That’s right. With this many people, I can handle a few cops or yakuza barging onto our turf.
A few days was all he needed. If he could maintain his power, he could patch things up with the Awakusu-kai and “produce” the culprit who killed Shizuo Heiwajima for the police.
Horada even considered pinning the pistol on Masaomi Kida and burying him in the mountains somewhere. He glanced at the gun in his hand, grinning madly.
Suddenly, a rustling came from the entrance.
Is it the cops already?!
Horada scrambled to his feet and made to give orders to Higa and his other pawns. But he stopped with shock when he saw who had arrived.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Standing at the entrance was the very boy he’d just sentenced to exile and death, panting and wiping away sweat.
Masaomi Kida looked from face to face until he quickly identified the figure at the center of the group. Once he had caught sight of Horada, he glared with all of his power.
“Huh? This makes no sense. I just told you you were fired, and you’ve got a death sentence tomorrow.”
“Which means…I’ve still got today!” Masaomi said quietly, a confident smile playing across his lips. “I don’t like this revolution you’re throwing. If I’m going to be treated like a traitor, I’d like to at least get my ass kicked by the old-school members who remember me…”
He surveyed the gathering of youths again and boldly opined, “What’s going on here? I barely recognize anyone in this mob.”
He didn’t see any of the members whose cell phones he’d tried to reach just a little while ago. Masaomi wasn’t stupid enough not to understand what that meant. The smile slowly faded off of his face, and his voice got deeper.
“Unless…you’re telling me…”
The few people he did recognize were all shuffling at the back, looking uncomfortable, while those who eagerly surrounded him up close were all unfamiliar. Horada, pleased with his tactical advantage, stayed right where he was seated in his chair, confidently looking down on Masaomi. “It’s strange; everyone who was against me taking over got ambushed last night and sent to the hospital for some reason. Their phones were busted and everything.”
A spiteful sneer spread over Horada’s face. He wasn’t even pretending to hide the truth anymore. “Ooh, ain’t that scary? Must be those Dollars at work again! Right, boys?”
He raised his hands, and the Yellow Scarves surrounding Masaomi laughed together.
“So…what’s your plan?”
“Huh? Well, first we’re gonna jump you… And then I suppose we’ll use you as bait to lure your little buddy out.”
“You son of a…”
“Hah! What an idiot. Maybe you thought you were coming to help your friend out, but all you really did was turn yourself into a hostage! Maybe I should try what Izumii did way back when! I’ll break your arms and legs and say, ‘Here’s your question!’”
Masaomi went still.
“What…did you just say?”
“Huh? I said I’m gonna use you to crush the boss of the Dollars! The real convenient part about how the Dollars work is that even the members don’t know who their boss is! So I can take over their information network; give whatever orders I want; and before they know it, they’ll all be my faithful pawns!”
“No, not that… Did you just say…Izumii?” Masaomi asked, eyes wide and fists clenched. Inside his head, he heard that crude voice and Saki’s screams over the phone.
Horada watched the change in Masaomi with glee and shouted happily, “Ha-ha! Oh yeah! After that, we’ve gotta think about all the bad deeds we’ve done as the Yellow Scarves! Maybe it’s time to change our image with a new team name and color. Maybe a nice pale blue…like the color of your face right now!”
“No…you…you can’t mean…,” Masaomi mumbled, his lips trembling.
“You finally figured it out? That’s right; everyone here,” Horada said, motioning to the crowd, “is your sworn enemy: the Blue Squares! Don’t bother to disparage us by calling us the ‘remnants’ of our old gang! After all, we sure managed to swallow the Yellow Scarves whole!”
“…”
“It’s sad, really… All we had to do was take off our blue gear and ask to join, and your pals accepted us all in as brothers. I was freaked a bit when you came back, but you didn’t notice a thing! I guess that’s all the Yellow Scarves meant to you in the first place. Ha-ha…hya-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
The crowd rolled with laughter to drown out Horada’s, until it was a giant wave of sound crashing against Masaomi.
He held his silence amid the overwhelming mockery. Eventually he raised his head and stared down Horada, Higa, and the others in a different way. Before, his expression was one of rage—but now, there was quiet determination and understanding.
Horada cackled at the difference in Masaomi’s demeanor and asked, “What’s up, then? You ready to get down and beg? Not that it’ll do you any good.”
“No… Actually, I feel relieved.”
“Ah? What?”
“I’m registered with the Dollars and a member of the Yellow Scarves,” Masaomi said mockingly, taking a step forward. “But I’ve been fired from the Scarves and can’t trust the Dollars. Now I’m just a flashy teenager.”
He took another step forward. Caution strengthened among the nearby youths. As they closed slightly on him, several of them went to lock the door so that Masaomi couldn’t escape.
But the frivolous-looking teen, with his brown hair and pierced ears, wasn’t bothered in the least. His voice was absolutely calm.
“That’s why I’m here.”
He took another step. And another.
“I’m just Masaomi Kida.”
As he took yet another step toward Horada, his words grew more and more powerful.
“That’s why…I’m here!”
Masaomi took another step—to protect those he cared about. No more reason than that.
With each quiet step, the tension in the crowd around him increased noticeably.
But the one truly feeling the pressure was Masaomi himself.
That’s right. This situation is my past.
The past I’ve been trying so hard to outrun somehow circled around ahead of me.
“You can’t escape it, no matter how you struggle. No matter where you go, the past will follow you. No matter how hard you try to forget, no matter if you die and let it all disappear, the past will always be right behind you, chasing you down. Chasing, chasing, chasing, chasing… Do you know why?”
As those words that he’d once heard in the hospital repeated inside his head, Masaomi saw a number of faces.
Anri, Mikado, Kadota, Yumasaki, Karisawa, Simon…
And Saki.
“Because it’s lonely. The past, memories, and outcomes are all very lonely things. They want a companion.”
Masaomi recalled those words of Izaya’s. He mumbled, “Now it’s my turn to chase my own past.”
“Wha—?”
“I hear the past is lonely—so I better catch up to it soon.”
“What the hell are you talkin’ about? Moron!”
Irritated that his former leader continued his fearless approach, Horada grabbed a crowbar from one of the boys near him and hurled it at Masaomi’s face.
Masaomi didn’t even try to dodge. The nail pry on the end of the crowbar hit him in the face. But he didn’t shy backward. He reached out and caught the bar as it fell to the ground. Blood streamed from his forehead down the side of his face, but he kept walking without wiping it.
“I didn’t come here expecting to be killed.”
Now the boy had a weapon in his hands. Horada felt a small note of unease at the sight—and it was he who had given him that weapon.
“I came here expecting to kill. You, in particular.”
The unease turned to fear.
Despite his advantage in age, despite his advantage in build, despite the presence of the d
eadly weapon on his side, despite the almost laughable amount of manpower at his disposal.
“I’ll say it as many times as it takes.”
With each step Masaomi took, a certain possibility grew larger within Horada.
“That’s why I’m here.”
Another step. And another step.
“And no one can deny that!”
Horada realized the nature of that possibility.
The very slight, extremely unlikely possibility that before he could have the boy beaten to a pulp, Masaomi might come and kill him first.
The instant he realized that, his unease changed into recognizable fear. A shriek emerged from Horada’s mouth in the form of an order.
“What are you guys doing?! Crush that idiot’s skull already!”
At the same time, the other boys, immobilized by the same anxiety as Horada, snapped into motion.
The violence of numbers bore down on Masaomi.
Apartment building, Shinjuku
Shingen inhaled the scent of the tea Namie offered him through his gas mask as he ran through the series of events.
“Well, after Miss Namie went on the run, Yagiri Pharmaceuticals was acquired by Nebula, if you recall. The company was independently investigating the trail of the head—well, of Namie—and I spotted her visiting your place from a variety of hotels. So as she was making her way here today, I used this model gun to convince her to let me in.”
“Should we call the police, Izaya?”
“Wouldn’t that cause trouble for you? A warrant based on my testimony produces a young woman’s head… It would be the newest sensation—forget about that old slasher. Perhaps I should engage in some self-orchestrated message board drama to heighten the anticipation.”
Izaya sipped his tea with a calm smile as Shingen went on at length about the ways in which he could sabotage them.
“Clearly Shinra got his twisted personality from you.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, my boy. Now show me the head.”
“What is his problem?” Namie asked, disgusted.
In contrast, Izaya was used to dealing with him, and he responded to Shingen in kind. “The only answer I can give you is no…but I’m curious as to what your response would be.”
“If I said this building might get invaded by a gang of armed robbers in the near future, what would you do?”
“Then, I’d say you shouldn’t have come here today. I could have this room spotless and empty by tomorrow morning,” Izaya answered the man twenty years his senior without a hint of intimidation.
“Ha-hah… I’m only joking. In all honesty, I don’t need the head back anytime soon.”
“Oh?”
“Our higher-ups at Nebula were more than a little shocked to see footage of Celty in action on TV. They determined that it might be better to research her body, rather than the head,” Shingen stated, all business. Namie found herself questioning his sanity.
Izaya was engaging Shingen in the conversation, weighing his statements, but his expression suggested that he wasn’t able to judge the other man’s intentions yet.
“Now I am on a mission to search for the location of the head. You seem to have a different approach to this head than we do. Under the ‘Valkyrie equals dullahan’ theory, you believe that placing the head into a certain type of power struggle will cause it to awaken on its own. A fascinating idea.”
“Oh…? I thought I got rid of all the bugs.”
“…I said that as a joke. Is it true? You’re really following such an obscure theory?”
“…”
It was extremely difficult to read the expression of a man wearing a joke of a gas mask to ascertain if he was serious or not. Izaya sighed in resignation and decided to explain his current strategy.
“I’m trying a number of things. If it comes down to it, I’ll just have to take it to a war-torn region, but I’d appreciate a cooperative response, if possible. Unlike you, I don’t have the facilities for proper scientific monitoring.”
“Ah… Well, test out whatever you wish. If you go through me, I can put our resources at your disposal…under our supervision, of course. To be honest, I am curious about your actions. No one else around me has considered experimenting from a mythological standpoint. And neither have I.”
“Well, thank you.” Izaya grimaced, sipped his tea, then regained his confident grin. He explained to Shingen, “As a matter of fact, I was really getting somewhere with this. I whipped up a number of gangs into an antagonistic frenzy to make them wipe each other out. And the people at the center of them were linked both by friendship and romance.”
“Ahh.”
“They were trapped by the whirlpool of violence—fated to fight, even as they cared for the others… And one of them is like Celty, a being slightly removed from this world.”
“Are you speaking…of Saika?” Shingen piped up excitedly. “Are you sure this wasn’t just your own desire, unrelated to experimenting on the head?”
“I won’t deny that.”
“So, when you say you were ‘getting somewhere,’ that implies that ultimately, you did not ‘get somewhere.’ What do you mean?” Shingen asked.
Izaya sighed confidently and replied, “I think you know what I mean.”
“Celty has gotten more involved with two of them than she needs to be.”
Ikebukuro
Once he returned to his apartment, Mikado decided to head for Anri’s place first.
He was preparing for the trip and feeling slightly apprehensive when he heard a whinny that he would never mistake for anything else.
“…Celty?”
The only possible explanation for the sound of a horse whinnying outside of his metropolitan apartment building was Celty’s black motorcycle. And if it was making that sound out front, it meant she had paid a visit to Mikado for something.
But…why now?
Despite his delight at the return of the “extraordinary” to his life, Mikado felt a pang of anxiety and doubt. Could it have something to do with Anri and Masaomi?
He threw open the door to his apartment, worry gnawing at his chest. Celty was standing at the door about to press the buzzer. She quickly yanked her hand away, looking guilty.
“Hi, Celty. What’s up…?” he said, greeting her with his usual happy smile. She held out her PDA apprehensively.
“I know this is a sudden question, but…do you love Anri Sonohara?”
“Huh…?”
What kind of question was that to ask completely out of the blue? Even worse, his apprehension about Anri was apparently proven true. Panic began to eat away at his heart for a number of reasons.
Mikado’s confusion was painfully apparent just from looking at his face. But before explaining things more thoroughly, she wanted to be sure of that one thing, while he was still ignorant of the rest.
So she threw him an even more pressing question.
“If you’re invested in her happiness…would you be able to reveal all of your secrets?”
Apartment building, Shinjuku
“I see… If they know someone as powerful and connected as Celty, that might be disastrous for the intractable warfare you desire.”
Shingen slurped his room-temperature tea through a straw stuck into the gap of his mask. The image was nothing short of a joke, but his manner was dead serious when he finished sucking down the tea.
“I have one piece of advice.”
“Oh?”
“If you want to mimic a war here in Tokyo to agitate Celty’s head—or soul—then perhaps rather than getting her involved with someone else’s battle…what if you used her body as the focal point, wreaking havoc on the surroundings instead?”
The suggestion was horrifically cruel and calculating. Izaya simply curled up a corner of his mouth and said, “That’s my plan.”
Shingen’s reaction to this proclamation was hidden from view by the gas mask. An eerie silence settled on the gloomy room. Izaya decided to break
it, though it didn’t particularly bother him. He launched into a further explanation of the incident he found himself involved with.
“Actually, this event is truly fascinating. These three people, so close to one another, each bore a terrible secret, and…through coincidence and a single act of malice—by me, of course—they were each informed of the others’ secret in nearly the ideal circumstances. Of course, it would have been truly monstrous if it had happened after the battle had gone to the point of no return.”
“The only monstrous thing here is you,” Namie muttered, but Izaya pretended not to hear.
Meanwhile, Shingen filed away what he had just heard. He announced his opinion on the matter with his usual flair. “I see. Malicious coincidence, overlapping and leading to more misunderstanding… It’s the kind of thing that happens so often in this world, it’s hard to call it ‘coincidence.’ You might call it human nature instead.”
As an unexpected part of that chain of coincidence whether he realized it or not, Shingen muttered a final statement from a lofty vantage point.
“Well, I believe I shall be going now…but remember one thing, information agent.”
“Which is?”
“The chains of coincidence do not only occur in the direction of misfortune.”
Interior, ruined factory
With a grunt, another Yellow Scarf—or perhaps he was really a Blue Square—collapsed next to Masaomi.
Over a dozen teens were already rolling around on the ground at his feet, clutching their arms, legs, or heads.
“Hey, he’s just one guy! What’s taking you so long?!”
At some point, Horada had gotten out of his chair and to his feet. He had the gun clutched in his hand, but he was taking a step backward, trying to put distance between him and the advancing Masaomi.
He was certain that when his companions closed in all at once, their victory was instantly assured. But that moment had passed, and Masaomi was still standing.
Naturally, he wasn’t unscathed. But all of the truly devastating blows were coming from him, not the other way around.
Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) Page 19