“…Yo. Is that you, Yatabe?”
“?! Shogun?!” exclaimed the man named Yatabe with a voice full of surprise and delight.
“None of that shogun stuff,” Masaomi said, annoyed. “Listen…I’m here in Ikebukuro now. Think you can meet up for a bit? With all the other guys, if possible…”
“The other guys? Meaning the OG Yellow Scarves?”
“Yeah. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of stuff to get off your chests… I want to talk to you guys about something, and I’m willing to suffer a beating if that’s what it takes. Or maybe I should be honest and say that I want to use you.”
“C’mon, don’t be a stranger. We’re used to our shogun following his whims! Plus, we know the story! I heard that you whooped Horada’s ass before he finally got arrested!”
Masaomi couldn’t prevent the smile from spreading across his face, talking to his old friend like this. Half a year ago, he was certain that he’d never team up with this color gang again.
This was a guy he’d actively avoided talking to, and yet he felt more natural talking to him now than he ever did before.
Hey, Mikado.
If you’ve fallen down into this side…then I’ll make sure to pull you back up.
Until just minutes ago, he’d been prepared to punch him, if that was what it took. But after seeing Mikado in person, Masaomi realized just how naive he’d been.
Mikado wasn’t ordering the Dollars around like it was some meaningless video game, and he wasn’t being manipulated by his junior from school, Aoba. He was in too deep for a good pop to the cheek to wake him up.
Masaomi had been trying to save someone who didn’t ask for help. Even he could tell that he was just as guilty as Mikado for trying to foist off his own obsessive good deeds on someone who didn’t need them.
But even with that in mind, Masaomi did not reverse his intentions.
That’s right, I’m gonna save you all on my own. No matter how much you cry about it.
You’ve known for years just how selfish I am, haven’t you?
Masaomi and Mikado, Anri and Masaomi. Though they shared brief reunions, there was no sign that the three would come together soon. The hopes and fears of each created a rift among all of them.
And with that little budding root of discord sprouting in Ikebukuro, the boys and girls had yet to find their place.
Epilogue & Next Prologue: Heads = Tails = Edge; Izaya’s Return @ Möbiusloop
Chat room
Kid: I was having a secret chat with Saika.
Kid: Doesn’t seem like anyone else is showing up, so I’ll leave now.
Kid has left the chat.
Awakusu-kai Head Office, Tokyo
“Are you all right, Akabayashi?” Shiki asked.
“Yes, yes, I’m just finishing up…now,” he replied, shutting his phone.
“Making some kind of deal?”
“You could say that. So what is it that you wanted, Mr. Shiki?” he asked breezily, addressing his fellow Awakusu-kai lieutenant.
Akabayashi rapped on the floor of the meeting room with his cane as he sat in his chair, a characteristically lazy leer on his face. On the other hand, Shiki was wearing his characteristic glare as he stood.
“Did you learn anything about the Dollars?”
“As much as anyone else might.”
Just a few days ago, the topic of the Dollars had arisen in an officers’ meeting.
The gang took form over the Internet, they said, but there were times that other groups copying their methods took to selling drugs and making a mess of the Awakusu-kai turf—thus raising the suspicion that the Dollars themselves might be the foundation with these others as offshoots.
“Do you mind if I handle this matter of the Dollars, then?” Akabayashi had offered, thereby assuming control of the situation.
“Have they taken any noteworthy, concrete actions?” Shiki asked.
“It seems to be a bit of a purge, actually,” Akabayashi explained. “From what the kids in Jan-Jaka-Jan were able to tell me, some folks within the group who were engaged in muggings and phone scams are getting driven out of the Dollars. The big story right now seems to concern a stalker of Ruri Hijiribe, though.”
“Ah yes…Kazamoto was furious about that. Something about his own subordinate being front and center in the rumors, treated like a stalker with his pictures floating around…”
“As a matter of fact, I saw that picture myself in a chat room unrelated to the Dollars. Had a good laugh.”
“It’s not funny.” Shiki snorted, exhaling cigarette smoke.
Akabayashi shrugged. “Oops, you’re right. Very sorry… At any rate, I don’t think we need to worry about the Dollars for now,” he claimed, but then he added, “Let’s just hope they don’t take their purge overboard and turn into some kinda hard-line cult.”
“I don’t care what they turn into,” Shiki snapped. “But if there’s a problem…I expect you to solve it, Akabayashi.”
“Shouldn’t you be the one on the lookout, Mr. Shiki?”
“?” Shiki narrowed his eyes.
“That info broker kid is under your jurisdiction, isn’t he?”
“…”
Shiki did not comment.
Several hours earlier, a liaison from Jan-Jaka-Jan, rubbing a wristband fashioned like a snake, delivered a personal report to Akabayashi.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on Mikado Ryuugamine, and it sure seems like he’s taking the lead in purging the ranks. I’m also concerned that he’s carrying it out with what looks like the old Blue Squares.”
Akabayashi got information on the Dollars’ leader by having one of his men in prison threaten it out of a man named Horada. After hearing that the boss was only a teenager in school, he assumed it really was just an Internet club, but learning that the guy was teaming up with the former Blue Squares to hunt down members of his own gang made Akabayashi curious.
“Also, while I don’t think it’s directly related…we spotted some Dragon Zombie guys for the first time in a while when we were staking out the Dollars’ boss. They could have been observing the Dollars, too. Plus—although I’m not sure this means anything—someone saw Izaya in Ikebukuro the other day. He’s been up to some fishy stuff. People have talked about him being Dollars for ages, so I wondered if he had something to do with this.”
So the Dollars themselves seemed all right for now—it was the periphery that was looking suspicious. Out of a sense of caution, Akabayashi decided to treat both Mikado Ryuugamine and the Dollars as a whole with careful scrutiny.
Then he got another report, one that was the most concerning of all, though it had nothing to do with business.
“I’m pretty sure that girl with the glasses that you helped out years ago was there, too… It seems like she’s…if not lovers with Ryuugamine, at least pretty close. We’ve spotted her leaving school with him, in fact.”
Anri Sonohara was the daughter of his first love, and Akabayashi cared for her like
a much younger sister.
The fact that she had a relationship with the leader of the Dollars was troubling, though not directly related to his job. If Akabayashi weren’t the type of person he was, he might be worried sick about it.
“…Seems like things are getting fishy enough in public, too,” he muttered mostly to himself, but Shiki noticed.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, just a personal matter. Anyway, are things all clear with the info dealer? He was out of commission for a while, and I hear he’s come back out of nowhere.”
“Yes… As I’m sure you know, I do have him…chained, in a way. Aozaki was not happy about it, though,” Shiki said, his eyes sharp as spears.
Akabayashi chuckled, his own eyes hidden behind tinted sunglasses. “Of course he was against it. He’s consistently said that we shouldn’t let that ‘chain’ go free.”
“I was against offing the guy, of course…but I was against letting him loose, too.”
Nebula Medical Research Facility, Nerima Ward
Shinra Kishitani came to on a bed in a research lab where his father, Shingen, and stepmother, Emilia, worked. It was twelve hours after he’d been brought in, and he had been in critical condition at several points.
His initial state of consciousness was heavily dazed, his wits so faint that no one else realized he was awake at first.
What is this?
Despite his steadily clearing mind, he couldn’t move a finger. The only physical sensation he felt was a blanket on top of him. As wakefulness steadily arrived, he recalled the reason he couldn’t move.
Oh, right. That weirdo got me. No wonder, after I got the crap kicked out of me like that.
Hmm? What? Is there something soft resting on my stomach? Heavy, soft…double mounded…
C-could this be…Celty?!
Then his mind snapped to absolute attention, and he forced his eyes to open.
Pain beat in his entire body to the rhythm of his pulse, but he ignored that to look down toward his navel—where he saw a pure-white gas mask.
“I should have known! This is what I get for getting my hopes up!” he bellowed, the air ripping from his lungs.
The exertion rattled his airway, his chest began to hurt, and he started coughing. The racking of his body caused the gas mask to wriggle a bit.
Huh? The location of the mask seems weird… Is that not Dad after all?
His vision was clearing to the point that he could see that it was not his father wearing the mask—but his father’s second wife, Emilia Kishitani.
The mask had slid off her face and happened to be pointing at Shinra, while Emilia slept soundly atop his chest. She must have dozed off while watching over him and used his torso as a pillow.
Oh, it’s just Emilia. You know, the breasts did seem a bit too ample to be Celty’s. On the other hand…my ribs are broken…and this is kind of heavy…
A normal man might be aroused by the close contact with Emilia’s bountiful bosom, but given that she was his stepmother and not Celty, Shinra was merely disappointed. He didn’t even blush.
Instead, he began to nudge her body, hoping to slip her off him.
“Mother, wake up please! Where is Celty?”
“Hee-hee-hee… Shingen, I won with your mah-jongg discard. It is a royal straight flush. Now I am requesting that you remove clothing.”
“Is she…sleep-talking?! Ah! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow…”
His painkillers had worn off. Bones and muscles all over his body were screaming for help.
Just when he had largely given up on waking Emilia, the door flung open, and Celty charged into the room.
“Aaaah! Celty?! It’s not what you think! I woke up, and Emilia was already sleeping here…”
If it were a rom-com manga, Celty would have flown into a jealous rage and stabbed him. And in fact, Shinra was putting up a desperate defense in that fashion, convinced that she would stab him anyway.
Instead, Celty rushed up and reached over Emilia to fling her arms around his neck.
“Mgwuh?!”
His body screeched in protest at the awkward angle of pressure, but he merely smiled and blushed, his weakened blood pressure suddenly rising.
“I heard your voice coming from in here… I’m glad… I’m so glad!” she typed into her PDA and rubbed his cheek. She was too busy genuinely celebrating Shinra’s recovery to care about Emilia.
“I was so, so worried! Oh, if you had died, I…I might have taken your head back home with me instead of mine…”
“…I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be serious or a joke, Celty. You’re scaring me,” Shinra snarked, but in truth, he was jubilant. He lifted his arms to hug her close, ignoring the protests of his muscles—and paid the price of five extra days in the hospital for that.
Once they had fully celebrated their respective good health, Shinra brought up a question that had been weighing on his mind.
“So whatever happened with that stalker scare?”
“…I’m not sure, but I heard that one person turned himself in, Shizuo beat several more to a pulp before they were arrested, and then they ratted out more and more of their group.”
There were a number of startling facts about the case, including the revelation of multiple stalkers—but most concerning to Celty was that Adabashi, the ringleader, had not been found yet.
“It seems like he was the one who did this to you,” she typed briefly, but Shinra had the ability to sense her subtle emotional cues.
“Celty,” he said softly.
“What?”
“Don’t ever become a murderer over something trivial.”
You very nearly could have died! That is not trivial! she wanted to protest, but she took Shinra’s request as it was intended.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to search him out and find him, but I won’t kill him.”
She got to her feet and, with some small measure of guilt, typed, “I just…can’t promise he’ll be unharmed by the time I hand him over to the police.”
It should have been a frivolous incident.
But the events exposed an unexpected weakness within Celty’s heart.
Celty almost never got truly rattled by anything, even when shot with an anti-matériel rifle or attacked by countless cursed blades—and chased by motorcycle cops? Well, that last one was a different story.
But when she learned that Shinra had been attacked, the news rocked her harder than anyone else could imagine. In fact, from the moment that Shinra had been brought here until he had woken up, Celty had been so distraught that she had barely been able to even produce her shadow scythe.
“Your love for Shinra might, in fact, be slightly different from the love that human beings normally feel for one another,” Shingen had told her. “In a sense, it might be even purer than human love.” Once he had learned that Shinra was all right, he left the lab.
Along with this sudden revelation of weakness, Celty detected another change in her heart.
It’s the first time…I’ve ever wanted…to actually murder a human being. But the part that I truly cannot forgive is my own weakness.
The regret, guilt, and frustration that she hadn’t been able to protect Shinra acted like a stake in her heart, pinning her negative emotions down. The stake was still there when she left Nebula Medical Research Facility.
I reassured Shinra…but if I come face-to-face with that Adabashi character…will I really be able to cling to my sense of reason? What if I can’t bring myself to stop the blade in time and sever his body in half? This is bad. I’m losing confidence in myself…
Doubt and worry plagued her mind as she raced through the night.
She did not realize that for the past several days, someone had been observing her riding around on her motorcycle.
Backseat, luxury vehicle, Ikebukuro
“What do you think, Mr. Yagiri?” asked a good-natured man entering his silver years, a spry smile on his lips.
Sitting
next to him in the back of the fine car was Seitarou Yagiri. “I see. It’s better than I imagined. From what they show on TV, I had just taken it for some wrathful monster that acted on impulse alone…”
“Personally, I would have preferred Ruri Hijiribe, but the stalkers were quite a disappointment, and I’m not sure what to do now,” the other man said, making a show of sadness, though the true depth of it was hard to ascertain.
Seitarou considered the Celty who passed the car window outside a moment ago and the Celty he’d just watched in the footage on the in-car monitor, and he exhaled a long breath.
“I’ll admit I was expecting to get a glimpse of Ruri Hijiribe’s extraordinary nature…but I have to say that the state of that Headless Rider has piqued my curiosity more than I figured it would.”
“Is that so?”
“I am filled with desire.”
“First you possessed her head, and now you want her body? Only a fairy can get away with such adulterous bewitching.” Yodogiri smirked.
“All of them,” Seitarou muttered.
“Pardon?”
“The body of the dullahan that fell into the trap of your latest promotion and the girl possessed by the cursed blade. And Ruri Hijiribe. And beyond that, the dullahan’s head that my niece made off with… I want them all. That is what I am saying to you.”
Seitarou cracked his neck and looked at the footage of Celty’s body on the monitor, his eyes gleaming like a boy pulling the wings off a dragonfly. “It seems that the body has given up on finding the head…but now I feel like experimenting with sticking them back together again. With them both fully under my command, of course.”
“…So you’re not just after an affair—you want an entire harem.” Yodogiri chuckled.
Seitarou snorted and snapped, “Enough crude jokes. Just tell me if you can assist me or not.”
“I can make the effort. If the dullahan and the blade wielder learn that I was orchestrating the stalking incident, I’m certain they will come looking for me.”
Durarara!!, Vol. 8 Page 17
