Durarara!! - Volume 2 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Ikebukuro Calamity

Noon, early March, Ikebukuro

The neighborhood began to bustle when March started.

The school exams were wrapping up, putting expressions of joy and mourning on the students’ faces.

The office workers looked frazzled from the pressure of the fiscal year’s approaching end.

The young adults without jobs or school loitered around the same way they always did.

People of every kind filled the city as the chill of winter began to wear off.

But the bustling of Ikebukuro these days was not due to the season.

Everyone who breathed in the air of the city could feel the abnormality hanging in the atmosphere.

“…Yikes,” muttered a young man with sharp eyes in the backseat of a van driving along the main street. The other two people in the backseat looked up from their books, distracted by the serious tone in his voice.

“What’s up, Dotachin?”

“What happened, Kadota?”

One of them was a woman wearing black as her base color, and the other was a baby-faced boy who looked to be half-Caucasian.

The man named Kadota (or Dotachin) looked out the window and muttered darkly, “After the attack last night, the victim count is up to fifty. Fifty slashing victims.”

“No way, up to fifty?! Wow, it’s like a manga! Are you getting heart palpitations, too?”

“That’s incredible. It’ll be a manga before long. Oh, but none of them are fatalities, so it makes for kind of a weak villain.”

“What’s the slasher like? Katana? With a katana? Think it might be like Shizu? With a dog and everything? Lone Wolf and Dog?”

“No, this one’s an original Lone Wolf and Cub, I’d say. So would that mean the Headless Rider is Kino?”

The two readers, Karisawa and Yumasaki, were off in their own world, making comparisons to characters from novels they’d read. Kadota sighed in exasperation. “I was an idiot for assuming you two had any sense of morality.”

While the pair chattered away as though none of this had anything to do with them, Kadota thought over the state of the neighborhood.

The first incident had happened more than a year ago. A tough guy walking the streets at night was attacked, but it didn’t make the news under the assumption that it was just a fight of some kind. The victim claimed he was attacked with a katana, but he eventually gave up on that, and it was classified as a street squabble.

But two months after that, an average salaryman with no history of violence got hit, which drew the media’s attention and served as fuel for the daytime variety shows.

While there was no difference in human value between the thug and the salaryman, the media found the topic of an indiscriminate attacker to be much more salacious than an underworld squabble.

More time passed, and on Christmas night, a couple was attacked. Authorities announced it to be likely the work of the same attacker. The fuel for the variety shows went from a wooden log to a tank of gasoline.

The fact that the victims never saw the face of their attacker, combined with the location of Ikebukuro—smack in the middle of the capital—added a touch of mystery to the incidents. It posed a riddle to the world but didn’t quite capture all of society, because as luck would have it, there were no fatalities.

But at this point, it was far more than gasoline.

The slasher was nitro fuel, blasting through the variety shows, prime-time news, and the front page of weekly tabloids and national newspapers alike.

After all, the number of victims only rose after the New Year, and by the end of February, the pitch rose to a victim every day.

And while the media wasn’t reporting it, the yellow bandannas were also on the rise. They were members of the Yellow Scarves, a color gang. Many of them were young, with about half of the members in middle school. There had always been kids that young in color gangs, and the Yellow Scarves were founded a few years back by middle schoolers, which meant most of them were now in their first or second year of high school.

But just because they were made of students didn’t mean they posed no threat. For one thing, there were several hundred of them. But even worse, kids didn’t know when to hold back. And on top of that, they had the worst kind of knowledge on their side.

They knew what ages were too young to be prosecuted for crimes, and when they got into trouble, they made sure to have the youngest members do it. The Yellow Scarves themselves hadn’t gotten involved in crime yet, but they were growing in number. No doubt those kids on the fringes would utilize the team name to get up to no good.

The street slasher and the Yellow Scarves.

To Kadota and the other Dollars members, these two things were cause for concern.

“So you haven’t heard anything about the slasher or the victims?” Kadota asked, turning to Karisawa and Yumasaki, but they were already in a far-off world.

“I’m telling you, Riselina has to be the heroine. I mean, she got the bridal carry!”

“No way, it’s obviously Urc! I mean, she’s the protagonist’s childhood friend!”

“Ha-ha-ha, oh, you are so naive, Karisawa! Knowing that author, Riselina’s gonna turn out to be a childhood friend, too.”

“Even though she’s from another world?! Well, either way, I don’t care, ’cause I’ve got the hots for Bradeau.”

They seemed to be deep in a heated debate involving a whole lot of unfamiliar names. Kadota couldn’t imagine a more confusing and obnoxious development.

“People are mourning here, and you’re blabbering on about some stupid video game!”

“Don’t be silly, it’s not a game. We’re debating who the main heroine is in the Dengeki Bunko novel series On a Planet Where the Skybells Ring. Really, Kadota, you need to stop distancing yourself from fantasy and give it a shot!”

“Good grief… If either of you ever commit a crime, the media will never let it go. ‘The uber-nerds who could no longer tell the difference between manga and reality,’ they’ll gasp.”

Shocked, Yumasaki shouted, “What do you mean, Kadota?!”

“?!”

Startled by the sudden outburst, Kadota stared right at his companion. He had never seen Yumasaki angry like this.

“You think we’ve lost touch with the distinction between 2-D and 3-D? Don’t be ridiculous! A true nerd knows the difference between 2-D and 3-D and chooses 2-D every freakin’ time! Toss the 3-D life in the garbage, man! Anyone who gets tired of 2-D and turns to crime in the real world isn’t a true nerd at all. Don’t compare us to those losers who give up on the 2-D life! I wish the variety shows and newspapers would figure that out already!”

“Uh…okay, man…,” Kadota murmured, leaning backward with the force of Yumasaki’s speech. He looked over to Karisawa for help, who didn’t exactly oblige.

“Don’t be dumb, Yumacchi. The media is totally aware of what they’re doing. It’s an easier message to sell. Plus, whether they’re committing crimes or not, anyone who sits around for days at a time fangasming over anime without bathing might as well be a criminal anyway. That’s creepy.”

“Ugh. This is exactly why we put so much effort into our fashion—to help update that old image of us.”

“If that’s what you’re hoping to do, stop shouting about otaku crap in the middle of the train. And stop using manga and novels for torture ideas,” Kadota snapped. The other two ignored him and continued their conversation.

“Goddammit… What if the slasher was a crazy fan of period pieces? Would the TV stations ban all of their boring samurai specials?!”

“I hope not, I like those shows,” Kadota muttered.

Yumasaki turned to him with a clenched fist. “Listen! The only 3-D objects I’ll acknowledge the existence of are figures and plastic models.”

“But not us? Screw you…”

“Hmm…oh, and maybe that dream demon who visited me in the summer. At least she was a maid. Maybe if she tries hard enough, she’ll be able to morph into a 2-D girl.”

“Yumacchi, what’s this about a dream demon?”

“See? This is what I keep saying—you can’t tell the difference between manga and reality!”

The chaos inside the van was interrupted by the sudden ringing of a phone.

It wasn’t just Kadota’s. Karisawa’s and Yumasaki’s phones were playing anime theme songs, and even the driver Togusa’s phone was going off in the front seat.

All the cell phones in the car were active at once.

It might have seemed like an effect from a horror movie, but all of them knew what it meant: They’d all received the same message.

It wasn’t just the people in the car, either. Certain people all around Ikebukuro would be receiving this together.

It was a Dollars message.

Kadota was the first to check the text. He ground his teeth and nearly cracked the flip phone shut.

“Okay, you guys. This is officially now our business. Get your heads back in reality.”

“?”

The others noticed the look of foreboding in Kadota’s eyes and checked for themselves.

The message itself was quite simple.

Dollars member has been attacked by the slasher. Need info, need info, need info.

There was that short “need info” repeated at the end.

Kadota took a number of emotions from that simple message and muttered.

“The town is starting to fall apart.”

Near Kawagoe Highway, top floor of apartment building

About the same time that people around the neighborhood were checking their cell phones, Celty was reading the same message on hers.

Celty lived in the spacious apartment, which was larger than some stand-alone houses, with her partner, a black-market doctor. Earlier she had been nothing but a freeloading guest, but after a time last year, she was now happily (?) his lover in a cohabitation arrangement.

But this was not a time for reflecting on her love life. She checked her phone and put her elbows on the desk in a pose of heavy thought.

Black shadows squirmed in the face of the bright light flooding through the windows. Amid that unbelievably eerie sight, she thought to herself, I wonder if Mikado’s starting to lose his grip.

She thought of the childish face of the Dollars founder when she met him around a year ago and folded her phone shut.

Without a mouth to speak, Celty might appear not to need a cell phone. But as a courier, being able to send texts to clients or Shinra while on the move was extremely convenient, and it was also quicker to operate than the e-mail client on the PDA.

Even the camera function, which she’d thought was totally useless before she bought it, was finding plenty of use. It all came down to conveying information quickly. It wasn’t great for clandestine activity, given the loud shutter noise, but in Celty’s case, she almost never ever needed to be that stealthy.

And now, more than anything, Celty wanted a cell phone photo.

If just one person could capture an image of the slasher who was terrorizing the town…

No one had died yet from the attacks, but Celty couldn’t bring herself to believe that fact.

When it attacked her, that red-eyed shadow had chopped her head off. She’d considered the possibility that the slasher knew she was headless already, but that only made the act of knocking her helmet off even more pointless and baffling.

The most reasonable explanation Celty could think of was that the attacker was only trying to wound her, and when she didn’t bleed at all, it knocked her head off instead.

But wait, what if I was just a normal human being with a prosthetic arm?

In either case, this could not be allowed to stand. Celty clenched her fist in determination. She wouldn’t let this wanton behavior continue in her home of Ikebukuro.

In a sense, though, before the slasher happened along, the most wanton behavior of all had come from Celty herself—but perhaps that just meant she couldn’t forgive the idea of anyone else committing crimes around here.

“Now, now, Celty. No need to get so tense,” said a bespectacled young man in a white doctor’s coat. He had noticed the headless knight’s sighing motions in front of the computer.

“Oh, you’re back,” Celty typed lifelessly into the computer screen without turning around.

“It’s always darkest before the dawn. Just do what you can—put your human affairs in order and let fate do the rest. Then again, you’re not human, so…put your dullahan affairs in order and let fate do the rest? Hmm. Given that a dullahan’s fate is to tell others of their death, it sounds like a pretty dark story in the making.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

Shinra had no hesitations about treating Celty as something inhuman, but this actually made her happy. Nothing was more reassuring than knowing that someone accepted and loved her for what she really was.

If Shinra had originally professed his love for Celty by offering to think of a way to make her human or claiming that his love would make her human, she’d probably have left him behind.

Instead, Shinra Kishitani loved Celty just as she was, without her head. That might have been the only way that she could face her own feelings for him.

“So anyway, do you have a plan? You can’t just go out patrolling the town every night, can you?”

“Maybe not. At the very least, I’m suspected of having a connection to the slasher. If I wander around too much at night, I might as well be claiming that I’m the attacker myself.”

“The slasher? Reminds me of that killer from five years ago,” Shinra murmured ominously. Celty thought back to the incident that had unsettled the neighborhood several years earlier.

The Ikebukuro tsujigiri incident

It was named after the old practice of “testing out” a new katana by attacking random passersby, because as with this ongoing incident, the victims claimed they’d been attacked with a traditional Japanese katana. But a clear portrait of the attacker was never established, and the book on the case stayed open.

Centuries in the past, Ikebukuro had been a place of many tsujigiri incidents, so some caused a stir by suggesting a curse was in effect. But once the attacks suddenly stopped, it passed completely out of the public interest in just the span of a year.

“Wasn’t that only two or three attacks though?”

“The main difference is that five years ago, people actually died. In the last incident, the killer barged into a house and cut down two people. The other victims got away with minor injuries, fortunately…”

“But they never caught whoever was responsible.”

Celty shrugged in resignation.

Suddenly, Shinra muttered to himself. “…Saika.”

“Psyche?”

“No, Saika. Written with the characters for ‘song of sin,’ pronounced Saika.”

Song of sin.

Celty typed the characters into the computer, then turned to Shinra in shock.

Saika. The mysterious troll who’d been messing up all the Ikebukuro-related chat rooms and message boards, including the one she’d been frequenting lately.

“Do you know this person? It hasn’t been you this whole time, has it?”

“No, no, I wouldn’t do that. If I wanted to troll people, I’d just get my super-hacker friend to take the boards down entirely.”

“Does this super hacker really exist? And what makes him super? Is that a joke? …Whatever. What about Saika?” Celty prompted, not in the mood to play along with Shinra’s jokes at the moment.

“Well, there’s been all that trolling about cutting stuff.”

“Yeah, the weird lists of words. But it also talks a lot about loving, so I’m not sure if there’s a connection or not…”

“Hmm… You’ve always been in Ikebukuro, so maybe you don’t know about it…”

“?”

Shinra looked at the question mark she typed onto the screen, then waited a long dramatic moment to build the tension.

“Saika seems to have happened a long time ago in Shinjuku.”

“???”

She added a few more question marks to show that she wasn’t following his meaning. Shinra found that to be unbearably adorable, and his face crinkled into a childlike grin.

“Well, the confusing part is that you could say Saika ‘happened’ or that Saika ‘was around’…”

“Stop beating around the bush and explain.”

“Fine, fine. Don’t get angry and fidgety at the same time,” he said, accurately reading her emotions despite the lack of a face to scrutinize.

“Saika was a real, actual, authentic demon blade that existed in Shinjuku years ago.”

“…”

Celty actually went to the trouble of typing in her silence.

“……”

The silence continued. She was apparently waiting for Shinra’s reaction.

“…”

But Shinra was waiting for Celty’s reaction as well. An awkward silence fell upon the room.

Celty lost her patience first. She typed her honest emotions into the keyboard.

“…Ohh?”

“What does ‘ohh’ mean?”

“…”

“…”

The silence was back. Celty hurried to fill it with a question.

“Demon blade… You mean like a Muramasa Blade?”

“You really do like those Wizardry games, don’t you?”

“Stop spying on my chat logs.”

“I apologize for that—sorry. Matter settled! Now…don’t you remember that Kanra person in the chat talking about a demon blade? Anyway, that jogged my memory about some old books I read once, so I looked them up again, and…surprise! There was a demon blade named Saika in Shinjuku once!” he announced proudly. Annoyed, Celty typed in her response.

“Setting aside that the matter is most certainly not settled…I don’t know. I thought you were more of a realist, Shinra. There’s no such thing as a cursed demon blade. Look at reality.”

As she typed, Celty was keenly aware that she might as well be denying her own existence. She made a show of a laughing motion to get her point across. Shinra only shook his head—he knew Celty better than anyone else, including how to get under her skin.

“Well, well, well… Remind me, who was it that was trembling in fear at the image of grays that they showed in that UFO special? Who was it that saw the video of the cow being sucked up by the UFO and couldn’t stop talking about how scary it would be if that happened to her?”

“Sh—”

“Who got suckered in by that April Fool’s show and came to tell me all about the revelation that ‘the Apollo mission never actually landed on the moon’?”

“Shut up, shut up, shut uuup! It…it’s obvious! Aliens are much more likely to exist than cursed swords!” she snapped back lamely.

Shinra just shook his head, the picture of smugness. “What if the aliens made the cursed sword?”

“Wha—?”

“A katana created with secret space technology. Seems like it would have a mind of its own, right?”

“W-well, in that case…”

The conversation was clearly going in the wrong direction, but Celty couldn’t think of a good rebuttal. Or a reason for one, for that matter.

“…It seems…plausible…”

Begrudgingly convinced, Celty decided she ought to ask about the sword.

I have to admit, I’m curious about the fact that it’s using the same name, she told herself and listened closely to what Shinra had to say.

“Now, just after the war ended, this demon blade Saika rampaged through Shinjuku for blood.”

“I see.”

“And then, after an incredible, thrilling battle with a magical sword from the West…”

“Now wait a minute!” Celty grabbed Shinra by his lapel, feeling that she’d been tricked into buying his story. “What boys’ manga did you rip this story out of?”

“Settle down, Celty! Adolescents aren’t going to take to a manga without human characters. It would get canceled! In fact, it wouldn’t even make it through the editors’ meetings! Just hear me out until the end!”

“…I’m listening,” she prompted, her hand still clutching his collar.

“Their battle was brought to an end by the bamboo spear of intelligence, which was carved from a magic stalk of bamboo. After that, Saika was forced to flee Shinjuku for—”

“Forget I asked.”

She let go of Shinra’s coat and started walking for the front entrance of the apartment.

“But I was just getting to the good part.”

“I’ve heard enough. I’m going out for a bit. I’m not taking any jobs tonight,” she typed into her PDA and held backward for Shinra to read. He didn’t make any attempts to stop her and switched topics on a dime. This was virtually a daily occurrence in their lives.

“Where are you going?”

“To see Shizuo.”

“Wha…? A-are you cheating on me, Celty?! If you’re unhappy with me, can you say why?! No, wait, not directly; that’ll just crush my spirit. Say what’s wrong with me with three different kinds of misdirection! Seventy percent praise and thirty percent insults, if you can!”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got no complaints,” she replied innocently and stepped into the entryway. “It’s just that this Saika character’s been repeating Shizuo’s name over and over. If you’ve read my logs, you should know. If he’s really got something to do with the slasher, it’s worth finding him and hearing him out.”

krch

ripcrik

snp krack

Sound.

The sound of joints and muscles breaking down.

rip snap rip snap crakk

With every unpleasant crackle, terrible pain ran through this body.

The boy had no choice but to endure this endless hell.

He knew that it was nothing but a manifestation of his own rage.

Shizuo Heiwajima came to understand that he was different in third grade.

He had a fight with his little brother over something pointless. And when he snapped, he tried to throw the refrigerator, which was easily taller than he was.

At the time, he didn’t have the strength to lift it, of course—but as a result, he pulled muscles all over his body and dislocated numerous joints.

That was just the start of the abnormalities.

When he got into a fight with his friend in the classroom, the boy threw a pointed compass at Shizuo. That was bad enough, but what Shizuo did in response was far worse. It was enough to make the phrase self-defense pick up and scamper away.

He lifted an entire desk packed with textbooks with his skinny nine-year-old arms, did a half rotation, and hurled it with all of his strength.

The target of his anger was nothing short of dead lucky.

All of that weight passed to his side, just barely brushing his arm. The next instant, the wall behind him sounded like it was falling apart.

With trembling legs, the boy turned around to see the desk stuck halfway into the classroom wall.

There’s a phrase: brute strength.

When humans think they’re exhibiting all of their strength, they’re really not.

The muscles naturally limit themselves so that what we think of as “full strength” is actually far weaker than their maximum capability.

But when placed in a situation of extreme danger, such as a house fire, the brain unlocks that potential. Suddenly the body is strong enough to lift heavy furniture or other people from the site of a disaster or to leap over obstacles that should be too tall to scale.

Shizuo Heiwajima possessed one unique feature. He could call upon that brute strength at any moment, not just in emergencies.

This might have appeared to be a great benefit—but it wasn’t anything of the sort.

The reason the brain prevents the use of full strength is to protect the body’s joints and muscles. The body’s limits are limits for a reason; putting it under that much stress will only cause it to break down.

In exchange for the gift of incredible power, Shizuo lost the ability to control his strength.

In other words, if he attempted to put all of his strength into something, his muscles would faithfully tear themselves to shreds in the attempt.

That overflowing physical strength soon became an extension of his own rage.

Whenever he got angry, that uncontrollable muscular strength would jump into action on its own. When his brain was wielded by great strength, it demanded the body make use of it: Pick up the heaviest object here, destroy everything, destroy everyone.

As a result, young Shizuo heeded his instincts.

Destruction. He sought absolute destruction, and it was always his own body that collapsed first.

A collapsing body and uncontrollable strength.

Trapped between these two things, the boy’s mind began to fall apart bit by bit. At some point, he forgot the concept of controlling his anger.

If I can’t hold back and I’m going to fall apart first anyway, I’ll feel so much better by just allowing my mind to be free!

He gave up on self-control.

He unleashed all of his instincts, ready to give up his own life.

As a result of that choice, he destroyed even more.

He wreaked an untold amount of violence…on his own body.

Day after day, he broke down.

When his body broke down, he flew into a rage and destroyed himself even more.

It was an unmanageable juggling act.

He gained nothing. Only the scars of destruction piled up behind him.

His muscles destroyed themselves repeatedly—and before they could rebuild stronger than before, they broke down again.

The boy was drowning in a hell of his own creation.

He struggled and strained and strove but could not escape himself…

And time passed.

“My dad and mom were always super nice about it,” Shizuo muttered, his eyes narrowed behind the sunglasses. “Even my little brother, whom I always fought with, screamed for an ambulance after I tried to lift the fridge and collapsed. He waited there with me until the paramedics arrived… I had a really nice family. They didn’t spoil me or anything, but I think I was raised in a happy home.”

Celty listened in silence as Shizuo spoke about his upbringing. The bartender’s outfit and riding suit were shoulder to shoulder on a bench as evening descended on South Ikebukuro Park. There were other people in the park, but the eeriness of the sight kept them all away.

“So…how did it turn out this way?” he muttered sadly into the air, a self-deprecating smile on his lips. “What was the catalyst for my change? I didn’t have any trouble at home. There was no childhood trauma, and I wasn’t obsessed with hyper-violent anime or manga. I barely even watched any movies. So was it me? Did the cause come from nothing but me myself?”

Celty maintained her silence. She wasn’t ignoring him but was attempting to absorb all of Shizuo’s confessions within her own shadow.

“I just want to be strong,” he admitted, but his voice was strong. “If I’m the cause of all this, then I hate myself most of all. I don’t care about the fighting. I just want the strength to control myself.”

It was an utterly honest confession. The only reason he could speak like this was because Celty didn’t waste his time with pointless rebuttals or jokes. Of course, it wasn’t only that—he’d been around her for a long time and had grown to trust her implicitly.

Shizuo knew that everyone in the neighborhood was afraid of him. Because of that, the fact that Celty would listen without fear made her a very precious thing to him.

If he was talking to someone who had no idea who he was, they would probably manage to drive him into a rage somehow, and just like all the others, they would find themselves terrified of him. Shizuo understood how the process happened.

But understanding its ways did not give him any better control over it.

After a long, long time, the number of people in his vicinity shrank down naturally.

There was his boss at work, who knew how to handle Shizuo. There was Simon, who was capable of defending himself against Shizuo’s extreme violence. There was Izaya Orihara, who stayed close because of his utter loathing. And there was the silent Headless Rider, who never made him mad.

He already knew that Celty was the Headless Rider. But he wasn’t particularly concerned with that. She’d always interacted with him while wearing the helmet, and knowing that she couldn’t actually speak meant that it made no difference to him.

Shizuo’s thought process was very simple, though it wasn’t the result of some kind of strong belief or ideal. He put everything in the world into two categories.

People who pissed him off and people who didn’t piss him off. Those were the only two choices.

“Sorry for griping at ya again,” he said with a slight smile. At this point, he didn’t look like anything but a mild-mannered young man. “So what do you want today? You came out here because you wanted me for something, right?”

“…”

Celty took out her PDA and conveyed the information in the fewest words possible.

The slashings taking place in town.

The person on the Net named Saika who was using his name.

That Saika might be connected to the attacks somehow.

That the journalist who’d been asking about Shizuo was one of the slasher’s victims.

And that Shizuo’s name had popped up in chat the night the writer was attacked.

Once he’d read all of this information, Shizuo raised an eyebrow.

“What the hell? Are you saying you suspect me?” he asked directly.

Celty shook her helmet side to side.

If Shizuo were responsible and swinging a katana around, there was no way the victims wouldn’t have died. There was no obvious reason for Shizuo to conduct the random attacks, and even if anyone made him mad enough to want to ambush someone under cover of night, he’d just twist the poor sap’s head around 180 degrees.

Shizuo claimed that he had no control over himself, but the fact that he wielded such strength and hadn’t committed homicide yet spoke to a nearly miraculous level of personal restraint.

Of course, it had occurred to Celty that he might have sent a number of people to an early grave after all, and she just didn’t know about it.

“A Dollars member has been attacked.”

“Yeah, I know. I got the message,” he replied shortly, pulling out his cell phone. “Honestly, I’d love to help out, but I only joined up because Simon asked me to. I’m not really that close to the Dollars to begin with… Of course, that shallow connection is what allows me to be a part of their group.”

He snorted wryly and looked up at the sunset. The sky was redder and more beautiful than it had any business being.

“Tsk. What the hell is the city sky doing looking like the countryside? What does it think it is?” he growled nonsensically as he got to his feet and started to leave. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t have any clues for ya. Besides…why are you so intent on making the Dollars your business? Just don’t get yourself hurt.”

It was rare for Shizuo to show consideration for anyone else. Celty quietly typed away.

“It’s not just for the Dollars. I’m also getting revenge for myself.”

“?”

“I was recently attacked by the slasher, too. Cut straight across the throat. If I wasn’t headless, I’d be dead.”

She typed this message in with a wry intention of her own, but the confession had huge, fateful consequences.

Not for Celty’s fate. For Shizuo’s and all of Ikebukuro.

“You asshole…”

“Huh?”

“Why didn’t you say that first?! You idiot! They say whoever calls someone an idiot is the real idiot, but I already know I am, so I’ll say it anyway! Say that first, you idiot! Why are we standing around with our thumbs up our asses?!”

It was exceedingly rare for Shizuo Heiwajima to be angry for the sake of another person.

He was angry about one of his companions being hurt, so in a broader sense he was angry for his own sake, but logical quibbling aside, Shizuo was full of pure rage.

“Someone’s gonna die. I’ll kill ’em. Butcher ’em. Murder ’em.”

“Hang on. Look, I’m the Headless Rider. I’m perfectly fine.”

“No, no, no. That’s not the point. Swinging a sword at you equals death. That’s all there is to it.”

But this was not his usual explosive rage, as the target of his anger was not present. Shizuo’s rage today was the kind that bubbled away and stored its energy up in his stomach.

“Celty, did you know there is power in words? So I’m trying to stifle my overwhelming urge to destroy everything by putting it into a single word.”

That was exactly what Celty was afraid of.

“Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill…”

If this situation continued and the slasher happened by, she knew who was going to die.

The slasher.

He wouldn’t leave them a moment for repentance. If Shizuo punched a person with all of his force, they’d be lucky with just the skull caved in. If worst came to worst, he would snap the neck and tear all of that flesh so that the target of his rage was just as headless as she was.

The only difference was that humans died when they lost their heads.

Celty allowed herself a moment of sympathy for the attacker as she watched Shizuo hop onto the back of her motorcycle.

“What about work? Aren’t you on break?”

“Who cares anymore?”

“Hey! You’d better not get yourself fired on account of me. Plus, we still need time to collect information on the slasher. Just wait until your shift is over. I’ll go make preparations.”

“…”

Shizuo thought it over for a few moments, then grumbled, “All right…but make it quick,” squeezing the words out in between his chants of “kill, kill, kill…”

It made him look like an exorcist attempting to resist the control of the devil.

“All the emotion that’s building up inside of me is screaming to be unleashed…and if I don’t take care of it…”

“…It’s pretty likely that I’ll end up destroying myself.”

Thirty minutes later, Shinjuku

There was a very good reason that Celty decided to split off from Shizuo momentarily.

Naturally, she was concerned with the state of his employment, but there was a much bigger rationale behind her choice.

If she was with Shizuo, there was one person she could never meet, and she had to make contact with him for information now.

“Hey… I’m delighted you decided to come visit me.”

“I just met you last month for the job you had me do.”

“Oh, what’s the harm? We didn’t get to chat last time. So how are things? It’s been a year now since the Yagiri Pharmaceuticals incident. Have you found your head yet?”

Izaya Orihara offered Celty a cup of tea with a sardonic smile. His nasty personality hadn’t changed over time—he knew full well he was offering tea to someone without a mouth to drink it.

“My issues aren’t important… I’ll be direct. Any suspicions as to the slasher?”

“It’ll cost you three bills,” he stated.

Celty pulled a wallet made of solid shadow from her riding suit of the same material. The bills inside were real, of course. She removed three ten thousand–yen bills and handed them to Izaya.

“So not only is your scythe made of shadow, so are your wallet and clothes. If I shined a bright enough light on you, would the shadow dissipate and show me your naked body?”

“You want to see?”

Izaya responded to Celty’s challenge by squirming backward and smirking.

“Not really. I’m not a pervert like that student or that unlicensed doctor. I don’t get all hot and heavy over a severed head or its headless body.”

The moment he tossed that insult back to her, a black scythe entwined its way around Izaya’s neck.

The end of the scythe was curled up like a spring, forming a twisted circle around Izaya’s neck, with the tip at the center. She had thrust the weapon up against his neck and morphed it into that bizarre shape in the blink of an eye.

Izaya’s smile faded just the tiniest bit, and he raised his hands in a sign of surrender.

“Insulting me is one thing. But if you slander Shinra again, you will pay dearly. Let’s say…with injuries that will take three days to recover from.”

“…Thanks for the detail. You’re calm enough to tell me that this isn’t a bluff.”

“Yes, Shinra might be abnormal. But if he’s weird, then he’s only weird to me and no one else. You have no right to judge him.”

“You sound like quite the couple,” Izaya noted coolly. Celty retracted her scythe in resignation.

Unsatisfied with just being released, the information agent had more sarcasm for the headless woman. “But what if your biggest fan just happens to have a thing for headless women? What if another dullahan comes along and seduces him? He might just fall head over heels for her instead.”

“Somehow I doubt that…but I wouldn’t mind. All I’d do—”

“Is kill Shinra and commit suicide?”

“No, I’d just make certain that no other headless women get near him. It’s not just that he loves me. Now I love him, too…”

The first instant that Izaya saw the confident text on the PDA, the smile vanished—only to be replaced by a great guffaw.

“…Kah-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I didn’t expect this! Since that last incident, you’re more human than ever! But be careful. The closer you get to being human, the larger the gap might be when you finally do get your head and memories back!”

“I can worry about that once I have my head. Actually, to be honest, I’m starting to think I don’t really need my head after all… But enough about that. Give me information on the slasher. You’re not going to take my money and tell me nothing, are you?”

With the topic back on business, Izaya shook his head and began to tell her the “product” she’d bought.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got some juicy intel I haven’t sold to the police or media or put on the Internet. I won’t lie—I was waiting for you to come to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this case is a lot like you—it’s straight out of the world of ghosts and goblins,” he teased. When he spoke next, it was in the hushed tones of one beginning a scary story.

“…Have you ever heard of the sword called Saika?”

“Huh?”

“You might not believe me, but once, here in Shinjuku, there was a demon blade…”

Thirty minutes later, near Kawagoe Highway, top floor of apartment building

“Shinra! Shinra, Shinra, Shinraaa!”

“Whoaaa, don’t just barge in here with your PDA thrust out like that! I’d like it more if you showed this kind of initiative in bed—ghrf!”

Celty gave Shinra a light knee in the stomach and rapidly typed out her next message.

“Hey! That demon blade story! Was that all true?!”

“Nngh… I have gone on a journey of despair now that I know you doubted my ironclad word. I’m done for—the only thing that can save me is your love. I need about level thirty-seven love. In the ABCs of love, a B should do…”

“Stop joking around! Listen!”

She yanked Shinra up to his feet and began to type out what she’d just heard from Izaya.

—That Izaya was also concerned with the connection between the online troll Saika and the slasher and was investigating on his own.

—That there was a legend of a demon blade named Saika with a mind of its own that could possess other people.

—That when the victims’ testimony was combined, no one had seen the attacker directly, but as they all passed out, they remembered red eyes.

—That each day the Saika username appeared online was the same day in which a new slashing victim appeared later that night.

Once she finished showing him these details, Shinra sadly rolled around on the carpet in his white coat.

“Ahh, how can this be? When I said it, you chuckled through the nose—no, wait, you don’t have a nose. You chuckled through your breast at me, but sure, you’ll take Izaya’s word for it! …Aaah!”

“What is it?!”

“I like that phrase, ‘chuckled through your breast.’ Sounds kinda sexy, if you ask—gffh!”

She caught him in the temple with a low kick, sprawling him out on the floor. Somehow, Shinra kept his wits about him and turned back to Celty with a deadly serious look on his face.

“So what’s the plan?”

“Well…if it was a spirit or fairy of some kind, I would have sensed its presence…but I didn’t feel a thing when I was attacked.”

“Well, of course. A katana might have a mind, but it doesn’t have a presence. As far as I know, the demon blade Saika possessed the mind of its wielder and controlled his body. If that was a strictly human body, then there would be no otherworldly presence or aura for you to sense. Plus, we don’t know that all spirits or fairies possess this ‘presence’ you’re talking about.”

“So there’s no way I can search for it, then.”

Celty clenched her fist in frustration at Shinra’s calm conjecture. But he only grinned at her and extended one last lottery ticket to his lover.

“Actually, there is, my dear.”

“Huh?”

“Let me start off by apologizing: sorry. I took another look at the chat room you hang out in… Have you seen this? It’s quite interesting. I’ve heard that Saika was a female blade, and based on this, it seems to be true.”

“What…?”

“Check out the past logs. Good thing this chat is the kind that saves a long backlog.”

Celty booted up her computer as he suggested.

And then she saw it.

She saw how much the thing named Saika had evolved in the time she’d been away from the chat…

Chat room

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—SAIKA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—

|I cut one person today. But one is enough. It’s not good to be greedy.|

|But I’ll cut again tomorrow. The more lovers, the better.|

|My strength has reached its peak.|

|I’m looking for a person.|

|Shizuo Heiwajima.|

|The man I must love.|

|Tomorrow night, I’ll cut again.|

|I know where Shizuo is. But there are too many people to be safe.|

|I want to know where Shizuo Heiwajima lives.|

|Does he live alone? Is it in Ikebukuro, too?|

|I want to know more about Shizuo.|

|About the strongest man in this town…|

|I want to love him, I want to know him.|

|I’ll cut someone again tomorrow. Every day, until I meet Shizuo.|

|I want to see Shizuo, soon, soon, soon…|

—SAIKA HAS LEFT THE CHAT—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—KANRA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—

«…Well, it seems like this person is only posting here now.»

«I was trying to figure out why.»

«When the name Shizuo popped up here earlier, Tarou clearly reacted to it.»

«So it seems like they think this Shizuo person might be reading these messages.»

«Now, I’m only guessing, but…»

«This is advance warning for the crime, right? If something happens tomorrow night, should we report it?»

«As the moderator, I’ll need to do something as soon as possible.»

«Well, so long.»

—KANRA HAS LEFT THE CHAT—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—SETTON HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—

[When did all of this happen…?]

[Tarou, are you still seeing all of this?]

[I’d really appreciate it if you responded.]

[On the other hand…]

[The log’s from last night…so “tomorrow” would mean tonight, yes?]

[Oh, I need to go out and do something, so I’m taking off…]

[I know it’s hard, Kanra, but please hang in there.]

[So long.]

—SETTON HAS LEFT THE CHAT—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—

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