Durarara!! - Volume 12 - Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: At Daggers Drawn

Shinra’s apartment

Celty Sturluson’s mental state was quite similar to that moment when the circuit breaker trips and the home suddenly goes dark and quiet.

An enemy calling herself Kasane Kujiragi suddenly appeared in their home and locked lips with Shinra Kishitani, the owner of the apartment. At this point, she still had a basic human level of reason remaining.

It was so sudden that it did take some time for her to fully process what had just happened—so that when she finally understood, the next situation was already occurring.

Unnatural blades, extending from Kujiragi’s fingers like nails.

Celty instantly recalled when she had seen such a phenomenon before.

Saika!

A cursed blade that controlled those it sliced and that implanted “children” within their minds.

Anri Sonohara was supposed to be in possession of Saika, so how did this woman have it now? Or was this some other, different cursed blade?

These questions and more floated through her mind as the steel sank into Shinra’s shoulder.

It felt like time stood still.

Already, Celty was unable to recognize or process the surroundings around them.

“…”

…

…Huh?

What? What am I seeing?

A dream? Some kind of joke?

Shinra is here. Who is this woman?

A kiss? With Shinra? Why?

What is this? Saika’s owner? Cheating? No.

Thief. Must hurry. Kiss? Katana?

Oh no. I’ve seen this. Saika. Transform.

Shinra. Controlled. Oh no. He must be fine.

I trust. So what? Shinra. Don’t.

Wait. Shinra. Shinra is. Shinra must. No!

Shinra. Shinra. It can’t be.

I hate this. Shinra. Please wait.

Shinra. Shinra. Shinra, Shinra.

Why is Shinra I have with Shinra and Shinra but who would do

No. No, no, no. But I love Shinra

Shinra no Shinra mistake won’t believe it Shinra wait Shinra can’t be won’t let it don’t

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The emotions that her confusion dredged up only made the confusion worse.

She was struck by two simultaneous levels of shock—an unfamiliar woman kissing Celty’s lover, followed by his being pierced by that woman’s blades.

It was the biggest shock she’d felt since losing her head, and it ate away at her rational mind, loosening her grip on reality.

Then she was hit by a third shock:

Before she had time to react, Celty witnessed Shinra’s eyes instantly turn red with blood.

When Saika stabs you, your eyes turn red.

Subjugation. The fate of Saika’s child.

This fact, sinking into her mind, caused something within Celty to burst.

Emotion: a storm of conflicting feelings surging into her panicked brain, suddenly bulging to their maximum possible size.

Celty’s instincts began emergency measures to prevent the worst-case scenario: total breakdown.

To save her memory and self-image from the muddy churn of her emotions, she cut rationality loose from her body.

The circuit breaker within her tripped without a sound.

And then…

“Wh-whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing?!”

It was Togusa who first spoke up in response to the woman’s sudden aggressive behavior. He was in the adjacent room, but because he was next to the sliding door, he could see right away what was happening there.

He rushed to pull Kujiragi off Shinra but came to a stop just as suddenly.

“Wha…?”

He had seen shadows erupting into the space before him.

“…”

Kujiragi witnessed the phenomenon as well.

There was no longer the shape of a woman in the space where Celty had been standing. It was just a writhing, expanding mass of shadow, brimming with pressure. One might actually be forgiven for imagining a gusher of oil right in the middle of the room.

But the black shadow, somewhere between a gas and a liquid, expanded explosively throughout the apartment and set upon Kujiragi.

“As I expected,” the woman muttered to herself as the black mist descended upon her with clear and present hostility. She lifted the listless, red-eyed Shinra over her shoulder and leaped backward with an agility that was simply inhuman.

Kujiragi landed next to Togusa and twisted around. After she had leaped away again, the black mass’s jaws closed upon the spot where she’d just been. Jaws was the only word to describe them.

They weren’t like those of any living creature on the planet, but they did have countless black fangs within them, and they bit with such incredible force that they seemed to sink into the very atmosphere itself. The sight was forceful enough to plunge any who saw it into a state of terror.

Neither Togusa, who along with Kujiragi was the first to witness it, nor those who heard the uproar and came to see what was happening moments later could actually understand what it was they were seeing.

That there was a black shadow with its own physical form should have been enough for them to identify Celty Sturluson, but in the moment, that answer was absent from their minds.

Because in the case of this black mass, there was not a bit of the rationality and intelligence they associated with Celty’s typical shadowy manipulations.

Kujiragi raced forward, reaching out, not sparing a backward glance. The next moment, an extremely slender blade like a piece of wire extended from her finger and, with the tensile strength of a whip, lashed in a circle pattern at the glass door to the veranda.

There was the momentary sound of metal scraping, and then a perfect circle fell out from the center of the glass door, just big enough for a person to get through the hole. Without losing any speed, Kujiragi passed through it still carrying Shinra, leaped to the railing of the veranda, and then promptly took flight.

The next moment, everyone left behind in the apartment learned that the giant shadow jaws that had appeared in the bedroom were only a small part of the whole.

A number of other sets of jaws appeared from the room, spinning and churning around the apartment at breathtaking speed. When they identified Kujiragi leaping from the veranda and Shinra slung over her shoulder, they all turned in that direction, then withdrew back to the bedroom.

“Wh-what was that all about…?” Togusa murmured. He tried to peek into the room.

The door of the bedroom—and the entire wall it was set within—erupted, and an enormous mass of shadow leaped out.

“Guwoah—?!”

Togusa didn’t get enveloped in the destruction, but the shadow did push him out of the way. The thing then broke down the glass door to the veranda, chasing after Kujiragi, who had leaped off the building with superhuman leg strength.

Shards of glass glittered in the air, surrounding a mass of shadow that had turned into jaws the size of an elephant.

The jaws blended into the darkness of night and made to devour Kujiragi whole, along with Shinra, too. But just an instant before they could, Kujiragi’s body somehow accelerated in midair.

The wire-width Saika extending from her hand tangled with the metal fence on the roof of the building across the street, and she used it like a winch to pull herself faster across the way.

The shadow missed its prey. But rather than falling down to the street below, the pursuit maintained its intensity. Ten shadow tentacles extended from the main body and lashed out at Kujiragi with the force of crossbow bolts. But the woman did not so much as grimace.

Instead, she landed on the rooftop and withdrew the wire-form Saika into her palm. The part of the fence Kujiragi had tangled it around sliced open and fell to the ground, a dry clatter against the night sky.

As if on cue, Kujiragi held out her right hand toward the shadow tentacles chasing her. It could only be the right hand, because Shinra was still slung over her left shoulder.

Five blades appeared from her fingertips again, forming a large vortex in the direction of the black limbs. A whirlwind of five narrow blades.

No ordinary blade would be capable of blocking this strange shadow with physical properties. But Saika was no ordinary blade. This accursed weapon could probably slice through the human soul itself, if you believed in such things. And in fact, it excelled at damaging the mind, which was very close to the soul, so that it could infiltrate it.

A physics-transcending shine of silver met a physics-transcending shadow of solid matter.

After a hideous sound of intense friction, the whirlwind of blades cut through all the attacking tentacles, turning them back to mist.

But the body of the shadow did not give up. Even as it fell, it created new shadow feelers that grasped for Kujiragi. She swung back against all of them, racing across the rooftop with superhuman speed.

“Owww… What was that about?”

The shattered glass was sprayed about the veranda, allowing the muggy air of the summer night into the apartment.

Togusa got to his feet, rubbing his lower back. What was that black thing just now?

Ordinarily, the sight of a writhing black thing in this apartment would lead everyone to the same answer. In this place, in this entire neighborhood, only one person could make use of a 3-D moving shadow.

But Togusa’s brain was unable to make the connection at the moment. What he had just seen had held no trace of human form.

The sight of the shadow mass taking a form that wasn’t that of a human or of any living creature had caused Togusa to think some kind of unknown monster had suddenly appeared in the room with them.

He felt not a single trace of the emotion and personality he’d always associated with that moving shadow.

“Hey, Yumasaki, what the hell just…?”

“Ohhh… Ohhhhhhh…”

Togusa turned to look at Yumasaki, who was gazing out the window and moaning queerly.

“What’s up, Yumasaki? Did you hit your head?” he asked.

Just then, Yumasaki raised his arms high and shouted in jubilation, “My time…my era has arrived at laaaast!”

“What the hell do you mean?!”

“A mysterious babe wearing glasses…strange wires coming from her hand…cutting a circle in the glass… A heroine who leaps through the sky, fighting the aliens dyed black! It’s all perfect! She was a bit older than I imagined, but at last, it’s the arrival of the 2-D heroine who will open a new door in my life!”

Yumasaki was so wrapped up in his own world that it was hard to tell whether he was even aware of Togusa. He continued shouting up to the open sky. “I must cause my own power to awaken soon! I bet kissing my little sister will cause that woman to be 2-D again, even if she’s temporarily in a 3-D form right now!”

“Okay, forget this guy.” Once Yumasaki got this way, Togusa knew there was no way to hold a conversation with him. It would be difficult to pull him back to reality without Kadota, but at least Yumasaki didn’t have the synergistic effect of Karisawa’s presence.

“Dammit, and I gotta go visit Kadota first thing in the morning tomorrow.”

Yumasaki’s typical mood was possible only because Karisawa had just texted him the news that Kadota was awake again. Even he wouldn’t let himself get this carried away without the relief of such good news. Or at least, that was what Togusa wanted to believe.

Once his mind had calmed down, Togusa realized that the thing that had flowed out of the room had probably been Celty’s shadow, and he hesitantly peered into the bedroom.

“Um, hey, Celty, was that your…?” he started to say, then stopped.

The room was devoid of life. The only notable thing within it was the helmet Celty always wore, resting on the ground.

“…Hey, what does this mean?”

“Celty just left,” answered Mika Harima, who was looking outside through the shattered glass doorframe.

“What? But what does that mean?”

“That black thing that just burst out of the apartment… That was Celty.”

“…”

Togusa fell silent. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have imagined this. He just didn’t want to actually consider it.

The Headless Rider whom Togusa knew, contrary to her fearsome appearance, was just as smart and reasonable as Kadota, tops among people he knew.

But there hadn’t been anything resembling the Headless Rider he knew in that dark monstrosity just now, and there was no glimmer of reason or wisdom in the wake of its destruction.

“Oh my, this is the after of exactly what event being revealed?”

This absurd attempt at the Japanese language was accompanied by Emilia’s face around the corner. At this point, the massive shadow was no longer visible outside the window.

Togusa gazed out of the broken glass door and muttered the first thing that came to mind.

“…Well, the guy who actually owns this place is gone now, so how are we supposed to explain this if the cops show up?”

In the dark of night, the shadow monster that was Celty Sturluson continued its chase of Kujiragi.

The woman leaped and bounded from rooftop to rooftop like she was going to cross a thousand leagues in the span of a night. Before the mass of shadow could fall, it extended tendrils of shadow that gripped buildings like some monstrous slime mold to keep itself aloft—yet the way it pursued Kujiragi was closer to a carnivorous beast on the hunt.

There was no end to the shadow tentacles. But those whiplike blades sliced through everything in their way.

Normally, if Celty had witnessed the bold act of warping Saika into other forms than a pure katana, she would have been alarmed, yet she would have watched carefully and calmly to formulate a proper response.

But in this state, she did not have that calm. She did not have any sense of reason whatsoever.

In fact, it was unclear whether the shadow monstrosity should even be referred to as “Celty Sturluson.”

There wasn’t a hint of Celty’s consciousness in its actions, just an automated hunting system that pursued the fleeing Kujiragi.

Were the swarms of tendrils attempting to skewer Kujiragi’s body, or were they trying to grab Shinra off her shoulder?

Kujiragi could not tell you the answer as she fled.

The shadow could not tell you the answer as it chased her.

Because the mass of shadow had eliminated the very sense of reason that would seek that answer in the first place.

Shinra’s apartment

“Nope, can’t tell where they went.”

Togusa and the others had stepped gingerly onto the veranda, avoiding the broken glass, but nowhere among the nearby buildings could they see the mysterious woman who’d abducted Shinra, or the freakish, monstrous form of Celty.

In the daytime would be one thing, but against the backdrop of night, it would be nearly impossible to see Celty in the sky.

“That chick with the glasses did that all in what, like, thirty seconds after entering the place? The hell is goin’ on, man…,” muttered Togusa, who was probably the most rational individual present.

And yet, thinking over what he had just seen, he came up with an answer to his own question that wasn’t all that rational.

“Was it just me, or did that chick kinda look like Ruri?” He shook his head, dispelling the thought. “Nah…can’t be.”

As a matter of fact, Ruri Hijiribe and Kasane Kujiragi were niece and aunt, so he was actually entirely correct in his observation, but Togusa had no idea of that. He banished the thought and glanced over the railing of the balcony. “But what should we do about…?”

He didn’t finish that sentence. It was interrupted by a braying that did not seem like anything from this world, coming from the bottom of the apartment building. It hit with the crackle and boom of a thunderbolt, echoing eerily throughout the night of the city.

Then, from the entrance to the basement parking garage, burst a shadowy black thing—not as big as what Togusa had seen moments earlier, but still significantly bigger than a human being. It reared up high among the streetlights. Togusa frowned and wondered, “Is that…a horse?”

It appeared to be a black creature with four distinctively long, narrow legs, but something about it still seemed to be weird and alien.

“Oh…”

A shiver ran down Togusa’s back when he recognized that the source of his concern was the lack of a head on the creature. But by that point, the headless horse was already going down the alley, leaving behind only the echo of its rumbling cry into the night.

“What the hell is even happening, man…?”

He had thought he was used to Celty and the abnormality she represented. While he hadn’t been as quick to embrace her as Yumasaki had been—and he was the one still jabbering on nearby—Togusa felt that he himself had accepted Celty and the fact that she was not human, but someone with whom you could have a relationship.

But the mass of shadow he had just witnessed made him realize that his take on the situation was naive.

“What the hell’s even going on with the world…?” he wondered now. If it was at all something grandiose, it didn’t feel like it to him.

Instead, his understanding of the world, as it appeared through his eyes, was being fundamentally overturned.

Rooftop, parking garage, Tokyo

Several hours earlier, there was another person who, like Celty, had exploded with a potent cocktail of mixed emotions: the leader of the Yellow Scarves gang, Masaomi Kida.

A young man on edge, people liked to say.

It wasn’t complimentary, but there was no other description that better captured what Masaomi was at this moment.

Just seconds before this, he had thrown himself into a tremendous fight.

You might say that Masaomi had cast his very life into challenging Chikage Rokujou, the leader of a motorcycle gang from Saitama—Chikage had superhuman toughness and strength, just not on the level of Shizuo Heiwajima. At the very least, Masaomi entered the fight with that expectation.

But in all accuracy, he did not cast his entire life into it, if you were to define that as fighting with the expectation of going up to and past the threshold of death. In fact, Masaomi was not thinking about dying in his fight against Chikage Rokujou.

Chikage’s ferocious attacks.

The mad way that he leaped off the building, holding on to Masaomi.

On several occasions, Masaomi expected that death would result from these things. Yet, there was still a gap between what he experienced and the sense of impending death.

In large part, this was because he did not sense any murderous intent from Chikage Rokujou in their combat—but Masaomi was not able to perform this kind of subtle analysis in the moment.

No less than a minute before, Masaomi had seen Chikage Rokujou fall from the rooftop and be perfectly fine. Masaomi turned back to the roof so that he could regain control of the situation—and he witnessed another group of several dozen approaching who were very much not the Yellow Scarves.

And standing at the head of the group: a man with burn scars, holding a hard rubber hammer.

“Heh-hya…I guess it’s true that idiots and smoke like to gather in high places, huh?”

Before his brain could process that voice, his very cells reacted.

The first memory that popped into his head was past terror.

Death.

This was the sense of certain impending doom.

If he went toward this man, he would be killed. His life would be erased. After he’d undergone suffering at the very limit of what he could fathom—if not even beyond it.

The memory of the first time he’d felt the powerful stench of death and fallen to his knees.

The moment he had abandoned the one person he must never abandon.

“Here’s your question! When I broke Saki Mikajima’s leg…who was the pussy who abandoned her and ran away?! Kee-hee-hya-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

And with those hideous, vexing words, Masaomi’s entire world was shut in darkness.

Unlike with Celty, this was not a case of an emotional circuit breaker tripping.

In fact, it was almost the exact opposite of the change that would happen to her a few hours later.

When all of his emotions exploded, they switched on all the power lines that had been down inside Masaomi Kida.

Because he was human.

Because he could not get rid of his emotions.

Because he was dragging his past behind him.

His fear and anxiety all converted into rage, and he screamed the name of his opponent.

“Izumiiiiiiii!”

He launched forward.

This time, he was truly putting his life on the line.

In that moment, the real determination to fight with his very life welled up from deep within. And at the same moment, it birthed another kind of determination.

When one offers up one’s life, it is often life that is sought in return.

The sheer force of the powerful emotions raging within brought about a kind of secondary, imitation determination. He was prepared to kill the interloper, if need be. The difference in numbers was stark, and if anyone was going to end up dead here, Masaomi was by far the most likely.

But still he ran.

Not like a man with tunnel vision.

He saw the obvious suffering ahead of him and chose to throw all his rising emotions into overcoming it.

Masaomi was not a very tall man. He was used to fighting, and he had a pretty decent physical build, but he didn’t cut the sort of figure that struck fear into others with a glance.

But he did cast off a demonic fury that was unlike your typical teenager, and it caused the thugs around him to subconsciously shy away a bit.

In their midst, the very source of Masaomi’s nightmares, Ran Izumii, smirked at his foe through sunglasses and raised his hammer.

“…You mean Mr. Izumii, yeah?”

And just like that, he swung it down at Masaomi’s head.

Masaomi avoided the swing by a hair’s width, putting him right inside his opponent’s defenses.

“ ”

There was nothing to say.

As if to make the point that nothing could be worth saying to this man, no words of hatred even being worth the effort, Masaomi put all the strength and emotion he could summon, all the regrets about his own weakness, and every other thing that had built up inside him into a clenched fist.

He twisted his body, putting rotation into the greatest possible blow he could muster, and then tensed and paused for an instant.

Just the slightest, briefest moment.

It was enough time for Izumii to recognize Masaomi’s stance and the distance between them and hastily attempt to evade. But rolling his upper half backward did not create enough room to avoid impact.

Masaomi’s fist hurtled with maximum speed and weight at Izumii’s unprotected face.

The next moment, the sound of violent impact echoed off the walls of the parking garage.

In the past

Ran Izumii was once the head of the Blue Squares, but he was not the kind of person you would consider a mighty brawler.

For one thing, he got the position only because it was left to him by his little brother, Aoba Kuronuma. So in the sense that he was never meant to earn that leadership position, it was true—because he didn’t build that throne for himself.

However, it was under Izumii’s lead that the Blue Squares actually expanded their power. So it was more accurate to describe him as a true scumbag.

He relied on numbers in battle, and out of an inferiority complex to his popular and charismatic brother, he tended to try to keep people under control with fear instead.

He would focus on annihilating enemy gangs, keeping them under his thumb with violence, and using his followers as the limbs that did his bidding. Kadota criticized him for his methods on many an occasion, but Izumii never intended to take that into account.

He knew that if he stopped growing the Blue Squares his brother had built and he allowed it to be comfortable in its own skin, it was bound to implode instead. And once that happened, he would be the first one its members turned against.

So he committed himself to atrocity: He wielded violence like a cudgel. He indulged in all his desires. He painted the back alleys of Ikebukuro in sticky, ugly fear, grinding the city rough and raw.

Because as soon as he stopped, that fear would crush him in return.

On the other hand, Ran Izumii was not some victim whose life had been sent off the rails by his brother’s actions. While he was unable to stop the relentless march of his gang, it was also by his own desire that he traced this path.

If he were really some sympathetic victim, he would have handed the gang over to someone else, retired from the position, and left the ugly, bloodstained back alleys behind.

In fact, if he had left it in the hands of Kadota, for example, the team might have come together well. A guy like him had the potential and the character to lead. He might even have altered the fundamental nature of the gang.

But Izumii refused to do that.

The power and money and influence he gained were all his, and the thought of giving them up to another person was unfathomable. Izumii was steering them down the path of madness because he wanted to do it.

In other words, he was a real scumbag.

But there were dangerous storm clouds around his path.

There was a street gang, supposedly set up by middle school kids, that wore yellow bandannas. This group, the Yellow Scarves, was somehow holding its own against the Blue Squares’ overwhelming advantage in numbers.

This inexplicable situation did not stop Izumii. When their relentless guerrilla assaults were proving to be impossible to overcome with his power of numbers, he began to get impatient—until a certain man made unexpected contact with him and gave Izumii some information.

That the leader of the Yellow Scarves was Masaomi Kida.

And that he had a girlfriend by the name of Saki Mikajima.

And how they could get her alone.

Izumii didn’t trust him, but he was willing to take any help he could get and accepted the man’s offer. They succeeded in kidnapping the girl, and all they needed to do after that was use her to lure Masaomi Kida to a place where they could crush him.

But as a result, Izumii lost his status, his power, and even the tiny bit of freedom he possessed. All he gained was the facial-burn scar from Yumasaki’s Molotov cocktail.

Izumii benefited from not having a significant prior arrest record, but he was still sentenced for his assault, and he spent time in juvenile detention.

While he served his sentence, he coincidentally learned about the trickery involved in the warfare between the Blue Squares and Yellow Scarves. That he had been placed on his throne by his brother and manipulated in the palm of a man named Izaya Orihara, who wanted to throw a wrench into the gang war.

At last, Izumii understood just how powerless he really was.

If he was the type of person to learn humility, his story would likely have taken a different route at this point.

But he was not.

He was not meant to inspire others with leadership, but he was indeed a bona fide scumbag.

Not for a single second did the emptiness consume him. Rather than reflect on his failings or look ahead to his future, he simply doubled down on the simmering, obsessive hatred within him.

He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong.

So Izumii punched the wall of the facility’s gym. He kicked it, screamed, and even head-butted the hard surface. It was identified as self-harming behavior, and he was placed in a solitary cell.

But he wasn’t trying to hurt himself at all—Izumii just wanted to destroy something, anything, that was within reach.

Since he wasn’t Shizuo Heiwajima, he did not destroy the prison wall, of course. His limbs did not break and heal again with superhuman speed, like Shizuo’s.

Instead, Izumii became a quiet, model inmate from that point on. He kept the fury and hatred he felt for the world suppressed deep down, so that they seeped into each and every cell of his being.

Izumii didn’t engage in any special training. There was no human drama that changed his outlook on life, and he did not gain any superhuman powers. He just quietly served out his sentence.

But there was a slight change in him.

That is, if you can call erasing something that was once within him a “change.”

All he did was extend the one remarkable characteristic he possessed.

Toward the act of destruction, he no longer felt any hesitation at all.

In other words, he no longer had any kind of braking mechanism to prevent him from engaging in destruction.

He didn’t care about destroying his own body.

He didn’t think about the risk of going back to prison.

He didn’t consider the danger that someone might lose their life.

Ran Izumii simply dedicated himself to destroying.

Not in spontaneous bursts of anger, as Shizuo Heiwajima did—but with the full variety of all kinds of hatred that he harbored within himself.

He could swing that hammer of destruction at anyone and anything.

That’s all he did.

Present day, parking garage

Time passed, and at last, Ran Izumii and Masaomi Kida came face-to-face in violent conflict.

Red blood dripped to the ground between the two, accompanied by the sound of bone cracking. Izumii and Masaomi paused in the moment of connection between fist and head.

This frozen moment made one thing clear.

It was that Masaomi had thrown a straight right powerful enough to damage the bones of the neck—and that Izumii’s body did not fly off its feet from the impact.

“…”

It was Masaomi who winced from the pain.

His fist did indeed make contact with Izumii’s head. But it was not direct to the face; rather, it was above the forehead, near his crown. Izumii had been bending backward, seemingly to avoid the punch, but now his torso was leaning forward.

The bending wasn’t to avoid the punch; it was so that he could head-butt Masaomi’s fist. Izumii had swung his upper half around like a spring, striking Masaomi’s punch with the top of his head.

It broke Masaomi’s fist and sent blood dripping from his lacerated flesh. Even the injuries to his fingers looked worse than simple fractures or dislocations.

Paralysis instantly turned to heat, and heat instantly turned to pain, which shot through his spine, amplifying into agony.

But while Masaomi winced at the pain, the strength did not leave his eyes and mouth. Izumii leered at him, earning a fierce glare in response, and asked in a rasping voice, “Did you think…I would be a pushover?”

Masaomi didn’t answer. He pulled his fist away and leaped off the ground, intending to drive his knee directly into Izumii’s downturned face.

But this move was already anticipated. The hammer came flying in from a blind angle and struck the cap of Masaomi’s knee.

“…!”

The hammer blow broke the patella, and Masaomi’s kick hit nothing but air.

He tried to land on his feet, but the pain in his knee caused him to topple over. As Masaomi lay on the ground, Izumii leered over him.

“Did you think that because I have all these thugs following me, I was the kind of wuss who needed them to do all my dirty work?”

He promptly kicked Masaomi to punctuate his sentiment. The boy, prone on the ground, turned on his side and crossed his arms to absorb the blow.

But Izumii’s kick was too strong. He could hear his arm bones cracking, and more blood flew from his crushed fist.

If he’d turned the other way to show his back, it might have caused less damage. But Masaomi’s emotions were at such a high that he refused to do so—and for two different reasons.

One, because he sensed that taking his eyes off the man for any reason would be extremely perilous; and two, because he felt that he could never show his back to this man again in his life.

“Izumii…,” Masaomi groaned, leveling an extraordinary amount of loathing through his eyes. The man just laughed it off.

“Did you think I was no better than Horada at this, Masaomi Kidaaa?”

“…”

“Did you think that acting like the tragic hero and letting the adrenaline take over was gonna do the trick to get you over the hump? Nah, the tragic part is that you earned all of this yourself! Hya-ha-ha-ha!”

“Shut up…,” Masaomi grunted, getting to his feet despite the pain in his knee—if he even felt it at all.

Izumii threw his hands wide and shouted, “And now, your question!”

The other thugs around him began to stir on that cue. The circle surrounding him broke, but only to bring a new fact to light.

“If you don’t let me kill you right here and now, what’s going to happen to your beloved little shitheads, hmm?”

Masaomi was looking at his fellow Yellow Scarves, who had been on the rooftop all along. Now each one of them was subdued by at least two of Izumii’s goons and unable to do anything.

“You bastard!” he swore, eyes filling with even more hatred and rage.

But like Izumii was hoping, Masaomi did stand down at this point. One of his followers called out in a tremulous voice, “Sh-Shogun! Forget about us! Just get outta here!”

Izumii turned slowly to face the one who’d spoken up. “Ooh, very cool. So you’re a tragic hero, too, huh?” He tossed his hammer back and forth from hand to hand, strolling casually toward the captured boy. “Let me guess… You think you’re safe from bein’ killed over some stupid fight between kids?”

“Knock it off!” Masaomi shouted, trying to bolt forward, but his leg gave way, and he fell to his knees again.

“It’s because it’s a stupid fight between kids that you’re gonna die just like that. Moron.” Izumii gleefully clenched the hammer in his right hand and lifted his arm up high.

“Stop it, Izumii!” the Yellow Scarves leader yelled, part rage and part plea. “If you’re gonna kill anyone, kill me! They’re not part of this!”

Izumii paused and turned back. “Not part of this? They’re wearing your yellow bandannas, and you wanna claim they have nothing to do with you? Is that right?” He chuckled and traced his burn scar with a finger. “Well, the answer to the quiz I just gave you was ‘They’re gonna die either way’! Hya-ha-ha-ha! Why would I ever let any of the Yellow Scarves get off easy?!”

“Because…they don’t have anything to do with me and you!”

The fact that there were hostages was like cold water poured over Masaomi’s boiling emotions, allowing rationale to make its way into his head.

Now that they were having an actual dialogue, Izumii rolled his neck, popping the vertebrae, and let the corners of his mouth curl upward in delight.

“Yeah. You’re right, huh? I personally don’t got nothin’ to do with these small-time Yellow Scarves, I suppose. And the score I got to settle with you ain’t nothin’ to talk about compared with guys like Kadota and Yumasaki.”

“In that case—!”

“But the thing is…I’m in the Dollars, see? And once I come across our rival group, I got an obligation to destroy ’em…”

Dollars.

The mention of the word was even icier water over Masaomi’s mind. Unease and fear grew within him to balance out his raging fury.

Izumii spun the hammer between his fingers. “If I don’t, then I got to answer to our boss, Ryuugamine, don’t I?”

The word boss was delivered with mockery that lacked even a shred of respect.

And yet, the mention of the name threw a number of reflexive emotional switches inside Masaomi.

“What…did you…just say?” he demanded, getting unsteadily to his feet. But while his voice was thick with anger, there was also a note of pleading, of hoping that he had somehow heard something wrong.

Izumii grinned sadistically, perhaps picking up on this, and rapped the end of the hammer against his own shoulder. “Mikado Ryuugamine, our leader. What’s it to ya?”

“He’s not—!”

“What about him?”

“…!” The right answer didn’t immediately pop into Masaomi’s head.

Izumii cackled. “What’s wrong? What’re you so scared of? You knew this already, didn’t cha? It’s why you came back to play the big boy and lead the Yellow Scarves again, yeah? So you could pick this fight?” He cracked his neck again and spat. “With us Dollars?”

“You’re…Dollars?”

“Yeah, what’s your problem? Thanks to Kadota and y’all, my gang broke up, remember? So here I am, rising up the ranks from the bottom, like a dedicated worker should. I think I deserve props for that,” Izumii mocked.

But it was no joke to Masaomi. Was the cold sweat running down his cheeks from the pain in his hand and knee, or was it more of a mental thing?

“What are you going to do…to Mikado?”

“Do? Dunno. I never met the guy in person. But from what I hear, I don’t even need to do nothin’ to him. He’s hauled off and gone crazy on his own.”

“Oh, screw you… What would you know about him—?”

“What would I know? I don’t know shit, dumb-ass!”

Izumii’s kick caught Masaomi on the shoulder. He lost his balance and fell over. Izumii stomped on him and continued, “Now, your question! If you know everything about your buddy, then surely you can tell me why Mr. Ryuugamine has lost his mind! And whose fault is it that your friends over there are going to get destroyed, and whose fault is it that your precious girlfriend’s legs got broken…?”

He paused, smirking gleefully. When Masaomi only glared back without a word, he raised his hammer again.

“The answer is…obviously, every last bit of it is your fault, moron!”

And he swung it downward, no hesitation, toward Masaomi and his gritted teeth.

But…

“That’s enough of that.”

…a hand grabbed Izumii’s wrist just below where he held the hammer.

“…Wha…?” He glared through his shades at this interruption.

It was a man, standing right behind him.

“Hang on… Aren’t you the guy who was fightin’ with this kid just now?”

“Well, seems you’re already caught up on the situation.”

The men around Chikage Rokujou buzzed and murmured. He had stridden through their circle so boldly, they initially assumed that he was just another member of the group.

“Don’t step in and steal my opponent,” Rokujou stated.

Izumii scowled and asked, “Didn’t you just fall off the edge over there?” jutting his chin toward the side of the rooftop.

“Yeah, I did,” he admitted.

“So why didn’t you just die?”

Izumii sent a signal to the rest of his thugs with a glance. A number of them grinned and laid hands on Rokujou’s shoulders. “What do you think you’re doing, bud…? Ngwah?!”

“Sorry. I’m not into guys just touching me out of nowhere,” said Rokujou. He had struck the face of one of the punks behind him with a backhand, giving him a bloody nose.

“You son of a…”

A different thug tried to hit him, but Rokujou grabbed him by the face first. He had the guy firmly around the head, thumb pressed right over his eyelid. When the thug realized that the fate of his eyeball depended on the whim of his opponent, he tensed, unable to strike back.

“All right, fellas, nobody’s gonna move now, okay? Not unless you wanna see your buddy’s eyeball explode.” Rokujou maintained his grip on the guy’s face but let go of Izumii’s arm and leaned back against a nearby pillar.

“…Are you insane?” said Izumii.

Rokujou gave him a breezy glance.

“A lot saner than you, I bet.”

“…”

All of this brought Masaomi back to reality. The series of cold showers he’d just taken snapped his mind to attention and helped him realize he’d just been saved by the guy he was fighting not long ago—and made him remember just where he was.

But all of it was too late.

Then again, with this many opponents, would it have even mattered whether he’d been thinking straight? At the very least, he might have been able to run away. But in that case, what would have happened to his companions?

They were screwed from the moment the other group showed up.

Masaomi actually felt a painful sense of regret that his own lack of caution had gotten Rokujou involved in something unnecessary—a remarkable bit of empathy for the man he’d practically been trying to kill minutes before.

It’s just not going to work out. Not against this many… Not unless I was Shizuo Heiwajima.

Why was he so weak?

Was this just going to be a repeat of the past?

But Masaomi tried to stand, weathering these self-doubts and more. He wasn’t going to be satisfied until he at least punched this guy’s lights out. Hatred for Izumii bristled through Masaomi, and the emotion erased the pain of his wounds.

But before he could stand, Rokujou interjected.

“Listen, are you folks all right in the head? I realize I was just fighting with this guy minutes ago, but you do know that if you kill him, the security cameras are gonna get y’all arrested, right?”

“What? You… You don’t think that’s gonna frighten us, do ya?” Izumii drawled, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “You think we’re stupid enough not to cut off the power to the cameras? In the time it’ll take a technician to come out and check on it, it ain’t no thing to pulverize the whole lotta you.”

It seemed like mere mockery, but Masaomi and the Yellow Scarves could sense that when he said “pulverize,” Izumii wasn’t just talking about beating them up. He was not making a threat or playing a mind game, but stating a fact.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Rokujou said. “Myself aside, that guy on the floor over there and the ones you’ve caught here are gonna die.”

“And so will you,” Izumii growled.

Rokujou ignored him and sighed. “Oh, bother. Sometimes you get stand-up guys like Kadota, and sometimes you get real trash like you folks. I swear, I just can’t figure out this Dollars group.”

“…Did you say Kadota?”

“You know him? He’s several levels above you in character. But you probably already know that, right?”

“…”

The smile vanished from Izumii’s face. His teeth ground audibly. Then he looked at the man whose face Rokujou was still holding, and he said, “You can take his eye.”

“I-Izumii?!” the thug shrieked, but Izumii wasn’t listening anymore.

“But you’re going to die here for it.”

“So I get to take one eye, and it costs me my life? What kind of rip-off are you running here?” Rokujou wondered with a wry shrug.

“If you get ripped off, it’s because you were stupid,” Izumi muttered simply. He raised his hand and started giving an order to the hoodlums around him. “Forget it. Turn this guy to dust—”

He did not finish his sentence.

Rokujou released the man he was grabbing—and ducked around the back side of the pillar.

“Hey, c’mon, you don’t think you can get away from…,” Izumii started to say, but then he noticed the bit of red sticking out from behind the pillar.

The moment Rokujou started doing whatever it was he was doing behind the pillar, a number of the thugs who could see it from that angle started to look panicked.

“Stop him!” he yelled, but it was too late.

Rokujou pressed the object that was attached to the other side of the pillar: an emergency fire alarm.

The alarm began blaring and rattling. People walking around on the street near the parking garage stopped and stared.

Even the office workers from adjacent buildings still at their jobs peered out to see what the matter was. All of a sudden, the completely ordinary parking garage that melted into the background was now a focal point of the city.

“You’ve gotta be an idiot to destroy only the cameras,” Rokujou muttered, though his words were drowned out by the alarm and never reached his opponent’s ears.

But Izumii could tell he was being insulted, and his eyes flashed with fury as they focused on Rokujou. “You… You’re mocking me, aren’t you…?”

He looked so furious that he might have launched himself at once, but he held back, sensing that the destruction he hoped to wreak could no longer be achieved. Instead, he gritted his teeth and sent a hand signal to his followers.

But a number of the thugs had already fled the garage due to the fire alarm, and in the confusion, the Yellow Scarves held captive had the opportunity to gain their freedom. They rushed over to Masaomi at once and began pulling him away from Izumii.

“You…little…fuckers…”

Knowing Izumii’s personality, this was exactly the moment he would chase down Masaomi to deliver a decisive blow—but for some reason, he was just standing there, sweating profusely, his face twitching.

It was the sound of the alarm, dredging up the trauma of his immolation at Yumasaki’s hands.

“C’mon, Izumii, let’s go! The cops are gonna show up!” one of his companions yelled into his ear.

“Tsk… Lucky bastard.” Spitting the words out, he shoved down the unsettling fear in his heart and headed to the exit with his team.

He did turn back one last time to look at Rokujou with loathing and say, “I’m gonna remember you…”

But when he actually faced that direction, two shadows crossed his vision.

They were the soles of Rokujou’s shoes.

Both his right foot and his left lined up for a beauty of a dropkick.

Before Izumii could register what was happening, they struck him square in the chest—and he rocketed and tumbled backward a good thirty feet, his sternum cracking under the sheer force of the blow.

A number of the hoodlums lifted up the unconscious Izumii.

“At least kill him, dammit!”

About ten of the feistier thugs turned to Rokujou, holding metal pipes and knives and such.

“Listen… I’d love to spend time with you, but I’m not waitin’ for the police.” Rokujou turned on his heel and rushed over to the Yellow Scarves who were dragging Masaomi away. “You guys should clear out, too. Don’t get caught, okay?”

“Huh? H-hey, wait…,” they murmured, but Rokujou just grabbed Masaomi and lifted him up.

“…Ah?” Masaomi was conscious enough to be taken by surprise, even through the incredible pain.

“Easier to get away if I’m the one carrying you than those guys, eh? We can continue our fight some other time.”

Thanks to the alarm making it harder to hear, the other Yellow Scarves couldn’t tell what was going on, and they tried to stop Rokujou from rushing away with Masaomi over his shoulder.

“Wh-what are you saying…? Ah! Hey!”

Rokujou ignored them and, using a car parked next to the fence around the rooftop as a stepping stone, leaped right over the wall.

“Hey, that can’t be—! Are you serious—? What the hell?!” the boys shouted all at once, to the sound of Masaomi’s yelp.

But Rokujou just jumped right off the edge without a second’s hesitation.

“Whoaaaaaa?!”

It was so sudden, so startling, that Masaomi actually forgot his pain for a moment.

The impact was far softer than he’d expected, and he realized that some of the energy of their fall was being directed sideways. Through bouncing, blurry vision, he could see a streetlight swaying.

Apparently, Rokujou had used the streetlight as a landing pad. And in the next moment, there was a dull thwump, and Masaomi felt their momentum changing directions again.

“…Huh?”

First he confirmed that he was still alive, and then the agony of his fist and knee injuries flooded back. He looked around, trying to withstand the pain, and saw that the scenery around him was moving. Then his body landed on a rough, woven surface.

“Yeow…”

“Sorry about that. Just stay down for a bit. If the cops find us, they’ll put a stop to it all.”

He recognized that his body was resting on the top of a covered truck. Overhead, the thugs were staring dumbfoundedly down at them from the roof level of the parking garage. Some of them were even beating on the chain-link fence in frustration. Given that none of the faces he could see belonged to the Yellow Scarves, Masaomi surmised that they must have run off as soon as they saw he was safely on the ground.

Masaomi looked at the sky, praying that they got away without trouble, and said, “Am… Am I alive?”

“Better thank me. If the cops or Dollars catch you, you’re not gettin’ away on that leg,” Rokujou said with a grin. The scenery sped by behind him as the truck picked up velocity.

Masaomi glanced back at the garage vanishing into the distance and asked:

“So what happens now?”

Several hours later, parking garage

“Buncha kids gettin’ up to no good again,” muttered one of the police officers patrolling the roof of the parking garage. They’d come here because an incident had happened earlier in the day.

The entire area was on heightened alert, due to an attack on a police vehicle about an hour ago. There hadn’t been any trouble at this structure recently, but there was a report about a fire alarm going off, and many young ruffians were witnessed around it. The power line to the security cameras had also been cut.

Given the timing of the other incident, the orders went out to strengthen local patrols to check out the garage, even if it was unlikely that the events were connected.

“You know about the period when the street gangs used to use this place as a hideout, Mr. Kuzuhara?” asked a younger officer.

Ginichirou Kuzuhara, a man entering middle age, sighed and said, “I do. You’re new on this beat, so you don’t know, but they used to fight all the time at this garage. It stopped cold about two years back…but ever since that incident with the street slasher, there’s just been a bad vibe around.”

“Doesn’t help when you’ve got that freaky Headless Rider putting on a public performance,” said the younger cop. He hadn’t seen the rider much, and he seemed to think it was just some kind of outlaw biker who liked to do circus tricks.

Ginichirou, however, had been around for years, and he remembered when the Headless Rider had first come to this city. He scowled and said, “Mmm…well, listen. There’s stuff in this world that doesn’t make logical sense. If that rider were a simple street performer, Kinnosuke would have had ’em lassoed up long ago.” The name he’d dropped was that of his own blood relation, a traffic officer who rode a motorcycle of his own.

The rookie laughed. “Oh, geez, are you trying to tell me the Headless Rider really is some kind of monster? It’s just a magic trick. Sleight of hand.”

“…Turning your motorcycle into a horse?”

“Yeah. Don’t you keep up with magicians, Mr. Kuzuhara? Over in America, they can make huge things disappear, like the Statue of Liberty and high-rise buildings and stuff! Even in Japan, we’ve got guys who can make frogs appear in their empty hands!”

“…Uh-huh.” Ginichirou looked at his partner with something akin to pity. “Well, I guess that’s better than getting all freaked out about it…”

“What was that, sir?”

“Just watch yourself for scams, kid.”

“Oh, geez, Mr. Kuzuhara, you’re the one who’s convinced of occult answers for everything!” returned his partner at a chatter.

The full tour of the structure turned up nothing out of order. They finished examining the camera vandalization and, finding no reason to stick around, headed quickly for the next spot on their patrol.

But then an odd sound from the northwest caught their attention.

“…What was that?”

The younger officer returned to the roof level to look in the direction of the sound. What he witnessed there was quite eerie.

Heading from rooftop to rooftop, and sometimes lodging itself into the sides of buildings, was a figure carrying something large, swinging and leaping about like an American comic book hero with a spider motif.

Chasing after this figure was a black cloud—or a thing in cloud form.

It was hard to tell against the night sky, but something black was there, absorbing all the light that hit it.

Occasionally, some black feelers would extend from the thing, and the figure would use some narrow silver object to swipe and cut at them to keep them away. The strange sound they heard was revealed to be the sound of the silver and black objects making contact.

Sometimes the black shadow would stop sending its tendrils forward, instead forming huge fangs that bit and lunged at the human figure. But the figure would leap with speed and agility to evade attack. It reminded the young officer of an action game he had played on his last day off.

“…Huh? No, wait, wait, wait.”

He came to his senses, pressed himself harder against the fence, and stared. But by that point, the shapes were gone, having passed behind buildings between him and them.

“What’s up? What was that sound?” said Ginichirou, walking up from behind.

The young officer rubbed his eyes near the bridge of his nose and said, as much to himself as to his partner, “It was…a street magician.”

“A street magician…? You need a break. You’re obsessed.”

“No, I am not possessed! Don’t try to scare me, sir!”

“…?”

Ginichirou was becoming concerned for the rookie’s mental health, but in the meantime, the actual source of the sound, the chase between Kasane Kujiragi and the black mass, continued.

“…It’s time,” Kujiragi muttered and made a sharp change of direction with Shinra over her shoulder. For just a moment as she leaped between buildings, she looked backward and drew a number of pen-like objects from her waist.

She gathered up the cylindrical objects and nimbly hurled them at the mass of shadow. It continued rushing for her, completely ignoring the projectiles. But Kujiragi looked forward again and resumed her jumping.

The next moment, the special pen-shaped flashbangs burst all at once, dazzling a small part of Ikebukuro briefly amid the darkness of night.

For a moment—just a moment—the flash caused the shadow creature to falter.

An ordinary human being would have been blinded and immobilized, but Celty did not have eyes to begin with, and her sense of vision recovered from flashes of light much faster—although this was only for her rational, humanoid form, not whatever she had become now.

But for that one brief moment, there was the possibility that she had lost her sight.

Celty knew this because Kujiragi then vanished from the rooftop, and her mass of shadow lost sense of where to go next for several seconds.

But seconds were merely seconds. It launched back into motion, perhaps sensing the alien power of Saika’s body, and hurtled itself toward the gap between two particular buildings.

There, it found Kujiragi, who had deftly descended the wall of the building. She was in an alley down below, far from the shopping district, and there were no people around.

But with its special type of vision, the shadow mass saw Kujiragi lowering Shinra from her shoulder to the arms of someone else.

There was a car parked on the street at the entrance to the alley, and next to it, a human being who was helping Kujiragi load Shinra into it.

The instant it saw this, the shadow creature stopped again.

Kujiragi rushed farther down the alley. The car began to drive, pulling away in the other direction.

Until this point, there had been only one target. But now there were two going opposite ways.

One was the woman named Kujiragi, who’d hurt and stolen the shadow’s beloved.

The other was that beloved, Shinra Kishitani—now captive to Saika’s curse.

Hatred or love?

It was a simple set of options.

As a monster of sheer instinct and no reason, Celty finally displayed hesitation.

But it was not the return of sanity. If that were true, she would have decided, “First thing is to confirm that Shinra is safe, and then I can hunt down the woman.”

No, in this situation, that emotional circuit breaker was still tripped. She was virtually unconscious of anything she was doing.

Yet, thirst does not require conscious will to desire water.

A moth does not require conscious will to fly toward the fire.

Whatever existed in the boundary between instinct and reason for her was being tested in this moment.

And then Celty, in her inhuman, freakish form, made her choice.

The shadowy mass plunged and writhed toward the vehicle carrying Shinra. Whether this was merely a coin flip or a conscious decision that she would have made every single time, it was impossible to know.

But Kujiragi decided that it was the latter. She watched the creature go, narrowing her eyes slightly, and muttered, “So even in this situation, you choose something else…over destruction and hatred.”

She recalled a past crime she had committed: upon Ruri Hijiribe, the girl who shared her blood but was treated like a human, and who had nearly gained human happiness because of it.

Kujiragi recalled what she had done to her, and the flow of emotions that had transpired. “I’m afraid I must admit,” she said, a tiny flash of danger crossing her lifeless robotic features, “that I was jealous of you.”

Then ten finger blades, five from each hand, extended over the alley like steel wires. They bit into the walls of buildings on either side, bouncing off and stretching farther. The swarm of Saikas writhed like living creatures into abstract patterns.

The Saikas stretched and crossed like fine netting, blocking the path of Celty’s monstrous form. But she charged straight ahead, seemingly unconcerned—until solid shadow and Saika’s blades smashed together, sending sparks and shadow alike about the area.

The two inhuman things ground and scraped against each other. While the alley was desolately empty, the sound was tremendous, and those who happened to be close enough to hear it assumed it was probably the death cry of a bird or something—such was the ability of this particular sound to set the human mind on edge.

Monstrous Celty attempted to force her way through the net of metal, but only because she was singularly direct in her pursuit of the car with Shinra inside.

Narrowing the shadow to pass through the smaller spaces, attacking Kujiragi directly, or simply pulling back and making her way around her—all of these were simple ideas, the kind a monkey or a dog would quickly attempt. Something even the smallest amount of rational thinking would produce, and yet she did not.

She was so absent of any critical thought at the moment that her only action was to pursue one person: Shinra Kishitani, the man who had given her a place in the human world.

The vehicle rushed away from Kujiragi. On the floor beneath the back seat was a man dressed in pajamas that resembled a lab coat.

His eyes were red and bloodshot, and his vision was woozy. Shinra Kishitani was a pitiable victim, a “child” implanted with the curse of Saika’s love.

Through Saika, Kujiragi had ordered him to stay put and behave for a while. Knowing that she needed to abduct him, she probably figured that if he put up a fight, it would cause trouble.

So as ordered, Shinra did not struggle at all throughout his captivity and was still under her control, awaiting further orders.

And yet—when the rattling, scraping bird death cry from the distant alley reached the car, his lips curved into a tiny smile. With bloodshot eyes and a smile on his face, he murmured to himself:

“Ha-ha…a fool…hardy…charge…indeed…”

Driver’s seat

Only one person heard Shinra mutter.

It was the person who’d been hired to take him from Kujiragi and drive him to a specified location.

“…”

She considered the potential meaning of his words, but Vorona, the mercenary behind the wheel, decided he was simply delirious from fever, and she did not spend any more time thinking about it.

What am I being forced to ferry right now?

She was currently working for Kujiragi, who had been Jinnai Yodogiri’s secretary. It wasn’t clear why Kujiragi, rather than Yodogiri, had come to hire Vorona, but the jobs themselves were taking her into more dangerous territory than Yodogiri’s had.

One was stealing a silver case from a police vehicle—an act of war against the national power of Japan. The second was kidnapping someone and running from a monster.

She had a decent idea of what the group of shadows trying to rush after her vehicle from the alley actually was. If Slon were present, he would warn her that it was dangerous to make an enemy of monsters. But her partner was no longer here to apply the brakes.

His eyes looked very bloodshot to me. Was he infected by some kind of virus, perhaps? she wondered briefly, alarmed, but given that her client had carried the man over her shoulder, Vorona banished the possibility from her mind.

If Slon were here, he might say something like “Wait, I’m suspicious. What if the client already took a vaccine for it? Now I can’t sleep at night.”

But there was no one with Vorona now.

No one at her side.

It filled Vorona with an odd feeling of loneliness. She had done a number of jobs by herself already. But because they’d been so cut-and-dried, she hadn’t had time to view them as particularly solitary.

But the reason she was feeling especially lonely now was the thought of another person who ought to be with her. A person who was not Slon.

The first temporary job she’d taken in Japan to make ends meet was at a debt-collection business. It was the kind of place that operated just on the dark side of the gray zone, but that didn’t matter to Vorona, who was used to utterly criminal work.

And what she found there was an interpersonal relationship different from what she had with Slon.

Shizuo Heiwajima was a man she had once tried to kill, a man she had failed to destroy, and a man who had obliterated Vorona’s own value system.

As she had spent time with their boss, Tom, as well as the other people at the company, Vorona had come to form a strong connection to a world she had never known before—a world she’d been introduced to for the very first time through Shizuo.

Vorona had never loved a human being before. She probably didn’t even love herself.

She knew of love only as a piece of discrete knowledge. She couldn’t decide whether the thing called love was something her life needed or not.

Beyond understanding the concept, she had never actually experienced the emotion of love.

That was no different now. But there was something she had learned in place of love.

The sufficiency and satisfaction of living itself, or in other words, peace.

Until this point, any day in which nothing wild happened was a day she might as well not have lived at all. She wanted to offer up her life as a prize, to wager it against the existence of the mighty. That moment of destroying a powerful opponent was the moment she felt she was truly living.

But the thirst, the drive that caused her heart and mind to creak, was completely gone. She did not feel it, and in fact, she hadn’t even noticed it was gone until she was reunited with Slon, whom she’d thought dead, and he pronounced that she had grown “tepid.”

That wasn’t the biggest shock, however. It was that despite denying it at that time, deep in her heart, she realized she had thought, That might not be so bad, actually.

Vorona had tried to cut off that thought at the root, but Izaya Orihara sneaked past her mental defenses and poured poison into her mind.

The poison slowly but surely spread, eating away at her and replaying memory after memory of humiliation. When this coincided with Shizuo’s arrest, she began to regain her old self bit by bit, and now she was doing jobs for Kujiragi.

When she attacked the police vehicle, she might not have killed the person driving it, but she certainly did enough to regain that sense of elation in pursuing only strength.

And then something happened right after that to completely dash her high.

“Hey, is that…Vorona?”

Shizuo Heiwajima just so happened to be there. When he recognized her, Vorona felt that all time in the world had briefly frozen.

She didn’t know why she’d felt that way. But she remembered that she’d experienced a sudden flood of despair, fear, and unease.

She’d said nothing to Shizuo, trying to stifle that feeling, and left the scene without a word.

There was nothing else she could do.

And in the time from then to now, through a sensation of unfathomable loss, she finally understood what her own emotions were.

Like Slon had said, she’d been affected by this country, colored by it. She’d spent a very different kind of time with Shizuo Heiwajima, the man she’d sworn to destroy. And in a period of peace and safety, without risking her life, she found a different kind of happiness from the kind she received when attempting to kill the mighty.

It makes sense to me. I’m afraid. Afraid of losing what I have now.

But as she performed Kujiragi’s jobs, she realized that risking her life to fight powerful foes and putting herself in danger gave her a particular kind of joy of its own.

By reconfirming what she knew about herself, Vorona came to a certain opinion: She did not have the right to live in a peaceful country like this, surrounded by the bliss and warmth it offered her.

I think…maybe the period when I was working with Father might have been the best time of my life.

She was flooded with alternating hatred and nostalgia when she thought about her father, an officer in an arms-trading company.

She couldn’t just toss everything out. She couldn’t make it that simple.

What about her was actually strong?

Did she really have the right to fight against powerful opponents at all?

At this late stage, Vorona began to question her own self. But there was no stopping her present course.

Now that Shizuo Heiwajima knew what she was, the peaceful life she might have enjoyed was gone forever.

Meanwhile, Vorona, too, could hear the eerie creaking of collisions between inhuman creatures. In the rearview mirror, she could see a writhing shadow in the street, but it was lost in the night as she pulled away from it.

Once around the corner, where she could no longer see the shadow, Vorona thought to herself, Are monsters now prowling the streets regularly? What is becoming of the world? I bet President Lingerin would enjoy this situation, however.

It seemed as though the city was plunging into chaos, but something about it was familiar, nostalgic. It reminded her of the past.

But even she knew that this was just her own mind trying to escape its present problem.

And she noted, with some loneliness, that there was no Shizuo Heiwajima in those old memories of hers.

At that moment, Ikebukuro

Shizuo Heiwajima was irritated.

“Hey, yo! Old man, I know you! You that Shizuo Heiwajima? The real deal?”

“That bartender look sticks out. You think that looks good on you, huh? You pullin’ that off?”

It was a much less crowded area, a good distance away from the main shopping district. Shizuo was out of police custody now and surrounded by a group of young men who were not the brightest of the bunch.

“You’re famous, yeah? I bet you make bank, bro! You could give us some allowance, I bet.”

“Why don’t you say somethin’, old man?!”

There were three accosting him at the moment, but including the ones grinning at him from a distance, the total size of the group was closer to ten.

He didn’t recognize any of them from around town. Given that they were all on bikes, they could even be middle school students. Most likely they were using the summer vacation time to come out and visit from a distant neighboring city, like Saitama.

“…Get lost,” he muttered, clicking his tongue with ever greater irritation.

This isn’t it. Neither that fleabrain nor the red-eyed guys would send punks like this after me.

His irritation was not at this lazy attempt to intimidate him, but at the fact that it wasn’t what he’d expected to see.

It wasn’t clear why Vorona would be doing this. But he could assume she was tangled up in something involving either a pawn of the detestable Izaya Orihara or someone related to that cursed sword.

Even if Vorona’s actions were totally unrelated, now that he was out of jail, he could expect that at least one of the two sides would try to mess with him. He was trying to make bait out of himself, hoping to get a glimpse at how the enemy would react.

But the first group to bite were these small-time jokers. He wanted to brush them off, figuring that causing a scene in these circumstances would only prove to be a pain in the ass.

“Get lost? What? What do you mean, ‘Get lost’? We’re a product of bad education standards, so you gotta teach us!”

“You’re the toughest guy in Ikebukuro, right, mister?”

But it seemed as though these street punks thought that the stories about Shizuo Heiwajima were more tall tale than truth, and they were simply having fun with whatever guy they found who fit the part.

“Hang on, old-timer—are you actually scared? You’re lookin’ pretty pale!” They took the fact that he wasn’t attacking them as a sign that he was actually intimidated, and they stuck their faces even closer to taunt him and push him around.

If any locals who were familiar with Shizuo were present, this would be about the time they started banding together to perform a life-saving rescue mission. Everyone knew that Shizuo was the type of person who replied to a mean look with a statement like “Did you know you can kill a man with a glance? So starin’ a guy down like that means you know your imminent death is a possible outcome, yeah?” before he proceeded to the destruction phase.

Some people said he had mellowed out a bit and was often seen escorting a foreign woman around, but everyone in the neighborhood knew full well that Shizuo’s nature was not the kind of thing that changed overnight.

Surprisingly, however, his patience held up. Under normal circumstances, they would already be airborne at this point.

The cops might still be keepin’ an eye on me. If I beat the crap outta these kids and get caught, what was the point of it all?

Thanks to the streak of patience he’d been on since last night, the length of fuse between the spark and the explosive at this moment was very, very long by Shizuo’s usual standard.

The only problem was that given the possibility that Izaya Orihara was behind all of this, the volume of explosives was very, very great, indeed.

Shizuo was going to simply drive off the delinquents, but they kept inching toward the breaking point, closer and closer to the actual explosives rather than the end of the fuse.

“Why do you wear a bartender vest anyway? Huh?” one of the boys asked and lightly kicked at his outfit.

There was a sound like something cracking, but none of the boys seemed to notice. The next moment, one of the boys gathered up his boldness and shouted, “Why don’t you say something, you silent bastaaaaaaaaa…aaa…a…a…a………” However, his words trailed off as he flew into the sky.

Shizuo had grabbed the spokes of his bike and hurled the entire thing, rider and all, directly upward.

“…Huh?”

“Uh…”

It appeared to the other youths around Shizuo that their friend had simply vanished. Meanwhile, the ones who were watching from a distance craned their necks back to follow the action—their companion and his bicycle, tossed to a height of about five stories in the air by the man in the bartender clothes.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” the boy wailed. Momentum carried him away from his bike, and he flailed his limbs as he fell. But right before he would have hit the ground, Shizuo caught the boy’s body with an outstretched arm. “Gblurf!”

The catch absorbed some of the shock, but it wasn’t enough to prevent significant damage to the young man, who gurgled like a drunk passed out on the sidewalk while passersby stepped on him. His bicycle crashed to the ground nearby, its frame warping in several places.

“…So? What was that?” Shizuo asked the young toughs, a blue vein bulging on his forehead.

Perhaps the only thing that held Shizuo back from a total eruption was the youthfulness of the ruffians’ appearance. But one wrong word at this point, and even a little grade-schooler with his backpack would lose his life.

The young men’s instincts told them as much, and they backed away with pale faces.

“Wh-whoa, we’re sorry, okay…?”

“O-oh my God, dude, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry, sir, sorry! We’re just stupid kids!”

“For-forgive…hyaaa. Don’t kill meeee!” they shrieked and scattered to the wind.

The boy Shizuo tossed into the air wobbled away, leaving his bicycle behind.

“Hey, your bike…,” Shizuo called after him, but the boy froze in place briefly before running off and screaming, “You can have it! Just let me goooo!”

Within moments, all of them were gone. In the aftermath, Shizuo closed his eyes and tried some deep breathing. Close to a minute later, when the veins on his forehead had subsided, he glanced at the mangled bicycle and sighed.

“I can ‘have it’…? What the hell would I do with a busted-up bike?”

In the end, Shizuo wandered around the alley with the bike over his shoulder. He couldn’t just leave it in the middle of the road, and since he was someone who found abandoned bicycles irritating, his better conscience refused to allow him to leave it on the side.

He walked along, hoping to ditch it at a bike rack somewhere, but as he was far from the business area, such things were not in quick range. Eventually, he started weighing more extreme options, such as crumpling it into a ball and turning it into junk, when an odd noise became audible somewhere behind him.

“KRRRRRrrrrrrrrr……”

The “voice,” which sounded like a blend of an engine revving and a horse whinnying, was familiar to Shizuo.

“…Celty?” he wondered, turning around.

Standing before him was a black horse. But there was something about this horse that was atypical, to say the least.

The curve of its long neck simply stopped without a skull on top, and the plane where it was cut was shrouded in dark shadow.

It was a headless horse.

“Huh? Ohhh…”

Where an ordinary person would run and scream, Shizuo showed no fear. If anything, he was searching for the right thing to say to the headless horse. “So, um, what’s up? You’re what I’m thinking of, yeah? Celty’s motorcycle…kinda…”

At that, the Coiste Bodhar—nicknamed Shooter—swished its tail happily.

“What happened to Celty?” Shizuo asked with suspicion. Shooter hung its head for a moment, then arched its back and lifted its front legs.

“…You want me to get on?” Shooter swished its tail again. But after a moment, Shizuo replied, “I never rode a horse before.”

Shooter froze. In just moments, shadow wreathed its entire length as it rebuilt its body into a more compact form.

Now it was not a horse standing before Shizuo but an all-black motorcycle, the familiar form of the vehicle that Celty typically rode around. Shooter gave him a cocky rev of the engine, but—

“…Sorry, I don’t have a motorcycle license, either.”

Shooter’s engine went dead, and a cold breeze blew between the two. The creature returned to horse form, dejected enough to make Shizuo imagine it was hanging its head. But then it noticed the bicycle Shizuo cradled under his arm, and it leaned closer.

“Hmm? Oh, this? I got this from some stupid kids a moment ago…”

Suddenly, shadow tendrils stretched out from Shooter’s body to grab and cling to the broken bicycle frame.

“Ohhh?” Shizuo let go of the bike, and Shooter pulled it closer to itself, integrating the structure into its shadow in a strikingly predatory fashion. Suddenly, the creature’s body shrank, transforming into a shape even smaller and slimmer than the motorcycle.

It was a bit blockier than your average bicycle, but it seemed perfectly rideable to Shizuo.

“Whoa… That’s pretty impressive, man,” he said.

Shooter happily chimed the bicycle bell. Then the all-black device rolled over on its own and leaned against Shizuo. He glanced at it and grinned.

“Yeah, this should work. Third time’s the charm.”

* * *

Shizuo straddled Shooter and grabbed the handlebars—and with impossible acceleration for a bicycle, the mount bolted forward.

“This is just like a motorcycle or something,” muttered Shizuo, who didn’t need to turn the handlebars, as Shooter was turning on its own, so he held them only to keep his body propped up straight.

It could turn without losing any speed whatsoever, so if not for Shizuo’s remarkable physical capabilities, he would have been thrown off already. Naturally, he couldn’t understand Shooter’s vocal messages. But through the fierce vibration of the mount, he could sense its panic, and given the circumstances, this led him to one conclusion.

“…So something happened to Celty?”

The bicycle’s bell rang once, a convenient affirmative signal. Shizuo narrowed his eyes, feeling the summer night breeze, and squeezed the handlebars harder.

“All right. Let’s hurry,” he said.

Something’s wrong. It’s not just coincidental timing. Not when everything’s piling up like this. I bet you’re in on this, too, huh?

He could sense the shadow of his archnemesis lurking behind everything that was happening around him.

Apartment building, Ikebukuro, at that moment

Izaya Orihara was in as good a mood as he ever had been.

“What’s up with the frolicking?” said Mikage Sharaku.

He turned to her, beaming. “Is that what it looks like to you? Even now, I consider myself to be staying very calm.”

“Calm, huh?”

Izaya had been trotting around rhythmically and humming, occasionally using shogi and chess pieces to start odd little territorial games. Most recently, he’d used his tarot deck to build a house of cards. After an hour-plus of this behavior, Mikage was thoroughly sick of him.

“You’re like a child on the day before a field trip. It irritates me.”

“What? You’re not going to say it puts a parental smile on your face?”

“If you’re supposed to be a guy who inspires smiles, then every other person on the planet might as well be Charlie Chaplin,” she shot back lazily. It merely earned her a shrug from Izaya.

“My goodness,” he said, “if normal people are on the level of Chaplin, then what would that make the man himself? Is there a term for someone who is even more lovable than the great king of cinematic comedy?”

Mikage clicked her tongue in irritation. From the corner of the room, Kine said, “When you tease other people for a slip of the tongue, that’s when you’re in a frolicking mood.”

“Oh, please, Mr. Kine. If you’re going to criticize me for that, it makes it that much more difficult for me to tease others in the future.”

“You know that’s not true…,” Mikage grumbled and observed him in a fresh light.

It was clear that his mood was more elated than usual all day. Because Kasane Kujiragi never showed up in her hideout, they withdrew and returned to an apartment Izaya was renting. Slon, whom they suspected of being under Kujiragi’s control, was still trussed up and locked in the same room as Adabashi.

But that alone did not seem to be enough material to inspire this level of frolicking. So Mikage thought she’d throw out some facts, just to see if she could hit on the real reason.

“Fewer people in here than there used to be.”

Only Mikage, Izaya, Kine, and a few members of Dragon Zombie were present. That was indeed a significant drop in attendance from the original size of the group a few days ago.

Manami Mamiya had stolen Celty’s head, tossed it out into public view, and vanished.

Haruna Niekawa, who was supposed to be guarding it, had not returned to base.

Slon was tied up.

Ran Izumii had suffered some kind of injury during the day and claimed he needed to recover for a while.

It was one thing to lose some members, but the lack of Haruna Niekawa’s Saika power at their disposal was a big loss. And the brainwashing they’d done on the woman named Earthworm to make her accuse Shizuo Heiwajima of assault had worn off, and so she had retracted her claim.

Beyond all of that, the loss of Saika and its ability to multiply their power infinitely had to be a bad situation for Izaya—yet after receiving the news from Mikage and Kine, he remained in a good mood.

“What about this is so much fun for you?” Mikage asked. She was just going to ignore him, but he finally wore her down enough that she had to ask.

“What’s so fun? Well, there are several answers…but the biggest thing is that I’m just delighted that a person I know very well vastly exceeded what I expected of them!”

“?”

“I told you about Mikado Ryuugamine, right? The boss of the Dollars.”

“…Oh yeah. That name pops up a lot.”

He was clearly a favorite subject of observation for Izaya, because whenever he talked about the other boy, Izaya was generally in a good mood.

“You said that everyone aside from you just sees him as a normal high school kid,” Mikage said, trying to get past this to the next topic, but Izaya was obviously going to bite.

“Yes, but he only looks like a normal boy. In fact, he turned out to be far more dangerous than I expected. Since I figured that out, I’ve been thinking about how to bring that danger to the surface, but it turned out to be a total waste of time!”

“A waste of time?”

“Yes, exactly! Because I didn’t need to do anything to make Mikado break down in a fashion far more fascinating than anything I could have imagined! Doesn’t that just make you want to giggle and frolic? Doesn’t it?”

Mikage’s brow furrowed. His answer was more nauseating than anything she needed to hear right now.

“…You know, I’m not really sure how to say this, but…I feel like it would kind of be improving the world as a whole if I just killed you right now.”

“Oh, I won’t argue with you there. The thing is, I love people, but I don’t love the world and the society we people live in. So I’m not really in favor of dying for the sake of the world, see,” he said, without a trace of irony.

Kine pushed the conversation with a prompt: “So what is it you intend to do with this teenage boy?”

“Do? That’s a cruel thing to say, Mr. Kine. It’s like you’re insinuating that I’m going to ruin his life somehow.”

“…”

Kine merely stared at Izaya with ice in his gaze.

“…Fine, fine. I will give you a serious answer. I’m going…to let Mikado do as he will. For the first time, I think I’m going to make for a proper observer.”

“Observer?”

“Yes. My intent was to just stir up some trouble around the neighborhood,” Izaya admitted, utterly without shame, “starting with little stuff between delinquents, then turf warfare between street gangs. Then I was going to get the yakuza and police involved…to find out how far I needed to push things to cause an undeniable reaction in the head.”

“The creepy severed head?”

“Yes. It wasn’t all completely baseless, as a matter of fact. But I don’t suppose you’d have any interest in connections between Norse mythology and Celtic fairies, or the evidence of such, would you?”

Mikage stared up at the ceiling for a bit, then back down at Izaya. “What’s…Celtic?”

“Exactly. That’s the best you can do, so thank you for proving my point. It would be a waste of time.”

“You want me to kill you?”

“Not particularly. Do you find it enjoyable to ask questions with really obvious answers?” Izaya mocked, ignoring the homicidal look on Mikage’s face. He continued, “So if it’s not an issue of scale, what exactly would cause the head to react? A battle to the death, with life and pride on the line? The souls of martyrs perishing in a holy war? Fighting against something nonhuman? Perhaps it could be something as innocent as babies fighting over a pacifier that sets her off.”

He picked up a chess piece, turning it over in his fingers. “I considered all this infighting in the Dollars and friction with the Yellow Scarves to be part of that experiment. I tried giving anxious young men a life without security or peace of mind and threw all sorts of things into the pot: squabbles and hatreds of every stripe, warfare that transcends pure hatred, and everything in between. A real mystery stew.”

He stopped twirling the chess piece over his digits and palm and suddenly threw it at the precariously balanced house of tarot cards.

“But Mikado Ryuugamine, just another one of those pieces, far eclipsed my imagination of what he could be.”

The tower of paper instantly collapsed, scattering its cards all over the table.

“He’s not physically strong. Compared with other boys his age, he’s as frail as paper.”

Izaya scooped up one of the cards that made up the tower with one hand, then tossed the little chess piece into the air with the other.

“The thing is—”

The next moment, the card he still held made a quick yet light snapping sound above the table.

“—he’s kind of scary right now.”

When the chess piece landed on the table again, it was split in two. Izaya waved and flapped the flimsy card in his hand.

At last, Kine spoke up again. “Do not destroy things without good reason.”

“Really? That’s what you’re going with?”

“…Treat your pieces with respect,” Kine said, his words heavy.

Izaya grimaced. “Oh, geez. I care quite a lot about both you and Mikage, I’ll have you know.”

“You are the kind of man who destroys everything without hesitation, even things you care about. Including that Ryuugamine boy.”

“No, he’s not my chess piece anymore. If anything, I’m more likely to be his, and I don’t think I’d mind. He’s so dangerous right now, I can’t keep myself from laughing at the sight of him. And the Dollars organization is the powder magazine for Ikebukuro itself.”

“Gee, I wonder whose fault that is,” Mikage jeered.

Izaya spread his hands and shook his head. “It’s no one’s fault. A confluence of factors combined and produced that result.”

“…So you’re saying there’s no puppet master pulling strings?” Mikage asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Izaya reiterated. “No one’s at fault. If I had to list a cause, I’d say a number of people around him turned out to be bad for him. Including himself.”

This was Izaya’s honest opinion. You might say the thing that broke Mikado Ryuugamine was his own twisted love for “the Dollars of the past,” and therefore that everyone in his vicinity was responsible for causing this.

Masaomi Kida, who was afraid to be an open, honest friend to him.

Anri Sonohara, who tried to remain a third party.

Shizuo Heiwajima, who haplessly gave a naive boy a fascination with raw power.

The Headless Rider, who made the boundary between reality and fantasy too vague.

Aoba Kuronuma, who approached the Dollars leader to use and manipulate him.

Chikage Rokujou, who did not inflict punishment on him for creating the Dollars and thus robbed him of the chance to atone.

And Izaya Orihara, who gave him that little push on the back at the start.

Each one on their own might not have made Mikado fall to the level of sin. But the accumulation of all that weight ate away at him and pushed him down to his current depth.

Izaya considered, reflected on, and sympathized with Mikado’s plight—and smiled with unbridled glee.

“But I can forgive him. I will forgive everything! They say God’s love is boundless, but so is human love! No matter who else refuses to forgive Mikado for what he’s done, I still will! I forgive every other person as well! They made me the audience of such a fun stage show, it’s the least I can do in return!”

The way he was carrying on by himself creeped Mikage out. She sighed heavily. “Uh, all I was doing was sarcastically pointing out that you’re the puppet master.”

“Oh. You’re not very good at sarcasm, Mikage.”

“Yeah, I’m better at pounding a man’s face in,” she growled, starting to get up.

“Whoa, stop, stop.” Izaya held out a hand to stay her. “There are some other folks you can use that aggression on for better purposes.”

“Other folks?”

“The way we originally planned. I think it’s time to kick out the nonhuman folks. This whole show is meant to make Mikado the star. It’s a human drama, and the nonhumans shouldn’t be messing with it.”

“Does that include Haruna?”

“Oh, no. She’s human. She’s an incredible human, in fact; she beat the curse of the blade,” Izaya declared. Mikage and Kine noticed that although his smile remained, Izaya’s eyes were no longer full of mirth.

“Anri Sonohara, Kasane Kujiragi, and the Headless Rider will all need to stay quiet for a bit.”

He picked up the Star, Moon, and Death cards from the table and tossed them into an ashtray that was merely a piece of interior decor and contained no butts at all.

“The problem is Shizu, I suppose. I know Mimizu withdrew her charges…but I just can’t buy that he was released because he managed to get through police questioning without losing his mind.”

Lastly, Izaya removed the Strength card and used a lighter from his pocket to set it on fire.

“You know how Shizu is. He’s probably coming to destroy me now, and he’ll destroy anything he needs to along the way. Including the entire stage I’ve set up just for Mikado.”

Kine and Mikage knew the man he called “Shizu” quite well. Very few people who’d been living here for years were unaware of him.

The game of tag that had been Shizuo Heiwajima’s and Izaya Orihara’s attempts to kill each other had been one of the defining features of Ikebukuro for the past seven years.

But Kine and Mikage also knew that it was not a game of tag like a murder competition. It was an actual, honest competition to kill each other, and the fact that neither had died yet was something of a miracle already.

“It’s one thing to do it to me. But to destroy the state this city is in…to commit heresy against humanity, I just cannot accept it.”

He dropped the burning Strength card into the ashtray, and it promptly lit the other cards. Izaya beamed with delight at the vision. “Ah yes, I think it’s time I finally take this seriously.”

The next moment, the smile completely vanished from Izaya Orihara’s face. The look in his eyes was enough to freeze with terror the hearts of any who witnessed it.

“It’s time to make Shizuo Heiwajima go away for good.”

Chat room

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The chat room is currently empty.

The chat room is currently empty.

The chat room is currently empty.

NamieYagiri has entered the chat.

NamieYagiri: Mikado Ryuugamine, are you watching this?

NamieYagiri: If you are, log in and join the room.

NamieYagiri: If you don’t, I will reveal your personal information here.

NamieYagiri: I’m very irritated right now, and not in the mood to wait.

NamieYagiri: Just get in the damn chat.

Kuru has entered the chat.

Mai has entered the chat.

Kuru: Well, well, Namie. Whatever brings you to a place like this? It is not supposed to be accessible without an electronic invitation. Did you hear about it from our foolish brother, perhaps?

Mai: I’m scared.

NamieYagiri: It’s you. Bring me Ryuugamine.

Kuru: Please don’t ask the impossible of us. Also, why do you interact with us so brusquely? If you are choosing to chat with your real name, would it not be more entertaining to type in your own manner of speaking? And is it really in your typical style to release real names here? Your own is one matter, but another person’s identity is sacred.

Mai: It’s bad manners.

NamieYagiri: Shut up.

NamieYagiri: My brother and I were given sedatives, and I’m very angry. And all of this is the fault of Mikado Ryuugamine.

NamieYagiri: I don’t need any more nonsense right now.

NamieYagiri: If Izaya’s watching this, you come, too.

NamieYagiri: This situation is doing Seiji no favors.

NamieYagiri: I’m going to put a finish to it all. So show yourselves.

Mai: You’re scary.

Mai: Help.

Kuru: Why, it seems as though you are under considerable pressure at the moment.

NamieYagiri: Whatever. I’m going to leave this open on the screen for now.

NamieYagiri: So come right away.

NamieYagiri: Before something crazy happens to Ikebukuro.

NamieYagiri: This isn’t time to be playing games with the Dollars, you little brat.

Mai: I’m scared.

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