Durarara!!, Vol. 13

by Ryohgo Narita

  “Oh, so you finally brought out someone worth my time. That’s much better.”

  But those two were not the only ones in his way. Suddenly the guys sitting on their bikes began to pull out their phones. While the engine noise largely drowned it out, Chikage could faintly hear their ringtones going off.

  “…Is that a notification of a mass text message?”

  “Well sleuthed. I just sent them a very short, simple instruction.”

  The bikers got down off their vehicles and turned vicious expressions toward Chikage. In the face of this malevolent aura, Aoba told Chikage what the rest of the group already knew.

  “Chikage Rokujou is the enemy of the Dollars.”

  Outside Russia Sushi

  “…Looks like something’s happening. They’re taking out phones… So are we assuming that one guy in the ski mask is Mikado? Whatever the case, he seems to be the leader,” Nasujima said to Haruna with a leer. They were watching the scene in front of Tokyu Hands. “If it turns into a brawl, we’re gonna have our people rush them all.”

  “Yes…Mother.”

  Inside Russia Sushi

  “Is it just me, or are the motorcycles really loud outside?” Tom wondered, his face gaunt with exhaustion. “Anyway, if we’re desperate enough, I think we can jump from the roof here to the ramen place next door…but I don’t think it gives us a way out of this mess—it only traps us in a different place instead.”

  “Oh, if pull no good, try push instead. You get discouraged, make hungry,” Simon advised as he and Denis checked on some kind of equipment.

  Tom didn’t ask what it was for, and he was planning to pretend he never saw it, if necessary. But then Denis said to him, “We were unlucky. If Shizuo were here, he coulda flattened all those folks outside by himself.”

  “You might be right, but I’m also glad that’s not the case.”

  “Oh?”

  “If you take Mr. Kine’s word, that’s all just some kind of fancy hypnotism, right? It’s one thing for people to pick a fight with him and earn what’s coming to them, but I can’t let him go around smashing ordinary folks who can’t control themselves.” Tom sighed.

  Kine broke his silence to say, “Is that all you want in life? You get a guy like that on your side, you could conquer this city.”

  “You’ve got the wrong idea about me. Shizuo’s an underclassman from our middle school days, and now he’s a coworker,” said Tom, stretching. There was a lonely look in his eyes. “Shizuo looks so sad when he’s raging the way he does, but I can’t even join in the carnage with him, much less stop him… It’s not much to be proud of.”

  The rooftop of a mixed-used building

  “Well, let’s see.”

  After Mikado asked him what he was going to do, Masaomi was silent for a while, clenching his fists.

  “I couldn’t do anything for you. And I guess even talking about doing things to help you is kind of condescending, huh?”

  Masaomi took a step closer to the gun. Mikado’s hand twitched. But Masaomi did not stop his forward progress across the rooftop.

  “I might not be that smart. I’m a coward. It’s pathetic to admit it, but the only thing I’m good at is fighting, to some extent…”

  There were two firm acts of determination in Masaomi’s mind.

  One was the determination to risk his life, like he did when he stood up to Horada. Not to throw his life away but to make his friend wake up.

  The other was the determination to be his best friend’s enemy—again, in order to wake him up to the truth.

  “So the least I can do is fight you,” Masaomi said with a smile, just like he did as a child. “If you wanna go crazy, I won’t stop you. But I can choose to go crazy, too.”

  “Masaomi…”

  “I’m gonna drag you, kicking and screaming, back into the ordinary life you hate so much.”

  There was no hesitation in his eyes anymore.

  “I’m gonna punch you, I’m gonna make you cry, and I’m gonna force you to remember.”

  Masaomi spoke forcefully, projecting his will, such that even if his friend had truly become something no longer human, he would deny that and will it out of existence.

  “You are not an urban legend like the Headless Rider. You’re just a guy named Mikado Ryuugamine…a normal, scrawny human being who tries to do right by everybody!”

  For a moment, Mikado’s expression vanished from shock. Then tears began to pool in his eyes.

  “You’re so strong, Masaomi.”

  “…”

  “I was always jealous of that. It’s why I really wanted to beat you,” he said, summoning up not hatred from the pit of his stomach but envy. “It’s why, no matter what I have to do, no matter what names people call me…”

  With a look of respect for his childhood friend, Mikado put his finger against the trigger of the gun.

  “…I will deny your words with all my strength.”

  And a few seconds later, the dry pop of a gunshot expanded into the sky over Ikebukuro.

  Outside of Tokyu Hands

  The sound of a gunshot from above reached the street in front of Tokyu Hands.

  “What was that?”

  Everyone present looked around for the source of the unfamiliar burst, but no one found it. The closest were a few bikers, who muttered that they heard it from up above, subsequently gazing at the expressway, the Amlux building, and the Sunshine building in turn.

  That was when they finally realized that the night sky was colored an abnormally dark black.

  The top of the soaring Sunshine building, in fact, seemed to be shrouded in some kind of black fog, completely hiding it from view.

  “Hey, what’s that…?”

  The murmuring among the crowd began to spread, until it all came to an abrupt stop some fifteen seconds later.

  A dark shadow suddenly raced through the group of men.

  “?!”

  The shadow leaped and bounced off motorcycle and car alike from roof to hood, easily speeding its way through the densely packed crowd of bikers and thugs.

  “Hey!” shouted one of the bikers whose motorcycle had been used as a stepping-stone, furiously following the shadow with his eyes. “What the hell? Kill that—”

  But before he could finish ordering his friends, his voice caught in his throat.

  He’d heard the sound of ugly, unpleasant scraping behind him.

  It was so abnormal that the bikers spun around, wondering what it was.

  And when they saw what the man back there was dragging around, they lost the ability to speak.

  “Hey, did you hear something?” Chikage demanded, shoulders heaving as he breathed, but no one responded.

  He was like a solitary island in the sea of bikers and Blue Squares around him. Even then, he challenged his foes, not backing down from the fight.

  “Hah… Ain’t that a mystery. Up against every last one of you, and I don’t feel scared in the least.”

  “Don’t try to play tough with us, Rokujou! You’re done for!” yelled one of the senior members of the rival Gozumezu Guns, but Chikage wasn’t bothered by it.

  “I’ll be honest,” he taunted. “I felt a lot more presence when I fought this guy who was as tough as a kaiju, about three months ago…”

  But he trailed off. The black shadow was racing toward Chikage, rushing over the heads of the other men. It was a man dressed in black.

  “…Who’s that?” Chikage wondered, appraising the injured man. That man just grinned at him and surveyed the situation.

  “…More people than I expected,” he said. Then he noticed the crowds of red-eyed people and added, “Half of them possessed by Saika. Whatever. That suits me fine.”

  And with that little brag out of the way, he looked toward Otowa Street.

  When Aoba saw the man, he clenched his jaws.

  “Izaya…Orihara!” the boy snarled.

  Just at that moment, an enormous mass leaped over the heads of the stunne
d bikers and flew toward Izaya.

  When they recognized it as one of the motorcycles parked right in the middle of the street, even the Saika-possessed were quick to back away.

  The vehicle crashed explosively against the street and slid over its surface, bits and pieces spraying off it. Izaya dodged the projectile by a tiny margin and stood in the middle of the space that had opened up in the crowd. There he awaited the monster.

  Everyone present turned in the direction from which the vehicle flew and instantly cleared the path.

  “Ah!” Chikage gasped.

  Walking down the newly created space toward him, exuding dozens of times more intimidation than the crowd of a hundred-plus bikers, was a man in a bartender’s outfit.

  “It’s you, Heiwajima!”

  Then he turned to Aoba with a bitter smirk.

  “Wait, is that guy the one you called in to help?”

  “No. He’s…not in the Dollars anymore.”

  “Wha…?” Chikage drawled.

  Under his ski mask, Aoba’s face was devoid of expression.

  “In fact, I think him leaving the Dollars was one of the reasons that Mr. Mikado broke down.”

  After Shizuo threw the bike he had been dragging along one-handed, he continued his steady pace toward Izaya. But the other man did not attempt to leave the scene.

  It was almost as though he had been hoping to lure him here from the start.

  While Masaomi challenged Mikado, who wanted to be an urban legend, Izaya Orihara was challenging an established legend in the flesh.

  Izaya pulled out his most trusted weapon, a large folding knife, signaling that all the little tricks were over now.

  “Shall we begin?”

  Despite being in the same circumstances as Masaomi, Izaya gripped his weapon for almost the exact opposite purpose.

  He wanted to carve into the world the fact that Shizuo, who tried to be human, was truly a hideous monster.

  Inside the van

  “Did you hear something earlier?” Anri asked with concern.

  In the passenger seat, Kadota replied, “Yeah, it sounded like a gunshot.”

  “C’mon, man… Don’t try to scare me like that…,” Togusa griped, his cheek twitching.

  Next to him, Anri looked at the sky through the window. Then she noticed it, too:

  The sky over Ikebukuro was covered in an abnormal darkness. When she detected the oppressive darkness surrounding the top of the Sunshine building, she couldn’t help opening her mouth—to speak the name of the creature she trusted most.

  “Is that…Celty?”

  In time, they gathered.

  In the place where the Dollars began.

  To bring the Dollars to their end.

  And almost as if retracing the very steps of that first in-person meetup, a woman cloaked in black shadow began to wriggle and writhe. Unlike at that meetup, however, she was riding a headless horse rather than a motorcycle.

  As well, rather than racing down the side of the Tokyu Hands building, she started from the roof of the Sunshine building, the tallest in Ikebukuro.

  What was once the Headless Rider was now in true, complete dullahan form.

  And so she descended into Ikebukuro once again.

  She would display to the city the change that had come over her.

  Chat room

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  The chat room is currently empty.

  The chat room is currently empty.

  The chat room is currently empty.

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  Final Chapter: Greener Pastures Wherever You Go

  Ikebukuro—in the past

  A ship rocked on the waves as it made its long voyage to Japan.

  When he wandered into the dark, afraid, the boy encountered “her.”

  But his fear eventually turned to trust—and trust into love.

  Then he mustered his everything to protect that love and asked a question.

  “Hey, Celty, when you find your head, will you be going back home?”

  Shinra was only six years old. Celty responded to him by writing on a piece of paper.

  “That’s right.”

  “I want to go with you.”

  “…? That’s nonsense.”

  “Then I don’t want you to go,” Shinra whined.

  Put off by this, Celty scrawled, “I am not your toy.”

  “I know. I don’t care if I never see my toys again.”

  “Apologize to the toy makers.”

  “I’m sorry,” little Shinra said dutifully, bowing to some unseen, imaginary toy factory.

  Celty noted to herself that this must simply be how children acted. She wrote, “Why do you want to be with me?”

  “…Because we’re family,” Shinra said. That made sense to her.

  The boy hadn’t had a mother around. Perhaps he felt some kind of motherly nurture from her presence. But if she was his example of what constituted “motherly,” he was likely to grow up warped somehow.

  “Listen to me, Shinra. I’m not human. I can’t be your family.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” she repeated, then paused her writing.

  “I can talk with you like this, Celty. We live in the same place. Or do you think we can’t be in the same family because you’re not rejistered in the household sertifikit or the sensus?”

  “Those are some very big words, you know.”

  Celty thought it over and answered him very carefully.

  “I am too different from human beings. If you live with me long enough, you will dislike me.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It’s true,” she said, trying to distance herself from him.

  Shinra fidgeted. “Then…if I don’t get tired of you, will you promise to stay here?”

  “If that’s true, I’ll consider it.”

  She wasn’t entirely accustomed to human society yet, but over the last two years, Celty had learned much from news, television shows, manga, and other channels of contemporary Japanese culture.

  She recalled a news segment where they’d said, “Unlike pairings of childhood friends in fiction, they rarely go on to a romantic relationship in real life.” She assumed that Shinra was simply being a child and would grow out of it.

  If he sees my face every day, he’ll get tired of me eventually. Or…sees everything but my face, I suppose.

  She added the last part as a self-effacing joke, but as a matter of fact, it was a crucial piece of information.

  He couldn’t see her face, hear her voice, or read her expressions. And perhaps it was this fact of life that helped Shinra hold tight to his affection for her over all those years, without growing tired of her.

  To Shinra, Celty Sturluson was like a blank canvas. Bit by tiny bit, he learned what expressions she made and what elicited her happy smile, and he sketched it out onto that canvas.

  After about ten years had passed, Celty had a firm image within Shinra. It was the result of seeking out her true face, not of pushing his own hopes and ideals onto her.

  And perhaps that was why he was still madly in love with her now.

  No matter what obstacles might exist between the two of them.

  Ikebukuro—alleyway

  On a street heading toward Sunshine City from the opposite side as the shopping district, a man and woman ran into each other.

  But it was not by any means a coincidence.

  “…I’m surprised. You overcame Saika’s curse in quite a short amount of time,” said Kujiragi, who looked anything but surprised—and yet there was a faint note of it in her voice.

  Standing across from her was Shinra Kishitani. Right about the time that he had identified Celty’s location, he spotted a vending machine soaring through the city. Manami surmised that the vending machine was heading toward where they would find Izaya and ran after it.

  Meanwhile, Shinra passed down streets with signs of de
struction here and there on the way to Sunshine City.

  And in the midst of that trip, Kujiragi—also chasing after Shizuo and Izaya—sensed the presence of his Saika.

  “Let’s see, it was…Kasane Kujiragi, right?” Shinra asked apologetically, his eyes bloodshot.

  “…Yes.”

  “Do you have time to talk? Or would that just end up with you cutting me and kidnapping me again?” Shinra wondered.

  Kujiragi shook her head. “No, I no longer have any reason to abduct you against your will,” she said, staring into Shinra’s red eyes. “I judge that any emotion that cannot be ruled by Saika will not be swayed by simple pain or brainwashing.”

  “I’m glad. I was worried you might say something like ‘If I can’t have you, then I’ll kill you.’”

  “No. I am not actually that enamored of you.” Kujiragi walked toward Shinra and explained, “But…it is true that I have an interest in you. If I had to describe it, I would surmise that perhaps I am jealous.”

  “Jealous…?”

  “As a part of my research into Celty Sturluson, I also examined you, her domestic partner. As a human who was in love with an inhuman creature.”

  “No mistake there,” Shinra said bashfully.

  “I actually did not believe it at first,” she admitted. “I thought that you were acting out affection for Celty Sturluson on Shingen Kishitani’s orders, in order to keep her and the valuable research she might represent close at hand.”

  “…”

  “But the more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that your feelings were genuine,” Kujiragi said. She closed her eyes and continued, her voice a monotone: “I, too, have the blood of the inhuman within me, and I have no memory of ever receiving true love from another. Even my actual mother, an entirely nonhuman being, practically abandoned me to survive on my own.”

  Despite her admission that she was all but nonhuman herself, Shinra said nothing. He was, of course, well aware that she was no ordinary human being.