Durarara!!, Vol. 6 Read online

  Copyright

  DURARARA!!, Volume 6

  RYOHGO NARITA

  ILLUSTRATION BY SUZUHITO YASUDA

  Translation by Stephen Paul

  Cover art by Suzuhito Yasuda

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  DURARARA!!

  © RYOHGO NARITA 2009

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by ASCII MEDIA WORKS

  First published in 2009 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo, through Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2017 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Narita, Ryōgo, 1980– author. | Yasuda, Suzuhito, illustrator. | Paul, Stephen (Translator), translator.

  Title: Durarara!! / Ryohgo Narita, Suzuhito Yasuda, translation by Stephen Paul.

  Description: New York, NY : Yen ON, 2015–

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015041320| ISBN 9780316304740 (v. 1 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316304764 (v. 2 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316304771 (v. 3 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316304788 (v. 4 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316304795 (v. 5 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316304818 (v. 6 : pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Tokyo (Japan)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.N37 Du 2015 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041320

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-30481-8 (paperback) 978-0-316-30497-9 (ebook)

  E3-20170227-JV-PC

  Interlude or Prologue D, Masaomi Kida

  May 3, inside a Shinkansen

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How straight it is.”

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

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

  “Really? Am I that weird?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  He had dug that rift.

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

  But Masaomi could not step over it himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She hit him right in the sore spot again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Therefore, he hadn’
t yet noticed something.

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

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

  May 4, morning, Tokyo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Maybe everyone vanished.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Not the slightest inkling.

  The Black Market Doctor Gets Sappy, Part Four

  Excerpt from Shinra Kishitani’s journal

  April 30

  Celty was cute again today. She always is.

  A month has passed since spring arrived, but her loveliness never changes.

  Even after the world ends and I’ve turned into dust, the truth that Celty was cute will remain a constant fact.

  I’ve been keeping this journal for about half a year, and upon consulting it, this is about the twentieth time I’ve started an entry this way.

  It just goes to show you how cute she is.

  That’s a good thing.

  That alone allows me to record that today was a good day.

  Speaking of which, when did I first experience romantic feelings for Celty?

  I think I realized it was love in middle school or high school.

  If youth is the season when you fall in love with love, then mine is undoubtedly happening at this very moment.

  Speaking of which, how do kids these days spend their youth?

  I look back fondly on my days at Raira Academy. Things were a bit rougher back then. The school was packed with the types who spent their younger years fighting.

  But I was no good at that, so I couldn’t join in on their style and saw no reason to, anyway.

  Some of Celty’s acquaintances are current students at Raira.

  They’ve been to our place a few times, and when they were, I told them that they weren’t like kids nowadays, for good reasons and bad. But in a way, they’re more futuristic than the youth of today.

  Of course, just being comfortable enough to know what Celty is and still hang around her makes them unlike normal kids.

  I understand full well just how adorable Celty is, so I can be with her forever.

  If only the people of the world understood her beauty better.

  Then everyone could love Celty.

  Dullahans aren’t monsters; they’re fairies.

  On top of that, Celty’s a cute one. That’s really something.

  Personally, I’d love to be able to explain all her charm, but I couldn’t possibly cover it all.

  And if I relayed how bewitching she is as a woman, I’d instantly create thousands of rivals for her love.

  Speaking of which, what about Mikado and Anri, the kids who came over recently?

  I thought they were a couple, but they seemed oddly distant. Hardly the intimate soul mate situation.

  Perhaps they’re still at that “more than friends, less than lovers” stage.

  Too formal to be the childhood-friend type, but not platonic male-female friends, either.

  Maybe they’re just before the romantic confession.

  I think they should live as they desire.

  Compared to our high school days, it’s a much more healthy way of life.

  They seem to have their own problems to worry about, but that’s fine.

  There’s no law that says you can’t balance love and battle.

  Yes, you need to compartmentalize and use self-control, but I also think that a lack of desire is a problem.

  People shout and carry on about the Dollars and Yellow Scarves and whatnot. I think it’s just youth.

  But there’s one thing you shouldn’t get wrong.

  You can’t just escape the responsibility for your mistakes by hiding behind the excuse of youth.

  Hang around in bars, and you’ll hear salarymen boast about their past indiscretions by saying, “I used to be a bad kid.” They’re mistaken about that.

  If you can laugh off the bad things you did in your youth and brag about them, you weren’t bad as a kid. You’re still bad now.

  As the sayings go, “A leopard cannot change its spots,” and “What is learned in the cradle is carried to the tomb.” These men haven’t changed, and their sins give them no guilt.

  You might consider that a criminal youth who goes to juvenile hall has paid the price for his crimes, but if they brag about it years later, they haven’t really atoned.

  I don’t disallow children the right to act stupid.

  But I also don’t disallow the necessity to pay the appropriate price for it.

  I suspect that the evil deeds I’ve done in the past will demand a day of reckoning eventually.

  But if possible, I hope that when the moment comes, it does not cause Celty grief.

  I think that’s the one atonement I can provide to make up for hiding the location of her head.

  Is that selfish of me?

  Wow, I really got serious there for a moment.

  I will now transition to my daily practice of listing outfits that I want Celty to wear.

  Just can’t get a good night’s sleep unless I do this.

  Imagining Celty in the outfits I describe here actually makes it more difficult to sleep, but that’s a very trifling problem.

  —Celty dressed as a Wild West sheriff. Maybe she’d exhibit a wild eroticism like Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead. She can’t be killed with bullets, so she’s an invincible sheriff, until the day she fell in love with me, the outlaw with a bounty on his head. No, wait, maybe I should be the sheriff who falls in love with Celty, the wanted outlaw. Since she doesn’t have a head to begin with, I could secretly save her by mocking up a sham of a hanging to throw everyone off her trail. Yep, that should work.

  —Celty in a school-issued swimsuit. On the nametag on her chest, it would say SERUTI in hiragana, like a kid would write. That might be kind of cute. I’m not particularly into young girls or older ladies as a rule, but I know for a fact that I could love Celty, no matter what form she comes in.

  —Stripper clothes. She works a job where she shows off her body, but around me, she doesn’t even like to show off her arms. But as a matter of fact, I secretly pay money to see her strip show every night. (← Veto this. It makes me sound like a normal old pervert, which Celty wouldn’t like.)

  —School sailor uniform. I’ve actually brought this one up several times before, so I’ll discuss
a black-based outfit in this case. Set the scene: the library after school. As the student librarian, I return in the evening to pick up something I forgot. Who should I see but Celty the nerdy bookworm, so wrapped up in her book that she never heard the bell ring, her headless body trembling in the dark… (← Bingo! This is some fantastic work. I’ll ask her about re-creating this one later.)

  Every single time, just rereading what I wrote nearly gives me a nosebleed.

  They say that love is not a true affliction, but my case of it is pretty severe.

  Only Celty can cure me now.

  She’s currently sitting behind me, watching last week’s episode of Mysterious Discoveries of the World.

  She probably couldn’t even imagine that I’m right behind her, indulging in fantasies of her dressed in various outfits. I love how innocent and unsuspecting she is.

  Uh-oh, I think she’s going to take a look at my journal.

  writing this in real time by hand as I try to hide this journal from Celty  if she sees my journal of fantasies I can’t even begin to guess what she’ll do to oh no! her shadow caught me around the ankl~~~~~ — ~ —

  (The rest of the page is blank except for a few spots of blood.)

  (Between the blood spots are a few lines of text written in a different hand.)

  Just say these things out loud, rather than hiding them there. Also, I think I stained your journal with your own blood. Sorry.

  Also, that sailor uniform scenario seems less like a romance and more like a scary school story.

  But I might not be against wearing more normal clothes.

  If I feel like it.

  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.”