DAILY LIFE B
THE WANDERER CONCERTO
Translator's note: Akabayashi refers to himself as "Oi-chan", which is simply yakuza-talk for "oji-chan" ("uncle").
6 years ago, Ikebukuro
- What?
- What is it……that I'm looking at right now?
That man was simply a strong fighter.
He was outstanding even in the violence organization he belonged to.
Rumors said he was good, and he was confident in his own strength.
In fact, he had blazed his trail in the underworld relying solely on the power of his two hands.
He was good at fighting.
With that alone he would be able to continue living and feel proud of his life.
Intelliyakuza* was on the rise and anti-violence laws were being enacted, but all of these didn't matter in the least to this man.
* Intelliyakuza (Intelligence yakuza): a term coined for yakuza specializing in financial manipulation and other kinds of non-violent lucrative activities. Information (intelligence) is key to these new yakuza activities, giving rise to the word "Intelliyakuza". Shiki is a prime example of Intelliyakuza in the Durarara!! series.
Conformity is valued, but endless conformity simply makes others look down on you.
He continued to walk his own path unwavered.
Several years ago, some subordinates of his rumored rival from another yakuza organization lost to a little boy at a bakery store. He had felt a mixture of emotions rush to his heart, compassion, contempt, anger - he told himself that it was no more than a joke, and remained decidedly skeptical.
That boy was going to grow up to wear a bartender suit and become an Ikebukuro urban legend of sorts - but of course, the man knew nothing of what was going to happen.
As if determined to show his fellow yakuza just what fighting was about, he exploded.
Violence, violence, violence.
Overwhelming violence. The man wanted everything he saw.
He knew it was impossible.
But he didn't stop.
Couldn't stop.
His impulse within.
His intoxication with violence.
The skills he polished through experience, the trained power of his muscles - he couldn't let a day pass him by without putting them to use.
Couldn't let a day pass him by without showing them off.
Even if that meant he had to destroy everything he saw - the man still continued to release his power according to his desires.
Until one day -
He met that monster.
- What, is this.
It was not the Headless Rider on a motorbike with a noiseless engine that had been featured intermittently in rumors -
It was the Slasher with a katana who had only just become the subject of such rumors.
- WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?
No one knew at that time.
Because no one could have known.
Even now, apart from this man only a few people knew the truth.
- Is this even real……?
That Slasher was a bona fide monster.
A monster with a pair of red pupils and blades of katana growing out of every part of its body. Furthermore, it behaved in a way furthest from human.
The man did not know the monster's name.
"Dammit……"
It was "Saika", the name of a demon blade in love with humans.
"What are you! Dammit - !"
Oblivious to the man's cries -
The demon blade in the hands of the red-eyed human cut into a part of the man's body.
And time elapsed -
♂♀
Now, midnight of May 4th, a certain nightclub in Tokyo
A suggestive mixture of music and light flowed freely in this club.
The Public Morals Law* would probably list it as a "cafe", but it was more on the "nightclub" side or at least something close to the disco clubs of yore.
* Public Morals Law: Short for "Regulation of Businesses Affecting Public Morals", a Japanese law regulating sex-related businesses in place since 1985.
Entertainment businesses came and went, renting the space in the club for their activities night after night.
Young people ground their bodies together to the rhythm of the loud music, immersed in all kinds of bliss.
Their bodies and souls were excited to the extreme by the low beats in the darkness.
Some danced like snakes to the music; some watched as they indulged themselves in the taste of beer and the beats of the music; some, riding on the waves of excitement, tried to pick up members of the opposite sex.
The alternating light and darkness etched their in-motion silhouettes onto nothingness as the music went on.
But even in clubs like these, there were young people who went about their own business seemingly unaffected by this world of sensory experience.
In the club's men's bathroom, the volume of the noise was reduced by more than a half.
"Oi……you brought it, didn't you? Show us!"
"We have money on us all right…..so hurry up, you heard me?"
The girls wearing heavy make-up sounded a little anxious.
It was a men's bathroom, yet these girls had walked into its innermost corner without hesitation.
Three well-built men stood facing them.
Unique tattoos were showing on the napes of their necks. They were all around twenty years old, but the aura they emanated was already intimidating. They surrounded the girls.
Among them a lanky man edged closer to the girls with smiles all over his face.
"Yeah, yeah, don't you even worry. We brought it with us."
The girls looked somewhat relieved after they heard the man.
But their faces were about to lose their color and sweat about to seep out of their skin.
"It's just, um…..you see, this thing is pretty popular nowadays. And pretty hard to get hold of, too, you know? So um, well, we're not going to charge you any more than we already did - but this is what we can give you."
Seemingly out of thin air the man produced a tiny, sealed plastic bag and dangled it in front of the girls' eyes. In the bag were several white pills.
One of the girls had a desperate expression on her face as she looked at the bag.
"But how……this is only half as many as what we usually……"
"Ahh, we were actually going to reserve them for older clients. But you girls look like you're having a hard time, don't you? We're too nice to just ignore cute girls when we see how they suffer."
"……We'll……give you double the amount……give us the usual……"
The girls muttered broken sentences in somewhat broken logic.
They looked thirsty, swallowing every now and then as they spoke.
One of the men began to stroke the girl's face as he continued:
"It's gonna be OK, it's gonna be OK - we'll find you better part-time jobs. Girls aren't supposed to look so heavy-hearted."
The man chuckled as he kept dangling the plastic bag before the girls' eyes.
- As if dangling a carrot in front of a horse.
But - the carrot was about to be swept away by a sudden gust of wind.
From one of the compartments came the sound of water being flushed down the toilet.
"?"
The men frowned and looked in that direction.
It was the compartment closest to the entrance. Before they came in they had checked; no one had been there.
And - unbeknownst to the girls, they had stationed two men at the entrance to stop anyone who would try to enter the bathroom except for themselves and their clients, and tell them it was being cleaned. At least that was the plan.
"……"
Was it one of those two men? But how come no one among them had noticed? They hadn't even heard the door close.
"Oi, oi, hurry up……"
"Shut up!"
One of the men bellowed to silence the girls and turned to look at the door.
The couple of seconds felt like a full minute on their nerves.
They were afraid that they would see a cop.
If it was a party guest who happened to have meandered in when their guards were not paying attention, they could simply kick him out or at least pretend nothing was happening.
But they didn't even hear him using the toilet or turning the toilet paper roll.
In other words - all that the man in the compartment did was flush the toilet.
Since he had begun to slowly push the compartment door, the men were convinced that he wasn't about to use the toilet either.
So he entered the compartment just to flush the toilet - but why?
To think that he simply spit into the toilet and flushed it would be too optimistic.
It was surprising enough that anyone who was not a client would be here to begin with when they were doing their transaction.
Meeting clients in such places and selling such illegal drugs - they were fairly experienced in this business judging from the how constantly vigilant they were.
"Oi, who are you? Oi!"
Bellowing in a manner meant to intimidate, the man began to walk into the half-opened compartment door.
- And the door opened noiselessly to reveal the man standing inside.
He was not one of the cops they had been fearing to see.
Yet he was no ordinary human who just happened to have stumbled upon the scene, either.
"Yah."
It was a weird man.
"Young folks, um, what should I say? It's so nice to see you doing well!"
It was a tall man in a gaudy suit.
He looked like he was over thirty.
He was not young, but his looks didn't fall under the middle-aged category yet.
He was tall and thin, but the scar on his face kept him from looking weak or fragile.
With a pair of expensive-looking sunglasses on his nose and an elaborately designed ornamented cane in his hand, he looked like someone who had just walked out of an old movie.
Although he was holding a cane, it didn't seem like his legs were impaired or anything.
The man was grinning as if taking no notice of his surroundings as he walked out of the compartment.
The young men exchanged glances among themselves as they saw the weird aura surrounding the man who had just made his appearance. Two of them said in a jesting tone:
"What up, old man?""We're having fun. Care to leave us alone?"
"……"
The remaining one, however, fell into deep thought as he saw the man's face as if it had rung a bell.
Ignoring the men, the girls kept reaching for that plastic bag as if their lives depended on it.
One of the men hid it behind his back while the other two approached the older man without fear.
"This bathroom is being cleaned! Get out!"
"Oops. Young people are so feisty nowadays. Alas, if you keep talking in that manner, I could pull your teeth out. Ah, do kids your age even understand what that means anymore?"
"What're you talking about, old man? Oi!"
"Ahh, nah, it's nothing, nothing, really. What I was trying to say was, 'Go read your manga like a good kid, don't go around pretending that you're a tough adult. Keep believing in perseverance, friendship and victory!*"
* Perseverance, friendship and victory: the slogan of Shounen Jump, one of the most popular magazines for shounen manga in Japan.
The man kept that grin plastered to his face as he flexed his neck and showed them his other hand without the cane.
"……?"
The men froze.
He was holding at his fingertips the exact same little plastic bag the tattooed man had just shown the girls a moment before.
Except that it was empty.
The man in sunglasses kept grinning as he said to the young men with steely faces:
"Alas, my bad for interrupting you. But the young folks at the entrance were putting dirty stuff into this bag, so I kind of had to bustle in, you see…one had to purge the place of dirty stuff. There was no choice but to flush it down the toilet. Well, granted, there are certain things you can't flush down the toilet because they congest the pipes. But that thing was fine, I think - it looked pretty soluble in water."
"……! You bastard!"
They more or less knew by now what had happened to the two guards at the door. But before they could even think of that, a young hand had grabbed the collar of the man in sunglasses.
But -
"Look, look. You can't do that, young man."
Crack. It sounded like a wet stick was being broken in half.
"You can't just grab the collar of someone older than you."
The smiling man moved his body slowly and in front of him -
The young man who was supposed to be grabbing him by the collar was beginning to trace a graceful curve as his body went into circular motion.
What was more - instead of following his body's suit, his fingers on the man's collar were bent into impossible shapes.
Yet the man in circular motion did not issue a single sound.
"?! - !!??!"
It wasn't only his lungs.
He felt as if all the oxygen and carbon dioxide he had was extracted by force from his veins.
Before he could even tell whether it was pain or numbness that was spreading from the tips of his fingers, a second blow ensued, piercing his Adam's apple.
It was the cane the man had been holding, which had forced its way into the younger man's throat and impaled him to the floor.
The younger man lost his consciousness in pain.
"Good thing that Oi-chan's not a martial artist. Otherwise your fingers wouldn't have been the only things that were broken."
The other two young men stopped moving as soon as they saw what had happened within these few seconds.
Only the voices of the girls resounded within this space in which time itself seemed to have come to a stop.
"Oi, oi, what are you doing! Sell it to us, quickly!"
"We have nothing to do with your fight!"
But one of the tattooed men boomed back angrily as the girls kept on shouting.
"Shut UP!"
"Kyahh - "
The man was about to aim his elbow at the girl's face as he saw her diving for the plastic bag he had hidden behind his back.
As he looked back for a second -
"You can't."
He saw the close-up of the mysterious man's face.
On the man's sunglasses he could see his shocked eyes staring back at himself.
"Uwahhh!?"
The man instinctively began to swing his fist about, but without technique his power proved to no avail.
"You can't go rough with your elbow on girls. You must be gentler with them."
The next second - the young man felt his ear being seized and pulled slowly downwards.
"W - Wait……it's being torn……"
His entire body was silently screaming that he was going to lose his ear. Before he could actually think about it the second young man began to lower his body in a natural effort to save his ear from being torn off his head.
The man in sunglasses seized this chance to kick him to the ground, making his lips kiss the bathroom floor.
"Bahh……you bastard……wahh?!"
The man wanted to get up and yell back at him but that wish had to remain unfulfilled.
His head was pressed to the floor by the sole of the man's shoe, his nose and front teeth breaking under the weight - and he had to let his consciousness slip into the world of dreams.
The only young man standing, seeing what had happened to his companions, let fear distort his face.
- I remember now.
Yet that fear was not only for the violence the man had just proven himself capable of.
- Man in sunglasses and a gaudy suit with a cane in his hand.
As he recalled who exactly this man was, he was reminded too of the organization the man belonged to.
- There's no mistaking it.
- Akabayashi……he's Akabayashi from Awakusu-kai!
"W - Wait a second! I'm sorry! I'm really really sorry!"
The man in sunglasses turned around to find the third young man already dropping to his knees on the bathroom floor.
"Oi oi, young man. Have you no sense of hygiene? Don't put your hands to the bathroom floor."
Akabayashi - the man in sunglasses - kept the other young man's face pressed to the bathroom floor with the sole of his shoe as he said grinning like a Cheshire cat.
"Real men don't just kneel in front of others, especially when they haven't even been asked to. More importantly, hello - Oi-chan doesn't want you to kneel before him since it's too easy to make you. Understand?"
Akabayashi mocked him scathingly in a light-hearted voice. The young man felt torrents of cold sweat all over his body as his pale lips tried desperately to move:
"I - I - I'm really sorry! I didn't know it was, um, someone from Awakusu-kai! I, I even tried to pick a fight with you……"
"Nah, nah, that you don't have to be sorry about. You see, it was actually Oi-chan who was trying to pick a fight with you, after all."
Akabayashi continued to grin like a Cheshire cat -
Yet, gradually, his grin receded; he squatted down and said in a whisper:
"If you're really sorry, see, you should be sorry about something else entirely. Am I right?"
"Eh……"
Akabayashi picked up the plastic bag with pills in it, which the young man had just dropped, and dangled it in front of his face.
"This club collaborates with us on quite a lot of things. So - this is gonna sound a bit old to you, but - who among the staff here did you talk to to get the permission to distribute these? Hmm? Come on, tell Oi-chan."
"Ah……it's not……um……"
"Hmm?"
Akabayashi tilted his head without turning his gaze away from the young man.
"That's……that's……!"
The young man stiffened further as Akabayashi's eyes became discernible behind the sunglasses.
"W - W - We didn't know this was Awakusu-kai's territory! I - I promise we'll pay for protection from now on……!"
"A ha ha ha!"
The laughter slipped like quicksilver from the corner of Akabayashi's mouth and ricocheted throughout the men's bathroom.
"Alas, this is a pain. Seems like you really don't know anything, young man."
"Eh, eh……?"
"Don't you know what's against the law? These drugs are illegal in Japan. Well, they could have been innocent lemon drops after all so Oi-chan asked a friend to look into the matter before coming all the way here."
Akabayashi shook his head in a histrionic manner, his face now closer to the younger man's.
"Especially in this club, which I'm kind of responsible for, well, you see, we don't make local laws that say you can do such business here either."
"Wait……"
- What the hell?
- That's unheard-of!
Akabayashi tsk-ed as he wagged his index finger at the anxious young man.
"Well, either way. When found out, cry 'We'll pay for protection! Sorry!' - you can't honestly have thought that Oi-chan and his friends were a herd of sheep of an organization who would be satisfied with just that, can you?"
"Uh……Uahhh……"
"So, care to choose?"
"Eh……choose……?"
The younger man realized that he was already breathing at an impossible pace.
He had only a vague idea of what the man in front of him was talking about. But he knew he was afraid of not only Awakusu-kai but this ever-grinning man in front of him as well.
The young man tried to think of a way out of this situation as he remembered that he had a pocket knife hidden on him.
Should he use it, or no?
- Will it work? - That will be me against the yakuza. - It's not gonna work.
- But they can't have known my face already. - I can get out of here if I kill him.
- No. - There's no escaping from the yakuza. - But what if no one knows about this?
- Dammit, why does it have to be me? - Am I getting off-topic?
- Speaking of which, will I even be able to get past him? - The knife.
- But the man might have a dagger or pistol on him. - No. - No.
- No no no no no no no no……
All sorts of thoughts came to his mind but not a single one of them was any use.
"Alas, you see, Oi-chan is what they call a hypocrite. But then that's kind of what my occupation requires. I settle accounts for casinos. I run a gambling ring myself. I sell crabs of suspicious origin to sushi restaurants. I do a bit of every bad thing you can think of in the world. But drugs, alas, drugs I cannot stand for personal reasons….yeah, yeah, it's probably just a matter of likes and dislikes. So feel free to call Oi-chan a hypocrite all you want."
Akabayashi took off his sunglasses as his face approached the young man's.
- One of his eyes, it looks weird……
- ………A glass eye……?
Even if he did notice that minor detail it was not going to help him in any way.
"The woman Oi-chan liked long ago, you see - her husband was addicted to these drugs. So she suffered a lot. That's why I reaaaally hate these drugs. Oi-chan is in Awakusu-kai because they don't mind their members having such personal 'likes and dislikes'."
Akabayashi kept chuckling light-heartedly -
But he suddenly stopped, his grin receding as he said in a whisper:
"…….Ah, yeah, I forgot to ask which one you'd rather choose……so which one?"
"Y - …….Yes?"
"……Should I hand you over to the cops as a present from Awakusu-kai, or should I break your arms right now and right here? Which one would you like?"
- ! - ! - !
The younger man was breathing faster than ever, to the extent that he had to stop breathing altogether for a couple of seconds.
The man in front of him was talking about handing him over to the police as trading material.
If he refused, his arms would be broken.
From what had just happened to his companions he knew that the man was not joking.
"No……no……no……wait……sorry! Sorry!"
The young man sounded on the verge of tears as he banged his head onto the bathroom floor. Akabayashi looked at him and shook his head with a bitter laugh.
"Don't disgrace yourself like that if you're brave enough to get a tattoo, it's way too rude to the tattoo artist."
"T - This is just a sticker! We're not that kind of people! W - We're decent citizens, we were just tempted and wanted to make some pocket money! It wasn't me! I'm here on someone else's orders! So let me go! Let me go!"
"A ha ha. In that case, you're being way too rude to the ones who made these tattoo stickers. ……Huh, I can't really say I like how complicated this is getting."
Akabayashi cracked his knuckles as he stood up and laughed.
Several young men in suits appeared at the bathroom door.
"Eh? Eh?"
"There's someone behind all this. There's a need for further interrogation."
As the young man fell into a state of confusion, Akabayashi waved his hand at the men in suits.
"So take him away. Let Kazamoto-kun deal with him."
"Yes.""Thank you, Akabayashi-san."
The men in black suits kept their heads lowered as Akabayashi tapped the floor with his cane and said in a low voice to the rhythm of his tapping:
"Yah - Oi-chan's simply not good at interrogating and all that diplomatic stuff."
The young man hastened to his feet as he heard Akabayashi say "take him away" in a casual tone.
- I have to run.
- Who knows what's going to happen to me after they take me to their headquarters!
Even if his tattoos were fake, the drug vendor knew enough to have at least some clue of what was likely to happen.
He took out his pocket knife and brandished it about as he ran towards the door.
"Ah, you bastard!""Stop it, bastard!"
The men in black suits who looked like Akabayashi's subordinates yelled. But the young man was too focused on escaping to actually listen.
The girls hid themselves in a small corner of the bathroom screaming when they saw the silver blade reflecting the bathroom light as it was being brandished about.
"Get out of the way! Or I'm gonna stab you!"
To be exact he was brandishing the knife about as if trying to slash people, but the man with the tattoo stickers was too out of his mind to realize what his own voice was saying.
Akabayashi exhaled slightly.
It was not a sigh.
He was re-pacing his breath in that instant.
Without hesitating, the young man dived for Akabayashi, who stood in his way in the middle of the bathroom.
"Get o - "
- uuuut! ……Huh?
The man's knife-holding hand was met with a sudden light impact.
From the dark corners of the man's vision - his blind spot - a stick-shaped object had extended its way to his hand and knocked the knife out of it.
- A cane?
It was too late when he realized it. The tip of Akabayashi's cane had already disappeared from his view.
In a fluid motion Akabayashi slid to a different location on the floor, and the tip of his cane made its appearance from a different angle than before.
Akabayashi was holding his cane with both hands as he would a rifle, but since the portion of the cane coming out of his left hand was not long, the young man judged intuitively that the cane could not reach him.
At least that was what his rationality told him - but as it turned out, information from the corners of his vision could mislead him in fatal ways.
Akabayashi pushed at the other end of the cane with his right hand - it was a simple move, but to the young man it looked almost like the cane had grown in length all of a sudden.
"Uwahhhh……"
The scream of shock and the groan from the pain of impact escaped his throat almost at the same time.
The head of the cane had been thrust into his throat, and his Adam's apple had been damaged from the outside.
What reigned the man's brain and nerves right now was neither pain nor numbness, but a sort of blinding shock as if he were being busted open.
The young man's pupils contracted spasmodically as he fell to the bathroom floor, the whites of his eyes showing, like a puppet whose strings had just been cut.
"OK, now take him away, take him away~"
Akabayashi grinned as he gave this order to the men in suits.
After making sure that the other unconscious young men had also been taken out of the bathroom, Akabayashi walked to its other end.
"So, little Misses."
"Ah……""U - Um……"
The girls, who had until a moment ago been filled with only the desire for drugs, stood dumbstruck at the scene right in front of their eyes. Ignorant they might be, but by now even these girls were beginning to realize what this man in front of them was.
The intensity of their fear surpassed that of their desires. They leaned into each other, trembling.
"Ah - ah - no need to be all frightened like that. Really. You see, Oi-chan was careless enough to have hurt a beautiful Russian girl's heart about an hour ago, so he's still kind of paranoid."
He kept on grinning as he produced a handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to one of the girls.
"Look, you're getting a nosebleed. Did that guy hit you with his elbow? Are you all right? Better go to the hospital and have a doctor check on you."
"Eh, ah, um……thank you very much."
"If you're going to the hospital, it's better to go right now. Want me to go with you? Either way, you're all not looking well."
"Eh, ah……no, I don't think…it's fine…….really."
The girls, not knowing what the man was trying to do, averted their gaze and continued to shudder like autumn leaves.
"P - Please, please help us, we'll……we'll do……we'll do anything!"
One of the girls shook involuntarily as she said in an almost-crying whisper.
"Ahh - alas, this is such a pain. Does Oi-chan's face scare you so much?"
Akabayashi laughed self-deprecatingly as he tapped the floor harder with his cane.
"Misses, you're in luck here. If it weren't Oi-chan - if it were anyone else you would probably have been sent to some really naughty clubs, or really naughty agencies, or really naughty DVD filming locations…places like that."
The girls shook harder as he delivered these words, all smiles.
"Ahh, nah, I'm not saying you should be grateful to me or anything like that. That's because Oi-chan is a hypocrite. I'm not going to do anything to you, but I will have to do something for you."
What Akabayashi proceeded to do was, in a sense, what the girls would hate him the most for doing.
"You know what that is? I'm going to send you Misses home, and tell your parents what kind of drugs you've been on. That's it."
"……!"
"What happens after that depends on how your families want to settle it. But on any account, I think a visit to the hospital can't be avoided."
"Ahh, and……well, that depends, but we might have to go over this with your parents as well."
♂♀
Less than an hour later, in a taxi cab
Akabayashi left the club alone after he had given the orders out to his subordinates.
Stretching his body in a moving taxi cab, he muttered to himself:
"It still feels like crap afterwards when you make girls cry."
The driver heard him as he muttered these words and asked:
"Oops, Sir, you been quarreling with your girlfriend?"
"Yeah. Well, at least we didn't fight. But I think I made her sad."
Akabayashi shook his head as if he was genuinely sad. The old driver laughed and said:
"That's no good. You have to be gentler with girls."
"How very true."
After several minutes, Akabayashi's cell phone rang.
The ringtone was the top idol Hijiribe Ruri's new song.
"Is it from the girl you're talking about, Sir?"
"Haha. I wish."
Akabayashi replied laughingly as he pressed the TALK button.
"Hello, this is Oi-chan~"
"Oi, it's me. Drop that disgusting way of greeting."
It was the voice of Aozaki, another Awakusu-kai executive and Akabayashi's colleague.
Just a couple of hours ago he and Aozaki had been settling some trouble they got into with a Russian duo. That was why Akabayashi thought he was probably calling to follow up on the matter.
"Huh, it's just Aozaki-san. Any problem you ran into with the Russian guests?"
"No, it's not that. Did you hear about what happened to Miss?"
"Yeah, I heard she was saved by that Heiwajima lad and the Black Motorbike? Mikiya-san must be feeling immensely relieved even as he's lecturing his runaway Miss right now."
The "Miss" they were talking about was the granddaughter of their head Awakusu Dougen and the daughter of their young head Awakusu Mikiya.
The girl named Awakusu Akane ran away from her home several days ago, got kidnapped by the Russian duo and was generally embroiled in a lot of troublesome happenings. But the latest news said that she had been found and returned safely to her home this evening.
"No. Actually, Miss is looking…weird."
"Weird?"
"……Well, all I heard was rumors so I don't really know the details. I don't give a damn either way. But you saw Miss quite a lot when she was little, didn't you?"
"Kind of. Hmm, I'll ask Mikiya-san tomorrow then. Speaking of which, why do you care? Don't you dislike Mikiya-san?"
Akabayashi said jestingly. A low voice came from the other end of the phone:
"Watch your tongue, Akabayashi. It's true that I don't think Mikiya-san is capable enough, at least not yet, but Miss Akane is the head's granddaughter too. If anything happens to her there will be an all-out war. There's no way to not be worried."
"I think you'd actually like that more, Aozaki-san."
"……I told you to watch your tongue, Mr. Obvious."
Aozaki tsk-ed with contempt as he hung up the phone.
"Really…" muttered Akabayashi as he, too, closed his cell phone.
The driver cut in all of a sudden:
"Sir, is it OK for me to stop here?"
"Oh, yeah. Drop me off at the corner over there."
"Thank you very much!"
The driver's smile had turned somewhat stiff.
He had probably realized that Akabayashi was no ordinary citizen from what he had heard him say on the phone.
"Sorry it was such a short ride. Here, take it. You don't need to give me the change."
"Ah, no! I can't take a Yukichi-san*!"
* Yukichi-san: A nickname for the Japanese 10,000-yen bill since the famous statesman Fukuzawa Yukichi is on it.
"It's OK."
Akabayashi practically shoved the 10,000-yen bill into the driver's hand as he got off the cab.
He flexed his neck and heard his muscles grind against his bones. He looked into the starry sky, which looked pale and dim against the city neon lights in the foreground.
"Still, this place is kind of weird recently."
The Black Motorbike.
The Slashers coming back.
The gang named Dollars looked like it was gaining momentum.
The trouble with Hijiribe Ruri.
Yadogiri Jinnai.
And then there was this business with the Russian duo and Akane.
"But then, trouble always knows where you live. You can't avoid it in any city."
He continued to mutter to himself as he made for the apartment he usually slept in.
- But even so, hmm, how should I put it?
- It's increasingly difficult to tell the brighter parts of the city from the darker parts.
- Or should I say that the world of ordinary citizens is getting harder to tell apart from the underworld?
Akabayashi knew that these thoughts were futile. Instead he looked once more into the starry sky.
The street lights blended themselves into the darkness of the night; the stars were losing their brightness in contrast in the dim sky.
Under the blurry, ambiguously-lit starry sky, Akabayashi muttered to himself:
"Is it bright, or is it dark? Pick one side and stick with it!"
(TO BE CONTINUED IN PART II)
