Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (10 page)

Where? Above? In front?

No. Below.

Everything in my field of vision was happening in slow motion.

Oh, wait. It wasn’t just Shizuo Heiwajima that went flying.

So was the building he came out of, and the asphalt base, and all the air surrounding it—

I get it.

I understood at once—I just didn’t want to admit it.

I was the one flying.

He sent not just my body, but my wits flying as well.

A shock ran through my back, telling me that I’d fallen back onto the ground.

“…! Uh—! Aghk…gah…”

I gurgled weakly as both intense pain and numbness fought over my body. My brain scrambled to process what had happened.

The moment Shizuo Heiwajima turned back, I felt a tremendous impact on my throat, and the next instant I was in the air.

It was like being on a launcher-style roller coaster that shot me backward. The only thing I felt in that brief instant was…what I assumed was Shizuo Heiwajima’s arm muscle.

But—was that truly muscle?

It was more like the tire of a dump truck, shrunk down to a small enough size that it could catch me around the neck. A thick, strong bundle of fibers, still smooth and supple. Upon calm recollection, that seemed like an apt description. But the moment that it hit me, I was unprepared to analyze the sensation—the only thing that filled me was instantaneous terror.

My head’s going to be torn off.

That was actually what I felt. At that very moment, I felt sure my head would tear off—the same way you might feel that having the Grim Reaper’s scythe pressed to your neck means your head would be cut off. It was due to the powerful shock and the centrifugal force of being pushed backward.

A lariat.

He hit me with one of the most basic pro wrestling moves in the book.

Some people watching it on TV might think that the lariat does less damage than a good punch or a German suplex. Some might even claim that anyone suffering heavy damage from a lariat had to be throwing the match.

But that would be a mistake. I once accompanied a writer from the sports page on his beat and got to try out being hit by a wrestling move. I chose the lariat, hoping for the least painful move possible.

The wrestler couldn’t have been using even half of his full strength. But I fell hard onto the ring and passed out. It was less the damage of the fall than the powerful impact of that arm.

That prior experience was possibly the only reason I could even identify that it was a lariat I’d just suffered.

But there was one thing I couldn’t quite buy yet. How did the skinny man I was seeing have the strength to lariat me straight up into the air? A man who clearly didn’t have half the body mass of a pro wrestler!

I got my nearly convulsing lungs under control and took focus on the approaching shadow.

Damn
, eyes foggy. My vision was unclear.

The shadow of Shizuo Heiwajima stood over me, speaking softly.

“The reason I was turning around to leave…”

His voice was indeed quiet—and chilling. Some people had voices of ice. The man named Izaya that I met a day before had one of those. But the chilling edge to Shizuo Heiwajima’s voice was something else entirely.

If Izaya had the kind of chill that froze his listener, this one was enough to cause frostbite. No, frostbite was too gentle to describe it. It was like liquid nitrogen boiling, a bubbling something enveloped in pure chill.

“…was because you were asking stupid questions, and I was about to snap.”

The voice was the same one that belonged to the man just moments ago. But the temperature of the voice was completely different. Before now, they’d been just words—there was no inflection to them in any way…

“See, I was leaving to make sure that I didn’t end up killing you.”

Now there was strength in his words.

It wasn’t like he was speaking words of power. There was no real meaning to what he said. But was it possible to strike fear in another person just with a tone of voice? Even that fact alone terrified me.

Finally, my vision was recovering from the shock of the blow.

My eyes found the man standing in front of me. It was undoubtedly the same man I had been standing with just moments before.

It was the same man…

…but…strange…why did his sunglasses seem to suit him now?

Those odd, out-of-place shades were now a perfectly natural feature of his face.

The shape and bridge of his nose hadn’t changed; neither had his hair. He wasn’t wearing a particularly different expression. The only
thing that seemed to have changed from moments ago was the slight smile playing on his lips. But that smile itself had no effect on the look of the glasses.

It was the air.

The air around him seemed to have changed. There was no other wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-way-wa-wa-way-wa-wa-wa-wa-way-way-way-way-way-way-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-way-way-way-way-wa-wa-way-way-wa-way-wa-way-way-way-way-way-way-way-way—

“Who said you could go to sleep?”

He grabbed my collar, and for an instant I couldn’t breathe. When he lifted me off of the ground, all I could feel was his incredible, monstrous strength.

I was scared.

At this point, I was jealous of scared the disappointed scared me from scared a minute ago. If the scared man scared here scared was scared truly scared that scared weak, scared scared scared how lucky scared scared I scared scared scared would scared scared scared be scared scaredscaredscaredscaredscaredhelpscaredscaredhelpscaredscaredhelpscaredhelphelphelphelphelpohshitshitshithelpshitshithelpscaredI’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry—

Every part of my body screamed in terror.

“Were you actually trying to piss me off? Huh? I’m not an idiot, you know. I can tell that much. But just because I understand it doesn’t mean I won’t get pissed off…”

There was no time for my boyish curiosity to open his eyes or my instincts to scream.

“So I give in to the provocation and get mad, I lose? Fine, I lose then. That’s all right. Because I don’t stand to suffer for losing this one, do I? Besides, you won, and your reward is that I kill you…”

That was the moment.

“Aaaaaa
aaaa
aaaa
aaaa
aaaa!”

The scream sounded.

Not from me.

I was unable to speak, paralyzed with fear.

The howl that echoed off the alleyway was from Shizuo Heiwajima himself.

The liquid nitrogen suddenly transformed into boiling oil, spitting all of the rage stored inside his body outward.

“Raaaah!
I told you, I hate violence!
Didn’t I?!
And now you forced me to get violent!
Who do you think you are? God? You think you’re God?! Huh?!”

That’s not fair
, I started to think, before I was flying again.

It was not a proper judo throw. That would involve some element of technique. There was none here.

He just picked me up and threw me forward, the same way one would throw a baseball.

I’d never done it, of course, but I could imagine a strong person being able to throw a toddler this way. But I weighed many, many times more than that—possibly more than Shizuo Heiwajima himself, in fact.

So how was I flying virtually horizontal?

If this were an American cartoon, I’d crash into the wall of the building across the way and leave a human-shaped hole behind. It certainly felt like there was enough force for that, but in reality, after just a few yards of flight, I crashed to the ground and rolled across the asphalt.

Is he going to kill me?
I wondered, my mind suddenly calm now that the fear had been eradicated by the force of his throw.

I didn’t want to die.

But he was going to kill me.

Once that logical calculation was finished, the fear began creeping back into my heart.

But at that moment, a voice of salvation came down from above.

“Hey, Shizuo.”

I recognized that voice. It belonged to Tom Tanaka, the man who showed me here.

“…What is it, Tom?”

“Remember that cup of instant ramen you opened? It’s been three minutes.”

“…Seriously?”

And just like that, Shizuo Heiwajima was shockingly uninterested in me. He reentered the building as if nothing had just happened.

So he never meant to speak to me for more than three minutes to begin with.

But that didn’t matter now.

All I wanted to do was savor the joy of being alive.

A little while later, Tanaka emerged from the building and came over to where I was lying.

“Well, there you go. Warned you not to piss him off, didn’t I? Lucky for you, while his boiling point is low, he’s also quick to cool off. I hope you learned your lesson and aren’t stupid enough to go to the cops about this.”

Though it didn’t make perfect sense, I decided to nod my understanding. Satisfied, Tom turned back and went into the building.

All alone now, I rolled over to face the sky, limbs outstretched. It wasn’t that I wanted to savor the sensation of stretching out in the middle of the street—I was just in too much pain to stand yet.

Even as I gave thanks for my safety, I was stunned to realize just how powerful that instantaneous fear had been.

When I was surrounded by the foreign mafia, the fear was more of a creeping sensation, the feeling of my body rotting from the inside out. Yet I’d managed to avoid my death by shooting or stabbing in that case.

But what I’d just experienced was instantaneous fear. An explosion of fear—the feeling one must feel when stabbed out of nowhere by a man passing in the street.

In fact, a knife wasn’t adequate to describe this. A katana…yes, the victims of the katana slasher running wild in Ikebukuro right now might have felt this same fear.

And now that the fear had passed…

…I remembered why I wanted to be a journalist.

I wanted control, to monopolize.

I wanted to gain the best, most shocking information on my own and tell the world about it myself. By doing so, that “truth” became mine.

It was the search of that pleasure that drove me to become a journalist, but after getting married and raising a daughter, my bubbling passion had cooled off.

And now it was back.

It had all come back just now.

Brought back by the fear I’d just tasted.

Incredible.

It’s incredible.

How stupid I must have been to doubt this.

But it was that very stupidity that led me here.

Here to my article!

The boy screaming about curiosity in my heart was dead. He had just died.

And now, the adult me was screaming it for him.

“Write!

“Seize it!

“Seize all of the truth, even if you have to fabricate it!

“Turn the fear that man put in you into your own strength!

“That’s right, I’m coming out ahead.

“I found this through the experience of fear and pain!
”

No matter how much I screamed them out, my heart kept overflowing with new words.

I want to tell the world about that fear.

I want to write an article about Shizuo Heiwajima.

With my hands, my own hands!

I want Shizuo Heiwajima and everything abnormal about him to belong to me, without exception.

That’s right.

I’ll get over this.

I’ll get over my fear, research everything about him, and announce his exalted strength to the entire world. That’s my duty as a journalist. In fact, when you consider what had to happen for me to come across him, you could say that it’s my
fate
.

I don’t care if all the rumors swirling around him are lies.

The instant of terror that I felt is an eternal truth! I don’t even care if you tell me he’s not the strongest. My article will
make
him the strongest!

That’s right! I’ve got better things to do than lie on the ground here.

I stood up at once and took a step forward to conquer my moment of fear—no, to make that fear my own weapon.

That’s right. I’m a journalist.

I’ll uncover everything about him—starting with his tastes, his personal ties…and how he can wield such incredible strength in such a thin body! Everything: past, present, and future!

If I can write this article, my life will get back on track. I’ll patch things up with my daughter. I can rekindle the old flame with my wife. It’ll be just like it was before…

I clenched my fist with absolute determination, ready to write the greatest article ever about Shizuo Heiwajima. Clenched it hard, so hard…

That night—chat room