The bottle flew back into the car from where it came, landing on the hand of a man in the act of pulling out a black pistol. He fired at that very moment, while his hand holding the gun burst into vivid flames.
That car slammed into a guardrail and came to a stop, screams coming from the interior. The rider continued forward into the center of the group of vehicles.
Suddenly, the lead vehicle changed directions and headed from the road toward the warehouses along the seaside.
The bike kept pace, chasing along after that lead car, when—
From the far end of the warehouse district came a massive explosion—and the appearance of a helicopter.
It was a small three-seater, not some massive military chopper, but it was still not the sort of vehicle that an individual simply owned.
The helicopter’s spotlight caught the silent rider, marking it clearly as it raced between the warehouse buildings.
Next, one of the men on the aircraft pointed a submachine gun at the motorcycle and opened fire. Like the helicopter itself, his attack was undisciplined and clearly nonmilitary; the man was spraying fire in a vain attempt to hit the shadow cyclist.
But even those shots from the hail of bullets that did land accurately were swallowed up by the rider’s scythe, which had transformed into an umbrella. The bullets simply sank into the black mass without deflecting away.
A number of bullets that missed their mark hit the lead car’s door and tires, sending the orderly line of vehicles into a swerving frenzy.
The shooter on the helicopter paused then, realizing the effect his gunfire was having, and instead pulled a pin from a hand grenade and tossed it down at the black motorcycle.
When the rider recognized the nature of the small rolling object, it toppled the bike sideways to evade—but the projectile exploded too quickly, and the blast tossed the small vehicle into the water across from the warehouses.
“All right! Yeah, in your face!” crowed the helicopter’s gunman, preparing to fire some more into the sea—when he noticed something amiss.
The motorcycle had fallen into the water with a suspiciously small and quiet splash. The surface of the night sea caught the spotlight and threw it back, making it impossible to see down into the water.
He was squinting to get a better look, when the anomaly registered not in his eyes, but his ears.
That horse whinnying that the bike made instead of an engine roar was coming up from the sea.
“Wha…?”
It wasn’t his mind playing tricks.
The shooter and pilot both stared, wide-eyed. An even more bizarre sight burned its way into their retinas.
A huge, singular shadow emerged from the water as thick as a tanker truck.
It stretched and stretched through the air, yawning its wide mouth in the direction of the helicopter and cars like a black dragon—until the black motorcycle shot from the opening.
In other words, just before the motorcycle would have fallen into the water, it created a tunnel of shadow that churned through the sea like a mole burrow before it came up to breach the surface again.
The shooter in the helicopter screamed and tried to spray more gunfire, unable to believe what he was seeing, but his magazine promptly ran out, and he had to exchange it for a fresh one.
That was plenty of time for the rider. Its shadow extended to the front car of the escaping line, engulfing the whole body with a black wave.
When darkness covered the windshield, the driver could no longer see and tried to swerve away, but the shadow grabbed at the tires as well, essentially forcing the car into emergency braking.
But that was only the start.
Now rooted to the car, the shadow bulged and grew like a tree, its branches reaching up to the helicopter directly overhead. The darkness clung to the blades and gently slowed their rotation.
The craft rocked, turning slowly, and looked poised to fall and crash—until the shadow tree grabbed the body with countless more branches and held it in place, creating a massive new sculpture that loomed over the warehouse district.
“…”
The rider stopped the bike just in front of the giant tree, then added shadow stairs that climbed the trunk up toward the tangled helicopter. Once at the cabin, the rider pulled the SMG from the unconscious shooter’s hands and turned to walk back down.
“W-wait…you monster… Why didn’t you let us fall?” groaned the pilot, glaring at his attacker.
The rider pulled a PDA out of its chest and showed the LCD screen to the pilot.
“Well, if I let you crash, you’d have died, right?”
“…Uh, what?”
“I don’t want to get in trouble with the cops for excessive self-defense. Besides, I’m not an assassin or a serial killer, so I’d feel terrible about it. Also, I saw on TV recently that these small helicopters cost like forty million yen? I mean, I know it doesn’t belong to me, but it’d be such a waste to crash it.”
For having just exhibited such ghastly, inhuman powers, the rider’s statement was both painfully human and even a little…frugal?
The shadow rider looked at the pilot’s face and seemed to hit on an idea.
“Well, if you’re not unconscious, I guess I can just ask you.
“Where’s the ‘Hakujoushi’ you kidnapped?”
Two hours later, mansion, Tokyo area
“Hakujoushi! Yay! You’re all right!”
A young girl raced over to the rider and a brilliant white snake—and clung happily to the reptile.
The force of this embrace would be enough to snap the backbone of a thin snake, but this white one was as thick as a beer bottle and big enough to strangle the girl if it felt so inclined.
But the white snake merely licked at the girl’s cheek gently, its big eyes shining.
“Thank you, courier! You saved Hakujoushi for me!” raved the girl, the snake still flicking her cheek with its tongue.
The courier—Celty Sturluson—typed back a “You’re welcome” message.
“Thank you so very much.”
“We don’t know how to thank you…”
“It’s just my job. I delivered them to the police already, so if you submit a stolen car report, they should wind up in jail.”
She took a thick envelope from the girl’s parents, waved to her and the snake, then left the mansion.
Celty had received the wealthy couple’s request to save their daughter’s kidnapped pet, but she hadn’t imagined at the time that it would involve a vehicle chase with helicopters and guns.
After Celty questioned them, she learned the thieves were after a different type of property, but they stole the entire moving truck, which just so happened to contain the pet in transit.
The fact that the wealthy couple had sought Celty’s assistance rather than the police’s suggested to her that perhaps the snake was being kept in violation of some law or regulation, but she did her best not to think about it.
I wonder, if my existence was admitted officially by the world at large, would I be put on the endangered species list? It’s usually the person who discovers the species whose name ends up being attached. I guess that would make me Celty Kishitani.
Hee-hee. That makes it sound like I got married and changed my name, she thought blissfully. But then she turned her attention to the snake that she’d just brought here in her cage of shadow.
Hakujoushi is a pretty wild name for a pet, though. I wonder if they named it after “Hakujaden,” the Chinese legend of the white snake. Or maybe they took it from the Megami Tensei series…
Hakujoushi was the name of a snake monster from China. A thousand-year-old white snake turned into a beautiful woman in an attempt to seduce the man it loved. By the end of the story, the monster is revealed and locked away—but among the various evolutions of the legend over the years, some had a happy ending where human and monster fell in love.
Celty revved her bike, thinking dreamily of the classic tale of interspecies
marriage.
A story of love between human and monster.
Just like me and Shinra.
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 basin full 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.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.
When someone in her homeland stole her head, she also lost her memories. 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 in retrieving her head, and her memories were still missing.
However, Celty knew who stole her head.
She also knew who was preventing her from finding it.
But ultimately, that didn’t mean that she knew its location.
And she was fine with that.
As long as she could live with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could enjoy being alive the way she was now.
She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face and held this strong, secret desire within her heart.
That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.
The “freakish” woman realized that she was daydreaming about her lover and willed herself to concentrate on the road.
She revved the engine, which produced the sound of a horse whinnying, and reflected on the day’s job.
Who could have guessed that tracking down an abducted pet would lead to the destruction of an entire criminal enterprise? I’m glad I got them all tied up and presented to the cops, guns included…but more importantly, that was my first time facing a helicopter. It actually wasn’t that bad. I felt like I was Angelina Jolie for a moment.
To her foes, she wasn’t an action star, but more like Jason, Freddy, or a Xenomorph. That didn’t bother Celty in the least, though. She happily pulled her Coiste Bodhar up into a wheelie.
The sight of a horse rearing back and whinnying at the moon spooked the drivers of nearby cars, who all found reasons to move away from her…but Celty failed to notice a shadow approaching the eerie Headless Rider.
“Yo, No-Head.”
The deep male voice rose above the growl of the bike engine and rattled around inside Celty’s helmet.
As her entire being turned to ice, she slowly focused in the direction of the voice.
There was the familiar man she always swore she never wanted to see again: the officer on the police motorcycle, Kinnosuke Kuzuhara.
“What was that, a two-hundred-foot wheelie? You realize you can’t give the old ‘my front tire slipped and came off the ground’ excuse for that, right? And that’s the least of your problems.”
…?!
The instant he stopped talking, fear exploded inside of Celty. Sensing the shift, her Coiste Bodhar leaped forward, picking up speed.
I’m s-s-s-s-s-s-sorry! I’m sorry! she chanted in her mind, terror rattling her being in a way that even the barrel of the submachine gun did not inspire—and kicking off a brand-new chase scene.
Only this time, she was the frightened girl on the run from the monster.
One week later, near Kawagoe Highway, top floor of luxury apartment building
“I was scared, so scared… I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Celty typed into her PDA as she slumped onto the shoulder of Shinra Kishitani, her roommate.
The Black Rider didn’t need to breathe physiologically, but she made motions like she was heaving against his shoulder and trembled incessantly.
“How? How is that biker cop able to evade all my shadows?! I stretched out just like I did with the helicopter, but the motorcycle just tilted sideways and passed between them. He even chased after me by riding on the midair shadows I sent from my hand!”
Celty raced all through Tokyo, then leaped into the river next to Ochanomizu Station and created a shadow tunnel through the water, like she did against the helicopter. That, at least, was enough to shake off the biker cop, but by the time she got home to Shinra, she collapsed into his arms.
As had become the routine after every Kuzuhara chase, Shinra rubbed Celty’s back before she could have a full-blown panic attack. He said, “It’s probably intuition and experience. Someone at his level who can keep calm can probably see all your shadows coming before it happens.”
“But being able to predict them doesn’t mean being able to ride on them! When he did that, I sent a tendril from another shadow to try to tangle up his tires, and he used his headlight to blind me and simply vanished the next moment!”
“So you can be blinded by brightness, even without eyes?”
“It’s not like squeezing your eyelids shut, but it’s still difficult to see when there’s a bright light shining on you… But enough about theory! What should I do, Shinra? Do you think if I attach a headlight and plate—which Shooter will hate—he’ll leave me alone from now on?”
She had to be delirious from fear still. Shinra watched her babble on nonsensically, blushed over how cute he found it, and told her, “Settle down, Celty. Either way, that won’t work once they decide to run your plate number or ask for your license. Anyway, hurry up and get yourself together. You’ve got a guest.”
“?”
A guest? For me?
Curiosity helped Celty regain some measure of rationality, and she saw a pair of women’s shoes in the entrance.
Then she glanced down the hallway and saw, bowing from the doorway, the figure of Anri Sonohara.
At that moment, Ikebukuro
In a completely normal office building, fairly removed from the center of Ikebukuro…
There were a variety of signs on the outside, from a private investigator to a dating website office to a hookup hotline to a marriage arrangement business to a loan shark office to a real estate agent—all manner of businesses, but as a matter of fact, the second floor up through the top were all interconnected companies.
Depending on the circumstances, the various offices would move from floor to floor, such that the building on the whole operated as one general conglomerate.
Up on the top floor, in an ordinary office, three people returned from their rounds and started packing up to go home.
“Dammit, you just had to rip out that traffic mirror. You’re lucky we were able to fix it—but what if some poor kid got into an accident because of that?”
“Sorry, I kinda lost it for a second…”
“Speaking of kids, that just floored me today. How does an elementary school kid rack up five hundred thousand yen of charges to a dating site?” wondered the dreadlocked Tom Tanaka.
The blond man next to him, Shizuo Heiwajima, merely grunted, “Yeah, I know.”
Standing behind them was a Russian woman, Vorona, who looked curious. “Negative. Payment was extracted smoothly from the parents. Lack of any physical trouble or combat.”
“No,” Tom said with a sigh. “I didn’t mean it like they literally knocked me to the floor, see…”
It seemed like the usual end-of-work routine of any other day, until a female desk employee on an internal line pressed the hold button and called out, “Mr. Heiwajima, you have a visitor. They’ve been sent to the reception room.”
“Oh? Uh…okay.” Surprised, he headed toward the reception area near the front of the office, wh
ich was separated by a standing screen.
“A visitor for Shizuo?” Tom wondered. “That’s rare.”
“Searching possibilities. Perhaps a complaint for the forklift destroyed three days ago.”
“Nah, the boss cleared that one up… Oh, maybe we didn’t really fix the traffic mirror after all?”
Tom and Vorona approached the screen, too curious to resist the topic, and peered into the reception area. They found Shizuo wearing a very unnatural smile—and a handsome young man with an utterly flat expression devoid of all emotion.
“Whoa, now there’s a face you don’t see every day. No wonder they let him pass right into the office,” murmured Tom.
“On the contrary, it is a face seen every day. On television and posters,” Vorona replied.
She had a point, in fact. The face was very familiar to anyone who watched a regular amount of TV.
“What’s up, Kasuka? Why are you here?”
“I said I’d wait until you finished with work… It’s not a problem, is it?”
“Oh, it’s totally fine. I was actually just leaving for the day. So what’s up?” asked Shizuo, more cheerful than usual now that he was talking to his younger brother, Kasuka Heiwajima.
Still emotionless, Kasuka looked back at the entrance of the office. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something… First, there’s someone I want to introduce you to. Should we go somewhere else, maybe?”
“Nah, here is fine. Are they waiting outside or something?”
“Yeah…there are reasons.”
Kasuka smoothly made his way to the entrance and opened the door into the hallway. Through it walked a hooded girl, who timidly set foot inside the office.
“Um, it’s…nice to meet you…,” she said, her voice faint as she bowed. She was a coworker of Kasuka—Yuuhei Hanejima—with rather mysterious eyes.
“…! Whoa, isn’t that Ruri Hijiribe?”
Durarara!!, Vol. 8 Page 3
