But it was true: The place was very special to Mikado Ryuugamine.
It was where the Mikado of now got his start, when the ordinary and extraordinary completely switched places.
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The intersection in front of Tokyu Hands.
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It was the start of the major road that passed by the Sunshine building—or, alternately, the end of it.
It was an answer that came to Mikado naturally. And in his case, inevitably.
He made the decision as the Dollars’ founder and as a member—in order to welcome Masaomi Kida, who wasn’t there on that day.
If possible, he hoped Anri would be there, too.
But despite his desire, Mikado had to keep his hopes under control, knowing he couldn’t be that selfish.
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That was because he knew that after this, something bloody and ugly was likely to happen there.
A part of him was aware that Anri’s secret was far more gruesome than a typical youth rivalry, but he still refused to intentionally get her involved.
Or perhaps it was still a bit of youthful stubbornness that remained within him.
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Ikebukuro—apartment bar
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“…”
In the meantime, a man in a line of work that was completely removed from youthfulness looked hard at his screen, just as Mikado had.
“What’s this, then?” grunted Akabayashi, lieutenant of the Awakusu-kai.
The old scar on his right eye was bothering him. He was sitting in a special unlicensed bar built into a private apartment that had been outfitted for business, collecting information for his own purposes.
What Akabayashi was examining was not one of the several Dollars-related message boards or a report message from his errand boys, the gang called Jan-Jaka-Jan. It was a chat room that he’d been introduced to by a girl he helped take care of.
The chat room was oddly well-connected with what was going on in the city, so Akabayashi made it a point to pop in at least once a day, both for information and to check on his patron there, the girl who was like a niece to him.
Something odd was going on in the chat now.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Akabayashi?” asked the middle-aged barkeeper, who must have noticed his expression.
“Oh, just some trouble with work.”
“Ah, I see.”
The bartender did not ask further. Whether he was aware of what Akabayashi did or not, he clearly came to the determination that it wasn’t worth asking about.
But Akabayashi gave him a lilting smile and offered freely, “It’s odd. I’d say that we took a shot from a direction that I wasn’t expecting.”
He looked back at his smartphone. In the chat, a woman named Namie Yagiri was throwing a tantrum and tearing into Mikado Ryuugamine. That alone would strike Akabayashi as nothing more than some internal Dollars trouble, but what alarmed him was when the real name of the girl who invited him to the chat room appeared in the conversation.
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NamieYagiri: Where is that headless monster?
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?
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Normally, one might take statements like that as the ramblings of a person undergoing a psychotic break.
But Akabayashi understood them perfectly.
And that was unfortunate, because the words that this Namie woman was saying did indeed relate directly to Anri Sonohara.
Monster.
Katana.
Street slasher.
The old scar on his right eye itched.
A searing pain assaulted his brain, centered around the scar—as though the prosthetic embedded into his socket was radiating the heat itself. But Akabayashi just took off his sunglasses, pressed his eye lightly, and smiled sadly to himself.
Calm down already. You’re not some kid in puberty.
He reflected fondly on his past.
His first love had come late for a man of his type, but it was very hot and painful.
The woman seemed barely human. She pierced both his eye and his heart.
The mysterious blade was contained within her body, and her eyes burned red, marking her as the slasher.
Akabayashi could clearly remember the first woman he’d ever fallen in love with.
She had been a blade personified and yet died from a blade wound through the stomach.
But Akabayashi knew more than that. Not from seeing it for himself but out of personal certainty.
She—Sayaka Sonohara—had cut off her husband’s head before running the sword through her own stomach.
Where had the katana housed in her body gone?
The police said they never found the murder weapon. So even though the wound looked exactly like a self-inflicted one, they couldn’t rule it a suicide without the weapon there, too.
Had the police coroner found anything abnormal with her body? If they had, perhaps they hadn’t announced it to the public because it was too abnormal—but what if the sword was still intact and well after Sayaka Sonohara’s death and had moved on to inhabit someone else?
In that case, the most likely host by far would be none other than Anri Sonohara.
The thought had occurred to him a number of times, but he’d always laughed it off as a nonsensical daydream.
And yet just a few lines of text from this chat room had given him clear evidence.
The katana that pierced his eye had moved on to Sayaka’s daughter, Anri.
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Heat bloomed on the right half of his face.
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The moment that his conjecture seemed more likely to be truth, he felt his own cold blood suddenly roar to a boil.
But that was where the surge stopped.
Akabayashi stilled the throbbing in his eye with force and pushed his emotions back into the memories of the past.
I said, calm down. Anri inherited a memento of her mother. That’s all this is.
If this were back in his more short-tempered days, he might have already been out the door. This meant that a part of the woman he loved was still alive within her daughter.
But Akabayashi was too mentally mature to hold some kind of twisted romantic affection for Anri, a girl young enough to be his own daughter.
The one I fell in love with…was a crazy woman named Sayaka Sonohara.
Not that buzzing, annoying sword.
Recalling the flood of obnoxious “words of love” that flooded into him the moment his eye was slashed, Akabayashi drained the last of his drink and called out, “Hey, bartender.”
“Yes, sir?” the other man asked.
Akabayashi gave him another lilting smile. “Let’s say you were in love with a woman, and she didn’t choose you. She ended up marrying another man.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And say her daughter was in some kind of trouble, real bad stuff about to happen. If you wanted to help the girl get out of it, would that qualify as ‘not being over it’?”
“…”
The bartender thought it over, returned the glass he was polishing to the shelf, and said, “Whether you can’t get over the girl’s mother or not, you don’t strike me as the kind of person who would intentionally turn a blind eye to the child of an acquaintance being in danger, Mr. Akabayashi.”
“Well, you might think too highly of me. You can close me out now,” Akabayashi said, getting up from his seat and pulling out his wallet. He didn’t really need to ask the man that question. He just wanted an excuse to go ahead with it.
But it was true gratitude that he felt for the bartender as he took his time leaving the little room.