And with that, the woman drew back the hands holding the pruning shears—and plunged them directly toward Anri’s soft belly.
A few seconds earlier, driver’s seat of the truck
Honestly, if they needed some normal girl roughed up, they couldn’t have asked any local ruffian? Why did they need us to do this? wondered Slon as he sat in the driver’s seat of the truck, looking at the picture of their target.
Of course, you never know if some local idiot would get carried away and kill her, and if a man did it, there’s always the possibility for danger of a different kind… Maybe having Vorona do this was the right call after all.
He sat back in his seat with the engine idling and his thoughts equally idle, when…
He heard something odd mixed in with the sound of the engine.
“…? Thought I just heard something.”
At first, he was ready to dismiss the distant noise as irrelevant.
But he found that he couldn’t ignore it. The sound he’d just heard was the kind of thing he knew he shouldn’t hear right smack in the middle of Tokyo.
That sound…
Slon’s eardrums throbbed again with the same vibration.
I knew it.
Certain that he hadn’t misheard it now only made the question loom larger.
Why is there a horse whinnying in the middle of the city?
It was the fierce, eerie sound of a horse crying out.
Was there a racetrack or a stable around somewhere? He decided that had to be the answer, but it was still an odd thing to hear in such an urban environment.
If this were New York, he could assume that it was a police horse. But he’d never heard of such a thing being used in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.
And for another thing, this particular whinny was creepier and more “emotional” than any Slon had heard before.
What is it? Is that really a horse?
Just as his curiosity started turning into unease, he realized another unsettling fact.
The sound was steadily approaching.
…?
Sweat began to bloom on his back. Alarms blared inside his head.
Normally, it might be the sort of problem he could safely ignore. But his vast experience working for Lingerin the arms dealer gave him keen instincts, and those instincts were screaming danger. It was the same feeling he had when Lingerin pissed off that private security firm run by ex-Spetsnaz.
What is it…? What’s coming this way?
Slon held his breath, glancing nervously into the rearview mirror.
And he saw…
A motorcycle even blacker than the black of night.
And sitting atop it, an abnormal figure holding an enormous scythe.
Meanwhile, Anri’s apartment
The whinnying of the horse approached.
Vorona felt something alien in that sound, but any thought she might have devoted to it was absorbed in a different sound altogether.
Metal.
She should have thrust the shears into the side of the girl’s torso at a proper angle, enough to cause a hospitalizing injury. But the feeling that reached her wrists was not that of supple young flesh being pierced.
It was an unpleasant rigidity, as though the shears had bitten down on a metal pipe.
“…Что?” she mumbled accidentally in Russian.
She looked down at the girl’s torso to see that the shears were halted just in front of their target by another piece of metal.
Японский меч? (A katana?)
It was a long, smooth blade.
The gentle backward curve of the metal was like the surface of a pristine water droplet.
What…is this?
The girl was secretly holding a katana, and she brought it forth to intercept the attack—an unlikely conclusion, perhaps, but certainly possible.
Yet there was an even eerier phenomenon in Vorona’s view.
“Um…I’m sorry,” mumbled the target, who was growing the blade directly out of her arm.
“I don’t know you. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong person…?”
Anri Sonohara was a normal human being.
Up until five years ago.
Of the many fates of those who associated with the “abnormal” such as Celty Sturluson, hers was to house the abnormal within herself.
When Shinra’s father, Shingen Kishitani, cut the dullahan’s soul to sever the head from the body, he used a cursed katana to do it. And “cursed” was the only way to describe this particular weapon.
Shingen sold the blade, known as Saika, to an antiques trading shop run by Anri’s father. Through a series of events, her parents then died, and she wound up bearing the cursed blade within her own flesh and blood.
It wasn’t the sword’s fault that her parents died. If anything, without it, she and her mother would have died at her father’s hands.
It was a painful thing to accept that either way her mother would have died anyway, but Anri chose to accept the cursed blade as the price to continue her own life.
Anri thought how much easier things would be if only this cursed blade was like the ones in the old period tales, where the curse completely took over its victim’s mind.
Or how much more delightful it would be if, like in comic books, it would become a conversation partner that she could have a fun chat with whenever she wanted.
But the curse of Saika, the one she actually had to deal with, was much nastier in nature.
Saika had only one desire.
To love people.
To love all humanity.
That was it.
But to Saika, “love” meant being one with the other. To be one with all humanity.
She would sink her curse into all human beings on earth, filling them with her words of love, filling the world with “daughters” that shared her consciousness.
That was the entirety of the Saika system, Saika’s curse.
But Anri could momentarily hold back that curse. By viewing the world around her as though through the frame of a painting, she could reduce even the overwhelming, maddening words of Saika’s love to nothing more than a distant landscape.
At the moment when she felt her mother’s love and her father’s lack of it, Anri’s mother was cutting her own belly open with Saika. And thus Anri felt an enormous unease and a certain kind of kinship toward Saika and her desire to love humanity—as well as overwhelming envy.
Just look… See how much Saika is able to love something. She seems so blissful.
When she realized that was how she felt about it, Anri felt terribly guilty, though not toward anyone in particular.
Saika, meanwhile, would not save Anri from her plight.
Since she could not cut the host that gave her life, Saika determined that Anri was not a target for her “love.” Anri idolized Saika, and Saika used Anri, even as it was trapped within her. It was not quite symbiosis, but a kind of circular parasitism.
If there was one thing that Saika could offer back to Anri—
It was the many “experiences” that were chiseled into Saika’s consciousness.
The moment that the shears touched her body, Anri realized that she had already twisted herself to put distance between her and the woman.
The memory of all that battle in Saika’s mind flowed into Anri’s body. She unconsciously made use of it, using her delicate figure in the most efficient manner possible.
“I don’t know you. Are you sure you don’t have the wrong person…?” she asked, her brain hastily pushing everything through to the other side of the painting frame.
She saw what was happening as though it were a distant scene. Not that you needed to be in Anri’s shoes to lose a sense of reality when a strange woman with her face covered up attacks you with a pair of pruning shears.
Praying that it really was just a misunderstanding, and determined to handle things as quietly as possible, Anri consciously moved the blade growing out of the rip in her pajamas over
toward the palm of her hand.
Like the tail fin of a shark crossing a sea of white skin, the tip of the katana slid down Anri’s arm until it reached her hand, where it burst forth. When the full glory of Saika was at last revealed, it fit neatly into her palm.
“Um…if you’re hoping to rob me…I have no money. Please leave,” she begged.
Vorona clamped her mouth shut and gave the girl an instantaneous examination. She found that the target’s eyes glowed a faint red.
As though the entire eyeball itself shone with red light.
John Carpenter’s remake of the movie Village of the Damned was known in Japan by the title Glowing Eyes. That little piece of trivia she read just days ago throbbed in her brain—not that it was any help in understanding the situation she now faced.
What is this? Vorona wondered, her brain full of question marks. What is this girl?
But her body still moved automatically. She twisted, plunging deeper into the sword’s range, and swiveled her elbow upward toward the target’s jaw.
But just as suddenly—
A shiver ran through her entire body.
A thought flickered into her brain: Oh, I’m going to die.
Vorona canceled her elbow attack and leaped backward. At almost the same moment, a flash of silver passed right before her nose.
Based on the location and speed, the slash was probably not meant to kill. It was a slice intended to hurt, not to cleave.
And what would happen…if I was cut?
She understood that the blade before her had appeared in a way that should have been impossible. Combined with the overall eeriness of its appearance, it was right to assume that even touching the sword meant great danger.
What is this girl? Is she…human?
She was an unknown—something that did not match Vorona’s knowledge or experience.
Coming face-to-face with such a thing brought about a complex emotional response within her.
…I feel…hot. I remember this. I felt this…before…
The sensation arising within her was very close to the sensation that she felt the first time she killed a person—right at the moment before she took his life. Vorona distanced herself farther from her target.
I have lost my calm, she recognized and tried to force her mind to cool down.
But just then, she heard the raucous horn of the truck.
—?!
She looked over to see that their vehicle, parked at the side of the apartment building, was flickering its lights madly to get her attention.
Emergency situation.
Vorona’s mind was ice-cold once again. She looked back at her target and announced, “You, mysterious. Very strange.”
“…”
“I will appear again. Happy to see you then.”
She ran off for the truck, careful to keep an eye on the girl so that she didn’t get sliced down the back. The target did not seem to be giving chase, but before Vorona could feel any relief at that, a new abnormality hit her ears.
The whinnying of a horse.
The bellow was coming from extremely close to the rear of the truck, and it floored Vorona with its eeriness. Still, she did not let it shake her too much and gave a curt command to drive as she passed by the driver’s side of the truck.
Tires tore against asphalt, hurtling the massive vehicle forward. As Vorona leaped onto the back of the truck, she saw the abnormality approaching—and realized that it was not an abnormality, but a monstrosity.
A pitch-black motorcycle without a headlight was slowly approaching. Not racing. Just pacing, measuring, confirming.
It was the very rider whom Vorona had decapitated minutes earlier. She recognized it at once.
Not because of the sleek black motorcycle…but because the person riding on it had no head above the shoulders.
…?
It was more confusion than fear.
Due to the rapid succession of bizarre events, she had to wonder if she’d been slipped a hallucinogen somewhere along the way. It could have been a dream—except that everything about it was too real for that.
In either case, it is dangerous.
The situation was too extreme for inaction to be an option, “just in case” it was a dream.
Vorona deftly opened the rear door of the truck as she clung to the back bumper.
—?
She noticed something odd.
She hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something like a fine thread running through the seam in the door and into the interior of the truck. It continued to the rear of her motorcycle.
The moment that bike became visible through the open truck door, the whinnying roared, fiercer than before, and the pursuing bike sped up.
That sound…it’s coming from the bike!
With this realization came another new fact about the black motorcycle.
Before, she hadn’t noticed because the exhaust of her own bike would have drowned it out anyway—but aside from the whinnying, the black motorcycle was not making any engine noise whatsoever.
Danger!
The street outside Anri Sonohara’s apartment was particularly sparse by Ikebukuro standards. There were hardly any cars or pedestrians to be seen.
But that would only hold true until the next light. After that, it was urban Tokyo as usual, the traffic network where cars ruled above all.
Even if the truck used its weight to muscle the other vehicles around, the motorcycle would catch up to them in less than a few hundred feet.
Danger! Danger! Danger! Danger!
Vorona’s decision was bold in the extreme, and the transition to action lightning fast.
She rolled into the cargo hold, ripping the cover off an object that was placed close to the door.
The Black Rider sped up all the while, closing in on the rear of the truck. But when the rider saw what appeared from under the cover, the bike instantly slowed.
The object was a gleaming mass of metal formed into a threatening shape: an anti-matériel rifle using fifty-caliber rounds.
It was a gun designed to attack tanks and helicopters, and if the right ammunition was used, it could pierce the hull of an armored tank from up to a mile away.
She had brought the rifle in the unlikely chance that they needed to escape police cars or choppers—but she certainly hadn’t foreseen using it in a situation like this.
Vorona got down on her right knee, lifted the gun, and placed the stock against her right shoulder. It weighed over twenty pounds, but she brought it into firing position with practiced ease.
It should be noted that using a fifty-caliber round on a human target is forbidden by international law. Vorona knew that fact because she had read it somewhere or other, and she remembered Lingerin saying, “You can’t shoot people with this because it blows them apart like red water balloons. It’s a bitch to clean up.”
But Vorona could not identify a motorcycle rider without a head as “human.”
Still, she did not aim it directly at the rider’s torso, either because she had her own misgivings or because the motorcycle itself was an easier target.
In either case, Vorona set the sights on the body of the motorcycle, as she had done to an armored car once in the past, and pulled the trigger without a second thought.
Eruption.
Ikebukuro rumbled with the sound of a cannon, and the pedestrians walking around outside instantly covered their ears, unable to pinpoint the source of the noise.
A few seconds later, lights turned on in the apartments nearby, and windows opened as residents peered outside to see what the commotion was about.
Vorona, meanwhile, was unable to see the result of her gunfire. The smoke from the anti-matériel rifle completely engulfed her.
The wind from the truck’s acceleration whipped the smoke clear momentarily, but for those few seconds, she was effectively blind—and when the smoke was gone, the Black Rider was gone.
Neither was there the wreckage of the bi
ke.
Thanks to the unique make of the gun, the kick was not as bad as the force of the shot would suggest, but given the circumstances, she was not in the mood to continue firing it for now. She set the gun down to examine the surroundings better.
When it became clear that the black thread was still connected to the rear of her own motorcycle in the cargo hold, she took out her shears to cut the tiny sinew. But it was far tougher than she imagined, and she had no luck severing it.
“Slon. What has happened to Black Rider?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s gone for sure, but it’s not in the rearview mirror. Did you actually use that thing, Vorona?”
“Affirmative. It was an emergency.”
The truck eventually came to a stop—they must have arrived at a light connecting to a major street.
Vorona hastily shut the rear doors right as the light turned green, and the vehicle turned into the thoroughfare.
After a few seconds of thought, Vorona touched the black thread and traced it back to her bike, where it was tangled all around the rear of the vehicle. She took the wireless receiver and ordered, “There should be a scrapyard nearby. Head there, please.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My motorcycle was being traced. We will scrap it,” she muttered without emotion, a trait she learned from her father. She thought for a few more seconds.
“Or perhaps we might set a trap and lie in wait.”
Outside Anri’s apartment
“Celty…!”
When she heard the eruption of noise, Anri raced out the door without thinking.
She was still confused over the attack she’d just suffered, but even more surprising was the sight of a truck driving away with her attacker clinging to the rear bumper and the familiar monstrosity chasing after it.
A few seconds later came an eruption that sounded like a cannon going off. Anri ran out into the street, so worried about Celty that she was oblivious to her own danger.
“Watch out,” spelled a message on a PDA screen flying in front of her face. A hand reached out from the side and pulled her back toward the apartment.
Anri turned in surprise and saw the riding suit without a head atop it. “Celty! Wh…what?”
Durarara!!, Vol. 5 Page 11