When Aoba saw the man, he clenched his jaws.
“Izaya…Orihara!” the boy snarled.
✦ ✦ ✦
Just at that moment, an enormous mass leaped over the heads of the stunned bikers and flew toward Izaya.
When they recognized it as one of the motorcycles parked right in the middle of the street, even the Saika-possessed were quick to back away.
The vehicle crashed explosively against the street and slid over its surface, bits and pieces spraying off it. Izaya dodged the projectile by a tiny margin and stood in the middle of the space that had opened up in the crowd. There he awaited the monster.
✦ ✦ ✦
Everyone present turned in the direction from which the vehicle flew and instantly cleared the path.
“Ah!” Chikage gasped.
Walking down the newly created space toward him, exuding dozens of times more intimidation than the crowd of a hundred-plus bikers, was a man in a bartender’s outfit.
“It’s you, Heiwajima!”
Then he turned to Aoba with a bitter smirk.
“Wait, is that guy the one you called in to help?”
“No. He’s…not in the Dollars anymore.”
“Wha…?” Chikage drawled.
Under his ski mask, Aoba’s face was devoid of expression.
“In fact, I think him leaving the Dollars was one of the reasons that Mr. Mikado broke down.”
✦ ✦ ✦
After Shizuo threw the bike he had been dragging along one-handed, he continued his steady pace toward Izaya. But the other man did not attempt to leave the scene.
It was almost as though he had been hoping to lure him here from the start.
✦ ✦ ✦
While Masaomi challenged Mikado, who wanted to be an urban legend, Izaya Orihara was challenging an established legend in the flesh.
Izaya pulled out his most trusted weapon, a large folding knife, signaling that all the little tricks were over now.
“Shall we begin?”
✦ ✦ ✦
Despite being in the same circumstances as Masaomi, Izaya gripped his weapon for almost the exact opposite purpose.
He wanted to carve into the world the fact that Shizuo, who tried to be human, was truly a hideous monster.
✦ ✦ ✦
Inside the van
✦ ✦ ✦
“Did you hear something earlier?” Anri asked with concern.
In the passenger seat, Kadota replied, “Yeah, it sounded like a gunshot.”
“C’mon, man… Don’t try to scare me like that…,” Togusa griped, his cheek twitching.
Next to him, Anri looked at the sky through the window. Then she noticed it, too:
The sky over Ikebukuro was covered in an abnormal darkness. When she detected the oppressive darkness surrounding the top of the Sunshine building, she couldn’t help opening her mouth—to speak the name of the creature she trusted most.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Is that…Celty?”
✦ ✦ ✦
In time, they gathered.
In the place where the Dollars began.
To bring the Dollars to their end.
✦ ✦ ✦
And almost as if retracing the very steps of that first in-person meetup, a woman cloaked in black shadow began to wriggle and writhe. Unlike at that meetup, however, she was riding a headless horse rather than a motorcycle.
As well, rather than racing down the side of the Tokyu Hands building, she started from the roof of the Sunshine building, the tallest in Ikebukuro.
✦ ✦ ✦
What was once the Headless Rider was now in true, complete dullahan form.
And so she descended into Ikebukuro once again.
She would display to the city the change that had come over her.