Durarara!! - Volume 5 - Chapter 3

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Chapter 3: The Days of Youth Shine and Crumble

Russia

“So, where were we?”

Lingerin’s hands rattled as he shook them, still stuck inside the pots.

But in contrast to his jaunty tone of voice, the place where he stood was one of raw violence.

The stench of blood filled the room. But even stronger was the pungent smell of gunpowder, the haze of smoke blotting out the red accents that covered the floor here and there.

A pile of bodies lay around Lingerin’s feet. Men of obviously foreign origin, presumably the illegal stowaways mentioned earlier, now sacks of flesh, their heads and torsos streaming blood.

And yet the men still living were virtually unchanged from before.

Drakon stood at Lingerin’s side, wiping steam residue from his glasses, while the men in special-forces gear warily eyed the surroundings in silence.

“We were talking about Vorona and Slon, Comrade Lingerin.”

“Oh, right, right. These guys came and interrupted us. They were not aware of the situation. That’s how you wind up dead,” Lingerin murmured heavily. He spread his potted hands wide and exclaimed, “Awareness is a very important skill! Denis and Simon were always very good at that. Certainly enough to scamper away to Japan just before we faced our greatest test.”

“You mean the time that we raided the security company hired by our business rival to send them a message.”

“Hoo boy, I sure thought I was going to die then. Well, that was a case where I was not being very aware. I failed to anticipate that they would have a whole boatload of former Spetsnaz in there. We were missing on purpose to threaten them, but they were very inconsiderate and actually tried to kill us!”

Drakon studiously placed his glasses back on his nose as his employer guffawed and stated clinically, “When the military was heavily reduced postperestroika, many Spetsnaz lost their jobs. As a means of employment, many wound up in private security and the mafia—a warning which I have given to you approximately twenty-three times since the dissolution of the CCCP, but it seems you were not listening.”

“How was I to know? Most of the members I knew went straight into mercenary work… Besides, is this really the time to criticize me? Surprisingly you seem to not be attentive, Drakon.”

“The most potent lack of awareness in this scene is the state of your hands, Comrade Lingerin.”

It was not said with hatred, disgust, or anger. It was simply the truth: His employer looked like a bear that had gotten both paws stuck in beehives.

Lingerin slowly turned away and then laughed to draw attention away. “It’s not as if I did this on purpo—”

A pot burst with a sudden eruption of noise.

Emerging from the right-hand pot was the gleaming barrel of a pistol. Smoke trailed upward from the muzzle as shards of broken pottery rained down onto the bodies on the floor.

A second later came the gurgling sound of spilling liquid.

Drakon looked down to see that a foreign migrant lying on the floor, who had previously been playing dead, was now drooling blood from his mouth. The gun he’d pointed at Lingerin fell to the floor.

“…I suppose I must offer you my compliments,” Drakon sighed.

Lingerin burst into a delighted beam. “Of course… I should I have shot my way out! It’s a shame about the pot, but it was cheaper than this gun…I think!”

“I am more curious about why you needed to put the gun in the pot in the first place. And why didn’t you just let go of it to remove your hand? And on top of that, if they were fragile enough to give way to a bullet, why did you not just smash them against the wall?”

“I have no idea what you are saying. Speak Russian, man.”

“Did the words that just came from my mouth sound like English or Japanese? Very well. If this is an issue with Wernicke’s area, the speech center of the brain, then the anomaly must reside in one of our brains. Let us visit the hospital together. I look forward to learning which of the two of us must be sent to the sanitarium.”

Drakon’s words emerged as a hunk of freezing dry ice. Lingerin’s eyes bulged, and he shook his head to dispel the illusion before returning to the topic at hand.

“As I was saying—Vorona. She might be twenty years old, but she’s still a child inside. She’s very good at her job, but the drawback is that unlike Semyon and Denis, she is not aware of things.”

“But this is a matter greater than awareness. They violated our most sacred of unspoken rules. If I have the opportunity, I will crush their skulls and spill their brains myself.”

“Very scary. And who says that about his own daughter? I’m willing to say that I’m not angry anymore. You can go easy on her by merely locking her in storage, can’t you?”

“The warehouse? I would think that starvation is a much more painful end than gunshot,” Drakon said, straight-faced.

Lingerin cackled and ran his tongue over his lips with delight. “So you’re saying an execution is unavoidable? Listen, we’re not military or mafia. Let’s play it loose, my friend. All this talk about killing—it makes you sound a bit barbaric, don’t you think?” Lingerin noted, sitting in a room full of grisly corpses. “For one thing, you don’t even have the skill to kill Vorona by shooting her.”

“Affirmative. I am ashamed to admit that I cannot stop her. Is that not why we sent Egor to Japan? If need be, he can enlist help from Denis and Semyon. But…from what I hear, Egor already suffered a major injury fighting against one of the locals.”

“Japan is scary in its own right, eh? Our illustrious president is adept in the ways of the Japanese art of judo—perhaps it was a judo master he ran into? Oh, right, I should break the other pot.”

Lingerin pointed the gun in his right hand at the pot covering his left. Drakon put a hand on his shoulder without looking and said, “I will not quibble with your choices anymore, but I believe that breaking it with the grip would be better than shooting your own hand. As for Japan, it is a very vexing situation. If she learns that Egor was taken unawares by a local, Vorona will most certainly not take it lying down.”

“Now, now. Your daughter is very human in nature, compared to you, you robot. She acts on her instincts and desires and does not hesitate to kill. And she’ll kill for reasons other than food or defense, so it’s a very human instinct, not like other animals.”

He struck the butt of the gun against the pot, breaking it apart. Inside, his hand was holding a piece of honeyed beef jerky, which he lifted to his mouth and started to chew. “But for a human, she’s definitely one of the crazy ones.”

“As ironic as it is to say this in your presence, Comrade Lingerin, Vorona is still immature as a person. It is the result of leaving my young daughter alone to be raised by books after the death of her mother. She has much knowledge, but her mentality is still that of a child,” Drakon lamented, half blaming himself for the outcome.

Lingerin waved his hand breezily. “Oh, it’s all fine. She’s in the midst of her youth, eh? You’ve got to get out there and mix it up while you’re young. The spring is warmer in Japan than here, right? Let her enjoy it.”

“The only problem is, she stole a couple of very grown-up toys from our stock before she left.”

May 3, on the road, Ikebukuro

The woman in the riding suit—Vorona—calmly accelerated her motorcycle as she glanced at the distant figure splayed on the ground.

“…”

Meanwhile, something rustled past, a fine glint that slipped around a loop of her belt.

No one could have possibly noticed the tiny glimmer of light, as the sight of the collapsed motorcycle and rider occupied all the pedestrians in the vicinity.

Meanwhile, the cars behind the scene had no choice but to either stop where they were or turn down side streets to avoid the mess.

Vorona rode down a cross street herself, feigning being yet another spectator. Once she had confirmed in her mirrors that people were beginning to gather and murmur at the scene behind her, she took off into the night without a second glance.

She knew why they were buzzing over the scene. She herself had seen it happen.

It was the sight of the Black Rider’s helmet flying high into the air and the headless body slamming into the ground.

“…”

Under her helmet, Vorona was silent with thought as she sped through the night streets. Eventually, she arrived at her destination.

A lonely, quiet street occupied by a single truck.

The truck was her own, an undercover vehicle with the logo of a fictional company on it. Slon was on standby in the driver’s seat, and as she approached, he flicked the hazard lights on briefly.

Vorona pivoted the bike over to the rear of the truck. As she did so, the back doors swung open, and a metal ramp automatically extended down to the ground. She rode the bike right up and into the cargo hold of the truck.

Half of the space was like a little warehouse, with plenty of other material stored away in addition to a platform to carry the motorcycle. The front half of the hold was built like an RV, with a white fur sofa and a closet.

Vorona stood in front of the closet and forcefully removed her helmet and riding suit. She wore nothing but a thin T-shirt and leggings underneath, her well-balanced body shining in the light.

There was internal electricity, just like in a real RV, with an outlet near the living space in addition to the lights. She had taken off her T-shirt, leaving only a bra on underneath, when Slon’s voice came through the wireless receiver on the table.

“Nice work,” he drawled from the driver’s seat up front. “Are you changing now?”

“I affirm.”

“It’s too bad I can’t see that.”

“It is not too bad for me,” she replied. She slipped briskly into a fresh T-shirt, neither ashamed nor angry.

Taken aback by that brief answer, Slon changed the subject. “By the way, while I was waiting I saw a car pass by with the license plate one-three-one-three, and it made me wonder… Why is thirteen considered an unlucky number? I feel like I’m dying to know the answer. Is that the curse of thirteen?”

“Many theories exist. Most famous is thirteenth seat at the Last Supper, seat of Judas. But not all are rooted in Christianity. Legend of Norse gods. Twelve gods provide harmony. Harmony broken by appearance of Loki, the thirteenth. In ancient times, cultures used duodecimal systems. Thirteen breaks the harmony of twelve. Hated number. Too bad.”

“I see—not that it makes me feel much better. Say…are you sure we can’t speak in Russian? I can speak Japanese to a degree because it was pounded into me years ago…but your Japanese is kind of stiff. It’s weird. It’ll give people the wrong idea and make them dislike you.”

“Denial. Topic of work will be understood, no problem. I will be hated. No problem,” Vorona replied.

From up ahead, Slon said, “I don’t really get it, but if it’s no problem to you, then that’s fine.” He wasn’t going to rack his brains worrying about it. He started driving the truck.

Meanwhile, Vorona had finished changing into her normal clothes and sat down on the couch. “That was too simple. Disappointment. Black Rider is too weak.”

“You say something?”

“No relation to Slon.”

“None of my business? Never mind, then,” he quipped.

Vorona waited for him to stop talking and then closed her eyes and let her mind work.

I am disappointed.

I thought a monstrous person like the one in the video would satisfy me.

But he was utterly careless. Nothing short of a mindless thug.

How could he fail to notice the special wire looped around his neck, connected to the traffic light?

I thirst.

…I thirst.

If youth was meant to signify the “spring of one’s life,” then despite the fact that she was twenty this year, she had not yet reached that point.

Vorona had never loved another human being.

Not even herself.

She knew that the emotion called love existed. But she was unable to determine if it was necessary in her life—for she had never experienced it outside of knowing it as an abstract concept.

As a child, she grew up by watching her father’s back.

But it was not because she idolized him.

Her father, code-named Drakon, had never attempted to see eye to eye with her. He gave her books to pass the time but always kept his back to her, focusing on any direction other than the one in which she existed.

“That’s just love. He’s turnin’ his back to you to protect you from the rest of the world, miss. Drakon’s just a clumsy, stubborn man, so he’ll never let it show, that’s all,” said Lingerin, the man her father worked for.

She did not understand what he meant because she didn’t know the meaning of love. She was merely bewildered.

But she never felt lonely.

Her father kept plenty of books around the house, and she had the right to read any of them whenever she wanted.

If she asked for a book, he would buy it for her without question or comment.

Lingerin was amused by the way she could read at many times the normal speed and would gather up strange books from foreign countries to give to her as gifts.

Surrounded by paper, she absorbed everything she could get her hands on into her brain, from knowledge necessary to survive to utterly useless trivia.

Her father did not love her, and she could not love anyone else. But she was not particularly unhappy about her plight.

She didn’t associate much with the other children at school, and they had been warned to stay away from her by their parents, who knew that her father was involved in a dangerous business. So she lived a solitary childhood.

Even still, as long as she had books, she was happy.

She had never felt the thirst—until the moment arrived.

The very first time she felt the thirst was when she committed her first murder.

The night that a burglar broke into the house and she killed him using knowledge she gained from a book.

Largely through coincidence and good luck, she made use of a method that she knew to kill a man.

She was just a little girl, just barely ten years old, who could hardly shoot a gun all alone.

The human body stopped moving much easier than she imagined from reading the books.

When she witnessed this phenomenon for herself, an eerie breeze blew into her mind.

It was several years later that she recognized the feeling that swirled through her mind was thirst.

When her father got word and raced home to see the motionless corpse of the burglar, he silently embraced his daughter.

He hugged her blankly, like a robot, but she could still remember the warmth of his arms.

The young girl thought.

I don’t understand, but Father is facing me.

He is making a connection with me.

Why?

What did I do?

Is it because I beat a bad man?

Because I killed someone stronger than me?

Because I was strong?

They were very silly, childish conjectures.

And even in her childish state, she could sense that it was undoubtedly something else.

But she was not able to understand love. And thus she could not have possibly understood exactly why her father hugged her.

Instead, she clung to a different premise. Or more accurately, pretended to cling.

After that, she began to learn things she couldn’t find in books from Denis and Semyon, her father’s subordinates.

Denis and Semyon were on the younger side within the group, but it wasn’t known what they’d done in the past. Lingerin, the company president, did not seem preoccupied with such details, and from what she could tell, Denis had been in the military, but that was it.

Just that little bit of information was enough for her. She asked the two of them for information on various weapons and ways to fight. Denis claimed that it wasn’t the kind of stuff to teach to kids, and the only things Semyon would teach her were about her own physical discipline.

But once she began helping out with her father’s business, they started to teach her how to use weapons, bit by bit. It was just a minimal amount, only enough for self-protection—but she turned those lessons into means to defeat others.

It started with hoodlums in town.

Next, the drug dealers with their weapons.

Next, a low-level mafia with battle experience.

Next, two of them, at the same time.

Next, three.

Then, four, five, six.

She raised the stakes with each successive attempt, and every fight she survived brought her the satisfying sensation of her own power.

One day, when she came across a rival group to her father’s company and learned that they were planning a raid, she approached the group by herself—and defeated them.

When Lingerin got word and visited the scene with his men, all he found was the air full of the smell of blood and gunpowder, and a little girl, totally unharmed, reading a gossip tabloid she found in her targets’ office.

This time, her father did not give her the warmth of an embrace, but a stinging slap across the face.

In that instant, she realized something—she was not shocked in the least that she had been slapped.

In fact, she understood, deep within her, that it was a justified action.

For years and years.

From the very moment she killed that first burglar.

And with that understanding came another truth.

If she knew that her father would not praise her, why had she done this thing?

Why did she continue to wage war against so many other people?

She hadn’t done it for the want of love.

It was simpler than that.

It was fun.

It was enjoyable.

It was thrilling.

It was pleasing.

It was deranging.

In short, she had been telling herself a cheap, transparent lie: that she wanted her father to pay attention to her. When all along, what she was really doing was indulging in her own pleasures.

Ironically, it was a worried slap from her father that made her realize this, but afterward, whichever direction he faced was no longer her concern.

With the stops removed, she rapidly grew more powerful and also steadily crumbled apart.

Lingerin likened her to a crow—very smart, yet choosing to scavenge the dead—and jovially gave her the nickname “Vorona,” along with an official position in his company.

Through Lingerin’s jobs, she continued to eliminate countless “enemies.”

But her thirst was never quenched.

Because her father never hugged her again, like that very first time?

No.

She already understood that was not the reason.

Was it because she was a bloodthirsty killer?

Technically, that was not the reason, either.

She did not really like defeating people.

She did not like killing people.

She just liked punching hard things and feeling them crumble.

Breaking through multiple layers of defense, cutting apart finely disciplined muscle with a knife.

Cracking through the fine seams in modern heavy armor—sometimes inserting gas, sometimes bullets—and shredding apart the fine, soft flesh inside the shell.

Confirmation.

All she wanted was to confirm.

It was a kind of desire for knowledge, perhaps.

Fragile. To her, humans were so terribly, terribly fragile.

But was that really true?

The first burglar she killed was far more fragile than she’d imagined, based on the books.

And so she thirsted.

Killing a person as a child had left a scar on her heart.

And just as some people cannot stand to let a wound go untouched, she could not go without picking at that scab on her heart.

Was it truly a human being she killed back then?

Are humans really so fragile?

Was she just as fragile as the others?

No matter how rigidly trained, no matter how heavily armed, no matter how experienced in battle—was a human being nothing more than a water balloon of flesh, hanging on bones as hard as quartz?

For whatever reason, she grew uneasy if she was not constantly seeking that confirmation.

She did not know why.

She just continued seeking out new foes…

And so she ended up working on her own, as a freelance jack-of-all-trades, in the biggest city of a country devoid of battlefields—but not by her own intention.

“Okay! As you just heard, I am everyone’s favorite idol, Eiji Takemo, and it’s time for today’s broadcast of Lightning Russian Paradise! My partner, as always, is this sweet bilingual baby speaking Russian and Japanese…”

“Я рад встретить всех вас сегодня! That means, ‘I’m happy to meet all of you today!’ It’s Kieri Murata! And why are you starting off with ‘baby’ right at the drop of a hat?”

“Whoa, whoa, what did you just say? ‘At the drop of a hat’ isn’t something a proper Russian would say! Kieri, you’ve got to eliminate that Edo Japan from your speech and work on exuding a proper Russian sexiness! You know, the way they do up north in the snow! Where you take off that heavy fur coat to reveal nothing but lingerie!”

“Замолчи Трилоби´ты!”

“Huh?! Wait! What did you just say?! You just said something in Russian!”

Vorona’s eyes opened slowly to the sound of a raucous radio program.

Half sleeping.

Slon must have turned on the radio up front. She looked at the clock to find that hardly any time had passed at all.

Through the wireless, she heard a familiar braying laugh drown out the radio.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Did you hear that, Vorona?! ‘Shut up, trilobite,’ she said! Even we don’t use the word trilobite as an insult! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Affirmative. But it is not worth laughing as much as you have. Also, I am slightly stunned by your knowledge to understand and translate ‘Трилоби´ты’ to Japanese.”

“Your dad taught me very thoroughly. He read tons and tons of Japanese newspapers and novels to me.”

“I escaped. Bond of family is cut. The next time of meeting, one of us will die. Too bad, so sad.” That shifted the conversation abruptly from mundane to deadly. But Vorona’s face was as devoid of expression as ever. “I have murdered the bodyguard riding the black motorcycle.”

“That’s good news.”

“When the child’s location is found, word will come. Until then, there is need to complete different job.”

“Right… You did accept another job, didn’t you? Do you really want to do it, though? I thought it wasn’t your style,” Slon asked.

Vorona pulled a book down off the shelf and flipped it open to where she had marked it. “There is no problem. We will act within the night.”

She picked up the photograph she had used as a bookmark.

This is the target.

It’s true. I don’t like this.

Hurting a normal girl, one with no training of any kind. I will feel guilty about it, and more importantly, it will be very boring.

Perhaps the client is putting the blame in the wrong place…but I cannot help it. It is my job.

Vorona resigned herself to the job and looked down at the photo again, committing its features to memory.

A girl with round glasses and reserved features.

Anri Sonohara.

The name written on the background sheet given to Vorona did not inspire any particular reaction.

It was only recently that she arrived in this city. And she had no particular interest in the neighborhood known as Ikebukuro.

Of course, even within Ikebukuro, there were very, very few who understood the true nature of the girl named Anri Sonohara.

But at this point in time, Vorona hadn’t the slightest clue what it meant to join that exclusive circle.

I am very disappointed by the Black Rider.

…On the other hand, I didn’t think he was going fast enough to knock his head off…

But what’s dead is dead.

Humans are weak, even the magicians.

She had only seen a brief snippet of footage from Yodogiri.

Which meant that she did not know.

She did not know what the Black Rider, Celty Sturluson, was called in breathless excitement by the national media of Japan.

The Headless Rider.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sever a head that was never atop Celty’s shoulders to begin with.

But that information could not be found in any book she had ever read before.

That was why she didn’t know.

She couldn’t be wary of things that were beyond the bounds of common sense.

If she was going to go to those lengths, she might as well be clutching good luck charms as she carried out her jobs, hoping for protection against the vengeful ghosts of her targets.

Celty Sturluson happened to be that far outside the bounds of what she knew.

Furthermore, Vorona never once noticed the abnormality of her own motorcycle.

Tangled around the rear of her vehicle was a very fine line about the width of a hair.

The pitch-black thread continued outside of the truck and off somewhere into the night.

And she certainly did not know the very unnatural source of that string was currently in hot pursuit.

May 3, night, Internet café, Ikebukuro

“And now…”

The voice was very upbeat and pleasant.

At the risk of sounding corny, anyone who heard that voice might say, “It was like the blue sky above was speaking to me.” That was how crystal clear and harmonious it was.

“Things should be getting interesting,” the voice’s owner said, looking at the text on the screen of the cell phone.

A handsome young man, looking very pleased with himself, was lounging in the middle of the Internet café.

At first glance, he might seem mild mannered, but his features were on the bold side, a perfect manifestation of the term suave. In contrast with his all-accepting smile, his eyes held a disdain for everything that was not himself. His overall look, fashion and all, was unique, yet no single feature stood out—an odd man whose nature was impossible to grasp.

Despite the fact that Izaya Orihara was sitting in front of a computer connected to the Internet using the café’s facilities, he ignored it and fiddled with his phone instead.

He absorbed the information flowing out of the little world nestled in the palm of his hand, filing it away inside his head, and muttered, “That takes me back to the high school days.”

He was giving a monologue, speaking his innermost thoughts aloud, but no one was there to respond.

The seats around him belonged to young people lacking a residence who rented those spots as a home for months at a time, but they were out working night jobs at this hour.

Izaya negotiated with the café proprietor to rent out his seat for a year. Whatever bargain he had struck with the business owner was apparently allowed as a special individual case.

He organized the information he’d just learned into a summary of the present situation and got to his feet.

It really does take me back.

Then again, my youth was a royal mess, thanks to Shizu.

If it weren’t for him, I would have done things so much better.

In fact, I think I must have spent half my effort in high school just trying to crush him.

Izaya waved to the front desk as he made his way out of the place. He chose not to take the elevator, savoring each and every step of the staircase as he descended toward the night street.

As the ground-level exit approached, a warm gust of spring air and the unique bustle of a shopping area enveloped Izaya’s body. He let the air permeate him and could not prevent a smile from twisting his lips.

I just can’t help it. Even imagining the scene makes me smile.

No matter how events play out…

Only I will be able to slip through the mosquito net.

* * *

One month earlier…

Izaya Orihara had been completely out of the loop for an incident that occurred in Ikebukuro.

He’d be lying if he claimed that this didn’t frustrate him.

He felt as if other people had left him behind.

Izaya Orihara loved people.

He did not love any individual person in particular.

He himself was human, and he loved the very thing we call “humanity.”

That might be considered a very grand form of self-love, but in his case, he did not count himself among the humanity that he loved.

No, more precisely, he was in love with “other people.”

That moment had been the perfect opportunity for him to observe the creatures he loved so much, but he missed it. During that incident when an enormous bounty had been place on Celty’s shoulders, he was left in the dust.

Calling this payback made it sound so petty.

It would be petty—but an undeniable part of the reasoning behind his actions.

He started this in the same way that a petty man would kick over a bicycle out of frustration at being left out of the fun—but the trouble with Izaya Orihara was that he was fully cognizant of that part of himself.

He was absolutely, objectively aware of his personal situation and emotions and continually chose the worst possible options for those people he loved so much.

Izaya Orihara was not an abnormal being like Celty or an invincible warrior like Shizuo Heiwajima. He was a perfectly ordinary human.

He was not even the calm and mechanical type, the sort who could kill without emotion.

He was a regular person through and through.

It was simply that he simultaneously possessed both the greed of a normal human being and the will to violate taboos if they stood in his way.

He was not some charismatic mad villain; he just lived true to his interests.

Back in high school, Shinra Kishitani told Izaya, “You know, you tend toward the evil side, but you’re not totally evil. But you don’t have a shred of goodness, either. If I had to sum you up in one word, it would be—sickening. I mean that as a compliment, though.”

Izaya snorted with derision at his friend’s comment, but he knew it to be totally accurate.

He forced his targets to be sick, spitting up their true natures, and he calmly observed from a distance safe from the splatter.

He just observed human nature.

Whether it was lofty ideals or contemptible bile that was spat up, Izaya loved and treasured all the answers equally.

They were all facets of the humanity he loved so much.

And today, he began a new game intended to expose the nature of people.

The players were assembled. The board was open.

He just had to roll the dice.

“Time to give those sweet, sweet kids at Raira a little present.”

“Just the right level of danger to promote a healthy level of personal growth.”

Izaya Orihara thought to himself…

It’s fine being out of the loop.

The people sleeping inside of the tent can’t kill the mosquito flying outside of it.

All I have to do is buzz my noisy little wings as loud as I can.

Over and over, without stopping, until the people inside slowly, inescapably go mad.

“A proper youth needs some thrills to spice it up.”

Izaya fiddled with his phone as he walked.

Shizuo Heiwajima, Simon, and his own two little troublemaker sisters.

He had numerous foes in Ikebukuro.

But he strode freely through the neighborhood’s streets—blending in with the city, silently, so silently.

The mosquito outside the tent began to ring his poison quietly into the night.

And for his first chirp, Izaya set off the ringtone of a particular young man.

After a few seconds, a timid boy’s voice came through the phone.

“Nice to talk to you again, Ryuugamine. Or should I call you TarouTanaka?” Izaya teased. He switched into a more serious tone to say, “I just checked the backlog of the chat room. I’ve heard a bit about this Saitama incident.”

“…Sounds like there’s some real odd business going on with the Dollars.”

May 3, night, Anri Sonohara’s apartment

The interior of Anri Sonohara’s apartment was truly simple; in fact, it was unbelievably tidy for the residence of a teenage girl.

It was typical for a serious, dedicated student to have a clean apartment, but in her case, this transcended clean into the realm of minimalism.

There was nothing to be found outside of living necessities. She didn’t even have any books or magazines to read for fun.

A TV and a radio also adorned the room, almost by obligation, while school textbooks were stacked on the room’s desk.

The interior was certainly lived in, but it was impossible to gauge the nature of the apartment’s resident just by looking at it.

Anri Sonohara was the sort of person who lived in such an apartment.

There wasn’t even a computer in the room, but she did have a cell phone, and she stared at the screen in silence, dressed in her pajamas.

It displayed a chat room that she logged into from time to time. The chat was managed by a woman(?) nicknamed Kanra, but Setton was the one who invited Anri there. No one had actually stated that Kanra was a woman, but as Anri was largely ignorant in the ways of the Internet and human communication, she did not know that there were men who pretended to be women online.

Celty wasn’t in the chat today. It was…nerve-racking…

Anri thought about the headless knight that went by the username Setton in chat and let out a long sigh.

Were there others in the chat who knew that Setton was Celty?

The question rose to her mind but did not lead to any further thoughts.

It was fun just watching the chat. But without Celty, her only actual acquaintance in real life, she felt more tension than usual being in there today.

Anri had been joining in at a Net café originally, but Celty recently taught her how to access the chat room on her cell phone, so she was doing her best with fumbling fingers to type in messages with the keypad.

As she didn’t have many friends, the chat room was a rare opportunity for her to communicate with others. It was a contact different from what she experienced at school, and she hesitantly, steadily dipped her toe into this new world.

Still, it was frightening to be there without the nickname Setton in the user list.

Realizing once again that she was a terribly weak person, Anri closed the Internet window and placed her phone in the charging cradle.

It was time to sleep. She reached out for the chain on her overhead light.

Just then, the doorbell rang, eerie in the night apartment.

She felt a nasty shiver run down her back.

It was eleven o’clock at night. Most people might not find the ringing of the bell to be eerie. But Anri did not know of any friends who would come by to ring it at this time of night.

Despite the eeriness, Anri couldn’t just ignore it, either. She headed over to peep through the hole.

She glanced around, but there was no one in sight.

“…?”

And then she did something she should not have done.

Under the assumption that she was safe with the chain on, she unlocked the door.

The instant she peered through the gap, an enormous pair of shears thrust itself into the doorway and clamped hard on the chain.

By the time the loud snap of metal echoed off the walls, it was already too late.

The door burst open to reveal…a woman.

Huh?

She wasn’t able to process it in the moment.

All she saw through her glasses was the figure of the woman.

The instant she saw the body shape under the tight clothing, she recognized that it was female. But the facial features were invisible to her.

The woman was wearing a ski mask with goggles over the eyes, completely hiding her head from view.

“Eeeh—” Anri started to scream—but the woman pressed the pruning shears around her throat before the cry could escape.

“Quiet. I will not kill you. You are relieved,” came a statement from the ski mask in perfectly accented Japanese that was nonetheless rather strange. “You will be immobilized for some days. Possibility of several months. But there is no need for death,” the emotionless woman said.

“Huh…?”

“I will avoid vital area. I will call an ambulance.”

“Umm…”

“You are very blissful.”

And with that, the woman drew back the hands holding the pruning shears—and plunged them directly toward Anri’s soft belly.

A few seconds earlier, driver’s seat of the truck

Honestly, if they needed some normal girl roughed up, they couldn’t have asked any local ruffian? Why did they need us to do this? wondered Slon as he sat in the driver’s seat of the truck, looking at the picture of their target.

Of course, you never know if some local idiot would get carried away and kill her, and if a man did it, there’s always the possibility for danger of a different kind… Maybe having Vorona do this was the right call after all.

He sat back in his seat with the engine idling and his thoughts equally idle, when…

He heard something odd mixed in with the sound of the engine.

“…? Thought I just heard something.”

At first, he was ready to dismiss the distant noise as irrelevant.

But he found that he couldn’t ignore it. The sound he’d just heard was the kind of thing he knew he shouldn’t hear right smack in the middle of Tokyo.

That sound…

Slon’s eardrums throbbed again with the same vibration.

I knew it.

Certain that he hadn’t misheard it now only made the question loom larger.

Why is there a horse whinnying in the middle of the city?

It was the fierce, eerie sound of a horse crying out.

Was there a racetrack or a stable around somewhere? He decided that had to be the answer, but it was still an odd thing to hear in such an urban environment.

If this were New York, he could assume that it was a police horse. But he’d never heard of such a thing being used in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.

And for another thing, this particular whinny was creepier and more “emotional” than any Slon had heard before.

What is it? Is that really a horse?

Just as his curiosity started turning into unease, he realized another unsettling fact.

The sound was steadily approaching.

…?

Sweat began to bloom on his back. Alarms blared inside his head.

Normally, it might be the sort of problem he could safely ignore. But his vast experience working for Lingerin the arms dealer gave him keen instincts, and those instincts were screaming danger. It was the same feeling he had when Lingerin pissed off that private security firm run by ex-Spetsnaz.

What is it…? What’s coming this way?

Slon held his breath, glancing nervously into the rearview mirror.

And he saw…

A motorcycle even blacker than the black of night.

And sitting atop it, an abnormal figure holding an enormous scythe.

Meanwhile, Anri’s apartment

The whinnying of the horse approached.

Vorona felt something alien in that sound, but any thought she might have devoted to it was absorbed in a different sound altogether.

Metal.

She should have thrust the shears into the side of the girl’s torso at a proper angle, enough to cause a hospitalizing injury. But the feeling that reached her wrists was not that of supple young flesh being pierced.

It was an unpleasant rigidity, as though the shears had bitten down on a metal pipe.

“…Что?” she mumbled accidentally in Russian.

She looked down at the girl’s torso to see that the shears were halted just in front of their target by another piece of metal.

Японский меч? (A katana?)

It was a long, smooth blade.

The gentle backward curve of the metal was like the surface of a pristine water droplet.

What…is this?

The girl was secretly holding a katana, and she brought it forth to intercept the attack—an unlikely conclusion, perhaps, but certainly possible.

Yet there was an even eerier phenomenon in Vorona’s view.

“Um…I’m sorry,” mumbled the target, who was growing the blade directly out of her arm.

“I don’t know you. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong person…?”

Anri Sonohara was a normal human being.

Up until five years ago.

Of the many fates of those who associated with the “abnormal” such as Celty Sturluson, hers was to house the abnormal within herself.

When Shinra’s father, Shingen Kishitani, cut the dullahan’s soul to sever the head from the body, he used a cursed katana to do it. And “cursed” was the only way to describe this particular weapon.

Shingen sold the blade, known as Saika, to an antiques trading shop run by Anri’s father. Through a series of events, her parents then died, and she wound up bearing the cursed blade within her own flesh and blood.

It wasn’t the sword’s fault that her parents died. If anything, without it, she and her mother would have died at her father’s hands.

It was a painful thing to accept that either way her mother would have died anyway, but Anri chose to accept the cursed blade as the price to continue her own life.

Anri thought how much easier things would be if only this cursed blade was like the ones in the old period tales, where the curse completely took over its victim’s mind.

Or how much more delightful it would be if, like in comic books, it would become a conversation partner that she could have a fun chat with whenever she wanted.

But the curse of Saika, the one she actually had to deal with, was much nastier in nature.

Saika had only one desire.

To love people.

To love all humanity.

That was it.

But to Saika, “love” meant being one with the other. To be one with all humanity.

She would sink her curse into all human beings on earth, filling them with her words of love, filling the world with “daughters” that shared her consciousness.

That was the entirety of the Saika system, Saika’s curse.

But Anri could momentarily hold back that curse. By viewing the world around her as though through the frame of a painting, she could reduce even the overwhelming, maddening words of Saika’s love to nothing more than a distant landscape.

At the moment when she felt her mother’s love and her father’s lack of it, Anri’s mother was cutting her own belly open with Saika. And thus Anri felt an enormous unease and a certain kind of kinship toward Saika and her desire to love humanity—as well as overwhelming envy.

Just look… See how much Saika is able to love something. She seems so blissful.

When she realized that was how she felt about it, Anri felt terribly guilty, though not toward anyone in particular.

Saika, meanwhile, would not save Anri from her plight.

Since she could not cut the host that gave her life, Saika determined that Anri was not a target for her “love.” Anri idolized Saika, and Saika used Anri, even as it was trapped within her. It was not quite symbiosis, but a kind of circular parasitism.

If there was one thing that Saika could offer back to Anri—

It was the many “experiences” that were chiseled into Saika’s consciousness.

The moment that the shears touched her body, Anri realized that she had already twisted herself to put distance between her and the woman.

The memory of all that battle in Saika’s mind flowed into Anri’s body. She unconsciously made use of it, using her delicate figure in the most efficient manner possible.

“I don’t know you. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong person…?” she asked, her brain hastily pushing everything through to the other side of the painting frame.

She saw what was happening as though it were a distant scene. Not that you needed to be in Anri’s shoes to lose a sense of reality when a strange woman with her face covered up attacks you with a pair of pruning shears.

Praying that it really was just a misunderstanding, and determined to handle things as quietly as possible, Anri consciously moved the blade growing out of the rip in her pajamas over toward the palm of her hand.

Like the tail fin of a shark crossing a sea of white skin, the tip of the katana slid down Anri’s arm until it reached her hand, where it burst forth. When the full glory of Saika was at last revealed, it fit neatly into her palm.

“Um…if you’re hoping to rob me…I have no money. Please leave,” she begged.

Vorona clamped her mouth shut and gave the girl an instantaneous examination. She found that the target’s eyes glowed a faint red.

As though the entire eyeball itself shone with red light.

John Carpenter’s remake of the movie Village of the Damned was known in Japan by the title Glowing Eyes. That little piece of trivia she read just days ago throbbed in her brain—not that it was any help in understanding the situation she now faced.

What is this? Vorona wondered, her brain full of question marks. What is this girl?

But her body still moved automatically. She twisted, plunging deeper into the sword’s range, and swiveled her elbow upward toward the target’s jaw.

But just as suddenly—

A shiver ran through her entire body.

A thought flickered into her brain: Oh, I’m going to die.

Vorona canceled her elbow attack and leaped backward. At almost the same moment, a flash of silver passed right before her nose.

Based on the location and speed, the slash was probably not meant to kill. It was a slice intended to hurt, not to cleave.

And what would happen…if I was cut?

She understood that the blade before her had appeared in a way that should have been impossible. Combined with the overall eeriness of its appearance, it was right to assume that even touching the sword meant great danger.

What is this girl? Is she…human?

She was an unknown—something that did not match Vorona’s knowledge or experience.

Coming face-to-face with such a thing brought about a complex emotional response within her.

…I feel…hot. I remember this. I felt this…before…

The sensation arising within her was very close to the sensation that she felt the first time she killed a person—right at the moment before she took his life. Vorona distanced herself farther from her target.

I have lost my calm, she recognized and tried to force her mind to cool down.

But just then, she heard the raucous horn of the truck.

—?!

She looked over to see that their vehicle, parked at the side of the apartment building, was flickering its lights madly to get her attention.

Emergency situation.

Vorona’s mind was ice-cold once again. She looked back at her target and announced, “You, mysterious. Very strange.”

“…”

“I will appear again. Happy to see you then.”

She ran off for the truck, careful to keep an eye on the girl so that she didn’t get sliced down the back. The target did not seem to be giving chase, but before Vorona could feel any relief at that, a new abnormality hit her ears.

The whinnying of a horse.

The bellow was coming from extremely close to the rear of the truck, and it floored Vorona with its eeriness. Still, she did not let it shake her too much and gave a curt command to drive as she passed by the driver’s side of the truck.

Tires tore against asphalt, hurtling the massive vehicle forward. As Vorona leaped onto the back of the truck, she saw the abnormality approaching—and realized that it was not an abnormality, but a monstrosity.

A pitch-black motorcycle without a headlight was slowly approaching. Not racing. Just pacing, measuring, confirming.

It was the very rider whom Vorona had decapitated minutes earlier. She recognized it at once.

Not because of the sleek black motorcycle…but because the person riding on it had no head above the shoulders.

…?

It was more confusion than fear.

Due to the rapid succession of bizarre events, she had to wonder if she’d been slipped a hallucinogen somewhere along the way. It could have been a dream—except that everything about it was too real for that.

In either case, it is dangerous.

The situation was too extreme for inaction to be an option, “just in case” it was a dream.

Vorona deftly opened the rear door of the truck as she clung to the back bumper.

—?

She noticed something odd.

She hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something like a fine thread running through the seam in the door and into the interior of the truck. It continued to the rear of her motorcycle.

The moment that bike became visible through the open truck door, the whinnying roared, fiercer than before, and the pursuing bike sped up.

That sound…it’s coming from the bike!

With this realization came another new fact about the black motorcycle.

Before, she hadn’t noticed because the exhaust of her own bike would have drowned it out anyway—but aside from the whinnying, the black motorcycle was not making any engine noise whatsoever.

Danger!

The street outside Anri Sonohara’s apartment was particularly sparse by Ikebukuro standards. There were hardly any cars or pedestrians to be seen.

But that would only hold true until the next light. After that, it was urban Tokyo as usual, the traffic network where cars ruled above all.

Even if the truck used its weight to muscle the other vehicles around, the motorcycle would catch up to them in less than a few hundred feet.

Danger! Danger! Danger! Danger!

Vorona’s decision was bold in the extreme, and the transition to action lightning fast.

She rolled into the cargo hold, ripping the cover off an object that was placed close to the door.

The Black Rider sped up all the while, closing in on the rear of the truck. But when the rider saw what appeared from under the cover, the bike instantly slowed.

The object was a gleaming mass of metal formed into a threatening shape: an anti-matériel rifle using fifty-caliber rounds.

It was a gun designed to attack tanks and helicopters, and if the right ammunition was used, it could pierce the hull of an armored tank from up to a mile away.

She had brought the rifle in the unlikely chance that they needed to escape police cars or choppers—but she certainly hadn’t foreseen using it in a situation like this.

Vorona got down on her right knee, lifted the gun, and placed the stock against her right shoulder. It weighed over twenty pounds, but she brought it into firing position with practiced ease.

It should be noted that using a fifty-caliber round on a human target is forbidden by international law. Vorona knew that fact because she had read it somewhere or other, and she remembered Lingerin saying, “You can’t shoot people with this because it blows them apart like red water balloons. It’s a bitch to clean up.”

But Vorona could not identify a motorcycle rider without a head as “human.”

Still, she did not aim it directly at the rider’s torso, either because she had her own misgivings or because the motorcycle itself was an easier target.

In either case, Vorona set the sights on the body of the motorcycle, as she had done to an armored car once in the past, and pulled the trigger without a second thought.

Eruption.

Ikebukuro rumbled with the sound of a cannon, and the pedestrians walking around outside instantly covered their ears, unable to pinpoint the source of the noise.

A few seconds later, lights turned on in the apartments nearby, and windows opened as residents peered outside to see what the commotion was about.

Vorona, meanwhile, was unable to see the result of her gunfire. The smoke from the anti-matériel rifle completely engulfed her.

The wind from the truck’s acceleration whipped the smoke clear momentarily, but for those few seconds, she was effectively blind—and when the smoke was gone, the Black Rider was gone.

Neither was there the wreckage of the bike.

Thanks to the unique make of the gun, the kick was not as bad as the force of the shot would suggest, but given the circumstances, she was not in the mood to continue firing it for now. She set the gun down to examine the surroundings better.

When it became clear that the black thread was still connected to the rear of her own motorcycle in the cargo hold, she took out her shears to cut the tiny sinew. But it was far tougher than she imagined, and she had no luck severing it.

“Slon. What has happened to Black Rider?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s gone for sure, but it’s not in the rearview mirror. Did you actually use that thing, Vorona?”

“Affirmative. It was an emergency.”

The truck eventually came to a stop—they must have arrived at a light connecting to a major street.

Vorona hastily shut the rear doors right as the light turned green, and the vehicle turned into the thoroughfare.

After a few seconds of thought, Vorona touched the black thread and traced it back to her bike, where it was tangled all around the rear of the vehicle. She took the wireless receiver and ordered, “There should be a scrapyard nearby. Head there, please.”

“What are you going to do?”

“My motorcycle was being traced. We will scrap it,” she muttered without emotion, a trait she learned from her father. She thought for a few more seconds.

“Or perhaps we might set a trap and lie in wait.”

Outside Anri’s apartment

“Celty…!”

When she heard the eruption of noise, Anri raced out the door without thinking.

She was still confused over the attack she’d just suffered, but even more surprising was the sight of a truck driving away with her attacker clinging to the rear bumper and the familiar monstrosity chasing after it.

A few seconds later came an eruption that sounded like a cannon going off. Anri ran out into the street, so worried about Celty that she was oblivious to her own danger.

“Watch out,” spelled a message on a PDA screen flying in front of her face. A hand reached out from the side and pulled her back toward the apartment.

Anri turned in surprise and saw the riding suit without a head atop it. “Celty! Wh…what?”

She’d just seen Celty riding off after the truck. Why was she standing here?

Celty shrugged and typed up a new message: “Well…it seemed like…I was going to get shot… So I put up a really thick shadow shield to block it, and it pushed me all the way back here. Or…blasted me, I guess… Yeah…that was kinda close…I guess. Shooter could have been…pulverized.”

Celty’s insertion of all those ellipses was probably a sign that she was still trying to process what happened.

Right behind her was the bike, and in Celty’s hands was a horribly distorted hunk of metal. That had to be what was left of the bullet.

“I was going to chase after them, but they clearly don’t mind firing guns in a residential area. If we get them too worked up, who knows what’ll happen to the people around here…”

“Guns…? You mean…”

“Why were they after you, Anri?”

“Actually…I have no idea,” she mumbled, looking troubled. “Do you think they’ll come back?”

Celty pounded her own chest reassuringly. “Don’t worry. You should stay at our apartment tonight. The security’s good there.”

“B-but…” Anri hesitated. Celty waved her hand back and forth in front of the space where her face should have been.

“Don’t hold back now. You’ve stayed there before! It’s already too big as it is—and we can think of a plan to deal with them!” Celty said, and Anri had no reason to refuse anymore.

“Th-thank…you…,” she mumbled, accepting the headless woman’s offer.

Celty, meanwhile, raised a hand to her own shoulder in consternation and typed, “By the way, do you have a mask or helmet or anything?”

“Huh?”

“I accidentally left my helmet out in the road…and when I went back to get it, a dump truck had squashed it flat where it lay… I’ll have to go back home to get my spare,” she explained desperately.

Anri thought it over. “Um…can you do what you did for me before and just make black helmets out of your shadow…?”

Silence fell between the two momentarily.

After ten seconds, Celty turned away shyly, forming a rounded shadow helmet, and held out her PDA.

“Right, I forgot…”

Thus, the first day of Golden Week came to a close.

Each and every being involved bore their own abnormalities, without realizing the troubles that others had fallen into.

The night passed, giving way to the morning.

The sunlight was exactly the same as on any ordinary day…

And the sun gazed down upon the disaster unfolding in Ikebukuro.

May 4, morning, Mikado’s apartment

Didn’t get much sleep after all…

He slumped into the desk chair in front of his computer, covering his exhausted face in his hands.

After hearing about the Dollars’ rampage in Saitama in the chat last night, Mikado had gone on a furious fact-finding hunt.

It wasn’t his duty, and no one else forced him to do it—but he couldn’t escape the feeling that he just had to do this.

As one of their founders, Mikado felt as though the Dollars were like a part of his own body.

They weren’t necessary for him to live. But just like cell phones and the Internet, once you made it a part of your ordinary life, it was very hard to cut loose. Such was the importance of the Dollars to Mikado.

On top of that, the Dollars were not booming in number the way they once did, but it felt like the group was still growing. Even Mikado did not have an idea of their precise number at this point.

And because of that, he was always fearful of the gang going out of control. He had even shut down the Dollars’ home page for a time.

When the circle of friends had just started the page, they created a joke rule that “all new members of the Dollars must confess the worst thing they’ve ever done” and then set up a registration page on the site.

That page no longer existed for two reasons.

One, the comment field to publicly confess those deeds wound up being used as a kind of chat forum and, at its worst state, contained links to pirated downloads and cracks for computer games found through other forums. It stopped following its intended function.

Two, the “confession of evil deeds,” which was created as a joke, steadily turned into something that was very much not a laughing matter.

At first, the entries were all about stealing snacks or drawing eyebrows on dogs, but the content slowly escalated until words like shoplifting and assault started showing up.

Then, people started looking down on others for the tepid nature of their confessions, trying to play up their bad side by bragging about their exploits. By the time they were writing things like “I shoplifted for the first time ever so that I could join the Dollars,” Mikado decided to shut it down.

The Dollars were created to be fun. They weren’t meant to destroy the world, or lower the level of morality in society, or play at being outlaws.

So if this rampage could be stopped, he had to do it.

He had no idea if that was possible or not, but he would be shirking his duty as one of the founders if he didn’t at least try to find out.

At least, that was what he thought.

Until he got a call from Izaya Orihara several hours ago.

“Hello, Ryuugamine speaking.”

“…Nice to talk to you again, Ryuugamine. Or should I call you TarouTanaka?”

“We haven’t talked on the phone in forever, Kanra.”

“I just checked the backlog of the chat room. I’ve heard a bit about this Saitama incident… Sounds like there’s some real odd business going on with the Dollars.”

“…Yes, I was just looking into that myself.”

“How much did you figure out?”

“I’m pretty sure that it’s new members of the Dollars doing this independently from the rest of us.”

“Yes, I figured as much. So what’s your plan?”

“Well, I want to stop them, but…”

“Why?”

“Uh…”

“Was there ever a rule in the Dollars that you can’t go into another prefecture to start a fight? What reason is there to go reining them in now?”

“But…”

“Or did that brouhaha with the Yellow Scarves make you wise up with the whole ‘playing street gangs’ thing? I’ve heard that it caused a terrible rift between you and a close friend.”

“That’s not true. Masaomi’s still my friend.”

“Let’s hope he feels the same way.”

“…Why are you stirring things up like this?”

“Oh, trust me, I’m just jealous of my alma mater juniors, thriving in the throes of their youth. I didn’t have friends like that, you see. I only had one pervert that kept sticking around and one hateful, violent cretin.”

“…”

“Anyway, back on topic.”

“Yes?”

“Whether you like it or not, the Dollars you created already have real form and power. There are going to be people who want to pull down others in order to sell the reputation of the gang…and thus raise their own reputation as well. It’s inevitable.”

“…I understand that.”

“It’s fine. The Dollars’ lateral connections are very weak, so even if the people from Saitama look for revenge against the ones who attacked them, all you have to do is stay quiet and let it blow over. Isn’t that how the Dollars work? You save the people you care about and sit back and be lazy toward those you don’t like. You have freedom. You’re free to do what you want.”

“…You called me just to say that?”

“Er, no, no. That’s not it. But the Saitama thing reminded me. You guys got attacked by those motorcycle gangs last month, right?”

“Um, yeah. We made it through all right, thanks to Celty and Kadota…”

“One of those gangs at the time was the one the Dollars just attacked in Saitama.”

“Uh…”

“Their leader has a terrible weakness for women… And he’s the kind of guy who will resort to violence in a snap. He kicks people down onto the ground, then jumps feetfirst onto their faces.”

“Wow, he sounds dangerous…”

“Very. So I wouldn’t go walking around at night with girls, understand? Like your friend Anri—I’d be very careful with her.”

“…Sonohara has nothing to do with any of this.”

“Does she? What if someone finds out that you’re a member of the Dollars and that there’s a girl you have feelings for…? There’s no guarantee that this hypothetical person is the sort that wouldn’t bring innocent people into this. They’re here for revenge, remember?”

“…”

“Besides, you’ve used the Dollars plenty of times already. Remember the squabble with Yagiri Pharmaceuticals? Do you really think you have the right to say, ‘Don’t do bad stuff,’ now?”

“…What should I do, then?”

“How about you think for yourself, rather than asking others for the answer?”

“What I think is that I want to do something. It’s what I’ve been telling you all along.”

“Ha-ha-ha. So I can’t coax you that easily. At any rate, if you don’t want Anri to be involved, and you yourself don’t want to get dragged in, then you should forget about the Dollars. Push them from your mind. If only until the heat dies down, you know?”

“But…”

“Let’s say that you really do want to stop the Dollars from beefing with other groups… Or you want to stop the Dollars from just randomly attacking other people… Even if you could achieve such a thing, it wouldn’t be the Dollars anymore. If your singular will could control the actions of the entire group, it would be something else entirely…but you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?”

“No, I understand that.”

“I happen to think that the Dollars fall under a much broader definition than just a color-based street gang. Maybe they’re not a country or a culture…but there are people with many different ways of thinking within the group. Some are good, some are bad. But you don’t know what people outside of the group will think of you. Will they see the good Dollars or the bad Dollars? That’s not a choice you get to make.”

“…”

“Sorry, I’ve been doing all the talking, haven’t I? Am I annoying you?”

“Er, no. Um…thanks. For everything.”

“…”

“…Is something wrong?”

“Mikado.”

“Yes?”

“Are you a bit excited?”

“…Pardon?”

“Oh, I was just trying to imagine what sort of face you’re making into the phone right now.”

“What kind of nonsense are you talking about?”

“Well, this is that ‘extraordinary’ you love so much, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean I’ll like anything, as long as it’s not ordinary.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure…”

“When you temporarily closed the Dollars’ site, you claimed it was because the registration page was being trolled and the confession of evil deeds was escalating out of control… I can buy the former, but I’m not so sure about the latter. Was it because you found them to be in poor taste?”

“Well, obviously.”

“If you really thought that way, you wouldn’t try to maintain the Dollars at all. You’d try to erase them and pretend they never existed. Or you’d just quietly slip away and be a normal person again. All you have to do to leave is ignore the e-mails. There’s no punishment.”

“I’m one of the founders… I can’t be that irresponsible about it.”

“Yes, you can. Nobody in the Dollars expects you to take responsibility. And if you still insist on doing so, that would mean you’re extremely conscientious… But you’re not actually that kind of person, are you?”

“What is this all about?”

“You know what? Never mind. You’d rather not know what other people think of you, would you?”

“You can’t just bring it up and then drop it halfway… Tell me. I’m not going to obsess over it.”

“You won’t? Well, this is only my personal conjecture, so don’t take it personally if I’m wrong. It’s just an info broker joking around.”

“Got it.”

“…It’s not the Dollars going out of control that you’re afraid of, is it?”

“Uh…”

“Aren’t you just afraid that they’re going to change and leave you behind?”

“That’s not true!”

“…”

“Ah…”

“You were very quick to deny that. You should be careful about hasty denial; it only increases suspicion. Or maybe you already recognize that about yourself?”

“…”

“You’re not a big fighter, and you’re not some trashy punk. I bet you’ve never smoked or drank in your life, and you’re disgusted at people who brag about committing theft. You’re a normal, productive citizen. That’s a very honorable thing, but I bet you felt bored with that honor and created and maintained the Dollars as a response to it. An escape from your ordinary life. Wasn’t that your dream?”

“…”

“See, I’m worried about you.”

“Wha…?”

“What did I tell you before? In order to enjoy your everyday life, it has to always be evolving. And it’s not the kind of thing you can bottle up, then just keep inside yourself.”

“Kanra… Mr. Orihara…”

“Just Izaya is fine. Kida calls me Izaya, too. You shouldn’t forget that even outside the Dollars, you have many people on your side. Not just Anri and Kida…but me, too, if you ever need the help. So you shouldn’t worry yourself sick over what’s happening now, all on your own. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

“Um…Izaya.”

“What?”

“Thank…thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything to deserve your thanks.”

“You never know. I might be manipulating you into doing some plot of my own… Just kidding.”

Mikado remembered the conversation and smiled wryly to himself.

I always thought Izaya was a mysterious, fishy weirdo who was always up to something.

But it turns out—he’s just a nice guy.

It was that easy for Izaya’s words to cheer Mikado up. If he hadn’t been so agitated about what was happening with the Dollars, he might have remembered what his best friend said on the day he first came to Ikebukuro.

“Don’t ever mess with Izaya Orihara.”

In a way, it was a crucially important warning. But that did not register in Mikado’s brain today.

Because Mikado still did not know the full breadth of what Izaya did to Masaomi.

After that, the boy focused again on devising a plan. Except…

“…I can’t come up with anything…”

He really was grateful for what Izaya said at the end, but he couldn’t deny that he’d also suffered a bit of a shock from their conversation.

He had no idea what he really wanted.

Do I…actually want to stop the Dollars from going out of control?

He didn’t actually know who had done what in Saitama yet. But it was undeniable that some kind of violence had happened there under the Dollars’ banner.

But I definitely don’t feel excited about this, he told himself. Yet deep down, he wasn’t sure that was true.

Yes, he wished to escape his ordinary situation more than anyone when he started the Dollars. That was essentially still true today.

Despite the fact that he met the greatest possible example of the extraordinary—Celty Sturluson—Mikado could sense that something was smoldering deep within him.

…I’m a coward. Just like Izaya says… I’ve never had a real fistfight with anyone, and I’ve never been beaten by a group of people.

It was presumptuous of him in the extreme to assume that he could control the entirety of the Dollars.

That feeling of uncertainty bloomed within him, and time passed without any change. Now there was sunlight shining bright through the window, and the hands on the clock said that it was nearly nine o’clock.

“…I don’t have any time left for sleep.”

He was supposed to meet with Anri and Aoba at eleven. There wasn’t much he needed to do in preparation, but if he started snoozing now, he’d probably sleep right through their meeting.

Fortunately, he’d napped yesterday evening after getting home from school. He was just pulling a nutrient drink from the refrigerator, assuming that he’d be able to manage, when—

The doorbell rang.

“?”

Who could that be?

Probably just a newspaper subscription salesman. They’d come by several times before, and Mikado always made up an excuse through the door to send them away. They typically left without another word, probably assuming that the run-down apartment didn’t house people with much extra cash to spare anyway.

But that didn’t mean he didn’t have money. In fact, Mikado raised all of his living funds aside from school tuition on his own. When his parents were against him moving to Tokyo, he convinced them by claiming he would work to pay for everything aside from tuition. Even then, his parents still sent him a bit of spending money here and there—but he gratefully deposited it into savings.

While his work was technically part-time, the variety of Net-based businesses that he worked with required a lot of time and trouble in total, so it was a significant drain on his schedule. Being able to pull that off and support himself while keeping up with his schoolwork was actually quite a feat, but Mikado didn’t consider himself particularly special. It was just what he needed to do on a regular basis.

He accepted the doorbell as another part of his ordinary circumstances and opened the door without thinking.

The bright morning world burned his late-night eyes, stinging the backs of his sockets. Mikado lifted a hand to shade his face from the sun as he looked out the door.

Standing there was the boy he’d met just yesterday and was scheduled to meet again in only a few hours.

“Good morning, sir!”

“A…Aoba?”

It was Aoba Kuronuma, the underclassman at school whom he promised to take on a tour around Ikebukuro today.

“What’s up? We’re not supposed to meet for another two hours.”

Huh? Something tickled at the back of Mikado’s head. Did I ever tell Aoba where I live?

“Well, actually, I needed to ask you about something before we met up with Ms. Anri…”

“You could have just called,” Mikado said kindly. “And, uh, who told you my—?”

“It’s about the Dollars,” Aoba interrupted, smiling.

A nasty chill crawled across Mikado’s spine. His face froze. Aoba leaned in closer, beaming angelically.

“It’s a little awkward to just stand around here, so shall we go somewhere else?”

At that point, Mikado realized something was wrong.

Someone was holding the door open. Not Aoba, who was standing in the entryway, and not himself, of course.

A mystery set of fingers was holding the edge of the faded door, visible against the sunlight.

Aoba filled the silence with an eerie suggestion.

“It’s okay if you need time to change. The group can wait.”

Twenty minutes later, abandoned factory, Ikebukuro

In a district at a slight distance from Ikebukuro, where the streets were much lonelier than the shopping area, there was a spot among a line of factories that was particularly vacant.

It was the site of what had once most likely been an ironworks. The gray metal walls were stained with rust in spots, the sign of several years’ passage since the property had been abandoned. There were piles of reddened scrap metal here and there, the machinery that would have processed them entirely dismantled.

For some reason, there was a nearly new motorcycle left in the factory, but its presence was less of an off-putting anomaly than a counterpoint that accented the rusted scenery.

It was a truly desolate locale, empty despite the clutter.

The inside of the dilapidated building rang with the excited chatter of youth.

“Whoa, what’s with the ride?” Aoba wondered. “This wasn’t here yesterday.”

A hefty youth standing next to him muttered, “Maybe someone’s hiding a stolen vehicle?”

The other boy was about as tall as Shizuo. He had tanned skin and tight muscles, the skin of his arms and neck that was visible under the tank top ribboned with tribal tattoos.

He wore a mustache over his menacing features—and certainly didn’t look like a student—but Aoba introduced him to Mikado as a “classmate from middle school.”

There were a large number of people surrounding Mikado now, in fact, and they jeered raucously at Aoba.

“Gross, there’s gonna be roaches and centipedes all over this place. Let’s go find some luxury hotel to use as our hangout spot.”

“You gonna pay for it?”

“Shut up and eat your roaches.”

“You eat roaches?!”

“Hee-hee!”

“How much will you pay me to do it?” “Three hundred yen.” “That’s it?!” “I’m in!” “Really?!”

“All right, let’s go find a cockroach! Get some oil to fry it up!” “You won’t eat it raw?”

“Euurgh!” “Don’t puke!” “But…I just imagined eating a cockroach…”

“Hey, Aoba, can I sock the shit outta these obnoxious clowns?” “Nope.” “Hee-hee!”

They had to be about the same age as Mikado. The assortment of youths in all stripes and shapes crowded around him, walking him toward the back of the factory. But other members of the group, present earlier but now absent, were clearly over twenty years old. They had driven the group to this place in their cars.

Why did I follow them here?

None of it made any sense. It was obvious that he shouldn’t have gone along with it, but it didn’t seem possible to refuse or run away.

At the same time, Mikado felt something eerie about this particular factory.

Wait…I recognize this place, he realized with a start. Oh! I was here…a few months ago…

But before he could travel any further down that line of thought, Aoba seated himself on a nearby pile of metal and looked up at Mikado.

“Last night, you were asking around on the Dollars’ member website about the fight that happened with the people from Saitama, right?”

The fact that Aoba was the only one smiling in his incessantly pleasant way was creeping Mikado out.

If Mikado had rather youthful looks, Aoba was practically a baby face. He didn’t look anything like a high school–age teen, and yet here he was, smiling innocently in the midst of a group of hardened ruffians. Mikado couldn’t help but get goose bumps.

“Y-yeah, I was. I had some concerns…”

“I know what happened. I wanted to explain it to you.”

“Really?!”

For a moment, Mikado forgot the eeriness of the situation, and life returned to his features. Ordinarily, the suggestion that he “knew what happened,” delivered in these circumstances, meant only one thing. But Mikado completely failed to anticipate that inevitability.

To Mikado, Aoba Kuronuma’s appearance, attitude, and position were about the furthest thing from that possibility. So even when it was stated aloud, he was initially unable to understand what the boy was saying.

“That was us.”

“…Huh?”

“We did that,” Aoba admitted, never breaking his smile. “Me and everyone else here… We attacked the people in Saitama, as members of the Dollars.”

“…Huh? What?” Mikado’s lips formed a vacant smile. He wanted to take it for a joke.

But Aoba’s childish, innocent expression delivered only the truth. “Look, you know that gang called Toramaru. The people who were chasing Mr. Kadota’s van and the Black Rider last month.”

“Uh, what? Ah, r-right.”

“We burned a couple of their bikes and hospitalized a good twenty or so of them.”

The menacing tattooed youth added, “To be accurate, you threw Molotovs right into the parking lot where they hung out, Aoba.”

Only when the statement came from someone who actually looked like they could do such things did Mikado finally put everything together.

“…Wha…? But…”

But his sense of reason refused to accept it. He could only flap his lips uselessly and stare at Aoba.

Aoba went on, watching Mikado’s eyes closely, soaking in the older boy’s reaction.

“We are in the Dollars…but we’ve also got another name.”

“…Another…name?”

“Have you ever heard of the Blue Squares?”

May 4, morning, chat room

Bacura has entered the chat.