Toi crawled into bed and pretended to sleep. It wasn’t long before Chikai came into the room. The floor desk rattled as he slid one of the drawers open, but just as quickly he headed back out again. Once he was gone, Toi slipped out of bed and timidly checked the drawer. Tucked inside, gleaming silver in the dark, was a Tokarev gun.
“…My brother really is a bad person.”
In front of their parents’ portrait, Chikai had casually left another wrinkled ten-thousand-yen bill.
Soon enough, Sobakyuu was forced to close its doors.
“Are we going to be thrown out? Are we going to lose Mom and Dad’s restaurant?” Toi asked his brother, who’d returned home for the first time in a long time.
But his brother only replied coldly, “Those who can’t survive have to disappear. Disappear and be left behind, forgotten.”
“I don’t want that! I don’t want to forget them! Not our parents, and not the taste of our soba, either…!” Toi vehemently opposed the idea, though there was nothing a powerless child like him could do about it.
The day before they were to be evicted, his aunt and uncle came to clean up the store.
“Stop it! Don’t touch our restaurant!”
As Toi clung to his uncle’s legs, the older man stared down at him as if he were some kind of bug. “You can complain all you like, they’re still going to evict you tomorrow.”
“It really is a shame this place has to close down,” said his wife.
“That’s how it goes if you can’t pay. You and your brother should just be glad that we’re looking after you.”
It really is over, Toi thought, about to give up. But then—
“If it’s money you need, I got it.” Chikai pushed the door open and stood at the entrance.
“Chikai! Where have you been all this time?”
Chikai ignored his uncle’s question and slammed an attaché case down on a nearby table. It was lined with stacks of cash and, in the center, the deed to the restaurant. “I got the restaurant back, and I’m giving you this cash. So…” He turned to his aunt and uncle, who were struck speechless at seeing such a huge sum of money for the first time in their lives. “Please, take over the place.”
It was a bitter decision for the two brothers to have to make.
Toi understood now how powerless he’d been, and that he was nothing but a burden for his brother to protect.
“Kuji? You listening?” Sara-Kazuki called out to him, disrupting the pool of memories he submerged himself in.
“Huh? Oh, my bad,” said Toi.
Sara-Kazuki was bent down on the ground, a blueprint spread out beneath him. He moved chips across it, ones with portraits drawn on their sides. “You following me? The day of the event, Sara will enter this waiting room. First, you need to lock her manager in this bathroom. After that, you can call Sara out of the room, and I’ll use that opportunity to sneak in.” He nodded to himself. “Yeah, this plan is perfect, dish! ✩”
“Hold on a second.”
“Hm?”
“How come I’m the one doing everything?” Toi complained.
“I told you, you’re the only person I can trust with this! I have to concentrate on passing myself off as Sara, disssrgh…!”
Sara-Kazuki’s voice turned into muffled groans as Toi squeezed the boy’s face in his hand. Kazuki dropped his cup of soba, and it went plummeting downward before coming to a soft stop a few inches above the ground, where it began to float upward.
“My soba!” Kazuki gasped.
“A Kappa Zombie!”
An imposing hush settled over the large conference room at the Asakusa Police Station, where a meeting was presently underway. A paper on the outside of the door read: Asakusa Suspicious Death Investigation HQ.
The chief’s voice echoed inside the dimly lit room. “We have identified the body we found early this morning: thirty-year-old Sobatani Yudeo.” His profile revealed that his name included the kanji for “boiling hot soba boy.” “He’s the owner of the restaurant Soba no Yu. Six months ago, he was arrested on suspicion of sneaking into the home of one of his female customers and stealing her used bathwater. He was released after we failed to bring charges against him. We’ll be investigating his death as a homicide.”
There was an audible ka-chik as the projector flipped through the images, eventually landing on a photo of the crime scene. Hoses crawled down from the window of the victim’s bathroom, pumping into plastic containers where the criminal stored the stolen bathwater.
The prevailing mood of the room was, Damn, this guy’s seriously creepy, isn’t he?
“We’re the ones who sucked him up!” said Reo.
“It was yesterday’s soba!” said Mabu.
Yesterday evening, to be precise. The incident took place at the police box where the two worked.
“Well, I have to prep for opening tomorrow, so…”
“For those souls without beginnings or ends, those unable to connect…” Mabu held up a photo of Sobatani threading the hoses through the woman’s bathroom window, plastic containers in his hands.
“Now, let us open a door…” Reo aimed the barrel of his gun at the man. “Is it desire?”
“Or love?”
A large taiko drum appeared above Sobatani’s head.
“Desire Extraction!”
Sobatani was sucked into the drum and disappeared completely.
The Desire Field wrapped itself around the entire area of Asakusa, and the Zombie’s underlings began swiping all of the soba throughout the city. Sobakyuu was no exception.
“Oh no! Our soba…!” Toi’s uncle watched as their bowls of noodles went flying away, one after another. Helpless to stop them, he collapsed to his knees.
Toi watched the scene unfold on Keppi’s monitor.
Enta gasped from beside him, “Wait, that’s Sobakyuu, isn’t it?!”
“Tch,” Toi clicked his tongue. He grabbed Keppi by the beak and threateningly hissed, “Turn me into a kappa right now!”
“Ribbit?!”
Toi turned his back to Keppi, and the Crown Prince of Kappa slammed into him from behind.
“Desiiiire Extractioooon!”
“The object of this Kappa Zombie’s desire is soba, ribbit.”
“Kuji, is your restaurant going to be okay?” asked Kappa-Enta.
“Huh? Kuji’s family runs a soba restaurant?” Kappa-Kazuki’s eyes widened. It was the first he heard of this.
“If someone steals from you, you take back what’s yours!”
“Kappature it!” Keppi cried as the three of them flew toward the creature.
“I love the girl who likes my soba!” The Kappa Zombie mercilessly threw bowls of soba at the boys. “Leftover bathwater isn’t enough! I want to be with her so bad!”
Kappa-Toi gave the creature’s whining a direct, verbal smackdown. “You’re just forcing your selfishness on other people! If you really ‘want to be with her so bad,’ then man up!”
“Gyaaaaaaah!”
Kappa-Toi dove into the creature’s rectum and grasped its shirikodama in his hands. He desperately cried, “I want to protect the same thing my brother fought to protect!”
“We kappatured it!” the three declared.
As he held the ball of energy in his hand, Kappa-Toi saw the man’s desire—him and the girl soaking in a bath filled with soba water, her eating noodles soaked in broth made from her leftover bathwater.
“I found the perfect dashi…” said the man in his fantasy.
“So that’s it,” Kappa-Toi realized. “You wanted to use the bathwater you stole to boil soba…”
“My secret’s been found ooooooout!”
Sobatani’s Kappa Zombie body began to fracture.
“Saraaa!”
“Saraaa!”
“Saraaa!”
And then all together, “Sarazanmai!”
As the transfer of the shirikodama began, Toi felt something akin to resignation. That emotion was soon transferred to the other two as well.
“Leaking.”
They saw a scene from a winter day four years ago. It was right after Chikai disappeared after saving Sobakyuu.
Toi’s breath puffed out in white clouds as he ran through Asakusa. “Brother, where did you go? Don’t leave me behind!” As he passed by one alleyway, he heard a familiar laugh.
“Ehehehe…”
He stilled his breathing and peered out from the shadows, spotting Yuri Kamome and his underling, Yasuda Yasu.