The Biter

by Reki Kawahara

  I’m going to forget. All of it. If the Jet Eyes want to fight the Ruby Eyes in secret, that’s fine. It’s not something I need to know.

  Murmuring this on the inside, he glanced at the watch on his left wrist. The sky was completely dark, but it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. When he got away from the Arakawa River and entered residential streets, he started to see teenagers on their way home from club meetings and salarymen carrying convenience store bags. The memory of having grappled with a fearsome monster with his life on the line just twenty or thirty minutes ago was gradually becoming surreal.

  I’m going to forget, Minoru muttered to himself again, pedaling his bike harder.

  6

  It was so cold that the joints in his extremities creaked. His whole face hurt as if it were scorched. Hunger twisted his insides. But with the energy of his boiling anger, Takaesu was able to silence those sensations.

  Nearly six hours had already gone by since he’d slipped into an abandoned building in the process of being demolished about two kilometers away from the park. After midnight passed, the date would change to Saturday, December 7, and there shouldn’t be construction either that day or the next. If he let his body rest here for two days, he should recover at least enough to be able to move again.

  On the first floor of the large abandoned building, which seemed to have been a warehouse originally, a frigid wind was blowing from all sides and the bare concrete floor was cold as ice. In place of a bed, he wrapped himself in dirty blue sheeting, nursing a bottle of juice that he had bought from a vending machine during his getaway.

  Usually he wouldn’t drink soft drinks with high fructose corn syrup even if someone asked him to, but he had no choice but to depend on one now. He couldn’t even go into a convenience store with his burned-up face, and after discovering that he was being pursued by that strange and dangerous bunch, he needed to lay low in this hiding place until he was able to operate as usual.

  He had to sleep and rest his body just a little bit. That’s what he thought, but when he made his thoughts a blank, a flame of rage would instantly start to flare up.

  “…Quiet now… Calm down…,” he whispered without moving his mouth.

  That’s when he decided to give up on sleep and at least do some quiet thinking.

  His long-awaited feast of bones had first been interrupted by the boy with the transparent shell. Then he had been attacked by the girl who could teleport. Although he had somehow managed to bite the girl’s stun baton in half, he had been unable to give either of them even a scratch and was forced to flee like some failure.

  In that situation, it was the best choice.

  Takaesu’s reasoning judged that to be true even now, but on an emotional level, it was impossible to accept. He had obtained the power of the strongest hunter, the shark. Wasn’t he the chosen one? Wasn’t he a proud predator who could bite through anything?

  No, it wasn’t as if I made some pitiful escape, not in the least.

  There were others apart from Takaesu who possessed the eye. The abilities bestowed by the eye varied widely. And there were people hunting those who possessed the eye, probably as an organization. Takaesu had simply given himself some distance for a moment to investigate all of this new information and rethink his plans. Like a man-eating shark slowly circling around its pitiful prey.

  Putting aside the boy, who seemed to be an acquaintance of the young girl he had so disappointingly missed out on biting, the teleporting girl had appeared to know from the start that Takaesu possessed the eye when she attacked him. But he didn’t understand how she had discovered where he was.

  If she had been tailing him the whole time, she should have attacked before he dragged the girl into the storage shed. And if she could use the power of the eye to track him, she likely would have appeared in this building a number of hours ago.

  If the tracking abilities of the girl or the girl’s companions were limited, they should be far away by now. But with his face like this, it would be difficult for Takaesu to even reach the hotel parking lot where he had his Maserati, let alone return to the hotel room he was renting in the new city center.

  If he only had the inflamed burns around his mouth, he probably could have covered them with a face mask or something. But his transformed shark’s jaws wouldn’t go back to normal, possibly because he’d taken intense electric shocks to the mouth. The fact that he’d been able to make it to this abandoned building without being questioned by passersby was already miraculously good luck.

  The reason he’d judged the teleporting girl to be a member of some kind of organization really came down to the effectiveness of that stun baton. The stun guns sold in military magazine advertisements and on the Internet often had taglines that jumped out at one about superhigh voltage products with tens of thousands of volts. They seemed to be extremely powerful, but in truth, what was dangerous for the human body was not voltage, but current—amperes.

  In stun guns that used transformers to increase battery voltage, the current strength fell proportionately to below one ampere. Although by appearances they sent bright sparks flying, they almost never caused serious damage to the body.

  But the stun baton that girl carried probably used a dedicated high-capacity battery, creating terrible burns in Takaesu’s mouth with high-ampere electricity. Naturally, something like that wasn’t openly sold in Japan.

  The only options were to import it from abroad or to buy something modified through illegal channels. No matter how one looked at it, it wasn’t something a simple high school girl could get her hands on just like that.

  The girl’s teleportation ability that allowed her to appear just when you thought she had disappeared was certainly notable, but it was actually that weapon that required attention. And that was because, put simply, there was some sort of organization backing the girl. In all likelihood, it was an extremely dangerous organization with multiple members who possessed the eye, and their goal was to eliminate others who had it, too.

  That’s right—dangerous.

  Even if Takaesu were surrounded by ten professional fighters it wouldn’t be much of a problem, but he couldn’t say the same for a group of people who possessed the eye. In reality, that girl had continued to narrowly escape his attacks—which were so fast that an average person wouldn’t be able to respond to them—and dealt Takaesu a severe blow. On top of having her physical abilities increased because of the eye, there was no doubt that she had also received some sort of combat training. If there had been just one more opponent like that, he probably would’ve been completely unable to escape.

  What would he do? What should he do?

  First, he had to get his wounds healed as quickly as possible and get away from this city.

  Then he would gather information. If possible, he would capture that girl or another member of her organization and get them to cough up as much information as they knew. After that, he would hunt them one by one. No matter how much time it took, he would continue to kill them until he alone was the chosen one.

  But before that…

  Momentarily forgetting the pain of his burns, Takaesu ground his teeth, which were still pointed like a tiger shark’s.

  Before that, just the boy—

  The boy, who had been the first to interrupt his meal, somehow seemed to be unrelated to the girl’s organization. The boy had been shocked when he looked at Takaesu’s transformed face, and he had come out with these innocent lines like, “Why would you kill someone?”

  Surely, Takaesu thought, he would be able to find at least one chance to attack the boy.

  He understood that the longer he stayed in the city the greater the danger became, but he just knew he wouldn’t be able to let the boy go. That was because that boy with his shell was the only one who could oppose Takaesu’s evolution head-on.

  The boy’s offensive power was far below that of the teleporting girl. Taking one punch had been Takaesu’s mistake, but the boy’s movements them
selves were that of an amateur. He could easily avoid them if he was careful.

  But the problem was his defensive power—the terrible hardness of that invisible shell.

  “…Grr…”

  Just remembering it drew a growl like that of a wild beast from his transformed mouth. The unbelievable hardness that had come across when Takaesu had tried to bite the boy’s neck through the shell remained deep in the roots of his teeth even now.

  It wasn’t at all like the feeling he got in his mouth when he bit something. No matter what the substance, things should at least bend when Takaesu bit them in his tiger-shark mode. But the boy’s armor didn’t communicate even a micron of sensation to his transformed senses.

  Three months ago, when the red eye had descended from the sky to slip into his lower jaw, Takaesu had finally put aside his dentures as real teeth grew in. He had been wild with joy.

  He crushed a tankard full of ice. He devoured hard salami. He bit through as many rock-solid biscotti as he wanted.

  The more hard things he ate, the stronger his new teeth became. When he became able to eat a T-bone steak, bones and all, Takaesu became aware of the privilege bestowed upon him. And that was to bite. To swim elegantly through the city at night hunting his prey like a superior being, like a predator, and savor delicious bones to his heart’s content.

  That was why he had to bite the boy. It made no difference that he possessed the eye. There couldn’t be any humans who Takaesu wasn’t able to bite. Next time, he would bite through that infuriating shell. To do that, he had to heal as soon as possible.

  He was a shark. He would be a shark.

  For fish, sharks boasted an extraordinary ability to survive. They had a strong resistance to disease, and they could recover even from deep wounds that would kill other fish right off the bat.

  Their life spans were long; one male great white shark was identified as being more than seventy years old.

  Burns like these would be nothing to a shark.

  Picturing himself lurking in the shadows of stones on the seafloor, Takaesu continued to concentrate on enduring the cold and the pain.

  There was no way he would be getting a good night’s sleep.

  Minoru was a light sleeper in the first place. That was because he had a habit of forcing himself awake if what he was dreaming took on even the slightest nightmarish cast.

  He knew his efforts were pointless. Because the easiest state to dream in was when your body was asleep and your brain was awake—so-called REM sleep—he should sleep deeply if he wanted to avoid dreaming. If he continued sleeping lightly, that alone would raise his chances of straying into a nightmare. Even knowing this, dreams were something he couldn’t control himself.

  With a sigh, Minoru groped around for the alarm clock on his headboard and got ahold of it, bringing it in front of him.

  It was one o’clock in the morning. Normally, he’d already be falling asleep at this time.

  Tomorrow—no, today—was Saturday, but Minoru’s high school had Saturday school every other week. Unfortunately, he would have to go to class today. Four hours later, he would need to wake up and do his morning run. He did feel like it would be okay to take the day off just for today, since he had experienced all those things, but messing up his daily routine was its own sort of annoyance.

  Putting the clock back, he burrowed into his warm blankets up to his head. He felt just a bit drowsy when he closed his eyelids, but the moment he was about to fall right to sleep, he got the feeling he had heard the faint howl of a beast. His eyes shot open. He had actually gotten out of bed, walked to the window, and smelled the outside air from the gap in the slightly opened window frame more than once or twice.

  He told himself over and over that there was no way the Biter knew where this house was, but doubts clung to him persistently—was that shark man lurking in the darkness on the street in front of Minoru, staring up at the window of his room?

  The existence of that man probably isn’t the only thing scaring me, he thought as he curled up in a little ball on his side.

  The events of last night were a sign that the peaceful life he had so desperately protected since coming to this city was going to crumble and fall. That was why he felt so uneasy.

  The collapse had probably been happening since the day that orb…the Third Eye slipped into his body. But Minoru had kept averting his eyes from reality and denying it until today. With a single phrase, “It doesn’t matter,” he had disregarded the abnormal improvement in his running time and even the mysterious phenomenon that had kept him from getting so much as a scratch when he was hit by the bike.

  But that girl Yumiko’s words had mercilessly smashed Minoru’s world, and it was starting to transform so much that it would never be able to go back to the way it had been.

  Is this power a weapon for fighting the Ruby Eyes who attack and kill people…? Are there people being targeted by monsters like that shark man at this very moment, and do I have a duty to protect them…?

  In bed, he gave his head a slight shake and tried to gloss over everything with a wry smile, but his tense mouth wouldn’t move.

  He was genuinely glad that Tomomi Minowa was safe after having been attacked by the Biter, or at least he thought he was. If his power had helped save her, that should make him happy.

  But ultimately, that feeling was just a fringe benefit. It came along with selfish relief that he had avoided seeing her ruthlessly murdered right before his eyes and that things ended without him creating unpleasant thoughts. When all was said and done, it was the same as when he had given the five-yen coin to the boy who was in trouble at the convenience store. If Tomomi had been a stranger whose name and face he didn’t know, even if she had been attacked and killed by the Biter without Minoru’s knowledge, he probably would’ve just thought that it was scary and felt bad for her.

  That’s right… I just need to protect the small world around me.

  Whoever Yumiko, DD, and the organization they belonged to wanted to fight, wherever they wanted to do it, and whoever they wanted to protect, it had nothing to do with him. They could just hurry up and catch the Biter, then kill him or give him the surgery.

  I’ve had enough.

  He’d had enough of people close to him dying, too. And of those gut-wrenching memories repeating and repeating. He’d had enough of everything.

  Suddenly, Minoru shot up in bed.

  “Not here. I’m not here. I’m not anywhere,” he cried in a low voice as if casting a spell.

  The muddy waters of his nearly overflowing memories changed course at the last second, plunging back down to the depths of his consciousness.

  It was dangerous for him to question himself in the dark any more than he already had. He would relive that night eight years ago, and it would take away his power to go on living. He couldn’t make another suicide attempt. For Norie—and for Wakaba.

  When he turned around and looked at the hand of the dimly lit clock, it had only advanced fifteen minutes.

  School was a half day, and he could probably make it through even if he stayed up all night. As far as his running—he would make it five kilometers. Giving up on sleep for the night, Minoru turned on his bedside reading light and pulled out at random one of the paperbacks he kept piled on his headboard.

  When he scratched gently around his mouth with his right hand, pieces of discolored skin flaked off.

  The pain from his burns had lessened quite a bit, but in its place he was now tormented by an intense itchiness. The desire to dig his nails in and scratch all over his face as hard as he could was unbearable.

  But this itchiness was proof that his wounds were healing. The burning pain he had felt in his joints and muscles every time he moved was now just a stinging stiffness. Takaesu could feel the eye buried in his lower jaw pulsing violently, attempting to restore the damaged areas with all its strength. If his recovery continued to progress like this, his burns would probably no longer stand out within a day.


  “…I’m counting on you, compagno,” Takaesu whispered in a hoarse voice, flopping down on the concrete floor.

  The price of this drastic metabolic activity was that his body kept expending massive amounts of energy. When he tried touching his stomach through his training wear, his fat, which had never been ample, seemed to have been almost completely stripped away.

  He had long ago passed the stage of hunger; he was now periodically struck by the sensation of an iron vise squeezing his gut. He had drunk the whole bottle of juice a while ago. He’d put an energy bar in his tool kit pack… The moment he thought this, he ended up imagining the flavor of chocolate and his gut ached powerfully and noticeably.

  When he gazed at the Panerai watch on his left wrist, it was barely two o’clock in the morning. Dawn was far away, and even if the sun did come up, his face still wasn’t healed enough for him to buy anything.

  Now, he felt like he could eat a mountain of overboiled fettuccine from a platter. Speaking of that, his article profiling that restaurant needed to be sent out by Monday. He’d left his computer in his hotel room, so he obviously wouldn’t be able to write the draft. He should probably at least send an e-mail to the editing department, but he had removed the battery from the smartphone in his pack so he wouldn’t be tracked using the signal. If he had the chance, he’d use a pay phone to inform them that the draft would be late…

  “…How ridiculous,” he murmured, giving a throaty laugh.

  He could discard his position as a gourmet food critic anytime. After all, even that was one of the curses that woman had placed on him.

  And still he was hungry.

  He’d drunk all of the juice, but there could still be a fraction of a drop left at the bottom of the bottle. Taking just his right hand out of the blue sheeting wrapped around his body, he searched for the bottle that should have been rolling around nearby.