Durarara!! Vol. 12 Page 4

  “Don’t step in and steal my opponent,” Rokujou stated.

  Izumii scowled and asked, “Didn’t you just fall off the edge over there?” jutting his chin toward the side of the rooftop.

  “Yeah, I did,” he admitted.

  “So why didn’t you just die?”

  Izumii sent a signal to the rest of his thugs with a glance. A number of them grinned and laid hands on Rokujou’s shoulders. “What do you think you’re doing, bud…? Ngwah?!”

  “Sorry. I’m not into guys just touching me out of nowhere,” said Rokujou. He had struck the face of one of the punks behind him with a backhand, giving him a bloody nose.

  “You son of a…”

  A different thug tried to hit him, but Rokujou grabbed him by the face first. He had the guy firmly around the head, thumb pressed right over his eyelid. When the thug realized that the fate of his eyeball depended on the whim of his opponent, he tensed, unable to strike back.

  “All right, fellas, nobody’s gonna move now, okay? Not unless you wanna see your buddy’s eyeball explode.” Rokujou maintained his grip on the guy’s face but let go of Izumii’s arm and leaned back against a nearby pillar.

  “…Are you insane?” said Izumii.

  Rokujou gave him a breezy glance.

  “A lot saner than you, I bet.”

  “…”

  All of this brought Masaomi back to reality. The series of cold showers he’d just taken snapped his mind to attention and helped him realize he’d just been saved by the guy he was fighting not long ago—and made him remember just where he was.

  But all of it was too late.

  Then again, with this many opponents, would it have even mattered whether he’d been thinking straight? At the very least, he might have been able to run away. But in that case, what would have happened to his companions?

  They were screwed from the moment the other group showed up.

  Masaomi actually felt a painful sense of regret that his own lack of caution had gotten Rokujou involved in something unnecessary—a remarkable bit of empathy for the man he’d practically been trying to kill minutes before.

  It’s just not going to work out. Not against this many… Not unless I was Shizuo Heiwajima.

  Why was he so weak?

  Was this just going to be a repeat of the past?

  But Masaomi tried to stand, weathering these self-doubts and more. He wasn’t going to be satisfied until he at least punched this guy’s lights out. Hatred for Izumii bristled through Masaomi, and the emotion erased the pain of his wounds.

  But before he could stand, Rokujou interjected.

  “Listen, are you folks all right in the head? I realize I was just fighting with this guy minutes ago, but you do know that if you kill him, the security cameras are gonna get y’all arrested, right?”

  “What? You… You don’t think that’s gonna frighten us, do ya?” Izumii drawled, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “You think we’re stupid enough not to cut off the power to the cameras? In the time it’ll take a technician to come out and check on it, it ain’t no thing to pulverize the whole lotta you.”

  It seemed like mere mockery, but Masaomi and the Yellow Scarves could sense that when he said “pulverize,” Izumii wasn’t just talking about beating them up. He was not making a threat or playing a mind game, but stating a fact.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean,” Rokujou said. “Myself aside, that guy on the floor over there and the ones you’ve caught here are gonna die.”

  “And so will you,” Izumii growled.

  Rokujou ignored him and sighed. “Oh, bother. Sometimes you get stand-up guys like Kadota, and sometimes you get real trash like you folks. I swear, I just can’t figure out this Dollars group.”

  “…Did you say Kadota?”

  “You know him? He’s several levels above you in character. But you probably already know that, right?”

  “…”

  The smile vanished from Izumii’s face. His teeth ground audibly. Then he looked at the man whose face Rokujou was still holding, and he said, “You can take his eye.”

  “I-Izumii?!” the thug shrieked, but Izumii wasn’t listening anymore.

  “But you’re going to die here for it.”

  “So I get to take one eye, and it costs me my life? What kind of rip-off are you running here?” Rokujou wondered with a wry shrug.

  “If you get ripped off, it’s because you were stupid,” Izumi muttered simply. He raised his hand and started giving an order to the hoodlums around him. “Forget it. Turn this guy to dust—”

  He did not finish his sentence.

  Rokujou released the man he was grabbing—and ducked around the back side of the pillar.

  “Hey, c’mon, you don’t think you can get away from…,” Izumii started to say, but then he noticed the bit of red sticking out from behind the pillar.

  The moment Rokujou started doing whatever it was he was doing behind the pillar, a number of the thugs who could see it from that angle started to look panicked.

  “Stop him!” he yelled, but it was too late.

  Rokujou pressed the object that was attached to the other side of the pillar: an emergency fire alarm.

  The alarm began blaring and rattling. People walking around on the street near the parking garage stopped and stared.

  Even the office workers from adjacent buildings still at their jobs peered out to see what the matter was. All of a sudden, the completely ordinary parking garage that melted into the background was now a focal point of the city.

  “You’ve gotta be an idiot to destroy only the cameras,” Rokujou muttered, though his words were drowned out by the alarm and never reached his opponent’s ears.

  But Izumii could tell he was being insulted, and his eyes flashed with fury as they focused on Rokujou. “You… You’re mocking me, aren’t you…?”

  He looked so furious that he might have launched himself at once, but he held back, sensing that the destruction he hoped to wreak could no longer be achieved. Instead, he gritted his teeth and sent a hand signal to his followers.

  But a number of the thugs had already fled the garage due to the fire alarm, and in the confusion, the Yellow Scarves held captive had the opportunity to gain their freedom. They rushed over to Masaomi at once and began pulling him away from Izumii.

  “You…little…fuckers…”

  Knowing Izumii’s personality, this was exactly the moment he would chase down Masaomi to deliver a decisive blow—but for some reason, he was just standing there, sweating profusely, his face twitching.

  It was the sound of the alarm, dredging up the trauma of his immolation at Yumasaki’s hands.

  “C’mon, Izumii, let’s go! The cops are gonna show up!” one of his companions yelled into his ear.

  “Tsk… Lucky bastard.” Spitting the words out, he shoved down the unsettling fear in his heart and headed to the exit with his team.

  He did turn back one last time to look at Rokujou with loathing and say, “I’m gonna remember you…”

  But when he actually faced that direction, two shadows crossed his vision.

  They were the soles of Rokujou’s shoes.

  Both his right foot and his left lined up for a beauty of a dropkick.

  Before Izumii could register what was happening, they struck him square in the chest—and he rocketed and tumbled backward a good thirty feet, his sternum cracking under the sheer force of the blow.

  A number of the hoodlums lifted up the unconscious Izumii.

  “At least kill him, dammit!”

  About ten of the feistier thugs turned to Rokujou, holding metal pipes and knives and such.

  “Listen… I’d love to spend time with you, but I’m not waitin’ for the police.” Rokujou turned on his heel and rushed over to the Yellow Scarves who were dragging Masaomi away. “You guys should clear out, too. Don’t get caught, okay?”

  “Huh? H-hey, wait…,” they murmured, but Rokujou just grabbed Masaomi and lifted him up
.

  “…Ah?” Masaomi was conscious enough to be taken by surprise, even through the incredible pain.

  “Easier to get away if I’m the one carrying you than those guys, eh? We can continue our fight some other time.”

  Thanks to the alarm making it harder to hear, the other Yellow Scarves couldn’t tell what was going on, and they tried to stop Rokujou from rushing away with Masaomi over his shoulder.

  “Wh-what are you saying…? Ah! Hey!”

  Rokujou ignored them and, using a car parked next to the fence around the rooftop as a stepping stone, leaped right over the wall.

  “Hey, that can’t be—! Are you serious—? What the hell?!” the boys shouted all at once, to the sound of Masaomi’s yelp.

  But Rokujou just jumped right off the edge without a second’s hesitation.

  “Whoaaaaaa?!”

  It was so sudden, so startling, that Masaomi actually forgot his pain for a moment.

  The impact was far softer than he’d expected, and he realized that some of the energy of their fall was being directed sideways. Through bouncing, blurry vision, he could see a streetlight swaying.

  Apparently, Rokujou had used the streetlight as a landing pad. And in the next moment, there was a dull thwump, and Masaomi felt their momentum changing directions again.

  “…Huh?”

  First he confirmed that he was still alive, and then the agony of his fist and knee injuries flooded back. He looked around, trying to withstand the pain, and saw that the scenery around him was moving. Then his body landed on a rough, woven surface.

  “Yeow…”

  “Sorry about that. Just stay down for a bit. If the cops find us, they’ll put a stop to it all.”

  He recognized that his body was resting on the top of a covered truck. Overhead, the thugs were staring dumbfoundedly down at them from the roof level of the parking garage. Some of them were even beating on the chain-link fence in frustration. Given that none of the faces he could see belonged to the Yellow Scarves, Masaomi surmised that they must have run off as soon as they saw he was safely on the ground.

  Masaomi looked at the sky, praying that they got away without trouble, and said, “Am… Am I alive?”

  “Better thank me. If the cops or Dollars catch you, you’re not gettin’ away on that leg,” Rokujou said with a grin. The scenery sped by behind him as the truck picked up velocity.

  Masaomi glanced back at the garage vanishing into the distance and asked:

  “So what happens now?”

  Several hours later, parking garage

  “Buncha kids gettin’ up to no good again,” muttered one of the police officers patrolling the roof of the parking garage. They’d come here because an incident had happened earlier in the day.

  The entire area was on heightened alert, due to an attack on a police vehicle about an hour ago. There hadn’t been any trouble at this structure recently, but there was a report about a fire alarm going off, and many young ruffians were witnessed around it. The power line to the security cameras had also been cut.

  Given the timing of the other incident, the orders went out to strengthen local patrols to check out the garage, even if it was unlikely that the events were connected.

  “You know about the period when the street gangs used to use this place as a hideout, Mr. Kuzuhara?” asked a younger officer.

  Ginichirou Kuzuhara, a man entering middle age, sighed and said, “I do. You’re new on this beat, so you don’t know, but they used to fight all the time at this garage. It stopped cold about two years back…but ever since that incident with the street slasher, there’s just been a bad vibe around.”

  “Doesn’t help when you’ve got that freaky Headless Rider putting on a public performance,” said the younger cop. He hadn’t seen the rider much, and he seemed to think it was just some kind of outlaw biker who liked to do circus tricks.

  Ginichirou, however, had been around for years, and he remembered when the Headless Rider had first come to this city. He scowled and said, “Mmm…well, listen. There’s stuff in this world that doesn’t make logical sense. If that rider were a simple street performer, Kinnosuke would have had ’em lassoed up long ago.” The name he’d dropped was that of his own blood relation, a traffic officer who rode a motorcycle of his own.

  The rookie laughed. “Oh, geez, are you trying to tell me the Headless Rider really is some kind of monster? It’s just a magic trick. Sleight of hand.”

  “…Turning your motorcycle into a horse?”

  “Yeah. Don’t you keep up with magicians, Mr. Kuzuhara? Over in America, they can make huge things disappear, like the Statue of Liberty and high-rise buildings and stuff! Even in Japan, we’ve got guys who can make frogs appear in their empty hands!”

  “…Uh-huh.” Ginichirou looked at his partner with something akin to pity. “Well, I guess that’s better than getting all freaked out about it…”

  “What was that, sir?”

  “Just watch yourself for scams, kid.”

  “Oh, geez, Mr. Kuzuhara, you’re the one who’s convinced of occult answers for everything!” returned his partner at a chatter.

  The full tour of the structure turned up nothing out of order. They finished examining the camera vandalization and, finding no reason to stick around, headed quickly for the next spot on their patrol.

  But then an odd sound from the northwest caught their attention.

  “…What was that?”

  The younger officer returned to the roof level to look in the direction of the sound. What he witnessed there was quite eerie.

  Heading from rooftop to rooftop, and sometimes lodging itself into the sides of buildings, was a figure carrying something large, swinging and leaping about like an American comic book hero with a spider motif.

  Chasing after this figure was a black cloud—or a thing in cloud form.

  It was hard to tell against the night sky, but something black was there, absorbing all the light that hit it.

  Occasionally, some black feelers would extend from the thing, and the figure would use some narrow silver object to swipe and cut at them to keep them away. The strange sound they heard was revealed to be the sound of the silver and black objects making contact.

  Sometimes the black shadow would stop sending its tendrils forward, instead forming huge fangs that bit and lunged at the human figure. But the figure would leap with speed and agility to evade attack. It reminded the young officer of an action game he had played on his last day off.

  “…Huh? No, wait, wait, wait.”

  He came to his senses, pressed himself harder against the fence, and stared. But by that point, the shapes were gone, having passed behind buildings between him and them.

  “What’s up? What was that sound?” said Ginichirou, walking up from behind.

  The young officer rubbed his eyes near the bridge of his nose and said, as much to himself as to his partner, “It was…a street magician.”

  “A street magician…? You need a break. You’re obsessed.”

  “No, I am not possessed! Don’t try to scare me, sir!”

  “…?”

  Ginichirou was becoming concerned for the rookie’s mental health, but in the meantime, the actual source of the sound, the chase between Kasane Kujiragi and the black mass, continued.

  “…It’s time,” Kujiragi muttered and made a sharp change of direction with Shinra over her shoulder. For just a moment as she leaped between buildings, she looked backward and drew a number of pen-like objects from her waist.

  She gathered up the cylindrical objects and nimbly hurled them at the mass of shadow. It continued rushing for her, completely ignoring the projectiles. But Kujiragi looked forward again and resumed her jumping.

  The next moment, the special pen-shaped flashbangs burst all at once, dazzling a small part of Ikebukuro briefly amid the darkness of night.

  For a moment—just a moment—the flash caused the shadow creature to falter.

  An ordinary human
being would have been blinded and immobilized, but Celty did not have eyes to begin with, and her sense of vision recovered from flashes of light much faster—although this was only for her rational, humanoid form, not whatever she had become now.

  But for that one brief moment, there was the possibility that she had lost her sight.

  Celty knew this because Kujiragi then vanished from the rooftop, and her mass of shadow lost sense of where to go next for several seconds.

  But seconds were merely seconds. It launched back into motion, perhaps sensing the alien power of Saika’s body, and hurtled itself toward the gap between two particular buildings.

  There, it found Kujiragi, who had deftly descended the wall of the building. She was in an alley down below, far from the shopping district, and there were no people around.

  But with its special type of vision, the shadow mass saw Kujiragi lowering Shinra from her shoulder to the arms of someone else.

  There was a car parked on the street at the entrance to the alley, and next to it, a human being who was helping Kujiragi load Shinra into it.

  The instant it saw this, the shadow creature stopped again.

  Kujiragi rushed farther down the alley. The car began to drive, pulling away in the other direction.

  Until this point, there had been only one target. But now there were two going opposite ways.

  One was the woman named Kujiragi, who’d hurt and stolen the shadow’s beloved.

  The other was that beloved, Shinra Kishitani—now captive to Saika’s curse.

  Hatred or love?

  It was a simple set of options.

  As a monster of sheer instinct and no reason, Celty finally displayed hesitation.

  But it was not the return of sanity. If that were true, she would have decided, “First thing is to confirm that Shinra is safe, and then I can hunt down the woman.”

  No, in this situation, that emotional circuit breaker was still tripped. She was virtually unconscious of anything she was doing.

  Yet, thirst does not require conscious will to desire water.

  A moth does not require conscious will to fly toward the fire.