Chapter 4

But about one year after Minoru came to this house, Norie’s father, Kouhei Yoshimizu, told him. Norie had lost her mother in a car accident when she was eight, the same age Minoru was. From that time until middle school, she was a child that almost never smiled. Although for his daughter’s sake he had at first opposed arranging an adoption, Mr. Yoshimizu was stern but kind with Minoru after adopting him. He had collapsed four years ago because of a brain hemorrhage and passed away. Norie, too, lost both of her parents at a young age. In the eight years Minoru had lived with her, the only time the smile had disappeared from her face was when Mr. Yoshimizu died. “Okay, finished!” said Norie, bringing Minoru out of his reverie. They had cleaned the bowl out, and the rows of milky-white gyoza inside the stainless steel tray were divided into two groups: one close to Minoru and one on the other side. Norie started tallying the ones she had made, counting, “Two, four, six, eight, ten,” so Minoru had no choice but to go along with her. “Thirty-one for me! How about you, Mii?” “Um…thirty-three…” “Ooh!” Even after he had announced the results, Norie gave him a smile that took up her whole face. She pressed her hands together, which were white with flour. “Just as I expected, Mii! I’ll nominate you for the high school men’s event in the All-Japan Dumpling Folding Competition!” “Th-thank you. So…we ended up making sixty-four. Is that really okay…?” “Oh, isn’t that a nice number? If we make eight each of grilled gyoza, fried gyoza, steamed gyoza, and boiled gyoza, it’ll work out perfectly.” “I don’t think that’s going to work. And you said it was fine for there to be openings in the wrappers, since we were making grilled gyoza…” “Well, guess it can’t be helped. Should I freeze half?” When Norie started to take the tray to the kitchen, Minoru hurriedly called out to her, “Freeze two-thirds!” 4 He was still in the city of Saitama. Even if he lived here he could never grow to like it, but it was curious that in the two short days he had stayed here he had developed a certain affinity for a city name that he had at first found laughable. He also might have felt that way because he had been able to find top-quality prey here. Takaesu finished showering and returned to his room in a bathrobe, pulling the curtains wide when he approached the front window. From the deluxe twin room of the high-rise hotel he had checked in to last night, he got a panoramic view of Saitama’s new city center at night. The footbridge that stretched out west from the train station was decorated with lights this time of year, and the quiet twinkling of the innumerable blue LEDs had its own sort of charm. The large, gently sloping flat surface that spread out directly from the north side of the footbridge might have been the roof of Saitama Super Arena. It looked just like a flat-topped seamount rising from the depths of the ocean. If he could have that whole space to himself to set up a dining table there, it would probably feel wonderful. As he looked down at the nighttime scenery, Takaesu moved his right hand to pull out a round thing of about two centimeters from a paper bag on the nearby table. He tossed it into his mouth. The glossy brown color resembled a chocolate truffle, but it wasn’t. It was a macadamia nut in its shell, said to be the hardest of the edible tree nuts. He rolled the macadamia nut—which people usually used a special nutcracker to open—around his mouth for a while, then held it lightly between his first and second premolars. He slowly, slowly applied pressure. The feeling in his mouth was just like that of biting a steel ball. His upper and lower jawbones creaked, and the masseter muscle that connected them shook. If the average person bit down this hard, they would surely break a tooth. Of course, Takaesu was not the average person, however. No. He was not a person at all. He was a shark. A shark that swam through the city, devouring people. There is a shark called the tiger shark. It’s a large variety that can grow to a maximum length of seven meters, and it has another name: the man-eater shark. The tiger shark’s teeth are a special shape. They have a double-layered structure with sharp, knifelike points and thick, sawlike bases. This shark, which can break even a sea turtle’s shell with these teeth, was Takaesu’s third favorite shark. Imagining himself in the form of a tiger shark, he bit down with all his might. The nut burst open in his mouth with a pleasurable popping impact. The thick shell broke vertically and the one-size-smaller embryo—the part commonly referred to as a macadamia nut—rolled out. Holding the shell in his mouth, Takaesu spit out only the embryo into the wastebasket. The shell had broken in two, and he chewed one half on the right side and one on the left. This second battle also ended with his teeth victorious. The shell broke apart, and he crushed it into even smaller pieces. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Three months ago, this would have been impossible for him. No, at that point, Takaesu would’ve had concerns about the hard-baked rice crackers and beef jerky that even children could eat without trouble. At the restaurant he had come to critique, he would’ve had terrible trouble fooling them if they had sent out stiff cantuccio biscuits. But it was different now. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. On the day that it had taken refuge in his lower jaw, Takaesu gained new teeth. Teeth that could crush any food, no matter how hard. Glorious teeth that kept growing stronger the more hard things he ate. “Chew, chew, chew, chew,” Takaesu murmured in a singsong voice as he persistently went on chewing the fragments of the shell, which had become as fine as grains of sand. “Chew, chew, chew, chew.” Suddenly, an indescribable fishiness spread through his mouth. It wasn’t the taste of a nutshell. It was the taste of dried-up anchovies…dried sardines. Chew it up well, Hii. Chew. Chew. Chew more. If you spit it out, you’ll get a pinch. There now, chew. Chew. Chew. Chew. “…!” He was struck with an intense nausea and gagged a little, but he held it together somehow. The dried sardine flavor went away after a few seconds, so he swallowed the macadamia shell, which was now a paste. Takaesu didn’t know if it had any nutritional value in general, but with that his teeth became a little bit stronger. Shaking off memories of a distant past, he imagined the near future. Was that girl here today as well, running along the road that passed through the new city center below him? Did she go home and eat a full dinner, and was she now deep asleep in her bed, growing a little more? He painted a picture in his mind of the calcium absorbed by the young girl’s body, circulating in her veins and permeating her snow-white bones. That alone brought a gush of saliva to his mouth. There was an itchy, stinging throbbing in the center of his lower jaw. Tossing a new macadamia nut into his mouth, Takaesu rolled it around, pretending to bite it, soothing the thing. He trembled slightly. Not yet. It was still too early. He was checked in to the hotel under a fake name, but it was impossible to avoid all of the security cameras in the lobby and the hallways, and the employees of the Italian restaurant he had visited the night before would likely remember Takaesu. He would need to wait at least one more day…no, two more days before taking action. Luckily, he had his laptop with him, so he could write his draft at the hotel. He would just think of this delay as a spice to increase his pleasure when he bit down on bone. “Sleep well and grow, Signorina,” Takaesu whispered to the young girl who was probably sleeping somewhere in the urban landscape he saw below his window. Then Takaesu bit through the second shell forcefully. 5 Minoru finished flipping through to the end of a running magazine that he wasn’t even that interested in and returned it to the magazine rack. He looked down at the digital watch on his left wrist: 4:25 p.m. Not even thirty minutes had passed since he came to this convenience store, but an employee who had been shooting glances at Minoru—or at least had seemed to be shooting glances at Minoru—for a while was probably thinking, It’s been half an hour already. He’d planned on killing some time at the nearby library before his plans at five o’clock, but it was unexpectedly shut down for the day. But the employee wasn’t aware of Minoru’s circumstances, and he would probably soon reach the limit for how much idle in-store reading he would tolerate. Akigase Park, where they were meeting, took less than five minutes to get to by bike. There was nothing for him to do for the remaining thirty minutes other than to read a book or something on a park bench while braving the cold wind. Luckily, he was wearing a wool Chesterfield coat over his uniform today, and there was a hardcover book in his bag that he had planned on returning to the library. Rereading a book was nice sometimes. Having decided on his next course of action, Minoru left the magazine section and headed toward the shelves of snacks. Minoru didn’t have enough willpower to leave the store without buying anything after having stood there reading for half an hour, but it wasn’t like he had much financial leeway, either. While he was thankful to his adoptive sister, who worried every month about whether his allowance was enough, he made sure he got only the lowest possible amount he needed to get by. After looking around the shelves for a bit, he took one package of mints that came with a small case and headed to the register. Out of the two payment counters, one was closed and the other had two customers already waiting. The customer checking out was a man who was nearly elderly. His basket was jammed full of items, which the female employee was holding up to the bar-code scanner sullenly. In line behind the man was a boy in about third grade, swaying his body around as if unable to wait any longer. A few minutes after Minoru stood behind the elementary schoolboy in line, the first customer finally finished checking out. As the man made his way to the exit with plastic bags hanging from both hands, the boy moved forward enthusiastically to take the man’s place, putting his item on the counter. It was a ten-card package of a fighting-style trading card game that was very popular among elementary and middle school students; even Minoru knew the name. The boy seemed to want to open it as soon as possible. Without waiting for the employee to hold the package up to the bar-code reader, the boy dropped a few coins he had been clutching in his left hand onto the counter. Immediately after, the employee looked at the register display and said, “That’ll be 313 yen.” Hearing that, the boy’s shoulders began to tremble. At first, he looked up at the employee’s face, then down at the coins he had just put on the counter. He stopped moving. Minoru leaned over a bit to see what was going on and looked at the counter. On the glass were three hundred-yen coins and one ten-yen coin. That was three yen short to buy the cards, but the boy was frozen in place and showed no signs of trying to add more coins. Suddenly, Minoru understood the situation. The sales tax had risen to 8 percent in 2014. It had become 10 percent in 2015, the year after, and this easy-to-calculate number had been used for a while. But this year, it had been raised to 12 percent. Moreover, the sudden talk of a tax increase had thrown the Diet into confusion, and the implementation of the new tax rate had been pushed back to the end of the year, December 1—in other words, five days ago. The price of the cards in question had probably been less than three hundred yen including tax through November. But because of the 2 percent tax increase, the price had gone up a little bit. Even though it was only just a few yen apart, it was a world of difference to an elementary school student. The boy finally seemed to understand that the price had changed, and his ears instantly reddened. He dug around in the front pocket of his pants many times but didn’t produce any coins to make up the difference. He had probably just run to the store from his house clutching only the allowance that he needed to buy one pack of cards. Discovering that one didn’t have enough money after bringing an item to the register would be incredibly embarrassing even for the teenage Minoru. The boy was completely dumbfounded, as if this was the first time this had ever happened in his life, and he continued to fervently search his pockets with his eyes all the way down. Minoru felt as if he could see the memory being engraved in the young boy’s mind with his own eyes. The boy would definitely recall this moment over and over in the future. Or the woman working at the register could tell the boy that she would hold on to his cards while he got three more yen from home, pulling him out of his panic and making it possible for him to forget this incident. But she didn’t seem to have any intention of doing so. She kept her silence with a scowl on her face, drumming her fingers on the glass surface of the counter. After the oppressive silence had gone on for about ten seconds, the boy finally seemed to have an idea of what to do next. Plucking his four coins up from the counter, he said, “I don’t need it,” in a barely audible voice. He turned right around and started to run toward the automatic door. Minoru had gotten a five-yen coin out of his wallet a little earlier, and it was now clutched in his right hand. At this moment, he dropped it on the floor. The boy turned around hesitantly, and Minoru bent down in front of him, picking up the brassy coin as it spun on the floor. Still crouched down, he held the coin out to the boy with it pinched between his fingers. “This fell out of your pocket,” he called out. The boy’s eyes grew wide with wonder, and he opened his clenched right hand. Minoru set the five yen on the other four coins atop the boy’s sweaty palm and stood up. “Now that you have this, I think you can buy the cards you wanted earlier.” At Minoru’s words, the boy counted his coins one by one with the index finger of his left hand. When he had confirmed that there was 315 yen, he looked up and smiled bashfully. He went back to the register right away and dropped his coins on the counter again. Once the employee rang up the card pack again and the boy had two yen clutched in his hand, he dashed out without giving Minoru a second glance. Minoru watched as the little figure disappeared on the other side of the automatic doors. When he remembered that he was in the middle of doing his own shopping, he rushed to put the mints down on the counter. When he glanced up, he locked eyes with the employee, who was giving him a creepy look. As he quickly averted his eyes, Minoru murmured in his head that he would have to stay away from the store for a while. When Minoru left the convenience store and got on his bike, he peddled against the cold wind that blew in his face. He rode through a residential neighborhood for a bit and crossed a bridge over the Kamogawa River, which was a branch of the Arakawa River. He stood on the pedals to power himself up the narrow path on top of the embankment, and the riverbed of the Arakawa at dusk spread out to fill his field of vision. Around here, the width of the riverbed was up to 1.5 kilometers, and the embankment on the other side was just like a hazy horizon. He couldn’t see the surface of the river because another embankment blocked the view, but the broad swath of green that lay nearby was Minoru’s destination, Akigase Park. The park, one of the largest within the city of Saitama, was on a three-kilometer plot of land that ran alongside the embankment. Inside it there were wooded areas, wild bird parks, and barbecue areas in addition to sports facilities like baseball fields and tennis courts. There had been a large park similar to this one near the town where Minoru had lived until eight years ago. On sunny days off, the four of them would go on picnics as a family, bringing a basket packed with lunch boxes. Shaking his head vigorously to interrupt the thoughts, Minoru came down from the embankment and entered the park. He stopped his bike in front of the directory for a moment, confirmed the route to his destination, and got moving again. Riding slowly down the path that cut through the center of the park, Minoru saw a wide-open lawn planted with orderly trees come into view. That was where he was headed; it was called the Western Garden. It was probably bustling with groups of families in the spring and summer, but now, in December, there wasn’t a soul around. Minoru got off his bike at the side of the lawn. Stepping onto the withered brown grass, he took his messenger bag off his shoulder and took a seat on one of the several benches there. His watch read 4:40. Another twenty minutes until the person he was meeting would arrive. He had a book in his bag, but, not in the mood to start reading, he leaned on the hard backrest and closed his eyes. Then the scene at the convenience store played automatically inside his brain. The reason he had put on such a show to give the boy the five-yen coin was definitely because Minoru felt sorry for him, not because he was trying to help him. It was because he was sure he would be in an unpleasant mood afterward if he had watched that scene all the way to the end. In other words, at the end of the day he had done it for himself. But that was the action he had taken, and now Minoru was getting a taste of the intolerable feeling of his self-important meddling. Ultimately, interacting with other people always increased his negative memories. Three days ago, when he’d fled in the middle of his early-morning conversation with Tomomi Minowa on the embankment. Two days ago, when he’d clumsily fallen on his backside in front of the track team guys. And now today with his hypocritical actions. The marsh where the black water of his memories continued to accumulate tried to capture Minoru and drag him down into it whenever it could. Lurking in the depths of this marsh was that incident eight years ago. The memories of that gruesome tragedy that he could remember clearly second by second, decorated in fear and despair, regret and self-recrimination. Every time he reexperienced that night, he felt like he was losing something inside himself. It was probably something like the strength to live. Was there any reason in this world to go on living when it brought such painful feelings? Wouldn’t he be happier if he could end his life right away and go to the place where his parents and sister were waiting? Every time he sunk into that marsh of memories, that urge came over him. The reason he had resisted thus far was because if he committed suicide or something, he couldn’t imagine how sad it would make Norie, who had protected and raised Minoru for eight years…or how sad it would make his sister Wakaba, who had sacrificed her life that night to save Minoru. But if those black memories grew any more than this… If the marsh overflowed inside him…wouldn’t there come a day when he could no longer recover from it? He would rather go off to a world without anyone in it. In a place where there were no other humans, his negative memories shouldn’t increase at all. If one reads science fiction or horror novels, they often come across plot developments where the main character is thrown into an uninhabited town and overcome with fear. If he were to be put in those kind of circumstances, Minoru thought he would definitely feel a deep relief before fear. What if— Had that thing descended from the sky to take Minoru to that kind of world of solitude…? Yesterday and today, after Minoru had finished his daily running in the early morning, he had tried to reproduce that mysterious phenomenon on the embankment when no one was around. Unfortunately, he hadn’t succeeded even once, but that didn’t mean the phenomenon had disappeared. He just didn’t know how to flip the switch. He had a feeling that if he kept on with his trial and error, he would someday be able to will the phenomenon to occur himself. Even if he was able to manipulate the power at will, Minoru’s true desire couldn’t be fulfilled through a physical phenomenon. Even so, that was fine right now. Because if he kept chasing after it hard, he might really be able to go someday. To a world of absolute solitude, all alone. As he thought this with his eyelids still closed, the faint sound of footsteps reached his ears. He had heard that light rhythm before. Picking himself up, he looked to the left. In the twilight, most of the afterglow having already vanished, he could see a small silhouette dashing toward him. Checking his watch, it was three minutes until five o’clock. A little surprised he had been worrying for a whole seventeen minutes, he stood up from the bench. The person Minoru had been waiting for, now standing before him, marched in place for a bit while catching her breath. Even when her breathing had returned to normal, for some reason she made no attempt to speak. Minoru himself actually felt it was hard to breathe, so he pointed to the bench first and said, “Um… Should we sit…?” At this, the girl in her workout clothes, Tomomi Minowa, nodded firmly and sat down at the end of the bench still wearing her day pack. Minoru sat down as well, leaving a little space between them. As Minoru was wondering whether he should start talking about something himself, it apparently hit five o’clock on the dot and the solar-powered light nearby flicked on. Tomomi took that opportunity to open her mouth. “…Sorry for dragging you out this late to somewhere so far.” “…I just go home after school ends, so…” “You aren’t in any clubs, are you, Utsugi?” “No. I guess I’m in the going-home club. Apparently there are less than ten of us in our grade.” The conversation broke off there again. A few hours ago, when another scrap of paper had fluttered down as he opened his shoe locker, Minoru had thought it might be better to just not look at it. But the precise handwriting he saw when he reluctantly picked it up spelled out a message reading, “Please come to the Western Garden in Akigase Park at five in the evening.” It was signed by Tomomi Minowa. He of course wondered if he should ignore it this time as well. The reason he didn’t was that he could feel the powerful intentions behind her signing her full name. The day before yesterday, he came to the conclusion that he would ignore the track team guys’ orders. He had no reason to timidly obey those guys, who wouldn’t even sign their names on his summons. Or at least he shouldn’t have a reason to. As he told himself this, Tomomi once again apologized in a small voice. “…I’m sorry, Utsugi.” “It’s fine… My house isn’t even that far from here…” “Not about that.” Tomomi’s expression, which had for an instant held a faint smile, suddenly distorted completely. Transparent droplets welled up rapidly in the corners of her eyes, and Minoru felt like he might stop breathing. “I heard the older girls on our track team gossiping. They said that the members of the boys’ team called you out and…beat you up.” “Huh?” Minoru’s eyes grew round as he listened to the words Tomomi said in a shaking voice. It was true that they had called him out, but everything after that was kind of an overstatement. Although he had been punched once in the stomach, that mysterious phenomenon had kept him from taking any damage at all. Besides, it wasn’t something that Tomomi, who had not been directly involved, needed to cry and apologize for. “Th-that’s sort of an exaggeration. I didn’t get hurt at all, and all they did was say a few things to me…,” Minoru explained hastily, thinking that he was in a real mess. Anyway, he should have denied being called out at all. Tomomi had probably chosen to meet in a park so far from school because she suspected that his conversation with her was why the guys’ team had set their sights on Minoru. Minoru’s response had only confirmed Tomomi’s fears. “…I’m sorry…,” Tomomi apologized again in a barely audible voice, then covered her face with both hands. Her weak sobs shook the dry December air. While Minoru knew he should say something, he didn’t know what more he could say. There was no reason he would know. Up until now, he’d always avoided facing girls—no, facing anyone one-on-one like this. Minoru kept his mouth shut, and Tomomi kept on crying. Ultimately, the one who ended this moment was not Minoru but Tomomi herself. Suppressing her crying with her mouth pulled incredibly tight, Tomomi rubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her workout shirt to wipe them. She kept her eyes all the way down as she said in a hoarse voice, “It’s probably better if I don’t talk to you anymore, right, Utsugi?” “…” She likely took Minoru’s silence as agreement. Shrinking her small body down even further, she finished by once again whispering, “…I really am sorry.” With that, Tomomi stood up. Turning her back to him, she started walking slowly not toward the path she had come from, but toward the woods in the center of the park. She gradually picked up her pace, eventually breaking into a jog. Even after the somehow heavy sound of her footsteps had grown distant in the twilight, Minoru couldn’t move. He just sat and stared as a single droplet that shone from where Tomomi had been sitting soaked into the wooden seat of the bench little by little. Hmm. Looking down on the vast park from the path atop the embankment, Takaesu tilted his head slightly. His prey’s behavior pattern was different than it had been before. Although she had passed beside Saitama Super Arena after six o’clock in the evening and gone straight home from there both yesterday and the day before, today she had changed course along the way. Instead of heading for home, she had continued running on the narrow path along the river, went over the high embankment, and entered the park about five minutes ago. He had kept a distance of more than fifty meters between them, so he found it hard to believe that she had realized she was being followed. Still, just in case, he came to a stop just this side of the park and decided to carefully take stock of the situation. It was only the third day since he had started tailing her, so he didn’t know whether this was irregular behavior. Maybe she headed all the way out to this park two kilometers from her house every Friday, but he had a feeling that today there was something heavy about his prey’s footsteps. He didn’t actually believe it, but had the police caught on to him without him noticing? Was this a trap to lure Takaesu out? If he set foot here to hunt his prey, would he become the one being hunted? In these last three months, Takaesu had already chewed on the bones of four people. There was little chance of the leftovers being discovered, as he had disposed of them discreetly, but twice his prey had been reported as missing persons. Naturally, the police would be moving forward with investigations, and Takaesu couldn’t say that it was absolutely impossible for them to be led to him by some unforeseen clue. That thing had given him physical abilities that far surpassed that of the average person and teeth that could easily break a human humerus or femur. However, it was indeed impossible for him to avoid or stop bullets. If he was surrounded by police officers who opened fire with their pistols, Takaesu’s biting ability would likely end there. He wasn’t afraid of death. However, what he flatly refused to accept was an unseemly, ugly end. He would rather suffocate to death by getting an overboiled fettuccine noodle stuck in his throat than die because he was trapped by a police plot. The majority of the park that the girl had gone into was enveloped in darkness, most of the only light being from the roadways in the center and southern parts of the park. Were those pigs lurking out there in the dark? Was this a moment of opportunity given to him by the devil? Or was it a trap set by an angel? Just then— The northerly wind that had been blowing from behind him into the park this whole time stopped. After a bit, lukewarm air blew toward him from the south. Takaesu’s body, which was layered in newly bought black sportswear, shrank into itself as he let out all the air in his lungs and immediately drew in a long breath through his nose. He had never tested it, but if there were dozens of police officers lying in wait in the park, he should certainly be able to pick up on a smell like that. What came in on the southerly wind was the smell of fallen leaves piled up on the ground, the smell of marshes thick with green, the smell of lawns withered to brown…and the sweet smell of that girl. The thing gave a sharp throb in his lower jaw. It’s all right, there’s no danger, it whispered to him. Bite her, bite her, it tempted him. “…Good idea, compagno,” he whispered. Takaesu gracefully dashed down the stairs that led from the embankment down to the park. What am I doing? Racked with self-recrimination, Minoru sighed for the umpteenth time. It had already been close to five minutes since Tomomi Minowa had run off, but he still wasn’t able to get up from the bench in the Western Garden. The reason he had come all the way to this park was supposedly because he couldn’t be heartless in the face of her show of determination. If that was the case, then shouldn’t he have been able to respond to Tomomi’s repeated apologies with the best words he could muster instead of trying to smooth things over with superficialities? But he hadn’t actually smoothed things over at all, because Minoru had just stayed intently silent. He didn’t want to interact with other people. He didn’t want to increase his memories. If those were his true wishes, it would be better to just confine himself to his room and not go to school, yet he didn’t have the courage. Although he said he wanted to be alone, deep down he was afraid to go off the track that led to getting educated and finding a job. More accurately, he was afraid of the people he knew looking at him with pity and contempt because he got off track. Ultimately, absolute solitude was just a fantasy. Even if Minoru shut himself away, it wasn’t as if he would immediately vanish from the memories of the people around him. In that sense, true solitude couldn’t possibly exist. But the people around me probably aren’t as concerned about me as I think. No, I’m sure she’s like that, too. She’ll probably forget in no time that she talked to me and that she cried earlier. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to go back to a life of not being involved with anyone. As he was telling himself this, he stood up slowly from the bench—that’s when it happened. “…?” Minoru got the feeling that he was smelling something strange and furrowed his brow. It was so faint that it wasn’t even clear if it was a bad smell. The smell of something burning, of iron, of beasts… If he had to say, it was the smell of violence. After emptying his lungs briefly, he inhaled slowly through his nose. He wasn’t imagining it. In the cold air was something he had never smelled before, a foul smell that, strangely, made his heart stir. On top of that, the smell was wafting out from the wooded area that covered the center of the park. From the same direction that Tomomi Minowa had run off in. Takaesu’s right canine teeth made a light grating sound as they rubbed together. The eye sheltered in his lower jaw swelled as if unable to wait for the feast that would soon come to it. That excitement traveled to all thirty-two of his teeth, and they ground together on their own, separate from Takaesu’s will. Hold on, compagno. It would be such a waste if we were to make a mistake now, he whispered in his mind, resuming his advance. He moved through the vast forest at the center of the park with quick steps. Because he was off the path, it would be easy to slip on the wet fallen leaves, and the light from the streetlamps didn’t reach where he was. But now, the far-off city lights alone were enough for Takaesu’s eyes. Like a man-eating shark cornering its prey, he walked on gracefully. His nasal cavity had a strong hold on her scent. She was close, probably no more than a hundred meters away. If he strained his ears to listen, he could hear the sound of her running shoes hitting the pavement. Her gait seemed a bit heavier than it had been yesterday, as if she were tired. Of course, it was optimal for his prey to be in its best physical condition, but her being fatigued would make the hunt easier. From the right side in front of him, the sound of her footsteps was coming reliably closer, as were the regular sounds of her breathing and the rustle of her workout clothes. On occasion, it seemed like she was sniffling. Had she caught a cold, or was she crying? If it was the latter, had something happened to her in the park? But really, none of that mattered. All he wanted was her properly developed flesh and her well-packed bone. Her footsteps came closer and closer. He could see the narrow recreation trail on the other side of the thicket in front of him. A small figure was swaying in the white glow of the LED streetlamps. Takaesu pressed his body tightly against the trunk of a large, towering camphor tree alongside the trail and waited. The moment the young girl ran in from the right and approached the other side of the tree, he spun himself around and came out into the road behind his prey. Possibly having noticed the slight sound of footsteps, the girl turned around as she ran. Her eyes grew huge when she spotted Takaesu. The teardrops gathered in those eyes glittered in the LED light. He would taste the tears first, as an aperitif. As he thought this, Takaesu reached out his thinly gloved left hand and covered the girl’s mouth as she prepared to scream. The vibration of her vocal cords reached his palm but never turned into sound. He came around behind her and pulled her closer, wrapping his right arm around her slim neck. With his first prey, he had made a mistake when regulating the pressure at this point and crushed the person’s cervical vertebrae. Although the final result was still the same, he really did want to savor the sense of energy that living flesh and bone had when he first bit down.