Chapter Nine: No Love Lost

“In an update to the years-long court case between the politician Takeru Otonobe and several major publishers and newspaper companies, a press conference was held today in which lawyers for both sides unveiled an official settlement. The case had been noted for…”

On the TV, the newscaster read from his script like always. Otherwise, Shinra’s apartment was a bit draftier than before, owing to the broken glass on the balcony. The group had picked up the pieces of glass, so over half the physical evidence of destruction was now gone.

Togusa sat on the couch, watching the news, feeling the lukewarm breeze of the summer night on his skin.

The police did not show up. They didn’t seem to be aware of the disturbance at the top of the building. But Togusa wasn’t in the mood to relax, so he kept his phone open in one hand as he checked the reports on the TV news broadcasts.

Normally, it would be faster to check on the computer, but now that neither Celty nor Shinra were home, he didn’t think it was right to use it without their permission. Yet, when Namie Yagiri woke up and learned the situation, she opened Celty’s laptop at once and began typing away.

He was going to ask her what she thought she was doing, but the ferocity in Namie’s manner intimidated him, so he decided to search for information from the living room instead.

“…to which Otonobe said, ‘The life that I and my family lost will never return, but at least we can now look forward.’ Next in the news…”

“No reports about monsters rampaging in town…,” Togusa muttered, feeling relieved.

“This is a special report. We are receiving word that a police vehicle has been attacked on a street in West Ikebukuro, Toshima Ward, Tokyo.”

Togusa’s hand froze in the process of hitting buttons on his cell phone. “Whaaa…?”

Did Celty attack a police car in her monstrous form? Fright zipped through Togusa at first, but it turned out that the attack had been with an explosive of some kind. The police on board were unharmed, but a piece of evidence they’d been carrying had been stolen.

From browsing news sites on the phone, he could see that something had stirred the people of Ikebukuro a while ago. It was probably from people located near the police-vehicle attack who had uploaded the details en masse. Now the people who had just found out on the news were joining the conversation, producing a large volume of chaotic commentary.

What stuck out amid the noise was someone’s guess: “Was it the head from earlier that got stolen?” Then came a few posts from people alleging to be witnesses, and within the span of a few minutes, it had turned into a full-on uproar with tinges of the occult: a mysterious head that seemed to be alive, stolen by a mystery attacker.

Because there had already been people wondering whether it was the Headless Rider’s head, some of them began to suspect that the rider had come back to retrieve its own head.

“…What the hell is going on here?”

At some point, Yumasaki had sneaked up behind Togusa. He clenched a fist and jabbered, “Ikebukuro’s finally about to become the ‘demon-world city of Ikebukuro’ instead! The seven days of fate are nigh! I just need to download a demon-summoning program onto my phone or game console, and then the exhilarating survival game will begin…! Gotta make it to the end!”

Togusa assumed this was all related to some anime or manga again. He left Yumasaki to his excitement and looked to Seiji Yagiri and Mika out on the veranda. They were still watching the city outside of the building, and the image without context would look like two lovers gazing out at the skyline.

Namie mostly kept her eyes on the laptop screen, but every now and then she glanced over her shoulder at the two figures on the balcony with distaste. When she looked at Mika, her eyes clouded with hatred. And when she looked at Seiji, they drowned in love.

The way her expression changed so rapidly and completely convinced Togusa that he was much better off not getting involved with Namie.

For her part, Emilia stayed calm and smiled reassuringly, but that only made Togusa worry that she was actually completely oblivious to what was going on.

Egor the Russian, who had seemed to be the most competent person there, left to go searching for Shingen Kishitani, he said.

“Does this mean the most rational person here is…me?” The two owners of the apartment were gone, so this was definitely unfamiliar territory for him. Togusa sighed. “You gotta be kidding me…”

Well, at least it sounds like Kadota’s opened his eyes again. All we gotta do is smash whoever ran him over. So…where do we start, and how far do we drag him behind the van?

Even Togusa’s thoughts were far from healthy. Just then, his phone automatically switched to the screen for an incoming call. The name listed was a familiar one.

Togusa hit the answer button and heard the raucous voice before he could even get the phone up to his ear.

“Hello?! Togucchan?! It’s me! It’s me!”

Just as the screen had threatened, it was Karisawa trying to rupture his eardrums. But something seemed strange about her. When she had called earlier, she had screamed out of joy that Kadota had woken up, but this time she was more panicked than anything.

“Whoa, what happened?! Calm down!”

“Dotachin… It’s Dotachin…”

“…What about Kadota?!” he demanded, worry creeping into his voice. Had his condition suddenly worsened again?

“…Whassup?” asked Yumasaki, who had stopped his creepy dance in the corner of the room and was approaching Togusa now, concerned.

“I just got a call from Dotachin’s father,” Karisawa said. She paused, and then her voice grew even louder through the phone speaker. “He said Dotachin left a letter and vanished from the hospital…even though they said he couldn’t walk!

“What should we do?! I’m sure Dotachin went to get even with the guy who ran him over!”

Ikebukuro

Somewhat earlier in the day…

Black and white flashes and blurs contrasted wildly from street to street.

Above them, golden hair rose and shone, bright against the dark of night.

A bicycle colored a perfect black seemed to absorb all light that hit it, and riding atop it was a man wearing a bartender’s vest—Shizuo Heiwajima.

He clung to Shooter the shadow bicycle with sheer arm strength alone, withstanding a bucking, rodeo-like series of jolts and abnormal positions. The vehicle was in bicycle form for the first time ever, and it didn’t seem to be getting the hang of the idea; it hurtled along in a violent and awkward manner.

But at this point, they were working in perfect harmony, as if one single creature. With each ferocious push of the pedals, Shizuo caused black shadow to spill from Shooter’s gears, filling in the fine cracks and holes in the road to keep them moving smoothly.

Shooter raced through the night city, turning left and right, and occasionally even grabbing the sides of buildings with its shadow to run along their surface.

After about ten minutes of riding, Shizuo heard an odd sound like metal scraping.

“…Huh?”

Shooter’s shadow rustled more fiercely than usual when the sound happened.

“What’s that sound?”

He wanted to keep pushing onward, but the sight of something troublesome in the street ahead caused Shizuo to stop pushing the pedals. “Hang on. Come to a stop.”

Once he could tell that Shooter was slowing down, Shizuo looked to the other end of the street again. There was a roadwork sign ahead, and there were cones at the entrance to a narrow alley. Standing before them was a group of men in work uniforms.

But there was something wrong with them.

They weren’t getting to work at all. They were just standing at the entrance of the work zone.

“That seems weird.”

The metal scraping sound was definitely coming from down that side street. Yet, there didn’t seem to be any construction work happening.

Shizuo reacted to the abnormal scene by tapping Shooter’s handlebars with a finger. “Let’s just go around the back way.”

Shooter rang its bell in a rhythmic whinny and took off through the darkness.

They made their way around the other side of the district, appearing only to the untrained eye to leave the work zone behind. But at every other road that led into the same area, they saw the same signs and groups of stationary workers.

It was a district of office buildings, and after work hours, the people completely cleared out. He saw a few luxury cars along the curb that looked out of place, but since nobody was inside, he let his attention move past them.

“…You want to go on ahead, yeah? If so, ring the bell once for me,” Shizuo said when they were within sight of the street. Shooter’s bell rang a single time; Shizuo inhaled and exhaled briefly and rolled his head to crack his neck.

“Guess that’s that, then. We gotta climb the side of a building,” he announced, a preposterous solution—if not for the fact that Shizuo on his own could probably climb the side of one of these structures. And so could Shooter, who was able to ride along the wall to an extent now. Even without his actual owner and rider, Celty, the vehicle could probably manage to get up, with a little help.

Shizuo began glancing around the buildings in the vicinity, looking for one that was unlikely to attract attention. Just then, one of the men in the work outfits noticed Shizuo. A moment later, all of them were looking straight at him.

“Oh, shit.”

Shizuo considered going somewhere else to avoid scrutiny, but he came to a stop when he saw the workers’ eyes.

At first he thought it was the effect of the warning lights next to the roadwork sign, but even the parts lit by the nearby streetlights were obviously abnormal.

The whites of every last worker’s eyes were red.

Shizuo had seen those eyes many times: in the park on the evening known as the Night of the Ripper, and just a few hours ago, inside the police station where he was briefly held.

“Okay…I get it. So these guys did something to Celty,” he said, putting it together. A few seconds later, he told the horse, “Too bad. Celty’s my good friend.”

Deep down in his voice, there was a core of rage, hot like liquid magma. Shooter shrank away from it—and so did the road workers who were approaching now.

“C’mon… Don’t hold back… Let’s blast straight through ’em!” Shizuo put his weight into the pedals of the bicycle, then thrust with his feet as if he were trying to kick the very earth with the bicycle.

Shooter channeled Shizuo’s anger, letting all that energy course into the ground.

Instantly, like a fighter jet being catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier, Shizuo and Shooter shot forward toward the little alley.

They did not turn back to see the poor men under Saika’s control floating through the air unconscious like so many sheets of paper.

Back alley

In the center of a street complex sealed off at all ends, there was a tiny intersection among a series of buildings, where a number of alleys overlapped. There was no traffic light; one of the alleys was barely wide enough for a motorcycle to ride down. The other road had space for a small car to fit, but it was off-limits to cars in the first place. It was the kind of route that only those who knew the area well would take, on foot or on bicycle.

It was a quiet place to begin with, sparsely visited, and a number of the buildings nearby were currently under construction or renovation. One of them had a construction crane attached.

All of this was why Kujiragi chose this place for her hunting ground.

And thanks to those she had controlled with Saika, she was able to close off the entire area along the bigger roads under the guise of “construction.” If the police noticed the abnormality and investigated, the ruse would be up very easily, but thanks to her Saika within the police force, she was able to get it officially acknowledged as a night roadwork site.

That meant the intersection here in this block was out of direct view from the surrounding areas, a little space entirely segregated from the rest of the city around it.

But of course, all you had to do was look into the sky over the intersection to believe you were in some alternate dimension isolated from the rest of the world entirely. It was certainly the case for Seitarou Yagiri, who stood in the alley and gazed upward.

“My goodness…”

There was ample, varied emotion in his voice, and he could offer no further comment. Instead, he turned to Kujiragi, cold sweat shining on his cheeks.

“Just to be clear, this is the Headless Rider…the dullahan’s body?”

“That is correct. The shadow has gone berserk without a rational mind governing it, but when it calms down, it should return to a fleshy body just like a human’s again.”

“I see… This is quite a change,” Seitarou said, looking upward again.

Normally, dark night sky would be visible between the buildings. But at the moment, there was an eerie, totally black cloud that seemed to be stretched between the structures. It was almost as if a black aircraft of some kind had crashed and gotten stuck between them.

Saika, in silver wire form, was tangled around the black shadow in endless ribbons, the tiny metal ropes creaking and screeching eerily as they ground against the shadowy thing.

“So you have total control over Saika, eh? And you can just…let it go from your body like that?”

“My control will work for a while, even after it has detached from my hand. But if I go too far away, it will likely revert to its katana form.”

“And I’m supposed to just pick that thing up and take it home?”

“If you have the means to contain the body once it has been freed from its current constraints, be my guest,” Kujiragi said flatly. It wasn’t sarcasm, just a statement of fact.

Seitarou held up a flashlight without a word. He saw spears of shadow occasionally escaping through the wire mesh and scrabbling at the sides of the buildings. He winced and said, “I’ll pass. The kick that Shingen’s goon gave me still aches.”

“A wise choice,” Kujiragi replied before turning to the subject of her plans. “A courier is bringing the head this way now.”

“Oh?”

“I believe that if the head is returned to the captive body, it will regain its rational mind. If I then use Saika to again sever the head and body, it should be possible to take the body.”

“…And will the body actually sit still if that happens?” Seitarou wondered skeptically.

“To a dullahan, the head is its memory storage,” Kujiragi explained. “When the memories of the past return, it should automatically revert to its original personality.”

“And in that case, what will happen to its memories in Ikebukuro, as the Headless Rider?”

“I do not know that. There is little precedent for this.”

Seitarou found it odd that she said there was little precedent, rather than none at all, but he decided it was better not to inquire further. “I see… Well, if the memories are erased, it will make the process of training and brainwashing simpler,” he said without emotion.

Kujiragi’s eyes traveled downward. “If her memories were to vanish, that would make me happier,” she mumbled, to Seitarou’s surprise.

“Why do you feel that way, too? Because if she escapes from my watch, you will not have to worry about her vengeance?” he asked, as if it was pointless to worry about.

But Kujiragi just said, honestly and without expression, “Because it suits me better to have a romantic rival’s memory wiped.”

“???”

This was very curious to Seitarou, but he didn’t have the chance to ask about it, because—

“Mr. P-President!”

—an employee he’d left behind along the alleyway rushed up, out of breath.

The men he’d brought with him here today were old companions who were aware of the shady side of the business—people from before Yagiri Pharmaceuticals got bought out by Nebula.

In other words, they were stout fellows who knew what they could handle. And yet, the look on this man’s face was practically of sheer terror.

“What is it? Is the head here?” Seitarou asked. It didn’t seem likely that he would be this afraid of a severed head, and he couldn’t imagine that Kujiragi’s hired courier would be stupid enough to just walk around holding the head in the open.

So he tried to calm the employee down, assuming it was something else—but even this wasn’t enough to stop the man from trembling in terror.

“There’s some weird guy, Mr. President… He just started rushing down the road at us, and…!”

It was then that Seitarou, his employee, and Kujiragi all heard the whinny.

A whinny that was strangely cute. Almost like a bicycle bell.

“Lrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

“Is that…?”

The Coiste Bodhar? Did it follow its owner?

Kujiragi immediately looked upward. The massive black shadow was still writhing up there, but the movement was noticeably duller, less crazed.

Is it regaining its reason? she worried, but there was no other sign of change yet.

“…”

She couldn’t risk any trouble, though. The Coiste Bodhar, like the head, was one of the major aspects that made the dullahan what it was. It didn’t seem capable of doing anything on its own, but she had to be cautious.

Should she return a part of the wire-form Saika to her palm? She considered it for less than a second before putting a stop to the idea—one of Seitarou’s men, holding a stun rod, shot around the corner of the alley ahead and slammed into the side of a building. He lost consciousness and slid to the ground.

“Huh…?” Seitarou gaped, too stunned to react more capably than that.

“Eeeep! I-it’s coming!” one of his men screamed and took off running past Seitarou and Kujiragi.

“Hey! Wait! What’s coming?!” Seitarou demanded, but the man kept going down the other side of the alley and vanished around the corner. “Worthless buffoon,” he swore and turned to examine his fallen employee, a cold sweat now running down his back.

What in the world was it around the corner that had shot him like a human cannonball? Despite the huge, freakish thing hanging just above them now, it was the unknown intruder that filled Seitarou with boundless fear.

And in the next moment, it came into view:

A man in a bartending outfit riding a bicycle, slowly turning down the alley.

“…Guh?” He gawked.

So much for a company president being able to maintain his own dignity. He simply couldn’t put two and two together. “Hey, Kujiragi…what is that?”

Kujiragi didn’t miss a beat or bat an eye. “Which are you referring to? The bicycle? Or the man seated upon it?”

“Both, obviously!”

“…The bicycle is, I suspect, the Coiste Bodhar. The rider is Shizuo Heiwajima.”

“?”

Seitarou was confused. An individual’s name wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. So Kujiragi elaborated as succinctly as she possibly could.

“He is the human being with the least human attributes, as far as I am aware.”

Shizuo squinted ahead, slowly pedaling on Shooter. He could see a middle-aged man holding a flashlight and a woman with glasses who resembled a secretary.

“…Hey. Are you people with those clowns who tried to attack me?” Shizuo demanded, temples slightly pulsing. Then Shooter moved of its own accord, pulling back into a little wheelie. “Whoa, whoa, what’s up…?”

And then Shizuo saw it.

The huge black something trussed up between the buildings over the narrow little alley intersection. It was hard to tell, but it was definitely darker than the night sky and the urban illumination reflecting off the ground, like a black hole swallowing all light.

He couldn’t tell what was going on at first, but when he saw the occasional spear of shadow emerging from the mass, Shizuo recognized a similarity to something he was quite familiar with.

“Is that…Celty?” he muttered. Shooter rang the bell once in affirmation. “Hey…! Celty! Can you hear me?!” he called out, with no response.

Shizuo clenched his teeth and turned to the middle-aged man. “What the hell did you do to her?”

He got off Shooter and put his hands on the walls of the narrow alleyway, blocking the other man’s path. The man took a step back, properly intimidated.

However, the secretary-like woman stepped forward and replied, “I will answer that.”

“…What?”

“Yes, what is above our heads now is what you once called Celty Sturluson. But at this moment, it is nothing but a monster without reason and rationale.”

“…”

The woman spoke in an utterly matter-of-fact way, despite the feral-tiger menace that Shizuo posed. She was neither helpful nor malicious but simply stated the facts mechanically.

“What are you people after?”

“She… Pardon me, what used to be ‘she,’ is now nothing more than a product for a transaction,” the woman revealed, to her companion’s shock.

“Um, Kujiragi—?”

“There is no point in hiding the facts,” the woman named Kujiragi stated crisply before turning back to Shizuo. “She is not a human, nor a pet, nor an endangered animal. She is just a freak. I am engaging in the business of hunting her and selling her to a wealthy buyer—that is all. You have no good reason to interfere.”

Scrunch.

Something crumbled. The sound came from the vicinity of Shizuo’s right hand, which rested against the building wall.

In fact, his fist was about half-buried in the concrete surface. He had simply grasped it with the power of his fingers, like squeezing through wet tofu.

“…”

The middle-aged man froze, but Kujiragi did not react in any way. He seemed to find her lack of reaction reassuring, as he said, “She’s right. We’re not engaging in some wicked crime. It’s just business. It doesn’t violate any law. After all, there’s no legal recognition of monsters, is there? All I want to do is pay money for something that should not exist in the first place. I would appreciate if you stayed out of this.”

Shizuo clenched his teeth and sucked in a deep breath.

“…I see your argument. You seem to have your reasons,” he said, surprisingly calm by his standards. He looked at them and then up at Celty. “I don’t complain when the motorcycle cops chase Celty around. She bears fault for what she does. It all makes sense. And maybe you folks have a reason that makes as much sense as the cops riding those bikes.”

“Thank you for understanding.”

“But—” Shizuo took a step forward. That was all it took to immediately compress the atmosphere into something more oppressive. “—I don’t give a shit about what the law says. Celty’s a very good friend of mine.”

The middle-aged man felt as though a lion that had been sitting calmly inside a small cage with him had suddenly stood up. Anger even infused Shizuo’s breathing. He walked slowly forward as he talked.

“And now you’re going…to treat her like a thing…to sell her off…” He leaped forward into a run with all the velocity of a cannonball. “And you expect me…to stand there and watch?!”

Rubber smoked on the surface of the asphalt where it had been rubbed off the soles of his shoes. The businessman was helpless in the face of this superhuman advance. He couldn’t move fast enough to avoid Shizuo’s oncoming arm, which was more like some heavy industrial machine arm than mere bear or tiger fangs as it closed in on his throat.

But when he was just inches away, the distance between the two men suddenly grew.

“Gblerk!”

Kujiragi grabbed the man’s collar and hurled him violently backward. He flew about ten yards and landed flat on his back. In other words, she had thrown a full-grown man, one-handed, at a speed faster than Shizuo was charging. While she wasn’t as powerful as Shizuo, it was still baffling strength for a thin woman like her.

“K-Kujiragi, why did you…?” The man gurgled, feeling as if a roller coaster had just deposited him onto the ground.

Without turning back to look, Kujiragi told the man, “Please keep your distance.”

Her attention returned to the obstacle before her: Shizuo Heiwajima.

The moment she faced him, the Saika binding the shadow cloud overhead began to rustle. The wire-form blade screeched exuberantly, scraping against its own length.

“…I did not want to draw your presence here.”

To Saika, Shizuo Heiwajima was just another target of her affections, but an extremely desirable one. The various “children” of Haruna Niekawa’s Saika had been terrified of Shizuo ever since the Night of the Ripper—but Anri’s and Kujiragi’s Saikas considered him to be a very special human.

Wary of her precision control over Saika going awry, Kujiragi had tried to use a “child” within the police department to hold Shizuo off, but it seemed as though there had been trouble with Izaya Orihara that had caused that to go awry.

“What? Whaddaya mean?” Shizuo demanded, frowning.

Kujiragi stood in his path, her face flat. “I am only speaking to myself.” She gave a little wave of her head and stared Shizuo right in the eyes. “You said that Celty is your friend.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Can you still call Celty Sturluson a friend in that state?”

Is Celty a friend or not?

With that simple question, Kujiragi raised her eyes to the sky. Shizuo followed her gaze to glance at the wriggling thing up there—indeed, it wasn’t a human or any other existing animal.

It created endless little spears of shadow through openings in the wires, ceaselessly scrabbling against the walls of the nearby buildings. It was a pure monster, one that exuded no higher intelligence beyond instinct.

That was Celty now.

But Shizuo wasted no time in saying, “Of course I can. What’s the problem?”

He gave her a look like Why would you even ask that question?

Kujiragi’s eyes widened just the tiniest bit. She asked, “How can you say that a monster that has abandoned its intelligence and human form is a friend?”

“Is this really the situation for a question like that?” he shot back. It was hard to tell whether Kujiragi really meant him harm, and he found he was rapidly losing a target for his anger. “Listen, all this stuff about monsters? I’ve been called that and worse since I was a kid. I’ve snapped and lost sight of everything around me and given Celty headaches on more than one or two occasions.”

He squeezed the wall he was holding as he thought about his past experiences. The concrete crumbled through his fingers into mere dust. “But even then, she would hear me out afterward. She didn’t write me off.”

He looked up and repeated, “She would hear me out.”

His eyes left Kujiragi to find an emergency stairwell on a building just ahead. It was fixed to the outside of the second floor, the kind that had a ladder that could be lowered to the ground in case of emergency. “So now it’s my turn to hear her out.”

Shizuo headed past Kujiragi toward the emergency stairs. He didn’t know what was going on with Celty now, but he might as well start by breaking those wires holding her in place.

Suddenly, Kujiragi’s hand was around his wrist.

“Hey, stop it. I’m not one to hit a…”

He stopped partway when it occurred to him. The slender woman was holding him back with a strength that was unthinkable given her size.

And yet, he couldn’t see her expression from here.

“…I feel…jealous.”

Shizuo detected the tiniest bit of emotion in her voice, something that had not existed before this point.

“Of you…and of Celty Sturluson.”

It might have been jealousy, as she said, but it sounded more like mourning.

“I never had anyone to hear me out.”

While her strength defied her appearance, it was far from Shizuo’s. He could brush her off if he wanted, but Shizuo wasn’t sure whether he should.

Then he heard Shooter’s bell ringing over his shoulder. As if it were trying to rush him along.

“Oh…sorry, I’ll go help Celty now,” he said briefly, realizing that Celty should be his priority at the moment, and tried to work himself free. “Look, I don’t care about your problems…but if you want, I can listen to ’em later.”

He put his other hand on her shoulder to pry her grip off.

“Requesting cease of activity,” said a familiar voice behind his back.

Shizuo stopped yet again and turned around slowly.

It was indeed a familiar woman standing there. She was holding up a gun with a silencer as if out of some movie, in the kind of pose that those movie stars assumed.

She wasn’t like Horada, who had once shot him. This was the stance of a professional.

Shizuo sighed and said, “Vorona…”

The woman whose name he called felt her mouth dry, and she glared at him.

“I desire for you to be pacified, with absence of resistance…Sir Shizuo.”