Or perhaps it was still a bit of youthful stubbornness that remained within him.
Ikebukuro—apartment bar
“…”
In the meantime, a man in a line of work that was completely removed from youthfulness looked hard at his screen, just as Mikado had.
“What’s this, then?” grunted Akabayashi, lieutenant of the Awakusu-kai.
The old scar on his right eye was bothering him. He was sitting in a special unlicensed bar built into a private apartment that had been outfitted for business, collecting information for his own purposes.
What Akabayashi was examining was not one of the several Dollars-related message boards or a report message from his errand boys, the gang called Jan-Jaka-Jan. It was a chat room that he’d been introduced to by a girl he helped take care of.
The chat room was oddly well-connected with what was going on in the city, so Akabayashi made it a point to pop in at least once a day, both for information and to check on his patron there, the girl who was like a niece to him.
Something odd was going on in the chat now.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Akabayashi?” asked the middle-aged barkeeper, who must have noticed his expression.
“Oh, just some trouble with work.”
“Ah, I see.”
The bartender did not ask further. Whether he was aware of what Akabayashi did or not, he clearly came to the determination that it wasn’t worth asking about.
But Akabayashi gave him a lilting smile and offered freely, “It’s odd. I’d say that we took a shot from a direction that I wasn’t expecting.”
He looked back at his smartphone. In the chat, a woman named Namie Yagiri was throwing a tantrum and tearing into Mikado Ryuugamine. That alone would strike Akabayashi as nothing more than some internal Dollars trouble, but what alarmed him was when the real name of the girl who invited him to the chat room appeared in the conversation.
NamieYagiri: Where is that headless monster?
NamieYagiri: Same question about your girlfriend, Anri Sonohara.
NamieYagiri: You know that she’s a monster, too.
NamieYagiri: You must have seen her with a katana at some point.
NamieYagiri: Want me to tell you what she did during that incident with the street slasher?
Normally, one might take statements like that as the ramblings of a person undergoing a psychotic break.
But Akabayashi understood them perfectly.
And that was unfortunate, because the words that this Namie woman was saying did indeed relate directly to Anri Sonohara.
Monster.
Katana.
Street slasher.
The old scar on his right eye itched.
A searing pain assaulted his brain, centered around the scar—as though the prosthetic embedded into his socket was radiating the heat itself. But Akabayashi just took off his sunglasses, pressed his eye lightly, and smiled sadly to himself.
Calm down already. You’re not some kid in puberty.
He reflected fondly on his past.
His first love had come late for a man of his type, but it was very hot and painful.
The woman seemed barely human. She pierced both his eye and his heart.
The mysterious blade was contained within her body, and her eyes burned red, marking her as the slasher.
Akabayashi could clearly remember the first woman he’d ever fallen in love with.
She had been a blade personified and yet died from a blade wound through the stomach.
But Akabayashi knew more than that. Not from seeing it for himself but out of personal certainty.
She—Sayaka Sonohara—had cut off her husband’s head before running the sword through her own stomach.
Where had the katana housed in her body gone?
The police said they never found the murder weapon. So even though the wound looked exactly like a self-inflicted one, they couldn’t rule it a suicide without the weapon there, too.
Had the police coroner found anything abnormal with her body? If they had, perhaps they hadn’t announced it to the public because it was too abnormal—but what if the sword was still intact and well after Sayaka Sonohara’s death and had moved on to inhabit someone else?
In that case, the most likely host by far would be none other than Anri Sonohara.
The thought had occurred to him a number of times, but he’d always laughed it off as a nonsensical daydream.
And yet just a few lines of text from this chat room had given him clear evidence.
The katana that pierced his eye had moved on to Sayaka’s daughter, Anri.
Heat bloomed on the right half of his face.
The moment that his conjecture seemed more likely to be truth, he felt his own cold blood suddenly roar to a boil.
But that was where the surge stopped.
Akabayashi stilled the throbbing in his eye with force and pushed his emotions back into the memories of the past.
I said, calm down. Anri inherited a memento of her mother. That’s all this is.
If this were back in his more short-tempered days, he might have already been out the door. This meant that a part of the woman he loved was still alive within her daughter.
But Akabayashi was too mentally mature to hold some kind of twisted romantic affection for Anri, a girl young enough to be his own daughter.
The one I fell in love with…was a crazy woman named Sayaka Sonohara.
Not that buzzing, annoying sword.
Recalling the flood of obnoxious “words of love” that flooded into him the moment his eye was slashed, Akabayashi drained the last of his drink and called out, “Hey, bartender.”
“Yes, sir?” the other man asked.
Akabayashi gave him another lilting smile. “Let’s say you were in love with a woman, and she didn’t choose you. She ended up marrying another man.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And say her daughter was in some kind of trouble, real bad stuff about to happen. If you wanted to help the girl get out of it, would that qualify as ‘not being over it’?”
“…”
The bartender thought it over, returned the glass he was polishing to the shelf, and said, “Whether you can’t get over the girl’s mother or not, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who would intentionally turn a blind eye to the child of an acquaintance being in danger, Mr. Akabayashi.”
“Well, you might think too highly of me. You can close me out now,” Akabayashi said, getting up from his seat and pulling out his wallet. He didn’t really need to ask the man that question. He just wanted an excuse to go ahead with it.
But it was true gratitude that he felt for the bartender as he took his time leaving the little room.
He was going to poke his nose into this incident but only in the way that a proper man on the underside of society would do.
Along Kawagoe Highway
“…This is the apartment building.”
“And is this person really going to be that helpful?” Saki asked, not to cast doubt on Anri’s offer but just to get some reassurance.
“Yes, she’s a very helpful…person…”
The hesitation around the word person was not simply an unconscious hitch of the tongue. Anri looked up at the building. It was a place she’d been a number of times. It was the home of a mutual acquaintance—and savior—of both Anri Sonohara and Mikado Ryuugamine: Celty Sturluson.
The troubles that surrounded Mikado and Masaomi seemed like too much for Anri herself to solve. And for one thing, she had no idea where the two of them even were at this moment.
So she didn’t want to make things worse for anyone, but she also really wanted someone to speak to. The first person who popped into her head was Celty.
But it was already late into the night. Society did not approve of two young women walking around on the streets at this hour, but Anri, at least, wasn’t worried about prowlers or delinquents bothering them. She harbored a weapon inside of her that no half
-hearted attacker could ever overcome.
Just because the girls were able to go around in search of a solution at this hour didn’t mean that Celty would be available at the drop of a hat, however. Anri felt that a sudden visit at the door in the middle of the night would be in poor taste, so she had at least tried calling on the way. But despite multiple attempts, she got no response from Celty, who was usually very prompt in responding, even in the middle of the night.
“Maybe she’s asleep already.”
“I suppose so… Oh!” Anri had a sudden epiphany and pulled out her phone again. “Maybe she’ll be in the chat room.”
“Chat room?”
“Yes…there’s one I use online. I actually interact with her more often there than by text messages.”
“I see. Then I’ll try contacting Masaomi. He didn’t answer yesterday, but maybe since it’s a new day, he’ll be in the mood to talk,” Saki suggested, opening her bag so she could get out her cell phone.
Most likely, Masaomi was avoiding talking to her in order to keep her at a safe distance from all the trouble, Anri thought, but there was still a greater-than-zero chance that he might pick up, so she let the other girl go ahead and glanced down at her own phone.
“Huh…?”
Her expression tightened.
“What’s the matter?” Saki asked. It was clear that something abnormal had happened. She paused, her thumb hovering over the buttons of her phone.
“Oh no…”
A woman calling herself Namie Yagiri was raging in the chat, throwing around Mikado’s and Anri’s names. For the moment, Anri’s mind went blank; she was unable to process what was happening.
Then Saki peered over her arm at the screen and said, “Hang on. Is the chat room you were talking about…the one that Kanra runs?”
“Huh?” Anri was startled to hear the name of the chat room’s moderator from Saki’s mouth. “Miss Mikajima, you’re familiar with this chat?!”
“Yeah. I go by the username Saki. And on that topic, Bacura is Masaomi.”
“…!”
It was all so sudden. Anri froze all over.
And though it was without malice of any kind, Saki made it worse by continuing, “Also, Kanra is Izaya Orihara… Did you know that before you joined?”
“…I…? …?! …Huh?”
Anri’s mouth opened and shut without anything to show for it. She couldn’t process this.
Not only was she unable to keep up with the string of revelations, the murmuring of Saika inside her was getting stronger and stronger.
Then, right as the dizziness was getting so bad that she might faint, Anri heard a familiar voice.
“Anri…?”
It was a voice she’d heard the other day, but at this moment, it felt old and nostalgic and comforting.
The voice of the girl who had always come to Anri’s aid when the bullies were picking on her in middle school. The friend who had accepted her on her side of the picture frame—and acknowledged the metaphor of the frame altogether. The bright and shining host whom she’d lived off when she thought of herself as a parasite.
Anri looked up, suspecting that she was just hearing things, and stared into a familiar face.
“Mika…Harima…?”
Normally, she would never expect to see this person at this hour, at this place.
Mika Harima rushed over to her old friend. “What’s the matter? What are you doing out so late…?” she asked, her voice loud and clear.
Anri stammered, “I…I wanted to talk to Celty about something… But what about you…?”
Mika Harima had been to this apartment before, too, to teach the group how to cook sagohachi-style pickled sandfish and other tricky dishes. They’d hunched around a hot pot together, so Anri knew that Mika was familiar with Celty and Shinra, but it was still abnormal to run across her in the middle of the night like this.
“Uh…some stuff happened, y’know? In fact, there’s stuff happening right at this moment, too…”
“?”
Anri gave Mika a quizzical look; it wasn’t a particularly helpful explanation. Just then, a group of people came into view over Mika’s shoulder.
“What the—? Is that Anri?”
“…Hey, it’s the Sonohara girl…”
“Don’t push it, Kadota!”
It was the van gang but without Karisawa present. That seemed ominous to Anri, but more worrisome than that was the paleness of Kadota’s face and the obvious pain with which he was walking.
Behind them, she could also see Seiji Yagiri, his arm over the shoulder of an older woman. He was unsteady on his feet, too, but unlike Kadota, he didn’t look pale or weak.
“…Oh, Sonohara. What’s up wi…ung…”
“Seiji! Don’t hurt yourself; the anesthetic hasn’t worn off yet! Forget about that girl possessed by the cursed blade!”
“Cursed…? What are you talking about, Sister…?”
Huh?
Yet again, Anri found confusion taking over. And to make things worse, the sickly-looking Kadota did his best to put on a brave face and told her, “You should get out of the area for a while.”
“Huh?”
“Remember that slasher who attacked you a while back? The one with the bloodshot eyes…”
“…!”
A nasty chill crawled over Anri’s skin. Not one of Saika’s murmurs but a feeling of fear from Anri herself.
Was it Haruna Niekawa, or Kasane Kujiragi, or the third party that Kujiragi said she would “sell” Saika to? Whoever it was, Anri was certain now that another slasher had appeared under Saika’s influence. She clutched her trembling fists.
And then Kadota added the devastating clincher:
“There’s some people around with their eyes all red like that slasher…but there’s tons of ’em.”
Ikebukuro—shopping district
“…What is this?”
Erika Karisawa hid in the darkness from the lights of the city, clutching her phone.
She was peering out at a major road from a narrow alley between two large buildings. And she was looking at a crowd of people.
It wasn’t as many as one would expect in the middle of the day, but it was still far too many for this hour of the night.
She’d seen this once before: a year and a half ago, when the Dollars held their first meetup. But the aura surrounding the people occupying the streets was not at all like that gathering.
They were all just loitering around, not going anywhere, standing still like automatons waiting for some order to fulfill.
And most alien of all—their eyes were a deep crimson, to the very last man.
Karisawa recalled the same event that Kadota did. The incident with the street slasher, half a year ago.
It was exactly how the slasher had looked, up until they’d hit him with Togusa’s van. It hadn’t been the end of it all, given that the Night of the Ripper had happened a few days later, when dozens of people were attacked at once. But even then, she hadn’t expected to see a return of that phenomenon out of nowhere.
“If I was gonna get lost in a two-dimensional situation, I’d have preferred a sports manga over a horror movie,” Karisawa grumbled, in characteristic fashion. The entire reason that she was here was because she’d gone looking for Kadota after he’d left the hospital without warning. It was by coincidence that she’d spotted this sight.
The group of red-eyed people approached the occasional ordinary pedestrian who passed by them and gave their victims a simple, easy scratch, like a zombie. The pedestrian would spin around at the pain, angry—but within a few seconds, their eyes would be just as bloodshot, and they would promptly join the group.
Karisawa herself had been watching from a distance, until a number of the red-eyed gang noticed her and began to approach, forcing her to run and hide where she stood now.
Yumasaki called her a couple of times while she was hiding, but she declined the calls, wary that answering the phone might draw atte
ntion by the noise and cause her to lose concentration.
“And a phone going off? That’s such a death omen,” she murmured to herself. That kind of monologuing sounded confident, but in fact, she was nearly trapped at the moment.
He did send a text message, however. It said, “Kadota’s fine. He’s saying either come to the black market doctor’s place or go home and hide.”
It was a relief to learn that Kadota was okay, but that meant the bigger question now was if she could actually safely escape this alley or not. Careful not to get too distracted, she typed back, “Kind of stuck right now. If anything happens, you can have my hard disc and doujinshi, Yumacchi.” Then she went back to watching the crowd for a chance to escape.
It looks like the people are getting scratched by their nails… I wonder if I’ll be a slasher, too, if they get me, Karisawa thought, remembering Anri.
The other girl, unlike this mob with their bloodshot eyes, actually glowed from her eye sockets when she swung her katana around. It seemed certain that there was some connection between them, though.
Maybe that was why she was being singled out by the slasher. But Karisawa didn’t mistrust or bear a grudge against Anri. She simply smiled sadly to herself.
Rather than being made one of the zombie horde, I’d rather get sliced clean with Anri’s katana, so I could be a katana wielder, too. Actually, I’d rather have a giant scythe instead. Just like Death.
Whether she simply felt no impending danger or was acting blithe to drown out her fear, Karisawa was still being utterly herself.
“What the…?”
A boy in an area not particularly close to Karisawa’s saw the gathering crowd and took out his phone. He was a Blue Squares member and was here scouting out the location of the “transaction” on Aoba’s orders.
“Hey, Aoba, is this a festival night?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a whole lotta people out at this hour.”
Durarara!!, Vol. 13 Page 3