Chapter 4: The Escapees Intertwine

May 4, midday, Ikebukuro

Outside of Ikebukuro, there was a dull sound.

It was the sound of the fist of a man wearing a motorcycle gang uniform connecting with the cheek of another man in street gang fashion.

“Gah!” he yelped, falling to the ground. The victim glared upward at the biker with furious loathing. “What the hell?! Do you have any idea who we are?! Huh?”

He tried to get to his feet as he clutched his cheek, but the man in biker attire caught him in the face with a kick.

“Yeah, I do. You’re the Dollars, right?” the attacker said coldly, standing over the fallen gangster. “Come on, you can’t possibly be this weak. I guess it’s true that the Dollars are a random bunch. Though we don’t got much room to talk ourselves.”

“Wh-who the fuck are you people?!”

“Hey, what’s going on here?!”

Three other street gangsters standing nearby seemed to have finally processed the situation before them.

A man wearing an ostentatious motorcycle gang uniform had just asked the four if they were Dollars. With the scorn reserved for the kind of guy who’d wear a biker gang outfit in broad daylight, one member had answered, “What if we are? You gonna offer us a donation, Captain Handlebars?” Then, the uniformed man punched him.

“You think this is a joke?! What gang you with?!” they shouted, tensing in anticipation of the answer.

If the biker was with Jan-Jaka-Jan, a street arm of the Awakusu-kai, then one wrong move could quickly send this situation spiraling out of control.

But if they gave up and backed down, while it might not do much to the Dollars’ name, it would certainly lower their standing.

They gave him a piercing examination from head to toe and noticed a piece of decorative stitching on the sleeve of his uniform reading TORAMARU.

“…Ahhh?” one of the gangsters mocked, the relief palpable in his expression. “What’s this? You’re with Toramaru from Saitama?!”

“…What if I am?”

“You guys just came here and got your asses whupped the other day!”

“Don’t you know that your people got absolutely wrecked?”

“Maybe they don’t get a network signal over in Saitama.”

Spurred on by having lost the physical initiative, they taunted and mocked him to show the superiority of their mental position.

It would have been more efficient to hit him instead, but they weren’t used to fighting, and one of their companions had just been felled in two blows, so none of them was able to take the leap from words into action.

“Besides, do you really think you can take all of us on your own? Huh?” one of them shouted.

The biker merely sighed. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I attacked you?”

“Shuddup! You think we care?!”

“Yeah! Stop actin’ like you’re in control here!” one said, nearly about to set upon him.

The man in the biker uniform calmly continued, “I’m pretty sure that I’m good enough to take on scrubs like you alone…”

The next moment, the gangsters’ spines froze.

“But I don’t wanna get tired out on chumps like you. It’s gonna be a long, long day.”

Behind his back, at the entrance to the alley, a crowd of nearly a dozen appeared, all wearing the same uniform.

“…!”

They turned in the other direction and saw that more Toramaru members were advancing from the other side.

“Wh-why…? Who are you guys?!” the gangsters pleaded, practically crying.

The man cracked his neck. “You said the answer yourself. Why would you ask me again?

“…We’re Toramaru. The same team you Dollars beat the shit out of…”

A few minutes later

In a parking garage not far from the alley, the gangsters were sitting formally on the ground, their faces swollen and their voices weak.

“N-no, you got it wrong—we ain’t really Dollars! I—I mean, we aren’t Dollars, sir. We just signed up online. We don’t even know what their leader looks like,” they pleaded pathetically, as the man in the uniform stood over them, wooden sword in hand.

“Hmm, well, the thing is, I don’t really care about that.”

“…”

“Using a name means assuming some level of risk, see? In this case, you were using the Dollars name to act big around here—it’s a very simple example.”

“Sowwy, we won’ do ih angymow,” the young men apologized in unison, their enunciation getting worse with the soft tissue swelling.

The man from Toramaru took a phone out of his chest pocket and tossed it at their knees. “Call them.”

“Wh-whuh?”

“You do stuff through texts, right? Call as many of them as you can. Message every person you know in the Dollars.

“You have no other option.”

Twenty minutes later

“Hey, this ain’t a sideshow! Get lost!”

Toramaru members were chasing off a small group of boys who were watching the events of the parking lot at its entrance. They ran off, screaming. In their hands were cell phones.

“…Hey, are those kids Dollars, too?”

“I—I don’ know. I juft added aw da namef on da maiwing wift…”

“There was that teenage girl and those salarymen who peered in, too.”

“We’ve probably been reported by now. Let’s move,” one member advised.

Their erstwhile leader sighed in annoyance. “Tsk! So I guess literally anyone could be with the Dollars.”

He imagined even the little boys from a moment ago descending on them with fists balled, and he scowled sourly.

“Whoever came up with your gang is smart but a real son of a bitch.”

Awakusu-kai office, Tokyo

The headquarters of the Medei-gumi Syndicate’s Awakusu-kai organization, one of several groups with territory in Ikebukuro—

At first glance, it was the kind of office building a large company would use, except that there was no sign at the entrance, and while it was open now, there were heavy shutters on all the entryways. Anyone perceptive enough to notice that something was odd with the building naturally found a way to avoid looking too closely.

The Awakusu-kai office was situated on the building’s middle floors.

Depending on the room, sometimes you could see the expected trimmings like expensive desks, picture frames, and black leather sofas, like the decorations seen in TV shows. Other rooms were absolutely the real deal, with pictures of the Medei-gumi boss (the kumicho) and the head of the Awakusu-kai, a traditional Shinto shrine, and hanging paper lanterns. But most of it looked just like any other office building.

In a meeting room tucked away in a corner of the building, a number of men huddled together.

Half of the men were clearly not in the “upstanding citizen” mold, just based on their appearance. The other half of them looked just like normal businessmen—if it weren’t for the fierce respect they commanded amid the tension.

One of them, a young man with a reptilian look to his sharp eyes, said, “And…did you get Shizuo Heiwajima?”

He was Kazamoto, an Awakusu lieutenant. Sitting across from him was an imposing-looking man smoking a cigarette.

“Who the fuck said you were in charge, Kazamoto?”

Kazamoto responded to this challenge without looking at the other man. “Please, Mr. Aozaki, don’t do this to me. I only asked a question. I wasn’t trying to take charge.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

Unlike Kazamoto, who was calm and collected, the man named Aozaki openly stared down his fellow yakuza. He was over six feet tall and very broad. There was a good mix of muscle and fat on his large frame, and his poorly fitted suit seemed likely to rip at any moment. His predatory attitude only increased the menace in the room.

Then another man’s voice cut the tension.

“Knock it off, Aozaki.”

The meeting room fell silent.

“Director,” muttered one or more of them unconsciously, and as if on cue, they all turned to look at Mikiya Awakusu, the “business director” and young leader of the Awakusu-kai.

He was the son of Dougen Awakusu, the “company president,” and was considered to be the most likely candidate to take over the organization next.

In recent years, it was growing less and less likely for groups such as theirs to pass down control to the leader’s own son, but as Mikiya fully intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, he was content to be the waka-gashira, the underboss who oversaw operations.

He was Dougen’s second son. The firstborn was not a yakuza but lived on the straight-and-narrow path, which was a sign that Mikiya’s presence among them was completely voluntary.

Some in the group assumed that he had only achieved his position through nepotism, and because he had no real history or infamy, other yakuza groups in their vicinity thought of him as the weak link of the Awakusu-kai; he was under pressure from both inside and outside the organization.

In fact, most of the other members of the organization were still reserving their judgment on him, waiting to see if he had what it took to inherit the operation and lead them all.

He narrowed his eyes and lobbed a question to prompt more discussion.

“I don’t know this Heiwajima kid…but is he really the kind of guy who can kill three of ours in a basic fistfight?”

This simple question seemed to chill the room even further.

About thirty minutes earlier, the bodies of three Awakusu-kai members had been discovered. This simple, clear fact cast a complex pall over the entire organization.

It happened on the morning of May 4, just as the rest of society was enjoying the climax of the Golden Week extended holiday.

Mikiya had direct control over a subsidiary group of the Awakusu-kai called the Mahoutou Company. Although it labeled itself a “company,” it was, of course, a front for their activities.

For all outward appearances, it was a gallery for art sales, with the Awakusu officer Shiki acting as company director, but in fact, Mikiya was the one in charge. A portion of the money they made went to Awakusu headquarters, while another portion went further up the chain to the Medei-gumi.

And at one of the three offices the Mahoutou Company owned in Ikebukuro, in the area of the building where they did their real business away from the public’s eyes—

An incident occurred.

There were four men on duty at the office. Technically, only three of the four were present.

When the fourth, a younger member, came back to the office after a several-hour work shift, he found a man in a bartender outfit, along with the pulverized remains of his coworkers. By the time he returned to the room with a weapon, the man was gone.

That was what the young man told his boss, Shiki. He swore up and down that it was Shizuo Heiwajima, without a doubt, and now Shiki had his men looking everywhere for Shizuo.

The guy was apparently collecting outstanding debt from the members of a hookup hotline, but he was still a non-yakuza. Was it really possible that he could kill three fully fledged members of the underworld?

It was this doubt that led Mikiya to ask about Shizuo.

His answer came from a man wearing a loud-patterned shirt. This one was about as tall as Aozaki but much more trim and slender. He wore expensive-looking sunglasses, and there was a Western-style walking stick sitting next to his chair, although he didn’t seem to have a limp.

“It’s not always with his fists. Depending on how he feels, he’ll use anything nearby.”

Despite the murder of his fellow Awakusu-kai members, this man had a cocky, lazy smile on his lips. But his eyes were sharp behind the tinted brand-name glasses, and the scar on his face and reactions from the others present made it clear that he was on the combative side.

“You know him, Akabayashi?”

The man named Akabayashi leaned over, creaking his chair, to respond to Mikiya. “You’ve been coming and going overseas so much and spending so little time in Ikebukuro, I don’t blame you for not knowing. I’ve seen him fight at a distance before… He will use weapons, but he doesn’t carry any around. He just uses whatever’s there.”

“Well, sure. Even a kid who’s been in his share of fights knows you can pick up a sign, or a rock, or…”

“No, I’m not talking about that. I mean vending machines and guardrails.”

“…? Yeah, that’s normal. Like smacking people’s heads into them, right?” Mikiya said, confused at Akabayashi’s vague answers.

“No, no, I mean he throws them.”

The furrow in Mikiya’s brow deepened. “What?”

“He’ll throw a vending machine and pull a guardrail right outta the ground. He even yanked a streetlight outta the sidewalk once, I hear.” Akabayashi chuckled. Mikiya was ready to admonish him for joking around in a crisis, until he recognized that something was amiss.

About half of the people in the room were staying conspicuously quiet, their eyes wandering. If Akabayashi was joking, then Kazamoto or someone else would have scolded him by now. But Kazamoto was looking down without a word, and Aozaki was scowling bitterly.

Then, Mikiya noticed that behind Akabayashi’s tinted sunglasses, his eyes contained no hint of mirth. That told him that the things Akabayashi was describing were not at all a joke.

He didn’t quite believe it yet, but there was no denying that many of the people in the room were very tense at just the mention of the name Shizuo Heiwajima.

“…Anyway, our reconciliation with the Asuki-gumi is coming soon. It’s not in our best interest to have any failure on our part coming to light. So, as quietly as you possibly can…

“…find this Heiwajima guy and bring him to me before we expose any of this calamity to others.”

Building, 3F, somewhere in Tokyo

It was an Awakusu office, the one attacked by some unknown assailant.

The bodies were discovered not half an hour ago, but a conversation was taking place in the room that bore little resemblance to the grisly scene.

“Thank you for coming, as always.”

“Oh, it happens all the time.”

“When I was a youngster, I owed a lot to th’ late Master Awakusu.”

“It’s a privilege to serve again.” “Lookit how big young Mikiya’s grown.” “Hasn’t he?”

Shiki, officer of the Awakusu-kai, was greeting a number of ancient old women bent over at the waist. They were dressed like a cleaning staff, but the trim of their uniform was so sharp that if they added the proper helmets, they might look like a germ warfare unit or perhaps wasp exterminators.

There were quite a few old women around the room, busy pushing mops and spraying cleaning solutions even as they exchanged pleasantries.

“…”

Shiki stood in the corner, silently watching their process.

“Well, it’s a good thing they didn’t bleed too much. If they ran a lumino-whatsit-called test, it’d pick up a dang nosebleed. You could change out th’ whole wallpaper, and it’d still pick up the blood.”

“The police don’t trust us enough to take our word for an excuse like that. But they’re not going to get a forensics team in here. We’re cleaning it up to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

“Well, o’ course.”

“Ha-ha,” Shiki laughed politely to the cleaning women, then turned to the man next to him. His face was covered in bandages—the young member of the Awakusu-kai who screamed when Celty took her helmet off and was punished for his transgression.

“Have you got custody of Shizuo Heiwajima yet?”

“Er, not yet… We’ve found him, but…”

“It’s all right. I realize that kid’s not exactly easy to haul in. And I’m telling you, no weapons yet. So…how many of ours went down?”

“Actually…,” the subordinate said hesitantly.

Shiki’s gaze drifted a bit. He asked coldly, “What’s the matter?”

“He’s only been running… He hasn’t struck back at us at all.”

Near Toshima Ward office, Ikebukuro

“You must be Shizuo Heiwajima.”

Shizuo was walking down a street a short ways away from Ikebukuro’s shopping district when the voice hailed him.

“…”

The wanted suspect, dressed in his signature bartender outfit, silently turned toward the voice.

He saw a number of men walking down the sidewalk, spread out to block his path. They were all well-built and carried the air of people who did not work under the light of the sun.

He spun around and saw that, sure enough, similar-looking men were on the other side, glaring at him in the same fashion and blocking his way.

A black van pulled over to stop at the curb, completely blocking him in.

“…What do you want?” he asked, exasperated.

One of the men said roughly, “Don’t play dumb. You know what you did.”

“It wasn’t me who did that, but I don’t suppose you’d believe me,” Shizuo said flatly, neither claiming ignorance nor affirming the man’s accusation. The group of men took a step closer.

“It ain’t up to us whether to believe you or not. Get in the car.”

“I refuse. I’m on the way to sock the crap out of Izaya, since he’s the one who framed me. Please don’t try to stop me.”

Shizuo’s tone of voice was still calm. In fact, given the polite way he was speaking to the older men, he even seemed in a better mood than usual—if you just paid attention to the words he was saying.

But the men who were actually present thought differently.

They could see that while his words were directed toward them, his eyes were looking elsewhere.

Instead, they burned with rage at some unseen target.

Naturally, the men were members of the Awakusu-kai organization, and some of them were the same age as Shizuo.

Anyone who’d been in high school in Ikebukuro at the same time as Shizuo had heard the legend of the “fighting puppet,” and many of them had seen his ferocity for themselves.

The sight of a human being flying through the air often leaves a deeper mental impact than one would imagine. And the younger crowd in the Awakusu-kai witnessed it.

Shizuo Heiwajima.

In Japanese, this name was peaceful, even pastoral, but the sound of it in their ears brought only cold, bitter sweat.

Several of these young professionals in the art of violence felt overwhelmed, threatened, by his presence.

Just as they steeled themselves to wield that violence and subdue Shizuo’s unfathomable strength—something unexpected happened.

The youngster in the bartender outfit, seething and nearly ready to explode, simply turned his back to them and began to flee in an open direction.

Neither the direction of the sidewalk nor into the street.

The building next to them had no entrance door to a store or office, merely a vending machine resting against its wall. So Shizuo chose to escape in the one direction that was not covered by his would-be abductors.

Up.

The moment he started moving in the direction of the vending machine, several of the other men assumed he would pick it up.

But rather than reaching out for the machine, Shizuo jumped.

The strength in his legs was enough to effortlessly kick a motorcycle down the street.

So when applied to a simple jump, his legs were easily strong enough to propel him straight on top of the machine, where he could grab onto the sill of a second-story window.

As the men stared in awe, he lifted himself up by only the strength of his arms until he stood on the sill. They figured he would just break the window to get inside, but instead, he jumped again, this time onto the metal fittings keeping the adjacent building’s sign attached—and up, and up, and up—just as fast as he had been running before.

“Y-you’re not gettin’ away!”

One of the men regained his wits, at least. But by the time he shouted, Shizuo had already disappeared over the roof of the building.

There is an athletic skill known as parkour.

It is described as a “skill” because it exists somewhere between the categories of sport, art, and method of movement.

It is the ability to run through any setting, urban or natural, with total grace, freedom, and efficiency.

That’s all it boils down to, but it’s not just running on dirt or asphalt. Masters of parkour identify a course taking them over various obstacles and utilize it to move smoothly and continuously to their destination.

If there’s a gap in the roof, jump over it. If there’s a wall, climb over it. If there’s a handrail, run on top of it and use the added height to run to higher ground.

Sometimes practitioners travel along walls, sometimes they leap over fences, sometimes they jump back and forth off alternating walls until they eventually reach the top.

They might as well be considered modern-day ninjas, and they go by the French term traceurs. Out of this movement came the development of “freerunning,” which adds the expressive elements of acrobatic tricks and flourishes to parkour that are unnecessary to reach the goal.

As movies and games exhibit these skills to a wider audience, familiarity with these activities has grown around the world.

But there was no such information stored in Shizuo Heiwajima’s brain.

And yet he was successfully racing through the town of Ikebukuro with absolute freedom.

His movements were not the practiced, disciplined art of the traceurs and freerunners.

Even for simple feats such as jumping down from heights, a fall of just a few extra feet can cause certain injury for anyone not practiced at it.

But Shizuo did have a bit of experience with this.

There was a young man named Izaya Orihara who often found himself at odds with Shizuo.

He had practiced this art of parkour while in his teenage years and made use of it to escape Shizuo’s brute strength when necessary. As Shizuo followed after him, he learned a little something about pursuing as well, until he reached the point where he could actually catch and knock out Izaya.

He recalled those memories of over half a dozen years earlier as he converted his pursuit skills into escape skills, tearing through the concrete jungle.

He leaped from building to building, plunging over gaps to land a dozen feet lower without an instant of hesitation. The distinction between jumping and falling might as well not have existed.

He wasn’t completely absorbing the impacts to his legs. But whether he wanted it to or not, Shizuo Heiwajima’s body simply withstood what would normally be withering pain, if not broken bones.

run    leap over      spin

   jump    stomp       cling      slide

grab    clamber up          crawl      spill

And run. Run. Run to and away.

All these movements contained none of the efficiency of parkour or the acrobatic artistry of freerunning. That made sense, as Shizuo had never trained in those areas. But he was able to make use of his body’s inhuman strength to succeed at the end result: racing through the city.

An ordinary strongman cannot match the achievements of the thoroughly trained. The fact that Shizuo could was a testament to the extraordinary physical strength he had.

So with his abnormal strength and absurd explosive power, the man known as Ikebukuro’s Strongest chose not to utilize those talents upon the Awakusu-kai but instead fled without resisting.

Building, 3F, somewhere in Tokyo

Shizuo Heiwajima had fled.

Shiki silently pondered this report for a while.

The old women were nearly done with their cleaning, removing all traces of the struggle from the room. It was as if three men had not actually died there at all.

Shiki’s subordinate couldn’t take the silence any longer and noted, “That Shizuo Heiwajima must be no big deal if he just turns tail and runs like that.”

The next moment, the back of Shiki’s fist pounded into the bridge of his nose.

“Glurk!”

“How stupid are you? You hear about a man racing up the side of a building with only the strength in his arms, and your first thought is, ‘No big deal’? If it’s that easy, why don’t I just dangle you out the window over there and see how you handle it?”

“S-sorry, sir! I—I just meant that even a monster like him will run away. He’s not going to be stupid enough to make an enemy out of us.”

Shiki thought this over. Eventually, he muttered mostly to himself, “Why would someone with that attitude kill our guys?”

“Well…,” his subordinate mumbled.

Shiki ignored him. “He didn’t mess with the safe. And he should be strong enough to pry open one of those things or just plain carry it off if he wants to.”

Then, he asked the simplest and most important question of all.

“…Was it really Shizuo who did this?”

“Blond guy with sunglasses and a bartender’s vest? Who else would it be?”

“Yeah, based on the report, I’m not doubting that he was here. What I mean is…”

Shiki paused and stared around the room again.

If it was really Shizuo Heiwajima who killed them, he wouldn’t have left a witness. I suppose he could have done it to make it clear that it was him, but why would he need to do something like that?

“At any rate, we’ve got to bring him in. If Akabayashi or Aozaki gets involved, it will only complicate matters,” he barked to his men.

Just then, another man raced in through the door. “I’ve got something you need to hear, Mr. Shiki!”

“What is it?”

“I…I just got a report from the guys out looking for Mikiya’s daughter… Our scout on Sixtieth Floor Street says he saw Miss Akane yesterday.”

That was the name of the daughter of Mikiya Awakusu, Shiki’s boss—and the granddaughter of Dougen Awakusu, the company president.

They’d had the entire operation searching for her after she ran away from home, but with a newer, fresher emergency on his hands, Shiki realized that he’d completely forgotten about her for a brief moment.

“It was Kazamoto’s team on the search for Miss Akane. Why are you reporting to me?”

The fact that this man had raced here to tell him meant that the report pertained to him somehow. Shiki waited for the younger man’s explanation, feeling a nasty sense of foreboding coming over him.

His premonition was immediately proven correct.

“W-well, yesterday…a girl resembling the young miss was seen…running somewhere with Shizuo Heiwajima…”

Train platform, somewhere in Tokyo

In the midst of the Golden Week holiday, the platform was crowded with traveling families, students in plainclothes, and office workers pressed into service during the vacation, making the scene even more chaotic and cramped than usual.

Amid the bustle, a young man leaned against a post at the corner of the platform, not moving even when the train came in.

Fleeing here and there isn’t your style, Shizu.

Izaya Orihara smirked, staring at the screen of his phone.

Does that mean you’ve chilled out a bit?

If you strike back against them, it leaves no room for excuses, after all.

I’m guessing that right about now…some of the sharper members of the Awakusu-kai are doubting that you were responsible for this.

I suppose that means you’ve grown somewhat as a person.

But in your case, that’s more of a regression.

He pressed a button on the phone, envisioned his greatest rival running around in a panic, and smiled again.

Happily, gleefully, maliciously.

What meaning is there in a monster growing as a person? You have no future doing anything but using your own strength. If you didn’t want to be suspected, maybe you should’ve beaten that witness to death, he thought to himself, a contradiction in terms.

The information agent typed away at his phone, continuing his deals. When a particular piece of intel caught his eye, he smirked, the smile more malicious than before.

Well, I guess it’s about time.

Until just thirty minutes ago, he’d been hiding out at one of his little lairs near the station. When he got the message that the Dollars were under attack, he slipped out of the darkness and entered the light of day.

But not to throw himself into the fray. Certainly not.

This platform would put him on a train moving away from Ikebukuro.

Yes, I prefer being outside of this web.

His mouth twisted cruelly. He hit SEND on a piece of information.

The next train came to a stop at the station.

The young man put away his cell phone and casually slid through the crowd into the train.

Time to buzz my noisy little wings from just out of reach.

Roof, building near abandoned factory, Tokyo

“Hey, Vorona. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a hunter, waiting for your prey to move,” the large man said.

Vorona did not move her head except to speak. “Affirmative, negative, answer cannot be determined. I have lack of experience hunting animals. But hunting humans is what we are doing this exact moment. They cannot be compared.”

“I see. I don’t get it, but…I get it.” The large man, Slon, nodded and put the binoculars to his eyes.

Through the lens he saw the rear of an abandoned factory. A being in a pitch-black riding suit and full helmet was there, sneaking a peek through one of the windows of the factory building.

It seemed to be preoccupied with the local hoodlums gathered inside, but as long as the Black Rider did not move, neither would Vorona and Slon.

In fact, nearly an hour had passed since the young men had walked into the factory. As they waited for any kind of movement, Slon began to wonder once again about things that had nothing to do with their situation.

“Speaking of hunting, I was wondering one thing…,” he asked, completely serious. Vorona did not even glance in his direction. “People have used poisoned arrows for hunting for ages, right? Or blow darts or whatever. They put the poison on first before they shoot it. Is that really safe? If they eat an animal that has the poison running through its veins, won’t the hunter get sick? I’m just so curious. The question is eating through my brain as if it were that very poison. I think I may worry myself to death.”

His partner, without moving or exhibiting any emotion of any kind, listed off the answers to his questions like an electronic dictionary, but she still sounded a bit odd.

“Many poisons are used for hunting; many pass through vessels to affect nerves, brain. Animals thus die or are left incapacitated. How sad. Humans intake through the mouth. Pass through saliva, stomach, duodenum, breaks down poison. Rendered harmless. Happily ever after. I have knowledge from experience. Grandmother’s folk wisdom.”

“I see! The human stomach truly is a wonder. But of course—if the poison you use to hunt ends up killing you, what would be the point? Oh…speaking of which, what would happen if a venomous snake bit its own tail?”

“Contains antibody to its own venom. Many venomous snakes have no problem. However, not all are affirmative. Concerning very venomous snakes, antibodies lose to toxins. There is only death. How sad.”

“I see!”

This conversation continued for several minutes, during which Vorona maintained sharp observation of the perfectly still Black Rider, while Slon scanned the surroundings tirelessly, even as he asked question after stupid question.

Was the rider just going to wait there until all the hoodlums left the factory building? Just as Vorona wondered if that would be the case, the figure budged.

“?”

She wondered what had happened and then realized that the Black Rider’s phone had just received a message.

On top of that, the ringtone had alerted the people inside, causing the rider to fluster wildly, visible even to Vorona and Sloan from their considerable distance.

“…For a monster, its actions are very human. Incomprehendable.”

“The word you’re looking for is incomprehensible. Anyway, something’s strange. Look at the entrance,” Slon pointed out.

She saw that a new group of a dozen or so men was gathering at the front of the factory. Once again, they were young ruffians, but something was wrong.

They held metal pipes and wooden swords, and unlike the youngsters who had entered the factory earlier, they were dressed in matching laborer uniforms.

Those must be the special uniforms that certain Japanese delinquent gangs wear, Vorona decided, right as the youths charged into the factory.

A few of them circled around toward the rear in an attempt to prevent the boys inside from escaping out the back.

“What do we do?”

“Observation necessary. Either way, the Black Rider will act. We shall not estrange our sight from that moment. It is crucial.”

They did not break their positions.

The assault of this new group of delinquents was clearly outside of their range of expectations—yet they did not panic in the slightest.

A fight between groups of Japanese teenagers had nothing to do with their world.

Their utter, rational calmness spoke to that.

At this point, at least.

A few minutes earlier, near Kawagoe Highway, luxury apartment

“Wow, it really cleared out around here.”

Shinra Kishitani’s apartment had been very lively until that morning.

It was a noisy night between the patient and the unexpected guests, but that was over.

And now Shinra was the only person present.

Celty had not returned from her job yet, Tom had left for work, Shizuo had gone to crush Izaya, and Anri and the little girl were out in Ikebukuro now.

“They’re all so lively, rushing out before noon. Kids these days and their lack of fear over UV rays!”

The young man was the very picture of the indoor type—he even wore his white doctor’s coat around the house at his own leisure. He busied himself with hanging up the patients’ blankets and other domestic tasks as he waited for his partner to return home.

Just then, the doorbell rang.

“Ooh, is that Shizuo? Or perhaps Izaya with every bone in his body broken?” Shinra hummed to himself as he walked to the door.

Outside, he found a number of menacing-looking men.

Shinra looked at the central figure without much alarm and asked, “Mr. Shiki, what brings you here?”

“I’ve got a question to ask you,” Shiki replied and promptly stepped through the doorway and past Shinra into the apartment without another word.

“Um, hang on, excuse me!”

But Shiki did not listen. He surveyed the interior from the center of the living room, then walked over to the kitchen.

“Looks like you’ve had company,” he noted, looking at the collection of used cups on the counter above the sink. He then picked up what was sitting next to them—the impossible sight of a steel cup crumpled into a ball.

Chagrined but somewhat suspicious, Shinra explained, “Well, that explains itself, right? Shizuo was here. All I did was tell a little joke, and he just crushed that cup in his hand… I tell you, I feared for my life.”

“…”

Shiki thought over his words for a bit.

The number of places that Shizuo Heiwajima might visit was naturally limited, given how he tended to inspire fear in the people around him. They’d sent people to Shizuo’s apartment building directly, of course, but Shiki decided that in order to gain information on the man, it would be best to drop by the home of his old acquaintance Shinra.

He hadn’t expected to actually find signs of Shizuo here. The only reason he had pushed his way into the apartment so brusquely was the sight of the ugly twist in a metal handrail on the staircase, as though a monster had taken a bite out of it.

That was an artifact of Shizuo’s rage as he left to beat Izaya Orihara to a pulp—but one didn’t need to know that particular detail to recognize that it was clearly Shizuo’s doing.

Could Akane Awakusu be in this apartment as well? Shiki briefly clung to that hope as he searched the place, but he couldn’t sense any human presence aside from theirs.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Shiki? Do you have another patient for me? I’m wiped out from treating Shizuo and others all night, so if it requires surgery, I would suggest a more skillful doctor right now.”

Shinra’s tone of voice suggested that he had no idea Shizuo was on the run. So Shiki chose to ask quietly but firmly, “Shizuo…was here, then?”

“Yes. What’s the matter? Did he go and wreck up one of the businesses on your turf?”

“You might say that. However, the victim claims they were doing nothing wrong when it happened, so I came to talk with you and see if I can learn whether he is truly responsible or not. That’s why I’m searching for him.”

“Oh, I see. You could have just called,” Shinra said, pulling his cell phone out of the pocket of his coat. “Huh? Got a bunch of Dollars messages… Well, whatever.”

He closed the inbox, opened his address book, and smiled at Shiki. “Tell you what, I’ll call him and find out where he is now. Yes, he snaps pretty easily, but not without reason, so go easy on him, okay? Oh—did this happen today?”

“Yes, today,” Shiki replied.

Shinra sighed and pressed the button that would dial Shizuo’s number. He put the phone up to his cheek and noted, “I guess I’m not surprised. He was angrier today than I think I’ve ever seen him.”

“…Oh?” It was a very interesting detail, but Shiki kept that from showing. He waited for more details.

“Where do I start? He just showed up here out of the blue last night…and who do you suppose he had with him?”

“I don’t know, his brother? He’s supposed to be a celebrity, right?”

Shiki had some idea. But he decided to offer up that curveball instead, as a means to gauge Shinra’s reaction.

Shinra’s smile never vanished as he chattered happily, “No, not even! You won’t believe this—he brought this little ten-year-old girl with him!”

“…!”

“Huh? He’s not picking up… Hmm, I guess that means…”

He did not finish that statement.

When Shinra looked up from his phone at Shiki, he noticed the other man was wearing a fiercer glare than usual—and his subordinates were fanning out around Shinra with menacing purpose.

“H-huh? Did I…say something bad?”

It was at that moment, at last, that Shinra recognized the grave nature of the situation.

Just to add one last layer of pressure on him, Shiki’s heavy, sharp voice thrust itself into Shinra’s eardrums.

“And…where is this girl now?”

Mikado Ryuugamine was aware.

He knew what he had created.

The Dollars had started off as nothing more than a joke.

Mikado had suggested that they invent a fictional organization, and a number of his online friends happily assisted him in creating a gang that did not actually exist.

“No requirements to join. No rules.”

And somehow, that odd little joke had taken on a life and form of its own within Ikebukuro.

Ikebukuro.

It wasn’t even a place that Mikado had visited before that point.

Just a thing beyond a conceptual wall in his mind, a location that existed only in the news, the magazines, the TV shows.

None of Mikado’s friends who were cofounders hung around him anymore.

They didn’t even know about the name Mikado Ryuugamine, and neither did he know the ages or appearances of those Internet figures. People who don’t go online might mock those relationships as utterly shallow, but they were still his companions in founding and building the Dollars.

They had cut off their online ties with Mikado.

And now their work had given birth to an eerie thing in real life.

The gang that they invented, mostly in jest, was active under that name, carrying out actions that were, at times, illegal—and earning itself proper recognition from society as a street gang.

The founders all fled the scene.

They changed their online handles and never spoke of the Dollars again.

That’s all it took.

The only step required to escape responsibility.

It had started off as a silly game that couldn’t possibly be real.

If a fantasy image of a monster started to attack people, was that actually the fault of the one who envisioned it?

It’s not a question with an easy answer, but one can certainly presume that most people would try to evade responsibility for such a thing, if they were in that position.

So with that in mind, all those people whose faces Mikado did not know vanished from the Dollars, one after the other.

But Mikado was different.

He accepted the Dollars as they existed in reality.

As if it was what he wanted all along.

Someone has to manage them. It’s the duty of the one who created them.

That was what he told himself, to hide the elation he felt.

But at that point, how much did Mikado Ryuugamine truly understand?

Did he realize exactly what he had created?

Did he grasp what it meant to be the founder of the Dollars and a leader to all the people who were affiliated with the name?

Whether he understood that perfectly or not at all, everything associated with the Dollars did its best to mercilessly thrust the reality of the situation onto him.

Mikado Ryuugamine understood what it was that he had created.

But he did not yet know what he himself was.

Mikado Ryuugamine was unable to find the answer yet.

Abandoned factory, Tokyo

The time: nearly an hour before Shiki would arrive at Shinra’s apartment.

“So, Mr. Mikado, have you made up your mind?”

Aoba Kuronuma’s youthful face took on a dazzling smile that was totally at odds with the menace of his words.

Before him was another boy who looked just as young, despite being a year older than him—Mikado Ryuugamine.

Two students in different years at Raira Academy, upperclassman and underclassman.

As well as companions within the very loose boundaries of the Dollars.

Those were the only two connections when they first met—but only from Mikado’s perspective.

For his part, Aoba knew everything from the start.

That Mikado was the founder of the Dollars. The war with the Yellow Scarves. The connection to Masaomi Kida. Perhaps even a part of Mikado’s personality that the boy himself was not aware of.

But Mikado didn’t know anything about Aoba.

He was just an ordinary boy who looked up to the other Dollars.

But he had no proof that Aoba was really “ordinary.”

Mikado didn’t even know enough to be aware of when the adjective ordinary was accurately applicable to a person. He might as well have described him as “someone I don’t really know.”

And that schoolmate he “didn’t really know” was now leveraging incredible pressure on him.

He had suddenly revealed that he was none other than the founder of the Blue Squares.

Also, that his group was responsible for attacking Toramaru in Saitama.

These alone, coming in such quick succession, were more than enough to drive Mikado into a state of confusion.

But the real kicker was his request at the end.

A request without rhythm, reason, or reality.

“Be the leader of the Blue Squares for us.”

He wanted to deny everything.

He assumed that he must be dreaming.

I’m jealous of Aoba for swooping in and getting along with Sonohara, so I’m dreaming all of this as a way to tarnish his name. I’m such a creep.

He tried to wake up from the dream.

He tried to escape reality.

But Aoba’s words tied him down to the ground.

“At this very moment…

…you’re smiling, aren’t you?”

That’s a lie! That can’t be true!

He wanted to scream it.

He wanted to bellow with all the air in his lungs.

But before he could actually do that, Mikado realized something.

He understood why he was so furious at this accusation.

A normal person might have gone ahead and yelled anyway before even thinking.

But the recognition of his own impulse was a total shock to Mikado.

It was such an abnormal occurrence that it paradoxically yanked him right out of that impulse.

After all, it was nearly the very first time in his entire life that Mikado had been furious about something.

Not when the Dollars first met in real life, and he argued with Seiji Yagiri’s sister.

Not when he learned the Dollars were under attack by the slasher.

Not even when he first came across Masaomi’s terrible injury.

He had never felt the urge to rage and shout, even if he had been angry.

So…why? Why do I feel such burning in the pit of my stomach?

What eventually rose to his throat was not a scream of denial, but fierce nausea.

He had just realized that the reason he was about to scream…

…was because he pointed out the truth, didn’t he?

Uh…wha…?

Mikado touched his own face without thinking.

His hands sought to ascertain his expression.

But what he found, now that he was aware of it, was that he wasn’t smiling in the least.

What about a moment ago—when Aoba had actually pointed that out?

What…was I…?

What was he thinking just then?

He couldn’t even recall his own emotion of a few seconds earlier. Cold sweat seeped.

“Are you all right?”

His eyes focused, recognized Aoba’s face right in front of him.

“Wh-wha—?!”

His schoolmate was suddenly something unknown, alien. That innocent smile was still there, but Mikado could no longer trust in its harmless benevolence.

“Well, that’s not very nice, screaming at the face of your sweet little underclassman. I’ve given you about ten minutes now… Have you come to an answer?”

“T…ten minutes…?”

Mikado looked down at his cell phone, stunned that so much time could have passed without realizing it. On the waiting screen was a line that said, “23 unread messages.” They were probably about the Dollars being attacked.

“That long…”

Mikado sensed that his pulse had skyrocketed.

He got the feeling that a wave of static was rushing in his ears.

Confusion.

He was in a state of confusion.

That was all he could tell.

He didn’t even know what his mind should focus on first.

The Dollars being under attack?

Aoba’s confession that he was the founder of the Blue Squares?

The fact that they were the ones who attacked the motorcycle gang from Saitama?

The fact that they knew he was the founder of the Dollars?

Their request that he be the leader of the Blue Squares?

And most of all—was he really smiling amid this chaos?

They were all separate issues, and yet there was no denying that they were connected.

But Mikado was so discombobulated that he didn’t even know where to start untangling the knot.

“Wait. Hang on,” he said without thinking. Those words did not solve anything.

Aoba kept that innocent smile on his face as he cruelly pointed out, “Haven’t we all been waiting?”

“…”

Aoba and Mikado weren’t the only ones in the factory, of course.

Other youths who must’ve been the Blue Squares that Aoba mentioned were spread about the interior of the building, each one doing his own thing. Some fiddled with their phones, like Mikado was doing; some yawned and leaned against empty barrels—they were not unified in their purpose.

And of course, unbeknownst to anyone inside, Celty was watching the entire scene through the window.

“Well, there’s no rush. You’ve got a lot of e-mail backed up on that phone, don’t you? Maybe you should look through that real quick,” Aoba taunted and glanced at his own screen. “But it only looks like they’re talking about another attack—nothing too big yet. I don’t hear any cop cars, and this factory was the Yellow Scarves’ hangout, so I doubt anyone would charge in here expecting to find any Dollars.”

Mikado’s spine trembled at this self-assured statement. Aoba was daring him to calm down and react to the situation.

“Do you think I could go back home to think it over?”

“I’m afraid I can’t be that patient,” Aoba replied, shaking his head. Two large delinquents headed for the front gate of the factory and slid the doors closed.

The rattling was a dirge of despair that froze Mikado on the spot.

“B-but, you know, I have to go meet up with Sonohara…”

“Wow, right in the middle of this situation, and you’d rather think about Anri? How much do you love her, huh?” he teased.

Normally, Mikado would blush and retort, “It’s n-not like that!” but under the circumstances, he couldn’t possibly send that much blood to his face.

Instead, Aoba delivered the kicker that would ensure Mikado’s cheeks went even paler.

“Either way, you probably shouldn’t meet with her today at all, should you?”

“Huh…?”

“You’re just going to drag her into this.”

“…!”

Anri had nothing to do with this sort of thing.

Mikado could sense that she was harboring some kind of secret, it was true.

She had a katana when they went to rescue Masaomi from the Yellow Scarves. She was clearly familiar with Celty. These things were enough to suggest that she was hiding something personal.

But secretive or not, Anri was still his friend, as well as his crush. He had to be certain that she wouldn’t get drawn into this issue of his. He’d made up his mind on that.

Then, he remembered something.

A phone call with Izaya, where the older man said, “If you don’t want to get dragged in, just don’t identify yourself with the Dollars.”

And just before that, Masaomi had given him a similar warning in the chat room. Don’t act as one of the Dollars for a while.

Perhaps Masaomi had known that this was going to happen.

Even in his confusion, Mikado was nearly certain that this was true.

Masaomi had his own different information network. Perhaps he’d found something about Aoba’s group.

Would that mean that if he gave them an answer as a Dollar, he would be spurning Masaomi’s considerate advice? But wouldn’t that also mean using his friend as an excuse to escape this chaos?

Despite his indecision, Mikado did manage to give the waiting boy an answer to his most recent question—but it was partially following the advice of his friend.

“Well, if I don’t claim to be with the Dollars…then she won’t get dragged in. Simple, right?”

Aoba might be disappointed by such a weak answer, but Mikado didn’t care. He decided that getting beat up by these young hooligans was acceptable if it got him out of the present situation.

That was how pressured he was feeling.

But the boy with the angelic smile would not allow his beloved upperclassman to escape.

“You can’t do that, can you?”

“…Huh?”

“I know you’re not perfect, but you wouldn’t abandon your besieged comrades and pretend to be an ordinary person, would you?”

“…!”

The whisper of the devil, as pure as silk.

“It’s easy to solve the problem. Hand us over to Toramaru as sacrifices. Order us to crush them instead. No need to torture yourself over it.”

He made it sound reassuring, but the suggestion was more of a challenge.

Normally, Mikado would claim that he could never do such a thing and start giving orders to the other Dollars in a way that would ensure no one got hurt.

But in his current state of mind, he hit the brakes before he could get to that idea.

Part of it was the warning from Izaya, whom he trusted. And during that phone call, he had suggested that perhaps Mikado’s true fear was of the Dollars leaving him behind.

Now Mikado suspected that if he exhibited his duty to the group and offered them information and plans, he would only be providing evidence to prove Izaya’s point.

He also worried that acting as one of the Dollars would be a betrayal of Masaomi’s warning and the sentimental consideration that led him to deliver it.

And most of all, he feared that by admitting that he was inextricably part of the Dollars’ structure and getting involved in this battle, he would most certainly drag Anri and Masaomi into a repeat of what happened with the Yellow Scarves.

Still, if he was going to be pressured into doing something just because he was afraid of Aoba and his gang, he’d prefer to make the decision on his own.

Mikado Ryuugamine was easily swayed by others. But when it came to the team of his own making, even he didn’t understand his own actions sometimes.

Even now, some kind of emotion was swirling deep in his gut.

The same sensation he felt when they faced off against Yagiri Pharmaceuticals was bursting up from inside of him now.

He just didn’t know exactly what that emotion was. And as a result, his confusion continued unabated, plunging him deeper into his quagmire.

“But…even still…”

This is weird. He’s not acting like the normal Mikado, thought Aoba. The first to notice the change in the other boy was the one who caused his confusion in the first place.

The Mikado he knew, once challenged like this, would either refuse their suggestion entirely or deliver some kind of verdict on the matter.

But some odd sense of hesitation within him was holding him back, shackling his feet, and preventing him from making that decision.

Did…someone get to him first?

He didn’t know that Mikado had received a warning from Masaomi Kida, his closest friend and confidant, not to act as one of the Dollars.

He didn’t know that this was not actually Masaomi, either, but someone else using Masaomi’s online handle as a means of manipulating Mikado.

But Aoba could tell.

Izaya Orihara…?

He could sense the presence of the man who used a tiny key to lock Mikado’s mind away.

There was no evidence to support this, only Mikado Ryuugamine’s odd reaction. Of course, human behavior is not perfectly predictable. But Aoba could feel that something was off, not in the sense that it “wasn’t like Mikado,” but more that it “wasn’t like the founder of the Dollars.”

And if someone was exerting influence over Mikado’s connection to the Dollars, that left only a handful of possible names.

I can’t be sure…but if he got to him, was it meant to be a nasty trick against me? Or does he seek to use Mikado for his own purposes, just like I do?

Aoba silently cursed the meddling Izaya Orihara but kept the simple smile on his face aimed at Mikado.

“It’s all right. Take your time. How about this? I’ll set your limit as our meeting time with Miss Anri.”

“Uh…”

“Once the time comes, I’ll go ahead and call her. I’ll say that something came up suddenly, and you couldn’t come today. But I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“W-wait a second!” Mikado stammered. He was more concerned about the latter half than the part about himself. “What do you mean…?”

“Oh, I’m going. Of course I am. And if we’re not going together, she’s going to worry, you know?”

He sent a glance to his companions guarding the front door of the factory and narrowed his eyes.

“But you will be staying here.”

Watching all this from outside the factory was a shadow.

Being careful not to be spotted by the boys inside, Celty Sturluson thought feverishly.

Hmmm. What should I do?

Her intention here was not to spy on the goings-on of these street delinquents, of course.

She was searching for Akane Awakusu on behalf of the Awakusu-kai, to bring the girl to safety.

Right after receiving that job, she and Anri were attacked by a mysterious biker, so she had attached a shadow string to their attacker’s motorcycle and followed it here. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of the factory were keeping her from following the trail inside.

I’m pretty sure their vehicles are in here. And these kids…don’t look like the types to kidnap the grandkid of the Awakusu-kai boss…

Inside the building, Mikado’s face went pale as he examined his phone, and the boy who looked like Mikado’s underclassman smiled like he was invincible.

Well, it doesn’t look like they’re going to start whaling on Mikado, so…this might take a while. It’s a good thing I muted my e-mail notifications.

Originally, Celty had the notification sound on, but she got so many Dollars-related text messages that she generally kept it off now. It did vibrate, but with all the boys inside getting the same messages at around the same times, her own sound was well hidden.

Partway through, she remembered that she could disable vibration, too, and promptly did that.

She considered leaving the scene temporarily, but she was worried about Mikado now. They weren’t strangers—in fact, he was one of the few “friends” she had, who knew her identity and still treated her kindly.

She also considered rushing in to help him, but Mikado might consider that a bad thing, and above all, this struck her as something he needed to answer on his own. Besides, if she raised a fuss here, it might attract the attention of her foe, the owner of the motorcycle, and put Mikado and all the other boys in danger.

Celty continued to monitor the situation, unaware that she herself was under surveillance.

Boy, he’s really got himself wrapped up in something here, hasn’t he? And that Aoba boy—he doesn’t look so tough, but he’s quite the evil schemer. Then again, the first time Shinra brought Izaya over, I thought he looked like an honor student… You can’t judge people on appearances.

Celty was herself a member of the Dollars, but it wasn’t her definitive place in the world. Perhaps it would’ve been if she’d spurned Shinra’s love, but for now it was just one of many circles for her, and she considered the others no more than online chat friends.

But she also knew Mikado in real life, and she wasn’t going to simply abandon him and find another place.

I wonder what he’s going to do.

Ordinarily, one would assume that asking a well-behaved boy like Mikado to be the leader of a gang had to be a joke. But Celty knew that Mikado was not as normal as he seemed.

The first time she had met him, he fought against a high-ranking executive of Yagiri Pharmaceuticals and didn’t back down a step. Of course, it was an argument rather than a fistfight, but still, he fought all the same. She thought of him as someone with firm personal fiber.

But the Mikado she was watching today was oddly hesitant.

Perhaps he was indeed worried that Anri could get dragged into this mess.

But he’d actually be safer if she was involved. In fact, it would be major trouble for whoever stood in her way.

Celty knew that Anri was the host of Saika and admired her power. She hadn’t told Mikado this, of course, but he was beginning to get a notion of the situation. She tried to analyze his decision-making.

I’m betting that even if he knew, Mikado would choose not to get her involved. Even if he was fully aware of Saika’s power. And yet, if Anri came to him and demanded to help, he wouldn’t say no.

Celty recalled that Mikado knew what she was and realized that it was the abnormal and extraordinary that he desired above all else. If Anri wanted to dwell on the extraordinary side, he wouldn’t try to stop her.

Then again, Celty had just taken a job from the Awakusu-kai and been shot at with an anti-matériel rifle; if anything, Mikado’s situation still seemed tremendously ordinary to her.

All this gang and turf and warfare stuff… I know high school was tough for Shinra—is it like this for everyone? I wouldn’t know about this.

Back when Shinra’s group was in high school over five years ago, Celty had witnessed a number of large-scale battles between the teens.

But they weren’t these giant gang wars between teams like the Dollars and the Yellow Scarves, more like personal fights between adjacent individuals staking out their personal territory.

At the center was always Shizuo, who just wanted a peaceful life.

Controlling the strings from behind the scenes was Izaya, who stayed a step outside of the fights.

And Shinra just wandered to and fro between them.

Shinra would probably say something like, “Go ahead, apologize and get beat up. I’ll fix you up for free, and we can call ourselves even.” While Shizuo would say, “Quit askin’ me all this pain-in-the-ass crap!” and beat everyone up. And Izaya…

What would Izaya do? That Aoba boy reminds me of him.

And then Celty noticed something.

Oh…I get it. Izaya wouldn’t get himself into this situation to begin with. They’re the sort of people who loathe their own kind, so they wouldn’t approach a kindred spirit and ask him to be their leader… Only if they were setting a trap maybe.

Meanwhile, she continued silently watching the interior of the factory.

Completely unaware of her enemies watching her every move at that very moment.

It’s been a while.

Still, nothing major was happening inside of the factory building.

Mikado would look down, ask Aoba something, then gather information on his phone, but the process didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

How long has it been now?

Celty checked the time on her phone and found that nearly an hour had passed since she had arrived at the factory.

Just as she was wondering if it was about time that she either barged in to help him or gave up and left, Aoba smiled and thumped a fist into his open palm.

“Okay, I think it’s time to call Miss Anri now.”

“N-no, wait,” Mikado started, but a large young man clapped a hand to his shoulder.

“I don’t want you yelling out something inconvenient over the phone, so I’ll contact her through text. Actually, my apologies. I already did that five minutes ago.”

“Wha…?”

“Which means that I need to leave now if I want to make it in time. You stay here and think things over…while you’re watching the reports come in from the Dollars falling apart in this war.”

“W-wait!”

Mikado’s shout brought Celty to a standing position.

…Yeah, maybe I should do something about this now. It’s looking like that Aoba boy is about to leave, so I’ll help after he’s gone.

As she watched Aoba go, Celty recalled how she felt about him earlier—specifically, his resemblance to Izaya Orihara. There was nothing concrete about her feeling, but it was more than enough to be wary of him.

Something tells me I shouldn’t get involved with that Aoba boy. Also, once I take Mikado ahead to Anri, I should swing back to this factory. I’ve still got my thread connected to that bike.

Just when she was gauging the best time to leap out—at the worst possible moment—something sounded off.

“Da-dum, da-dum, dummmm~.”

The descending jingle from the show Mysterious Discoveries of the World, whenever a participant answered a quiz question wrong.

Coming from her own cell phone.

Nwhaaaa—?! I forgot to turn off my actual ringtone!

She’d muted her text notifications but forgotten to mute the incoming calls.

A while ago she’d tried out a number of different ringtones, and when Shinra happened to overhear that one, he panicked and said, “Wait, Celty! Nobody else calls you but me, since you can’t talk! So what does this mean?! When I call you, it’s like getting a wrong answer?! Listen, if I’ve done something to wrong you, I apologize—just let me know what level of disappointment you’re at first!”

She found that response so amusing, she set it to be the specific ringtone for calls from Shinra’s number.

The ringtone was so out of place in the present situation that she couldn’t help but recall its genesis, but it was the very worst time to get caught up in memories.

As she scrambled to stop the phone from going off, Celty noticed that through the factory window, Mikado, Aoba, and every other young man inside the building was staring out at her in disbelief.

“Hello, Celty? Mr. Shiki’s here at the apartment now and wants to talk about the job you’re working. Do you have some time soon? Hello? If you’re listening, why aren’t you sending your usual secret signal? Hello? Hellooo?”

But the voice coming through the phone speaker did not reach Celty’s ears.

“…The Black Rider?”

“Celty?! What are you doing here?!”

For the first time, the smile was off Aoba’s face. Mikado’s voice was disbelieving.

And immediately after their questions overlapped—

“What are you doing here?” demanded the other boys, their angry voices echoing around the massive building.

Celty put a finger to the mic on her phone and tapped to signify that it “wasn’t the right time for this,” taking out her PDA with her other hand.

With countless little tendril-like shadow fingers from her left hand, she typed out a message and held the screen to the window for the nearest boy to read.

“I am but a simple passing urban legend. Just pretend that you never saw me, or I’ll come to haunt your dreams tonight.”

Near Kawagoe Highway, Shinra’s apartment

“You think this is some kinda joke?!” bellowed a young man’s voice from the phone speaker.

Shinra sighed and turned around. “I think Celty might be indisposed at the moment.”

Across from him, Shiki was sitting in a chair with his arms folded, looking pensive.

“…Please continue trying to get in touch with her. We really need all the help we can get right now.”

“Sure thing. You believe me, right? I don’t think Celty knows that Akane was here, and I wasn’t informed of the nature of her job.”

“I do believe you. If you really wanted to, you could easily remove all traces that Shizuo was here. And Celty would have kept her job private from you to prevent you falling into danger. I’m just…irritated at the unfortunate coincidence,” Shiki admitted. His expression grew a bit harder, and he returned to the target of his duty. “More importantly, you mentioned a teenage girl that took Miss Akane out to meet a friend… Any ideas on where they might be?”

Something in the tone of Shiki’s voice and the glint in his eyes sent a chill down Shinra’s back, but he did not let it show in his response.

“That’s a good question. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl that would know a hundred different meetup spots, so if I had to guess a few, I’d say in front of Tokyu Hands on Sixtieth Floor Street; the Lotteria on the other side; or, in terms of spots around the train station, the fountain near the Metropolitan exit, West Gate Park, or the Ikefukuro owl at the east gate.”

“…”

Shiki glanced over at his subordinates, and a number of them started for the door with their phones out. They were probably going to instruct other Awakusu-kai forces to head to all those locations.

“To think that little girl was actually the granddaughter of the Awakusu president!”

“…I don’t think I need to point out that everything happening here is—”

“Nothing to worry about. You know how much I value confidentiality, don’t you? The only person I tell things to is Celty, and she’s aware of all of this already,” Shinra reassured him, looking for a sugar packet as he prepared some coffee.

Suddenly, the sounds of destruction and the angry yelling of young men erupted through the speaker of the phone, which was still on the call in the kitchen.

“?”

Naturally, Shiki heard it as well. He raised an eyebrow.

“…Sounds like there’s some trouble.”

“You think this is some kinda joke?!” a broad-shouldered delinquent demanded. Celty easily shrugged her shoulders.

If she still had her head, this was the exact situation that sighs were made for, she thought.

She leaped nimbly through the empty windowsill and into the building, tucking her phone away into her riding suit and holding out the PDA as she approached Mikado.

“…”

Aoba Kuronuma watched Celty with suspicion as his comrades buzzed around him.

It wasn’t his first sighting of the Black Rider. He’d been present in the van with Mikado just a month ago as she rode around them.

That experience was enough to give him a suspicion that she was something else, something inhuman.

She produced shadows out of her body, rode a motorcycle that made no engine noise, and—if you believed the footage on TV—there was nothing inside that helmet.

Some claimed that she was a magician, but they probably didn’t know that for sure.

If that’s all a magic trick, then magic tricks might as well be real magic spells.

And he recalled that Mikado had referred to the rider as Celty.

“…Eavesdropping? Or did Mr. Mikado summon you here with his phone to ambush us?” he asked, glancing over at the other boy. Mikado was staring at Celty wide-eyed, though. It seemed he was just as surprised at the Black Rider’s presence as everyone else.

Celty, meanwhile, silently typed on the PDA as she walked over to the two boys without a shred of hesitation.

“I was just passing by and happened to overhear you. But it feels like I shouldn’t be commenting on this.”

“…”

“…”

Upon seeing the message, both Mikado and Aoba went quiet, but for different reasons. Celty continued typing without waiting for a response.

“So don’t mind me. Please continue.”

“…”

“…”

Their reticence deepened into silence. A seemingly unbreakable stillness filled the factory.

“…Who…?”

Who the hell do you think you are? one of Aoba’s companions was about to ask.

Just then, the rusted metal doors slid open, shattering the silence of the scene.

Standing in the light shining through the recently closed entrance were a number of men.

They appeared to be a year or two older than the boys inside. Due to Mikado’s and Aoba’s baby faces, an impartial audience might assume they were five or more years apart instead.

The men wore matching leather jackets with logos on the sleeve reading TORAMARU. A large version of the logo decorated the backs of their jackets, although Mikado and Aoba couldn’t see it.

A number of them held two-by-fours and metal pipes. They weren’t here for a meeting, but a full-on war.

“…Toramaru,” Aoba grunted, his smile completely gone.

One of the jacketed men, his head bandaged up, stepped forward. His eyes widened when he recognized Aoba, and he told his comrades, “I found ’em… It’s them. These are the guys who jumped us and burned our bikes.”

“Bingo,” a man in a flared uniform at the center of the group said menacingly, cracking his neck. “Once we’ve done all these guys, we’ll go back to report to the boss.”

“What about our other guys patrolling around? Should we call ’em in?”

“Nah… I think we’ve got enough here.”

“Okay,” the associate replied, already on the move.

He lifted his piece of wood and swung it down at the face of one of the delinquents stationed near the door. The boy recognized the attack just in time and crossed his arms in the path of the dry weapon.

Wood cracked and snapped.

The weapon broke quite easily, suggesting a crack was already present, but it was still strong enough to deliver a considerable blow. The boy was hunched in the same defensive position, his face a grimace of pain.

That attack was the signal to begin. The teens inside the factory roared with anger, ready to strike back at the young men in their leather jackets—

“Stay cool.”

Aoba’s command was like a dose of cold water poured over their fury.

It wasn’t a shout.

Just a clear, loud statement.

Everyone present, including the attackers, looked at Aoba.

Once he was assured that he had their attention, he looked over—and said something that carried a very special significance to Mikado Ryuugamine.

“We’ll hold them off here, Chief! Hightail it now while you have the chance!”

“Eh?”

He was baffled. He didn’t understand what Aoba meant.

Two seconds later, realization came to him, and he looked toward the entrance in a panic.

They were all staring at him.

“N-no, it’s not…”

“Listen up, boys!” Aoba yelled, cutting off Mikado’s protest. “Don’t let ’em lay a finger on our chief! Get ’em!”

“Rahh!” “Hell yeah!” “Die, bitch!” “Don’t mess with the Dollars!”

Emboldened by Aoba’s lead, the rest of the delinquents rushed headlong for the gang in leather jackets.

“Sounds good… Let’s just settle this once and for all!”

“Rahh! If you’re the guy leading these shitheads, then stay here and face off with me!”

Toramaru responded in kind and closed in on the younger boys.

“W-wait! Hang on!”

Mikado’s frantic cry could no longer rise above the fray.

One of the two people who actually heard him was Celty. The other was Aoba.

The younger boy spun around on his heel and wore his usual innocent, plucky smile for Mikado. “Okay, we’ll hold them off here, Chief!”

“Um, h-hey…”

Before Mikado could form a proper statement, someone behind him bellowed, “Die, you Dollars sons of bitches!”

“Uh…”

He spun around and saw a metal pipe being swung down at his face.

—!

Just as he was certain that it was going to strike him, a black hand shot out and caught the pipe.

“C-Celty!”

“Who the hell are y…? Whoa!!”

She tangled up the jacketed young man with her shadow and tossed him aside so that she could show Mikado her PDA screen.

“I know you won’t be happy about it, but we should just scram for now. This misunderstanding will be difficult to clear up.”

“B-but…”

She plucked Mikado off the ground before he could say anything and carried him through the window to the outside. Once there, she hopped directly onto Shooter, affixed Mikado to her back with shadow, and took off.

“Damn! Don’t let them get away!” shouted the jacketed men inside the building, but Celty charged onward. She typed up a message for Mikado behind her.

“Let’s just head for your meeting place with Anri now. We’ll keep you two safe at our apartment until this all blows over.”

“…”

Mikado had no response to the message.

He’s probably not happy about that, Celty figured. Knowing his personality, she thought the order to stay in the dark and hide would not be welcome. But she didn’t have the time to hear out his argument or wishes.

She had another enemy to fight, one separate from all this chaos.

In the end, Celty never noticed the presence of her observers.

Amid the chaos, she never recognized that a transmitter had been placed on her motorcycle.

Perhaps Shooter had tried to alert her to it in his own way but ultimately prioritized getting his master away from the dangerous, unpredictable scene first.

Celty raced down the road to get away from the factory building, completely forgetting about those who had attacked her.

Without realizing that more chaos awaited at her destination.

Roof, building next to the factory

Once the Black Rider was out of sight, Vorona looked at her cell phone and nodded with satisfaction. “Transmitter is in operation. Now Black Rider’s location is trackable. Happily ever after.”

“So now we just sleep until the rider goes back home?”

“Slon is foolish, confirmed. We return, negative. Like us, rider will detect transmitter. If thrown onto long-distance truck, we earn backbreaking journey and loss of assets. Too bad, so sad. Naturally, to avoid outcome, we pursue immediately,” Vorona replied, uncharacteristically harsh.

Slon shrugged. “Fine, fine. Strange to see you so fired up about this; you don’t get that excited for our normal jobs.”

“Half work, half interest. I fulfill my desires. I also receive payment. No problem. Another attractive day on this planet.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but when your attractive mouth says the planet is attractive, it must be a real beauty, indeed.”

The two “professionals” headed down the stairs, bantering in a decidedly amateur fashion.

“Still, I didn’t think the rider would fall for our bait so easily. I guess that monster’s pretty careless after all.”

“Affirmative. But denial that opponent is simple. None assume a bear falling into trap is stupid prey, challenge bear to fight. It is like laughing at stupidity of butterfly to get caught in spider’s web.”

“…Oh! That reminds me… Speaking of spiders, how come they never get stuck in their own webs? I’m so ensnared in this mystery that I can barely take another step.”

Even now, with business at hand, Slon couldn’t help but wonder. Vorona did not reply with exasperation or disgust. She simply rattled off the answer mechanically.

“Spider. Utilizes two types of thread. Easy to test by touching. Central threads absent of adhesion. Extending threads in all directions also absent of adhesion. Only spiral threads traveling around center capture prey. The end.”

“But when they’re wrapping up their prey, wouldn’t the threads tangle them up, too?”

“Spider secretes special material from body. Material negates adhesion. Provides resistance to stickiness. So even clinging thread can be touched to a degree. Happily ever after,” she concluded, racing down the stairs at full speed.

Slon nodded with a beaming, satisfied smile. “I see! So if you were the spider, I would be the secretion. Only together can we bring in our target.”

“Choice of metaphor doubtful. Me, secrete Slon. Denial on account of extreme displeasure. Erasure of your existence desired.”

“…I’m going to pray that your lack of Japanese experience is making that sound harsher than intended.”

Right as their conversation finished, so did the stairs, dumping them out into the space in front of the factory. Several motorcycles were racing out of the factory building onto the street at that moment. Meanwhile, the ruckus was continuing inside, suggesting that the gang had split into two groups, with one staying behind and the other chasing after Celty.

“…That reminds me. There was a kid on the rear seat of the Black Rider’s bike.”

“Affirmative.”

Being unfamiliar with the visual aging of Japanese people, the pair probably assumed that baby-faced Mikado was as young as an elementary school child.

Vorona headed to her newly procured motorcycle and answered, “Possible that it intends to use him as food supply.”

“Are you just completely making this up?”

“Affirmative. Monster does not exist in my book knowledge. No meaning to imagining its actions. Truth is hidden in darkness until confirmed with my own eye,” she said in cryptically broken Japanese.

Vorona straddled her bike with a tinge of excitement, strapped on her helmet, and muttered, “I have hope…that you find a way to please me, black, mysterious monster.”

Several minutes later, Ikefukuro, Ikebukuro Station east gate

There are certain spots that young people in Ikebukuro use as meetup locations.

Around the train station, the most notable are the underground “prism garden” at the fountain under the Metropolitan exit or the statue at the east gate known as the Ikefukuro.

Both spots are accessible even when it’s rainy, which makes them useful and typical meeting spots for walking around Ikebukuro.

The Ikefukuro is a punny owl (fukuro) statue that, like the statue of the faithful dog Hachi, serves as an easy, identifiable meeting place.

Right in front of the owl, a girl wearing round glasses was speaking to a little girl five or six years her junior.

“We’re going to meet up with a boy named Aoba. He should be here any moment now.”

“…Okay.” The little girl, Akane, nodded as she squeezed the hand of the older one in glasses, Anri Sonohara.

Akane looked totally healthy now, with no signs that she had recently been ill. Anri found that change reassuring, but a part of her was still nervous.

I wonder what it was that came up all of a sudden for Mikado.

After Aoba sent her a text message, she had decided to wait here, but she couldn’t dispel the strange nerves that plagued her.

Was that “business for another day” that he’d mentioned yesterday happening today? Usually if he had a message for her, he’d just text her directly. So the secondhand message was concerning. Could something bad be happening to him now?

Her own experience last night, when the foreign attacker nearly slashed her across the stomach, cast Mikado’s strange behavior into a darker light.

What if…something happened to him because of me…?

She wanted to believe that it was just a sudden, harmless thing that popped up for him. But maybe the attackers from last night had identified Mikado as someone close to her.

And not just him. They might pose a threat to other people she knew like Mika Harima, Masaomi Kida, Seiji Yagiri, or her other classmates.

After all, she didn’t know a thing about the purpose or identity of the attackers. There was no saying what could happen.

She tried sending a message to Mikado’s phone, but he hadn’t responded yet. She considered calling him, but she didn’t want to be a bother if his reason for skipping out was legitimate.

So she decided that it was best to wait for Aoba to arrive and explain in detail—except that the memory of the glinting scissors from last night set her shivering.

Not because she was reliving the instant that a deadly weapon was turned on her. The shivers were coming from imagining if it was turned on Mikado or her other friends.

What would I do…if that happened…?

She put up a stoic exterior, but she could sense the fear and anger swirling on the inside. Yet ultimately, Anri was able to keep herself at bay from the waves of emotion, capturing these events as part of the “world inside the painting frame.”

The same way that people watching a movie might be affected by anger or fear, but very few actually screamed and ran out of the theater or leaped to their feet and yelled, “Go to hell!”

Meanwhile, Saika’s cursed words echoed on and on like always within her.

I love you.

Those simple words, chanted and sung, a hundred, thousand, million times—the eerie monster sword that droned through her.

A simple “I love you” on its own could be considered trite and shallow. But even the shallowest words take on a shining luster if repeated for eternity. Whether that shine is sinister or sacred is a different matter entirely—but Anri was incredibly jealous of the cursed blade for being able to say those words proudly.

While she was frustrated with herself for not being able to banish all her fear and anger to the other side of the frame, Anri was still more concerned about Mikado and Celty being chased around by those mystery attackers than for her own safety.

So she quietly waited for Aoba to arrive, letting none of this show on her face.

“Oh, Sonohara. What’s up?”

“…Ah, Kamichika…”

It was one of Anri’s classmates. The girl was with a group of friends who were chatting as they waited a short distance away.

She was similar to Anri in her reserved plainness, but they were neither good friends nor distant acquaintances. Since they didn’t interact regularly, it was hard to know what to say, and an uncomfortable shadow lurked between them.

“Um, is that your sister?”

“Oh no, just a girl I know… What about you, Kamichika?”

“Um, some of my friends from middle school arrived here yesterday, so I’m showing them around the area. We were just over at the west gate, and now we’re heading for Sunshine.”

“Ah, I see.”

A pause settled over the stilted conversation. In order to ease the discomfort, Anri’s classmate, Rio Kamichika, noted, “Oh, right. If you’re walking around today, you should watch out. It seems like there are street delinquents starting fights all over the place.”

“Fights?”

“The Dollars are fighting with some motorcycle gang from somewhere…”

“…”

Anri’s mind reacted to the word Dollars.

“I see. We’ll be careful.”

But her flesh body, trapped inside the frame, merely replied in a flat affect with no other visible emotion.

Just as a third awkward pause threatened to intrude, one of Rio’s friends approached and tugged on her sleeve. “Come on, Rio, I’m hungry. If she’s your friend, why don’t you invite her along to eat?”

“Sorry, Non, I’m coming! So, um, what are you doing next…?”

“Oh, actually, I’m meeting someone here…”

“Ah, okay. Well, um, I’ll…see you at school,” her classmate said, smiling uncomfortably as she left.

Anri watched her go, then lamented, I’ve got to learn to be more social…

She had volunteered to be the class representative in the hopes of changing her normally passive self. But she didn’t seem to be much different now than when she was bullied for being a thorn in Mika’s side.

Eventually her mind wandered to the topic of the Dollars. She knew that Mikado had some kind of connection to the Dollars—and possibly a deep one. But she had never asked him about it directly. He’d seen her with a katana in her hand, but he wasn’t asking her about it, either.

Perhaps there was a meaning to waiting until Masaomi Kida came back, so the three could talk in earnest. Anri longed for that moment and feared it.

She was afraid that if they all learned one another’s truths, their relationship would break down. You might say it already had, given that Masaomi was no longer around—but Anri wanted to believe.

She wanted to think that if the other two could actually accept Saika, her abnormality, that she might learn to forge human connections in a way she never had before.

Perhaps that was overly optimistic and convenient to her own needs, but she clung to that hope.

At the same time, she made a decision.

That she would accept Mikado and Masaomi, no matter what darkness they possessed within. She would not gaze at them within the frame, but bring them inside with her, understand them as they truly were.

It was this hope she kept in mind as she waited for Aoba to show up.

She wanted the peace of mind of knowing that Mikado was safe, of finding out the nature of his sudden business.

But what she actually saw was a group of unfamiliar men in suits.

“Miss Akane.”

There were three of them. They were oddly imposing, and despite being in a particularly crowded part of the train station on a holiday, the people around them naturally found a way to give them space.

The first one of them to speak addressed not Anri, but the little girl holding her hand.

“!”

Akane stared back at them with a look of shock plastered on her face.

Not fear—pure surprise.

“We’ve been looking all over for you. Come along, please.”

“H-how did you…?” Akane stammered, faltering back a step. A firm hand grabbed her shoulder.

She spun around to see another man in a suit, looking down at her in consternation. “Please behave now, miss.”

“S-stop! Let go, or I’ll scream that you’re kidnapping me!”

“You want to call the police and explain the situation? We can do that if you want, but it’ll cause more trouble for you than us, Miss Akane.”

“Ah…” She was at a loss for words.

“?”

The only one with a question mark plastered over her head was Anri. “Um, excuse me…”

“Are you the young lady Dr. Kishitani mentioned?”

“Uh…”

“We’re sorry about this. I understand you’ve been caring for Miss Akane. We will take her from here.”

None of it made sense. Dr. Kishitani was probably the doctor-looking man who lived with Celty. She always referred to him as Shinra, but Anri could remember seeing the nameplate on the apartment saying SHINRA KISHITANI.

So was it thanks to him that these men were here?

None of them seemed to be Akane’s father. And the fact that there were several of them ruled that out. But it also didn’t seem like a kidnapping. They weren’t hostile at all—in fact, they seemed very respectful of the little girl.

Altogether, Anri believed they were here to take the runaway back home. But she still didn’t know who these men were.

“Um, excuse me, are you relatives of hers…?” she asked hesitantly, trying to be as pleasant as possible.

One of the men considered this question for a moment, then muttered, “Well…we’re not actually related, but given that she’s the old man’s granddaughter, she might as well be family to us…”

This vague explanation only confused Anri further.

Wait, so if she’s the granddaughter of their “old man,” meaning “father”…then that would make Akane their daughter or niece. But she’s not family, so she’s not a daughter. So that would make them…her distant uncles…?

Yet the obvious variation in age and facial features among the men didn’t make this clear, either. Anri was totally at a loss for how to proceed, so she decided to ask further about Akane’s situation—when a source of even greater confusion arrived.

“Sonohara!”

“M-Mikado! And Celty?!”

Rushing down the stairs toward Ikefukuro from the surface was an out-of-breath Mikado and the always eye-catching Celty.

“I—I thought you were busy today. And what about Aoba…?”

“I’ll explain later! And—”

Mikado stopped himself midsentence. There were four men standing beside her, looking tense, and surrounding the little girl holding Anri’s hand.

—?!

Based on their ages, the men seemed unlikely to have any connection to Toramaru, but Mikado couldn’t help but get immediately nervous, given the situation.

What if he had already gotten Anri into trouble on his account? He glanced at her, then at Celty. But Celty was frozen just like he was.

Pitch-black riding suit and full-faced helmet.

The crowds enjoying their holiday couldn’t help but stare at Celty in her rather suspicious outfit.

But perhaps due to the sheer number of people blocking lines of sight, many others were coming and going without noticing the striking figure in their midst. If you wanted to cause a stampede with this larger crowd, you’d either need an ultra-famous singer to appear with musical accompaniment or to send a full-grown lion into their midst.

Still, a few of them noticed the infamous Black Rider among them and pulled out phones to snap pictures, except that Celty stealthily extended tendrils of shadow to cover the lenses and protect herself from photography.

Normally, she wouldn’t care, but being caught together with Mikado and Anri would make her feel guilty.

So she rushed up to Anri, taking pains to protect her acquaintances, and…

…Is she…in trouble?

There were four gentlemen of a certain professional aspect present, watching her warily. One of them bowed to her.

“Hello there.”

Huh?! W-wait…have I met these people before…?

“Did you get word from Dr. Kishitani or Shiki, too, Celty?”

“Perfect timing. Can you help us escort her safely?”

Oh, of course! They’re Awakusu-kai…

But what were these Awakusu members doing with Anri? Was it possible that they figured out Anri was involved in the street slashings?

Then, she noticed the little girl holding Anri’s hand, and that fear evaporated—to be replaced by a new question.

Huh? Um…wait, what? Is that…Akane Awakusu?

She came to a startled stop. That little girl was the very Akane Awakusu she was tasked with finding. If Celty had a head, her eyes would be bulging out of it right now. She turned to the Awakusu men and started to type.

“Actually, I’m only here to talk to that young woman with the glasses—”

She was interrupted by a bellow of rage.

“Hey! Get back here!”

“Quit skitterin’ around like a little rat!”

She stopped typing and looked up, startled by angry shouts making a scene in broad daylight.

You’re kidding… They followed us all this way?!

It was a group of five or six young men in leather jackets. The irate bikers were drawing more attention from the crowd than Celty’s arrival had. Some people were scrambling away to steer clear, while others watched from what they perceived to be a safe distance or from behind nearby pillars.

Nobody had rushed to alert the police or staff yet, only because they had merely shouted and not descended into violence yet.

Hang on, there’s even a police box right at the corner! So they’ll go to any length to catch the head of the Dollars…Mikado!

She considered using her shadow to tie up all the men, but wouldn’t that just cement the idea that Mikado was the leader in their minds?

Celty’s moment of hesitation allowed the Awakusu-kai men to act instead.

“Stop causin’ a ruckus right at the train station, you obnoxious little turds!”

The mobsters knew that Celty had been chased around by bikers last month, so they assumed these new ones were after her, too, and were doing her the favor of brushing them off.

But while the bikers faltered briefly, they quickly regained their poise and shot back, “Ahh? What the hell do you want?!”

Akane jumped in fear. The four Awakusu men reacted instantly, glaring at the bikers. “Act your age; don’t scream in front of the kid. We’re busy here—get lost.”

Again the bikers stood their ground, bristling at the dismissive attitude of the older men. “What? You with the Dollars, too? First it’s little kids, then office ladies, now even the gangsters are in the group? Dollars don’t have no standards, do they?!”

Mikado felt his chest contract. Their slander of the Dollars felt like a denial of his entire existence.

The Awakusu-kai, unsure of what the young men were talking about, began to wonder if they were on drugs. One of them asked, “Wait, are you the shitheads trying to go after Miss Akane…?”

He spoke it quietly enough to keep Akane from overhearing. Naturally, the Toramaru bikers didn’t understand what that meant, either, and took it as a threat. Without noticing the girl behind the yakuza, they said something they would very much regret.

“Quit messin’ around and just hand over that damn kid!”

“ “ “ “ “!” ” ” ” ”

The expressions of the Awakusu men changed instantly.

The Toramaru members said “kid,” referring to Mikado.

But to the Awakusu-kai, the “kid” in this situation was none other than Akane Awakusu.

In their minds, someone was after Akane, and it had something to do with Shizuo Heiwajima attacking the gang’s office. Given this information front and center in their minds, they couldn’t be blamed for assuming the bikers were talking about the girl.

“…You got some balls on ya. What syndicate are you workin’ for?”

“Wh-what?”

“Or did Yodogiri send you after us? What kinda chump change did you just sell your lives for?”

“Wh-what the hell you talkin’ about?”

For the first time, the bikers seemed uncertain in the face of the increasing hostility of the suits. One of those men took Akane by the hand and led her over to Celty, saying in a voice only she could hear, “Take the little miss to safety please, Celty. Shiki should still be at Dr. Kishitani’s place.”

Uh…hang on. What do I do now?

She recognized that the men were mistaken about something, but there wasn’t time to clear it up for them. And in any case, Akane couldn’t be left to fend for herself where a fight was about to break out.

So Celty just gave up, took the girl’s hand, and raced off.

“Aah!” Akane shrieked, but Celty typed, “Don’t worry. I’m on your side,” into the PDA, with a little smiley symbol to give it a friendlier air. The girl read it as they ran and looked back for Anri in confusion.

But Anri was there next to them, her hand in Celty’s. Next to her was Mikado, who was also holding Celty’s hand.

This was very confusing to Akane, but Anri’s presence was a relief, so she decided to go ahead and keep running. Not to mention, she might be happier pulling away from the Awakusu-kai men, anyway.

With the extra shadows stretching out of her body, Celty temporarily boasted four arms.

As the crowd watching the scene noticed this, they began to stir uneasily.

“Are you serious…?” “Did he just grow arms?!” “What was that?!”

“You mean that wasn’t a special effect?” “A magic trick?!” “Whoa!”

“No, I’m serious, the Black Rider’s like ten feet away from me!” “Holy crap!”

Curious gazes were all around her, but Celty had learned not to care by now. As before, she simply used her shadow to sense the surroundings and deftly block the cameras of any cell phones.

“W-wait, damn you!”

One of the young men in the leather jackets tried to pursue. Naturally, he planned to go after Mikado and Celty, while all the Awakusu gentlemen saw him chasing after little Akane.

“No, we have business with you.”

“Whuh—?!”

A firm hand grabbed the biker’s collar from behind, and he toppled to the ground.

Celty watched this happen as she raced up the stairs of the east gate.

Her motorcycle was parked on the street in front of the station. This was a parking violation, but she justified her actions as an emergency in this case.

Four on one bike…not gonna work! I guess I’ve got to do this one again!

Celty touched Shooter’s back, sending shadows into it and giving a signal. The motorcycle’s rear half began to evolve, regaining the true form of the Coiste Bodhar, the dullahan’s steed.

This was not the simple horse form that she had used several times in the last year, but the true original Coiste Bodhar of Ireland—meaning a full two-wheeled carriage pulled by a headless horse.

Sorry, Shooter, you’ll have to put up with a bit of extra weight!

Celty placed Anri and Mikado on the carriage seat, where she would normally sit, and fashioned a seat belt out of shadow to hold them in place. She used a similar trick to strap Akane to her own back and leaped onto Shooter’s horse form.

This transformation, of course, happened in broad daylight, in crowded Ikebukuro, during the Golden Week holiday, in full view of easily over a hundred pedestrians and waiting taxi drivers.

As the wide-eyed crowd watched, helplessly transfixed, Celty put similar shadow-fashioned helmets on her three fellow passengers—this would be a much more efficient solution than covering every single camera out there.

Lastly, she grabbed black reins and lashed them hard.

The headless horse’s whinny echoed across Ikebukuro’s east gate rotary.

Let’s go, Shooter.

The pitch-black carriage started to ride.

Slowly at first, but it soon caught up to the speed of traffic, an old-fashioned horse-drawn carriage on the asphalt of the big city.

Thattaboy, here we go! Celty encouraged her mount, then offered up a prayer.

Not to any god, but to the flow of the entire city, a force of fate.

Please…if you’re listening…don’t let us run across that terrifying motorcycle cop!!

The crowd watched the whinnying carriage ride away with utter astonishment.

But among them were some who kept their cool, relatively speaking: Vorona and Slon, who had trailed Celty to that spot.

They each rode their own motorcycle into the rotary, where they witnessed the stunning transformation.

Through the wireless units in their helmets, Slon said to Vorona, “Okay…this thing literally is a monster.”

“Affirmative. But problem is not that spot,” said Vorona. Her tone was as cool as ever, as she pointed out, “The boy was riding in rear with her. Problem is truth that two more have been added.”

“Oh, that’s why the bike turned into a carriage. What would you say if I told you I was so fascinated with how that works, I won’t be able to sleep tonight?”

“Answer impossible. I recommend investigation of your own.”

She rolled forward slowly, having technically answered his question. The light was green now, but traffic had been stunned still by the previous sight. Eventually the cars in the back that hadn’t seen what happened starting honking.

Beneath the raucous noise, Vorona explained, “Added two are related to job.”

“What?”

“One is bespectacled girl that claims blade from skin. The other is little girl, target of kidnapping. Certain—zero criteria for denial.”

“…Really? Now that you mention it…,” Slon muttered, following Vorona on his own bike. It looked smaller, carrying his larger body, but it was actually the same model as Vorona’s.

As she followed the carriage, Vorona rationally considered the situation. Eventually, she said, “Bespectacled girl and young girl are from different clients. Distinct duties. Confirm?”

“Affirmative.”

“Yet different duties are gathered as one. Add Black Rider to make three. Inexplicable.”

“…You mean the rider’s a connection between the two jobs?” Slon asked.

Rather than confirm or deny this, Vorona continued, “Coincidence, inevitability—unknown. Possibility that the link is the boy Black Rider took from factory: greater than zero.”

“Good point…”

“Depending on factors, possibility that client is trying to set us up: greater than zero. I propose necessity of acting carefully,” Vorona said. She believed she spoke these words calmly. And anyone unfamiliar with her who heard them would feel a mechanical chill to them.

But Slon, who had known her for a long time and was used to her odd Japanese, was aghast.

“You’re excited, Vorona.”

Underneath her helmet, the professional’s mouth twisted the faintest bit.

“Affirmative. I am…in the midst of a pleasing tension.”

Interlude or Prologue E, Akane Awakusu

The world blessed the girl’s existence.

By any reasonable measure, she enjoyed an extremely high standard of living.

She lived in a large home on the outskirts of Ikebukuro that looked comfortable, not cramped and urban.

She was protected and raised by a kind mother, understanding father, fierce grandfather, and many others in her vicinity who cared for her and valued her opinion.

However, this luxury did not mean she was spoiled. The girl was raised with a healthy mind-set.

From the moment she was born, she never lacked for anything.

In fact, she was so unfamiliar with the concept of need that she had no way of knowing just how blessed she was.

The girl was happy.

Until she learned what her father and grandfather did and the underbelly of the world around her.

It began with a cell phone.

Her father was unhappy about this, opining that a little girl in grade school was too young for her own phone. Eventually, he gave in for security purposes, and she got her own private line.

Not just a phone line leading to other people to speak with.

This invisible line could weave its way through the Internet—a magic door that showed her a brand-new world. She didn’t have her own computer, so this was her first experience online.

Some downplay the Internet by saying that it’s nothing but a virtual world, but on the other side of those computer-generated walls was something in the real world. Online chat partners might be wearing virtual masks, but they were people, not just artificial intelligences that existed solely in the ether.

If she connected to pay sites, her real capital would dwindle. And the malice that led to scams was also coming from the real world.

By having a phone, the girl found herself connected to an unlimited number of realities.

Even if she didn’t actually want that to happen.

In school, she was bright, energetic, and almost never had to worry about being bullied.

—Almost never because of an incident she once witnessed.

About half a year ago, a girl in her class was being bullied. The others shunned her and even put a bunch of dead bugs into her bag.

The girl happened to see them in the act and sternly told off her classmates.

“Bullying is a very bad thing!”

The girl was raised in a happy environment, and her action was rooted in her own morality.

But it was an action that took every last ounce of the girl’s bravery.

Even in her naive youth, she could feel it on her skin. If she did this, she might be the next target.

But she still opened her mouth to speak and protected the bullied girl.

She didn’t regret it.

At least, not at that moment.

The result: She succeeded in stopping the bullying at that point.

So did she end up becoming the new class target?

The answer is no.

Things went stunningly well, and peace returned to the class within just a few days, as if there had never been any nastiness to begin with.

She wondered if it might actually be continuing in secret where she couldn’t see, but there were no warning signs to suggest this.

After that point, the girl became the central figure in the class.

She was the class representative in the student body, but she didn’t hold it over anyone. She did her best to stay on good terms with the other children, and the smiles never ended around her.

She was happy.

And she assumed that all the classmates who smiled and laughed with her were happy, too.

She never even doubted it—that was how pure a heart she had.

At her young school-going age, she began to believe that life was a wondrous, purely joyous thing. If she ever found someone who was unhappy, she wanted to help them, out of the goodness of her heart.

Such feelings often lead to forcing good deeds onto others. But at least in her case, she helped the people around her get along, put together playdates, found ways to visit the beach and mountains, and eventually became a central figure in her entire school, not just the class.

She wanted to grow up and find a job that brought even more smiles to those around her.

The girl didn’t understand her grandfather’s job, but she knew that her father sold paintings to a variety of businesses.

There were a number of paintings around her house of distant vistas, paintings that looked very expensive. She didn’t understand much about the pricing of art, but they did look very pretty to her.

They’re such beautiful paintings, so I bet a lot of people are happy when they see them. What a wonderful job Daddy has. Oh…I know! I’ll make paintings. I’ll be a painter! I’ll make so many, many paintings and have Daddy sell them!

With this idea in her head, the girl began to study art.

The people around her supported her idea, but when she talked about her new dream, she noticed that her father and grandfather shared a strange look.

At any rate, the girl started with blessed circumstances and then found a dream for herself on top of that.

Into this life full of blissful happiness came the present of a cell phone.

The girl treated it as a safety measure and a means to contact her family and hardly ever used the phone—but it ultimately forced her to confront a truth.

She didn’t get a call from someone.

She didn’t connect to some secret school-related site.

The first incident was physical in nature.

Such a simple thing: She forgot the phone at a friend’s house.

The girl rushed back in a panic to retrieve it.

And just when she was about to ring the bell, she heard her friend’s voice from the backyard.

She went around the side to call out to her friend and heard her own name coming from the friend’s mother.

“You better not have caused trouble for Akane Awakusu, I trust?”

Huh?

Confusion stopped her progress toward the yard.

There were three or so friends over at the house at that moment.

She had left a while earlier and only just got back to pick up the cell phone she forgot.

So why was her friend’s mother mentioning her just now?

Had she done something strange at the house?

But that didn’t line up with what the mother had said.

What did she actually say?

The young girl considered the possibility that she had misheard.

But her friend’s response completely obliterated that idea.

“I know, Mom! I always make sure to do what Akane tells me!”

…Huh?

Her time stopped.

Her world froze.

It was the annoyed voice of a child who is scolded just before starting her homework and replies, “But I was just about to start!”

The girl was in such a panic that she couldn’t put this together, but an objective listener would undoubtedly assume that listening to Akane Awakusu was treated as an obligation on par with doing homework.

“And I hope that none of the rest of them did anything to upset her, either!”

“We didn’t!”

“Is that true? Because I don’t want anything coming back to hurt us! Goodness, I just hope you wind up in a different middle school,” the mother said.

The girl’s friend sounded bewildered and a bit guilty. “But…Akane doesn’t boss us around or act selfish. It’s okay. You’re just making a big deal out of it, Mom.”

The tone of voice suggested not the defense of a friend, but the generalized dislike of a parent deciding the facts of a situation regardless of the truth.

Breathing heavily, her mother snapped back, “It doesn’t matter if Akane’s a good girl or a bad girl! Those Awakusu people are scary! If you ever get into a fight and hurt her somehow, there’s no telling what they’ll do to us!”

…

…?

…??? …?

Still the girl couldn’t understand what her friend’s mother was saying.

All she could tell was that her chest was feeling hot.

Ultimately, Akane Awakusu ran away.

She shouldn’t be there, she knew. And so she ran.

Her cell phone was still at the house, but she didn’t care about that anymore.

She just wanted to get away from her friend’s house as soon as possible.

She didn’t even attempt to fathom what that conversation was supposed to mean.

But fate did not let her escape.

That night, Akane’s cell phone was delivered to her house.

Her friend’s parents drove it over themselves.

They took the car to give back something that their daughter could easily hand over the next day at school.

She watched them bow to her mother.

Her mother said, “Go ahead, Akane, thank them properly.” As she lowered her head, she tilted it a bit to look at their faces—and saw only polite smiles with no hint as to what lay behind them.

Later on, an older acquaintance of hers remarked, “A cell phone is a little brick of information. They probably figured it was better to return it themselves, before your folks assumed they were prying into their daughter’s life.”

The statement sounded quite matter-of-fact, but Akane couldn’t just say, “Oh, I see,” and leave it at that.

After all, this was the incident that ended up toppling the whole house of cards.

With her cell phone back in safe hands, Akane decided to try connecting to this Internet thing. At first, she was deathly afraid of it and had no idea what she should be doing.

Until that point, she had never been online before. The only thing she knew was the e-mail address assigned to her phone. But as the days went on and she learned more and more, the intelligent young girl began to get the hang of traversing the Net.

She was still going to school like usual. And the friend in question was interacting with her like normal.

In fact, it was so much like normal that it frightened her.

It was enough to make her wish that she’d simply misheard that backyard conversation.

But when she connected to that new world through her phone, the truth she found was cruel and cold.

By the time she had learned how to use search tools, the girl was ready to look.

She typed in the name “Awakusu” and summoned up her courage to browse the results.

Medei-gumi Syndicate, Awakusu-kai

It led her to an article on the Internet encyclopedia Fuguruma Youki.

It contained a detailed explanation of the “organization.”

Some parts of it were too hard for the elementary school girl to understand, but she got enough of the big picture.

She now knew what kind of organization the Awakusu-kai was.

When she realized that was also the moment she noticed she was shivering.

This is wrong.

It must be some kind of mistake.

She had seen the word Awakusu-kai here and there around the house.

She knew that in the room with the family shrine, there were paper lanterns with the characters for “Awakusu-kai” on them.

It’s not right.

It had to be a simple coincidence, a shared name.

She tried to convince herself of that…

Until the moment that she found a picture of her grandfather, labeling him the chairman of the Awakusu-kai, and her world stopped.

Then, on a page from a different search engine, she found text describing them as “hiding in plain sight as an art dealership,” and her frozen world began to crumble.

Even then, she didn’t shout or wail or scream.

She just closed the browser window, empty eyed, and called one of her friends—the girl she had saved from being bullied.

She called the girl she always assumed had been her friend since then and asked, “Why does everyone always do what I ask them?”

Something in the tone of her voice must have frightened the girl. Her friend hemmed and hawed for a bit but eventually broke and started to explain the truth.

“…Actually…everyone said we should pick on you next, Akane. They told me that if I picked on you, they would leave me alone. But…then one of the kids said that your dad was scary and that we shouldn’t mess with you…”

When one of them let it slip to their parents, the rumors spread quickly around the neighborhood families. “Our children are attempting to pick on the granddaughter of the Awakusu-kai chairman!”

Some of the adults panicked and started to command their children, “Don’t you dare disobey whatever that Awakusu girl says to you.”

She was the beloved granddaughter of the Awakusu. And if it came to light that their children were the ones tormenting her and the mobsters raised a fuss, they would have no moral leg to stand on.

So the obvious choice was for those parents to lay down strict rules for their kids: “Don’t you ever upset Akane.”

And if they ordered their children to stay away from Akane, that might be seen as shunning, another type of bullying. On the other hand, if they got too close and wound up having an argument and hurting her, that would be bad as well.

So the adults ordered them to uplift Akane Awakusu and make her feel good.

This was around the time that TV stations started doing pieces on secret school websites. Those terrified parents worked the URL out of their children and browsed the bulletin board to see if their children were bad-mouthing Akane there.

The extreme reactions of these concerned parents drew notice, spreading to other parents and children, until ultimately, no one dared to cross Akane.

She became the queen of the class, and she had no inkling of the true reason why.

Akane never looked down on anyone. She always assumed they were on the same level.

But she didn’t know that everyone else was treating her like a precious doll placed far above their heads.

No one could really answer the question, Would the Awakusu-kai’s chairman and waka-gashira actually throw around the name of their organization to threaten civilians over their daughter’s school relationships?

But the demonstration of abject fear from a portion of the parents spread to the others like wildfire.

If they didn’t take precautions and Akane did end up the target of bullying within the class, could they say for certain that the Awakusu-kai officers wouldn’t come after them with threats?

The lack of a firm voice guaranteeing their safety meant that fear was allowed to grow unchecked, thus leading to this rather twisted state of events.

She couldn’t glean all these subtle details just from what her friend told her, but the perceptive girl was able to grasp the general atmosphere surrounding her.

After hanging up, Akane stared at the floor of her room in total shock for minutes.

She thought she was happy.

As a matter of fact, she had been.

But she also thought that everyone else was just as happy as she was.

She believed that her class was an ideal one without bullying, where everyone was free to speak and be valued.

But her very existence was stealing that freedom from her classmates.

Yes, it eliminated bullying from the class. But now, that result meant nothing to Akane.

Time passed by her numb senses until she heard her mother calling from the dining room. Dinner was ready.

Her father and grandfather were often busy, so it was quite common for Akane to eat dinner with just her mother, but she never thought of it being lonely. Whenever she did see her father, he was kind and gentle to her. She loved her father.

The girl summoned her courage and went down to eat dinner with her mother.

She wore her usual smile and carried on with her usual lively conversation.

But on the inside, she told herself, Don’t let your guard down.

After dinner, she kept that fake smile on until she closed the door of her room and started to clean up her desk for something to distract herself.

In the midst of this, she dropped a sketchbook while moving it off the desk, and it fell open to a drawing.

It was a portrait of the class eating lunch. On each and every face was a delighted smile.

Very, very happy smiles, heartfelt and full.

Looking at that drawing finally caused her to break down.

“Aah…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

She tore the drawing out of the sketchbook, wadding it up, ripping it apart, throwing it aside.

“I’ll make so many, many paintings and have Daddy sell them!” Her childhood dream echoed in her head.

The young girl cried and wailed, not even understanding why she was so sad, and tore up more and more drawings.

The things she had seen, those happy smiles on her classmates—all lies.

And it was her existence that had forced those lies into being.

In a wild fit, she tore her drawings, her dreams, to shreds.

Just a few seconds felt like a long, long eternity to the girl.

And that elongated time negated all the happy life she’d led.

But halfway through tearing out the sketchbook pages, she stopped.

It was a drawing of her father’s and mother’s faces.

Upon seeing this picture of her family, the girl came to a realization.

While she was shocked to learn what the Awakusu-kai actually was, she could never actually bring herself to hate her family.

“Akane? Akane! What’s the matter?!”

Before long, her mother had rushed into the room, drawn by her daughter’s screams.

Akane didn’t know what she should do. She leaped into her mother’s embrace and cried.

The world blessed the girl’s existence.

But that blessing did not guarantee her happiness.

For a while after that, the girl led a life that was somewhat broken.

She could sense that her heart’s distance from her family—especially her father—was growing steadily.

Her father Mikiya could sense that his daughter had realized what he did for a living and was trying to keep close to her so she couldn’t drift away.

At school, she put on her best fake smile so as not to let her true feelings show.

She was both shocked at learning the truth that her personal world was coated with lies and unable to summon the strength to break down those lies.

The rest of the class continued to play along with Akane, and she allowed herself to play along with their lie.

It was a world of nothing but lies, including her own.

That world blessed the girl’s existence.

And then, several months later…

The girl made up her mind to finally run away from home.

Not because she knew that she could make it.

It was just on faith that if she went to a place where no one had heard of her or the Awakusu name, something might change.

She used the Internet function on her phone to gather information on running away.

Searching a few helpful keywords pulled up a number of good sites.

After hesitantly dipping her toes into the forums there, she was approached by a man with the username Nakura.

He helpfully answered her questions, no matter how naive, and offered thoughtful advice. In a sense, it was inevitable that Akane, with her lack of Internet knowhow and damaged state of mind, would grow to trust this man.

Then, he suggested that they meet up. Even Akane grew wary at this, and she decided to stake out the meetup place to ascertain what kind of person her chat partner was—only to find that it was a beautiful woman with long hair.

The girl timidly approached, and the long-haired woman smiled and said, “Are you Akane? Hi, I’m Nakura.”

Akane’s eyes bulged. She was not expecting this beautiful, smart-looking woman.

It had never once seemed to her that Nakura would be a woman.

She was very kind to Akane, enveloping the girl’s damaged heart with warmth. The release and rebound from her fear that Nakura would be a frightening man was so strong that Akane immediately opened herself up, and they met a number of times after that.

After a few meetings and conversations, the woman introduced her to a man.

“I hear you want to run away from home?”

This young man, who called himself Izaya, was a work partner of Nakura’s.

In the presence of these people with a strange knack for working their way into her mind, Akane finally explained her situation.

And as soon as she said it, she regretted it.

Akane realized her legs were trembling. Would they be afraid, too, now that she’d told them about her link to the Awakusu-kai?

What should I do?

What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?

They’re going to be terrified of Dad and Grandfather, too.

But instead, a gentle palm landed on top of her head.

Izaya caressed Akane’s hair and smiled at her kindly. “If I told you it’s all okay and there’s nothing to be afraid of, that would be a lie…but you’re still you, Akane.”

Her heart was already halfway broken. And those cracks were all it took for him to worm his way inside.

From that point on, Izaya fed her all kinds of information and taught her special web addresses only cell phones could reach and novel ways to use her device.

Then, one month became the next…and she realized that she had run away from home.

It really was as sudden a realization as that.

She hadn’t been home since late April.

She was sending her mother texts that she was staying at a friend’s house and not to worry, every single day.

The first night, she really was at a friend’s house: Nakura’s. She wasn’t lying.

The next day, Izaya took her to a manga café, and the day after that, she slept in a twenty-four-hour restaurant.

All her actions were according to Izaya’s instructions.

But she didn’t find this to be strange or questionable.

She recalled that this was exactly what she’d hoped for—an environment that would see her for who she was, not just the daughter of the Awakusu family.

It was true that she was a little lonely being separated from her parents.

But maybe if she ran away from home, her father and grandfather would think twice about their work and how it frightened people.

Deep down, she knew it wasn’t that simple, but a part of her glowed with optimistic hope and kept her dedicated to her cause and numb to homesickness.

But then, when it finally felt like she was going to give up, Izaya asked, “Do you hate your grandpa and dad?”

Taken aback, Akane recalled when she tore up her drawings. She looked down and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

Izaya smiled kindly at her. “This isn’t the kind of problem I can give you the answer to. Just think it over until you know,” he said. But then his expression went dark, and he murmured, “But there’s no guarantee they’ll be safe by the time you have your answer.”

“Huh…?”

“Well, your dad and grandpa cause fear in many people. That’s what you were worried about, right?”

“Y-yeah…”

Whatever it was that he was talking about, it was frightening her. Izaya held out a piece of paper. It was a photograph of a man with blond hair and black-and-white clothes. Behind the lenses of his sunglasses, his eyes were sharp and lupine.

“This is Shizuo Heiwajima. He’s considered the most dangerous hired killer in Ikebukuro.”

“K-killer?” She held her breath.

And with an absolutely straight face, Izaya told the frightened girl, “And it’s possible he could be going after your dad and grandpa.”

“…What would you do if that were the case?”

There was no compulsion in his statement at this point.

It was just a question.

But it was also just another string tangling itself around her heart.

And then she was caught in the midst of the fray.

While still blessed by the world, as she had been since birth.

The Black Market Doctor Gets Sappy, Part Five

Please, have some tea as we wait, Mr. Shiki.

It’s all right. Everything will go smoothly with Celty on the case.

I would appreciate it if you didn’t scowl like that.

Please believe that I’m not just being lackadaisical.

In any case, we can’t do anything until the results become apparent. So if you hold onto hopeful optimism, that will at least cut down on the stress and fatigue as you wait. “Good fortune comes to he who laughs,” as the saying goes.

Actually, I’ll admit that I’m relieved to learn that the job you hired Celty for this time was protecting a young girl. If it had been the other way around, like “kill the guy going after her,” I very much doubt that Celty would have accepted it.

She does the courier job because she doesn’t have any better options, but in reality, Celty’s just a normal girl.

…Huh?

…Oh yes. Well, you do have a point.

That’s absolutely true.

The dullahan’s original job was to warn people of their coming demise. Depending on the type of legend, some of them were treated like Grim Reapers that collected the souls directly.

But that’s quite a different thing than just killing people left and right. You’re acting like she’s some kind of personification of death or a zombie, but the truth is, she’s a type of fairy.

…What kind of blood is in the basin…? You know…that’s a good question.

Hey, maybe it’s just tomato juice. Reality often turns out to be mundane.

By the way, Mr. Shiki, how do you know so much about dullahans?

I’ve heard that gamblers these days are intellectuals. Does that make you a card-carrying member of the intelligentsia?

Huh?

No, no, I wouldn’t call you yakuza.

After all, in the three-card game of karuta, the eight-nine-three cards, pronounced ya-ku-za, are the worst possible hand to have. It would be terribly rude of me to refer to you as the worst hand in the game to your face, wouldn’t it?

Look, it doesn’t really matter if you personally don’t mind or not.

The thing is, I’m not a naive enough dreamer to call you and your group “proper” old-school yakuza of the valorous type.

I don’t know how things work in other gangs, but there’s only a handful of people in the Awakusu-kai that I would consider to fit the “chivalrous” yakuza ideal, full of manly compassion, never harming innocent civilians, and not dealing any drugs whatsoever.

Oh, really? Mr. Akabayashi fits the type, even with the way he looks?

Well, anyway, given what I’ve just told you about how I see your group, maybe you understand why I’m hesitant to let Celty work with you.

And yes, I’ve given up on attempting to steer clear of you. If there’s any future incident where I screw something up working with you, it will have nothing to do with Celty.

So once you’ve finished dumping my body in Tokyo Bay, please don’t extend the punishment to her as well.

This is a personal request just to you, Mr. Shiki, since you’ve known both me and my father.

Tell Celty that my final words were “My soul is floating right around you, Celty. Just look for it. We’ll be living together forever, my dear.”

…What? What was that sigh for?

…

N-no, no, not at all!

I certainly don’t have any plans to get myself killed for a mistake!

…Sorry, that was thoughtless of me.

Your people didn’t have the chance to leave their own final words.

…Please don’t glare at me.

I don’t like the thought of someone doing such a grisly act in Ikebukuro, either.

…But asking purely out of personal curiosity, how did the three men die?

?

What’s this camera for?

…

Oh, there are pictures of the deceased on it?

And I’m supposed to look at them once, then delete them all?

Well, here goes…

…

…May they rest in peace.

I’ve seen all the pictures now.

May I give you my personal opinion?

Not as an unlicensed doctor, but as a longtime friend of Shizuo Heiwajima’s.

This isn’t his work.

…I’m not trying to defend him.

Yes, about a third of me wants to believe that he’s innocent…as his friend.

But that alone won’t be enough to persuade a man of your stature, would it?

If you want more concrete points of evidence, I have a few to list…

For example, let’s say that Shizuo flew into a big enough rage to want to kill a person.

A rage so tremendous that it might even envelop three members of the Awakusu-kai.

Well, I happen to think the bodies are remarkably well-preserved for that.

Take this body driven into the wall, for example. Shizuo has the arm strength to rip a guardrail out of the ground—if he drove someone’s face into the wall with all his force, you wouldn’t be able to identify the face of the victim. You wouldn’t even find a skull, I daresay.

The other bodies are relatively intact as well.

They do look like they were killed with bare hands.

But they’re just too pristine.

There’s almost no sign of a struggle from these…subordinates of yours, you said? Do you think that Shizuo could kill all three of them without any kind of response?

And this doesn’t look like one of his usual rages with some unlucky and tragic consequences this time. At least, not based on these photos. I mean, aside from the spot where the one body was driven into the wall, there’s essentially zero damage to the room.

…Plus, I can’t imagine why he would be in that building to start with.

I’ve never heard him say anything about going there.

And you don’t ever recall having beef with Shizuo, do you?

…So if it’s not Shizuo, then who would it be? As for that, I haven’t a clue. After all, it’s not my business to know who the Awakusu-kai have professional difficulties with at any moment.

That’s right.

I don’t know what sort of troubles the Awakusu-kai are in, and I have no intention to start learning now.

Only if it has something to do with Celty, that’s the only exception.

She popped back in yesterday for just a moment and took a spare helmet.

I’m assuming that means something happened to the first one.

I think that Celty’s gotten involved in something quite dangerous.

Oh no, this isn’t meant to be a complaint directed at you, Mr. Shiki.

And I’m not actually that worried about anything happening to Celty herself.

She’s very strong, as you know.

I just don’t want to see Celty’s grieving face.

Yes, I said face.

Just because she doesn’t have a head doesn’t mean she’s got no face. Or expression, I should say.

I can tell by her motions, by the mannerisms of the shadow that flickers around her. And I bet I’m the only one who can do that.

The thing is, Celty’s too kind for her own good.

In exchange for being extremely hardy herself, she gets incredibly upset when people she knows get hurt.

She might be extending this sense of sympathy to your young mistress already.

She looks horrified when she hears about children dying, even if they’re not related to her in any way.

It didn’t always used to be that way, but Celty’s changed in the last few years.

I suppose that coming into contact with people has made her more human.

I’m basically adrift from the concept of morality, so she probably wasn’t getting that much of an effect from me personally.

At any rate…

If I had to guess, I’d say that Celty’s probably above average for a human when it comes to caring for others.

When faced with the opportunity to save another person for no personal gain, most weigh that sacrifice based on factors like the labor involved, social standing, and personal safety.

But Celty has very, very little to weigh on that scale.

She doesn’t even have a head. The only things she can lose are her pride and a life without guilt. And because she lives a healthy lifestyle without pride or guilt, Celty saves people. If anything, she puts all her weight onto the “save” arm of the scale.

That’s what makes her so wonderful.

At the very least, I lack a human heart.

And Celty just keeps getting more and more lovely. She really is far too good for the likes of me.

Which is exactly why I don’t want anyone else to have her or for her to be sad. I don’t think that an unlicensed doctor like me is suited for Celty. But I still love her.

I guess what I’m saying is that if my name was on Celty’s scale as something else to lose, that would be a very heartwarming thing.

…Huh?

…Shiki? Mr. Shiki?

…Hello? Did you fall asleep?

No, you were just annoyed? Oh, well, that I understand.

If anything, I’d be worried if you sympathized with and understood my situation. If you were able to understand that, you’d see what makes Celty so lovable, thus making you my rival for her love.

So that’s Celty’s personality in a nutshell. Have no fear.

If Celty’s found Akane Awakusu, she will protect the girl with everything she has.

Even if the Awakusu-kai rescinded its contract for this job.