A furious, frustrated Seitarou ordered, “What are you doing, Kujiragi? Use any means necessary! Just eliminate him and—”
But the mouth he used to issue that command and the rest of the body attached to it were now five yards removed from their previous location.
A third white shadow had descended behind Seitarou without a sound and struck him in the lower back like a pile driver. Had his arms been held at the same time, the force of the attack would have surely dislocated them—but the attack was not meant for maximum damage, only to physically knock the target out of the area. It was successful in that regard; the company president went flying like a tumbleweed in a Western.
Seitarou hit the ground and rolled until he slammed into the wall. His eyes rolled backward, and a streak of blood trailed from his mouth, from biting something on the impact.
Kujiragi apparently considered her tactical disadvantage as this new attacker arrived, and she mechanically switched from fighting back to assisting her boss instead.
As she helped him up, Seitarou saw that Namie had recovered enough to stand on her own, and next to her, the three men in gas masks stood in a direct line facing him. They were rotating their heads and shoulders in a hypnotic circular rhythm, much like some kind of corny boy band.
“Fwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Does it confuse you that I have multiplied into three, Seitarou? And this is not even the end of it. My body doubles can multiply with every act of human desire, until the entire earth is overrun with me.”
“…Hrg…gah…,” Seitarou gasped, blood-flecked spittle spraying from his mouth. It wasn’t clear he had even registered Shingen’s taunt. “What do you…think you’re…?”
The member of the masked trio standing at the lead stopped and proudly answered, “My, my, who would have expected that you, of all people, would forget a contract! I believe I told you this about my son: that I would come and punch you. And I believe you accepted those terms, as long as it was one punch.”
“That’s horseshit! You didn’t do that just now, someone else did! And I authorized you to punch me, not to kick me!” Seitarou bellowed, the blood flying from his lips.
Shingen shook his head. “That’s quite an entertaining hypothesis, but do you have proof of it? I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that my…my Nebula punch was so powerful that you confused it for a kick.”
“That does not matter now! Why have you interfered with our business?!”
“And why must I be forced to explain myself to the likes of you…? Have you grown arrogant in your old age? Humanity is not your slave. People grow by overcoming unexpected obstacles and challenges. Don’t you agree, Kasane Kujiragi?”
The woman, who hadn’t been expecting a direct address at that point, squinted for a moment. Then she said, “I do not sense any need to answer that question. What reason should I have to reply?”
“I’ll pay you ten thousand yen.”
In an airy tone, the gas-masked man right behind Shingen said, “Oh, you are just the worst, Shingen.”
“Be silent, my doppelgänger, Gas Mask Number Two!”
Kujiragi considered his offer in silence, her expression completely flat. For several seconds, she looked down, then said, “That seems an outrageous sum in reward for answering a question that does not involve secrets. I cannot accept such a seemingly suspicious offer.”
“Okay, how about five hundred yen?” asked Shingen, pulling a five hundred–yen coin from his pocket. He tossed it toward Kujiragi.
“…Actually, you really are the worst, huh?” said Gas Mask No. 3, the one who had kicked Seitarou.
But Kujiragi caught the coin, and when she was satisfied that it wasn’t fake, replied, “Very well. I will give you my answer to that question.”
“You’re actually going through with it?!” snapped Gas Mask No. 3.
Kujiragi ignored him, propping up Seitarou in her arms, and explained, “It is true that humanity is not Seitarou Yagiri’s slave. An unfair reality will likely cause him to grow as a person, with the condition that he must be capable of overcoming it first. However, if one broadly interprets the status of humanity to be in the thrall of someone, or of rules, or of instincts…then one might say that all humanity is, in fact, a slave to something else—perhaps to the world at large.”
“Is that your idea? Or is it Jinnai Yodogiri’s idea?” Shingen asked sharply, but Kujiragi just shook her head.
“I do not understand what you are saying.”
“I’ll give you another five hundred yen.”
“It is one of President Yodogiri’s lessons,” Kujiragi said, catching the coin.
“What kind of conversation is this?” wondered No. 3, but the others ignored him.
Meanwhile, Shingen muttered to himself, “Ah yes, I see. She hasn’t changed in twenty years. She was just a young girl back then… I suppose this would make her a poison that cannot be poisoned by society.”
Then he turned his gaze upon the prone man. “Now, Seitarou. It is I who wishes to ask what you think you’re doing. Whatever it is that you’re making a deal with Jinnai Yodogiri about and manipulating his secretary Kujiragi to achieve, you haven’t announced any of it to Nebula headquarters in the least!”
“I’m not under any obligation to—”
“You do have an obligation,” Shingen boomed haughtily through his mask. “Wasn’t there an item in your contract that states, ‘You must report prior to handling any matters pertaining to the business, even if personal in nature’? Naturally, it only suggests anything relating to the handling of pharmaceutical products…but you do know that Celty’s head qualifies for that category, I trust.”
Seitarou could only mumble and mutter under his breath. Shingen continued, “Things are becoming highly troubling now, thanks to you. I am not your supervisor or babysitter. But on the other hand, that means that if you are acting suspiciously, you cannot weasel your way out of it with me.”
“Oh, don’t be silly… My company president’s position is nothing more than a stepping-stone, compared to what we’ve seen.”
“You are like the apocryphal tomb raider who attempts to rob the mummy’s tomb, only to succumb to being a mummy yourself. Only you’re so incapable of cradling that mummy that you have no right to even be a mummy. You’ll just wind up as a man wrapped in bandages, burning in the fire and brimstone of hell!”
“Do you have any room to speak? You’re the man who used a cursed sword to steal a dullahan’s head,” Seitarou snapped back, full of hatred.
Shingen was unperturbed. “I am already a false mummy. As your friend, I am merely warning you not to follow my example, and yet you cannot even take my warm advice on good faith… What a sad and foolish thing we human beings are!”
Seitarou was about to bellow back at him, but a stab of pain through his body left him moaning and coughing.
Kujiragi replied instead, “I do not detect any such elements of fondness and caring in your conversation.”
“Aha… You would appear to have keen abilities of observation. Very well. It is foolish to give away information to the enemy, but out of respect for the greatness of your imagination, I shall answer honestly! It is true! What I said to Seitarou just now was utter nonsense! Indeed… I am the sort of man who can lie right to his old friend’s face without compunction… A very bad man, indeed! You might even say that I am the baddest man in all this city!”
“…”
“And good and evil are separated by the slimmest of margins… You might even say they are sides of the same coin. In other words—! Because I am the greatest villain to be found in this city, that gives me the right to refer to myself as its most laudable saint as well! How wicked you people must be to treat this saint with hostility. Therefore, let us define the violence I wielded in saving Namie to have been judiciously applied in self-defense. Why, I could have sworn Seitarou was going to kill me back there. How very frightened it made me, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…”
It was difficult to tell how serious S
hingen was being. He pulled something out of his coat. Nearby, the men that Gas Mask No. 2 had knocked out were beginning to recover and get to their feet, which suggested that combat could break out again at any moment.
But just before the men in suits could stand again, Shingen pulled the pin on the smoke grenade he was now holding and tossed it into the middle of the street.
“Fwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Until we meet again, Seitarou! The next time, you’d better have changed your name to Akechi the great detective! And I shall be the Fiend with Two Faces!”
Then the smoke grenade burst, and a curtain of all-concealing white completely enveloped a small corner of Shinjuku.
The same day, evening—Shinra’s apartment, near Kawagoe Highway
“Next in the news, a very friendly saltwater crocodile measuring seventeen feet long appeared in a river in Saitama today. Local residents took to calling it Salty and tossed raw meat to the creature…”
In a penthouse apartment, with the large TV as background accompaniment, Celty Sturluson listened to Shingen Kishitani brag on and on.
“And it was only because I was able to multiply myself into multiple bodies that she was saved. If not, those scoundrels would have taken Namie away, and who knows what kind of scandalous things they would have done to her?”
“I see. Good for you,” Celty typed into her PDA without much emotion, but it did nothing to suck the wind out of Shingen’s sails.
“By the way, when I mentioned ‘scandalous things,’ what did you imagine I was implying specifically? Think of this as a simple psychology test. I want to know how much you, as a monster, have in the matter of human desires, or getting more directly to the point, just how far you have gotten with Shinra in the ways of—gmmf!”
A tray came flying through the sliding doorway of another room and smacked Shingen right on the temple. He turned toward its hurler, holding his head. “Why would you do that, Shinra?! I did not raise you into the kind of son who throws a tray at his father!”
“And I didn’t raise you into a father who would sexually harass his son’s girlfriend!”
“Grr… I did not get raised by you, period… They say a son grows in his father’s example and a father grows by watching his son, but I was always so busy with my work that I hardly ever had time to watch you… If the result of that fact is my current situation, then I must heartily acknowledge—my bad!”
The target of Shingen’s speech was Shinra, who was wheelchair bound. He couldn’t walk yet, but with Celty’s help, he was at least able to sit in the chair now.
“But fear not, Shinra. As I just explained, I went to the wicked source of your current predicament and socked him a good one! Normally, I would take him to court and reduce him to utter ruin, but I thought that exposing you and Celty to the legal system would be a poor idea. So be grateful to me that I did not make it into a big deal.”
“A big deal, huh?”
“You and I are creatures of the darkness. Shadows ought to stay low and quiet.”
As a sign of perhaps how cool and nihilistic he was, Shingen punctuated this statement by spinning the tray that had hit his temple around his finger.
But then…
“Next in the news, an apparent smoke screen device went off in a residential block of Shinjuku this afternoon, sending large clouds of smoke around the area…”
The sound of the newscaster on the television caused the tray to slip from Shingen’s finger.
“According to eyewitness reports, a number of men wearing white outfits were seen running from the…”
The newscaster’s voice cut off mid-sentence, replaced by the laughter from a comedy show. Shingen slowly raised his head, remote control in hand, and faced his son, who was looking at him with dead eyes, and Celty, who merely held up a PDA screen with an ellipsis typed on it.
“There is no longer any place to hide in this new information society… The network has become light that shines through the darkness. Don’t you feel that it has surpassed the boundaries of mankind? I fear the data revolution…might have all been a terrible conspiracy to transform humanity into a higher being.”
“Don’t try to weasel your way out of this!”
Celty’s shadow wove its way around Shingen, squeezing him tight.
“Gwaaaah! W-wait, Celty! I can explain! Let’s all just ta-ta-ta-talk—”
The only one who came to Shingen’s aid was a man who Celty did not recognize. “Please wait,” he said. “The responsibility lies with me for providing him with that smoke grenade.”
The young man was obviously not Japanese, but his command of the language was excellent.
“You know, this is a good opportunity to finally ask… Who are you?” Celty typed, not realizing that he was none other than the “bandaged man” she herself had ferried as cargo before.
“Greetings. My name is Egor. I am an old companion of Simon and Denis from Russia Sushi.”
“Simon?”
Now that he mentioned it, he did look as if he could be Russian. But why would Simon’s friend be handing out smoke grenades? Celty was confused, but to be fair, confusion was becoming a familiar state of mind for her.
The reason she was able to stay oddly calm when talking to this unfamiliar Russian was probably thanks to the other people present in the room with them.
Seated by the window of the large common room were Walker Yumasaki and Saburo Togusa. They’d been on edge until recently, when Karisawa sent them a message saying, “Kadota’s heading toward recovery, and he might open his eyes by the end of tomorrow,” and they relaxed quite a bit.
“Y’know, Mr. Kishitani’s dad is a pretty cool guy. When you wear a white gas mask like that, you can’t help but be curious what kind of face is hiding underneath. Could be a half dragon—or it could even turn out to be a gorgeous girl!” said Yumasaki.
“You want a dude with a deep-ass voice to turn out to be a girl…?” Togusa replied.
Shingen boomed, “Fwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! If my identity is to be a beautiful young woman, then I am not opposed to that fate. As a matter of fact, my previous wife and I—Shinra’s mother, I mean—once did a bit of clothes swapping indoors. I seem to recall it being rather…enticing.”
Celty typed a message into her PDA and showed it to Shinra.
“How does it feel to have your dad admit to his sexual fetishes out loud?”
“I would prefer if you would console me without comment, Celty.”
“Hey, don’t worry, Shinra! We did not exchange underwear, so that does not make me a pervert!”
“SHUT UP PERVERT!” Celty typed for emphasis, thrust the message into Shingen’s face, then turned her attention to the other side of the room.
“Seiji, Seiji! Should we exchange clothes, too?!”
“Nah, that’s creepy.”
“Okay, but is it all right if I put on your jacket and roll around on the ground with it?”
“…Yeah, I guess that’s okay,” Seiji Yagiri replied without much interest to Mika Harima’s sappy request. On the other side of Seiji, Namie grabbed his arm, her temple twitching.
“My goodness, whatever is this little cat burglar playing at? When Seiji was a little boy, he wore my old hand-me-down pajamas. So would you please cut out the mimicry, if you don’t mind?”
“Huh? Those were your old pajamas? I’m pretty sure they were men’s pajamas…”
“I wore them first and stretched them out to make them easier for Seiji to wear,” Namie said, blushing like a teenager.
Seiji didn’t seem to think much about this revelation. “Oh, you did? Thanks, Sis.”
Namie managed the impressive feat of simultaneously smiling at her brother while shooting death rays at Mika past him. Celty couldn’t help but lament.
This place is doomed. The only people who seem normal are that man named Egor and the driver of the van. Then again, if Egor was working with Shingen for whatever reason, that would make him involved in the criminal underbelly.
She glanced
at the long-haired young man, hoping for at least some kind of normalcy…
“Hey, Yumasaki. If they sold the right to switch pajamas with Ruri Hijiribe, do you think it would be insincere to pay for that with money? Because even if it is, I don’t know if my willpower could hold out, if given the option…”
All the normal people are gone! Celty despaired, making the gesture of sighing in disappointment. She had to make the gesture, because she wasn’t actually capable of sighing.
Instead, black shadow oozed and writhed from the cross section of her neck.
Celty Sturluson was not human.
She was a type of fairy commonly known as a dullahan, found from Scotland to Ireland—a being that visits 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 on 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 if this was true.
And it wasn’t that she didn’t know; more accurately, she just couldn’t remember.
When someone back in her homeland had stolen her head, she had lost her memories of what she was. It was the 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.
However, Celty knew who had stolen her head.
She also knew who was preventing her from finding it.
But that meant she still 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 go on the way she was now.
Durarara!!, Vol. 11 Page 2
