He was baffled. He didn’t understand what Aoba meant.
Two seconds later, realization came to him, and he looked toward the entrance in a panic.
They were all staring at him.
“N-no, it’s not…”
“Listen up, boys!” Aoba yelled, cutting off Mikado’s protest. “Don’t let ’em lay a finger on our chief! Get ’em!”
“Rahh!” “Hell yeah!” “Die, bitch!” “Don’t mess with the Dollars!”
Emboldened by Aoba’s lead, the rest of the delinquents rushed headlong for the gang in leather jackets.
“Sounds good… Let’s just settle this once and for all!”
“Rahh! If you’re the guy leading these shitheads, then stay here and face off with me!”
Toramaru responded in kind and closed in on the younger boys.
“W-wait! Hang on!”
Mikado’s frantic cry could no longer rise above the fray.
One of the two people who actually heard him was Celty. The other was Aoba.
The younger boy spun around on his heel and wore his usual innocent, plucky smile for Mikado. “Okay, we’ll hold them off here, Chief!”
“Um, h-hey…”
Before Mikado could form a proper statement, someone behind him bellowed, “Die, you Dollars sons of bitches!”
“Uh…”
He spun around and saw a metal pipe being swung down at his face.
—!
Just as he was certain that it was going to strike him, a black hand shot out and caught the pipe.
“C-Celty!”
“Who the hell are y…? Whoa!!”
She tangled up the jacketed young man with her shadow and tossed him aside so that she could show Mikado her PDA screen.
“I know you won’t be happy about it, but we should just scram for now. This misunderstanding will be difficult to clear up.”
“B-but…”
She plucked Mikado off the ground before he could say anything and carried him through the window to the outside. Once there, she hopped directly onto Shooter, affixed Mikado to her back with shadow, and took off.
“Damn! Don’t let them get away!” shouted the jacketed men inside the building, but Celty charged onward. She typed up a message for Mikado behind her.
“Let’s just head for your meeting place with Anri now. We’ll keep you two safe at our apartment until this all blows over.”
“…”
Mikado had no response to the message.
He’s probably not happy about that, Celty figured. Knowing his personality, she thought the order to stay in the dark and hide would not be welcome. But she didn’t have the time to hear out his argument or wishes.
She had another enemy to fight, one separate from all this chaos.
In the end, Celty never noticed the presence of her observers.
Amid the chaos, she never recognized that a transmitter had been placed on her motorcycle.
Perhaps Shooter had tried to alert her to it in his own way but ultimately prioritized getting his master away from the dangerous, unpredictable scene first.
Celty raced down the road to get away from the factory building, completely forgetting about those who had attacked her.
Without realizing that more chaos awaited at her destination.
Roof, building next to the factory
Once the Black Rider was out of sight, Vorona looked at her cell phone and nodded with satisfaction. “Transmitter is in operation. Now Black Rider’s location is trackable. Happily ever after.”
“So now we just sleep until the rider goes back home?”
“Slon is foolish, confirmed. We return, negative. Like us, rider will detect transmitter. If thrown onto long-distance truck, we earn backbreaking journey and loss of assets. Too bad, so sad. Naturally, to avoid outcome, we pursue immediately,” Vorona replied, uncharacteristically harsh.
Slon shrugged. “Fine, fine. Strange to see you so fired up about this; you don’t get that excited for our normal jobs.”
“Half work, half interest. I fulfill my desires. I also receive payment. No problem. Another attractive day on this planet.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but when your attractive mouth says the planet is attractive, it must be a real beauty, indeed.”
The two “professionals” headed down the stairs, bantering in a decidedly amateur fashion.
“Still, I didn’t think the rider would fall for our bait so easily. I guess that monster’s pretty careless after all.”
“Affirmative. But denial that opponent is simple. None assume a bear falling into trap is stupid prey, challenge bear to fight. It is like laughing at stupidity of butterfly to get caught in spider’s web.”
“…Oh! That reminds me… Speaking of spiders, how come they never get stuck in their own webs? I’m so ensnared in this mystery that I can barely take another step.”
Even now, with business at hand, Slon couldn’t help but wonder. Vorona did not reply with exasperation or disgust. She simply rattled off the answer mechanically.
“Spider. Utilizes two types of thread. Easy to test by touching. Central threads absent of adhesion. Extending threads in all directions also absent of adhesion. Only spiral threads traveling around center capture prey. The end.”
“But when they’re wrapping up their prey, wouldn’t the threads tangle them up, too?”
“Spider secretes special material from body. Material negates adhesion. Provides resistance to stickiness. So even clinging thread can be touched to a degree. Happily ever after,” she concluded, racing down the stairs at full speed.
Slon nodded with a beaming, satisfied smile. “I see! So if you were the spider, I would be the secretion. Only together can we bring in our target.”
“Choice of metaphor doubtful. Me, secrete Slon. Denial on account of extreme displeasure. Erasure of your existence desired.”
“…I’m going to pray that your lack of Japanese experience is making that sound harsher than intended.”
Right as their conversation finished, so did the stairs, dumping them out into the space in front of the factory. Several motorcycles were racing out of the factory building onto the street at that moment. Meanwhile, the ruckus was continuing inside, suggesting that the gang had split into two groups, with one staying behind and the other chasing after Celty.
“…That reminds me. There was a kid on the rear seat of the Black Rider’s bike.”
“Affirmative.”
Being unfamiliar with the visual aging of Japanese people, the pair probably assumed that baby-faced Mikado was as young as an elementary school child.
Vorona headed to her newly procured motorcycle and answered, “Possible that it intends to use him as food supply.”
“Are you just completely making this up?”
“Affirmative. Monster does not exist in my book knowledge. No meaning to imagining its actions. Truth is hidden in darkness until confirmed with my own eye,” she said in cryptically broken Japanese.
Vorona straddled her bike with a tinge of excitement, strapped on her helmet, and muttered, “I have hope…that you find a way to please me, black, mysterious monster.”
Several minutes later, Ikefukuro, Ikebukuro Station east gate
There are certain spots that young people in Ikebukuro use as meetup locations.
Around the train station, the most notable are the underground “prism garden” at the fountain under the Metropolitan exit or the statue at the east gate known as the Ikefukuro.
Both spots are accessible even when it’s rainy, which makes them useful and typical meeting spots for walking around Ikebukuro.
The Ikefukuro is a punny owl (fukuro) statue that, like the statue of the faithful dog Hachi, serves as an easy, identifiable meeting place.
Right in front of the owl, a girl wearing round glasses was speaking to a little girl five or six years her junior.
“We’re going to meet up with a boy named Aoba. He should be here any moment now.”
Akane looked totally healthy now, with no signs that she had recently been ill. Anri found that change reassuring, but a part of her was still nervous.
I wonder what it was that came up all of a sudden for Mikado.
After Aoba sent her a text message, she had decided to wait here, but she couldn’t dispel the strange nerves that plagued her.
Was that “business for another day” that he’d mentioned yesterday happening today? Usually if he had a message for her, he’d just text her directly. So the secondhand message was concerning. Could something bad be happening to him now?
Her own experience last night, when the foreign attacker nearly slashed her across the stomach, cast Mikado’s strange behavior into a darker light.
What if…something happened to him because of me…?
She wanted to believe that it was just a sudden, harmless thing that popped up for him. But maybe the attackers from last night had identified Mikado as someone close to her.
And not just him. They might pose a threat to other people she knew like Mika Harima, Masaomi Kida, Seiji Yagiri, or her other classmates.
After all, she didn’t know a thing about the purpose or identity of the attackers. There was no saying what could happen.
She tried sending a message to Mikado’s phone, but he hadn’t responded yet. She considered calling him, but she didn’t want to be a bother if his reason for skipping out was legitimate.
So she decided that it was best to wait for Aoba to arrive and explain in detail—except that the memory of the glinting scissors from last night set her shivering.
Not because she was reliving the instant that a deadly weapon was turned on her. The shivers were coming from imagining if it was turned on Mikado or her other friends.
What would I do…if that happened…?
She put up a stoic exterior, but she could sense the fear and anger swirling on the inside. Yet ultimately, Anri was able to keep herself at bay from the waves of emotion, capturing these events as part of the “world inside the painting frame.”
The same way that people watching a movie might be affected by anger or fear, but very few actually screamed and ran out of the theater or leaped to their feet and yelled, “Go to hell!”
Meanwhile, Saika’s cursed words echoed on and on like always within her.
I love you.
Those simple words, chanted and sung, a hundred, thousand, million times—the eerie monster sword that droned through her.
A simple “I love you” on its own could be considered trite and shallow. But even the shallowest words take on a shining luster if repeated for eternity. Whether that shine is sinister or sacred is a different matter entirely—but Anri was incredibly jealous of the cursed blade for being able to say those words proudly.
While she was frustrated with herself for not being able to banish all her fear and anger to the other side of the frame, Anri was still more concerned about Mikado and Celty being chased around by those mystery attackers than for her own safety.
So she quietly waited for Aoba to arrive, letting none of this show on her face.
“Oh, Sonohara. What’s up?”
“…Ah, Kamichika…”
It was one of Anri’s classmates. The girl was with a group of friends who were chatting as they waited a short distance away.
She was similar to Anri in her reserved plainness, but they were neither good friends nor distant acquaintances. Since they didn’t interact regularly, it was hard to know what to say, and an uncomfortable shadow lurked between them.
“Um, is that your sister?”
“Oh no, just a girl I know… What about you, Kamichika?”
“Um, some of my friends from middle school arrived here yesterday, so I’m showing them around the area. We were just over at the west gate, and now we’re heading for Sunshine.”
“Ah, I see.”
A pause settled over the stilted conversation. In order to ease the discomfort, Anri’s classmate, Rio Kamichika, noted, “Oh, right. If you’re walking around today, you should watch out. It seems like there are street delinquents starting fights all over the place.”
“Fights?”
“The Dollars are fighting with some motorcycle gang from somewhere…”
“…”
Anri’s mind reacted to the word Dollars.
“I see. We’ll be careful.”
But her flesh body, trapped inside the frame, merely replied in a flat affect with no other visible emotion.
Just as a third awkward pause threatened to intrude, one of Rio’s friends approached and tugged on her sleeve. “Come on, Rio, I’m hungry. If she’s your friend, why don’t you invite her along to eat?”
“Sorry, Non, I’m coming! So, um, what are you doing next…?”
“Oh, actually, I’m meeting someone here…”
“Ah, okay. Well, um, I’ll…see you at school,” her classmate said, smiling uncomfortably as she left.
Anri watched her go, then lamented, I’ve got to learn to be more social…
She had volunteered to be the class representative in the hopes of changing her normally passive self. But she didn’t seem to be much different now than when she was bullied for being a thorn in Mika’s side.
Eventually her mind wandered to the topic of the Dollars. She knew that Mikado had some kind of connection to the Dollars—and possibly a deep one. But she had never asked him about it directly. He’d seen her with a katana in her hand, but he wasn’t asking her about it, either.
Perhaps there was a meaning to waiting until Masaomi Kida came back, so the three could talk in earnest. Anri longed for that moment and feared it.
She was afraid that if they all learned one another’s truths, their relationship would break down. You might say it already had, given that Masaomi was no longer around—but Anri wanted to believe.
She wanted to think that if the other two could actually accept Saika, her abnormality, that she might learn to forge human connections in a way she never had before.
Perhaps that was overly optimistic and convenient to her own needs, but she clung to that hope.
At the same time, she made a decision.
That she would accept Mikado and Masaomi, no matter what darkness they possessed within. She would not gaze at them within the frame, but bring them inside with her, understand them as they truly were.
It was this hope she kept in mind as she waited for Aoba to show up.
She wanted the peace of mind of knowing that Mikado was safe, of finding out the nature of his sudden business.
But what she actually saw was a group of unfamiliar men in suits.
“Miss Akane.”
There were three of them. They were oddly imposing, and despite being in a particularly crowded part of the train station on a holiday, the people around them naturally found a way to give them space.
The first one of them to speak addressed not Anri, but the little girl holding her hand.
“!”
Akane stared back at them with a look of shock plastered on her face.
Not fear—pure surprise.
“We’ve been looking all over for you. Come along, please.”
“H-how did you…?” Akane stammered, faltering back a step. A firm hand grabbed her shoulder.
She spun around to see another man in a suit, looking down at her in consternation. “Please behave now, miss.”
“S-stop! Let go, or I’ll scream that you’re kidnapping me!”
“You want to call the police and explain the situation? We can do that if you want, but it’ll cause more trouble for you than us, Miss Akane.”
“Ah…” She was at a loss for words.
“?”
The only one with a question mark plastered over her head was Anri. “Um, excuse me…”
“Are you the young lady Dr. Kishitani mentioned?”
&
nbsp; “Uh…”
“We’re sorry about this. I understand you’ve been caring for Miss Akane. We will take her from here.”
None of it made sense. Dr. Kishitani was probably the doctor-looking man who lived with Celty. She always referred to him as Shinra, but Anri could remember seeing the nameplate on the apartment saying SHINRA KISHITANI.
So was it thanks to him that these men were here?
None of them seemed to be Akane’s father. And the fact that there were several of them ruled that out. But it also didn’t seem like a kidnapping. They weren’t hostile at all—in fact, they seemed very respectful of the little girl.
Altogether, Anri believed they were here to take the runaway back home. But she still didn’t know who these men were.
“Um, excuse me, are you relatives of hers…?” she asked hesitantly, trying to be as pleasant as possible.
One of the men considered this question for a moment, then muttered, “Well…we’re not actually related, but given that she’s the old man’s granddaughter, she might as well be family to us…”
This vague explanation only confused Anri further.
Wait, so if she’s the granddaughter of their “old man,” meaning “father”…then that would make Akane their daughter or niece. But she’s not family, so she’s not a daughter. So that would make them…her distant uncles…?
Yet the obvious variation in age and facial features among the men didn’t make this clear, either. Anri was totally at a loss for how to proceed, so she decided to ask further about Akane’s situation—when a source of even greater confusion arrived.
“Sonohara!”
“M-Mikado! And Celty?!”
Rushing down the stairs toward Ikefukuro from the surface was an out-of-breath Mikado and the always eye-catching Celty.
“I—I thought you were busy today. And what about Aoba…?”
“I’ll explain later! And—”
Mikado stopped himself midsentence. There were four men standing beside her, looking tense, and surrounding the little girl holding Anri’s hand.
—?!
Based on their ages, the men seemed unlikely to have any connection to Toramaru, but Mikado couldn’t help but get immediately nervous, given the situation.
What if he had already gotten Anri into trouble on his account? He glanced at her, then at Celty. But Celty was frozen just like he was.
Durarara!!, Vol. 6 Page 6