Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (19 page)

As they all watched him in silence, Shizuo put his fingers through the inside handle and held the door aloft with his grip alone…pointing it toward the slasher.

“Uh…”

The slasher seemed to grasp Shizuo’s intention, and unease colored his features for the first time. His
iai
stance and his secret wild card that required only a scratch were rendered meaningless.

Shizuo Heiwajima was using the van door like a giant shield, protecting his front side from the slasher.

“I live a messed-up life. I ain’t nice enough to fight a man…with my bare hands!”

The instant he finished speaking, the asphalt at Shizuo’s feet seemed to explode. The asphalt itself was perfectly fine, but his speed was so great that it tricked all of the witnesses’ brains into viewing it that way.

The man with the door for a shield hurled himself at the enemy like a cannonball. Directly in a straight line. Simpleminded in its directness.

But the cannonball was too fast to be dodged. That’s all it came down to. All of the slasher’s tricks were nullified by sheer speed and strength. No one would ever know what those tricks were because he hadn’t been given the time to deploy them.

“No…wait…”

Collision.

First, a
whud
sound.

Just the sound alone was enough to cause serious damage to the slasher’s brain, but next came the actual vibration.

He might as well have been hit by an enormous hunk of metal. A vortex of strength thrust him upward. That hardy body, which had bounced right back from a collision with a van…

It’s an even stronger impact…than the car?!

But by the time he realized that fact, his body was already afloat on the current of force transmitted via the slightly upturned shield.

The slasher had no time to think of resisting or breaking free before he was crushed between the shield and the wall at the side of the street.

The deadly battle against the slasher ended far too quickly, and suddenly the street was as silent as if nothing had ever happened.

No one spoke for several moments, until Togusa stepped out of the driver’s seat and asked, “So who do I bill for the door repairs?”

Only then did they regain their senses.

“What do we do with him?” Shizuo asked, gently pulling the door away from the wall. Behind it was a man whose body was half-embedded in the crumbled concrete. He peeled off of the wall and crumpled to the ground.

Celty took out her PDA and showed Shizuo her opinion.

“Well, first we have to figure out if he’s being possessed by the blade or just an actual street slasher doing this under his own discretion. We should take the weapon away and tie him up until he wakes. If he’s only a puppet, it doesn’t seem fair to put him at the mercy of the police.”

Assuming he wakes up at all,
she thought, examining the man’s face.
Huh?

Suddenly, Celty felt as though she recognized that face. She beckoned Shizuo over.

“What?”

Shizuo was already cooling off from his fury. His face was calm as he looked down at the man.

The man’s eyes flew open, exposing the bloodred eyeballs.

“!”

Celty and Shizuo both leaped back. The slasher looked at them and groaned, “I suppose…I can’t handle you. I always knew you were abnormal…”

He seemed to have given up on beating Shizuo. Celty started to type a question into her PDA, keeping her guard up, but she barely had time to start.

“But if I can’t have you…I’ll settle for
her
!” the slasher cried, leaping to his feet.

Right for Anri Sonohara, who was timidly watching events unfold at a slight distance.

“…Uh,” she stammered, unsure of what was happening.

The man everyone assumed was in critical condition leaped for her, knife in the air.

Shudd.

A dull sound rang out, and the slasher’s knife plunged deep into her breast.

The breast of Celty Sturluson covered in black shadows.

“—!”

Anri shrieked soundlessly, her entire body tense.

But not a single drop of blood dripped from Celty’s chest. She clamped down on the wrist holding the knife and extracted it from her chest through arm strength alone.

Next, she flipped the slasher’s feet out from under him, pulled his hand with the knife around behind his back, and shoved him into the ground.

His joints locked, the slasher was completely immobilized. Once he realized that no amount of strength would allow him to move, the man spat with loathing.

“You…you’re not human, are you? Filthy! Abhorrent! How can my pure love be defiled by such a
stupid-looking
monster?!”

Well, excuse me, you
piece of
.

Celty tried out one of the insults she’d liked from the last Tarantino film she saw and increased her pressure on the arm held behind his back.

There was an odd
grunch
sound, and the slasher’s arm was suddenly not where it had been before. The knife fell out of his hand and clattered onto the asphalt. He had finally gone entirely silent, apparently unconscious at last.

Celty suddenly realized how angry she’d gotten and shook her head to clear it.

If Shinra found out I’d called this guy a
piece of
, he’d be so disgusted. I have to watch myself,
she reflected idly.

Celty left the man sprawled out on the ground and looked up at the knife ahead.

Who would have guessed that Saika was just a kitchen knife?

She assumed that it would be dangerous to touch it herself, so she increased the shadow density around her hands to twice the normal level before pinching the handle delicately.

She still didn’t sense anything special from it. Either Shinra was right and the demon blade didn’t have a presence of its own, or there was no cursed sword to begin with…

I really should have just asked him if he was Saika.

But in any case, the slasher was dispatched. The only thing left was
to wait for the man to regain consciousness. She could explain the situation to Kadota and Yumasaki and have them handle the rest.

But for now, the knife needed to be disposed of. If she used Shinra’s connections, she could probably find a blast furnace to toss it into. She fashioned a net of shadow to hang from the underside of the motorcycle and stashed the knife inside of it.

With that out of the way, she pulled out her PDA and started to explain the situation to Kadota, but Shizuo’s quiet monologue interrupted her.

“What the hell…? I just don’t feel satisfied… Why is that?” he wondered, his face growing more and more upset by the moment. “Ahh, dammit, I just don’t feel right… I’m gonna head to Shinjuku and kill Izaya.”

He tossed the shadow helmet back to Celty. It dissipated like mist in her hands, reabsorbing itself into her body.

Shizuo left the scene with no apparent concern for that otherworldly effect. No one made a move to stop him, despite his announced intent to commit murder. They knew that Izaya wasn’t the kind of man who would go down easily, of course, but first and foremost, none of them felt like they would be capable of stopping Shizuo.

Karisawa watched him walk away, her cheeks rosy red.

“I just knew Shizu was in love with Iza-Iza all along. I’ve always had the feeling that behind closed doors, they were actually—”

“That’s not true.”

The answer came from Celty’s PDA, Kadota, and Yumasaki all at once. Yumasaki covered her mouth with his hands, his heart quaking in his chest.

“If you ever say that within earshot, they’ll pound you into mincemeat!”

Celty tried to imagine the sight of Shizuo and Izaya making love. A feeling of nausea rushed up from deep within her. Then again, she couldn’t expel anything from her severed neck but shadows anyway.

It was surprisingly easy to explain matters to Kadota’s group.

She was expecting them to doubt her story, but the mention of a cursed demon blade got Yumasaki and Karisawa on board immediately with sparkles in their eyes.

On top of that, when she said that Saika was a demon blade with
a female personality, Yumasaki shrieked something about “moe personification of inanimate objects” and tried to grab the knife from its storage space under her bike. The rest of the group battered him to a pulp and tossed him into the van along with the slasher.

They would be capable of handling the rest. She instructed them to call Shinra if they needed help, but otherwise everything should resolve itself. If he was being controlled, he was just another unfortunate victim of the incident—but given that he attacked Shizuo and still survived, perhaps he should actually consider himself to be fortunate, Celty tried to tell herself.

If we find out he did nothing wrong, I’ll have to send him some support money or something…

When she turned around, the girl with the glasses was timidly staring at her.

Oh, I forgot.

Celty stared at the victim and wondered what to do. How much should she explain? If she chased the girl away, she might call the police. Then again, the local residents might have heard the uproar and called them already. Celty just wanted to extract herself from the scene as quietly as possible.

But when she got a better look at the girl’s face, Celty realized something.