Durarara!! Vol. 12 Read online

  Copyright

  DURARARA!!, Volume 12

  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!! Vol.12

  © RYOHGO NARITA 2013

  First published in Japan in 2013 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

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

  English translation © 2019 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.) | ISBN 9780316439688 (v. 7 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474290 (v. 8 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474313 (v. 9 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474344 (v. 10 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474368 (v. 11 : pbk.) | ISBN 9780316474382 (v. 12 : 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

  Interlude

  An excerpt from Shinichi Tsukumoya’s closed blog

  Let me tell you about Mikado Ryuugamine.

  And also about the Headless Rider.

  I don’t know what it is you seek to know, visitor to this website.

  After all, there’s been a lot going on lately around the Dollars. Too much, in fact.

  As a member of the group, I’ve done as much information collecting around the periphery as I can.

  And what did I find?

  A variety of incidents and people intertwined in a complex and tangled game of cat’s cradle.

  And to continue that metaphor, there are two fingers in particular that are especially tangled up.

  Mikado Ryuugamine and the Headless Rider.

  Plus, Izaya Orihara and Kasane Kujiragi seem to enjoy tampering with these strings maliciously, so who’s to say whether the tangles can be unwound at all?

  There are a number of other fingers, to continue this metaphor. Allow me to list off the big ones.

  There’s Celty Sturluson, as I’ve already mentioned. She’s involved in the highest number of incidents, to be sure, but she’s also the central figure of many.

  That’s right: Her severed dullahan’s head has finally taken center stage in public. In the way she wanted least.

  The police quickly seized the severed head that had been left on the Ikebukuro sidewalk in broad daylight. The head itself wasn’t shown on the news, but it had been exposed all the same.

  Celty already had her hands full with her own affairs, but the things around her just wouldn’t leave her alone, either:

  • The hit-and-run on Kyouhei Kadota, Dollars officer

  • The team-up of Mikado Ryuugamine and Aoba Kuronuma, using the Blue Squares within the Dollars to lead a battle against the Yellow Scarves

  • The contact between Mikado and Akabayashi, a lieutenant of the Awakusu-kai

  • The issue with Haruna Niekawa, wielder of Saika and member of the Dollars

  • The attention of Seitarou Yagiri, the president of Yagiri Pharmaceuticals

  All these incidents and issues heavily involve the Headless Rider, whether by intention or coincidence.

  She does have a few allies, however. In fact, they simply gather at her residence, so it’s kind of unclear whether they’re honest allies or something else. Mika Harima, Seiji Yagiri, Walker Yumasaki, Saburo Togusa, Egor the suspicious Russian, and his client Shingen Kishitani… I’m not sure whether his wife, Emilia, should be counted, but lastly, there’s also Namie Yagiri, who made her way in—and she is certainly not a friend. So the Headless Rider has got trouble within and trouble without.

  Where is the future taking her, do you suppose?

  But the one whose future is even more uncertain is Mikado Ryuugamine.

  The founder of our Dollars, the one calling the shots for the Blue Squares—and a mere high school student.

  That’s right. I’m willing to state that on the record here. Mikado Ryuugamine is a “mere high school student.”

  He is not an inhuman creature like Celty, and he doesn’t have Shizuo Heiwajima’s strength or Anri Sonohara’s cursed weapon.

  He’s just a plain old human, pure and simple.

  But that’s the kind of person—perhaps because he is that kind of person—who is now in just as much trouble as Celty, if not even more, because of the following:

  • The hit-and-run on Kyouhei Kadota, Dollars officer

  • Aoba Kuronuma and his gang, who are trying to use Kadota and the Dollars

  • Izaya Orihara and Kasane Kujiragi, and the young man named Hiroto Shijima, who joined the Dollars while having connections to both Izaya and Kujiragi

  • Threats from Akabayashi of the Awakusu-kai

  • Shuuji Niekawa’s request to search for his daughter, Haruna Niekawa

  • Mikado’s turf war with the Yellow Scarves

  …There are more that could be listed, but these are the chief concerns.

  Yes, I know what you want to say. It looks almost the same as Celty’s list, doesn’t it?

  But it’s not. Their implications are entirely different.

  Celty Sturluson was merely dragged into all this business, even the part about her own head. Some of that is thanks to her quasi-legal job as a courier, so one might call it expectable, but the way she’s been manipulated into all of it is beyond that kind of simple karma.

  Meanwhile, for Mikado Ryuugamine, the majority of these issues are seeds he himself sowed. He could have refused to deal with the Haruna Niekawa and Shijima issues. He could have murmured passive affirmations and tossed them out afterward.

  But Mikado Ryuugamine did not.

  He was trying to burn everything down to reset the Dollars, while doing his best to save every single good person who clung to the group.

  Good person. Yes, “good person.” At least, going by his own standards.

  Some of you might wonder why I don’t alert him, sin
ce I know everything going on behind the scenes.

  Yeah, I could. Perhaps I would have given warnings to the “Tarou Tanaka” of a year ago, the guy who was addicted to the Internet to the point that he believed in its power. Watch out for Shijima; stay away from Haruna Niekawa—and so on.

  But such warnings are pointless to the current Mikado.

  He no longer trusts anything online. Not the Dollars, not Anri Sonohara, not Masaomi Kida.

  But of course he doesn’t. He doesn’t even believe in himself—the focal point of all those connections.

  And that’s why he’s trying to burn it all down. To crush it all to dust and cast it aside.

  He’s trying to erase everything that he’s built up to this point. Including Mikado Ryuugamine himself.

  There’s only one thing he believes in: the past.

  The illusion he witnessed when the Dollars first met and all networks seemed to sparkle and shine to him.

  That memory has been positively adjusted in his mind. Perhaps it now represents the peak of Mikado Ryuugamine’s life to him and acts as the genesis for everything.

  Unbelievable. Rather than choosing the bonds of family with his parents, or memories of his best friends, he’s decided to make the focal point of his entire life the event in which a group of strangers met in person for the first time.

  It’s laughable but not funny.

  At the very least, I don’t have the right to laugh at it.

  In this case, I can focus only on being an observer. As you probably know, having found my blog, I learn things a bit quicker than others do, and I have knowledge of various topics.

  But I do not know the future.

  I like people, if not as much as Izaya Orihara does.

  And unlike him, I also like those who aren’t human.

  Which is why I observe.

  I’ll be honest with you: I can manipulate things by releasing information in the right ways. However, I cannot tell exactly what the end results will be.

  So helping someone might also mean hurting someone else. It might mean that something will happen that will change Ikebukuro forever.

  You get it, right?

  You know that we stand atop a thin layer of ice held in place only by a fragile balance.

  And so do Celty Sturluson and Mikado Ryuugamine and many other people involved with them.

  The strings in their game are tied not around their fingers, but around their necks.

  And the game of cat’s cradle will come to an end soon enough.

  Shizuo Heiwajima.

  He has already grasped the string.

  When he yanks on that string, will everyone it is connected to come out unscathed?

  It’s not a question of who will laugh and who will cry. It’s a question of whether anyone will be able to do things like that at the end of this.

  Such is the current situation.

  It’s all a logjam. It’s checkmate.

  I’m not going to say, “This is getting interesting now.” I’m not Izaya Orihara.

  It would be more accurate to say, “This is getting troublesome.”

  I mean, my town is getting turned into one big slow-moving accident. But only a limited selection of people can actually see it happening.

  There are the “light of day” folks, the ones hard at work in business or school, shopping at the department stores of Parco, Seibu, and Tobu.

  There are the “dark of night” folks, getting up to no good in the back alleys, parking garages of clubs, and seedy apartment rooms.

  But the strings of this disaster are tangled around those who belong to neither group.

  Let’s say that Ikebukuro is a map. The folks I’m talking about are not on the front side or the underside of the map, but lodged deep inside the paper fibers in the middle.

  I’m not telling you to be careful. I’m telling you to be ready.

  Because if that map rips from the inside, it will cause great damage to both sides of the parchment.

  But what shape do you suppose it is that this game of cat’s cradle has produced?

  It is irregular, complex, and in the end, interconnected.

  I’m not going to sit here and tell you, “It is the shape of Ikebukuro itself.” But I do think it’s clear that this is the shape of something that makes up this city.

  Will the strings burn away, will Shizuo Heiwajima pull off the fingers—er, heads—of those in the middle, or will someone come along and neatly undo all the knots?

  All I can do is watch.

  But watch I will.

  When this “mere high school student” paints himself into a corner, I will see who is dragged into it, how he falls, and where.

  I suspect that the story of Mikado Ryuugamine, mere high school student, is coming to an end soon.

  But do you know what?

  An ordinary student, not even a bully or a thug, calling the shots of a street gang and getting the strings of fate tangled around yakuza and headless motorcycle riders alike?

  It sounds just like some urban legend to me.

  Celty Sturluson was not human.

  She was a type of fairy found from Scotland to Ireland, commonly known as a dullahan: a being that visited the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending mortality.

  The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode in a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basinful of blood. Thus the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.

  One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing whether this was true.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.

  When someone back in her homeland stole her head, she lost her memories of what she was. It was that search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.

  Now with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.

  But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and her memories were still lost.

  Celty knew who had stolen her head.

  She knew who was preventing her from finding it.

  But ultimately, she didn’t know where it was.

  And she was fine with that.

  As long as she could live with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could happily live the way she was now.

  She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face and held this strong, secret desire within her heart.

  That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.

  Yes, she was a dullahan.

  Celty Sturluson was not human.

  She could not become a human, and a human could not become a dullahan.

  But still, she did her best to understand what it meant to be human.

  She learned about humanity through a variety of things and took great pains to live as a human being did.

  A rare and powerful sense of reason built her persona, and despite the lack of a head or legal identity, she gained an almost perfectly human mind and lived as an individual within the city of Ikebukuro in Japan.

  Which was why nobody could predict what exactly would happen to a dullahan that had lost not only its memories, but also its sense of reason, whether out of anger, sadness, shock, or pain.

  Chapter Seven: At Daggers Drawn

  Shinra’s apartment

  Celty Sturluson’s mental state was quite similar to that moment when the circuit breaker trips and the home suddenly goes dark and quiet.

  An enemy calling herself Kasane Kujiragi suddenly appeared in their home and locked lips with Shinra Kishitani, the owner of the apartment. At this point, she still had a basic human level of reason remaining.

&nb
sp; It was so sudden that it did take some time for her to fully process what had just happened—so that when she finally understood, the next situation was already occurring.

  Unnatural blades, extending from Kujiragi’s fingers like nails.

  Celty instantly recalled when she had seen such a phenomenon before.

  Saika!

  A cursed blade that controlled those it sliced and that implanted “children” within their minds.

  Anri Sonohara was supposed to be in possession of Saika, so how did this woman have it now? Or was this some other, different cursed blade?

  These questions and more floated through her mind as the steel sank into Shinra’s shoulder.

  It felt like time stood still.

  Already, Celty was unable to recognize or process the surroundings around them.

  “…”

  …

  …Huh?

  What? What am I seeing?

  A dream? Some kind of joke?

  Shinra is here. Who is this woman?

  A kiss? With Shinra? Why?

  What is this? Saika’s owner? Cheating? No.

  Thief. Must hurry. Kiss? Katana?

  Oh no. I’ve seen this. Saika. Transform.

  Shinra. Controlled. Oh no. He must be fine.

  I trust. So what? Shinra. Don’t.

  Wait. Shinra. Shinra is. Shinra must. No!

  Shinra. Shinra. It can’t be.

  I hate this. Shinra. Please wait.

  Shinra. Shinra. Shinra, Shinra.

  Why is Shinra I have with Shinra and Shinra but who would do

  No. No, no, no. But I love Shinra

  Shinra no Shinra mistake won’t believe it Shinra wait Shinra can’t be won’t let it don’t

  StopthatrightatoncetakethatbladeoutofShinraletgoofhimwhywon’tmybodymoveShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinrarunawayrunawayrunawayrunawayrunawayrunawaymoveCeltymovemovemovemovemoveohnoohnoohnoohnoohnoohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraShinraohplease ShinraIShinraloveShinraShinraandShinrayetShinraIShinraloveShinraShinraandShinrayetShinraIShinracan’tShinramoveShinraShinraShinra

  The emotions that her confusion dredged up only made the confusion worse.

  She was struck by two simultaneous levels of shock—an unfamiliar woman kissing Celty’s lover, followed by his being pierced by that woman’s blades.