It was a very warped way to rationalize her own actions. And that rationale took her to the back door of this building, too. Through the clouded glass, she could see the lights turn on.
“…”
Cautiously, she focused all her senses. She heard the lock open from the inside, and then a young man’s face emerged from the opening door.
His pajamas were covered in red stains here and there, and he was dragging one foot in what looked like a cast. Whatever was going on, it was abnormal. He was either the victim of an attempted murder or perhaps the perpetrator, coated in the blood of his prey.
And then there were his eyes, clearly bloodshot behind his glasses.
“…It’s the Saika-possessed,” Manami muttered, though not out of fear. If Saika was controlling him, then he must be one of Haruna Niekawa’s pawns.
Perhaps Izaya had foreseen what she was up to and sent him there to Yodogiri’s hideout ahead of her. But as soon as the thought occurred to her, she realized it might not be the case.
She recognized this man.
She’d seen him in a photograph when studying every bit of information about Izaya Orihara she could find, for revenge.
He was…the unlicensed doctor…
Shinra. That’s right. Shinra Kishitani.
Izaya Orihara had any number of pawns to do his bidding, but she remembered that the only one he considered a friend was this black market doctor. But what was he doing here?
“…Why, good evening. Don’t be alarmed. There’s nothing wrong here,” said the bloodstained man. He smiled at her and approached, dragging his foot. He was holding a mop that he’d clearly found inside the building as a crutch.
“Shinra…Kishitani.”
“Huh? How do you know my name?” asked the red-eyed Shinra. So he wasn’t Niekawa’s cat’s-paw.
Izaya Orihara’s friend, Manami considered. Would he suffer if he learned that his friend died?
She concentrated on the ice pick she kept concealed on her person. Shinra, meanwhile, had the red eyes that were a dead giveaway of Saika’s possession, but he beckoned to her just as if he was normal.
“Have I given you a checkup in the past, perhaps? If so, I’ve got one little request,” Shinra said, approaching her.
Manami wasn’t sure whether she should pull out the ice pick yet and kept her hand on it. “Mr. Kishitani, do you know Izaya Orihara?”
“Hmm? Well, he is my friend. And?”
“I don’t know much about having friends, you see… What did you think when he got stabbed a little while back?”
It wasn’t the kind of thing you asked a man in bloodied pajamas. She seemed to be plenty abnormal herself—but Shinra considered the question seriously.
“Let’s see… I think I figured, He must have earned it.”
“…”
“When he called to tell me about it, I said, ‘Oh, cool,’ and hung up. Was that mean of me?”
“No. It’s all his fault. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable response,” said Manami. She exhaled and let go of the ice pick she was keeping concealed.
Everything Shinra said was indeed true, but it was so far from the typical concept of a “friend” that she saw no value in killing him. Plus, Izaya was the kind of person who would watch a friend die with a smile on his face.
It was why he filled her with such hatred, Manami knew. She asked the man in front of her, “Are you hurt badly?”
“Oh, this? I’m all right. Thanks. It hurts a whole lot, but I’ll manage,” Shinra said, not realizing that the girl whose concern he appreciated was the very person who threw Celty’s head before the eyes of the world. “Actually, this might be a strange thing to ask, but…can I borrow your phone?”
“…Pardon me?”
“I need to go somewhere, but I don’t have a phone to arrange a ride… I need to call a taxi and then either my mother-in-law or my dad… Actually, not my dad,” Shinra muttered to himself, eyeballs bright red.
Manami thought it over and decided to offer Shinra her shoulder.
“Oh no, it’s fine; I can walk on my own.”
“But it must be painful.”
“You know, a girl shouldn’t be giving suspicious people a shoulder to lean on in the middle of the night,” the red-eyed man said, which was a strangely specific piece of advice, but Manami’s expression did not change.
“No, it’s fine. All you have to do is answer something for me.”
“?”
“About Izaya Orihara,” she said, her voice flat and mechanical. “Tell me if you know anything that he really, really hates to have happen.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to kill him, and I want it to be awful for him,” she admitted freely.
Shinra smiled as he dragged his leg along. “What is that, jealousy? Or one of those emotions? No, that’s love.”
“You’re wrong,” Manami said flatly, neither angry nor pleased.
“Let’s see… Something he would hate… Ah! Ah!”
Shinra winced occasionally from the pain in his joint as he walked. But otherwise he maintained a thin smile that, combined with the red eyes, made him look like a creepy clown.
He decided to go to the main street to catch a taxi, and as they walked together, he reminisced about the past as a means of answering the girl’s question.
“Let’s see… Izaya is never disappointed or disgusted by people. So anything involving human relationships or the ugly side of people, like betrayal or death, isn’t going to bother him.”
“…”
“But actually, I don’t think that’s because he’s mentally strong or anything. Just the opposite, in fact.”
“?”
Manami gave him a questioning look. He leaned onto her shoulder for support as he made his way slowly down the street.
“People think of him like some cold-blooded monster, but he’s more human than anyone I know; he’s so fragile inside. If you pumped him full of love and betrayal and such, I think he’d fall apart. I think that’s why he decided to love humanity by letting everything wash over him. Do you see what I’m saying? He accepts everything, but he doesn’t take it in. He lets it wash over him.”
“Wash over…?”
“Yes. Think of those koinobori poles, with the carp streamers that blow in the wind. At first glance, they appear to have wide mouths and insides that happily swallow everything into them…but there’s no bottom to that container. It’s just a hollow tube. So of course they can accept everything into their mouths; they don’t actually hold it. Of course he can love everything.”
It was hard to tell exactly what Shinra thought of his friend’s disposition. But the little smile never left his lips.
“Oh, sorry,” he said to Manami. “You didn’t want to know his nature, just the things that he hates.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled quietly.
“I think…simple pain, heat, agony… He hates those things.”
Ikebukuro—inside an office building
“Kahk…”
Breath returned to Izaya in the form of a cough.
The air he expelled contained flecks of blood.
His attempt to seize understanding was besieged by ferocious pain.
“…!”
For an instant, he forgot who he was and why he was here.
The awful pain was inseparable from heat in his mind, creating the brief illusion that his entire body was on fire. Agony tore through his being, preventing him from even passing out.
I’m still alive.
Izaya was not the type of person to argue about guts and willpower overcoming flesh. But he didn’t rule it out, either.
He summoned all his mental strength, forcing the pain aside so his brain could work unimpeded.
What happened? I was atop the beams, and…I fell…
The shock was so strong that even memories ten seconds old felt vague. He reached back what felt like ten years to arrive at last at an answer.
&nb
sp; That’s right. He hit me. The monster used a metal beam like a bat and hit me like a ball.
“…Monster,” he spat.
If his opponent had been a human, Izaya would have praised the strength of the man who hit him, near-lethal blow or not. But Izaya no longer recognized Shizuo Heiwajima as human.
All he felt was horrible, detestable pain, his entire body being devoured by seething agony.
Apparently, he was inside a building. After being struck, there had been a shock against his back and a sound like glass breaking, as he recalled it.
“…”
He looked around, his back against the ground, and saw a number of office desks. So he was inside of an office of some kind.
I was lucky.
After Shizuo struck him, he’d flown into the building across the street and crashed through a window. Perhaps the glass of the window had cushioned him, because aside from a number of lacerations on his clothes from shards of glass, his arteries were miraculously intact.
Instead, the blood oozed from a myriad of smaller cuts all over him. Izaya looked to the broken window.
He couldn’t tell what was happening outside. There was only one thing he could say for certain.
He’s going to come here to finish the job.
But the death sentence that was the truth also sent Izaya’s heart trembling.
That means it’s not over yet.
And when he’d reached that point, there was a sound of breaking glass up above. It could mean only one thing.
Shizuo Heiwajima had jumped here from the building across the way.
With legs powerful enough to kick a car like a soccer ball, a narrow alley was an easy gap to cross in a single leap. But few people, even if they had the same leg strength, would jump from such a tall building to another, knowing that a fall would be fatal.
If only he’d fallen, Izaya thought briefly, but then he remembered how Shizuo had kicked aside the forklift that had fallen from that height. No…maybe a fall of that distance wouldn’t kill him. And why would I hope that he went to his own demise? The entire point is that I’ve got to purge the monster from existence.
He chided himself for indulging in such a naive thought and smirked.
“Yes, that’s right.”
He clenched his fists, telling himself that at least the nerves there still worked. And then, withstanding withering pain all over, he got steadily to his feet.
“I’m here to vanquish a monster.”
Perhaps it was his one-sided, selfish love for humanity that brought his willpower back to him. And yet, not a single “beloved” human face came into his mind’s eye.
Not the parents who raised him.
Not the sisters who looked up to him.
Not the brother-loving woman who made for such a capable, unquestioning secretary.
Not the crazy friend who was the first to see his true nature.
Not the many unfortunate, despairing people he’d sent into ruin.
Not the naive fools who thanked him for sparing them on an idle whim.
Not even the boys on the border between normalcy and ruin.
Not a single face came to mind.
But still, he loved humanity.
Izaya Orihara, possessing a view of humanity that was as blank as the void, got to his feet.
“It’s not to run away.”
When Shizuo Heiwajima descended the stairs, the door to the office was still open.
“…” He watched carefully, saying nothing. Normally he would be shouting something like “Where did you go, fleabrain?!” But this situation was anything but normal.
He held everything inside, even his voice, conserving and converting all his energy to the purpose of eradicating Izaya Orihara from the earth.
Shizuo made his way slowly into the office, until he noticed a bloodstain on the floor near the center of the room.
Despite all his fury and hatred being turned solely on Izaya, Shizuo was not yet a raging, berserk animal. That might have been the benefit of all the time he had spent waiting and perhaps even what he yearned for.
Shizuo had misjudged his jump and crashed through the glass an entire story above where Izaya had landed, but he did not simply stomp his way through the floor to get down there.
The lights were out, so he wasn’t worried that some innocent person might get hurt. But even still, Shizuo’s furious instincts gave him a warning. He’d clashed with Izaya Orihara so many, many times before that he knew one solid fact.
Unless he watched himself kill the man, Izaya would not be dead.
It didn’t matter if he was buried under rubble. There could be no rest until Shizuo saw the body. And when you couldn’t see him, that was when you were in Izaya’s danger zone.
That wasn’t a rational, known fact that he kept in his brain. It was something that Shizuo had come to understand innately, through years of near-fatal brawling with Izaya.
There was no point to it unless he finished Izaya off visibly.
He could pack the man in concrete and dump him into the sea—and as long as Izaya was still alive when he disappeared under the waves, there could be no rest.
And even if he was dead, the unease would still live on in the city. His dead body could turn up in the rubble of the building, and people would still think, Does that body really belong to Izaya Orihara?
Among those who knew Izaya Orihara, the unease would live on, like a swelling that would not subside. And that was why Shizuo Heiwajima was here, to ensure that it did not happen.
He had to witness the sight of Izaya Orihara being eliminated from the earth.
However much rational sense Shizuo still had now, if he was his normal self, he would say something like this: I’m not here for the sake of all the people Izaya’s harmed. It’s all for my own selfish reasons.
On the other hand, if he were the sole target of all of Izaya’s malice, it would not have come to this situation, either. It was the way the malice was entangling all those around him, like Vorona, like Akane Awakusu, Shinra, Celty, and Tom, that had Shizuo so cornered and furious.
In a sense, it was ironic.
If he were the Shizuo from before he fought the crowd of Saikas and began to feel differently about his own strength…
If he were the Shizuo from before he met Akane Awakusu and learned how to use his strength to protect…
If he were the Shizuo who’d become trapped by his own violence and chosen to place himself at a distance from his surroundings…
…then he might not be in this position now.
Or if he was, then maybe he’d be screaming and chasing his opponent around like he so often did before.
But he did not this time.
Shizuo Heiwajima accepted people, connected to people—and because of that, he was tormented when they were hurt, and he trapped his unprecedented anger within himself, so that now it exploded.
It might lead to nothing but tragedy, but there was no stopping him now.
In a sense, it was his connections to others that created the single devastating weakness of the demon that was Shizuo Heiwajima.
And now Shizuo was falling into his least favorite development.
Izaya Orihara was nowhere to be seen.
He was gone, leaving behind only a bloodstain in the office.
Perhaps he was setting up an ambush. Shizuo stared around, then began lifting up the office desks one-handed, one after the other. But there was no sign of him hiding anywhere.
He couldn’t have had time to set up some flaming gas trap, like he did earlier.
“…”
Shizuo headed out of the office and glanced around the building. Aside from the green emergency exit panel, there was just one illumination glowing.
The elevator light.
He approached without making a sound and confirmed that the light was moving. It was indicating that the elevator was traveling downward from this floor. Of course, it was possible that the elevator was just a feint
and that Izaya was still hiding on this floor.
But that, too, was merely another facet of escape.
“It’s not to run away,” Izaya had told himself, and yet mysteriously, he had vanished from the building.
Shizuo hadn’t heard him say that, but he could sense that the man truly intended to kill him. He gave not a single thought to what Izaya might actually be plotting and sneaked back to the office area.
Then he stuck his head through the broken window.
Izaya could pop up behind him and push him through it. He could have gone up a floor during the elevator distraction and prepared a rope or something to hook around Shizuo’s throat.
But Izaya knew full well that these things would mean nothing.
So instead, he chose to allow Shizuo to catch sight of him.
The elevator hadn’t been a distraction at all, merely a straightforward means of exiting the building.
When Shizuo saw Izaya, dressed in his usual black clothing, running down the dimly lit alley, his expression did not change one iota.
Instead, he placed his foot upon the frame of the broken window, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing to do—and stepped out into the open air the way a person would walk down a staircase.
Alley
“Why, hello there, young Orihara. What has you in such a hurry?”
“…”
Shingen, wearing a gas mask like always, spotted Izaya leaving the building, but Izaya gave him no more than a glance before scampering away.
“Hrm… Well, how about that, Egor? I’ve just discovered that being totally ignored by a person younger than myself hurts more than I realized it would.”
“Are you saying you’ve never been ignored before this?”
“Why did you phrase that question as though it seems only natural that I would be ignored? Not only that, he was one of my son’s few friends, and—whether he did it or not—he was brought in by the police for stabbing my son years ago! Surely my presence would earn some kind of reaction…”
Egor ignored Shingen, who then launched into a pointless speech about nothing important. Instead, Egor focused on the building above them.
Durarara!!, Vol. 13 Page 7
