“You, you’re kidding me…”
Kisara, rearing away, was blocked by her desk from going farther. Hitsuma quickly acted to hold her before her legs gave out.
“I’m deeply sorry, Ms. Tendo. I told my men multiple times to take Satomi alive if they could, but apparently there were some crossed wires in our command chain.”
Kisara shook violently as she embraced Hitsuma.
“What am I gonna do…? I… What am I gonna do? Enju, Tina, Satomi… They’re all gone.”
There was something moving about the sight—such a firm, resolute woman, looking so pitifully small now. Hitsuma turned her head away from the desk, then lightly blew into her ear. It practically made her leap out of his arms.
“Now you’re all alone,” he sweetly whispered. “I want to be here. To help you forget about your loneliness… Will you marry me, Kisara?”
They both had their respective chins on each other’s shoulders so he couldn’t gauge her face, but through the shaking, he could feel one firm, palpable nod on his body.
Now this girl is mine.
Resisting the urge to shout out in joy, he turned his face downward.
Her hair was as jet-black as a raven, her skin almost a sickly white, her neck thin. Her collarbone was flushed with pink, no doubt from her emotional agitation. Her breasts, like fruit, pushed up by her black school uniform, were ripe and ready for the picking, practically dripping with sweetness radiating off her body. It was like a work of art.
Just as he was reaching toward one of them, hoping for perhaps a small taste, the cell phone in his breast pocket rang. He nodded at Kisara, almost groaning in frustration in the process, and answered it.
“This is Nest. Dark Stalker says he needs to talk to you about Rentaro Satomi. It’s urgent.”
It was now one o’clock in the morning.
Police officers swarmed to the riverside where Rentaro fell, Yuga Mitsugi among the crowd. He stared at the river with his hands in his pockets, motionless.
Is this it? he wondered to himself.
Rentaro Satomi… He considered the life of his adversary: the savior of Tokyo Area. Part of the civsec pair whose names were on the lips of people worldwide. The slayer of Kagetane Hiruko, Rank 134. Slayer of the Zodiac Scorpion. Slayer of Tina Sprout, Rank 98. Slayer of Aldebaran, the immortal Gastrea.
If this was any normal civsec, he would’ve been 100 percent dead in these circumstances. But was he?
A bespectacled young man sidled up to him.
“What is it?”
“Mr. Hitsuma,” he said as he stared at the black water, “can you get divers on the scene right away?”
Hitsuma eyed him doubtfully, wondering what inspired this.
“There’s no point doing that until sunrise.”
“It’ll give me some peace of mind, at least. It’ll be too late by then anyway.”
Hitsuma’s eyebrows arched downward. “You think Rentaro Satomi is alive? You said you defeated him.”
“I’m saying that we need to prepare for anything. Common sense doesn’t apply to him.”
“That’s high praise, coming from you.”
“You haven’t fought him, Mr. Hitsuma. You wouldn’t understand. My specs were defined so I’d be able to suppress Rentaro Satomi. When we did the calculations before the mission, there was supposed to be a 0.02 percent chance of Satomi even landing a blow on me. But even though I deflected it, Satomi landed the first strike. A kick. When we unleashed our eyes, he managed to graze me three times because I couldn’t calculate his moves fast enough. In the end, I was hit by a rain of shrapnel I had no chance of dodging. Satomi was starting to get accustomed to my moves.”
“……”
“Wouldn’t that make you sleep better, too, Mr. Hitsuma, if we found an arm or his head or something?”
“Look, are you threatening me?”
Yuga shrugged and raised his hands in surrender.
“No, no, no. I’m just making a suggestion. Just get those divers in here, all right? As long as we don’t find a body, I think it’ll be smarter for all of us if we treat him as alive.”
BLACK BULLET 5
CHAPTER 02
THE NEW WORLD CREATION PROJECT
1
He could hear droplets of water going plink-plink into a puddle at regular intervals. Some insects were faintly droning a fair distance away.
He could smell rusted metal. The air batting against his skin was humid, and he felt something hard and solid on his back and hips that made him wonder where they put him down.
How long had he been asleep? He needed to get up. He had important things to do. Something really important…
Trying to move his body, he realized that he almost couldn’t move his arms at all. Whenever he tried, all that resulted was some kind of jingling metal sound. His arms hurt.
Was he tied up somewhere?
—Where am I?
Finally, he came to the core question. His eyelids felt like they were made of iron, but he struggled through it, blinking several times until he could finally start to make out the environment around him.
The first thing he saw was a wall lined with light blue tiles. He was sitting on tile as well. He couldn’t move his hands. Something was hanging between his arms, keeping them aloft. He twitched his neck upward to look. Both of his wrists were cuffed, binding him to an orange, rusted metal pipe. It appeared Rentaro had been resting his back on the side of a bathtub.
Yes. That was the case: He was handcuffed to a pipe in a bathtub. It wasn’t a large bathroom, just big enough for the tub in question, and he couldn’t even stretch his legs all the way out. He guessed he was in someone’s private residence.
After a few more moments, he finally realized his predicament. He was being held. Beyond that, he knew nothing. Who was keeping him in here, and for what reason?
His mind was still hazy, but he felt he had a grip on at least two things. One, he was alive. Two, he probably wasn’t taken in by the police. If that were the case, he would’ve awoken on a hospital bed or something.
Looking down at his abdomen, he found several layers of bandages wrapped underneath his open shirt. It was basic, but he was receiving some treatment, at least.
The bathroom was dark and partitioned by a sliding door. It was bright on the other side of the opaque glass, but he could only discern faint outlines beyond it.
Forcing his body to shift position, he felt an intense pain shoot out from his side and course across his body.
“Is…anybody there…?” he called out haltingly. Then he repeated it a few times. At the third repetition, he heard heavy tramping as a shadowy figure came up to the glass and slid the door open.
“You’re awake?”
The first thing he noticed was her legs—too thin to be called supple. Looking up, he realized her thighs and arms looked just as thin, like easily snappable twigs. She had on short denim pants, a pink tank top, and an American Apparel jacket. Her cold eyes and bob-cut chestnut hair danced around in the air, a quiet anger burning behind her gaze. She was a girl as frigid as ice.
“Do you know who I am?”
Rentaro slowly nodded, trying to will his pounding head into kindling his memory for him.
I think her name was—
“Hotaru Kouro…right? Suibara’s Initiator.”
Hotaru slowly returned the nod.
“And do you know why I’m confining you in here?”
Rentaro took another look around the cramped bathroom.
“More or less.”
His memory served him up to the point when he was shot out of the air by a sniper and smashed into the river’s surface. Given that he wasn’t six feet under, he supposed that meant he was dragged out of the water at some point.
That, and he had an idea of what this girl who saved him wanted.
At that exact moment, the barrel of a gun darker than death dominated his sight. An automatic revolver, pointed right between his eyes.
&nbs
p; “Got anything you want to say?”
“You’re the girl who flipped that van over, aren’t you?”
“Mm-hmm,” the girl murmured without hesitation, staring icicles at him.
“Why did you do that?”
“To get revenge for Kihachi. Is there any other reason?”
“You look pretty calm, considering.”
“Do you have any idea how long you were out? Three days. Three days is long enough for anyone to calm down a little.”
“Why didn’t you kill me before now?”
“I wanted to see you confess your sins,” Hotaru replied, eyebrows wholly motionless as Rentaro glared up at her.
“I didn’t kill Suibara, man.”
“Don’t give me that shit.”
The words were quiet, but Hotaru’s irises were a blazing shade of red. The gun’s hammer was cocked, her hand virtually crushing the grip. Silent rage enveloped her tiny frame.
“Don’t you care about your life at all?”
“I mean it. Seriously, I didn’t kill him—”
Then he took a teeth-shattering blow to his lower jaw, and the next thing he knew, he was looking at the ceiling tile. It broke a molar or two—he was gritting his teeth at the time. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. It took some time for him to realize Hotaru landed a straight kick on him.
“Gnh… Ahghh!”
He fixed his gaze on Hotaru as he spat out the tooth fragments. A ribbon of saliva mixed with blood hung down from the side of his mouth before falling. Hotaru watched from above like an executioner.
“I don’t think I heard you.”
“I already told you, I didn’t—”
The next kick was to the wound on his side.
“Grhh…nnh!”
She kept her foot on the opening, making him experience enough pain to make his brain explode.
Hotaru refocused her gun’s aim on Rentaro’s head.
“All right—I’m not into tormenting people like this, so this is your last chance. If you admit to your crime and beg for mercy, I’ll turn you over to the police instead of killing you. But if you lie to me, the next time your head hits the floor, it’ll have a hole right in the middle of it. Think it over before you decide—do you need to live, or do you need to die?”
Rentaro, still staring at Hotaru, nodded silently.
“Okay. Here goes: Do you feel any guilt at all about killing Kihachi? He said you were one of his best friends, and you caught him in that dirty little trap and killed him. Are you even a little sorry for that? Answer me.”
What a witch hunt this was. All she wanted was for Rentaro to confess to it. She didn’t believe he was even a little bit innocent.
But, perhaps because of that, the girl’s words were completely unadorned. They came from the heart. If Rentaro screamed his innocence, she was absolutely going to pull the trigger.
The voice of logic in his mind shouted at him to admit to it for now. He could make up for it later. This girl’s just like the cops. Why would he ever hesitate to deceive her?
His conclusion made, he gave Hotaru a defiant, resolute look. “Please believe me,” he said, elucidating every syllable. “I didn’t do it. Really.”
The gunshot blared across the bathroom. Rentaro’s body spasmed. With a tink, the empty cartridge bounced off the tile a few times before the silence returned.
White smoke wafted out from the gun barrel.
Gingerly turning his head to the side, Rentaro found a bullet lodged in the bathtub, millimeters from his nose.
Hotaru turned away from him as she took out a cell phone and dialed a number.
“Oh, hello,” she said after a moment, “is this the police?” She turned back to Rentaro for just a moment before continuing. “I came across the wanted fugitive Rentaro Satomi, so I placed him under citizen’s arrest… Right. No, this isn’t a prank. It’s true.”
After relaying her name and address, Hotaru ended the call and looked back at Rentaro. “They thought I was kidding,” she stated, “but they’re still coming. They said I wasn’t far from the nearest station, so it won’t even be five minutes.”
Hotaru leaned in, putting her eye level on the same height as her quarry.
“I’ll listen to what you have to say. But only until the police arrive. Once they do, that’s it. You’re going with them.”
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
“Because you’re not worth it anymore. Have fun getting strung up by the court.”
“Whoa, what did the police tell you?”
“They said you lured Kihachi over to you and killed him for money.”
Rentaro attempted a scornful laugh, but gurgled out a cough instead. He gazed at Hotaru as he spat out a mixture of phlegm and blood.
“The story they told me was, Suibara was blackmailing me for money and I killed him to shut him up.”
“…That’s a lie. There’s no way Kihachi would do that.”
“Of course not. He didn’t do that at all, and I didn’t blackmail him, either. So there, you see? Right from the start, our stories are contradicting each other. I think we’ve got enemies in the police, too. Don’t you think there’s something weird about all this? Nothing striking you as odd?”
“…You got four minutes.”
“There’s something I do need to apologize to you about. It’s that I couldn’t keep Suibara safe. He was a nervous wreck by the time he came to my office. I was fully willing to listen to his story so we could share the burden, but he was too freaked out to tell me. And I didn’t pursue it. I misjudged the situation, and for that, I am truly sorry.”
Hotaru kept her eyes away from him, twisting her eyebrows low as she anguished for her Promoter.
“Stop it.”
“Look, in a court of law, you’re supposed to listen to both sides of the story and then the jury or a judge or whatever makes the decision, right? You’ve already heard the police’s side. Now I want you to hear mine, but I can’t wrap that up in the course of five minutes. I want you to give me a chance.”
“A chance?”
Hotaru found herself leaning forward.
“There’s a group out there that framed me,” Rentaro continued, choosing his words carefully. “Not only did they pin the murder on me; they targeted everybody in the Tendo Civil Security Agency. I’m not some kind of innocent bystander here. I want to catch the guys that framed me. Can you help me with that?”
“You’re just gonna run away.”
“If that’s what you think, then go right ahead and hand me over. But, if you think even a little bit that I’m worth listening to, I want you to wait on that. I know you want to learn the truth about all this, if you can. I took a case from Suibara. He was keeping some kind of secret, and he said he wanted to go through me so he could reveal it to the Seitenshi. A day later, somebody killed him. There’s got to be something going on behind the scenes.”
“…Two minutes.”
“If it turns out there’s not anyone behind the scenes, you can go ahead and kill me then. Burn me at the stake, draw and quarter me, put my head on a pike; anything.”
“Are you…serious?”
Rentaro returned Hotaru’s stare and gave her a powerful nod.
“Suibara trusted in me. Now it’s your turn. Please.”
The two of them looked into each other’s eyes for several moments. Rentaro held his breath in silence. A drop of water from the tap fell with a splip onto the tile floor by his feet.
Just as Hotaru was about to say something, someone began repeatedly pressing the doorbell. It was the police.
Rentaro closed his eyes and tried to keep his body from shaking. Time’s up, huh?
Hotaru, all emotion quelled from her eyes, stood up and walked out of the bathroom. She didn’t close the glass door behind her, forcing Rentaro to watch the entire proceedings. The layout of this place meant that the main bathroom and the front door were extremely close to each other, so it took only a few seconds for Hotaru to
undo the door chain and greet the person outside. He could see Hotaru, but not the policeman she was talking to.
“Are you the girl who called?”
A chill crossed Rentaro’s spine.
“Yeah.”
“All right,” said the clearly doubtful voice of another officer. There must’ve been two of them. “Um, so…let’s cut to the chase. Did you really capture Rentaro Satomi?”
Rentaro jammed his eyes shut, already imagining the next sentence. Oh, do come in. Want some tea? I have him in cuffs in the bathroom.
“I’m sorry, that…that was a prank call. I didn’t think the police would actually show up or anything!”
Watching Hotaru bow down deeply in a laudable act of apology, Rentaro had to stop himself from audibly saying Wha?
“Yeah, I figured,” said an officer, not sounding particularly angry about it. “The news said there’s a good chance he’s dead anyway. But you know it’s against the law to waste the police’s time like this, all right, kid?”
Hotaru continued to apologize. The policemen continued to give her a mild scolding. They exchanged a few more words. And then they left.
Her sorrowful expression immediately drawing itself back, Hotaru went expressionless once more as she briskly walked to the bathroom. Falling to one knee, she took a key out of her pocket, inserted it into the keyhole in Rentaro’s cuffs, and turned it.
“Why…?” Rentaro whispered, deeply moved as he heard metal rattling.
“You’re not the guy, are you?” Hotaru replied, refusing to return his gaze.
Of course he wasn’t. But how many times had he screamed that before? How many times had she ignored him? Hot tears began to well in his eyes. He wiped them away with the pit of an arm.
Soon, there was another clink, and the handcuffs fell to the floor. Rentaro tried to stand up as he checked his wrists. His knees refused to cooperate. He decided not to risk it, instead borrowing a shoulder from the suddenly cooperative Hotaru.
The moment he stepped out of the bathroom, the droning of the insects outside went up an octave in his ear. He was greeted with a tiny, cramped, and disorganized studio apartment. He didn’t realize it in the bathroom, but apparently it was the middle of the afternoon outside, the contrast between his poorly lit bathroom cell and the great outdoors reminding him more than a little of his own place.
Rentaro Satomi, Fugitive Page 14
