“Edo is famous for fires and fighting. But fighting no fun, makes your face flush. Replace fires with fireworks, and everyone friends, no fighting.”
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Ikebukuro
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“Are you all right, Sonohara?”
“…Yes, sorry to worry you.”
“You shouldn’t push yourself if you can’t do it. Want to rest somewhere?” asked Saki Mikajima, who had noticed that Anri Sonohara was looking pale and uncomfortable.
“I’m fine…”
Anri’s voice was clearly unsteady, but Saki seemed to conclude that she wasn’t going to get the answer she was looking for and didn’t press the issue any further.
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The girls were making their way to a specific destination.
They considered taking a taxi, but since the place was close, they leaned toward walking the distance instead—and right around the point that they passed by Ikebukuro Station, Anri suddenly found herself racked with a powerful anxiety.
On the inside, something much more reliable than simple animal intuition was giving her unmistakable signals: The Saika slumbering within her was stirring.
What…is this…?
Even during the Night of the Ripper, when Haruna Niekawa brought forth a great new influx of Saikas, she had never felt a stirring of this scale.
Part of that was the fact that she hadn’t fully accepted Saika yet at the time, but she could tell that the trembling from the cursed blade within her was abnormal beyond whatever difference that would make.
It felt like the Saikas were resonating. Like she was on the inside of a gigantic bell, and the roar from the outside was reverberating directly into her body.
This mental resonance blasted Anri’s mind. It made her see spots.
But she couldn’t stop now.
After talking with Saki, Anri decided that whatever trouble was happening at the moment in Ikebukuro, she ought to involve herself in it.
Izaya Orihara had hinted to her that Mikado Ryuugamine and Masaomi Kida were in the path of some terrible oncoming disaster. He was not the kind of man whom she trusted at all, but there was something in his vague, suggestive words that she found highly believable.
And both Anri and Saki shared that view.
I wonder if Saika’s surge…has something to do with them…
What if someone aside from her caused Mikado and Masaomi to be made part of Saika? The thought sent a terrible shiver down Anri’s back.
✦ ✦ ✦
Fortunately, her fears were unfounded.
But as it happened, Mikado and Masaomi were indeed caught in the midst of a terrible ordeal.
It just didn’t have anything to do with Saika.
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Abandoned factory—late night
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“Now, let’s see… Which one of these numbers belongs to Mikado Ryuu-ga-mi-ne…?”
The cheery voice was quite at odds with the oppressive setting of an abandoned factory in the middle of the night.
“Aha, there it is! Wow, when you see it with the kanji and everything, ‘Mikado Ryuugamine’ sure looks imposing,” Chikage Rokujou chattered happily as he fiddled with the cell phone. “Emperor of Dragon Peak—hah!”
The phone’s owner, Masaomi Kida, sighed and said, “I told you, he’s not going to answer a call from some number he doesn’t recognize. The guy’s really shy and suspicious like that…”
It wasn’t clear whether Chikage was actually listening to him, because he went ahead and read the number off Masaomi’s phone, inputting it into his own smartphone. “But that was the old Mikado Ryuugamine, right?”
“…”
“If the guy’s cracked as much as you say he has, he’ll pick up. Trust me,” said Chikage, smiling confidently. He pushed the call button on the screen.
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But many rings later, there was no indication that the call was going to be answered.
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“…”
“…”
“Wanna pretend that conversation never happened?”
“…Sure, sounds good.”
To break the awkward silence between the two, Chikage launched into conversation again, as if nothing had ever happened.
“Doesn’t he have a social media account somewhere? Like on Mix-E or Twittia? Something he would definitely look at, rather than ignoring by default.”
“You really are exhausting all your options, huh…?” Masaomi said, abandoning any pretense of respect for his elder. Then he sighed again and thought it over. “Someplace he would look… Maybe a Dollars-related web forum…”
“Don’t really want a lot of people seeing this.”
“Hmm… Social media, huh…? But whatever he might potentially be doing, I’m not linked to him, so… Oh!”
Masaomi snatched the phone out of Chikage’s hand, remembering something out of the blue. He connected to the Internet in a hurry.
“Maybe he’s still checking that one chat site every day…”
A dozen or so seconds later, when the chat room filled the screen, Masaomi’s eyes bulged.
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TarouTanaka: I don’t understand what you mean. Who is Kujiragi? What are you after?
NamieYagiri: You’re the one who’s after something. What do you think you’re doing?
NamieYagiri: Why don’t you look around yourself?
NamieYagiri: I just want to bring an end to what’s going on. So help me.
NamieYagiri: You have no idea about anything, and yet you’re connected to everything.
NamieYagiri: Wake the hell up. You’re the key.
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“What is this?”
Chikage peered over Masaomi’s shoulder and said, “Whoa, this chat looks pretty gnarly. What’s up with that?”
“It’s not usually like this…”
On the screen, a woman named NamieYagiri was taking TarouTanaka—the handle name of Mikado Ryuugamine—to task with blistering force. It was all just on a screen, of course, but her posting was powerful enough that it practically grabbed the collar of the reader.
“Yagiri…? Does that person have something to do with Seiji?” Masaomi wondered, thinking of the boy he’d known from school. Confused, he continued reading.
And after a while, he froze up again.
It wasn’t only Mikado.
There was another familiar name in the chat room.
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NamieYagiri: Same question about your girlfriend, Anri Sonohara.
NamieYagiri: You know that she’s a monster, too.
NamieYagiri: You must have seen her with a katana at some point.
NamieYagiri: Want me to tell you what she did during that incident with the street slasher?
✦ ✦ ✦
Abandoned factory
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“…”
Masaomi was frozen, unable to continue scrolling down, so Chikage picked up the slack.
“Oh, Anri? Yeah, she had a katana.”
“No…wait. Hang on. There’s just too much…I can’t wrap my head around…”
“See? You think you know your friends, but you know them a lot less than you realize, huh?” Chikage sagely mocked. It was easy for him to say, since none of this had to do with him. He snatched the phone away and checked the web address, typing it into his own smartphone.
Then, eyes sparkling like a child who’d thought up a good prank, Chikage began typing his own text into the chat room.