Durarara!!, Vol. 11

by Ryohgo Narita

  Mikado’s response to this mockery was quite simple. “I would think that’s the devil, not God.” But he didn’t deny any of it. “It occurs to me—that would be you, Izaya.”

  “Is it a coincidence that you just called me Izaya instead of Mr. Orihara? Or by design?”

  “Is it that important? I called you Mr. Orihara earlier because it had been a while and I felt some distance, but it’s a bit of a mouthful.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to call you out,” Izaya said. “It’s just that because my hobby is observation, I’m very sensitive to minor changes. I must say, though, I’m relieved. You haven’t changed at all.”

  “Huh?”

  “To be honest, I was worried. I thought you might’ve changed since the last time we spoke. But no, nothing about you has changed since that very first meeting. I mean, independent of personal growth. You’re moving forward while retaining who you are.”

  Despite the fact that he’d just mentioned how it was human nature to switch things up out of nowhere, Izaya was now complimenting Mikado for his nature never changing. But it didn’t seem to fully register with the younger boy, whose voice was uncertain, hesitant.

  “Do you…think so?”

  “Yes. What you’re doing now is so extreme that you’ve been worried about yourself, haven’t you? Worried that you might be going crazy somehow.”

  “…”

  Izaya took his silence as agreement and sang his praises. “Right now, the people around you are probably thinking things like, He went crazy, and He’s acting weird, and Someone’s fooling him. Particularly the people who know you well, like Anri Sonohara, Masaomi Kida, Dotach…er, Kyouhei Kadota, and Celty Sturluson.”

  “…! I was trying to hide it from them…but I guess…I’ve been worrying folks like Celty.”

  “Yes, I believe you have. She’s not human, but she’s got a strong image of humanity that she models herself after, based on TV shows and books and the like. In a sense, that’s what makes her seem so human for being so inhuman. I guess she can’t help but think that you’re running wild at the moment. Because from a normal person’s perspective, you seem to be going totally out of control.”

  Izaya followed his preamble with a more forceful answer.

  “However, you don’t need to worry about this, because I can guarantee that you, Mikado Ryuugamine, have not changed a bit from the moment you formed the Dollars! If you’ve gone mad, then it happened right at the time you formed your group, not now! When you got all those people together and declared war on a huge corporation with a single text message, that was when you were insane.”

  “…”

  “And yet, you persisted in treading your ordinary daily life, with that air of madness inside of you. I’m quite jealous. I wasn’t able to do that when I was in high school,” Izaya said wistfully.

  Mikado reacted to his mentor’s plaudit with a soft snort. “And…what do you intend to do with the Dollars, Izaya?” he asked.

  “What do you mean, what will I do?”

  “I’d like to think I know a bit about you. Even this very conversation has told me something. You’re not just sitting back and quietly watching this unfold. Also, since this started up, I’ve been doing some research into the past.”

  The past.

  It was a word Mikado said with great meaning. But he otherwise did not change his tone of voice and didn’t beat around the bush in revealing what he knew about then and now.

  “You’re trying to do to us what you did to the Yellow Scarves two years ago, aren’t you?”

  Silence reigned.

  A train passed over the bridge above, and Izaya said nothing until the roar had passed.

  Mikado heard the noise through the phone speaker and waited patiently.

  After ten seconds of a very noisy silence, Izaya smiled. His eyes sparkled with surprise and delight. “With the distance you put between yourself and Kida, I didn’t think you’d figure that out. Who did you hear that from, Tsukumoya?”

  “No…I searched out people who were low on the Yellow Scarves totem pole back then and lead normal lives now. I only got bits and pieces, but when put together from twenty different people’s stories, I finally started to see the big picture.”

  “Do you despise me?”

  “If anyone would, it’d be Masaomi, wouldn’t you think? Oh, but…if Masaomi’s big injury back in March had anything to do with you, then I suppose I should despise you… I wonder what the answer is. I guess I’ll consider that again once things are back to normal between me and him,” Mikado reflected, detached.

  “I see,” Izaya replied. “We’ll put that off until later, then. Honestly, I was going to stay quiet about the whole thing, but at this point it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to hide it.”

  He leaned against the wall of the tunnel, free hand in his pocket, looking up at the ceiling.

  “It’s true, I intend to mess with you two. But I’m not deciding if I’ll be your ally or your enemy. Frankly, I think that remaining an observer is the fairest choice and will allow me to observe people in their most natural state, but that might be difficult at this point. You and Kida can’t solve your issue anymore just between you and the people you have doing your dirty work. The fact that Mr. Akabayashi’s involved should make that clear, right?”

  Still, he didn’t bring up the issue of Kasane Kujiragi. He could have gone ahead and revealed that Hiroto Shijima was his own cat’s-paw but decided against doing that. He knew that actions he took while elated often had a way of coming back around to bite him.

  But usually that happened because he couldn’t help himself and did it anyway.

  Mikado took Izaya’s statement with a grain of salt. “If possible…I’d appreciate having you on my side. As one of the people who knows what the Dollars were on that first meeting…”

  “Well, that’s tricky. Even I can’t tell what I’ll be doing up ahead. Ultimately, what I want to see is other people, not myself. My biggest pleasure in life is observing what others do when placed in unpredictable circumstances. So yes, I will start all the fires and put them all out to that end.”

  “…It wasn’t you who arranged the stunt with the head, was… Aaah!!” Mikado yelped. Izaya’s eyes narrowed in curiosity at the sudden shift in his voice.

  “Oh! That’s right!” Mikado continued. “That’s what I wanted to call you about!”

  “?”

  “Were you aware of today’s news, Izaya?!”

  “No, I just got done with something. I haven’t checked the news recently. Did something happen?” Izaya asked, sensing something abnormal in the tone of Mikado’s voice.

  “You’d be better off just turning on the TV for the news, rather than hearing it from me! You could even check the news on your phone! In fact, I was calling because I wanted to ask if you had anything to do with it…but based on your reaction, I’m guessing you didn’t,” Mikado said, clearly agitated. Then he claimed he would call back and hung up.

  Izaya recalled the police cars he’d seen passing by and decided to just check it out on his phone. In all honestly, he’d have preferred to bask in the splendidness of humanity, out of respect for young Mikado Ryuugamine, but he felt a note of unease in his chest and pulled out a separate smartphone so that he could launch his own special news-aggregating app.

  Maybe Shizu broke out of the holding cell. Man, it would be awesome if they would just shoot him down…

  He gazed at the screen of the smartphone, holding to that faint hope—and when the headline “Woman’s Head in Crowded Ikebukuro” appeared, his mind froze.

  It was less than a second, but if Shizuo Heiwajima just so happened to be throwing a vending machine at him in that moment, he would have perished without any means to avoid it.

  Once the momentary shock—powerful enough to expose him to fatal threat—had passed, Izaya scanned the details of the article, then launched another online app.

  A quick check of the obscure, underground i
mage site brought him what he was looking for very quickly. The instant he saw the face that was identical to Mika Harima’s, Izaya understood.

  It was not Mika Harima’s head. It was the head of Celty Sturluson, which was supposed to be in his possession.

  The culprit was likely Manami Mamiya.

  And her motive was simple: provocation.

  It was for that reason, that extremely personal and petty reason, that she threw the entire city into a panic and totally destroyed a portion of Izaya’s plans.

  And Izaya’s reaction to losing one of the best aces up his sleeve was overwhelming joy.

  “I see… So that’s how you want this!”

  He had accepted Manami Mamiya into his team as an irregular element that would interfere with him. His goal was not something experimentally productive like forcing his operation to tighten up by including an enemy among the ranks. No, it was for the most Izaya of reasons: a desire to observe what a girl who lived on nothing but hatred for him might do.

  Naturally, he was under the assumption that she would do something.

  She’d report their activities to the police, or try to kill him in his sleep, or dump poison into the water tank of the building, knowing full well it would harm other members and innocent residents.

  He maintained a minimum of caution, of course, since getting himself killed wasn’t the idea—but what she ultimately did far surpassed his expectations. He anticipated that she would steal the head, but his guess was that she would either give it back to Celty, take it to Nebula, or offer it to Kasane Kujiragi.

  I never expected she’d get the entire world involved in it.

  It was as though, by shining the spotlight of the public’s attention on the head, she was exposing everyone and everything in this secret state of affairs—Dollars, Jinnai Yodogiri, Awakusu-kai, Izaya, even the dullahan and Saika—to the world at large.

  “…Ha-ha!”

  He could no longer hold back his laughter.

  Gales of it burst forth, echoing off the walls of the tunnel, laughter that threatened to bowl over the entire world.

  When a new train passed over, the clatter and roar of it harmonized with the laughter in ugly ways, chilling both any pedestrians in the area and even the Dragon Zombie members who waited a short distance away.

  This is what makes humanity so wonderful!

  I admit it, Manami Mamiya—I’m taken aback by your actions. In fact, you might even say I’ve been put on a major mental defensive. And I couldn’t be happier!

  But this isn’t the end, is it?

  He considered the current affairs anew, a sign of utmost respect for the girl who’d placed him in great danger.

  I guess this means I should start moving in earnest, then. Shizu’s stuck with the police thanks to that thing with Earthworm, so I can move around in safety. And thankfully, Kasane Kujiragi’s Saika children will extend his time in captivity.

  You know…that meeting with Anri Sonohara this morning seemed portentous. After talking with Mikado, I feel like today is marked by fate. In order to turn coincidence into inevitability, I suppose I should work on Kida later tonight, perhaps.

  Malevolent plans swirled in his heart, blissful smile on his lips.

  Now, in the moment, when his plans were in danger of being destroyed, he felt the pure opportunity of human observation, a hope that no one else would ever bother to believe in.

  Parking garage, Tokyo

  It was one of Tokyo’s uncountable unmanned standing garages, not very far from Ikebukuro. This had once been a hangout for the Blue Squares, but after the past squabble, the Yellow Scarves had used Izaya Orihara’s information to root it out and take over the territory.

  When the Blue Squares broke up, and after Masaomi left the gang, some local teens occasionally loitered around the area—but now the folks in yellow were back in full force.

  Not that they ever bothered the cars that used the garage. They didn’t even sit out in the open where people would take notice. They knew that if any of the usual people complained, the police would come down on them at once. Apparently the cops regularly patrolled the area back in the days of the Blue Squares.

  Masaomi Kida made use of that information, using the garage less as a base of operations than a clandestine hideout. Even after he left, the practices he had put in place had been followed, so it was extremely rare that an officer ever came around anymore.

  On the roof of the garage, Masaomi was holding a meeting with the other Yellow Scarves.

  “Okay, so we’ve got to watch out for this huge guy with the sleepy eyes. If the rumors are accurate, he’s probably a guy from Kushinada High called Houjou.”

  The plan to lure out and strike the Blue Squares yesterday had worked up to a point. But when the large youth got out of the van, the entire skirmish ended in a draw and mutual retreat.

  “So…I guess they’re serious about this,” said Kouji Yatabe, one of the senior members.

  Masaomi nodded gravely. “Same goes for me. I was dead serious about fighting them off. If it weren’t for the Blue Squares, he and I could’ve had a good fistfight and gotten this all over with already.”

  “How many times have you said that, Shogun?”

  “Yeah, you can’t keep playing the old hits.” His friends chuckled, annoyed. Masaomi laughed, too.

  “I’ll say it as many times as I want. Thanks for sticking around through my personal battle, guys.”

  “This is so dorky.”

  “Ahh, bittersweet youth!” they joked to hide their embarrassment.

  Masaomi prepared himself to get serious again so they could discuss their next actions—but he sensed a silhouette moving out of the corner of his eye and glanced that way.

  A young man dressed in casual attire emerged from the elevator. Probably just an ordinary person getting his car, Masaomi mused and turned back to his friends.

  But then he realized that something struck him as wrong, and he glanced back.

  He understood what it was.

  The man wasn’t heading for any of the cars parked on the roof. He was walking straight for their group.

  “Hey,” Masaomi said, and his friends turned to look.

  They got to their feet, sending dangerous warning glances. There were only five or so of them, but this was one man. If he was with the Blue Squares, they could handle him.

  Most importantly, their shogun, Masaomi Kida, was here. This wasn’t like when they had sparred with Houjou yesterday.

  They stared the man down, putting their full trust in Masaomi’s presence. But for his part, Masaomi was feeling a light layer of sweat break out.

  He knew the man approaching them.

  You’ve gotta be kidding me. What’s he doing here…?

  At first, he didn’t recognize the man. After all, the previous time they met had been under drastically different circumstances.

  When he’d been secretly listening to Mikado Ryuugamine talk to this man on the street, his face had been covered by many bandages. It was only the sight of his distinctive hat that gave him away.

  “Chikage…Rokujou…,” he muttered.

  The other members turned toward him. “Huh? You know this guy, Shogun?”

  “I don’t know him… I’ve never talked to him. But that’s the head of a motorcycle gang from Saitama called Toramaru.”

  “Saitama?” they repeated, befuddled.

  All the while, Chikage Rokujou continued forward, until he was close enough to have a dialogue with.

  He stopped there and raised a hand to them. “Yo. You guys are Yellow Scarves, right?” he said breezily.

  Yatabe and the others shared an uneasy look, but Masaomi stepped forward. “That’s right… I don’t see your girls with you this time, Chikage Rokujou.”

  Chikage looked surprised. He gave the smaller boy an appraising glance. “Yeah. Sounds like something gnarly was happening right outside the train station. I sent them back home. But, um…more importantly, sorry, kid. Have we m
et somewhere before?”

  “No. This is our first time talking. But you’re pretty famous, you know that?”

  Chikage considered the words, then smirked. “Ah, I see. This is just a hunch, but I’m betting you must be the boss of the Yellow Scarves, huh?”

  “Technically, yes. Once divorced.” Masaomi snorted.

  Rokujou readjusted his hat and said, “Well, I don’t think I need to introduce myself, then, but I’ll do it anyway. I’m Chikage Rokujou. I run a little gang called Toramaru over in the Kawagoe area.”

  “Masaomi Kida.”

  Chikage cracked his neck and gave Masaomi another once-over. “Hmm. I was imagining more of a burly bandit type. You’re smaller than I expected.”

  “If anything, I bet the rest of society would be more surprised to learn that you lead a street gang.”

  “You think so? Well…it’s true that I kind of stick out against the rest of my boys.”

  “So what brings you here today?” Masaomi asked, neither sucking up to nor looking down on his visitor, merely cautious.

  “Oh, right, right. My business.” Chikage chuckled. He answered the question with another question. “You guys are at war with another group called the Dollars, right?”

  “…Yes, that’s true.”

  “Well, I’ve got a complex situation with them. Lots of favors owed back and forth,” the young man said, always breezy and friendly. “So I know this is sudden, but I was hoping you could choose for me.”

  “…Choose what?”

  “Whether you want your gang taken over or destroyed entirely.”

  Ikebukuro Park

  Anri followed Haruna Niekawa to a park located next to Sunshine Street.

  Despite it being midday during summer vacation, it was only sparsely populated. The familiar blue vinyl tarps were visible in the back of the park, but there were no homeless around at the moment, just a few people taking a break from their nearby offices and several students enjoying their vacation. Nobody was even sitting at the stone benches in front of the fountain. Upon close inspection, hardly anyone was actually off their feet.