Durarara!! Vol. 12 Page 5

  Whatever existed in the boundary between instinct and reason for her was being tested in this moment.

  And then Celty, in her inhuman, freakish form, made her choice.

  The shadowy mass plunged and writhed toward the vehicle carrying Shinra. Whether this was merely a coin flip or a conscious decision that she would have made every single time, it was impossible to know.

  But Kujiragi decided that it was the latter. She watched the creature go, narrowing her eyes slightly, and muttered, “So even in this situation, you choose something else…over destruction and hatred.”

  She recalled a past crime she had committed: upon Ruri Hijiribe, the girl who shared her blood but was treated like a human, and who had nearly gained human happiness because of it.

  Kujiragi recalled what she had done to her, and the flow of emotions that had transpired. “I’m afraid I must admit,” she said, a tiny flash of danger crossing her lifeless robotic features, “that I was jealous of you.”

  Then ten finger blades, five from each hand, extended over the alley like steel wires. They bit into the walls of buildings on either side, bouncing off and stretching farther. The swarm of Saikas writhed like living creatures into abstract patterns.

  The Saikas stretched and crossed like fine netting, blocking the path of Celty’s monstrous form. But she charged straight ahead, seemingly unconcerned—until solid shadow and Saika’s blades smashed together, sending sparks and shadow alike about the area.

  The two inhuman things ground and scraped against each other. While the alley was desolately empty, the sound was tremendous, and those who happened to be close enough to hear it assumed it was probably the death cry of a bird or something—such was the ability of this particular sound to set the human mind on edge.

  Monstrous Celty attempted to force her way through the net of metal, but only because she was singularly direct in her pursuit of the car with Shinra inside.

  Narrowing the shadow to pass through the smaller spaces, attacking Kujiragi directly, or simply pulling back and making her way around her—all of these were simple ideas, the kind a monkey or a dog would quickly attempt. Something even the smallest amount of rational thinking would produce, and yet she did not.

  She was so absent of any critical thought at the moment that her only action was to pursue one person: Shinra Kishitani, the man who had given her a place in the human world.

  The vehicle rushed away from Kujiragi. On the floor beneath the back seat was a man dressed in pajamas that resembled a lab coat.

  His eyes were red and bloodshot, and his vision was woozy. Shinra Kishitani was a pitiable victim, a “child” implanted with the curse of Saika’s love.

  Through Saika, Kujiragi had ordered him to stay put and behave for a while. Knowing that she needed to abduct him, she probably figured that if he put up a fight, it would cause trouble.

  So as ordered, Shinra did not struggle at all throughout his captivity and was still under her control, awaiting further orders.

  And yet—when the rattling, scraping bird death cry from the distant alley reached the car, his lips curved into a tiny smile. With bloodshot eyes and a smile on his face, he murmured to himself:

  “Ha-ha…a fool…hardy…charge…indeed…”

  Driver’s seat

  Only one person heard Shinra mutter.

  It was the person who’d been hired to take him from Kujiragi and drive him to a specified location.

  “…”

  She considered the potential meaning of his words, but Vorona, the mercenary behind the wheel, decided he was simply delirious from fever, and she did not spend any more time thinking about it.

  What am I being forced to ferry right now?

  She was currently working for Kujiragi, who had been Jinnai Yodogiri’s secretary. It wasn’t clear why Kujiragi, rather than Yodogiri, had come to hire Vorona, but the jobs themselves were taking her into more dangerous territory than Yodogiri’s had.

  One was stealing a silver case from a police vehicle—an act of war against the national power of Japan. The second was kidnapping someone and running from a monster.

  She had a decent idea of what the group of shadows trying to rush after her vehicle from the alley actually was. If Slon were present, he would warn her that it was dangerous to make an enemy of monsters. But her partner was no longer here to apply the brakes.

  His eyes looked very bloodshot to me. Was he infected by some kind of virus, perhaps? she wondered briefly, alarmed, but given that her client had carried the man over her shoulder, Vorona banished the possibility from her mind.

  If Slon were here, he might say something like “Wait, I’m suspicious. What if the client already took a vaccine for it? Now I can’t sleep at night.”

  But there was no one with Vorona now.

  No one at her side.

  It filled Vorona with an odd feeling of loneliness. She had done a number of jobs by herself already. But because they’d been so cut-and-dried, she hadn’t had time to view them as particularly solitary.

  But the reason she was feeling especially lonely now was the thought of another person who ought to be with her. A person who was not Slon.

  The first temporary job she’d taken in Japan to make ends meet was at a debt-collection business. It was the kind of place that operated just on the dark side of the gray zone, but that didn’t matter to Vorona, who was used to utterly criminal work.

  And what she found there was an interpersonal relationship different from what she had with Slon.

  Shizuo Heiwajima was a man she had once tried to kill, a man she had failed to destroy, and a man who had obliterated Vorona’s own value system.

  As she had spent time with their boss, Tom, as well as the other people at the company, Vorona had come to form a strong connection to a world she had never known before—a world she’d been introduced to for the very first time through Shizuo.

  Vorona had never loved a human being before. She probably didn’t even love herself.

  She knew of love only as a piece of discrete knowledge. She couldn’t decide whether the thing called love was something her life needed or not.

  Beyond understanding the concept, she had never actually experienced the emotion of love.

  That was no different now. But there was something she had learned in place of love.

  The sufficiency and satisfaction of living itself, or in other words, peace.

  Until this point, any day in which nothing wild happened was a day she might as well not have lived at all. She wanted to offer up her life as a prize, to wager it against the existence of the mighty. That moment of destroying a powerful opponent was the moment she felt she was truly living.

  But the thirst, the drive that caused her heart and mind to creak, was completely gone. She did not feel it, and in fact, she hadn’t even noticed it was gone until she was reunited with Slon, whom she’d thought dead, and he pronounced that she had grown “tepid.”

  That wasn’t the biggest shock, however. It was that despite denying it at that time, deep in her heart, she realized she had thought, That might not be so bad, actually.

  Vorona had tried to cut off that thought at the root, but Izaya Orihara sneaked past her mental defenses and poured poison into her mind.

  The poison slowly but surely spread, eating away at her and replaying memory after memory of humiliation. When this coincided with Shizuo’s arrest, she began to regain her old self bit by bit, and now she was doing jobs for Kujiragi.

  When she attacked the police vehicle, she might not have killed the person driving it, but she certainly did enough to regain that sense of elation in pursuing only strength.

  And then something happened right after that to completely dash her high.

  “Hey, is that…Vorona?”

  Shizuo Heiwajima just so happened to be there. When he recognized her, Vorona felt that all time in the world had briefly frozen.

  She didn’t know why she’d felt that way. But she remembered that she’d experienced a sudden flood of despair, fear, and unease.

  She’d said nothing to Shizuo, trying to stifle that feeling, and left the scene without a word.

  There was nothing else she could do.

  And in the time from then to now, through a sensation of unfathomable loss, she finally understood what her own emotions were.

  Like Slon had said, she’d been affected by this country, colored by it. She’d spent a very different kind of time with Shizuo Heiwajima, the man she’d sworn to destroy. And in a period of peace and safety, without risking her life, she found a different kind of happiness from the kind she received when attempting to kill the mighty.

  It makes sense to me. I’m afraid. Afraid of losing what I have now.

  But as she performed Kujiragi’s jobs, she realized that risking her life to fight powerful foes and putting herself in danger gave her a particular kind of joy of its own.

  By reconfirming what she knew about herself, Vorona came to a certain opinion: She did not have the right to live in a peaceful country like this, surrounded by the bliss and warmth it offered her.

  I think…maybe the period when I was working with Father might have been the best time of my life.

  She was flooded with alternating hatred and nostalgia when she thought about her father, an officer in an arms-trading company.

  She couldn’t just toss everything out. She couldn’t make it that simple.

  What about her was actually strong?

  Did she really have the right to fight against powerful opponents at all?

  At this late stage, Vorona began to question her own self. But there was no stopping her present course.

  Now that Shizuo Heiwajima knew what she was, the peaceful life she might have enjoyed was gone forever.


  Meanwhile, Vorona, too, could hear the eerie creaking of collisions between inhuman creatures. In the rearview mirror, she could see a writhing shadow in the street, but it was lost in the night as she pulled away from it.

  Once around the corner, where she could no longer see the shadow, Vorona thought to herself, Are monsters now prowling the streets regularly? What is becoming of the world? I bet President Lingerin would enjoy this situation, however.

  It seemed as though the city was plunging into chaos, but something about it was familiar, nostalgic. It reminded her of the past.

  But even she knew that this was just her own mind trying to escape its present problem.

  And she noted, with some loneliness, that there was no Shizuo Heiwajima in those old memories of hers.

  At that moment, Ikebukuro

  Shizuo Heiwajima was irritated.

  “Hey, yo! Old man, I know you! You that Shizuo Heiwajima? The real deal?”

  “That bartender look sticks out. You think that looks good on you, huh? You pullin’ that off?”

  It was a much less crowded area, a good distance away from the main shopping district. Shizuo was out of police custody now and surrounded by a group of young men who were not the brightest of the bunch.

  “You’re famous, yeah? I bet you make bank, bro! You could give us some allowance, I bet.”

  “Why don’t you say somethin’, old man?!”

  There were three accosting him at the moment, but including the ones grinning at him from a distance, the total size of the group was closer to ten.

  He didn’t recognize any of them from around town. Given that they were all on bikes, they could even be middle school students. Most likely they were using the summer vacation time to come out and visit from a distant neighboring city, like Saitama.

  “…Get lost,” he muttered, clicking his tongue with ever greater irritation.

  This isn’t it. Neither that fleabrain nor the red-eyed guys would send punks like this after me.

  His irritation was not at this lazy attempt to intimidate him, but at the fact that it wasn’t what he’d expected to see.

  It wasn’t clear why Vorona would be doing this. But he could assume she was tangled up in something involving either a pawn of the detestable Izaya Orihara or someone related to that cursed sword.

  Even if Vorona’s actions were totally unrelated, now that he was out of jail, he could expect that at least one of the two sides would try to mess with him. He was trying to make bait out of himself, hoping to get a glimpse at how the enemy would react.

  But the first group to bite were these small-time jokers. He wanted to brush them off, figuring that causing a scene in these circumstances would only prove to be a pain in the ass.

  “Get lost? What? What do you mean, ‘Get lost’? We’re a product of bad education standards, so you gotta teach us!”

  “You’re the toughest guy in Ikebukuro, right, mister?”

  But it seemed as though these street punks thought that the stories about Shizuo Heiwajima were more tall tale than truth, and they were simply having fun with whatever guy they found who fit the part.

  “Hang on, old-timer—are you actually scared? You’re lookin’ pretty pale!” They took the fact that he wasn’t attacking them as a sign that he was actually intimidated, and they stuck their faces even closer to taunt him and push him around.

  If any locals who were familiar with Shizuo were present, this would be about the time they started banding together to perform a life-saving rescue mission. Everyone knew that Shizuo was the type of person who replied to a mean look with a statement like “Did you know you can kill a man with a glance? So starin’ a guy down like that means you know your imminent death is a possible outcome, yeah?” before he proceeded to the destruction phase.

  Some people said he had mellowed out a bit and was often seen escorting a foreign woman around, but everyone in the neighborhood knew full well that Shizuo’s nature was not the kind of thing that changed overnight.

  Surprisingly, however, his patience held up. Under normal circumstances, they would already be airborne at this point.

  The cops might still be keepin’ an eye on me. If I beat the crap outta these kids and get caught, what was the point of it all?

  Thanks to the streak of patience he’d been on since last night, the length of fuse between the spark and the explosive at this moment was very, very long by Shizuo’s usual standard.

  The only problem was that given the possibility that Izaya Orihara was behind all of this, the volume of explosives was very, very great, indeed.

  Shizuo was going to simply drive off the delinquents, but they kept inching toward the breaking point, closer and closer to the actual explosives rather than the end of the fuse.

  “Why do you wear a bartender vest anyway? Huh?” one of the boys asked and lightly kicked at his outfit.

  There was a sound like something cracking, but none of the boys seemed to notice. The next moment, one of the boys gathered up his boldness and shouted, “Why don’t you say something, you silent bastaaaaaaaaa…aaa…a…a…a………” However, his words trailed off as he flew into the sky.

  Shizuo had grabbed the spokes of his bike and hurled the entire thing, rider and all, directly upward.

  “…Huh?”

  “Uh…”

  It appeared to the other youths around Shizuo that their friend had simply vanished. Meanwhile, the ones who were watching from a distance craned their necks back to follow the action—their companion and his bicycle, tossed to a height of about five stories in the air by the man in the bartender clothes.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” the boy wailed. Momentum carried him away from his bike, and he flailed his limbs as he fell. But right before he would have hit the ground, Shizuo caught the boy’s body with an outstretched arm. “Gblurf!”

  The catch absorbed some of the shock, but it wasn’t enough to prevent significant damage to the young man, who gurgled like a drunk passed out on the sidewalk while passersby stepped on him. His bicycle crashed to the ground nearby, its frame warping in several places.

  “…So? What was that?” Shizuo asked the young toughs, a blue vein bulging on his forehead.

  Perhaps the only thing that held Shizuo back from a total eruption was the youthfulness of the ruffians’ appearance. But one wrong word at this point, and even a little grade-schooler with his backpack would lose his life.

  The young men’s instincts told them as much, and they backed away with pale faces.

  “Wh-whoa, we’re sorry, okay…?”

  “O-oh my God, dude, I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry, sir, sorry! We’re just stupid kids!”

  “For-forgive…hyaaa. Don’t kill meeee!” they shrieked and scattered to the wind.

  The boy Shizuo tossed into the air wobbled away, leaving his bicycle behind.

  “Hey, your bike…,” Shizuo called after him, but the boy froze in place briefly before running off and screaming, “You can have it! Just let me goooo!”

  Within moments, all of them were gone. In the aftermath, Shizuo closed his eyes and tried some deep breathing. Close to a minute later, when the veins on his forehead had subsided, he glanced at the mangled bicycle and sighed.

  “I can ‘have it’…? What the hell would I do with a busted-up bike?”

  In the end, Shizuo wandered around the alley with the bike over his shoulder. He couldn’t just leave it in the middle of the road, and since he was someone who found abandoned bicycles irritating, his better conscience refused to allow him to leave it on the side.

  He walked along, hoping to ditch it at a bike rack somewhere, but as he was far from the business area, such things were not in quick range. Eventually, he started weighing more extreme options, such as crumpling it into a ball and turning it into junk, when an odd noise became audible somewhere behind him.

  “KRRRRRrrrrrrrrr……”

  The “voice,” which sounded like a blend of an engine revving and a horse whinnying, was familiar to Shizuo.

  “…Celty?” he wondered, turning around.

  Standing before him was a black horse. But there was something about this horse that was atypical, to say the least.

  The curve of its long neck simply stopped without a skull on top, and the plane where it was cut was shrouded in dark shadow.