Durarara!! - Volume 8 - Chapter Ep

Epilogue & Next Prologue: Heads = Tails = Edge; Izaya’s Return @ Möbiusloop

Chat room

<Private Mode> Saika: thank you so much

<Private Mode> Kid: It’s fine, I mean it.

<Private Mode> Kid: I didn’t think that I’d figure out how to use private mode before you did, though.

<Private Mode> Saika: i’m sorry

<Private Mode> Kid: Why are you apologizing? lol

<Private Mode> Kid: By the way, I was curious.

<Private Mode> Saika: what is it

<Private Mode> Kid: What does your username mean, Anri?

<Private Mode> Saika: saika? song of sin

<Private Mode> Kid: Yes, but is it from something?

<Private Mode> Saika: umm it’s a name from a fairy tale my mother told me

<Private Mode> Kid: Oh, I see… I hope that didn’t bring up any bad memories.

<Private Mode> Saika: no don’t let it bother you

<Private Mode> Kid: Whoops, sorry, I’ve got to go. One of my associates is calling for me.

<Private Mode> Saika: good night then

Kid: I was having a secret chat with Saika.

Kid: Doesn’t seem like anyone else is showing up, so I’ll leave now.

Kid has left the chat.

Awakusu-kai Head Office, Tokyo

“Are you all right, Akabayashi?” Shiki asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m just finishing up…now,” he replied, shutting his phone.

“Making some kind of deal?”

“You could say that. So what is it that you wanted, Mr. Shiki?” he asked breezily, addressing his fellow Awakusu-kai lieutenant.

Akabayashi rapped on the floor of the meeting room with his cane as he sat in his chair, a characteristically lazy leer on his face. On the other hand, Shiki was wearing his characteristic glare as he stood.

“Did you learn anything about the Dollars?”

“As much as anyone else might.”

Just a few days ago, the topic of the Dollars had arisen in an officers’ meeting.

The gang took form over the Internet, they said, but there were times that other groups copying their methods took to selling drugs and making a mess of the Awakusu-kai turf—thus raising the suspicion that the Dollars themselves might be the foundation with these others as offshoots.

“Do you mind if I handle this matter of the Dollars, then?” Akabayashi had offered, thereby assuming control of the situation.

“Have they taken any noteworthy, concrete actions?” Shiki asked.

“It seems to be a bit of a purge, actually,” Akabayashi explained. “From what the kids in Jan-Jaka-Jan were able to tell me, some folks within the group who were engaged in muggings and phone scams are getting driven out of the Dollars. The big story right now seems to concern a stalker of Ruri Hijiribe, though.”

“Ah yes…Kazamoto was furious about that. Something about his own subordinate being front and center in the rumors, treated like a stalker with his pictures floating around…”

“As a matter of fact, I saw that picture myself in a chat room unrelated to the Dollars. Had a good laugh.”

“It’s not funny.” Shiki snorted, exhaling cigarette smoke.

Akabayashi shrugged. “Oops, you’re right. Very sorry… At any rate, I don’t think we need to worry about the Dollars for now,” he claimed, but then he added, “Let’s just hope they don’t take their purge overboard and turn into some kinda hard-line cult.”

“I don’t care what they turn into,” Shiki snapped. “But if there’s a problem…I expect you to solve it, Akabayashi.”

“Shouldn’t you be the one on the lookout, Mr. Shiki?”

“?” Shiki narrowed his eyes.

“That info broker kid is under your jurisdiction, isn’t he?”

“…”

Shiki did not comment.

Several hours earlier, a liaison from Jan-Jaka-Jan, rubbing a wristband fashioned like a snake, delivered a personal report to Akabayashi.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on Mikado Ryuugamine, and it sure seems like he’s taking the lead in purging the ranks. I’m also concerned that he’s carrying it out with what looks like the old Blue Squares.”

Akabayashi got information on the Dollars’ leader by having one of his men in prison threaten it out of a man named Horada. After hearing that the boss was only a teenager in school, he assumed it really was just an Internet club, but learning that the guy was teaming up with the former Blue Squares to hunt down members of his own gang made Akabayashi curious.

“Also, while I don’t think it’s directly related…we spotted some Dragon Zombie guys for the first time in a while when we were staking out the Dollars’ boss. They could have been observing the Dollars, too. Plus—although I’m not sure this means anything—someone saw Izaya in Ikebukuro the other day. He’s been up to some fishy stuff. People have talked about him being Dollars for ages, so I wondered if he had something to do with this.”

So the Dollars themselves seemed all right for now—it was the periphery that was looking suspicious. Out of a sense of caution, Akabayashi decided to treat both Mikado Ryuugamine and the Dollars as a whole with careful scrutiny.

Then he got another report, one that was the most concerning of all, though it had nothing to do with business.

“I’m pretty sure that girl with the glasses that you helped out years ago was there, too… It seems like she’s…if not lovers with Ryuugamine, at least pretty close. We’ve spotted her leaving school with him, in fact.”

Anri Sonohara was the daughter of his first love, and Akabayashi cared for her like a much younger sister.

The fact that she had a relationship with the leader of the Dollars was troubling, though not directly related to his job. If Akabayashi weren’t the type of person he was, he might be worried sick about it.

“…Seems like things are getting fishy enough in public, too,” he muttered mostly to himself, but Shiki noticed.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, just a personal matter. Anyway, are things all clear with the info dealer? He was out of commission for a while, and I hear he’s come back out of nowhere.”

“Yes… As I’m sure you know, I do have him…chained, in a way. Aozaki was not happy about it, though,” Shiki said, his eyes sharp as spears.

Akabayashi chuckled, his own eyes hidden behind tinted sunglasses. “Of course he was against it. He’s consistently said that we shouldn’t let that ‘chain’ go free.”

“I was against offing the guy, of course…but I was against letting him loose, too.”

Nebula Medical Research Facility, Nerima Ward

Shinra Kishitani came to on a bed in a research lab where his father, Shingen, and stepmother, Emilia, worked. It was twelve hours after he’d been brought in, and he had been in critical condition at several points.

His initial state of consciousness was heavily dazed, his wits so faint that no one else realized he was awake at first.

What is this?

Despite his steadily clearing mind, he couldn’t move a finger. The only physical sensation he felt was a blanket on top of him. As wakefulness steadily arrived, he recalled the reason he couldn’t move.

Oh, right. That weirdo got me. No wonder, after I got the crap kicked out of me like that.

Hmm? What? Is there something soft resting on my stomach? Heavy, soft…double mounded…

C-could this be…Celty?!

Then his mind snapped to absolute attention, and he forced his eyes to open.

Pain beat in his entire body to the rhythm of his pulse, but he ignored that to look down toward his navel—where he saw a pure-white gas mask.

“I should have known! This is what I get for getting my hopes up!” he bellowed, the air ripping from his lungs.

The exertion rattled his airway, his chest began to hurt, and he started coughing. The racking of his body caused the gas mask to wriggle a bit.

Huh? The location of the mask seems weird… Is that not Dad after all?

His vision was clearing to the point that he could see that it was not his father wearing the mask—but his father’s second wife, Emilia Kishitani.

The mask had slid off her face and happened to be pointing at Shinra, while Emilia slept soundly atop his chest. She must have dozed off while watching over him and used his torso as a pillow.

Oh, it’s just Emilia. You know, the breasts did seem a bit too ample to be Celty’s. On the other hand…my ribs are broken…and this is kind of heavy…

A normal man might be aroused by the close contact with Emilia’s bountiful bosom, but given that she was his stepmother and not Celty, Shinra was merely disappointed. He didn’t even blush.

Instead, he began to nudge her body, hoping to slip her off him.

“Mother, wake up please! Where is Celty?”

“Hee-hee-hee… Shingen, I won with your mah-jongg discard. It is a royal straight flush. Now I am requesting that you remove clothing.”

“Is she…sleep-talking?! Ah! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow…”

His painkillers had worn off. Bones and muscles all over his body were screaming for help.

Just when he had largely given up on waking Emilia, the door flung open, and Celty charged into the room.

“Aaaah! Celty?! It’s not what you think! I woke up, and Emilia was already sleeping here…”

If it were a rom-com manga, Celty would have flown into a jealous rage and stabbed him. And in fact, Shinra was putting up a desperate defense in that fashion, convinced that she would stab him anyway.

Instead, Celty rushed up and reached over Emilia to fling her arms around his neck.

“Mgwuh?!”

His body screeched in protest at the awkward angle of pressure, but he merely smiled and blushed, his weakened blood pressure suddenly rising.

“I heard your voice coming from in here… I’m glad… I’m so glad!” she typed into her PDA and rubbed his cheek. She was too busy genuinely celebrating Shinra’s recovery to care about Emilia.

“I was so, so worried! Oh, if you had died, I…I might have taken your head back home with me instead of mine…”

“…I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be serious or a joke, Celty. You’re scaring me,” Shinra snarked, but in truth, he was jubilant. He lifted his arms to hug her close, ignoring the protests of his muscles—and paid the price of five extra days in the hospital for that.

Once they had fully celebrated their respective good health, Shinra brought up a question that had been weighing on his mind.

“So whatever happened with that stalker scare?”

“…I’m not sure, but I heard that one person turned himself in, Shizuo beat several more to a pulp before they were arrested, and then they ratted out more and more of their group.”

There were a number of startling facts about the case, including the revelation of multiple stalkers—but most concerning to Celty was that Adabashi, the ringleader, had not been found yet.

“It seems like he was the one who did this to you,” she typed briefly, but Shinra had the ability to sense her subtle emotional cues.

“Celty,” he said softly.

“What?”

“Don’t ever become a murderer over something trivial.”

You very nearly could have died! That is not trivial! she wanted to protest, but she took Shinra’s request as it was intended.

“Don’t worry. I’m going to search him out and find him, but I won’t kill him.”

She got to her feet and, with some small measure of guilt, typed, “I just…can’t promise he’ll be unharmed by the time I hand him over to the police.”

It should have been a frivolous incident.

But the events exposed an unexpected weakness within Celty’s heart.

Celty almost never got truly rattled by anything, even when shot with an anti-matériel rifle or attacked by countless cursed blades—and chased by motorcycle cops? Well, that last one was a different story.

But when she learned that Shinra had been attacked, the news rocked her harder than anyone else could imagine. In fact, from the moment that Shinra had been brought here until he had woken up, Celty had been so distraught that she had barely been able to even produce her shadow scythe.

“Your love for Shinra might, in fact, be slightly different from the love that human beings normally feel for one another,” Shingen had told her. “In a sense, it might be even purer than human love.” Once he had learned that Shinra was all right, he left the lab.

Along with this sudden revelation of weakness, Celty detected another change in her heart.

It’s the first time…I’ve ever wanted…to actually murder a human being. But the part that I truly cannot forgive is my own weakness.

The regret, guilt, and frustration that she hadn’t been able to protect Shinra acted like a stake in her heart, pinning her negative emotions down. The stake was still there when she left Nebula Medical Research Facility.

I reassured Shinra…but if I come face-to-face with that Adabashi character…will I really be able to cling to my sense of reason? What if I can’t bring myself to stop the blade in time and sever his body in half? This is bad. I’m losing confidence in myself…

Doubt and worry plagued her mind as she raced through the night.

She did not realize that for the past several days, someone had been observing her riding around on her motorcycle.

Backseat, luxury vehicle, Ikebukuro

“What do you think, Mr. Yagiri?” asked a good-natured man entering his silver years, a spry smile on his lips.

Sitting next to him in the back of the fine car was Seitarou Yagiri. “I see. It’s better than I imagined. From what they show on TV, I had just taken it for some wrathful monster that acted on impulse alone…”

“Personally, I would have preferred Ruri Hijiribe, but the stalkers were quite a disappointment, and I’m not sure what to do now,” the other man said, making a show of sadness, though the true depth of it was hard to ascertain.

Seitarou considered the Celty who passed the car window outside a moment ago and the Celty he’d just watched in the footage on the in-car monitor, and he exhaled a long breath.

“I’ll admit I was expecting to get a glimpse of Ruri Hijiribe’s extraordinary nature…but I have to say that the state of that Headless Rider has piqued my curiosity more than I figured it would.”

“Is that so?”

“I am filled with desire.”

“First you possessed her head, and now you want her body? Only a fairy can get away with such adulterous bewitching.” Yodogiri smirked.

“All of them,” Seitarou muttered.

“Pardon?”

“The body of the dullahan that fell into the trap of your latest promotion and the girl possessed by the cursed blade. And Ruri Hijiribe. And beyond that, the dullahan’s head that my niece made off with… I want them all. That is what I am saying to you.”

Seitarou cracked his neck and looked at the footage of Celty’s body on the monitor, his eyes gleaming like a boy pulling the wings off a dragonfly. “It seems that the body has given up on finding the head…but now I feel like experimenting with sticking them back together again. With them both fully under my command, of course.”

“…So you’re not just after an affair—you want an entire harem.” Yodogiri chuckled.

Seitarou snorted and snapped, “Enough crude jokes. Just tell me if you can assist me or not.”

“I can make the effort. If the dullahan and the blade wielder learn that I was orchestrating the stalking incident, I’m certain they will come looking for me.”

“Using yourself as bait? You are a strange man.” Seitarou sighed, but Yodogiri never lost his thin smile.

“Using yourself as bait is the best way to handle, kill, and sell off the supernatural. If Adabashi gives up my name, she’ll go to the ends of the earth to come after me. She’ll chase me and corner me. That is when you’ll see me at my best,” he proclaimed, then scratched his head in embarrassment. “But I suppose I miscalculated a bit. I haven’t had tabs on Adabashi’s whereabouts since last night.”

“…”

“I’m fairly certain I know who’s responsible… After all, he’s got a grudge against me for stabbing him. It’s not good for young people to be tied down to their past, don’t you think? Ha-ha-ha.”

Seitarou merely stared at his conversation partner, unable to determine where the boundary was between joke and truth. Then a thought occurred to him, and he asked, “I noticed that you look different from the way you were in the paper. Did you get surgery?”

“Yes. Well…the Awakusu-kai and the police are both after me. Wearing a recognizable face is no recipe for survival, after all. Ha-ha-ha.”

Seitarou looked at him with pity, but he wasn’t concerned enough to press further. However, unbeknownst to him, the man who once hired Vorona to kidnap Akane Awakusu and the man talking to Seitarou now were, in fact, completely different in both looks and voice.

What was more, if Seitarou had happened to be listening to the phone conversation between Yodogiri and Adabashi several days ago, he would have noticed that the voice of the man sitting next to him now was also completely different.

But as he was not aware of these things, Seitarou Yagiri felt little caution toward his riding companion. Instead, he reflected upon a conversation with a friend wearing a gas mask.

It was just a day ago that the friend had called him, right when the man’s son had been grievously wounded.

“You’ve really done it now.”

“Why, what a perceptive fellow you must be. Except that I haven’t done anything at all.”

“If you knew what was going to happen and did nothing about it, you are in essence an accomplice. With what has happened to my son, there’s one thing I can do for you as a friend…and that is to punch you as hard as I can.”

“Well, what are friends for? Then, the next time we meet, you’ll get your punch in. But I have no intention of allowing anything more than that, even to you.”

That was the end of the phone call, and the man hadn’t contacted him since then.

But Seitarou knew Shingen well and understood that he was not the type of man to back down and leave things at that. With that in mind, Seitarou chose to prioritize his own greed and made his twisted deal with Yodogiri.

He was more concerned about interference from Shingen than the man sitting next to him. He sat back, wearing a confident smile, and predicted his friend’s next move.

“He is a man who will use any means necessary. I wonder what he’s got planned…”

One day earlier, Rakuei Gym

In fact, Shingen moved quickly after calling his friend.

He chose his destination immediately after the call and headed there by foot. When he arrived, gas mask still attached, he proudly and confidently announced his entrance:

“For reasons that are private, I owe my longtime friend one good punch. However, you may be surprised to learn that I’ve never thrown a punch in my life! I want you to teach me a very good killer knockout punch—preferably one that is easy to learn!”

“Piss off,” grunted Eijirou Sharaku, cheek twitching.

But the man in the white gas mask who barged into the gym did not back down. He pulled out his wallet to continue the negotiation.

“I have money! Plenty of money! If you doubt me, it would please me to slap your cheek with a wad of bills!”

“It wouldn’t please me! And if you need a killer punch, why don’t you just use that? See? Problem solved. Piss off.”

“Damn… Well, I’ve been called a man who will use any means necessary…”

“…Whatcha gonna do?” the instructor asked warily.

Shingen leaned in and whispered, “You can wear my mask and turn into me, then wallop Seitarou with a Russian hook! How about that? Perfect, isn’t it?! And I’ll pay you to do it, too! One hundred thousand yen in cash!”

“…Actually, that is kinda tempting…gwuah!”

A fierce chop swung in and caught Eijirou on the side of the head.

“Stop this nonsense conversation and take over. I’m done already, so you’re in charge now, Brother.”

The attack came from a young tomboyish woman. She sneered at Eijirou and turned to leave the gym.

“Hey, Mikage! You better watch out, because I’m detecting a serious lack of respect for your old broth… Hey, what about dinner?”

“I’ll eat out.”

The woman’s appearance stood out thanks to her short-cropped hair and rippling abs showing through the part in her shirt, and if not for her face and the unmistakable swell of her chest, she could easily be taken for male. One might describe her as “active” or “sporty,” but “tomboy” really said it best.

After she left the building, Eijirou lamented, “I dunno what it is with her, but she always packs up early these days. I swear she found a man. Anyway, why am I telling you this?”

“Well…the finer points of your situation aren’t my business, but might I say one thing?”

“What?”

Eijirou waited with bated breath for the man in the gas mask to dispense his wisdom.

“I wouldn’t mind if that boyish girl there were the one to pass off as me. In fact, the idea of a woman dressed as me punching someone else is actually a turn-on, in a somewhat perverse way… What do you think?”

“Piss off!”

“Now, just a moment. As a matter of fact, my son is currently in the hospital. It occurs to me that if his father comes to visit having turned into a young woman, the sheer surprise of it might actually speed his recovery. Could you see your way to helping out a concerned citizen and—”

“Piss! Off!”

A short while after that odd-couple comedy routine played out at the fighting gym in Ikebukuro, Adabashi returned in a daze to his home, burns running from his back to his ears.

He parked his car in the lot and headed to the door, wincing in irritation at the pain in his back—but the injury wasn’t the only thing annoying him.

It was that his sacred love for Ruri Hijiribe had been interrupted by another. And on top of that, on his car TV, he’d just caught the press conference put on by her agency.

That picture of Ruri, the one he’d been preparing to send to all the media outlets, was already there on the screen before he was able to send it.

“Photos of Ruri Hijiribe’s latest movie leak online!” the segment raved. “Leak suspected to have occurred due to a virus on Max Sandshelt’s computer after he was browsing pornographic movies on the Internet!”

The shocking photograph was being passed off as a still from the filming of some top-secret horror suspense movie.

What? What the hell is that? How dare they… How dare they all try to block our love…

The combination of irritation and frustration filled him with a sudden impulse to destroy someone—anyone would do.

He clenched his teeth audibly and then saw a man waiting, standing before the building staircase. He was young, but he stood with his back to the light so that his face was mostly obscured.

“…”

Adabashi had enough sense to realize that causing an incident in front of his own place of residence was not smart, so he reeled in his raging desire and prepared to pass by the man.

But then the man addressed him first.

“Yo. Are you burned or something? Because you reek like charred hair.”

“…?”

“What was that from? Lighter oil or a Molotov? It doesn’t feel hot at first, but once your clothes are ablaze, that’s when it gets bad. By the way…who did it to you? It wasn’t that squinty-eyed otaku, was it? Hya…hya-hya-hee-ha-ha-ha-ha!” the man said, clapping his hands in delight.

Adabashi raised an eyebrow, not understanding what he meant, and made a simple decision.

I will destroy him with a kick.

He launched a full-frontal kick, ignoring the pain in his back—and in the next instant, Adabashi’s foot bent at a horrible angle with a tremendous sound.

“?!?!?! G-g-gaaah?!”

There was a thick rubber mallet in the man’s left hand, which he had swung right at Adabashi’s foot, timed to the rhythm of the kick.

Adabashi rolled and writhed on the ground, screaming in agony, while the man beamed down at him. It was the same kind of smile Adabashi wore when he smashed photos of Ruri Hijiribe to dust.

Through his seething moans, Adabashi focused enough to look up at the man’s face, dimly lit by the streetlight.

He was maybe twenty years old at most—and covered in deep, dark burn scars that ran from the right half of his face down to the end of his arm.

“I’ll…kill…you…” Adabashi grunted, reaching and straining for the man.

Then something slammed into the back of his head, instantly knocking him into deep darkness.

In the post-screaming silence, a woman’s voice said, “What kind of game are you playing? Do you really want to go back to juvie?”

It was a woman with close-cropped hair and boyish features: Mikage Sharaku. She was the one who had kicked Adabashi in the back of the head to knock him out as he was rolling on the ground.

The man with the hammer said, “Shut the hell up… You don’t tell me what to do! Ha-ha… Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Heee-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The burned man laughed and laughed, though it wasn’t at all clear what was funny.

Behind him, a number of men appeared, wearing bone-motif riding jackets. They lifted Adabashi’s unconscious body and hauled him into a van parked in a corner of the lot, then drove it away just as quickly.

“Well, whatever. C’mon, let’s go,” she said to the laughing man, and they left as well.

The only evidence of the scene was a few bloodstains from Adabashi at the entrance of the building.

Chat room

Sharo: And it took thirty minutes to get the guy in the gas mask out of there.

Chrome: What a disaster.

Saki: A white gas mask? That’s really something.

Kanra: Was this guy actually real? You aren’t pulling our leg, Sharo? lol

Sharo: Absolutely serious.

Mai: I wanted to see it.

Mai: I should have practiced late.

Kuru: It is a true modern urban legend. We should create a rival legend to match the Black Headless Rider. Call him, say, the Gas Mask Freak. I daresay his true identity is made of gas. If he removes the mask, his body dissipates into a gas and vanishes into thin air!

Kanra: Scary!

Chrome: You know, there was that old movie called The Human Vapor.

Kanra: Oooh, are you a movie buff, Chrome?!

Chrome: I like movies as much as anyone else does.

Sharo: The Human Vapor is a pretty old one…

Kanra: You’ll have to give me some suggestions, then!

Chrome: That’s a good idea…

.

.

.

Luxury apartment building, top floor, Ikebukuro

Namie Yagiri was stunned.

She tensed up and nearly dropped the documents she was carrying.

At her old company job, she was famous for having ice in her veins, but now she was nearly on the verge of tears.

She was facing a laptop computer and a small netbook set up on the desk—and seated between them, taking turns typing at each one, was a man.

The same chat room was displayed on both computers. He was logged in as Chrome on one computer and Kanra on the other, holding a conversation with himself and even humming. For the very first time, Namie found herself feeling sympathy for the man.

I could always tell he didn’t have any friends…but I didn’t think he’d turn to chatting with himself online…

She shook her head, pretending she hadn’t seen this, and turned away. Then Izaya Orihara leaned back toward her and cackled, “Ah-ha-ha. You’re probably thinking that the guy with no friends is up to something weird, huh?”

“It’s not weird. It’s pathetic.”

“Call it whatever you like. Having multiple personas out there on the web just makes it easier to manipulate the collective opinion, see…”

He had each account announce that they were logging off, then shut the computers and stood up. “Plus, it’s very rude of you to say I have no friends. I love all the people of the world, and everyone is my friend and lover, okay?”

“Forcing your love on people is just how a stalker thinks.”

“Really, now? Coming from you?” he shot back.

She glared at him. “And why did you rent this huge place in Ikebukuro, anyway? You’re actually going to get yourself killed by that bartender this time.”

The mention of the word bartender brought a brief scowl to Izaya’s face, but it soon vanished as he explained, “Well…the reason I came back to this neighborhood was to provide some troubled youths a life without relief or solace, I suppose.”

“Huh?”

“You see, relief is what stalls development. Take Shinra, for example. No matter what he gets involved in, he has the relief of knowing that Celty and Shizu are out there to help him out of it. And that attitude ended up getting him into the hospital this time. So I intend to be very harsh to my friends now. Out of friendship. If Shinra calls me up to tell me he’s been hospitalized, I’ll say, ‘Oh,’ and hang up on him.”

“That’s not harsh. That’s just being an asshole. And would he ever call you on the phone, anyway?”

Izaya ignored Namie’s comment and leaned back on the desk to take in the room around him.

“Of course, I consider everyone in this room to be a friend, too.”

In fact, there was quite a variety of humanity there with them:

A girl loitering next to a bookshelf and staring daggers at him.

A number of men and women in leather jackets with the backbone pattern of Dragon Zombie on them.

A smiling woman with red eyes and thin black hair down to her waist.

A large man dressed in bandages, who was at least six feet tall.

A thin man passed out on the ground, his leg broken.

A number of men with shaved heads near the entrance of the room, their demeanor marking them as mobsters.

There were other men and women of varying degrees of eccentricity elsewhere in the room, all of them listening to Izaya with different facial expressions.

One man who bore ugly burn scars on his face leered viciously. “Well, I never considered myself a friend of yours… All I can say is that I wanna kill Yumasaki and Kadota, I wanna kill Aoba, I wanna kill Masaomi Kida, and then I wanna kill you at the end before I can really be happy.”

“Knock it off, Izumii,” said Mikage Sharaku, who was next to him.

But Ran Izumii continued, “That’s right, Yumasaki…Yumasaki… Ooh, that otaku fuck… I’ll kill him so bad… Roast that smirking face of his until he looks just like me… Ha-ha… Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

The others around Izumii watched him as he went from muttering to full-blown laughter. Izaya stared right at him, still smiling, and said, “For having such a cute name, you approach things in the most extreme manner, Ran. But that just makes you more human to me.”

Then he paused, spread his hands, and addressed the entire room.

“Welcome to the Dollars. The Dollars will welcome you all equally.”

Then he turned to the wall-spanning window and gazed down at Ikebukuro, full of wonder.

The girl in the shadow of the bookshelf spat, “Get sniped,” but he ignored that curse and lifted something from the table.

He tossed it up into the air like a basketball, then caught it before pointing it toward the view of the city.

“It’s a familiar sight to you, too, isn’t it?”

And so the man who waltzed back into Ikebukuro held Celty’s head up in the palm of his hand with great delight—and showered the beloved people in the room with one of his most beatific smiles.

“So, as a sign of our close friendship…why don’t we have a little hot-pot party, everyone?”