Shizuo Heiwajima was still alive.
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That simple fact meant that he was in the presence of a threat to his very life.
Perhaps if there had been no wind blowing between the buildings or if the night had been perfectly still, the situation would have been different. In any case, it was fortunate for him that his strategy was effective enough to stop Shizuo in his tracks in an outdoor environment at all.
How many minutes would it take before he recovered from the lack of oxygen? How many seconds?
Izaya couldn’t put on his usual confident grin, because any estimates based on normal human physiology meant nothing here. Normally he would have been running and darting about, smiling cockily as he fled, but there were two reasons he wore no such smile now.
He was full to the brim with loathing for his opponent.
And he knew, on an instinctual level, that one wrong movement would lead to the end of his life.
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I don’t care if I die.
But I don’t want it to be at the expense of this monster surviving.
The monster can’t live among the human beings in a world without me.
Pretending to be human, pinning down humanity with his strength.
Love, hope, malice, plotting, intelligence, technique, experience.
All the things that humanity has built, he ruins.
“…Yeah, that’s right.”
The words spilled right out of his mouth.
But whether they were meant for anyone aside from himself, as his eyes narrowed with turgid black emotions, no one could say. Not even the man who said them.
“I ought to kill you, whether there’s a good rationale or not.”
Any display of emotion had disappeared from Izaya’s face. He stood atop the steel beam and took out an object.
It was an old-fashioned box of matches, with the name of some business or other on it—the same implement he’d used to burn the chess pieces in his apartment a while ago. He lit a match and dropped the little spark below.
The wind had already blown free the extinguishing gas that was meant to remove the oxygen that might fuel any flames.
Now there was a different kind of gas surrounding Shizuo.
The flammable gas that had been flowing across the outside area from the moment that he’d first emerged there.
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As he watched the match falling toward him, Shizuo could also sense the odor of the gas filling the space around him. But no one could say whether he currently had the brainpower needed to process that information accurately.
All that was certain was he hadn’t recovered from the damage the lack of oxygen had caused, and he wouldn’t be able to generate the same kind of wind he had earlier when kicking down the door.
So he couldn’t leap out into the open air. The gas surrounded him on all sides. He was trapped.
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And then the flame of the match reached the layer of gas.
Red light flashed against the starless night sky.
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Ikebukuro
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Because it was late at night, only a very limited number of people witnessed a part of the night sky turning red.
But within the confines of a dense metropolis, even a limited number can mean quite a lot—in this case, several hundred people.
Mysteriously, however, the light vanished nearly as quickly as it appeared. From a distance, it was as though the roof of a specific building flashed, then returned to darkness in less than a minute.
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But many of those witnesses failed to detect something off about the phenomenon.
The blinking aircraft warning lights atop the building in question had vanished as well.
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Only a handful of those witnesses actually noticed what happened.
There were Shingen Kishitani and Egor, looking up at the building under construction from its base.
And also, watching from the window of a distant building, a man whose eyes were bloodshot red.
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The man’s skin was peeled off here and there, his flesh scraped away, as if he had wrenched his way free from some kind of physical bondage. He had done a minimal amount to stop the bleeding, but there was plenty of blood on his clothing.
He watched the distant sight as if he were gazing upon someone beloved, with those bright red eyes. And he did know what happened.
On the roof of a building about two-thirds of a mile away, a shadow had plunged from the sky, scooped up a flame that was about to burst throughout the area, and extinguished it within its darkness.
At a brief glance, it was as if the light had rapidly dwindled. But the man, who had observed the freakish shadow longer than anyone and knew it better than anyone, understood immediately how it had extinguished the fire, even from a distance.
It was as though the night sky had a will of its own and had chosen to put out the fire.
And in knowing what it did, the man exulted.
Exactly because he knew what it had done.
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Saika’s accursed words of love surged within him.
When Kujiragi possessed him with Saika’s power, she commanded him to stay put and behave.
But he used his own love to pin down both of these things—and spoke the name of the one to whom he dedicated his unstoppable love.
Moaning, singing, his own word of love escaping his throat.
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“Cel……ty……”
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It was just a name, but to him, it was a word of love.
He hadn’t driven out Saika’s curse, the way that Akabayashi once had, by gouging out his own wound. Instead, he had repeated Haruna Niekawa’s method, mastering Saika’s mad song of love from the inside.
He was able to overwhelm Saika much faster than Haruna had—perhaps because Saika loved “humans,” while what he loved was “inhuman.”
Did he even know what had happened to himself?
The man cut by Saika, Shinra Kishitani, faced the darkened sky with red eyes and smiled.
Full of love for what seemed to be the dark of the night itself that coated the city.
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Raijin High School—in the past
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“So if that tiger’s going to leave his skin behind, as a person, how will you leave your name behind? I’m kind of excited about the thought of you being remembered as a serial killer.”
“As a person…?”
The smile vanished from Shinra’s lips as he looked up at the light coming down from the rooftop door. He imagined a great shadow beyond that light, sucking up everything into its midst.
“I don’t need to leave anything behind.”
“But I thought people died and left their names behind. If you’re not a tiger or a human, then what do you intend to be?”
“Good question. If I’m not a person or a tiger, then I guess I’m going to be some kind of weird folklore monster,” Shinra joked—or made what could only be taken as a joke—smiling worriedly.
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“But if I could be with her…then I wouldn’t mind not being human.”
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Chat room
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Kuru: Well, well. My, my. For claiming that she would flame TarouTanaka until he showed up, Miss Namie does seem to have given up posting all of a sudden.
Mai: Mysterious.
Mai: Maybe she got hungry.
Kuru: We can only hope the reason is as benign as that.
Kuru: But who do you suppose this “Rocchi” is? This message board is supposed to be accessible by invitation only, so I would assume that Rocchi must know one of the members. Or perhaps Masaomi Kida is in fact a member of the chat, and Rocchi threatened him into giving up the address. Who could this Masaomi Kida be…?
Mai: This is shameless.
Mai: Ouch.
Mai: I got pinched.
Kuru: Be that as it may, since neither Rocchi nor Namie has left the room, I would assume they’re still watching?
Mai: Exciting.
Rocchi: Yo, I’m here.
Mai: Yo.
Kuru: Oh my. So you’re still around. Very clever of you to stay quiet and spy on the chat, pretending that you are away.
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NamieYagiri has left the chat.