Right around the time the sales chief felt like he was going to get an ulcer, Chikage Rokujou started following Yumasaki as he exited the gallery.
“…That’s him? Doesn’t look the part.”
“Well, that’s just what the Dollars are like. You can’t identify ’em in a crowd like that. A couple of our guys who raided Ikebukuro last month got beat by his friend, some asshole named Kadota. From what I hear, Kadota’s got a lot of pull within the Dollars.”
“Ahhh…,” Chikage muttered, following his prey by sight. Up ahead, a woman dressed in black stopped Yumasaki. Next to her was a fierce-looking man with a knit cap who was speaking with Yumasaki on obviously friendly terms.
“Ah, that’s him! Kadota is the guy in the beanie.”
“…They’ve got a girl. No action this time, then. We’ll just watch.”
“Got it.”
The Dollars trio wandered around Sunshine Street for a while longer, and as they reached the Tokyu Hands building, Kadota said something to Yumasaki and the woman and then walked off on his own.
The pair crossed at the light to go toward Sunshine City, while Kadota continued south along the Metropolitan Expressway.
“I’ll take it from here. You meet up with the rest.”
“But—”
“Just go.”
“Got it.”
With his companion out of the way, Chikage continued following Kadota. But after a while, his gaze stopped on a building nearby.
He stopped walking momentarily, forgetting even that he was busy trailing a target.
“…Right in the middle of Ikebukuro…there’s an all-girls’ school…?!”
The leader of Toramaru was rooted to the spot for most of a minute, standing at the entrance of a girls’ academy located right near Raira Academy. Because of the vacation, there did not happen to be any girls in the vicinity right now.
But I gotta hold out hope… No! I got more important things to do now.
He came back to his senses and shook his head. Suddenly, he heard someone speak in a cold voice behind him.
“…You want something with us?”
“…”
Chikage spun around and saw the man with the beanie, the one he was supposed to be trailing. “Oh. You knew I was following you.”
“Yeah. But I began to doubt my own instincts when you stopped in front of the all-girls’ school,” Kadota said, cracking his neck. He asked Chikage, “So who are you? I don’t think I’ve ever met you before, but at least I know you’re not the kind of scum who’d target a guy escorting a lady.”
“My name’s Chikage Rokujou… I think I’d get along with you,” he grinned, and then he shook his head sadly. “But…you’re with the Dollars, right?”
“…Yeah, you might say that.”
“It’s a shame. I heard a rumor that Shizuo Heiwajima’s also in the Dollars. Is that for real?” he asked.
“…I think that’s the case, but I don’t believe he thinks of himself as being a member of anything,” Kadota replied honestly.
“Yeah, he’s one of those guys, huh? I see… So you’re not all on the same page together.”
“?”
“…But still, that’s got nothin’ to do with us.”
Right at that moment, Kadota’s cell phone rang, as if on cue.
“Go on, get it. I’ll wait.”
“It’s an e-mail,” Kadota said, looking at the screen without letting down his guard. The ringtone had to be for messages relating to the Dollars. He opened it up promptly, wondering if it had something to do with the man right in front of him.
“…”
Kadota squinted at the contents of the message, and then he turned up to glare at Chikage.
“What’s up?”
“…Hey, punk.”
The message on his phone was an emergency alert—that Dollars were being attacked all over Ikebukuro.
“Why did you— No, why did all of you people come here?” Kadota demanded, staring down the other man in worry and anger.
Chikage, meanwhile, stared right back into Kadota’s eyes. He shrugged. “We just came to pay for the fight we were sold.”
“Keep the change. I don’t need it.”
At that moment, inside the abandoned factory
As Mikado tried to extract the term Blue Squares from the recesses of his mind to put a meaning to Aoba’s shocking revelation, his cell phone suddenly erupted with the arrival of an e-mail.
Similar notifications and vibrations went off on the phones of the other boys around them, all at once.
—!
The notification was the sound Mikado used for Dollars-related messages—which led him to a major realization.
I should have figured… They’re all Dollars, too.
A group all gathered in one place. Ringtones going off all at once.
The scale was much, much smaller, but it reminded Mikado of a scene he experienced a year earlier. The realization shook him.
And even worse than that was the content of the e-mail: that members of the Dollars were under attack.
“I think it’s started,” Aoba said as he checked the same message on his phone, his smile never wavering.
“Started…? What’s started…?”
“Toramaru’s revenge… The guys from Saitama,” Aoba replied. Mikado felt his vision warp.
Is this…real life?
Was this boy really the same kid from school who grinned innocently at everything? Well, he certainly had that same smile right now.
But Mikado couldn’t connect the things that Aoba was saying with reality as he knew it.
“Why…would you attack people in Saitama? Why are you doing this…?”
“It was thanks to them that our little Ikebukuro tour got torn to shreds. So this was a little payback… Does that work for you?”
“…”
Mikado swallowed. He had no words.
Based on what he heard so far, he had to assume that he wasn’t going to elicit Aoba’s true intentions here. Clutching his phone, Mikado decided to attempt a dialogue with the younger boy.
“The Blue Squares… I’ve heard of them. I think…they were a color gang around here years ago… And after a war with the Yellow Scarves, a number of them were claimed by the other gang…from what I hear.”
A number of the boys in the factory whistled in admiration. Even Aoba’s eyes were sparkling in surprise.
“You know a lot more than I imagined. I’m impressed!”
“Why would you tell me…tell me these things?”
“Because I trust you. Is that such a bad thing?”
“It’s not an answer… What do you want from me?” Mikado demanded, his confusion only deepening.
“That’s a good question. I was hoping to do this after you knew a little bit more about us…but I guess I could just start off by asking you first.”
Aoba looked up at Mikado, still sitting on the pile of metal beams, his eyes sparkling.
“Leader,” he prompted.
“Huh…?”
“I’m not asking you to be the leader of the Dollars. That would conflict with the ethos of the Dollars, I suppose.”
Giggling.
Mocking.
For some reason, the other boys present all broke into laughter, the sound undulating rhythmically off the walls of the empty factory. And riding atop that rhythm like poetry, Aoba’s words melted into the air of the room, rattling Mikado with their implication.
“…Instead, we want you to be the leader of the Blue Squares.”
“Uh…”
“We’ll just hang back and follow you.”
He couldn’t keep up. It was too sudden, too illogical.
It felt like someone was asking him to become an Arab oil monarch tomorrow. If Yumasaki and Karisawa had mentioned it, he would have assumed they were making a manga reference. That was how baffling the request was to Mikado.
“Why…why would I—?”
“Well, there are
a number of reasons, but mostly it’s because you occupy a special position in the Dollars.”
“Special position…?” Mikado repeated robotically.
Aoba helpfully explained, “To be brief, it’s because you are the founder of the Dollars.”
“…!”
“Is that a surprise? We have our own information network, you know.”
Aoba was neither intimidated by nor was he patronizing to the stunned Dollars’ founder. He simply put his intentions into words that spoke for themselves.
“You can use us any way you want. If you decide you want to end this war, and command us to go and grovel at Toramaru’s feet so they can beat us to a pulp…then we’ll have no choice but to obey. We’ll take it. But if we survive and make it out of the hospital, then you really will be our leader… On the other hand, if you command us to crush Toramaru and stop them from harming our fellow Dollars, we’ll use whatever means necessary.”
“You know…I can’t do…either! It’s out of the question!” Mikado said, finding his authority at last. He shook his head vigorously. “What makes you think I would accept such a thing…? If you want to avoid gang warfare, just pretend you’re not in the Dollars and stay out of it. That’s the type of person I am. I’m not meant to stand on your shoulders!”
It was a true cry from the heart. That was how he meant it and how it felt coming out.
But Aoba only got to his feet and leaned in close.
In a tiny voice that only Mikado could hear, he muttered, “That’s not true.”
He looked delighted, so delighted.
“After all…”
“Huh…?”
“At this very moment…
…you’re smiling, aren’t you?”
At that moment, within the factory grounds
It was a negotiation taking place in total privacy.
No matter what choice Mikado made, only those involved in the matter would know.
Except that a third party was, in fact, listening in at that very moment.
And depending on how loosely you wanted to define it, they were very much involved.
Ummm…
Celty Sturluson was on the outside of the abandoned factory, hiding in the shadows around a window.
…What’s going on here?
Her sense of hearing could pick up the conversation inside with ease. It sounded like the uniquely aggressive bravado of young delinquents, but the boy at the center of it was someone she knew.
Am I actually witnessing a major turning point in Mikado’s life?
The irony was that it wasn’t even the group of boys that had brought her here.
Celty only spent a few minutes back at Shinra’s apartment the previous night. She was surprised to learn that Shizuo and his workmate had been there, but there was more important business to cover: She explained the situation with Anri and asked Shinra to let the girl stay the night, then left again.
The reason she left was simple: She had to search for the girl in the photo, the granddaughter of the Awakusu boss.
According to Shiki, the girl was bouncing between twenty-four-hour manga cafés and family restaurants. It seemed unlikely that such a girl could stay at a late-night restaurant by herself without being reported to the police, but she clearly had some special trick to living out of a restaurant.
But how would she shower? When Celty peered into an actual manga café (with funny looks and warnings about wearing her helmet indoors), she was surprised to learn that the cafés were putting in showers now.
In addition to this, she was rotating around the homes of friends from school and acquaintances from the Internet, which made it difficult for the yakuza’s information network to pick up details.
Shiki claimed that they would inform her once they found the girl, but the thought of those dangerous, armed men on the move made Celty afraid for this unfamiliar girl and pressed her into action.
All night long, she prowled around Ikebukuro—without realizing that the girl had been inside her apartment all along.
Celty wound up cycling through restaurants until morning but never found the girl—and when she returned to digging into the identity of the mystery attackers from earlier, the trail of black thread led her to the abandoned factory.
Wow…my shadow really will stretch for miles and miles, she noted with surprised admiration when she saw that the thread was still intact. When the slender line of shadow touched the ground, it rejoined her real shadow, where it would not tangle on anything or anyone.
Celty could manipulate the shadow at will, making it act like a liquid or even a gas if she wanted. If she ran it around a single building hundreds of times, she could still retrieve all of it within mere seconds.
I feel like that cat-shaped robot that came from the future with all its helpful tools. But I can return to that later, she thought and focused on the situation before her. What is it with me and this run-down old factory?
She was interested in what choice Mikado would make, but was it right of her to listen in? A wave of terrible guilt washed over her, but Celty couldn’t force herself to move or stop eavesdropping.
And she, too, was being observed by someone else.
At that moment, inside Russia Sushi
“So what is it?”
“There are signs the two of them have been around Ikebukuro. I thought I ought to tell you.”
They were speaking Russian—the familiar visitor Egor, as well as the brusque owner of the sushi shop, who asked, “You said the other day that these are people we don’t know?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s true that I don’t know this Slon fellow, but Vorona is Drakon’s little daughter, isn’t she?”
“When I said you don’t know them, I was being truthful. She’s not the girl you once knew, Denis.”
Simon was out luring in customers for the approaching lunch hour, when the restaurant would open, so the only ones in the building were Egor and Denis, the owner.
“It’s still her, no matter how much she changes. That’s what Colonel Lingerin would say,” Denis noted with disinterest.
“Well, er…if you look at things the same way that Lingerin does, yes,” Egor sighed. “Did you happen to hear anything last night?”
“…I heard what sounded like one distant shot from an anti-matériel rifle.”
“I heard it, too. That was probably Vorona and Slon. And it didn’t just ‘sound like’ that, it was the very anti-matériel rifle that they took from the company.”
“…”
The sushi chef silently polished his knife as Egor rubbed the bandages wrapped around his face. He came to a serious conclusion.
“It will do no one any favors if we don’t stop her soon. For her sake, for Drakon’s sake, and for Tokyo’s sake. And of course…for your sake, since you love this place so much.”
At that moment, rooftop, building next to abandoned factory
“Unused factory building. The information was in error. Location is gathering place of delinquent youth.”
“It looks like the Black Rider is hiding from the children… Should we snipe from here?” Slon asked as he peered through the scope.
Vorona shook her head. “Rider survived after yesterday’s shot—true monster. Failed attempt will only reveal our location. Fatal mistake.”
Vorona and Slon were on standby on the roof of a building within a reasonable distance from the factory. They were set up so they could see the majority of the factory grounds and watched Celty as she followed the black thread in.
If they only wanted to find her, they just had to follow the thread the other direction. But they were enemies, of course, and it would be foolish to head straight into a face-to-face confrontation.
Instead, they left Vorona’s motorcycle inside the empty factory to lure the Black Rider there—and just moments after that, the strange group of boys appeared. Now the rider was crouched in the shadows outside of the window, hiding from them.
; But of course, she was openly visible to Vorona and Slon. The Russian woman continued watching for a while, sucked in a deep breath, and muttered, “We will follow the monster. Target child might be found at the end of this.”
Slon sighed and commented, “You’re enjoying yourself, Vorona.”
“Affirmation. It has become more enjoyable.”
Vorona’s flat expression, that was a gift from her father, twisted slightly with her warped words of love.
“I like Ikebukuro. Half disappointment, half envy. A bit of hope. That is love.”
“I have decided to love Ikebukuro. Affirmation.”
At that moment, office building, Ikebukuro
“That son of a… I told him never to come back to Ikebukuro…”
In an office building far from the shopping center of the neighborhood, Shizuo was furiously climbing the stairs.
“Now he thinks he can just open up an office here…”
He reached the third floor and set his sights on a door straight ahead. The address on the sheet of paper pasted on his old office was correct. There was no sign on the door or wall, but there weren’t any other tenants in the building, either.
Guess I’ll pretend to be a customer to get him to open up.
He knocked on the office door.
“…”
There was no response.
He spotted a doorbell to the side and tried ringing that—still no response.
Next, he attempted to listen through the door to see if it was vacant inside, but he heard the sounds of a TV or radio coming from within.
So he thinks he can pretend not to be home? Shizuo fumed and grabbed the knob so he could force the door open…
Huh?
The door wasn’t locked. It opened without any resistance.
What the hell? He didn’t even lock up.
Shizuo let go of the knob, which was now molded into the shape of his palm, and strode into the office, not bothering to hide his irritation.
The office was split into a number of smaller rooms, and the first one had bookshelves along the wall, packed with countless files and materials.
Durarara!!, Vol. 5 Page 15