Boogiepop At Dawn

by Kadono. Kouhei

  “Sure I do. He's nice. More relaxed than you.”

  “Yes...I should ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Seiichi said, resolving to ask his wife not to take Nagi in. At this stage, making any major changes would just arouse suspicions. He had to wait for it as if he knew nothing.

  That would keep Nagi safe. He was a famous writer, and his death would create a stir. They would make it look natural. Which meant they would not kill Nagi with him.

  This was the best way he could see to protect her.

  ***

  One sunny day, in the early afternoon.

  A girl was walking alone through the park. She did not have any particular destination in mind. She was just wandering.

  She had a pretty face, but she liked being alone, and did not feel lonely walking around without any friends to walk with her.

  She hummed quietly, enjoying the quiet beauty of the trees.

  Ahead of her she saw a bench.

  “......”

  Her expression clouded slightly.

  There was a man on the bench. He looked completely exhausted, and was staring blankly up at the sky.

  She went slowly up to him and stared into his face.

  He looked back at her.

  They stared at each other for a while.

  At last he smiled faintly, and the girl said,

  “Oji-san.”

  “What?”

  “You're going to die soon.”

  “I know.”

  “You know...and you don't mind?”

  “There are some things that knowing about can't prevent.”

  “You're not even going to try?”

  “I ended up like this because I did do something.”

  “Hmm...”

  It was a strange conversation, but it made sense to both of them.

  The girl looked up at the sky, where the man had been looking.

  “What were you looking at?” she asked.

  “The birds,” he said.

  “I was thinking about the birds.”

  “What about them?” the girl asked, crooking her head.

  The man raised his eyebrows, and answered with a question.

  “Do you know why birds can fly?”

  “Because they have wings?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Because there are very few creatures that can fly. Insects and bats are about the only other living things in the air. That's why.”

  “Airplanes?” she asked.

  The man smiled.

  “Those are not alive.”

  “So why do only birds fly?”

  “If there is nothing else there, they can live without fighting. The sky is the birds' domain, and nothing else gets in their way. The birds have survived like that for a very long time.”

  “For how long?”

  “You know about dinosaurs?” the man asked, suddenly.

  “What about them?”

  “Those are the birds' ancestors. At least, that's one theory. Do you know about the archaeopteryx? People believe that birds descended from it, but some people think it was actually the reverse, and the archaeopteryx is what happened when birds were evolving into dinosaurs. Which means the birds have been around since before the dinosaurs.”

  It had turned into a lecture. But the girl was keeping up.

  “Hmm...but the dinosaurs died out.”

  “There are a lot of other things on the ground. They were unable to survive down there.”

  “Not because of a meteor?” the girl asked.

  The man laughed.

  “That's just a fairy tale. Even if one did fall, if it was big enough to wipe out the dinosaurs it would have killed everything else too. The dinosaurs just proved unable to compete with the other creatures. There's no other reason for it,” he explained patiently.

  “The ones that could fly lived longer, which is very significant.”

  “But sometimes birds fall out of the sky.”

  “And sometimes it snows in April. In other words, danger and the unexpected exist for all living things equally. The question is how you survive despite them.”

  A dramatic way of putting things, but his tone was placid. He spoke with no trace of pretension.

  “Humans too?”

  “Humans, and things beyond humans,” the man said, stressing the last bit.

  “There are things that are mostly human, but a little bit different from the humans that came before them, and they are engaged in the same struggle.”

  “Struggle...?”

  “Everyone copes with the struggle in a different way. Some run away, some hide...and these are both ways of fighting. No better or worse than any other. They are all trying out different possibilities.”

  “…………”

  The girl was silent for a moment. Then she asked,

  “Who are you?”

  An ontological, fundamental question, but the man's answer was very simple,

  “A humble writer.”

  “A writer? So you're important?” the girl asked.

  The man laughed.

  “I'm very important indeed. I may not look it, but I'm an enemy of society, public enemy number one.”

  He seemed to be joking, but his tone was serious.

  “Enemy?”

  “People who are too new for the world, and have no choice but to be its enemy, all seem to be very impressed by my books. I might as well be leading them personally,” the man said, quietly, but there was certainly a note of pride in his voice.

  “...so you're tempting them?”

  “Maybe. But I don't really believe that much in words. If my words have given someone encouragement, then they already had the strength to follow through within them. All I've done is give them a little push, tell them they can go ahead and use that strength -- that's the most that words can do. I can neither order them to take the first step nor prevent them from taking it. The words I write are nothing more than weapons -- tools. How they use those weapons is up to them.”

  “............” The girl thought about this for a while. Then she said,

  “But you're going to die.”

  “Apparently.”

  “So it won't work out. It'll end unfinished,” she said, apathetically.

  The man did not seem to care much either. 'Nothing in this world ever works out perfectly. Everyone lives their lives making irreversible mistakes, large or small.”

  “Even when they know they'll fail?”

  “Who decides what failure is?”

  “But...if you die, you don't know what happens next.”

  “The will remains. Even if it doesn't look like anything but evil, if you try to do something, and seriously work to make it happen, then that will leave its mark on other people. Those people might not get there either. But what they do will be passed on to other people. And who knows? One of those people might finally reach the heart of the world...”

  The man's voice faded out.

  He looked up at the sky again.

  “What's your name?” he asked.

  “Minahoshi Suiko,” the girl said.

  “You can see people's death?”

  “...yes,” she said. She had never told anyone this before.

  “Do you think that strange ability is a curse?”

  “...I don't know,” the girl said, with no emotion. She didn't seem to know if it was a curse or a boon.

  “Nobody ever does. And nobody can ever decide if that is a failure,” the man said, staring up at the sky, not looking at her.

  “Whatever you choose to do with it, even if it ends before you finish, someone else after you might be more successful.”

  “Who?”

  “It might be your enemy. It might just be a random passerby. It might even be someone who has no connection to you at all. I don't know. I have no way of telling. Nobody does.”

  The girl looked up at the sky herself. They stared upwards in silence. />
  At last the girl asked,

  “And you?”

  “Mm...?”

  “Will there be someone after you? Do you believe someone will continue what you're doing?” she asked.

  “. . .not sure,” the man said, smiling ruefully.

  “Truth is, I always wanted people to read my novels.”

  ***

  If you had looked down on that park from above, like a bird, you would have seen the man stand up, and the girl walk away again.

  And thus public enemy number one met the person who'd become the enemy of the world eight years later, and parted, neither one of them knowing what the other had done or would do. The chance encounter, like all of reality, faded away to nothing.

  VS Imaginator Part III -

  “Public Enemy No. l” closed.

  Chapter 6

  The Bug

  1

  “There’s a bug inside you.”

  “Growing in you, eating everything you’ve forced yourself to forget, everything you don't want to think about.”

  “Your bug will decide your fate one day.”

  “And...chances are, you will die because of it.”

  “…………”

  For some reason, those words came floating back into his mind.

  Mo Murder had killed the boy who spoke those words several years before. The boy had a unique ability to awaken hidden talent in other people. He had been declared dangerous, an enemy of modern society. The boy said those words to him as he lay dying.

  “What did you say?” the girl sitting across from him asked, frowning. She appeared to be about eighteen. She was probably not really a girl, but she looked like one.

  “No.. .nothing,” he said, shaking his head. He was wearing an ordinary suit and silver-rimmed spectacles. To anyone around him, he must have looked like an ordinary salaryman.

  They were sitting in a booth in a donut shop, surrounded by high school girls and child-toting parents on their way home from shopping.

  There were photographs spread out on the table between them. Well, technically they weren't photographs, but copies -- printouts.

  All of them featured strange images. They were of human figures lying on their side, limbs flung out like they were dancing, their mouths open wider than their heads. Looking at them led him to make the macabre discovery that human skin could stretch farther than he had previously imagined. He'd seen similar imagery in The Mask, but this was no movie -- these were pictures of real people.

  They were corpses. On each one, the skull had been pried apart and the contents of the victim's head removed.

  “...gross,” Mo Murder said.

  The girl laughed.

  “You're one to speak, assassin.” He detected a hint of malice, or at least aggression, in her voice.

  “…………”

  Mo Murder ignored it, looking the pictures over again. He had killed enough people that he probably didn't have the right to judge the violent acts of another. Even so, this particular method of killing felt wrong to him. The wrongness seeped into the depths of his heart...

  Is that why I'm thinking about what that boy said...?

  The more he tried to avoid thinking about it, the more prominent the feeling would become, until it finally killed him...a chilling prophecy. He’d put it out of his mind until now.

  “So? Any ideas? Why would someone kill like that? You're a killer too, you must know something,” the girl said, trying to wind him up.

  “No,” Mo Murder said, honestly.

  “What a shame. Well, this is your new job. Figure out why they're killing like this, and kill the murderer if you must. You're quite familiar with ending others' lives, so this should be easy for you,” the girl snapped. She clearly didn't want to be anywhere near him.

  It was starting to bother him.

  “Pigeon, was it? You seem a little...emotional,” he pointed out.

  She scowled furiously back at him.

  “A killing machine has no right to criticize,” she said, as though she was looking at a mortal enemy.

  “I understand that you do not care for assassinations, but your duties include providing backup for that kind of activity,” Mo Murder said calmly.

  Despite the nature of their conversation, all around them they could hear high school girls laughing and chatting. Nobody paid them any attention, so their discussion went unnoticed.

  “…………”

  Pigeon glared at Mo Murder, and he met her gaze with silence.

  At last she looked away.

  “...let's talk about work.”

  “Very well.”

  This series of gruesome murders had been all over the news lately. The victims were all females in their late teens, and the method of murder -- prying the skull open while the victim was still alive, and removing the contents -- was so bizarre that the Towa Organization had suspected there was a reason for it beyond the current capacity of mankind to understand. Thus they had ordered an investigation. Since it related to murder, they had assigned the mission to an expert on the subject -- Mo Murder.

  Pigeon was a messenger, carrying orders to the agents scattered around the area. She had brought his orders along with all the information the Organization had gathered so far.

  “I think I understand what I'm supposed to do. I'll start work at once,” Mo Murder said, closing the file, and handing it back to her. He had memorized the contents.

  She took it glumly. It would soon be destroyed.

  “Where will you start?” she asked, not looking at him.

  “I thought I'd begin by looking at the crime scenes. I want to figure out how they died. I want to figure out what the killer was after.”

  “The police did that ages ago. You won't find anything.”

  “There might be something that links them together, something the police overlooked. I think this killer is clearly acting with a goal in mind.”

  “...you sound pretty sure about that. So you'll check out the scenes, then?”

  “Exactly.”

  Mo Murder stood up, and headed out of the shop.

  “Hmph...” Pigeon watched him leave through her lashes. There was a hidden, almost snake-like darkness in her eyes.

  ***

  Mo Murder's human name was Sasaki Masanori. Officially he worked in the sales department of a major food manufacturer. If anyone were to call his company (not that anyone ever would) they would reply that

  “Sasaki is out at the moment.” He'd never even been to the place. It was unlikely he ever would.

  As a synthetic human, he had the ability to release micro oscillating waves from the palms of his hands. He could use the talent to agitate a human's organs into pulp, or make a knife vibrate like a chainsaw. The only thing he couldn't cut through was armor specially designed to resist his attack. Such armor had once defeated his ability.

  Even without the use of his power, he had managed to kill his target -- a traitor to the organization named Scarecrow. Mo Murder's true ability was not his weapon, but his finely honed killer instinct.

  “…………”

  Mo Murder was investigating one of the murder scenes.

  It was an ordinary park in a residential area with one slide, four swings, a sandbox, and a seesaw. Over to the side, against the hedge, was a small bench that could maybe seat four.

  The first victim had been found dissected on that bench in the evening, after schools had released their students.

  “…………”

  Mo Murder sat down on the solitary bench. For a short period of time, the place had been crawling with reporters and rubberneckers, but that murder had occurred a month ago. Today, he was alone. The police investigation had long since wrapped up here.

  Mo Murder looked around. There was nothing particularly attention-worthy about the site. There were no nearby tall buildings -- just a bunch of similarly-sized houses. There was no apartment building where someone might conceivably have been watching through binoculars.<
br />
  The park was on a little hill just high enough that the scene of the crime was not visible from the road. However, there wasn't a fence around it, so anyone cutting through the park would have seen something. If the victim had screamed, it would have drawn attention.

  Which meant...the murder happened so fast she never had time to scream. But...

  The murder seemed to be too impulsive for such techniques or power.

  Considering the state of the body, this should have been more calculated, deliberate...but it seemed like she had been attacked without hesitation.

  It was just a coincidence that no one saw them,.. I'm sure of that. But then, that would mean this was more like...

  “A carnivorous animal out hunting?” someone said.

  He looked up in surprise, and saw a girl standing there.

  When he saw her face, Mo Murder gaped. It was Kirima Nagi -- the daughter of one of the men he’d killed.

  “Y-you're…”

  “Why are you investigating this?” she asked, ignoring his evident shock.

  “I-investigating? No, you must be mistaken. I'm not...”

  “That's a lie,” Nagi said, firmly.

  She was wearing a jumpsuit made of synthetic leather, and he could not tell how old she was. Though he knew she should only be about fourteen, she looked like she was at least eighteen, and a rather grown-up eighteen at that.

  “Snooping carefully around the scene of a crime, sitting down on the bench and looking to see if there are any tall buildings around, and then muttering to yourself as you try to imagine the killer's state of mind...if you aren't investigating, just what the hell are you doing? Hmm?”

  He noticed belatedly that she was using very masculine speech patterns.

  At the same time, he realized she had sensibilities rather like his own. She was just as perceptive as he was. The only difference between them was that he would not have spoken to someone else. Assassins never did. The only people who did that were

  “warriors” -- people who needed to size up their enemies.

  “...what does my investigating have to do with you?” he said. He already knew the answer.