And he witnessed a cavalcade of steel beams and rebar crashing down onto the spot where he’d stood just seconds before.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Wh… Wh-wha…?”
Seitarou was now well and truly stunned at what was happening around him. He couldn’t be blamed for his abject terror, given that he, too, had just been in that spot moments before. If he hadn’t been backing away, he would be dead right now.
One of the bars bounced and landed right next to him, but Seitarou was unable to budge even the tiniest bit.
Kujiragi’s eyes were bulging; she had no idea what had just happened. Apparently, this was not part of her plans.
But at this point, Seitarou didn’t care anymore; he just cursed fate and prayed that the employee of his who ran away would come back with reinforcements to save him—the employee who, unbeknownst to him, was currently unconscious in a trash-pickup area.
✦ ✦ ✦
Shizuo was just as immobile as the rest of them.
He was so unable to process what had just happened that he even forgot to breathe. All he could see was an endless pile of steel beams sprayed around a tiny, cramped alley.
And before him, trapped under one of the beams—Vorona.
“…Vorona!”
He snapped out of it, racing to her side and hauling the beam off her with one hand.
Her body was still visibly intact, so it hadn’t been a direct hit straight off the drop. But the metal materials had clearly struck her on the bounce, as her suit was ripped in several places, the skin beneath bloodied here and there.
“Hey, are you all right? Vorona! Hey!”
“…Sir…Shizuo.”
“Oh, good! You’re alive! You’ll be okay!”
“Worry is…unnecessary. I had an evasive calculation, but I was unable to avoid the jumping building materials.”
Her speech was much more understandable than usual, which was probably a good sign. It was hard to tell whether the force of the steel beams was affected by the bounce off the pavement or whether it was just thanks to her excellent physical fitness, but she didn’t seem to be in mortal danger.
“You idiot… Don’t risk your life for my sake…”
Indeed, Shizuo might have taken the hit directly and lived. But in the moment, Vorona had feared for his life and pushed him out of the path of the debris. Now Shizuo was full of regret and shame that she had been injured in his place.
He wanted to say something to her—but the situation would not allow him to.
“Sir Shizuo!”
Vorona, lying flat on her back, gaped at what she witnessed. Shizuo put two and two together and looked upward.
What he saw was quite abnormal, indeed.
✦ ✦ ✦
Falling from the roof of the office building under construction was the entire forklift.
✦ ✦ ✦
First it tilted like a seesaw, until the entire body began to flip over—and it fell right toward them, like a scene in a movie.
Time flowed very slowly for Shizuo as it happened before his eyes.
Just before the forklift fell.
Standing to its side.
Looking down at them.
A man, his face unclear.
Just for an instant—even the color of his clothes was warped by the halogen lights.
But with a foreboding that was close to certainty, Shizuo spoke the name that came to his mind.
“…Izaya?”
✦ ✦ ✦
And then the forklift was plummeting toward Shizuo and Vorona.
Seitarou wailed, and Shizuo secretly hoped it would simply flatten him. It never even occurred to Shizuo that any of the debris might strike and kill him in the process.
But no one could believe what happened next.
Shizuo leaped to his feet and rushed at the falling forklift to give it an extremely simple and powerful shoulder tackle.
In sumo terms, this would be known as a buchikamashi, a violent shoulder strike.
Shizuo, of course, had no experience in actual combat disciplines. He was just following an instinct that told him to give the falling object a body blow. But the impact of such a blow at zero range would be devastating.
The vending machines Shizuo typically threw weighed around six hundred pounds. Depending on the contents, they might get up over a thousand.
But the forklift falling down on them easily cleared a ton. And it was falling from the top of the building—even if it wasn’t the final height of the finished project.
It was a weight that spelled certain death—but Shizuo literally knocked it away. The moment he made contact, the forklift’s trajectory changed dramatically, accompanied by a tremendous crash as the vehicle bounced off at an angle and slammed into the partially built structure, breaking through the concrete wall and tumbling inside it.
✦ ✦ ✦
Following the racket of the wall’s destruction, silence reigned over the alley. No one was in any position to speak.
Unavoidable death for any other human being had been no match for the pure physical strength and hardy body of Shizuo Heiwajima.
Even Vorona, whose life had just been saved by this, was unable to believe what had just transpired.
She’d seen Shizuo kick cars like soccer balls. She knew that knives couldn’t stab through his skin.
But she had never been cognizant that he was allowed to be this ridiculous. Would bullets even pass through his body? She was in the presence of a superhero out of an American comic book. Vorona’s definition of human was crumbling before her eyes.
“…You okay?” Shizuo asked, breaking the silence he had created. He smiled with relief when he saw that Vorona wasn’t freshly injured. “Yeah, you seem okay to me.”
Then he tilted his neck to crack it and turned his back to her, rotating his left shoulder. “Sorry…Vorona.”
“…?”
“I’m about to do somethin’ that ain’t right. I can’t complain if you shoot or stab me for this one.” Then he turned toward Shooter, which was farther down the alley, and bowed. “And you… You looked to me for help outta this situation… I’m sorry. When Celty’s back to normal, you can kick me all you want.”
If you judged him on words alone, he might seem even calmer than usual.
But everyone in his physical presence could tell—even Seitarou, who didn’t know Shizuo at all—that something else was behind his words.
✦ ✦ ✦
Anger.
✦ ✦ ✦
Pure, simple, endless emotion.
Shizuo was a fiery mentality compressed to its most potent state, walking in human form.
The words he’d just emitted to Vorona and Shooter were probably the last impurities of other emotions before he burned them all away.
Vorona, Seitarou, and even Kujiragi could all imagine what would happen once he had finished expelling everything that held him back—and they felt an itch from deep in their bowels that urged them to run.
When Shizuo had seen Vorona outside the police station, he’d felt the greatest rage he’d ever felt well up inside him. But within hours of that, he’d been acting normally. After that, he’d tossed a teen into the air and had a talk with Shooter, which even Shizuo had thought was a sign that his anger had fully subsided.
But he’d been wrong.
He’d thought that pushing his emotions underneath the surface meant his anger had calmed. But all it meant was that the actual thing lurking at the pit of his emotional center had not allowed that anger to be expressed.
He instinctually knew that this tremendous rage, fiery enough to evaporate boiling magma, could be reserved for only one man.
And there he was.
Having just maliciously injured Shizuo’s coworker Vorona.
Shizuo strode forward, directly into the construction site, through the hole the forklift had blasted in the building’s wall.
As he did so, Vorona noticed that Shizuo’s right arm was dangling limp from the shoulder and seemingly immobile.
“…Sir Shizuo.”
But she couldn’t stop him.
It felt as if stopping him now would be akin to defiling something sacred. Perhaps it was some cheap illusive form of religion in her heart, born of her admiration for human strength.
In any case, there was no one present who could stop Shizuo now.