Durarara!! - Volume 6 - Chapter 3.3

Interlude or Prologue D, Masaomi Kida

May 3, inside a Shinkansen

“These bullet trains are amazing, aren’t they?”

Her eyes shone like the sea at night as she gazed out the window.

The scenery flowed past like wind and occasionally left nothing but the reflection of the car interior against the glass.

He met her eyes in that reflection and smiled gently. “What about it is amazing?”

This question would normally prompt certain answers: the speed of the train or the fact that such a huge piece of metal could move at all. But he knew that the girl sitting next to him was too old to consider such innocent, childish thoughts worthy of mention.

She craned her neck to look straight at him this time and gave him a meek smile.

“How straight it is.”

The abstract answer put an awkward look on his face. He replied, “You’re always going to be weird, Saki.”

“Is that a fact? Not as much as you, Masaomi,” the girl named Saki said, the grin still stuck on her face like a doll’s.

“Really? Am I that weird?”

“Yes. You hate Izaya so much, but you’re perfectly content with running errands for him. You’re really twisted, you know that? Like a Tokyo subway map. But I like that about you.”

She beamed like a little boy who’d just caught an impressive stag beetle. He shifted his face away from her uncomfortably but turned his eyes in her direction.

“And you never fail to be blunt about the things that are hard to say, Saki.”

Masaomi Kida was riding the Shinkansen back to Tokyo with his girlfriend, Saki Mikajima.

For personal reasons, he had quit school and now lived together with her. Masaomi’s parents practiced a hands-off approach, so they didn’t have any apparent intention of scolding this behavior.

Once Masaomi and Saki became former high school students, they found that it was difficult to be independent—and so Masaomi ended up doing odd jobs for Izaya Orihara, the very man who had put him in his current predicament.

Masaomi understood that Izaya’s encouragement had caused him to lose many things.

But he also knew the responsibility for taking those steps forward lay in no one but himself.

The Dollars and Yellow Scarves were two gangs that made their home in Ikebukuro, and a midscale conflict arose between them.

Fortunately, they were able to resolve the situation before it went truly large-scale, but over the course of events, Masaomi had created an enormous rift between him and the friends he truly cared about.

He had dug that rift.

Perhaps the others could simply leap over the crevice without worry.

But Masaomi could not step over it himself.

He was too afraid of seeing his old self in the darkness at the foot of that chasm.

Ultimately, Masaomi was unable to jump over it and unable to back away. His method of fleeing the situation was standing still, right on that very spot.

Inward, always inward. To ensure that his own shell couldn’t overtake him.

Dragging the half-broken girl at his side with him.

Now he was on the Shinkansen, heading back to Tokyo.

As an errand boy for Izaya Orihara, he’d just been in a city in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. The trip ran longer than he expected, and he’d been away from the capital for a week.

The final few days sent him so far into the mountains he could barely get a cell signal, which cut him off from the rest of the world. Saki had never been addicted to the Internet or cell phones, but Masaomi found the experience to be alienating.

The Internet continued onward without his knowledge. The sensation that he was being left behind filled him with an awful unease.

“You’re way too tied down to the Internet, Masaomi. What are you, a masochist?” Saki laughed.

“What do you mean, masochist? Don’t you know how handy the Net is?”

“Even the people you can just meet in person, you only contact through the Internet.”

“…It’s not strictly by choice. I can’t see them in person.”

“Convincing yourself of that is what makes you masochistic. You’d feel a lot better if you just saw them.”

She hit him right in the sore spot again.

He snorted in denial, but on the inside, Masaomi was examining his own heart.

The fact that he always considered himself to have absolutely no addiction to the Internet only made this feeling of being left out all the more troublesome.

Maybe I’m just getting homesick because I can’t goof around in the chat room with those guys like I always do.

…I can’t even talk to Mikado except online, too.

Every time he pictured the face of the friend he’d cut himself off from, he’d shake his head and scold himself for wallowing in emotions. It wasn’t his style.

After repeating the process a few times, he forgot about his feeling of haste.

Therefore, he hadn’t yet noticed something.

Within the impatience bubbling inside him at being cut off from the Internet, there was a small but sharp foreboding he felt about the sudden mission that Izaya sent him on.

Neither did he notice that the tiny premonition was absolutely correct.

May 4, morning, Tokyo

Masaomi and Saki got back to Tokyo on the night of the third, and because he had to report to Izaya and handle some routine tasks, they were still awake when morning came.

He booted up his PC when they got back to his apartment. For some reason, the desktop came up instantly, as though it had been on sleep mode the entire week he was gone.

“What’s up, Masaomi? Going to surf the Net before you sleep?”

“Yeah, just gonna check the chat room for the first time in a week.”

Izaya had introduced him to this chat room. Mikado was one of its frequent members.

Not only was it a handy connection to his friend, it was also a useful place to gauge what things were like in Ikebukuro.

Masaomi opened the page, hoping to find out what, if anything, had changed in the week he was gone. The chat room was in a blank, initialized state—there was no backlog to it at all.

“…Huh. The backlog is gone. Did they have another spammer?” Masaomi wondered aloud briefly, then dismissed the thought and typed in a generic greeting.

“Maybe everyone vanished.”

“Don’t be scary,” he replied, laughing off her joke.

A part of him felt a momentary shiver at Saki’s words, but he told himself it was nothing.

Because he had been away from the Internet for a week, he had no inkling about what had happened.

He had no idea that someone had taken his username in the chat room (Bacura) and adopted it to manipulate the mind of his best friend.

Nor did he know that his friend was currently rushing headlong into a terrible disaster on account of it…

Not the slightest inkling.