Kadota grinned back. “The Dollars are a congregation of evil. What else would you expect?”
Soon they were both laughing out loud. The scene grew light with mirth.
“Knock it off with the sappy friendship bullshit, Kadotaaaaa!”
And then it was ruined by a coarse, crude bellow.
“?”
“Who’s that?”
The two men turned in the direction of the voice and saw a pack of about twenty young street toughs heading their way.
The one who appeared to be in charge spat on the grass and shouted, “What, you have one fight, and now you’re best friends? What is this, the shonen manga playbook? Has hanging around with that freak otaku Yumasaki ruined your brain, too?”
Kadota showed no sign of panic at the oncoming gang. He replied, “It happens a lot more than you’d think, outside of manga. And really, is that the best insult you have?”
Then, pity entered his eyes, and he murmured, “Oh, I get it. You don’t have any friends.”
“Wha—?!” the thug yelped, eyes wide.
Chikage managed to rise to a sitting position and added, “C’mon, don’t pick on the poor guy. With looks like that, he doesn’t have a girlfriend, either. It’s not fair to taunt the lonely.”
“…Fugoff! Gah!” screamed the goon, the bridge of his nose turning red.
But Kadota wasn’t even looking at him anymore. “Speak Japanese. This is Japan.”
The delinquents were furious at being completely ignored, but they kept their cool by remembering what their overriding priority was.
A derisive shout was directed at the badly injured Kadota. “You talk a lotta shit, boy! You think you can stand up to us in that condition?”
“…Who says I’m gonna fight you?”
“Shuddup! Listen, Kadota, I never liked you from the start! Actin’ like you’re some big shot in the Dollars, when you hardly do anything in the first place!”
“Huh?” Kadota asked. This accusation seemed to come out of nowhere. But that was what Chikage had said when he first made contact, too. Somehow things had gotten very troublesome without his knowledge, but he was unable to figure out why they considered him to have this position.
“The Dollars don’t even have a direct hierarchy of any kind. So we don’t like you actin’ like you’re some kind of exalted officer!”
“I don’t remember telling anyone I was an officer,” Kadota sighed, scratching his head. He took a step toward the newcomers.
They suddenly stopped, faltered half a step in caution. Kadota was well-known as an expert brawler. Of course, they didn’t believe they’d lose with their numbers, but none of them wanted to be among the first few to take a punch from him.
Tension infused the scene—and Kadota finally had the chance to ask what had been bugging him.
“So anyway, who are you guys?”
“ “ “ “…!” ” ” ”
That honest question was enough to finally drive them over the cliff into rage.
They were afraid of him, or at least conscious of him, realizing that this was a big chance to seize his infamy for themselves—they were here exactly because they hungered for that glory—and the guy didn’t even seem to recognize his own status.
For those who terrorized Ikebukuro under the Dollars’ name, there could be no more direct a form of insult.
“…Damn, we’re lucky today. First we crush Toramaru, then we get to lay Kadota low!” one of them crowed to hide his shame.
Veins bulging on his temple, one of the punks pulled out an extending police baton.
“I figure we’ll get a little bit of infamy from bein’ able to say we crushed Toramaru. Like I said, just a little—they’re only some dinky gang from the sticks in Saitama!” he mocked, pulled back the club, and swung it toward Chikage’s face.
But…
Ga-gya! There was a sharp metal squeal, and the special police baton stopped just before Chikage’s cheek.
“Huh…?”
Somehow, there was a rodlike object in Chikage’s hand. A mottled handle of red and black, and a sheath…
It looked a bit like a wakizashi, the short swords used by samurai, but there was no hilt.
“What…is that?” the thug mumbled, stunned that this mystery object had stopped his baton. Chikage clutched the black-and-red sheath in his left hand and drew the handle with his right.
A long silver object appeared from the sheath, humming softly as it slid out.
At a distance, it did indeed look like a wakizashi or perhaps a long yakuza knife. The delinquents’ expressions changed dramatically.
But on second glance, the weapon had a very odd shape. It looked like a blade at first, but there was no edge to it, just the facing of a thick steel bludgeon. At the base of the gently curved rod was a hook-like protrusion, which made it look like a combination of a jitte, a short blade with hooks used by police in the Edo period, and a katana.
Kadota was the only one who recognized the weapon. He fixed Chikage with a curious gaze. “A kabutowari, huh? That’s a stylish weapon,” he said, referring to an old-fashioned “helmet-splitting” tool meant to catch blades in the hook near the handle so they could be broken.
“I bought it at a souvenir shop when I was on vacation in Kamakura.”
“Oh, you mean that store right in front of the giant Buddha statue?”
“You know the place? It’s really cool. I bought a bunch of stuff there, but this one really spoke to me. Had to teach myself how to use it, though; nobody around offers lessons.”
Despite the light, breezy chat they were having, the situation had not changed or improved for the two. The thug with the police baton was still enraged at being ignored.
He pulled the baton up high, ready to split Chikage’s head open—but that was when his target leaped into action.
At the same time that the attacker raised his arm, Chikage twisted his body and whipped around the blunt kabutowari, cracking it against the thug’s nose.
The attacker’s aim looped and drifted upward. An instant later, he fell to his knees, and as if on command, jets of blood shot out of his nostrils.
“…”
Just a few feet away, the thug’s companions gulped, feeling cold sweat break out on their skin.
They had the advantage. And yet the fountain of blood seemed to have erased that illusion from their minds.
“You were saying?” Chikage smiled, kicking over his victim and putting a foot on his head. That pleasant grin was utterly the same as the one he’d worn when chatting with Kadota.
“…Are you sure you weren’t going easy on me earlier?” Kadota wondered.
Chikage tilted his head side to side. “Nah, I don’t use weapons as long as the other guy doesn’t. I didn’t go easy on you, and I ain’t goin’ easy now. That’s that.”
He tapped his own shoulder with the kabutowari rhythmically, turning to the thugs with a sadistic leer. “Yeah, it might be tough to take all of you down…but the first five at least will suffer a gouged eye or a broken collarbone.”
“…!”
The punks held their breath and looked among themselves. With a group that large, they couldn’t lose the fight. But none of them wanted to be among those promised five. It was because they were likely to win that none of them wanted to risk undue harm.
Kadota took a step forward, ready to lay on more pressure.
“And if I’m taking part, too, you can expect another five will get an ear torn off.”
“…You think we’re just a joke?” snarled one of the men calling themselves Dollars, but there was no strength in his voice.
They were on a different scale.
All the hoodlums had to admit that the two men they faced were made of sterner stuff than they were individually.
There were just two of them, both badly wounded, and yet they were intimidating twenty.
But there was no turning back now. The leader of the group, his expression bitter
, gave an order to someone around the side of the storeroom, where Kadota and Chikage couldn’t see.
I was hoping to rough ’em up first, before I showed them…
Perhaps he was still rankled by how that weird kid had called him “cowardly” earlier—but at any rate, the head of the thugs decided to trot out his trump card earlier than planned.
From around the shadow of the building appeared a number of girls, held down by other punks.
“…Non…?!” Chikage gasped, eyes bulging. His teeth gnashed as he realized what was going on. The girl, meanwhile, took one apologetic look at him and mumbled.
“…I’m sorry, Rocchi… We got caught.”
Ikebukuro, Raira Academy Field Two, the path heading around back
Mikado and Anri reached the athletic field slightly later than the group of men did.
They moved stealthily, hiding around trees and walls, as they made their way toward the rear of the storage shed, where they knew they would find Kadota.
The voices of the kabaddi team still drifted over the field, and it was hard to imagine a large fight was about to break out up ahead.
But in fact, the student athletes hardly ever came back to the storeroom, so it was essentially its own discreet location. They brought all their supplies from the school building, so the storeroom itself hardly served any purpose.
With this fact in mind, Mikado realized that it was extremely unlikely that any fights or altercations ahead would be witnessed or reported to anyone. In the normal course of events for the Dollars’ mailing list, he had read things that suggested some members used it as a hangout, day and night.
He considered sending out a message saying, “You can’t take girls hostage. Let’s all stop them!” but given the danger that someone might alert the police and make the situation even more complex, he played it safe and deleted it at the last second.
…We just can’t do it.
With innocent girls held captive in harm’s way, there was really no call to “play it safe,” but Mikado was so amped up that he was unable to realize this in the moment.
Plus, if this is truly turning into a criminal matter, the normal members aren’t going to want anything to do with it.
When he first got the Dollars together in the real world, it was like a club meeting, with many of those who attended there out of sheer curiosity. But thinking back on it now, the Dollars had changed since then, bit by bit.
Once the Dollars’ existence had been verified as fact, many began to use that name as a tool for its power.
Mikado did not attempt to stop them or call them out. He knew that he had no such authority. And the end result was this event today.
Whatever it was that Aoba’s gang was plotting, the possibility was always there for something like this to happen.
It’s my fault. All because I never did anything about it…
…?
He realized that something about this thought struck him as wrong.
But his legs carried him onward while the nature of that understanding still eluded him.
Peering around the side of the storeroom, he saw the group of punks from before facing off against two men. They had the girls held hostage, which suggested that the man standing next to Kadota was the leader of Toramaru.
“…We have to get around them somehow and save the hostages…”
But Mikado was there without a plan or any preparations, so his range of actions was limited. He could pretend to call the police to cause chaos or use the fire extinguisher in the storehouse to create a smokescreen…
Without turning around to face Anri, he said, “I’ll jump in there somehow, and if that doesn’t work, you go get the poli…”
griing
He paused in the middle of his sentence when he heard the strange metallic sound.
“Huh…?”
He spun around…and saw a most bizarre sight.
Anri was now holding a katana for some reason—and using it to block a knife held by a sudden assailant wearing a helmet.
—?!
For a moment, he thought it was Celty, but the color of the riding suit was different. And the curves of the suit were more pronounced, undoubtedly feminine.
Wh-who is that…?
Meanwhile, the helmeted woman stabbed at Anri, twice, three times. Anri deflected the attacks with her katana and swiped back at the assailant’s legs. But the attacker narrowly evaded, retreated a few steps, then brandished the knife again.
“S-Sonohara!” Mikado yelped, totally baffled by the situation.
“…Get away from here,” she cautioned, lifted her sword, and took a stride forward.
But her opponent pulled back even farther than that, took something out of her waist pouch, pulled out a pin, and lobbed it at Anri.
Huh?
In a sense, it was exactly what Mikado generally sought in life: the extraordinary.
What is that?
But it was so far out of the bounds of the extraordinary, he imagined that he couldn’t process it, couldn’t prepare himself—and it flew right toward them.
It’s a bo…
The object floated in an arc toward them, and he only identified it when it was several feet away.
Then brilliant light filled his eyes and eradicated the confusion from his mind.
“Huh…?”
“Wh-what was that?”
The thugs from the Dollars had Chikage Rokujou’s girlfriend held hostage. They controlled the reins.
But their control was momentarily broken by a blinding flash. Something had gone off on the other side of the storage building where they couldn’t see.
It vanished in a second, and there was hardly any sound, but the suddenness of that flash was so eerie that they were all momentarily taken aback.
The same thing went for Kadota and Chikage, who were facing away from the flash. Their heads swiveled around to look, eyes wide.
It was just a few seconds—less than ten that their concentration was drawn to the fading remnants of the flash.
Someone with more battle experience, or who recognized the source of the light, would have come to his senses sooner. But the Dollars thugs hadn’t been around that long, and they didn’t know what caused this kind of flash.
And as a result, the temporary void in their minds led to an extreme turnabout in the situation.
One of the men felt something splatter against his arm.
“…Huh?”
He was the one holding a knife to the girl named Non, and there was a liquid splashed on that arm now.
He looked down at that arm and saw—
“Ciao.”
A young man, half-Japanese and half-white, with narrow eyes.
“Y…Yumasaki!” the man shouted in alarm.
Then, he recognized the unique, pungent smell wafting up from his arm—and saw the canister of lighter oil in one of Yumasaki’s hands.
And then the Zippo lighter in the other.
“Wh-whaa—?! W-wait…get that away!” the thug screamed, trying to distance himself from Yumasaki, who used that opportunity to grab Non’s hand and pull her away from the group.
“Ah…h-hey, what the hell!”
“What do you think you’re doin’?!”
“When did you get here, you otaku freak?!” they bellowed and leaped onto Yumasaki—except that several men butted in and blocked their way.
It was only five or so, but their attitudes set them apart from the rabble of street toughs.
“Sorry, everyone’s off on vacation this week, so this was the most I could scrape together. Hopefully we’ll be able to pull off some elite ass kicking: quality over quantity. Brawl Brawl Revolution!”
“…The fuck?! You’re just barnacles hanging off Kadota’s ass!” the leader of the thugs bellowed, but it was too late by then. The newcomers’ ambush started on those holding the girls hostage.
“W-wait…aagh!”
To hold down the girls or let go and fight? Most of the pun
ks didn’t even have the moment needed to consider these options before they were under attack.
Released at last, the girls gathered around the beckoning Yumasaki, and thus the remaining hoodlums rushed to jump him. But instead, they ran headlong into brilliant orange flames.
“I guess in a certain scientific sense, this would be considered pyrokinesis. I wanna take a class from Miss Komoe—yeeha!”
“Whaa—?!”
The thugs came to a stop, feeling the heat of the air on their skin. Instead of the oilcan in Yumasaki’s hand, there was now a spray bottle of some kind.
“Don’t try this at home, kids!” he said with a dazzling smile and let go of the spray trigger.
It was the simplest kind of flamethrower: a lighter and a spray bottle of flammable liquid. If used incorrectly, the spray can could easily explode with disastrous consequences. Local news broadcasts often covered these extremely dangerous events when they resulted in injury and fire.
Yumasaki was well aware of this, and he was using the tools to keep the hoodlums at bay. The initial spray of flame was over, but the lighter was still engaged in his other hand. They wouldn’t dare approach as long as he was at the ready.
Kadota recognized the group that had sprung to his aid and cried out, “You guys…”
Just then, a woman in black clothing—Karisawa—appeared behind him out of nowhere and said, “The truth is, we only thought we’d come check out your fight, Dotachin, but then those weirdos showed up, so we hid and kept an eye on things.”
“…But how did you know to come here?”
“Dollars’ mailing list. You can look up what it said later. Anyway, why was everyone just spacing out for a second there? That was how Yumacchi was able to rush in and save the day.”
“Hmm? Oh, there was a weird flash over there,” Kadota said. He spun around to check the direction of the flash—and heard numerous motor engines coming from the opposite end of the area.
Beyond the fence of the field, motorcycles were emerging through the trees, piloted by young men in leather jackets.
Once they determined there was no gate, they stopped the bikes and started to climb right over the fence to approach them.
It was a group that had cornered a different bunch of Dollars in a different location.
Durarara!!, Vol. 6 Page 16
