lifted his hammer. “Here’s a very generous hint… It’s someone who’s currently…in the hospital!”

Before Yumasaki could even hypothetically ask what the answer was, Izumii swung the hammer down toward his head…

…except that a fireball consumed his upper half.

“Eeeh…eeyaaaa!!”

Izumii buckled and fell off Yumasaki, reliving the trauma of his past experience with a terror. He leaped away to a safe distance, making sure no part of himself had caught on fire, and screamed, “You…you’ve got another one of those tricks up your sleeve again!”

Yumasaki slowly got to his feet and smiled the way he always did. “Aww, geez, I’m really sorry about this, Mr. Izumii. I’m a flame type, despite not wearing red.” In his right hand was a specially modified lighter. This was his own homemade flamethrower, which could shoot a jet a bit shorter than a baseball bat in length, though only a few times—making it better for sneak attacks than anything else. Still, it was effective enough to get Izumii away from him and on the defensive.

“Yumasakiii…”

“Now that I think about it, if you had run Kadota over, you would’ve gone back and stuck him in the van rather than leaving him behind.”

“Obviously…I’d drive him straight out to the mountains to bury him!” Izumii swore.

Yumasaki shook his head and said, “Well, I apologize. I shouldn’t have suspected you, but on the other hand, if you’re going to attack the hospital next after me, I guess I can’t afford to roll over and let you win.” His eyes went wider than usual, as he toyed with the weaponized lighter in his hands.

“Sounds like fun… So after I kill you, I’ll use that toy to burn your body instead…,” Izumii growled, his eyes brimming with murder. Yumasaki promptly reached for the backpack he’d left on the ground, pulled something out of it, and took a step farther away.

“Huh? What is that, another Molotov? C’mon, bring it on. You really think that’s gonna take me out, huh?”

“I would’ve preferred if you’d transitioned over to me by saying, ‘First, I’ll destroy that illusion,’” Yumasaki said cryptically.

“Wha—?” Izumii glowered. Then his ringtone went off.

“?”

But it was Yumasaki who was startled by it.

Izumii’s fury instantly disappeared from his eyes. He put another step between himself and Yumasaki and answered the phone.

“…I see. Yes, thank you. Okay… Okay.”

Just seconds ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to see Izumii acting this deferential. Yumasaki was so confused that he was trapped in place for the moment, question mark over his head.

“…I understand, sir. I’ll be right there, sir.”

Sir?!

Yumasaki’s mouth fell open. He couldn’t imagine a more unlikely word for Izumii to say. Meanwhile, the other man hung up his call and spat.

“You’re lucky, otaku. You get to live a few more days. You and Kadota,” he said, back to his usual snarl. He turned his back on Yumasaki. “There are plenty of former Blue Squares who got a bone to pick with you and Kadota. Just be careful not to let anyone else kill you before I can.”

Then he clicked his tongue and left the parking garage. Yumasaki picked up the long-handled ball peen hammer that Izumii had thrown and grunted “Don’t get killed by anyone other than me? Mr. Izumii, you’re even more of a 2-D character than I gave you credit for. It’s too bad that such good lines are wasted on such a low-rent person, though. Maybe I need to rethink my assessment of him.”

Yumasaki then realized that his back-and-forth with Izumii had actually cooled his head down quite a bit. “Speaking of rethinking things, I really said some awful things to Kida and his friends. I’ll have to go apologize to them, after I burn the real culprit.”

Obviously, he wasn’t going to forgive whoever ran over Kadota.

“…But it’s a bit inefficient just walking around, and someone might come after me like this again…

“Guess I need a place to hide for the time being… Yes, exactly! I need a hideout!”

At that moment, Anri’s house

Unable to get to sleep, Anri decided to mess around with her cell phone instead. The usual chat room she hung out in appeared to be dead at the moment.

I just get a really bad feeling about this… What is it? Whatever it is, it’s awful…

She couldn’t shake that feeling, so she typed in the address of the Dollars’ message board, hoping to at least get some up-to-date information on the city. It was a social forum that Celty showed her, where she could get hard-core, real street-level info on what was happening.

She was hoping to find some kind of clue about the hit-and-run on Kadota, but nothing jumped out at her. Disappointed, she scrolled through the entire board for anything interesting at all.

At the top of a subgroup titled “Latest Updates,” there was a thread titled “Top Priority: Searching for Runaway Daughter.” Apparently, helping people find runaways also fell under the Dollars’ stated activities.

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Kadota’s incident, but Anri opened it up anyway, wondering if it was something she could help with.

“…Huh?” she gasped aloud.

There was a name and picture attached to the post. The moment she saw them, both the unknown anxiety plaguing her and the voices of Saika that sought human love pulsed much stronger.

The connection between the two was clear.

It was the girl who once fought Anri and ultimately was re-enslaved by her Saika.

Haruna Niekawa.

A girl with beautiful, long black hair and a pleasant, gentle face.

The instant it registered on Anri that this girl was now missing, her world lurched and rotated. She felt disoriented, practically dizzy, and racked with fear.

It felt like she was being sucked into something very big and very frightening.

And she was worried she would cause the same thing to happen to people she cared very much about.

The next day, noon, ruined building in the burbs

“What did you want to talk about alone like this?”

Celty was back in the same torn-up building, this time summoned by Mikado. Unlike yesterday, Aoba and his cohorts were nowhere to be seen—it was just the two of them.

“I wanted you to know a bit about what’s going on with me… Remember, we were in the middle of something important yesterday when all those people showed up and made things complicated.”

“I see.”

Celty had wanted to speak to him as soon as possible, too, so she had no reason not to take up his offer. In the daytime, the building was so different than it was at night that she almost wondered if she was in the wrong place. The battery-powered lights the boys had brought were gone, and the interior was a dim mixture of sunlight and shadow.

But Mikado’s expression was exactly the same as the night before. He’d probably turned this way for quite a while now. There were a few scratches on him now, but that childish, slightly weak-willed look of his hadn’t suddenly transformed into an adult one over such a short period of time.

It feels like something’s different about him, though, she thought. Something’s different about his personality or his mannerisms. Or…in fact, he might be reminding me of the Mikado who used the Dollars to set that trap for Namie Yagiri. That had been over a year ago now.

Celty decided to start with some small talk. “How long has it been since the two of us had a chat like this?”

“I’ll admit, it feels strange when I have a conversation with you, Celty. It’s like being in a dream. Or like I’ve just become the hero in a movie or something.”

“You aren’t losing track of the difference between reality and fiction, are you?”

“…What are you trying to say?” He chuckled, looking a bit worried.

“Anri was telling me about you the last time we met,” she typed.

“Sonohara was?”

“She was saying you’d gotten very cheerful recently. Mysteriously so,” Celty said, consciously omitting the fact that Anri was quite worried about him.

Mikado muttered a doubtful reply under his breath, but after another pause, he smiled. “I see… Yeah, maybe she’s right.”

“Did something good happen to you?”

“I don’t know if it’s good or not… I don’t know. Life is fun right now, I guess.”

“Fun? In what way, exactly?” she asked, her helmet tilting out of curiosity.

“I have a goal, a purpose. I’ve found what I want to do, I guess…but in the past, I was just going with the flow around me. Then I realized I can’t just do that…”

“I see.”

Based on that statement alone, it was easy to understand this as a withdrawn boy who found a dream and learned how to be proactive—but Celty had seen many people in her life, and this also struck her as the sort of thing that people stuck in shady multilevel marketing scams said as well.

“And the goal you’ve found to dedicate yourself toward is an internal purge of the Dollars?”

“…How much do you know about that? Oh, geez, Celty. Yesterday, you said you wanted to hear it from my own lips, and today you go and say it before I can,” he said, turning to the window with a sad little smile. “That’s right. But it’s not anything as drastic as a purge. I want to return the Dollars to how they used to be. That’s all it is.”

He placed his hands on the frame of the window, which had no pane or even a sash—just a hole in the wall—and stared out at the distant sky as he waited for Celty’s answer. She stood next to him, soaking in the sun, and held out her PDA.

“All I know is what the rumors on the town say. I suppose the fact that everyone was talking about it was why Mr. Akabayashi showed up.”

“The real gangsters…are scary guys.”

“Just so you know what you’re getting into, he’s actually the most reasonable of the Awakusu-kai members. If it were Aozaki, he could’ve had everyone there beaten to a pulp. If things had gone even worse, you all might be in a far-off blast furnace once owned by a now-bankrupt company, mixed in with the melted slag.”

“D-do they dispose of bodies that way now…? I guess it would be a good way to hide them,” Mikado said, his lips twitching at the thought.

“Apparently, if the police conduct an investigation, they can find foreign substances left within the iron.”

“Please don’t talk about that right now. It’s hitting a little too close for comfort,” he said.

Looking at him now, Celty couldn’t see anything other than a teenage boy in his features. She wanted to believe in the expression he was giving her, but now that Akabayashi was involved, there was no room for just skating along and hoping it all worked out. Perhaps there was a way to distance the young man from the group.

“Calm down and think about it,” she typed. “I’m not trying to scare you straight. I’m saying you’re in a position that could very well cause that to happen to you, Mikado.”

“…I know.”

“Do you, though? You would risk those consequences to turn the Dollars back to what they used to be? I know they’ve changed recently, but there have always been members who have messed around with mugging and so on. You make it sound lofty, but you really just want to reform the gang so it’s more convenient for your ends, don’t you?”

“If the Dollars becoming peaceful is what’s convenient for me…then I guess you’re right,” he said. The firmness of his manner threw Celty for a loop.

“Mikado, what will you gain by kicking out the headaches with violence? They’ll just leave the Dollars and start doing the same thing again in secret. Violence doesn’t solve anything.”

“…I’d say Shizuo solved a lot of things with violence.”

“If you ever said that to his face, he’d kill you.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?” he persisted. Celty felt a shiver run through her. “Listen, Celty. I don’t think what I’m doing is perfectly right and just… I mean, just creating the Dollars in the first place wasn’t the right thing to do, according to society, you know?”

“Well, the police have it out for me, so I have no room to judge,” Celty said, thinking of the motorcycle cop and shivering. Then she scolded herself for getting frightened and continued typing. “If I were a human being leading an upright life, with nothing to hide from society, I’d probably knock you out to force you to quit the Dollars. But I live in a much deeper, darker part of town, and I’m not even human.”

“…”

“But I still like to dream about a happy life with Shinra. It’s my own selfish desire. So I don’t have the right to stop you from doing what you want. But as someone who’s lived a bit longer than you, I want to give you a warning.”

She slumped her shoulders a bit mournfully, turned her attention to Mikado’s face, and typed some more. “Where did you get those cuts on your face? I bet you kicked out some Dollars, and they got back at you. You know it’s going to get worse than just facial bruises pretty soon, right?”

“…These weren’t the result of revenge.”

“What?”

In the same flat affect he’d been using all conversation, he explained, “When I’m getting them to leave the Dollars, if they don’t want to listen to me, it inevitably turns into a fight…but I’m not much of a fighter at all, so…”

“Hang on. Are you saying you’re the one getting into fights?”

“Huh? Of course I am.”

“Of course you…? I just assumed you were giving orders to Aoba and his little goons to make them do the dirty work…”

“It’s true that Aoba’s team works on my orders…but the Dollars have no vertical hierarchy. That’s my ideal, and that’s how I started it. It would be crazy for me to put the people I care about through danger for my own reasons,” he said, with a smile that suggested it was a very odd thing for her to insinuate. That only made the shiver running through Celty worse.

Mikado, what’s going on? What happened to you?

A number of things had happened to Mikado during the events of the Golden Week holiday. But Celty hadn’t been there for them, so it wasn’t until this conversation that she realized how the boy was changing.

Yes, something is wrong. It’s clear that Mikado is acting strangely. No wonder Anri’s worried for him.

After a bit of hesitation, Celty decided to make a bet.

“I wasn’t sure if I should tell you this or not.”

“?”

“Did you know…there are rumors this week about the Yellow Scarves reuniting?”

The Yellow Scarves were potential foes of the Dollars. They had clashed in the past. But this gang in particular held a very special meaning to Mikado.

“…I’ve heard the rumors. They’re going around and giving pitches to all their former members, apparently,” he said vaguely. He leaned through the empty window frame to catch the comfortable breeze. Celty sensed this gesture was meant to buy time or hide something from her.

“Things ended without a lot of resolution half a year ago. But you know what’s going on now, don’t you?”

“…”

“About the Yellow Scarves and Masaomi.”

Mikado responded to Celty’s blunt question with a pleading smile. “Celty, please pretend I haven’t noticed.”

“What?”

“That and the fact that I founded the Dollars. Sonohara’s secret, too… I’m sure you know about all these, Celty, but Sonohara and I have an agreement. We’re only going to speak about these things when the three of us are back together.”

“…Okay, but what if the Yellow Scarves attack the Dollars again?” Celty asked. She just wanted to know what Mikado was going to do.

The boy opened his mouth and replied, “I would fight them, of course.”

It was so simple and straightforward that Celty assumed at first that it must have been a mistake.

“What are you talking about? Are you insane?”

But it was just a sign of how far apart Celty’s hopes and Mikado’s ideas were.

Mikado Ryuugamine smiled—that same innocent, youthful smile—and revealed one extremely momentous fact.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve got Aoba leading an attack on them right now.”

Back alley, Tokyo

“Damn! I didn’t think they’d be coming after us this soon,” said one boy, leaning against a fence, breathing heavily. There was a yellow scarf around his arm, indicating that he was a member of the group of the same name. “Go figure, they’re making the rounds in broad daylight.”

There were three boys closing in on him. They had been at the abandoned building with Mikado last night. They wore the bandannas and ski caps of the Blue Squares, which stuck out like little else in the middle of the city during the day—but there was a black van stopped at the entrance to the alley, blocking the events within from witnesses.

Aoba peered through binoculars from inside the vehicle. He happily murmured, “Let’s see how faithful his oath to Masaomi Kida really is.”

“If you wanted to hurt him enough to get the answer, wouldn’t it be easier just to trail him there?” asked an older guy, sitting in the driver’s seat.

“If he doesn’t spill the beans, that’s fine,” said Aoba. “This is a declaration of war. We just need to make an example of somebody.”

“Y’know, it’s kind of weird how you talk down to me, when I’m four years older than you, but then you treat Ryuugamine with total respect,” grumbled the driver, who had a sporty, spiked haircut.

“Why wouldn’t I? Mr. Mikado is someone worthy of my respect,” Aoba replied, laughing in the face of the driver, who looked to be around twenty years old. On the inside, he considered a conversation he had with Mikado.

“Let’s hope you’re able to proudly go and visit Mr. Kadota as soon as possible, sir. Along with Miss Sonohara and Mr. Kida, too,” Aoba had said.

“That’s true. But in a sense…this was a good thing.”

“Good?” Aoba asked.

Mikado smiled like he always did around school. “I knew that if Kadota found out about what I was doing, he would absolutely try to stop me…and I don’t want to have to fight him. I know I wouldn’t win,” he had said bracingly. “Plus, now he doesn’t have to take part in this whole big thing I’m going to orchestrate…where we temporarily crush the Dollars into dust.”

“He’s gonna destroy as much of the Dollars as he can so he can rebuild it. By the end, I bet he’ll even offer up the Blue Squares as a sacrifice.” Aoba chuckled.

The driver’s eyes bulged. “Hang on, man—that sounds scary! Why are you letting him boss you around, then?!”

“Calm down. My purpose here is to expose the interior of the Dollars over the process. I’ll drag that pretentious info broker out into the open…and if I can sacrifice him to the Awakusu-kai, that would be the best outcome.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about…”

Aoba peered through the binoculars and said excitedly, “Mr. Mikado’s going to expand the sea we swim in beyond imagination. That’s what I’m saying.”

Ruined building

“What are you saying? Get a grip! Get a grip!”

“Don’t be silly, Celty. I’m perfectly rational,” Mikado said, laughing. She grabbed him by the shirt.

“No you’re not! What, do you think the Yellow Scarves are being manipulated by bad guys, like before?! If anything, that’s clearly your group this time! Do you really think Aoba’s that trustworthy?!” she typed, which was more bracingly honest than anything she’d said yet, but Mikado was utterly unshaken. It was as if he knew all that already.

“It’s not an issue of trust. Aoba uses me, and I use him. That’s all this is.”

“Mikado!”

“You know about me and Masaomi and Sonohara separately, but you wouldn’t know what exists between us.”

“Don’t try to mislead your way out of this with that adolescent garbage!”

Except…I’m the one who’s trying to mislead myself.

He was right that she had no idea what sort of bonds existed between the three kids. She couldn’t possibly know the feelings of each of them, as they clung to their individual secrets.

Celty was shying away from the inconvenient fact that she couldn’t speak to these things. She wanted to continue her argument, to play righteous in front of Mikado—except that the utterly familiar ordinariness of his smile stopped her in her tracks. The very same way that when Masaomi reunited with Mikado, that smile froze him in place.

“I think the strings between Masaomi and I are so tangled up that there’s no way for either of us to escape.”

He smiled. The kind of open, singular smile that one would say with a statement like Mmm, this ice cream is amazing!

“So my only option is to burn all the strings so we can start over again.”

“Mikado…”

Was there anything she could say to get through to him anymore? It seemed doubtful to Celty at this point. He bowed to her apologetically.

“I don’t know what it is that Aoba’s trying to make you do, but I know I don’t have the right to ask you to take part.”

“But…at the very least, it would be a huge help if you could look the other way while we do what we’re doing.”

Back alley, Tokyo

“So, what’s it gonna be? If you come peacefully, you might not even get hurt that bad.”

The three youths cornering a Yellow Scarves boy closed in menacingly.

“Seriously, why did you guys have to show up?” demanded the cornered youth, although he didn’t sound all that frightened about it.

“Huh?” they grunted.

“It’s just like Shogun guessed. Now I look like an idiot for saying this was a waste of time.”

“What…?”

Before they could process what he’d meant by that, a number of boys wearing yellow accessories appeared from the shadows of the alleyway.

“Wha…?!”

They showed up from the rear of the trio, who suddenly blanched. Even more Yellow Scarves came climbing over the fence, and very soon it went from three-on-one to eight-on-three.

“Shit,” said Aoba, who was watching the scene in the alley with his binoculars from the safety of the van.

“What’s up? Should we bug out?”

“No, better to stay put. If they realize we’re here, they could pop our tires,” he said, stone-faced, and then put on a sharp smirk. “Not bad. If they’re here on Izaya Orihara’s intel, this sort of plan makes sense.”

He turned to the boy sleeping in the reclined seat next to him and shook him. “Houjou, wake up. Houjou!”

“…Wuhh? Just gimme five more hours…,” mumbled the boy blearily.

He was quite large, practically a pro wrestler. He had well over twice the muscle on his significant frame than Aoba did; when he shifted his weight, the entire seat creaked. He had long black hair tied into a ponytail in a way that looked old-fashioned for one so young, like some kind of armored samurai.

Aoba smacked him on the cheeks and shouted, “You’re supposed to say five minutes, dumb-ass! We’ve got an emergency. Eight baddies! If we take too long, more will come, so the goal is to get outta here! Got that?”

“…Damn, why’s it gotta be me? Take Yoshikiri or Neko, man,” complained Houjou. He opened his eyes slowly, cracked his stiff neck, and sat up.

“Well, you fell asleep in the car, so you’re here now. C’mon, time to work,” said Aoba, opening the door and tugging on the arm of the giant. The sleepy boy allowed himself to be moved outside. He stretched, facing the sky, and cracked every joint he possibly could before glancing toward his surrounded companions down the alley.

“Damn, my family’s already got multiple generations of sleep loss… You’re a real hard-ass, Aoba.”

“The hell are you talking about? The only thing you like more than fighting is sleeping.” Aoba chuckled, then looked at the scene in the alley for himself.

“Then again, our gang’s full of guys who love fighting most of all, so maybe you’re actually smarter than the rest of us, Houjou.”

Five minutes later, karaoke place

“Oh, they got away? Okay, no worries. They had guys waiting in ambush—shit happens.”

Masaomi was taking the report over the phone quite well.

“More importantly, anyone on our side get hurt? Uh-huh…uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, tell them not to get carried away,” he said considerately and hung up.

Yatabe, who was sitting next to him, spoke right on cue. “So they did come after us… You think it was that Kuronuma guy’s decision?”

“No…that might have been on Mikado’s orders,” Masaomi replied.

Yatabe was shocked. “What?! Oh, but that’s only because he doesn’t know you’re the Shogun here, right?”

“The way he’s been acting, he might have done it knowingly.”

“Whaaat?”

“I know what Mikado’s up to, and I’m trying to destroy the Dollars. Turnabout’s fair play.” He leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling, remembering the way Mikado had looked earlier. The smile vanished from his face, and he made a silent oath.

Just you wait, Mikado. If you’re really in so deep you can’t escape, I’ll turn into a scumbag myself and dive into those depths until I find you.

It wasn’t just Mikado and the Blue Squares. Masaomi was silently formulating a plan to deal with the entirety of the Dollars. He narrowed his eyes venomously and envisioned one man’s face.

Even if I have to use the help of the most wicked, conniving bastard.

And if it turns out he’s actually behind all this bullshit, I’ll just destroy him myself.

Underground parking, luxury hotel, Tokyo

“That reminds me. We still don’t know where Izaya Orihara is?”

In the basement lot of a fancy hotel several train stations away from Ikebukuro, an old man walked with a young woman at his side—Kujiragi.

She bowed. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. Since we made contact with Namie Yagiri yesterday, we’ve completely lost sight of Izaya Orihara.”

“Hmph… Very well, then. He’ll trip one of our nets soon enough. And it’s about time we put Shijima into motion, I suspect. My word, but the food here was simply divine,” he added, changing topics on a dime as if to suggest just how little he really cared about Izaya Orihara. The memory of the hotel restaurant’s full course dinner put a blissful smile on his lips. “Freedom is truly a wonderful thing. Now I can dine in such luxurious surroundings without having to fear the Awakusu-kai’s retribution.”

“Of course, Mr. President.”

“Yes. However, the only way to truly experience freedom is to taste the lack of it first, you see. There’s no way to appreciate it unless you know how to yearn for it.”

“A profound statement, Mr. President,” his secretary replied robotically.

Yodogiri would have continued lauding the noble joys of freedom if not for the buzzing of the phone in his back pocket.

“Oh? How strange for my phone to go off instead of yours, Kujiragi,” he marveled and answered the call. The voice that spoke belonged to none other than the vanished man they’d just been talking about.

“Hello there, Jinnai Yodogiri. It’s been a little while.”

“…? And you are?”

“Oops. Was it a different Jinnai Yodogiri who stabbed me earlier? Then I’ll need to introduce myself again. I’m Izaya Orihara, just a humble little info agent in Ikebukuro. Is that okay?”

“Why, my word! We were just talking about you! But how in the world did you get this number?” Yodogiri asked, coming to a stop with a sticky smile on his face.

“One doesn’t get far in my line of work without being able to acquire such information.”

“And what did you want to speak to me about?”

“Oh, pardon me. I have a bad habit of letting the preface run long. I’ll be short and to the point,” Izaya said. He continued, “Where is Namie Yagiri now?”

“…What is this? I haven’t a clue what you mean.”

“I searched for her through Yagiri Pharmaceuticals and was getting nowhere. I wondered if she might be spending time with you instead.”

“Oh dear. But even if that were the case, would I have any obligation to tell you the answer?” Yodogiri replied smarmily.

“Hmm, I suppose not. This is the problem with Japan, you know. How can you not be compelled to give me information? Then I suppose I’ll have to ask nicely instead,” said the teasing voice over the phone. “If you’re not going to tell me, could you at least go to sleep for a bit?”

“Pardon?”

“Be a grown-up and don’t get yourself caught in the middle of fights between children, please. You’ll only get yourself hurt.”

“What is that supposed to—?” the old man started to say.

Then a shock ran through Jinnai Yodogiri’s body, and he fell unconscious without knowing why.

“…”

Kujiragi silently witnessed what had happened right next to her.

In the middle of the call, a car drove down the slope to the garage and struck Yodogiri. It probably took him by surprise because the driver had killed the engine, put it in neutral, and let the momentum of the slope carry it downhill.

It had rushed upon them without lights or sound. Yodogiri could be excused for not noticing it while he was on the phone. But Kujiragi had sensed it coming just before the impact.

She had enough time that she could have braved the danger to push him aside and save him, but instead, she simply watched as the violence unfolded.

“…”

The next moment, the car’s engine started again, and it raced back up the garage slope, leaving Yodogiri on the ground. For an instant, Kujiragi caught sight of the driver, who looked like your typical hoodlum—except his eyes were so bloodshot the white parts were entirely red.

Her only reaction was to take out her cell phone and place a call.

“Hello? What is it, Kujiragi?” said a voice, which sounded rather similar to the one belonging to the old man on the ground next to her.

“President Yodogiri Number Eight is injured. Please come and take his place, Number Five.”

“Injured? What hap— — — —?”

The voice on the other end cut off abruptly. An instant before the call dropped, Kujiragi heard another car engine and an impact just like the one that had happened next to her.

“…”

She still didn’t change expressions. Instead, she called a few other numbers—except that none of these even connected. The old man on the ground next to her was unconscious, but she didn’t bother calling a hospital. She just kept punching in numbers.

After a while, it was her phone that received a call. It was from a number she’d never seen before. She immediately hit the answer button and brought the phone up to her ear.

“Hello, Miss Kujiragi. Do you know who I am?”

“Mr. Izaya Orihara,” she said, still in the manner of a secretary.

Izaya chuckled to himself. “Well, your boss didn’t want to give me Namie’s location, but I was thinking that perhaps you might.”

“I’m very sorry to admit that the decision is not mine to make,” she answered. It was as though the unconscious old man at her feet wasn’t even there.

For his part, Izaya was unfazed by her refusal. “Come now, we both know that’s not true. Your decision should be taking precedence over everything else. It’s why I’m waiting on pins and needles for the wisdom of it, isn’t it?

“Your decision as the leader of the Jinnai Yodogiri group.”

Rental building roof, Ikebukuro

“Who did you hear that from?” asked Kujiragi through the phone. Nothing in her voice suggested she was alarmed by having the very essence of her being exposed.

Izaya smiled happily. “I didn’t hear it from anyone. I just investigated the situation in various ways and came to the conclusion that the answer couldn’t be anything else. Besides, there’s a Kujiragi in the census, but that’s not even your real name, is it? So the identity is real, but you killed the owner to take its place, perhaps?”

“I did not kill anyone to steal it. It was a proper transaction with the owner’s consent. She’s currently living out the life she really wanted in Southeast Asia somewhere, I would guess. Whether she’s happy doing it or not is for her to say.”

“You’re quite honest. I was only going on half conjecture. But anyway, I don’t have possession of your actual name…so I figured I would start by exposing your position and getting those pitiful old decoys out of the way.”

“There’s no reason to pity them. They made the decision to chase personal profit and engaged in wicked acts knowingly. From society’s viewpoint, one might say they’ve earned what’s become of them,” Kujiragi answered robotically.

Izaya couldn’t help but shrug. He was currently in hiding along with Slon. He’d split up the Dragon Zombie members working for him into several smaller teams, all currently in action. This provided cover from anyone prying for information on him, while he was free to hide and undertake a totally different set of actions.

Still, he kept his eyes on the surrounding rooftops for any sign of danger. “That’s very cold of you. You’re such a pretty woman; why don’t you express more emotion? On that matter, Jinnai Yodogiri’s been a broker in that field for over twenty years, I hear…so if you don’t mind an extremely forward question, how old are you, Miss Kujiragi?”

“I thought it was a widespread social understanding that asking a woman her age is frowned upon.”

“Come on, don’t stonewall me. You can’t be past your early twenties. Is it makeup? Surgery? Some other special reason?”

“I don’t feel any need to answer that,” she answered without any emotion whatsoever.

Izaya found this fascinating.

“Okay, okay, let’s change the subject. Was it you who was using my nickname in the chat room? At first I thought you had someone else do the job, but when I traced it back to your personal PDA, I was stunned.”

“Your information-collecting abilities are tremendous. Did you hack me?”

“Oh, my methods are neither here nor there. The point is, you sought to isolate me within the Dollars, where I had set up base, by spreading rumors about Dragon Zombie while the rest of the Dollars were fighting over the Kadota incident. The fact that you did this in a tiny chat room with maybe ten people in it must’ve been meant as a prank or a warning perhaps.”

As a matter of fact, when he realized she’d both figured out he was acting as Kanra and then imitated him, it came as a surprise—but he hadn’t been working very hard to hide it. Namie and his sisters knew, for example, so it wasn’t that big of a loss.

That was what made him wonder if she’d gotten the information from Namie. “By the way,” he said, “it’s one thing for you to imitate me on the chat…but why all the cat puns? Are you trying to humiliate me?”

Of all the questions he could ask Kujiragi, this was the one he was most curious about, even more than the matter of Namie’s safety.

Once again, Kujiragi’s answer was in a totally flat affect.

“It was cute, wasn’t it?”

“…I’m having trouble gauging who you are as a person,” Izaya said, trying to stifle a laugh. It was hard to do after hearing a line like that spoken with no irony whatsoever. The spasms in his stomach made his voice tremble.

“So that’s it? A personal taste thing?” he mocked. “You weren’t doing it to make fun of me but because you really just thought that was making Kanra act like a cute girl? Kujiragi, on your days off, do you put on cat ears and a tail, make poses and say ‘meow  ’ as you stand in front of the meow-ror?”

This was met with a long, thoughtful pause. In the same flat and mechanical manner, Kujiragi replied, “That doesn’t sound bad. I’ll try it.”

“Please have mercy. My sides can’t take this.”

Izaya was so taken with this unexpected side of Kujiragi that he almost completely forgot about the matter of Namie’s location—until his sense of reason won out at the last second. He took a deep breath to steady his mind.

“So you don’t intend to tell me where Namie is?”

“I don’t feel the need. Did you orchestrate a number of traffic accidents just to ask that question?”

“If necessary, I’ll cause many more. The guys I had Niekawa cut were thugs who were opposing me, so I feel no pangs of conscience. I love humanity so much that even the troubles of those who are manipulated into being guilty of harming others are like a beloved little treasure to me,” Izaya monologized—like the villain he was.

In fact, he didn’t wait for Kujiragi to reply: “To be honest, without Namie it takes much, much longer to sort my data. And knowing the incredible sense of pride she has, I can’t help but wonder what sort of face she’ll make when she gets rescued by the boss she hates.”

“I don’t think much of your hobbies.”

“That’s the last thing I expected to be judged on by a woman involved in human and monster trafficking. It’s ironic, isn’t it? You sold Saika to Shingen Kishitani, and now it’s come back around to be your enemy.”

He opened the laptop sitting on the simple table setup before him and gave Haruna Niekawa instructions through the Skype text chat function, intending for her to bring together all the thugs under Saika’s control and have them abduct Kujiragi.

“I’m sorry, but you people are interfering with my ability to observe the outcome of the Dollars,” he said.

“And I’ll admit that you and Shizuo Heiwajima were interfering with my ability to procure my products.”

“…?” The name of Izaya’s nemesis caused his fingers to pause.

“So when you tricked Shizuo into walking right into the police station, you did me quite a favor. I have to express my gratitude for that.”

“And why…would Shizu be a problem for you?” Izaya asked, gauging her reaction carefully. Something felt off.

“When people like Shizuo Heiwajima are around, the children are distracted. Although it seems like Haruna Niekawa’s children already gave up on him.”

“…”

Kujiragi continued on her own. “Saika was in my grasp twenty years ago. That means everything. Do you know why I simply gave up a sword that powerful?”

“Is there some secret power to it that only its owner would know about?”

“I suspect its current wielder doesn’t even know about it… Saika’s reproduction isn’t entirely done by cutting others to create children and grandchildren. There is another way. I call it branching.”

Branching.

He considered what this might mean, and alarm bells went off in his head. And in the act of conceiving all possibilities, Izaya spun around.

He was too late.

“It means breaking Saika in two, then reforging the pieces as separate blades, that’s all.”

As she spoke, Izaya saw the large man who had been standing guard in the back leap toward him with speed and agility that didn’t seem possible given his leg injuries.

Before he even recognized that it was Slon, Izaya registered one simple fact.

The color red.

Eyes red and full of blood, racing toward him.

Half a second before the muscles of Izaya’s body could fire into motion, the red-eyed Slon grabbed Izaya’s neck—and slammed him into the concrete roof.

Basement parking garage

“Mother…I have Izaya now. What shall I do?” said a different voice over the phone, several seconds after a loud, violent noise.

“Take him to office twelve. I need to ask him about the dullahan’s head.”

“Understood.”

Kujiragi hung up the call and closed her flip phone. When she was Yodogiri’s secretary, she never uttered a single unnecessary word, but now she allowed herself a private comment with the faintest of emotions behind it.

“Thank you, Izaya Orihara. I’m grateful to you for destroying the Jinnai Yodogiri organization.”

Ignoring the old man unconscious on the ground, she headed for the exit of the garage, her leather pumps clicking. She even ignored the luxury car she’d driven here. She would use her own two feet.

“I acknowledge you as an impediment in the district of Ikebukuro. The third, after Dougen Awakusu and Shinichi Tsukumoya.”

Free from the shell of Jinnai Yodogiri, of the daily repetition that kept her locked in place, she admitted some appreciation for the man who shattered that very cage to pieces.

As she left the garage, the sunlight seemed to pierce her skin. She felt the powerful prickle, but all she did was narrow her red eyes—not bloodshot, but pure, shining red—with a look of pure, unbridled joy on her face.

“Thank you for my freedom.”

Chat room

.

.

The chat room is currently empty.

The chat room is currently empty.

Kuru has entered the chat.

Mai has entered the chat.

Kuru: It was quite lively just two days ago, but it seems there is little activity today.

Kuru: It is a shame, as I was prepared to offer a good two dozen thoughts on last night’s catatonic catastrophe of cattiness from Kanra.

Mai: Nobody’s here.

Kuru: Let us hope it is just a momentary loneliness. It seems to me that when something odd happens in the city, there is a sudden lack of attendance here. Could this perhaps be some den of thieves, where all involved have some major role to play behind the scenes?

Mai: Scary.

Kuru: I do detest being lonely, so I shall hope that Kanra, at least, returns soon. If my hunch is correct, when things are peaceful again, life will return to this little chat room. As a resident of Ikebukuro, I wish for nothing more than the arrival of that happy day.

Mai: I don’t like being lonely.

Mai: Please be fun againnn.

Kuru has left the chat.

Mai has left the chat.

The chat room is currently empty.

The chat room is currently empty.

.

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