If I tried to break my wrist free from his grip, he would use that opening to shoot. But the same went for him. An odd balance of power kept us calm, allowing us to converse.
“Why did you stop killing, Sakunosuke?”
“Why do you search for a battlefield, Gide?”
I suddenly heard footsteps. It was the sound of many people running our way.
“Your men?”
“Your colleagues?”
The footsteps were coming from both sides of the ballroom. It sounded to be around ten people. If those were Mimic soldiers, I wasn’t gonna be able to take Gide and them on at the same time. I’d have to end Gide the moment they came bursting in, then dispose of them. The footsteps gradually got closer until the oak doors were kicked wide-open. That moment, I broke free from Gide’s grip. A gunshot echoed by my ears as gunpowder burned hair on my cheek. However, the bullet didn’t hit me. Gide evaded my bullet with the same movement.
Our arms locked like hooks. Thanks to my skill, I already knew who was coming. At the door ahead were armed Mafia members, while Mimic soldiers were at the back door. They stormed into the room at almost the same time. As Gide and I bent at the elbows while locking arms, I shot the Mimic soldiers behind him. Pelted with bullets, they flew back. I was sure the Mafia men behind me were being shot in the same manner. I knew what Gide was thinking. He wanted to take out the intruders before anything else, as did I. He grabbed my lapel and pulled me, but I returned the favor. While we used each other as a fulcrum, I faced my enemies once more. I shot. Another Mimic soldier was knocked backward.
This was a ballroom. We stood in the center while empty shells hit the ground like surrounding applause. Using each other as a point of support, we continued to shoot our enemies. Leaning against each other’s backs, we shot them. Our clothes fluttered in the air as we spun, swapping positions. Using the other’s shoulder to rest our weapons, we shot more of them. Fresh blood from the soldiers painted the walls. Our shoulders intersected as we spun, shooting each other’s allies.
The flames from the gunpowder and empty shells glittered around us. Both Gide and I approached our limits as blood gushed from our gunshot wounds. My face turned pale and my vision blurry. Only my focus was sharp. We danced together around the edge of death—a place not of this world. My skill automatically showed me the future, carving Gide’s next words into the back of my mind.
“What do you think, Sakunosuke?”
“About what?” I replied before he even asked.
But in reality, I didn’t say a word because Gide heard my answer in a vision and replied before I could even get a word out.
“This is the world I searched for… I lived for this moment.”
We didn’t actually speak because our skills were predicting what the other would say, and we would think how we would reply. The moment we came up with an answer, the other would foresee it in a vision and then come up with his own reply.
“What are you after?”
“Why did you quit killing?”
It was a brief moment of eternity—a short passage of time that hardly existed. Our visions and reality meshed, creating a world that transcended our world, making it impossible to know how much was real and how much was our skill. It was a world only we could exist in. It was a world we could find only through killing each other.
“I wanted to be a novelist. Someone once told me I should.”
“A novelist…” Gide smiled inside our still world. “I’m sure you could have done it.”
“Yeah.” Maybe there existed a world where that was possible. “This man I talked to gave me a novel. It was the last volume to a series I’d been looking everywhere for. Before I read it, he warned me that it was terrible.”
“How was it?”
“It was…”
“Boss, you started putting this scheme into motion years ago to get that license,” Dazai continued, standing in front of the boss’s desk. “I’m guessing this plan first took shape two years back when Ango went to Europe for business. You did some searching and found that Mimic would be the most promising enemy for your plan, so you had Ango contact them. I was wondering how Mimic escaped Europe and sneaked into Japan so easily, but the answer was rather simple. The Port Mafia helped them illegally enter the country. To send the Special Division for Unusual Powers into a panic and make them get off their butts, you purposely invited the enemy organization to Yokohama.”
“Dazai.” Ougai, who had been listening in silence, cut Dazai off for the first time. “What remarkable inference. There is nothing that needs correcting. I have just one thing I’d like to ask: What’s wrong with that?”
“……”
“I told you—I am always thinking about the organization as a whole. Just like you see here, I received a Skilled Business Permit, so the government has more or less given us approval to conduct our illegal activities. And right now, Sakunosuke Oda is risking his life to eliminate a troublesome, violent group. It’s a win-win situation. So why are you so angry?”
Dazai didn’t say a word. That was just about the first time he’d ever been unable to articulate his feelings.
“I…”
—“There is nothing worth pursuing at the cost of prolonging a life of suffering.”
—“Awaken me from this oxidizing world of a dream.”
“I just…” His voice came out strained. “I just don’t get it. You were the one who tipped Mimic off about the orphans’ safe house. No one else could’ve found out about the location I chose. You killed those kids to get Odasaku to fight Mimic’s leader because he is the only one who can defeat him.”
“My answer is the same, Dazai. I will do anything for the benefit of the organization. Besides, we are the Port Mafia. We have always brought darkness, violence, and cruelty to this city. Why is that a problem now?”
Dazai knew. He knew Ougai’s calculations, his mentality, and the rationale behind the plan. That was just the kind of organization the Port Mafia was. Logically speaking, Ougai was right, and Dazai was wrong.
“But…”
He turned on his heel, then began walking toward the door. Immediately, Ougai’s guards pointed their guns at him.
“You cannot go, Dazai,” Ougai called out to stop him. “Stay. Or do you have a logical reason for going to him?”
“There are two things I want to say, Boss.” Dazai turned around and glared at Ougai. “First—you’re not going to shoot me, and you’re not going to have your men shoot me, either.”
“Why is that? Because you wish to be shot?”
“No. Because it wouldn’t benefit you in any way.”
Ougai grinned. “True. However, you wouldn’t gain anything by disobeying me and going to him, either. Am I wrong?”
“That’s the second thing I wanted to say, Boss. There’s nothing in it for me. There’s only one reason why I’m going. Because he is my friend. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
The guards placed their fingers on the triggers. However, Dazai paid them no mind and simply strolled to the door as if he were going for a walk. The guards looked to Ougai as they waited for orders. Without saying a word, Ougai crossed his arms while he gazed at Dazai’s back with a faint smile. Then Dazai opened the door and walked down the hall until he could be seen no more.
“The last volume was amazing,” I said.
I’d never read a book that drew me in so much. Every word touched my heart, and I saw myself in every character. The man who gave me that book said it was awful, but I felt the complete opposite. I read it in one sitting practically without eating anything all day. The moment I finished the book, I opened it up again to read once more.
It felt as if every cell in my brain was reborn after reading that book. Once I’d finished it, the world I’d known before completely changed. Before that, all I had was killing. I would kill people for the mission—rob them of their lives. That book opened my eyes like the sun at dawn. That last volume had only one flaw. There were a few pages near the end that
were torn out, so I never knew how one of the key scenes unfolded. It was a scene where one of the characters, an assassin, explained why he gave up killing.
There wasn’t enough information on the following pages to guess why he did, and not knowing caused me so much anguish. Not only was that scene an important turning point in the story, but it was also crucial to understanding the assassin. The book was nowhere to be found new or used anymore, so I couldn’t confirm that missing part. That man with the mustache never showed up again, so I couldn’t ask him, either.
After worrying about it for so long, I came to one conclusion.
—“Then you write what happens next.”
I decided to write it myself. I would become a novelist and write a story about why the man stopped killing. But to become a novelist, I needed to sincerely know what it meant to live.
So I stopped killing. There was one line in that last volume right before where the pages had been torn out. It was something the protagonist said to the assassin.
“People live to save themselves. It’s something they realize right before they die.”
I continued to think about what that meant after I vowed never to kill again. There probably wasn’t any deep meaning to it. It was more than likely just a line to connect information with more information. But whenever I read that line, I thought back to the older man who had so mysteriously given me that book. Even now.
Did he know I worked as an assassin? Had he approached me to get me to stop? Was the reason he gave me the last volume, tore out those pages, and told me to write what happens next because he wanted to tell me to save myself? That was what I believed with almost no doubt in my mind.
He had told me his name the first time we met. I had forgotten it for so long, but it was only just recently that I remembered.
His name was Souseki Natsume.
The same name as the name of the author on the cover of that novel.
“I was a hero,” Gide said.
Gide was in a war. He fought for his country and for justice. He fought for his friends who joined him by his side. During a past war that stretched the globe, he had made countless victories and saved countless allies.
Gide was a hero.
He was a soldier who protected his country, fought for its inhabitants, and believed that his destiny was to die for them. During a certain battle, Gide led a mere forty men into battle and conquered a stronghold of six hundred people. He defeated every single one of them and captured the stronghold.
However, that was a scheme thought up by his own allied base. When the country was already finishing up a peace treaty, Gide was used by military staff executive officers in an immoral ploy to crush one of the enemy’s key locations and rob them of their transport network.
Since peace had already been declared, Gide’s actions were deemed a war crime, and allied soldiers were sent to kill him for his betrayal. To ensure their survival, Gide and his forty men had no choice but to plunder the enemies’ equipment, become the enemy themselves, and break through his former allies’ siege.
Numerous soldiers came to kill the traitor. Gide and his men took the enemies’ pistols known as grau geists, donned the enemies’ military uniforms, and fought to the death against their fellow countrymen.
They mimicked the enemy soldiers and became the ghosts of the deceased. Gide and his men killed their pursuers to survive, but they didn’t have anywhere to live. They were criminals of war, dead men, a military with no master. From there, they wandered the lands. They took on dirty work as illegal mercenaries. These former heroes were no more. Their lives, which they were supposed to lay down to protect their country, were used for no one. They just dulled their senses, dirtied their hands, and lost their reputation. Several men in the group even killed themselves. Gide didn’t stop them; he lacked the words to do so.
But there were also those who didn’t die. They were soldiers at heart, and they believed killing themselves would strip them of that right. They fought, suffered wounds, and lost their friends, but they still got back up. It was proof that they were once soldiers, that their blood still drove them to be such militants. They searched for a battlefield—a place to prove they were soldiers—a place that would help them remember who they were even if it meant dying. They became ghosts who wandered the battlefield. Their homeland and pride forever lost, they became spirits of the wasteland in search of an enemy.
Time was still extending endlessly. We continued to foresee and respond to what the other was going to say. Not even a second had gone by in the real world, where I’d just killed the Mimic soldiers while Gide killed the Mafia soldiers. In this world, I got ready to point my gun at Gide, who was surely going to do the same.
“The final moment is near,” Gide said in that world of eternity.
“Tell me one thing, Gide,” I said back. “Did you never want to go after something else? Couldn’t you have changed how you lived your life somewhere down the line? Something different from searching for a battlefield or a place to die…”
“Change the way I live? There is no way I could have done that.” Gide smiled. A glimmer of sorrow flickered within his eyes. “I promised my allies that I would die as a soldier. Nothing else was possible.”
We pointed our guns at each other. However, in the world of eternity, we quietly faced each other and talked like friends. Gide looked at me. I could see the sincerity in his gaze.
“But…perhaps I could have changed my life at some point. Maybe if I had tried to change earlier in life, then perhaps I could have become something else…just like you stopped killing others. If I had the strength you had, then maybe one day I, too, could have…”
There were only two people in that massive hall still alive. Our muzzles each pointed at the other’s heart. Gide wasn’t wearing bulletproof clothing, and I’d taken mine off moments prior during battle. A shot to the chest would be fatal. The triggers had already been pulled. The bullets began to slide out of the barrels.
However, we just smiled, facing our partners as if we’d come to know everything about each other, like old friends after a long chat.
—“They’ve observed that when multiple skills interact, on rare occasions they’ll careen off into a completely unexpected direction.”
So this world was a skill singularity.
“I have one regret,” I said. “I never got to say good-bye to my friend. He was always there for me as ‘just a friend.’ He was bored of this world and always waited for death to come for him.”
“That man was in search of a place to die just like me?”
“No, not exactly,” I answered. “I thought you were similar to Dazai at first, rushing into battle and wishing for death without even considering the value of your own life. But he’s different. He’s sharp-witted with a mind like a steel trap. And he’s just a child—a sobbing child abandoned in the darkness of a world far emptier than the one we’re seeing.”
He was too smart for his own good. That was why he was always alone. The reason why Ango and I were able to be by his side was that we understood the solitude that surrounded him, and we never stepped inside it no matter how close we stood.
But in that moment, I kind of regretted not stepping in and invading that solitude.
The bullets left our guns’ barrels and slid toward our chests.
“A magnificent shot until the very end.” Gide smiled. “I’m going to go see my men. Say hello to the kids.”
The bullets reached our chests.
The singularity vanished.
The bullets penetrated the skin, cut through our clothes, and exited out our backs. At the very same time, in the very same fashion, we both fell backward.
Just then, I heard footsteps.
“Odasaku!”
Dazai rushed into the building and over to the ballroom, passing the myriad of corpses through the corridors along the way. When he burst through the oak doors, he saw his friend lying on the ground.
“Odasaku!”
/>
“Dazai…”
Dazai rushed over to Odasaku, then checked his wounds. The bullet had pierced Odasaku’s chest, and a vast pool of blood had collected on the floor. It was clear that the wound was fatal.
“You’re such an idiot, Odasaku. The biggest idiot I know.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t have to do this. You didn’t have to die.”
“I know.”
Odasaku smirked with that particular satisfaction of accomplishing something worth the cost.
“Dazai… There’s something I want to say.”
“Don’t. Stop. We might still be able to save you. No, we will save you. So don’t say such—”
“Listen.” Odasaku wrapped his blood-soaked hand around Dazai’s. “You told me if you put yourself in a world of violence and bloodshed, you might be able to find a reason to live…”
“Yeah, I said that. I did. But what difference does that—?”
“You won’t find it,” Odasaku said in almost a whisper. Dazai stared at him.
“You should know that. Whether you’re on the side that takes lives or the side that saves them, nothing beyond your own expectations will happen. Nothing in this world can fill the hole that is your loneliness. You will wander the darkness for eternity.”
—“Awaken me from this oxidizing world of a dream.”
That was when Dazai first realized: Sakunosuke Oda understood him much more than he’d ever imagined—right up to his very heart, almost to the center of his mind. Dazai didn’t realize until then that someone had known him so well.
For the first time in his life, Dazai wanted from the bottom of his heart to know something. He asked the man before him:
“Odasaku… What should I do?”
“Be on the side that saves people,” Odasaku replied. “If both sides are the same, then choose to become a good person. Save the weak, protect the orphaned. You might not see a great difference between right and wrong, but…saving others is something just a bit more wonderful.”
Osamu Dazai and the Dark Era Page 15