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The entire scene had only taken a few minutes. She was a monster. He just lost the sight of one of his eyes forever. Anyone would assume that his sanity had buckled under the extreme circumstances.

But the man’s brain was operating quite normally, successfully withstanding the pain and loss of that eyeball. It was much later that he realized that not only was it “love at first sight,” it was also “love at single sight.”

A person he’d only ever identified as a target to be hurt—a “weak, fragile” woman—had turned out to be a presence every bit his equal, completely capable of killing him.

The ghostliness of those glowing red eyes, the feminine figure, the flowing black hair melting into the darkness of night—all these things melded together in womanly beauty and enchanted his heart.

He’d never professed love before.

This innocence, his first ever feelings of romance, got under the cracks of his protective pride—his violence—and shot it someplace far, far away.

But that very first confession ended in failure.

“…Thank you. I’m very flattered that you said you love me, even like this,” she chuckled with a hint of sadness. “But I’m afraid I can’t return the feeling.”

She shook her head and spoke the only two words that could cut him deeper than her katana already had: “I’m married.”

“…!”

“I still love my husband and daughter. So I can’t reciprocate your sentiment.”

The sheer finality of that statement made his knees quake. Whether through sadness, anger, embarrassment, or the strange beauty of her rejection, he promptly slapped his cheeks with both hands. The blood drooling from his mutilated eye socket stained his hand even further. Intense pain shot through his face.

But he held fast without yelling, silencing the trembling in his knees through willpower alone.

“I see… That’s too bad. But…can I at least get your name?”

“…”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to bother your husband or daughter.”

She seemed hesitant, but something in his gaze eventually convinced her. She summoned up some level of commitment and said, “That’s right… If you harm my daughter or husband, I will cut you down with everything I have.”

“Ha-ha… I’ll have earned it.”

“My name…is Sayaka Sonohara.”

The name jolted him.

Sonohara.

The name of the antiques dealer he was just about to go beat up.

“Well, well… I guess it’s fate. You just saved your hubby.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Talking to myself.” He smirked. Then he turned his back on the slasher and walked away from the scene. “My name’s Akabayashi. Let me know if you ever get tired of that husband of yours.”

“Believe me, I’m a worthy enough man to take care of both you and your daughter.”

Present day, Ikebukuro, taxi

“Yo, Akabayashi,” said a familiar voice over the phone.

“Is that you, Aozaki? You really do love calling me when I’m in a taxi, don’t you?”

“I don’t give a damn about your schedule or where you are.”

“So what’s the call about, then? If it’s about the young miss, things have calmed down a bit.”

“Nah. I just called to say my farewell,” said the low-pitched, jovial voice through the phone.

“Why’s that? You gonna kill me once and for all? Or are you staging a mutiny and leaving the Awakusu-kai?”

“Don’t be a moron. You know there’s nothing to be gained in that.”

“Of course not. If there’s one thing that’s real about you, it’s your devotion to Chairman Awakusu.”

“Just shut up and listen,” Aozaki snapped in irritation. “You’ve been living too free these days.”

“Those ghosts from five years ago have come back to destroy you.”

May 5, night, ruined building

Quite a ways away from the center of the city stood an unfinished building, its construction halted for some reason or another.

The first two floors were finished like any other building, but everything above that was stuck in skeletal form, the concrete bars standing open in the air and looming eerily over the night.

Men quietly surrounded the building.

“That him?”

“Yep, it’s him.”

The men in hoodies had bandannas wrapped around their faces. What little skin could be seen of their arms and necks featured fake tattoo stickers with similar patterns. They carried metal pipes, knives, two-by-fours studded with nails, and other crude weapons. These weren’t youngsters about to enjoy a spooky rite of passage at a haunted abandoned building—they were outfitted to bust those ghosts themselves.

“I can’t believe we’re gettin’ paid two hundred thousand just to wax that old man.”

“Even better, they said they’re also gonna give us the lion’s share of the shipment when we re-up.”

“I heard they were gonna raise our commission on deals.”

The information each of them possessed was varied and wild-eyed, but the tattoo-stickered men all shared one particular fact: Their job was to go into the abandoned building and kill the man named Akabayashi.

Hardly any of them knew that he was a lieutenant of the Awakusukai. For the most part, they were unaware of the Awakusu-kai at all. But they were drug dealers drawn to a reward for killing a man, so it was possible that even if they did know what the Awakusu-kai was, they would still leap at the offer.

In essence, they were the lowest, most disposable pawns in the drug operation. But here they were, right at the destination of their target.

“Man, the Dollars are so useful,” one of them said, staring at his phone. Earlier this evening, he posted to the Dollars’ message board a picture of Akabayashi attached, saying, “I’m looking for this man. I owe him my life, but I don’t know where to find him! Let me know if you see him, so I can thank him!”

And in the very same evening, they found out that he used this abandoned building as a hideout.

“Just when I figured we’d never find his lair, it turns out he’s doin’ a homeless gig.”

“I dunno, man, I heard he’s crazy tough.”

“Nah, no worries,” said another of the gang. He held up a cylindrical object: a Molotov cocktail. “I brought a couple of these, so we can just burn the building down.”

He seemed gung ho on the idea, and the others laughed and agreed that it was a good plan. Some of them grabbed the bottles with eyes glazed over; they’d clearly been dipping into their product.

“So once he runs outta the building, we just nab him, take him out into the hills, and…end of story.”

“Exactly.”

“Let’s burn it down.”

They all laughed, including the ones who still looked sober. In that sense, from the moment they put on fake tattoos, they were already losing their grip on reality.

The same moment, inside

“…I can’t believe you’d show yourself like this, Akabayashi,” said a stone-faced man, sitting on a toppled oil drum inside the abandoned building. There were nearly a dozen men with him, all clearly members of the underworld.

Standing across from them, dressed as usual with walking stick in hand, was Akabayashi. He maintained his breezy, aloof manner in the face of their open loathing and said, “Well, it’s a summons from the gentlemen who taught me so much, back in the day. I can’t just blow that off.”

“You talk different than you used to. Was that all just an act to fool us back then? Or are you playing coy like this now so you can devour the Awakusu from the inside like you did to us?”

“Actually, you may be surprised to learn that people change and grow. I always assumed that I would be the same person forever after I hit twenty…but the thing is, shocking experiences have a way of changing you,” he announced, rapping the floor with his stick. “Such as being attacked by a slasher on the street or falling in love with a woman at first sight for the first time in your life.”

“Cut the bull—”

“On the other hand, you said you wanted to talk one-on-one, but it looks like you’ve got quite a gathering of familiar faces here. Unless I’m mistaken or hallucinating?” Akabayashi said, cracking his neck as he surveyed the group.

The other man’s expression softened a bit. “That’s right, I’m the only one talking. No guarantees about anything else, though.”

“Ah, I see. I didn’t see any cars around the building, though. Did you all walk here?”

“…?”

The confident smile never left Akabayashi’s face, even in his present danger. The other man cautiously replied, “No…we thought you might get spooked and run. So we parked them a ways off. But I didn’t really think you’d show up. If necessary, we were going to rustle up someone you knew and kidnap them as a hostage.”

“Which is exactly what I showed up to prevent. But it helps that you don’t have cars,” Akabayashi said, scratching his cheek. His grin deepened.

“…?”

“Well, if you had lots of cars around, you might get spooked and run, after all.”

“What the…hell are you talking about?”

“My line of thought was the same as yours. Yeah, we can talk one-on-one, but I’m not so much of a hero that I’d bother to fight you all on my own.”

“?!”

Suspicion flitted across their faces.

Did the Awakusu betray us?

They tensed up, preparing for some sudden sign, but they still needed to find out what Akabayashi was really doing.

“So…you really don’t realize that the Awakusu left you out to dry, do you, Akabayashi?”

“What’s that? You already cleared this up with the boss?” he replied.

Now the other man was truly confused. “The Awakusu-kai will not interfere with you and me in any way. You might have thought you called for backup, but no one’s going to—”

Ktok.

Right in the middle of the man’s menacing speech, Akabayashi cut him off by rapping the bottom of the stick on the floor.

“Ha-ha-ha. When did I say anything about the Awakusu-kai?”

“?!”

“It never occurred to you that I might have connections beyond just the Awakusu?”

“No way…!”

Belatedly, the men reassessed the fact that they had called Akabayashi here to make him pay the price for killing their old boss. A nasty sweat broke out on their backs.

Did he bring in yet another yakuza gang…?

“…You’re bluffing.”

“Think so? Go ahead and look out the window,” Akabayashi taunted.

The man glanced over at one of his companions, signaling that he should look outside. The bald man sucked in his breath and headed for the window. He approached the empty window frame carefully, keeping his weight low as he watched for snipers.

Suddenly, the room was full of the sound of breaking glass.

But the building was incomplete, and there were no panes in the windows. The source of the sound was soon quite apparent.

The man with the shaved head instantly began to scream, his body enveloped in flames.

“Aaauuughh! Gaaaaahhhh!”

Some kind of liquid was spreading on the ground, and a second later, it, too, was ablaze.

They realized it was a Molotov cocktail immediately, but before their bodies could react to that knowledge, more flaming bottles entered through the window, shattering in rhythm.

“Outside! There are people outside!” screamed the bald man, who had succeeded in putting out the flames on his face by rolling on the ground. Just before the first bottle had hit him, he’d seen a crowd of figures surrounding the building.

Some of the men inside rushed farther to the back of the room, while others headed for the window on the opposite side. One of them put his back to the wall, peering through the window from the side—and pulled out a gun.

Without hesitation, he started firing into the crowd outside.

When the very first pop went off, the drug dealers assumed that something inside the building must have exploded. They only realized their mistake when one of them trembled and crumpled to the ground.

“H-hey, what just…?”

“Oh, G-God, my…my leg…”

There was a round hole in the thigh of his jeans, with a red stain spreading outward from it. They only realized it was a bullet wound when the second and third shots rang out.

“Oh, shit! It’s a gun! Holy shit, the guy’s packin’!”

“Kill him!”

Foolish as it was, they were still under the mistaken assumption that they were dealing with a single man. If they were at least professionals used to undertaking an attack of this sort, they might have scouted out the place and made sure to confirm a number inside. But not only were they rank amateurs, they also weren’t even all sober. The gang was in no state to carry out their mission.

Those few who were in a proper state of mind wisely fled the scene, but most of the agitated men decided instead to charge into the building in search of vengeance.

A small war had just erupted, here in this building far from the center of the city…

And neither side understood who it was they were fighting.

Inside the chaotic, flaming building, the man who had faced off with Akabayashi bellowed, “Akabayashi, you son of a bitch! You set us up!”

The ex-con looked around, but there was no sight of his foe anywhere. As a matter of fact, Akabayashi had slipped out at the moment the bald man first caught flame and drew the attention of all his fellows.

“I knew you killed the boss, Akabayashiii!”

From where he was standing, the man in question murmured, “It wasn’t me.”

He was leaving the building via the back door, as nonchalantly as if nothing was happening. “I just let it happen.”

On the ground at his feet were two men with fake tattoos, who were supposed to be guarding the door. Once he had put a little distance between himself and the building, he saw several police cars drive past.

“Oooh, there they go. Perfect timing—glad I reported it ahead of time,” he said, hiding out of sight as the cars passed. He started down a back alley to get farther from the scene. Inside one of the cars, an officer had the receiver in his hand, probably to report a confirmation of the burning building and gunshots.

Akabayashi headed away, pulling out his phone to check the Dollars’ home page and delete his own post reading, “Oh, I know him. He’s staying at an abandoned building here on the map in this link.”

The post had a picture of the building, too. He deleted it all, shut off his burner phone, and returned it to his pocket.

Then he looked up at the night sky, wearing his usual smirk, and muttered to himself.

“Yeah, the Dollars are useful. But truth is they’re also pretty scary.”

May 6, morning, Awakusu-kai headquarters

“Skirmish breaks out between criminal organization and youth gang! Sixteen injured! Mass arrests in the middle of the night!”

The tabloid front page blared the latest lurid news, behind which an elderly man murmured, “Oh, look at this, Aozaki. Ruri Hijiribe’s going to put out a photo album.”

He was looking at the celebrity news page, totally unrelated to the front-page article, and cackled, “There’ll be a three-thousand-unit limited edition, too. That’ll fetch a good price. Couldn’t ya just buy ’em all up and sell ’em on that hee-bay thing?!”

“I don’t know… I’m not the right guy to ask about that. Check with Shiki or Kazamoto…”

“Ahh. Well, at any rate, tell one of the kids to go and buy three for me.”

“Please, boss, think of your age. You gotta set an example for the young guys,” Aozaki pleaded. He glanced at the front page of the newspaper held open across from him. “So, boss…did you know this would happen?”

He was referring to the outcome of the two incidents involving Akabayashi, of course. All those men fresh out of jail who had gone after him were promptly arrested again. The kids with the fake tats were all rounded up, too, which would certainly set off quite a lot of police and media investigation into the student-run gang.

While neither group was a real enemy to the Awakusu-kai, the incident certainly cleared two potential annoyances out of their hair and had the added bonus of drawing police attention away from them for a time.

Without taking his eyes off the paper, Dougen Awakusu answered, “I had a hunch. A bit of this, a bit of that. I knew that Akabayashi could handle his own matters—and it seems that someone else was watching out for him, too.”

“…Whatever do you mean?”

“I suspect someone tipped him off that he was being targeted. He couldn’t have arranged such an elaborate trap in advance without knowing about it,” Dougen commented, his eye peering over the top of the paper at Aozaki.

“I don’t know who would have done such a thing, sir…but I suspect that since we weren’t going to take action, that person figured words didn’t count.”

“Hah! Never took you for the type to tell jokes. So you wanted to settle your score with Akabayashi yourself, huh?”

“Now you’re the one joking, boss,” Aozaki replied, shaking his head with a grin. “Maybe in the old days, but now that he’s gone soft, there’s no point to killing him.”

“You know, soft can be a good thing, too. Lots of stuff bounces off you when you’re soft…”

The phone on the desk rang. Dougen fumbled the receiver loose, cleared his throat, and put it to his ear. From Aozaki’s position, what sounded like a scream of anguish squeaked through the speaker. Perhaps the brand-new gang that got itself arrested last night was now calling for help.

Dougen maintained the same cold, steady tone of voice he always did when on the phone. “Why, I don’t know what you mean. We said we wouldn’t take action against you, and that was that. If you tried to attack Akabayashi and wound up in a trap, that’s none of my concern.”

They were no fools. They were men of the night, responsible for building the darkness of Ikebukuro.

Dougen ended the call and returned to his newspaper—with a sadistic smile on his lips this time.

“You see, I can’t betray my trading partners…but I can abandon them.”

Five years ago

The man changed after his meeting with the slasher.

He told people that he’d been attacked by the slasher but made up the details: “It was a huge old man, over six feet tall, with white hair.” He was actually just quoting a manga he’d read recently, but no one recognized it, so the others within the group merely laughed and said, “Turns out he’s human after all.”

Because of his injury, he got a temporary reprieve on the Sonoharadou job. He’d started the job, and he would finish it, he said. So he spent his time investigating the business, trying to find a way to save them—to save that beautiful, bewitching slasher…

One day, he learned that the slasher had struck at Sonohara-dou, killing the two parents.

The husband’s head was lopped clean off, while the wife’s stomach was slit in a manner resembling seppuku.

The daughter was still alive but in a state of terrible shock, unable to speak.

When he heard about it, he couldn’t believe it at first.

A terrible sense of loss infused his entire being. It was far worse than the feeling of losing his eye—it felt like his entire life was being ripped away.

But through his grief, he knew.

He knew that the wife, Sayaka Sonohara, had committed suicide.

She was the slasher, after all. Whatever happened, she ended up cutting off the head of the husband she loved, then turned the blade on her own belly.

But why had she done it?

Weren’t her husband and daughter equally precious to her?

It wasn’t the entire family, just her husband, who she killed before committing suicide, leaving only the daughter alive. Whatever could have happened to her body?

He was temporarily broken out of this train of unanswered questions by the sound of his boss’s voice.

“Hey, Akabayashi. No need to worry about Sonohara-dou anymore.”

“…Sir?”

Akabayashi was often tapped to serve as the yakuza boss’s bodyguard, in recognition of his skill. Today, the boss was heading to his favorite lady companion’s house alone, taking only the one guard.

“The people who own Sonohara-dou are both dead, as you know. And now we get the land without having to deal with them. Long live the slasher!”

“…”

“Whoops. I shouldn’t have mentioned that—forgot you lost your eye to him,” the boss said, a distasteful sneer on his face. “But the place would’ve been done for in either case.”

“…?”

“I gave the owner a little taste of medicine, you see.”

“…?!”

It was obvious what he meant by “medicine.”

Akabayashi had always hated drugs. As a man to whom strength and violence were everything, the idea of making your own bones more brittle was unfathomable to him. He didn’t have a crusade to stop the gang from doing its drug business; he just didn’t bother to think about it.

The boss cackled with delight and explained, “We already had a contract that gave us the right to seize his land as collateral, but I figured we could squeeze more out of him… So I made him an offer. Take out life insurance on your family and let’s make some money, I said.”

“…!”

“From what I hear, he was always the violent type at home. But once he got hooked on the dope, it got way worse. That stuff must’ve really fucked with his head,” his boss bragged—he’d probably had a few drinks. “They didn’t put this in the papers, but from what I heard, the kid had marks around her neck. The police thought it was the slasher who did it, but I’m betting that at some point, the old man tried to strangle his own daughter! All to raise the money to support his drug habit!”

“…”

“See? Crazy, right? You’re not gonna get the insurance if you kill the brat yourself! But maybe he actually thought he might get away with it? In either case, it’s laughable.”

The yakuza boss might as well have been intoxicated on his own speech. He wasn’t paying any attention to his surroundings.

“The thing is, that kid looked like she’d grow up to be a pretty fine-lookin’ woman herself! I figured I could whip up a convincing little IOU form and collect on the girl—she could make us a fortune! Maybe I could even get first dibs? Then again, she’s only what, twelve? Can’t have much experience yet, gah-ha-ha!”

There were a number of things the boss wasn’t paying attention to—that he failed to pay attention to.

One: the increasingly icy manner of the bodyguard charged with attending to his safety.

Two: the fact that they were in a totally empty back alley.

And three: that a man with a knife was approaching with murder in his eyes.

“Hmm…?”

At last, the boss noticed the third of these details. The man with the knife stared at the gleeful yakuza, seething with hatred.

“You bastard…”

“Who the hell are you? Who’re you with?!” the boss demanded.

But the tear-streaked young man with the knife responded, “You’ll pay…for what you did…to my sister…”

“Huh…? Oh, I get it. You must be that one girl’s brother. Yeah, now I remember seeing you in that family photo she carried around.”

“You got her hooked…on your damn drugs! It’s all because of you! Now they say…she might never wake up and walk around again!”

Apparently, the interloper had a score to settle with the boss over the gang’s drug-dealing operation.

“Hah! If anything, you should be thanking me for letting her last memories be blissful, then! C’mon, Akabayashi, do your job. Grab this ungrateful little shithead and squeeze the life outta…ah…ah…ah…”

He spun around to give Akabayashi his orders but froze in place.

As the saying goes, one can look down on another person like an ant—but in Akabayashi’s case, the gaze he was giving the shorter man was full of such disgust and anger that he might as well have been trying to squash that ant through visual pressure alone.

The gaze was so strong that the boss felt as though his shoulders were being held down. All that unstoppable pressure was emanating from the prosthetic right eye.

“Wh-what the hell…are you staring at me…like that…for…?”

He could barely even form the words to accost his subordinate. The pressure flowing from Akabayashi was so all-consuming that the boss completely forgot that he was in a dire situation that allowed for no distractions.

Several minutes later, the yakuza boss was lying facedown in the street, twitching. Red liquid pooled beneath his upper half.

A short ways away, the young man trembled, his knife dripping with blood.

“…”

Akabayashi took a step closer, causing the boy to turn the knife toward him. But either he instinctively realized he didn’t stand a chance against a much larger man, or he was satisfied at completing his revenge; in any case, the young man sat down on the spot.

“Kill me… Just kill me already! I can’t… There’s nothing I—”

Akabayashi slapped him. “If you die, who’s going to take care of your sister? Huh?”

“…! …? H…huh?”

The boy turned his trembling face to look up at Akabayashi. He clearly didn’t understand what the man was saying.

“Just…go. Hide the knife and get out of here. If you’re lucky, they’ll chalk this one up to the slasher.”

“…?! Ah…aaah… Th-tha…thank you!” he stammered, getting to his feet and hiding the knife under his shirt.

No doubt the young man had no idea why his life was being spared, but hearing the word sister had brought some measure of control back to his mind and spurred him away from the scene.

“‘Thank you’?” Akabayashi murmured, looking down at the corpse of his boss. “Don’t thank me, kid… You should hate me.”

“I just turned you into a murderer…”

Present day, near a Yamanote Line station, shopping district backstreet

“Ooh, Ruri’s got a photo album coming out? Better get my preorder in.”

Akabayashi strode down the street, reading the same tabloid as Dougen Awakusu had.

Suddenly, his eye stopped on a particular word in the article. “Oh, right, she changed agencies. And they haven’t found Yodogiri yet? Guess Shiki’s got his hands full.”

The word in question was the name of Ruri Hijiribe’s new talent agency. “Jack-o’-Lantern, huh?”

It was a very peculiar and memorable name, but Akabayashi snorted and thought, Hell, it’s me.

While it wasn’t widely known in Japan, a jack-o’-lantern was a pumpkin-faced spirit often associated with Halloween. It started off as an Irish legend: a human turned away from heaven for his wicked deeds but also shunned from hell for cheating the devil and therefore doomed to wander the earth as a ghost forever, carrying a lantern carved from a pumpkin.

In the world of the yakuza, the most forbidden act was to kill one’s parent—the boss.

Akabayashi didn’t do the deed himself, but there was no denying that he abandoned his boss to a certain death. Naturally, he wasn’t going to wind up in heaven, either.

He was something like a ghost, unable to exist fully in the light or the darkness, wandering aimlessly.

Maybe calling myself a jack-o’-lantern is a stretch. That’s cooler than I deserve.

Akabayashi chuckled as he walked along the street, paced from behind by a smaller figure.

This sneaking follower carried the sharp glint of a knife in its hands.

However…

“Yah!”

“!”

Akabayashi knew he was being trailed. He spun around, grabbed his assailant’s hand, and snatched the knife right out of it.

It turned out to be a boy, maybe fifteen years old.

“Come on, kids should be kids, not playing with toys like this. Go back home and play some video games. You can’t hurt anyone doing that.”

“Eep! Aa…aaah!”

The boy raced away. Akabayashi watched him go and tucked the knife into his pocket. “Hmm… Does a small knife count as recyclable? Or is it classified as metal garbage?”

He wondered about the boy. There had been a tattoo sticker on his neck, which meant he was one of the remaining members of that gang. Or perhaps he was hoping to get in, and they ordered him to stab Akabayashi as a means of initiation.

I’ll be damned. If it weren’t for the fake tat, I really would have no idea.

He considered the Dollars and the way Anri reacted yesterday and couldn’t help but feel that something in the atmosphere of the city was eerily lukewarm.

It’s like the kids these days really don’t know how to tell the difference between day and night. Not that a pumpkin head like me has any room to call them out.

He murmured, “Still, I’m allowed to pray.”

If possible, I’d like to at least keep the boundary between day and night clear—so that Anri and Miss Akane can avoid being collateral damage.

He thought about the daughter of the first woman he ever loved. The way she was growing up to resemble her mother reminded him of the slasher.

Maybe…

Just maybe, if he continued wandering the boundary line between hell and heaven like a jack-o’-lantern, he might one day run into that slasher again.

That’s stupid. I must be reading too much manga.

He smirked at himself again, rapped his walking stick, and continued on his way.

“But if the girls say they prefer the night…well, it ain’t my place to stop them.”

And so, the man began to walk as the sun set,

Following the boundary line between the light side of town and the dark.

With the scar of his first-sight love burned permanently into one eye,

The man once more vanished into the depths of the city, smiling easily.