“My issues aren’t important… I’ll be direct. Any suspicions as to the slasher?”
“It’ll cost you three bills,” he stated.
Celty pulled a wallet made of solid shadow from her riding suit of the same material. The bills inside were real, of course. She removed three ten thousand–yen bills and handed them to Izaya.
“So not only is your scythe made of shadow, so are your wallet and clothes. If I shined a bright enough light on you, would the shadow dissipate and show me your naked body?”
“You want to see?”
Izaya responded to Celty’s challenge by squirming backward and smirking.
“Not really. I’m not a pervert like that student or that unlicensed doctor. I don’t get all hot and heavy over a severed head or its headless body.”
The moment he tossed that insult back to her, a black scythe entwined its way around Izaya’s neck.
The end of the scythe was curled up like a spring, forming a twisted circle around Izaya’s neck, with the tip at the center. She had thrust the weapon up against his neck and morphed it into that bizarre shape in the blink of an eye.
Izaya’s smile faded just the tiniest bit, and he raised his hands in a sign of surrender.
“Insulting me is one thing. But if you slander Shinra again, you will pay dearly. Let’s say…with injuries that will take three days to recover from.”
“…Thanks for the detail. You’re calm enough to tell me that this isn’t a bluff.”
“Yes, Shinra might be abnormal. But if he’s weird, then he’s only weird to me and no one else. You have no right to judge him.”
“You sound like quite the couple,” Izaya noted coolly. Celty retracted her scythe in resignation.
Unsatisfied with just being released, the information agent had more sarcasm for the headless woman. “But what if your biggest fan just happens to have a thing for headless women? What if another dullahan comes along and seduces him? He might just fall head over heels for her instead.”
“Somehow I doubt that…but I wouldn’t mind. All I’d do—”
“Is kill Shinra and commit suicide?”
“No, I’d just make certain that no other headless women get near him. It’s not just that he loves me. Now I love him, too…”
The first instant that Izaya saw the confident text on the PDA, the smile vanished—only to be replaced by a great guffaw.
“…Kah-ha! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! I didn’t expect this! Since that last incident, you’re more human than ever! But be careful. The closer you get to being human, the larger the gap might be when you finally do get your head and memories back!”
“I can worry about that once I have my head. Actually, to be honest, I’m starting to think I don’t really need my head after all… But enough about that. Give me information on the slasher. You’re not going to take my money and tell me nothing, are you?”
With the topic back on business, Izaya shook his head and began to tell her the “product” she’d bought.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got some juicy intel I haven’t sold to the police or media or put on the Internet. I won’t lie—I was waiting for you to come to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this case is a lot like you—it’s straight out of the world of ghosts and goblins,” he teased. When he spoke next, it was in the hushed tones of one beginning a scary story.
“…Have you ever heard of the sword called Saika?”
“Huh?”
“You might not believe me, but once, here in Shinjuku, there was a demon blade…”
Thirty minutes later, near Kawagoe Highway, top floor of apartment building
“Shinra! Shinra, Shinra, Shinraaa!”
“Whoaaa, don’t just barge in here with your PDA thrust out like that! I’d like it more if you showed this kind of initiative in bed—ghrf!”
Celty gave Shinra a light knee in the stomach and rapidly typed out her next message.
“Hey! That demon blade story! Was that all true?!”
“Nngh… I have gone on a journey of despair now that I know you doubted my ironclad word. I’m done for—the only thing that can save me is your love. I need about level thirty-seven love. In the ABCs of love, a B should do…”
“Stop joking around! Listen!”
She yanked Shinra up to his feet and began to type out what she’d just heard from Izaya.
—That Izaya was also concerned with the connection between the online troll Saika and the slasher and was investigating on his own.
—That there was a legend of a demon blade named Saika with a mind of its own that could possess other people.
—That when the victims’ testimony was combined, no one had seen the attacker directly, but as they all passed out, they remembered red eyes.
—That each day the Saika username appeared online was the same day in which a new slashing victim appeared later that night.
Once she finished showing him these details, Shinra sadly rolled around on the carpet in his white coat.
“Ahh, how can this be? When I said it, you chuckled through the nose—no, wait, you don’t have a nose. You chuckled through your breast at me, but sure, you’ll take Izaya’s word for it! …Aaah!”
“What is it?!”
“I like that phrase, ‘chuckled through your breast.’ Sounds kinda sexy, if you ask—gffh!”
She caught him in the temple with a low kick, sprawling him out on the floor. Somehow, Shinra kept his wits about him and turned back to Celty with a deadly serious look on his face.
“So what’s the plan?”
“Well…if it was a spirit or fairy of some kind, I would have sensed its presence…but I didn’t feel a thing when I was attacked.”
“Well, of course. A katana might have a mind, but it doesn’t have a presence. As far as I know, the demon blade Saika possessed the mind of its wielder and controlled his body. If that was a strictly human body, then there would be no otherworldly presence or aura for you to sense. Plus, we don’t know that all spirits or fairies possess this ‘presence’ you’re talking about.”
“So there’s no way I can search for it, then.”
Celty clenched her fist in frustration at Shinra’s calm conjecture. But he only grinned at her and extended one last lottery ticket to his lover.
“Actually, there is, my dear.”
“Huh?”
“Let me start off by apologizing: sorry. I took another look at the chat room you hang out in… Have you seen this? It’s quite interesting. I’ve heard that Saika was a female blade, and based on this, it seems to be true.”
“What…?”
“Check out the past logs. Good thing this chat is the kind that saves a long backlog.”
Celty booted up her computer as he suggested.
And then she saw it.
She saw how much the thing named Saika had evolved in the time she’d been away from the chat…
Chat room
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—SAIKA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—
|I cut one person today. But one is enough. It’s not good to be greedy.|
|But I’ll cut again tomorrow. The more lovers, the better.|
|My strength has reached its peak.|
|I’m looking for a person.|
|Shizuo Heiwajima.|
|The man I must love.|
|Tomorrow night, I’ll cut again.|
|I know where Shizuo is. But there are too many people to be safe.|
|I want to know where Shizuo Heiwajima lives.|
|Does he live alone? Is it in Ikebukuro, too?|
|I want to know more about Shizuo.|
|About the strongest man in this town…|
|I’ll cut someone again tomorrow. Every day, until I meet Shizuo.|
|I want to see Shizuo, soon, soon, soon…|
—SAIKA HAS LEFT THE CHAT—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—KANRA HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—
«…Well, it seems like this person is only posting here now.»
«I was trying to figure out why.»
«When the name Shizuo popped up here earlier, Tarou clearly reacted to it.»
«So it seems like they think this Shizuo person might be reading these messages.»
«Now, I’m only guessing, but…»
«This is advance warning for the crime, right? If something happens tomorrow night, should we report it?»
«As the moderator, I’ll need to do something as soon as possible.»
«Well, so long.»
—KANRA HAS LEFT THE CHAT—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—SETTON HAS ENTERED THE CHAT—
[When did all of this happen…?]
[Tarou, are you still seeing all of this?]
[I’d really appreciate it if you responded.]
[On the other hand…]
[The log’s from last night…so “tomorrow” would mean tonight, yes?]
[Oh, I need to go out and do something, so I’m taking off…]
[I know it’s hard, Kanra, but please hang in there.]
[So long.]
—SETTON HAS LEFT THE CHAT—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
—THE CHAT ROOM IS CURRENTLY EMPTY—
.
.
.
.
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Chapter 5: Right to the Points
In her dream, the girl met her dead parents.
At a theme park, surrounded by the smiles of her family.
On a mountaintop covered with flowers.
At a riverside blanketed with warm sunlight and the smell of barbecue.
In her own kitchen with a birthday cake in the center of the table.
“You’re going to be just as pretty as your mother someday, Anri.”
“No, I think she gets it from you.”
Her mother and father were smiling.
There were no mirrors in her dream, but she was probably smiling, too.
Mom, Dad.
We’ll be together forever and ever, right?
Anri Sonohara always repeated the same phrase in her dreams.
A happy home.
Her family’s smiles.
So small and insignificant, but the greatest joy of all to a young girl.
The more she had those dreams, the more she recognized they were dreams as they happened.
But within her waking dream, she would smile.
She indulged in the happiness of her dreams, knowing they represented times that would never return.
Food was set on the table.
It was a meal she cooked with her mother.
Her father ate it and smiled, said it was delicious.
She would smile again.
That symbolic process repeated over and over.
Just a repetition of the most orthodox, simplistic series of events, so standard that if happy home appeared in a dictionary, this would be the definition. She’d seen the dreams so often that she knew exactly what would produce smiles in each and every one. There was no need for any other action. She just repeated the process.
That was enough for Anri.
She was fine with the happiness in her dream being a simple, predictable, repetitive process. That was what it took to get her to smile. She could relive the same dream over and over without growing tired of it.
She convinced herself that this was true happiness. And she was truly happy.
Perhaps it didn’t look like happiness to someone else, but this was the world of her dreams. No one else could see it for themselves.
In her dreams, she was in early elementary school. She would talk to her dream parents with a face full of innocence.
“Mom, Dad, we’ll be together forever and ever.”
Her parents grinned and nodded, and the dream ended there.
It was the same dream every single time, and it ended at the same point every single time.
Together forever and ever. It was like a magical mantra that ensured she would have the same dream the next night.
The same process. The same happiness.
She felt that happiness over and over and over, as regular and predictable as breathing.
And on this particular day, just like any other day, she would wake from that dream.
Anri’s eyes opened to take in the morning sunlight filtering through her curtains.
The sleepiness was gone. The last words she spoke to her parents in the dream were always the alarm that snapped her out of the final REM sleep of the night.
Anri stretched and hopped off the bed to trot to the bathroom in her pajamas.
Before she washed her face, she looked at her reflection in the mirror—blurred without the help of her glasses—and smiled.
But when the reality of her parents’ death set in, the smile faded a bit, turned cynical and self-deprecating.
Anri’s parents were dead.
It had happened five years earlier. So she would never again taste the happiness that she found in her dreams.
It was in her dreams that she sought what was impossible in reality.
It wasn’t that she could have whatever dream she wanted. In fact, the first time she had the dream, she hadn’t been hoping for it.
In the dream, she just lived with her parents, with no upheaval or excitement. But after they died, she began having the dream more and more often. Now she experienced it every single night.
A popular theory said that dreams were the brain subconsciously processing memories, but that would mean that her brain cells were processing the same things over and over. Taking out something that was already neat and ordered, then rearranging it into the exact same pattern. If that process was completely pointless, Anri certainly didn’t let it bother her.
At first, it felt completely empty.
Dreams were hollow things, producing nothing, providing no solace.
But as the dream came to her again and again, Anri changed her mind very quickly.
Was it really just a hollow fiction?
Yes, the table and the meal sitting atop it were false. No amount of eating would provide her real body with any nutrition.
But what about the emotion?
In her dreams, Anri felt happiness. She felt her heart being at ease.
Was an emotion produced by a fiction really false? Did that mean the emotions she felt when watching a movie were utter lies as well?
No. That wasn’t true.
Anri denied the fiction. Movies weren’t fiction. Whatever happened on the screen was real. And if that was true, then the events in her dream that moved her heart were just as real.
Since then, Anri had the same dream every night.
She indulged in a happiness of her own creation, over and over and over…
But in the real world, she was just a bit—just a bit further away from happiness.
The horrible incident that had taken her parents’ lives was five years in the past.
And An
ri Sonohara still couldn’t find where her life belonged.
At the same time that Celty bolted out of her apartment, Anri Sonohara was wandering.
All through Ikebukuro without a destination.
The end-of-term exams were over, and only graduation and the end of the school year ceremonies were left. So she walked about the town with a goal in mind.
A goal, but not a destination.
She didn’t know where she should go, but she wasn’t in a mood to hang around her house. So she wandered the neighborhood.
The night was cold despite the imminent arrival of spring, and its chill winds tore mercilessly through Anri. She took in the sights of the town through her glasses as she walked and suffered the cold.
The usual waves of humanity. It seemed like the ratio of yellow bandannas was higher than before, but she didn’t give it any more thought than that.
As the various people walked past her with their own various troubles in mind, Anri sought out just one of them.
Haruna Niekawa.
Anri was wandering the night in search of the girl one year her senior. She hadn’t been back home. Once school had wrapped up, she came out here still dressed in her uniform. Raira Academy allowed for students to wear private clothes, but the uniform looked good and was suitably warm in the winter, so plenty of people wore it.
But when it came to the city at night, that number dropped precipitously. If you were out at night, chances were high that you’d still be out very late, and wearing a uniform just meant it was easier to be singled out by the police.
Anri wasn’t planning to be wandering the streets that late, but she didn’t know what the most effective time to return home was, either.
“…What should I do?”
It was an honest lament of her present situation.
So why was Anri searching for Haruna Niekawa?
The answer to that question came earlier in the afternoon.
And the cause was nothing other than Nasujima’s fixation on her.
Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) Page 9