When Shizuo Heiwajima descended the stairs, the door to the office was still open.
“…” He watched carefully, saying nothing. Normally he would be shouting something like “Where did you go, fleabrain?!” But this situation was anything but normal.
He held everything inside, even his voice, conserving and converting all his energy to the purpose of eradicating Izaya Orihara from the earth.
Shizuo made his way slowly into the office, until he noticed a bloodstain on the floor near the center of the room.
Despite all his fury and hatred being turned solely on Izaya, Shizuo was not yet a raging, berserk animal. That might have been the benefit of all the time he had spent waiting and perhaps even what he yearned for.
Shizuo had misjudged his jump and crashed through the glass an entire story above where Izaya had landed, but he did not simply stomp his way through the floor to get down there.
The lights were out, so he wasn’t worried that some innocent person might get hurt. But even still, Shizuo’s furious instincts gave him a warning. He’d clashed with Izaya Orihara so many, many times before that he knew one solid fact.
Unless he watched himself kill the man, Izaya would not be dead.
It didn’t matter if he was buried under rubble. There could be no rest until Shizuo saw the body. And when you couldn’t see him, that was when you were in Izaya’s danger zone.
That wasn’t a rational, known fact that he kept in his brain. It was something that Shizuo had come to understand innately, through years of near-fatal brawling with Izaya.
There was no point to it unless he finished Izaya off visibly.
He could pack the man in concrete and dump him into the sea—and as long as Izaya was still alive when he disappeared under the waves, there could be no rest.
And even if he was dead, the unease would still live on in the city. His dead body could turn up in the rubble of the building, and people would still think, Does that body really belong to Izaya Orihara?
Among those who knew Izaya Orihara, the unease would live on, like a swelling that would not subside. And that was why Shizuo Heiwajima was here, to ensure that it did not happen.
He had to witness the sight of Izaya Orihara being eliminated from the earth.
However much rational sense Shizuo still had now, if he was his normal self, he would say something like this: I’m not here for the sake of all the people Izaya’s harmed. It’s all for my own selfish reasons.
On the other hand, if he were the sole target of all of Izaya’s malice, it would not have come to this situation, either. It was the way the malice was entangling all those around him, like Vorona, like Akane Awakusu, Shinra, Celty, and Tom, that had Shizuo so cornered and furious.
In a sense, it was ironic.
If he were the Shizuo from before he fought the crowd of Saikas and began to feel differently about his own strength…
If he were the Shizuo from before he met Akane Awakusu and learned how to use his strength to protect…
If he were the Shizuo who’d become trapped by his own violence and chosen to place himself at a distance from his surroundings…
…then he might not be in this position now.
Or if he was, then maybe he’d be screaming and chasing his opponent around like he so often did before.
But he did not this time.
Shizuo Heiwajima accepted people, connected to people—and because of that, he was tormented when they were hurt, and he trapped his unprecedented anger within himself, so that now it exploded.
It might lead to nothing but tragedy, but there was no stopping him now.
In a sense, it was his connections to others that created the single devastating weakness of the demon that was Shizuo Heiwajima.
✦ ✦ ✦
And now Shizuo was falling into his least favorite development.
Izaya Orihara was nowhere to be seen.
He was gone, leaving behind only a bloodstain in the office.
Perhaps he was setting up an ambush. Shizuo stared around, then began lifting up the office desks one-handed, one after the other. But there was no sign of him hiding anywhere.
He couldn’t have had time to set up some flaming gas trap, like he did earlier.
“…”
Shizuo headed out of the office and glanced around the building. Aside from the green emergency exit panel, there was just one illumination glowing.
The elevator light.
He approached without making a sound and confirmed that the light was moving. It was indicating that the elevator was traveling downward from this floor. Of course, it was possible that the elevator was just a feint and that Izaya was still hiding on this floor.
But that, too, was merely another facet of escape.
✦ ✦ ✦
“It’s not to run away,” Izaya had told himself, and yet mysteriously, he had vanished from the building.
Shizuo hadn’t heard him say that, but he could sense that the man truly intended to kill him. He gave not a single thought to what Izaya might actually be plotting and sneaked back to the office area.
Then he stuck his head through the broken window.
Izaya could pop up behind him and push him through it. He could have gone up a floor during the elevator distraction and prepared a rope or something to hook around Shizuo’s throat.
But Izaya knew full well that these things would mean nothing.
So instead, he chose to allow Shizuo to catch sight of him.
✦ ✦ ✦
The elevator hadn’t been a distraction at all, merely a straightforward means of exiting the building.
When Shizuo saw Izaya, dressed in his usual black clothing, running down the dimly lit alley, his expression did not change one iota.
Instead, he placed his foot upon the frame of the broken window, as though this were a perfectly ordinary thing to do—and stepped out into the open air the way a person would walk down a staircase.
✦ ✦ ✦
Alley