“…? …Huh?”
He put a hand to Earthworm’s cheek and spoke to her, slow and gentle, like to a puppy. “The truth is, I was aware of you before the Awakusu-kai hired me. You made contact with an online info dealer that I operate under a different name.”
“You’re joking…”
“I’m not. In fact, it made me laugh that you came to hire my services while I was working the job for the Awakusu-kai. When I saw ‘I want information on Izaya Orihara,’ I had my first real belly laugh in ages. I almost thought I was going to rip open my stab wound from this spring,” he said, rubbing at his side.
Then something in his smile changed. It was more wicked now, clearly plotting.
“So I realized something while I was working with you.”
“No… Stop…”
“It kind of seems like your group’s ‘owner,’ as you call him, hasn’t made contact with you in quite some time, has he? Perhaps he’s actually abandoned you…”
“Stop it!” she bellowed, bringing the low background hum of conversation to a halt. “Kill…him…”
“Oh?”
“Hurry! Someone do it, anyone! Just kill him and get him out of my sight!” she shrieked to her companions in the back of the bar.
Right on cue, Shijima sent a meaningful look at his companions. He jutted his chin at the spiky-haired woman in Izaya’s crew, a silent signal to take her hostage.
About a half-dozen men perfectly interpreted his gesture and rushed upon the woman.
Bjurnk.
It was like the sound of a cardboard box being stomped on.
“…That wasn’t even a sneak attack, you guys,” said Mikage Sharaku, the spiky-haired woman in question. She looked practically bored.
She’d spun in place and slammed an elbow directly into the nose of the first man to reach her, who’d grabbed her collar.
“Haaah?!”
The other men faltered, alarmed by the sight of their buddy gushing blood from his shattered nose. In the next instant, Mikage’s toe slammed into the temple of one of them. It was a one-legged high kick at maximum power, and the steel-plated toe of her safety shoe knocked him unconscious before he even had time to scream.
Then, without lowering her leg, she bent her knee, and with perfect balance, she rammed her toes into the neck of another man. She didn’t break the skin, but it did make a disgusting sound, propelling air out of his nose and mouth. His eyes rolled upward, and gravity pulled him down to the ground.
“…”
Mikage lowered her leg, glared at the remaining Heaven’s Slave dealers, and then gave them a beckoning gesture with her hand.
Nearby, the members of Dragon Zombie watched without much concern. Clearly, they understood that she didn’t need any assistance.
“Who the hell is she…?” Shijima muttered as Mikage continued to kick ass.
Izaya shrugged. “That’s Mikage, the girl who popped up in the conversation a minute ago. So, where were we…?”
He started to say something but was drowned out by the sound of breaking glass behind him. Izaya spun around to see Earthworm holding a broken bottle in each hand, glaring at him with a look of madness.
“What…is your deal…? Why did you do…such a preposterous thing…?! Why would you go to the trouble of pretending to be kidnapped…just to get here…?”
“This is lovely. You’re much more natural in this mood than when you were putting on that terrible wheedling voice earlier.”
“Answer the question!”
“Very well. I suppose I’d say it’s a similar purpose as to what Shijima over there said.”
Shijima flinched at the unexpected mention of his name. But Izaya ignored him, hoisted himself up to sit on the bar, and began to explain.
“I could have just contacted the Awakusu-kai, told them about this location, and had them shut it down. But it would seem a bit mean to let those big bad men have their way with you helpless youngsters, wouldn’t it? So I came here in an attempt to convince you to stop running your illegal casino, I suppose. You see, I’m not your enemy.”
“…?”
“As for the rest of it, I was engaging in some human observation. You can actually see out of that bag pretty well. It seemed like a rare opportunity to glimpse the adorable face of an amateur torturer. So I let you capture me, expecting that some finger bones and nails would be a worthwhile price to pay for that. Pretty simple, really.”
Earthworm’s features twisted at the nonchalance in his voice, and she turned to her group, bottles brandished. “What are you doing?! Hurry up and…,” she started before her voice trailed off, “…kill…him…?”
She fell completely silent once she noticed the state of her companions.
“?”
Shijima followed her lead and glanced at the members of Amphisbaena—and like Earthworm, he, too, stiffened on the spot.
Izaya kicked his dangling legs as he sat on the bar counter. “Do you know how I was able to get here unharmed? Without a single punch or kick? As well as how I was able to get out of the ropes tying my hands back?”
“…What’s going on here?”
“I bet you don’t. In fact, I don’t think you’ll even believe me if I explain it to you.” He smirked and looked toward the back of the room to see for himself.
All the members of Amphisbaena had the deep-red color of blood where their eyes should have been white. They all stood there—eyes crimson, faint smiles on their lips, and totally still.
“The truth is, I’d have been happy to take my time and allow your subordinates to betray you, but with this Heaven’s Slave stuff, there wasn’t enough time. So I cheated a little. For that matter, the Black Rider is kind of like cheating, too.”
The mention of the Black Rider brought a glimmer to Shijima’s mind.
No way. Did he…intentionally get us to steal the laptop…? In order to lure us…no, to lure me here?
But his suspicions vanished in the face of the red-eyed group. He assumed they were under the influence of some kind of drug; the idea that it was some supernatural phenomenon was beyond his imagining at the moment.
Earthworm was under a similar impression. She spun back to the info broker, clutching her broken bottles. “Izaya Orihara…what have you done to my subordinates?”
“What did I tell you? You aren’t going to believe my answer,” he replied.
She leaped at him, as though that response alone were good enough reason to kill him. The propulsion of her jump was explosive. In fact, the speed of it surpassed the range of almost everyone present. Even Mikage, who was still fighting near the entrance, stopped in her tracks for a moment and uttered a note of impressed surprise.
Without losing an ounce of momentum, the torturer thrust the deadly weapon in her right hand at Izaya’s throat, intent on proving that she was more than met the eye. With a little flick of the wrist, she’d easily be able to sever his carotid artery.
But at the last possible instant, Izaya dodged out of the way and toppled back behind the counter. She raced around the bar, but he was already gone.
“Where did you go?!” she bellowed.
Yet now he was somehow on the outside of the bar counter. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Gosh, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t like hitting girls.”
“That’s very funny, Izaya Orihara! You want to play the chivalrous gentleman now, after all of this…? I suppose you’d be happy to let me kill you, then!”
“I don’t think the chivalrous label really fits in this case. And I certainly would prefer not to be murdered.” He chuckled.
With superhuman agility, she leaped up on top of the counter, ready to jump on him.
“Instead, I’ll let my friend handle this,” he said, right as a shock ran through her knee.
“…?!?!”
Something in her body broke. She lost all sensation below the knee and toppled to the counter.
“~~~~~! …!”
She couldn’t even br
eathe due to the pain radiating from her knee to her entire body, much less scream or speak. The bottles fell from her hands all the way to the floor, where they shattered loudly.
Through the terrible impact of the pain, Earthworm tried to jolt her brain into motion, to make it tell her what happened. The answer came to her not through her logical mind but through her eyes and ears.
“You just scored a zero on that quiz, didn’t cha?”
Resting his elbows on the counter right in front of her was a man whose voice she recognized. It was the man who’d pretended to be Izaya on the phone.
“Which means it’s time for the pretty young lady to undergo our very entertaining penalty round.”
“Rgh…aaau… Son of a… Fuck,” she swore, all thoughts of ladylike behavior gone. She glared at him through the pain. Right on cue, the man with the sunglasses and the burn scar on his face swung down his rubber-coated hammer onto her fingertip.
“…………!!!”
Coincidentally, the location where he crushed her finger was the exact same spot she had smashed on her enemies in the past. Her own blood ran over the old stain.
She screamed, and Ran Izumii, the man in the sunglasses, shoved a piece of cloth into her open mouth.
“Mrruh!”
Instantly, Earthworm understood what the fabric was. The rough texture against her tongue and the nose-stinging odor of oil told her it was the burlap sack over Izaya’s head just minutes ago.
“Happyyyyy birthdaaaay!” Izumii jeered, pulling out a lighter—and sure enough, he immediately set the fabric in Earthworm’s mouth ablaze.
A few dozen seconds later…
Earthworm was at Izumii’s feet, covered in agonizing wounds. She’d rolled off the counter onto the floor to put out the flaming fabric stuffed in her mouth. That part of the plan succeeded, but she wasn’t thinking about the minefield of broken glass on the floor. Her unharmed knee fell prey to Izumii’s hammer next, and the pain of all this knocked her completely unconscious.
“Ha-ha… Y’know, this reminds me of the old days. Don’t it?” Izumii cackled madly, rolling the woman over with his foot. “Hey, she’s pretty hot when you get a good look at her.”
And despite the huge crowd present in the room, he reached out for her clothes, and…
“Knock it off, Izumii,” warned Mikage, bringing him up short.
“What the hell? Why you stoppin’ me? She’s a sicko; she’s tortured multiple people,” he complained.
“Yeah, so I’m not going to stop you if you smash her face with that hammer or burn her alive,” Mikage said without batting an eye. “But if you’re going to defile her as a woman…it’ll be my turn to hurt you, Izumii.”
He clicked his tongue in obvious disgust and dropped his hand to his side.
“I don’t gotta follow your orders…but I suppose you can owe me one. You’re gonna make up the favor to me yourself, right? Huh?”
“Go ahead, assuming you can get the best of me,” she retorted, murder in her voice.
He clicked his tongue again and left the room, leering.
Having watched the scene in stunned disbelief, Shijima was relieved that at least one of the more dangerous individuals was gone. But it also imparted a terrible truth to him: All his Heaven’s Slave friends who’d attacked Mikage were wiped out.
What is this? What…am I watching happen?
There was only one thing he knew for sure: At this moment, he had not a single ally in the bar who was capable of helping him.
Izaya Orihara approached him and whispered into his ear, “Hi. You capable of talking yet?”
“…”
“By the way…when I was wearing the sack earlier, you tried to stab me, didn’t you?”
“…!”
Shijima flinched and spun around despite himself. All his people were either knocked out by Mikage or groaning on the floor, unable to stand. They wouldn’t be able to hear Izaya’s whisper.
“It’s all right. I’m not going to reveal that to your friends. Very bold of you, though. It takes real guts to assume that it’s Kumoi under the sack and go in for the kill.”
“…”
“My assumption about you and Kumoi was right, it seems,” Izaya crowed.
Shijima felt the sweat running through his clenched palm. “What…are you going to do with me?”
Izaya replied to the young man’s question by glancing at Earthworm first, then saying, “If you want, you and your people can stop getting into mischief that draws the attention of the Awakusu-kai, then give yourself up to join the Dollars. I can set you up with them.
“With the Dollars’ information network…you might even be able to learn the location of the missing Amphisbaena owner and your Kumoi.”
“Very clever of you to pull the grandson of a powerful man into the group,” said a woman outside the entrance to the bar, when Izaya stepped through it.
“I wasn’t trying to get access to an influential figure. He was just a little bonus I received for taking the Awakusu-kai’s contract,” he told the long-haired woman.
Haruna Niekawa smiled and said, “So what should I do now?”
“I have a feeling I won’t find any success trying to convince that Earthworm girl. Would you give it a shot for me?”
Haruna smiled and smiled and smiled, her eyes sparkling. For some reason, there was a bandage wrapped around her neck. “If I do as you say, will you really let me see Takashi?”
“Whether you can or not depends on you. All I do is give you the information.”
“Hmm…”
The next moment, there was a sharp metallic sound between the two. Izaya had his knife free, which he’d used to block Haruna’s own knife lunge.
“…Too bad. I figured that if I could control you, I’d know Takashi’s location right away.”
“The thing is, I love human beings. I’m not interested in the least in being under the control of some inhuman monstrous thing.”
“Says the man who’s making use of a monster,” she retorted.
He shrugged. “You’re right. It’s half against my better judgment. But I’ve made use of the dullahan for so many things already, I had to draw the line there. I won’t use your power unless absolutely necessary, and in this case, things were going to get very, very messy without you.”
He paused, then admitted, “Actually, I respect you as a human being. You’re not like Anri Sonohara, who completely accepted Saika and gave up on being human. You conquered Saika through your own power and rule her as a human.”
“My Saika is a weak thing compared with that little thief,” she said, grinning as her head inclined to the side. “And…it wasn’t my own power. It was the power of my love for Takashi.”
Izaya smiled back at her, waved, then turned away.
“Have no concern. Your Saika power might be weaker than Anri Sonohara’s, but that’s what makes you stronger.”
“You’ve beaten Saika’s stranglehold on you twice now.”
Several days later, Tokyo, in a luxury sedan
“…So it turned out that Amphisbaena had already effectively ceased activity. The club owner nicknamed Lizard was already long gone by the time I started looking into him. I’m sure he’s far away by now. I have no doubt that the usual customers at the gambling rings you oversee will be returning shortly,” Izaya proudly declared, sitting on the left side of the backseat.
In his usual way, Shiki said, “And you don’t know the whereabouts of anyone aside from the leader?”
“I did look into it, but the majority of them were ordinary civilians. I doubt we’d learn anything from talking to them, and given the fact that the group is inactive, what’s the use of putting the screws on them?”
“That’s for us to decide…but fine. If they start up again, you’re going to give us the full list for free.”
“Certainly. And since I didn’t manage to track down their leader, I don’t need any follow-up payment. Just the up-front money will do,” Izaya
said, shrugging sadly.
“By the way, about those college student dealers…,” Shiki began, “they’ve been gone from the market for the last two days. Any thoughts about why that is?”
“Dunno. Maybe they fought it out with what’s left of Amphisbaena,” Izaya suggested gleefully.
Shiki grinned—and offered earnestly, “Info Broker…don’t assume the world will always work out in your favor.”
His words were delivered with a smile but as heavy and piercing as a bullet to the gut.
Unfazed, Izaya took the statement head-on and shot back, “Oh, please. It’s the fact that things don’t always go your way that makes the world fun.”
Shiki glanced at Izaya without changing the angle of his head and steepled his fingers. “You don’t think we’re totally ignorant, do you?”
“…”
Izaya said nothing, but Shiki didn’t push him any further on that point.
“So, getting back to business… Ah, right. Our Akabayashi wants to speak with you. You may contact him at a convenient time,” Shiki said, back in work mode.
Izaya replied, “Yes, I’ll get back to him soon.”
He grinned, then laughed sardonically.
“I make my living by being used by everyone I can.
“That’s what being an info dealer…no, what being Izaya Orihara means. That’s my bliss.”
Epilogue & Next Prologue: Me
Hi, Nakura. Nice work.
“…”
I was listening in with my earpiece. Very nice acting. You’re such an accomplished liar.
“You’ve made me do it so much, I can’t help but learn.”
I have to admit, your ad-lib about it being “clear at a glance that he’s abnormal” was an inspired choice.
“Was there a problem with that?”
No, not at all! It’s just that if you truly sensed I was abnormal, I don’t think you’d have let me use your name or enlist your help for this little act. It kind of made me laugh.
“Please, Izaya, don’t do this to me. That Kujiragi woman wasn’t from an insurance company, either, was she?! Just please, please, please don’t get me trapped in some kind of yakuza thing!”
Durarara!!, Vol. 9 Page 15