“!!!”
“I’m assuming that even you have a wife, or a daughter, or a mother, so for their sakes, I’m not gonna kill you right here and now. But what kind of man attacks a woman at all? Am I right?”
“! !!”
The shoplifter twitched in agony on the ground, all the air expelled from his lungs.
All the helpless onlookers crowding around the scene felt time stop around them, but the young man merely returned to his gentle smile and remarked, “Don’t worry. Everything’s all right. I’ve taken the liberty of enacting your revenge for you.”
“…”
The woman was still stunned into silence. He continued casually, “Vengeance doesn’t suit a beautiful lady like you. For real. Er, seriously. Just let me handle all the dirty work—”
He was interrupted by a different woman’s voice.
“Rocchi.”
“Oh? What is it, Non?”
He spun around to see the shortest of the group of girls that he came with. The girl named Non tugged on Rocchi’s sleeve and said frankly, “Kiyo says we ought to take off now because that was excessive self-defense.”
“Oh. Really?”
He turned back to the unconscious shoplifter twitching on the ground, then glanced at the store employee.
She was blinking in silence, but there was less gratitude in her gaze than sheer terror.
“…Uh-oh, Non. I seem to have frightened her.”
“I told you, we gotta run. Look, the police are coming.”
“Ooh, you’re right.”
Across the massive intersection in the direction of the station, police uniforms could be spotted among the crowd waiting for the light to change.
“Well, pretty lady, I’ve got to get going. You don’t want to develop a limp, so go to a doctor to get your leg checked…”
“Come on, Rocchi! Hurry up!”
“H-hey, wait… Non! When did you get to be such a selfish…? Fine, fine! I’m coming, I’m coming! Oh, and miss! If that guy wakes up, tell him something for me! I can usually be found riding highways all over Saitama, so if he’s got a problem, he can find me there… Owww! I’m coming! Just stop pulling on my ear, Non! Nonnn!”
The young man was dragged back to the group of girls, who took off running with him in tow.
Some of the crowd left behind after the scene had tried to snap pictures with their phones, but the young man was hidden among the group in no time, so the only photo evidence they could collect was of the shoplifter, who seemed like both the criminal and the victim in this case.
After the hubbub, the crowd was left curious about the identity of the young man.
“And here he is,” muttered a man sitting inside a Lotteria fast-food joint, who had witnessed the entire exchange. “Ugh, this is gonna be a pain.”
The bespectacled, dreadlocked debt collector grimaced. Another man, who was wearing a bartender’s uniform for some reason, approached and said, “Got you some coffee, Tom… What’s wrong?”
“Oh, thanks. Just…saw a familiar face, that’s all.”
Shizuo Heiwajima, the man in the bartender’s outfit, sat easily across from his supervisor, Tom. Either the commotion from moments earlier hadn’t drawn his notice or he didn’t particularly care about it either way.
“You saw a friend?”
“No, I wouldn’t call him that,” murmured Tom, who sipped his black coffee. “If anything, he’s probably here for you.”
“?”
“Remember how you beat up that biker gang from Saitama last month? Walloped them, really.”
“…Yeah. The ones who ripped my clothes…”
Tom noticed Shizuo’s expression darkening and chose to tread carefully to avoid angering his partner.
“I just saw the leader of Toramaru, that very biker gang.”
“…”
“His name’s Chikage Rokujou. Normally, he walks around with—well, gets dragged around by—a group of girls during the day. But he’s still a gang leader. He ain’t the kind to set your house on fire, but you oughta watch out for him all the same.”
Shizuo remained silent for a time, reflecting on Tom’s words, then asked, “Is he the guy with a leather jacket and some kinda white heart mark on it?”
“Oh, you’re familiar? Yeah, that’s kind of like their uniform, so he only wears it at night.”
“He showed up yesterday.”
“Huh?” Tom gawked, holding his coffee in front of his face with an arched eyebrow.
Shizuo chewed on a mouthful of burger and described the previous night’s events.
“Well…I was on my way home when this guy on a motorcycle came up.”
The previous evening, Ikebukuro
“Yo, how’s it going?”
“?”
He turned around at the sudden greeting and saw a motorcycle stopped nearby, with a young man standing in front of the idle vehicle.
“You Shizuo Heiwajima? Yeah, I figured. You don’t see many guys wandering around dressed like bartenders. I hear you’re a pretty big deal around here.”
“…?”
“I hear some members of our team got a beatdown, courtesy of you.”
“Team?”
Chikage Rokujou chattered amiably, “Look, I’ve heard they were carryin’ on where they shouldn’t, so I’m takin’ that into account; it’s their problem. But you hospitalized ’em all. Even if it was our fault, I think I’ve got a right to be a bit upset here, don’t you?”
The young man, half a head shorter than Shizuo, smiled cockily and leaned in until they were a breath apart.
“What do you suppose they said to me from their hospital beds? That you pulled a streetlight out of the ground and swung it around. I thought they musta taken a bad blow to the head, but today I come and see a streetlight paved into a brand-new patch of concrete.”
“And…?”
“Given my position, I’m naturally feeling curious about what you can do. Oh…by the way, you got any women who would cry over you?”
“Huh?” Shizuo grunted.
Chikage shot him a toothy grin. “I’m just saying, if you did, I’d be fine with dropping this whole thing. It’s not my style to make women cry.”
Anyone who knew Shizuo would assume that by now he’d reach the boiling point and throw that monstrous fist of his. But instead of looking furious, he had an expression of sudden understanding.
“…Oh, I see. It makes sense now.”
“What does?”
“You’re picking a fight with me.”
“Uh, yeah,” Chikage mumbled, surprised that the conversation had taken a few steps backward.
“Gotcha, gotcha. Haven’t had such a straightforward approach since high school. Speaking of, I’m a fully grown adult now, but you’re just a kid, a teenager still. Even if you did beat me, you wouldn’t get to brag about it at school.”
“What does age have to do with a fight? Did you learn how to chat working as a bartender?”
“If only,” Shizuo chuckled. He cracked his neck. “I actually kinda like it when people are so straight with me, in fact. But the best option is not coming after me at all.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Oh, and there’s one thing I should say.”
They were standing quite close to each other, but right as Shizuo was going to tell the other man something—
No sooner had Shizuo removed his glasses than his field of vision was filled with shoe soles.
With a heavy thud, both of Chikage’s feet slammed into Shizuo’s face.
The instant Shizuo had opened his mouth to speak, Chikage used the sidewalk fence nearby as a launching pad to throw a full-body dropkick, more of a pro wrestling move than an actual street-fight technique.
However, right as he thought, Got him!—Chikage realized something felt different.
Huh?
Why won’t he go down?
It felt like that one time he’d leaped off an especially thick stalk of bamb
oo, and a terrible chill ran through his entire body.
Chikage managed to maintain his balance as he landed, and he used the full momentum to bounce off the ground and up into a fierce punch.
Even so, something was wrong.
…
…Huh?
…Did I punch the ground just now?
There was indeed a sensation of soft flesh at the end of his fist, but whatever the material was, it did not yield. His fist just stopped short, as if he were punching straight into the ground. Chills and question marks swirled within Chikage’s head.
Shizuo repeated, “There’s one thing I should mention… Like my name says, I just want to live in peace and quiet.”
“…What?”
Chikage’s eyes went wide. Yes, his fist was touching the other man’s cheek.
But at best, it tilted Shizuo’s face and hadn’t changed the man’s expression in the least. He was acting as though he hadn’t even been touched.
“So I need you…”
“Wha—?!”
The skin-colored mass burst straight through the accomplished street fighter’s guard.
“…t o g o t o s l e e p .”
Unlike with Chikage’s punch, this fist hit its target and buried itself deep into the flesh.
“…And then you sent him to Sleepytown, like always,” Tom noted, sipping his coffee. Meanwhile, Shizuo tugged at the straw of his vanilla shake.
“Yeah. Well, I took him to a doctor I know.”
“Really? You took someone to the doctor?”
“Didn’t want him to end up dying. Also, I didn’t really hate the guy. If he was a total fleabrain, I’d have finished him off for good.”
“Then again, a single punch from you is basically fatal as it is,” Tom noted wryly.
But Shizuo interjected, “Four.”
“Huh?”
“He kept getting up until the fourth punch.”
“…Seriously?” Tom murmured, the sugar packet falling through his fingers.
“I think the last thing he said before I could punch him a fifth time was, ‘I got a girl who will take care of me in the hospital, aren’t you jealous?’ But he broke a tooth, so it was kind of hard to make out—maybe I misheard. Anyway, that’s when he fell over.”
“…I mean, I knew he was tough, but still.”
“Actually, you’d be surprised. The foreign guy who showed up a while back took several shots, too.”
“Yeah, well, the world’s a big place… It’s also wild that he’s up on his feet and walking around today. But I guess they’re just facial wounds…”
“To be honest, I actually am jealous that he has a girl to take care of him.”
“Right, you don’t have a girlfriend. Well, when you’re just hanging around eating lunch with a dude all the time, it does feel kinda empty. Would be nice to have a more gentle relationship to engage in, ya know? I guess even you could want something like that, yeah?” Tom asked. Maybe because of how far back they went, Tom dared to ask Shizuo a personal question. Most people familiar with Shizuo would be too scared to ask such a question, but Tom had been with him long enough to understand his boundaries and what made him angry.
Sure enough, Shizuo simply nodded and grunted in the affirmative before complaining, “The only person who’s ever said she loved me might not even count as a woman.”
“Huh? Why, you go to gay bars or trans pubs or something?”
“No, I’m not talking about them. I don’t even know if she’s human…more like a blade…”
“Okay, you’ve totally lost me there,” Tom said, baffled.
Shizuo thought back on the days of his youth. “Girls have pretty much never wanted anything to do with me. Part of it is my own personality, but I also hung around with that fleabrain and the four-eyed freak in school. Fleabrain would trick the girls into going with him somewhere, and the crazy one was so creepy that none of them ever bothered to approach.”
“You talkin’ about Izaya and that…doctor guy you mentioned earlier?”
“Yeah, he was real logical and fussy, too, so I would snap on him all the time, but I guess we were just destined to sort of hang around together. But I do wish that fleabrain would just rot away and die already. At any rate, I don’t seem to have much luck with human women.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. You could get a girlfriend anytime you want. You look a lot like your brother, and he’s a superstar,” Tom ad-libbed.
Shizuo merely looked surprised and wondered, “You think we look that alike?”
Up until this point, it was just another ordinary day for them—for Shizuo Heiwajima in particular.
The incident with Chikage Rokujou should have been nothing more than a momentary spice to liven up the very mundane day.
But when it ended, it took the mundane part with it.
Abnormal, extraordinary occurrences were by their very definition rare, so when the ordinary came to an end, it was always abrupt.
But in the moment of this particular shift, neither man realized it had happened.
Because the dawn of this extraordinary occurrence to Shizuo Heiwajima appeared as anything but.
“Since we had Lotteria for lunch, maybe we should balance it out with McDonald’s for dinner… Wha—?” Tom squawked abruptly.
Shizuo looked up, a question mark floating over his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“Behind you.”
“?”
Shizuo was sitting at a table with his back to the window that faced out on Sixtieth Floor Street. Tom directed his attention over Shizuo’s shoulder toward the street.
“What’s behind—?” Shizuo started to say, then closed his mouth.
Squish.
That was the best way to describe the scene before him.
A girl was on the other side of the store window. The small figure had both palms and her forehead flattened tight against the glass, staring intently at Shizuo.
“…”
For a second, Shizuo thought it was Kururi or Mairu, two girls he knew. He couldn’t imagine any other girls flattening themselves against a window, staring at him, smack in the middle of Ikebukuro.
But this girl’s face was different, and she was clearly too young to be Mairu or Kururi. If anything, this girl seemed to be no older than elementary school age, ten years old at best.
“…?”
The girl was staring hard at Shizuo’s face. She dropped her gaze momentarily to a scrap of paper she was holding and then went back to gazing at the young man in the bartender outfit.
Her features bloomed into a flowery smile.
It wasn’t a polite smile or a shy smile, but the innocent beaming of a child that just got a toy it wanted.
The girl tottered back and forth like a wind-up figurine, spinning around in front of the store as she stared at Shizuo.
“…Is that a relative of yours?”
“…Nope. Not ringing a bell.”
“And that wasn’t the look of someone who saw a rare outfit and wanted to gawk.”
“Nope. I’ll go out and see what’s up,” Shizuo said, getting to his feet to find the answer to this mystery.
“Wait, really? What if she starts off with ‘Papa!’ or ‘Darling’ or something?”
“This is real life, not one of Yumasaki’s fantasies.”
He cleared his tray and headed outside, where the girl was still watching him with sparkling eyes. Many parents liked to praise their children for having features “like a doll,” but if anyone was worthy of the phrase, it was this girl.
Her shoulder-length black hair shone in the sun, and her cutely bobbed bangs bounced, covering her eyes one at a time as her head tilted left and right.
Despite the warmth of May, she had a double-breasted jacket on. It was a formal child’s outfit of foreign style, and despite the gaudiness of the gold buttons, it was rather chic in appearance.
But the way her hair always covered one eye gave her a strangely
gloomy appearance overall, even with the smile.
The girl stared straight at Shizuo and trotted over to him without hesitation.
Trotted closer.
Trotted closer.
Trotted, trotted
Trotted trotted trotted
trot trot trot trot trot
trot-tot-tot-tot-tot
Something feels wrong.
An unfathomable, indescribable wave of unpleasantness ran down Shizuo’s back.
There’s something about the way she’s smiling.
If you called that “innocent,” it would sound so nice.
But this one’s an awful lot like those worn by kids who stomp on lines of ants…
The words that tumbled out of the girl’s mouth confirmed his suspicion.
“Drop dead.”
And then, the girl drove a modified stun gun straight into Shizuo’s midsection.
The next instant, there was a terrific crackling sound in the air as electricity jumped—
And Shizuo Heiwajima was gently pulled into the realm of the extraordinary.
Chat room, one night earlier (May 2)
Setton has entered the chat.
Setton: Evenin’.
Setton: Oh? No one’s here.
Setton: I’ll just wait.
Setton: Hang on, my partner’s calling me, so I’m stepping away for a moment.
TarouTanaka has entered the chat.
TarouTanaka: Good evening.
TarouTanaka: Is it just you, Setton?
TarouTanaka: Oh, no response.
TarouTanaka: I guess you’re still busy with whatever it is. Sorry.
TarouTanaka: I’ll just wait.
Kuru has entered the chat.
Mai has entered the chat.
Kuru: Forgive me for intruding when you are so occupied with your waiting. Tarou waits despite knowing that the other is around, and Setton has left, not realizing that there are now others to speak with anew. Is it a hint of romance I detect? Oh, but I do not know either of your genders. Perhaps the male moniker “Tarou” in fact belongs to a woman. And the name Setton
Mai: ?
Kuru: Pardon me. I hit the character limit. Anyway, the name Setton is not innately gendered. By the way, it is a very curious username to have. Where does it come from? I just did an Internet search and found it is the name of a piece of traditional Korean clothing. Is that it? Or did you borrow it from the movie producer Maxwell Setton?
Durarara!!, Vol. 5 Page 2
