Durarara!! Vol. 12 Page 2

  It was the biggest shock she’d felt since losing her head, and it ate away at her rational mind, loosening her grip on reality.

  Then she was hit by a third shock:

  Before she had time to react, Celty witnessed Shinra’s eyes instantly turn red with blood.

  When Saika stabs you, your eyes turn red.

  Subjugation. The fate of Saika’s child.

  This fact, sinking into her mind, caused something within Celty to burst.

  Emotion: a storm of conflicting feelings surging into her panicked brain, suddenly bulging to their maximum possible size.

  Celty’s instincts began emergency measures to prevent the worst-case scenario: total breakdown.

  To save her memory and self-image from the muddy churn of her emotions, she cut rationality loose from her body.

  The circuit breaker within her tripped without a sound.

  And then…

  “Wh-whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing?!”

  It was Togusa who first spoke up in response to the woman’s sudden aggressive behavior. He was in the adjacent room, but because he was next to the sliding door, he could see right away what was happening there.

  He rushed to pull Kujiragi off Shinra but came to a stop just as suddenly.

  “Wha…?”

  He had seen shadows erupting into the space before him.

  “…”

  Kujiragi witnessed the phenomenon as well.

  There was no longer the shape of a woman in the space where Celty had been standing. It was just a writhing, expanding mass of shadow, brimming with pressure. One might actually be forgiven for imagining a gusher of oil right in the middle of the room.

  But the black shadow, somewhere between a gas and a liquid, expanded explosively throughout the apartment and set upon Kujiragi.

  “As I expected,” the woman muttered to herself as the black mist descended upon her with clear and present hostility. She lifted the listless, red-eyed Shinra over her shoulder and leaped backward with an agility that was simply inhuman.

  Kujiragi landed next to Togusa and twisted around. After she had leaped away again, the black mass’s jaws closed upon the spot where she’d just been. Jaws was the only word to describe them.

  They weren’t like those of any living creature on the planet, but they did have countless black fangs within them, and they bit with such incredible force that they seemed to sink into the very atmosphere itself. The sight was forceful enough to plunge any who saw it into a state of terror.

  Neither Togusa, who along with Kujiragi was the first to witness it, nor those who heard the uproar and came to see what was happening moments later could actually understand what it was they were seeing.

  That there was a black shadow with its own physical form should have been enough for them to identify Celty Sturluson, but in the moment, that answer was absent from their minds.

  Because in the case of this black mass, there was not a bit of the rationality and intelligence they associated with Celty’s typical shadowy manipulations.

  Kujiragi raced forward, reaching out, not sparing a backward glance. The next moment, an extremely slender blade like a piece of wire extended from her finger and, with the tensile strength of a whip, lashed in a circle pattern at the glass door to the veranda.

  There was the momentary sound of metal scraping, and then a perfect circle fell out from the center of the glass door, just big enough for a person to get through the hole. Without losing any speed, Kujiragi passed through it still carrying Shinra, leaped to the railing of the veranda, and then promptly took flight.

  The next moment, everyone left behind in the apartment learned that the giant shadow jaws that had appeared in the bedroom were only a small part of the whole.

  A number of other sets of jaws appeared from the room, spinning and churning around the apartment at breathtaking speed. When they identified Kujiragi leaping from the veranda and Shinra slung over her shoulder, they all turned in that direction, then withdrew back to the bedroom.

  “Wh-what was that all about…?” Togusa murmured. He tried to peek into the room.

  The door of the bedroom—and the entire wall it was set within—erupted, and an enormous mass of shadow leaped out.

  “Guwoah—?!”

  Togusa didn’t get enveloped in the destruction, but the shadow did push him out of the way. The thing then broke down the glass door to the veranda, chasing after Kujiragi, who had leaped off the building with superhuman leg strength.

  Shards of glass glittered in the air, surrounding a mass of shadow that had turned into jaws the size of an elephant.

  The jaws blended into the darkness of night and made to devour Kujiragi whole, along with Shinra, too. But just an instant before they could, Kujiragi’s body somehow accelerated in midair.

  The wire-width Saika extending from her hand tangled with the metal fence on the roof of the building across the street, and she used it like a winch to pull herself faster across the way.

  The shadow missed its prey. But rather than falling down to the street below, the pursuit maintained its intensity. Ten shadow tentacles extended from the main body and lashed out at Kujiragi with the force of crossbow bolts. But the woman did not so much as grimace.

  Instead, she landed on the rooftop and withdrew the wire-form Saika into her palm. The part of the fence Kujiragi had tangled it around sliced open and fell to the ground, a dry clatter against the night sky.

  As if on cue, Kujiragi held out her right hand toward the shadow tentacles chasing her. It could only be the right hand, because Shinra was still slung over her left shoulder.

  Five blades appeared from her fingertips again, forming a large vortex in the direction of the black limbs. A whirlwind of five narrow blades.

  No ordinary blade would be capable of blocking this strange shadow with physical properties. But Saika was no ordinary blade. This accursed weapon could probably slice through the human soul itself, if you believed in such things. And in fact, it excelled at damaging the mind, which was very close to the soul, so that it could infiltrate it.

  A physics-transcending shine of silver met a physics-transcending shadow of solid matter.

  After a hideous sound of intense friction, the whirlwind of blades cut through all the attacking tentacles, turning them back to mist.

  But the body of the shadow did not give up. Even as it fell, it created new shadow feelers that grasped for Kujiragi. She swung back against all of them, racing across the rooftop with superhuman speed.

  “Owww… What was that about?”

  The shattered glass was sprayed about the veranda, allowing the muggy air of the summer night into the apartment.

  Togusa got to his feet, rubbing his lower back. What was that black thing just now?

  Ordinarily, the sight of a writhing black thing in this apartment would lead everyone to the same answer. In this place, in this entire neighborhood, only one person could make use of a 3-D moving shadow.

  But Togusa’s brain was unable to make the connection at the moment. What he had just seen had held no trace of human form.

  The sight of the shadow mass taking a form that wasn’t that of a human or of any living creature had caused Togusa to think some kind of unknown monster had suddenly appeared in the room with them.

  He felt not a single trace of the emotion and personality he’d always associated with that moving shadow.

  “Hey, Yumasaki, what the hell just…?”

  “Ohhh… Ohhhhhhh…”

  Togusa turned to look at Yumasaki, who was gazing out the window and moaning queerly.

  “What’s up, Yumasaki? Did you hit your head?” he asked.

  Just then, Yumasaki raised his arms high and shouted in jubilation, “My time…my era has arrived at laaaast!”

  “What the hell do you mean?!”

  “A mysterious babe wearing glasses…strange wires coming from her hand…cutting a circle in the glass… A heroine who leaps through the sky, fighting the a
liens dyed black! It’s all perfect! She was a bit older than I imagined, but at last, it’s the arrival of the 2-D heroine who will open a new door in my life!”

  Yumasaki was so wrapped up in his own world that it was hard to tell whether he was even aware of Togusa. He continued shouting up to the open sky. “I must cause my own power to awaken soon! I bet kissing my little sister will cause that woman to be 2-D again, even if she’s temporarily in a 3-D form right now!”

  “Okay, forget this guy.” Once Yumasaki got this way, Togusa knew there was no way to hold a conversation with him. It would be difficult to pull him back to reality without Kadota, but at least Yumasaki didn’t have the synergistic effect of Karisawa’s presence.

  “Dammit, and I gotta go visit Kadota first thing in the morning tomorrow.”

  Yumasaki’s typical mood was possible only because Karisawa had just texted him the news that Kadota was awake again. Even he wouldn’t let himself get this carried away without the relief of such good news. Or at least, that was what Togusa wanted to believe.

  Once his mind had calmed down, Togusa realized that the thing that had flowed out of the room had probably been Celty’s shadow, and he hesitantly peered into the bedroom.

  “Um, hey, Celty, was that your…?” he started to say, then stopped.

  The room was devoid of life. The only notable thing within it was the helmet Celty always wore, resting on the ground.

  “…Hey, what does this mean?”

  “Celty just left,” answered Mika Harima, who was looking outside through the shattered glass doorframe.

  “What? But what does that mean?”

  “That black thing that just burst out of the apartment… That was Celty.”

  “…”

  Togusa fell silent. It wasn’t that he couldn’t have imagined this. He just didn’t want to actually consider it.

  The Headless Rider whom Togusa knew, contrary to her fearsome appearance, was just as smart and reasonable as Kadota, tops among people he knew.

  But there hadn’t been anything resembling the Headless Rider he knew in that dark monstrosity just now, and there was no glimmer of reason or wisdom in the wake of its destruction.

  “Oh my, this is the after of exactly what event being revealed?”

  This absurd attempt at the Japanese language was accompanied by Emilia’s face around the corner. At this point, the massive shadow was no longer visible outside the window.

  Togusa gazed out of the broken glass door and muttered the first thing that came to mind.

  “…Well, the guy who actually owns this place is gone now, so how are we supposed to explain this if the cops show up?”

  In the dark of night, the shadow monster that was Celty Sturluson continued its chase of Kujiragi.

  The woman leaped and bounded from rooftop to rooftop like she was going to cross a thousand leagues in the span of a night. Before the mass of shadow could fall, it extended tendrils of shadow that gripped buildings like some monstrous slime mold to keep itself aloft—yet the way it pursued Kujiragi was closer to a carnivorous beast on the hunt.

  There was no end to the shadow tentacles. But those whiplike blades sliced through everything in their way.

  Normally, if Celty had witnessed the bold act of warping Saika into other forms than a pure katana, she would have been alarmed, yet she would have watched carefully and calmly to formulate a proper response.

  But in this state, she did not have that calm. She did not have any sense of reason whatsoever.

  In fact, it was unclear whether the shadow monstrosity should even be referred to as “Celty Sturluson.”

  There wasn’t a hint of Celty’s consciousness in its actions, just an automated hunting system that pursued the fleeing Kujiragi.

  Were the swarms of tendrils attempting to skewer Kujiragi’s body, or were they trying to grab Shinra off her shoulder?

  Kujiragi could not tell you the answer as she fled.

  The shadow could not tell you the answer as it chased her.

  Because the mass of shadow had eliminated the very sense of reason that would seek that answer in the first place.

  Shinra’s apartment

  “Nope, can’t tell where they went.”

  Togusa and the others had stepped gingerly onto the veranda, avoiding the broken glass, but nowhere among the nearby buildings could they see the mysterious woman who’d abducted Shinra, or the freakish, monstrous form of Celty.

  In the daytime would be one thing, but against the backdrop of night, it would be nearly impossible to see Celty in the sky.

  “That chick with the glasses did that all in what, like, thirty seconds after entering the place? The hell is goin’ on, man…,” muttered Togusa, who was probably the most rational individual present.

  And yet, thinking over what he had just seen, he came up with an answer to his own question that wasn’t all that rational.

  “Was it just me, or did that chick kinda look like Ruri?” He shook his head, dispelling the thought. “Nah…can’t be.”

  As a matter of fact, Ruri Hijiribe and Kasane Kujiragi were niece and aunt, so he was actually entirely correct in his observation, but Togusa had no idea of that. He banished the thought and glanced over the railing of the balcony. “But what should we do about…?”

  He didn’t finish that sentence. It was interrupted by a braying that did not seem like anything from this world, coming from the bottom of the apartment building. It hit with the crackle and boom of a thunderbolt, echoing eerily throughout the night of the city.

  Then, from the entrance to the basement parking garage, burst a shadowy black thing—not as big as what Togusa had seen moments earlier, but still significantly bigger than a human being. It reared up high among the streetlights. Togusa frowned and wondered, “Is that…a horse?”

  It appeared to be a black creature with four distinctively long, narrow legs, but something about it still seemed to be weird and alien.

  “Oh…”

  A shiver ran down Togusa’s back when he recognized that the source of his concern was the lack of a head on the creature. But by that point, the headless horse was already going down the alley, leaving behind only the echo of its rumbling cry into the night.

  “What the hell is even happening, man…?”

  He had thought he was used to Celty and the abnormality she represented. While he hadn’t been as quick to embrace her as Yumasaki had been—and he was the one still jabbering on nearby—Togusa felt that he himself had accepted Celty and the fact that she was not human, but someone with whom you could have a relationship.

  But the mass of shadow he had just witnessed made him realize that his take on the situation was naive.

  “What the hell’s even going on with the world…?” he wondered now. If it was at all something grandiose, it didn’t feel like it to him.

  Instead, his understanding of the world, as it appeared through his eyes, was being fundamentally overturned.

  Rooftop, parking garage, Tokyo

  Several hours earlier, there was another person who, like Celty, had exploded with a potent cocktail of mixed emotions: the leader of the Yellow Scarves gang, Masaomi Kida.

  A young man on edge, people liked to say.

  It wasn’t complimentary, but there was no other description that better captured what Masaomi was at this moment.

  Just seconds before this, he had thrown himself into a tremendous fight.

  You might say that Masaomi had cast his very life into challenging Chikage Rokujou, the leader of a motorcycle gang from Saitama—Chikage had superhuman toughness and strength, just not on the level of Shizuo Heiwajima. At the very least, Masaomi entered the fight with that expectation.

  But in all accuracy, he did not cast his entire life into it, if you were to define that as fighting with the expectation of going up to and past the threshold of death. In fact, Masaomi was not thinking about dying in his fight against Chikage Rokujou.

  Chikage’s ferocious attacks.


  The mad way that he leaped off the building, holding on to Masaomi.

  On several occasions, Masaomi expected that death would result from these things. Yet, there was still a gap between what he experienced and the sense of impending death.

  In large part, this was because he did not sense any murderous intent from Chikage Rokujou in their combat—but Masaomi was not able to perform this kind of subtle analysis in the moment.

  No less than a minute before, Masaomi had seen Chikage Rokujou fall from the rooftop and be perfectly fine. Masaomi turned back to the roof so that he could regain control of the situation—and he witnessed another group of several dozen approaching who were very much not the Yellow Scarves.

  And standing at the head of the group: a man with burn scars, holding a hard rubber hammer.

  “Heh-hya…I guess it’s true that idiots and smoke like to gather in high places, huh?”

  Before his brain could process that voice, his very cells reacted.

  The first memory that popped into his head was past terror.

  Death.

  This was the sense of certain impending doom.

  If he went toward this man, he would be killed. His life would be erased. After he’d undergone suffering at the very limit of what he could fathom—if not even beyond it.

  The memory of the first time he’d felt the powerful stench of death and fallen to his knees.

  The moment he had abandoned the one person he must never abandon.

  “Here’s your question! When I broke Saki Mikajima’s leg…who was the pussy who abandoned her and ran away?! Kee-hee-hya-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  And with those hideous, vexing words, Masaomi’s entire world was shut in darkness.

  Unlike with Celty, this was not a case of an emotional circuit breaker tripping.

  In fact, it was almost the exact opposite of the change that would happen to her a few hours later.

  When all of his emotions exploded, they switched on all the power lines that had been down inside Masaomi Kida.