Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel)

by Ryohgo Narita

  “…What do you mean?”

  “In my heart.”

  “…Is this another stupid manga or novel phrase?”

  “Yes, it’s from Lunatic Moon. Heh-heh, whenever something bad happens, you just shut your heart and feel nothing. Life’s a breeze if you never let your emotions get heightened.”

  Kadota cut Yumasaki off before he could explain more of his twisted views on life.

  “I told you, stop assuming that everyone in the world has read the same books as you have! Anyway…is it true that you actually want a breezy life?”

  “My desire for a tumultuous life of excitement is powerful, but I choose to feel nothing. But enough about that. Recently I realized something. For one, there aren’t seven mystical balls that once gathered will grant any wish. Also, there isn’t a shrine near my house that houses a magical fox spirit named Kugen that transforms into a beautiful girl. Also, there’s some road construction happening at night out in front of my place, but there aren’t even any vampires working there! Plus the Black Rider won’t grant my wishes, and the dream demon babe hasn’t shown up since then!”

  Wait, you seriously didn’t know all of those things until now? Also, what the hell is this dream demon he keeps bringing up?

  Kadota had no end of questions to ask, but he couldn’t bring himself to overcome the sad, fiery look in Yumasaki’s eyes.

  “So you see, I’ve learned patience and self-control! I don’t ask for much; I just want a simple, peaceful life! Basically, I just want to visit abroad and adopt an adorable little girl with green hair, then move back to Japan right next door to three beautiful sisters and have a heartwarming life, that’s all! Is that too much to ask?!”

  “Is that Yotsuba&!? That’s Yotsuba&!, isn’t it?” Karisawa interjected, grinning madly. Kadota finally came to his senses and shut down the fun.

  “First of all, yes, it’s too much to ask, and second of all, shut up about manga already!”

  “Eeep!” Yumasaki shrieked, shrinking into a ball.

  Kadota turned away with a huff and looked out the window. “This is about the spot where the girl from Raira got slashed last month,” he muttered.

  They were crawling along a road a short way away from the business center. Kadota was irritated that one of their group had been attacked, yet they still had no information about it. So they rotated around to the various attack locations. He was hoping to discover some kind of common link between them, but so far they’d had no luck.

  Behind him, Yumasaki was already babbling on about if they drew a diagram that connected all the attack locations, a demon would be summoned at the center. At this point, Kadota realized it would be pointless to tell him off.

  As he grumpily stared out the window, his eyes eventually settled on a single teenage girl walking on her own.

  She had glasses and plain, undyed hair, which suggested that she wasn’t looking for trouble. It was almost unnatural to see someone like her, wearing her school uniform and everything, out this late.

  “Ah, geez, how careless can you get? This is exactly what gets you targeted. Doesn’t even have to be by the slasher—she could easily get abducted by folks like us driving a creepy-lookin’ van around,” he grumbled. After they passed the girl, he turned his eyes back to the road ahead…until he noticed the presence of a suspicious man.

  His age was uncertain. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about his outfit, except that he was wearing a rather thick coat, given that the weather was warming up lately.

  But far more notable than that…

  “Were that guy’s eyes…red?”

  Was Officer Kuzuhara back there…the father of that Kuzuhara boy from the Discipline Committee at school? Anri wondered, noting the similarities in the faces of the policeman she’d just encountered and the boy from her class. Her apartment was just about to come into view.

  She suddenly stopped in the middle of the street, which was neither wide nor narrow.

  It was the very spot where Anri’s bully had been attacked.

  She dropped her eyes to the asphalt. There were no bloodstains anymore.

  Why did that happen?

  Anri shook her head, feeling miserable. Was it just simple coincidence that the girl was cut down right before her eyes? Or was there some kind of fate at work?

  Maybe…in fact, it must have been…

  Just as she was searching for an answer within her memory…

  A man stood right behind her.

  He pulled a blade out of his coat and took a silent step forward.

  The blade swung high up into the night air.

  “Oh, shit! He’s got a weapon!”

  Togusa’s shout from the driver’s seat shot through the van. Kadota and the others looked forward through the windshield from the backseat to see a tense scene playing out.

  At the side of the road was the uniformed girl, face down and back turned—and a man in the middle of the road raising a blade and slowly approaching her from behind.

  Kadota had noticed the man’s odd behavior and told Togusa to turn the van around after they’d passed originally, and they were finally at the same street heading the other way—and sure enough, they were witnessing the slasher at work at this very moment.

  But he already had his weapon in the air. He didn’t seem to notice the lights or engine noise of the van, as he didn’t turn toward them in the least.

  Yet they were still too far away to reach him if they got out of the car and ran. Kadota thought for a second and called out to the driver, “Togusa, can you do something crazy?”

  “What’s that?”

  The sharp-eyed driver jammed down on the gas pedal, clearly anticipating what Kadota was about to say. He delivered the expected order.

  “Run him over.”

  A car horn blared, jolting Anri back to reality.

  She quickly pressed her back to the wall and looked toward the headlights to see a large van barreling down.

  And just in front of her, there was a man with full red eyes, holding a blade pointed at her.

  “Red” eyes could certainly be explained as so bloodshot that the whites appeared red. But there was too much blood involved here, if that was the case.

  There was no white left in his eyeballs. They were simply points of glinting black pupil in the midst of red spheres.

  “…!”

  Anri grasped the situation and was turning to run—

  —when the van slammed into the slasher with merciless force.

  Celty and Shizuo patrolled the streets of Ikebukuro without a clear destination. Shizuo was wearing a pitch-black helmet, hastily fashioned out of shadow by Celty.

  It wasn’t for the sake of avoiding trouble with the vastly increased number of police officers out. After all, Celty’s motorcycle didn’t have a license plate or even a headlight and chases with traffic cops were a regular occurrence for her.

  But if that happened tonight, Shizuo stood to wind up in trouble if his face was spotted. So she made him a full-faced helmet to hide his identity. Of course, he was still in his distinct bartender’s outfit, so anyone who knew him would recognize him anyway.

  Still, I can’t aimlessly wander around without any leads.

  Barely any of the attacks had occurred in the bustling shopping district, and there were too many cops. But even the full police force didn’t have enough men to stake out every single street, so Celty was able to travel around using back alleys.

  If the Saika in the chat is the actual slasher, today’s attack was already announced in advance.

  If she wandered around too much on her own, people might assume that the Black Rider had to be the street slasher, but the danger of that was lessened if she had a passenger with her, Celty assumed. That made Shizuo’s presence a bonus, it seemed, but…

  I was naive.

  While they were waiting at a light, some people with yellow bandannas decided to stare them down. Celty was used to this and perfectly content to ignore it—bu
t today she had Shizuo with her.

  He stepped down off the idling bike and walked over to the youngsters before Celty could stop him.

  “When you point a knife at someone, you lose the right to complain if they kill you in self-defense,” he started to lecture, his helmet still in place. The young men, who weren’t carrying any knives, were completely baffled.

  He continued to deliver his sermon to the Yellow Scarves, who were looking more irritated by the moment.

  “Listen, stares can kill. Whether it’s a curse or a magical death stare, the possibility of it killing a person is at least as high as 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000675 percent.”

  The boys’ misfortune was that Shizuo’s helmet covered his face and that they didn’t notice the significance of his bartender’s outfit. The Yellow Scarves hadn’t realized that they’d picked a fight with none other than Shizuo Heiwajima.

  “Huh? Dude, what the hell are you talking ab—?”

  “I’m saying, if you stare down a man, you aren’t gonna complain if he kills you, are ya?!”

  What followed was ten seconds of absolute hell.

  Shizuo clobbered the three men in an instant. He didn’t just accept their challenge; he welcomed it.

  Celty pulled him away and drove off, but there was no doubt that multiple police officers would be converging on the scene in no time.

  Even as they rode away, they passed two officers rushing in the other direction. She recognized one of them, a pushy senior patrol officer at the local police box named Kuzuhara.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  She wheeled the bike around to avoid attention and sent it racing in the opposite direction of where the officers had come from. She didn’t want any police attention right now.

  Once they were safely free, they resumed their steady patrol of the local streets. Suddenly, the part of Celty’s shadow that acted as her sense of hearing picked up the honk of a car horn, followed by a hard collision.

  As Anri pressed herself against the wall, wide-eyed, a number of people got down out of the van.

  “Is he dead?”

  “That was really messed up, Kadota! How can you act like this, just after I was telling you about my desire for a life of tranquillity?!”

  Karisawa and Yumasaki didn’t seem to be fazed in the least by the events. Only Kadota looked nervous as he stared down the street.

  A few yards away from the van, a man lay sprawled out on the pavement. There were no major external wounds to be seen, and there didn’t appear to be a pool of blood on the asphalt, either. There was a kitchen knife at least a foot long in his right hand.

  Kadota eyed the knife and muttered, “Ahh, I see… It’s a little too short, but someone in a panic who didn’t know any better might confuse it for a katana.”

  After he was struck by the van, the man flew through the air and sprawled out magnificently upon impact with the ground. He hadn’t budged since then.

  Suddenly, the figure rose.

  “!”

  The silhouette got to its feet. His left arm was twisted at an unnatural angle. With the knife still gripped in his other hand, the bloodshot eyes glared straight at Anri.

  “?!”

  He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. The middle-age man awkwardly began to stumble in Anri’s direction.

  “Hey! What the hell?!”

  Kadota’s group, assuming he was coming after them, were taken flat-footed for an instant—then snapped into action to stop the man. But he only paid them an instant’s notice, swiping the knife sideways with incredible force.

  “Whoa!”

  The tip passed just in front of Kadota’s nose with tremendous speed. Yumasaki and Karisawa behind him actually felt the breeze from the swing.

  The slasher kept swinging with the same force, bouncing back and forth like a spring-loaded toy. Like a fan whose blades were all knives. The group couldn’t very well do the child’s game of stopping this fan with a finger—they were completely taken aback.

  But the man wasn’t even looking at them anymore.

  He created an entire impassable sphere of spinning knife, gradually bringing the sphere closer and closer to Anri.

  “Stop, you idiot!”

  It was too late to hit him with the car again. Kadota recognized the gravity of the situation and was prepared to charge in at the risk of personal injury…

  But the moment he began to step forward, a shadow passed by Kadota’s side.

  Celty’s motorcycle, engine on silent, plunged right into the slasher while doing a wheelie.

  The underside of the tire tore right through the knife’s sphere of range, flattening the man beneath it.

  Stunned by the series of action-movie scenes unfolding before her eyes, Anri didn’t even conceive of running away.

  “Ah…”

  Then she realized that it was none other than the infamous Black Rider who had saved her and gasped with surprise.

  The bike rode straight over the man and came to a stop a short distance away. There were two people on it—behind the monstrous black-suited rider was a man in a bartender’s outfit who slowly stepped off. The rider followed him and turned to face the group.

  “The Headless Rider…and…Shizuo?!” Kadota blurted out, recognizing the helmeted man in the bartender’s outfit. But the instant he said the name Shizuo, the slasher on the ground suddenly sprang to his feet again.

  “?!”

  As Kadota and the others looked on in shock, the man finally spoke.

  “Shizuo… So you’re…Shizuo Heiwajima? Is that so? Are you Shizuo…sweetie?”

  Kadota murmured, “Huh? Is he…a queen?”

  “No, Dotachin, you’re not actually a drag queen unless you’re dressed as a woman,” Karisawa explained patiently, but no one cared.

  “Oh, I’ve been dying to meet you… I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting…tee-hee!”

  While his appearance was male, his speaking style was unmistakably feminine.

  But even more alienating than that was the fact that there was no hint of damage from the way he was speaking, despite separate collisions with both a van and a motorcycle.

  Shizuo took a quiet, menacing step forward and said, “Okay, I’m killing you.”

  “I’m so happy… Finally, finally, we meet. My beloved.”

  “You’re happy, huh? Then I’ll kill you.”

  This conversation makes no sense, Celty and Kadota thought simultaneously, but neither wanted to set Shizuo off, so they kept that to themselves.

  “I love you, Shizuo Heiwajima.”

  The middle-age man spoke words of love in a feminine tone to a person he’d never met before. Add to that the redness of his eyes, and it was clear he was not sane.

  I see. He must be under the demon blade’s spell. I just didn’t expect it to be a kitchen knife…

  Celty reached out a hand to Anri, who was slumped on her behind against the wall.

  “Eeek!” she shrieked, but when she realized the Headless Rider meant her no harm, she timidly grasped the hand and used it to get to her feet.

  “Are you okay? Not hurt?”

  When Anri saw the message on the PDA screen, she looked with surprise at Celty’s helmet. The only thing visible in the black visor was the reflection of the streetlights, and nothing beyond.

  “Oh…yes. I’m…fine.”

  “Well, that’s good. You might want to keep your distance,” Celty typed for Anri, who was barely able to respond.

  The dullahan turned to Shizuo and produced a shadow scythe within her hand, brandished it behind her, and advanced on the slasher.

  So after knocking my helmet off last time, now it wants to ignore me entirely…

  Irritated by this change in attitude for some reason, she wondered how to deal with both Shizuo and the slasher now.

  Meanwhile, the slasher had stopped talking and was now slowly approaching Shizuo. He had the knife in his right hand held ov
er at his left hip, an odd stance that resembled an iai quick-draw position.

  But there’s no point to doing an iai if it’s not in a sheath to begin with. That’s the whole point…

  Yet the slasher’s eyes were filled with mad confidence.

  Based on the speed with which he swung the knife moments earlier, something was clearly wrong with him. But the veins still pulsed in Shizuo’s temples, and he smiled quietly.

  “I can’t catch a blade with my bare hands.”

  Anyone who knew Shizuo well would understand just how dangerous that subdued, suppressed smile was. The instant Celty saw it, her goal shifted from how to crush the slasher to how to keep the slasher from dying.

  She’d seen the man’s hardiness for herself when he stood up after she ran him over with the bike. Even then, she couldn’t possibly envision the man in the trench coat beating Shizuo.

  “So if you wanna wave a knife at me…you can’t complain when I murder you…”

  Shizuo reached out toward the van stopped next to him. The slasher didn’t know what Shizuo was doing, but the look in his twisted, supremely confident eyes said that he didn’t care.

  “There is nothing you can do to me. You really think you can avoid my sword? Let me tell you: one millimeter. That’s all it takes—one tiny little scratch—for you and me to share our love.”

  Celty and Kadota were confused by this statement, but Yumasaki and Karisawa both reacted with surprise and excitement.

  “Oh, there must be poison spread on the tip! Poison so powerful just a drop of it could knock out a dragon!”

  “Or how about this? The kind that slowly eats away the victim from the inside, like with parasites or flower seeds or something!”

  Nobody reacted to their nerdy brainstorming. Only the slasher himself put on a knowing smile. It seemed they might not be that far off.

  If that was the case, it meant that Shizuo’s personal fighting style, self-sacrificial “losing the battle to win the war,” wasn’t an option. Celty suddenly didn’t feel so confident.

  But she needn’t have worried.

  Shizuo, still wearing Celty’s shadow helmet, turned to his conveniently present acquaintance and made a bizarre request.