CHAPTER 3
Our Ikebukuro Must Be Protected
Why doesn’t anyone understand.
Even after this many victims, still there are those who defend that despicable comic. Even the mass media has no initiative.
When it’s comics and cartoons they flame all they like, but not the movie. Is it because of the stars acting? Because it has the support of the TV station and major sponsors?
Such things should be no deterrent in this situation. Don’t they understand?
Is this not enough?
Understand how dangerous that demon is?
I cannot.
To warn of the demon’s danger, I sold my soul to the demon itself.
I sold my soul.
Shinra’s apartment.
“Ah owowow, this sucks, seriously.”
“Just in case, you should get an X-ray or a CT scan at the hospital in the morning.”
“Thanks, Doctor. Sorry for coming this late at night.”
Shizuo hovered nervously, looking at the bandage, and Tom waved his hand.
“Yeah, I’m fine. That was a close call.”
According to them, Tom had been walking nearby when he was attacked.
While Shizuo was in the convenience store deciding between the cartoned caramel and vanilla au lait—Tom, who had finished buying his things and was waiting outside, drinking his canned coffee in the small parking lot next doors, was assaulted.
By the time Shizuo had heard the noise and come out, Tom saw that the assaulter had climbed over the fence and was running away behind the store—but despite that, Shizuo had run towards Tom’s injured form first, and so the culprit had just only managed to escape.
“I saw the attacker’s back too… He escaped when I saw Tom bleeding and thought, shit… I thought it would be faster to come here than the hospital, so I called. Sorry for the trouble.”
‘You said he was attacked, so I thought he’d been hit by a hammer or something.’
“In that case it must be that Slugger all over the news lately.”
It was an anime clip of the Owl of the Peeping Dead character Dark Owl.
“Y, yeah.”
Shizuo, who was clearly furrowing his brow under his sunglasses, and asking Shinra,
“Oi, what do you mean, Slugger…”
At his reaction, Celty tilted her helmet.
—Shizuo doesn’t know about the Slugger?
For some reason, Shinra wore an ‘oh, crap’ expression at Shizuo’s reaction.
As Celty puzzled over this on the sidelines, Shinra went quiet for a few seconds, before slowly, he explained the case in as roundabout a way as possible.
“I see… So that’s how it is.”
“Anyway, you were a great help, Shinra. Thanks for today.”
Shizuo turned back casually to Shinra, who was slowly becoming drenched in cold sweat.
“Going? Where?”
Haha, Shizuo chuckled, before his smile faded, and he said,
—Into dust?!
That Shizuo’s voice was so unbelievably calm indicated that he was holding back.
It was the calmness he showed when there was no target he could vent his anger out on; the atmosphere right now was similar to once in the past, when, in this same room, he had discovered that Orihara Izaya had framed him, and had given Awakusu Akane a shockingly sweet smile.
Celty sneaked Shinra a look at her smartphone, to which he whispered back,
‘? And the other half?’
Shinra glanced away, and, shrugging, said,
‘That character, yeah?’
‘…What?’
(We didn’t see the movie since we were on our onsen tour, and you probably didn’t check on movie information or his fanclub site, right? It was an Easter egg they didn’t advertise, a surprise. It’s not like he could show his face, plus it’s not the kind of thing that would bring in revenue; it’s just that his boss thought it would be funny.)
(Yeah, him. As you know, he’s Shizuo’s brother.)
He was Heiwajima Shizuo’s younger brother, and a popular young actor.
Tom had avoided mentioning the Slugger in front of Shizuo.
That foreboding had escalated with Tom being attacked.
—Oh no, someone will die.
Beside Celty, who was still dazed at the situation, Shinra said to Shizuo,
“Huh…? I just have to mash anyone I see wearing that into the ground, right…?”
Shinra argued against this completely unimportant detail. From behind him, Tom scolded Shizuo,
“…? What do you mean?”
“Ah, right, it’s like this. Since this whole thing some people have been buying lots of the same mascot suit as the criminal. I don’t know if it’s a stand against the police, but now and then you see them walking along the street wearing that. Right, Celty?”
“…Now you mention it, I might have seen some too…”
“But… If you think about it, well I don’t know if it’s for fun or whatever but wearing some weird costume around in public counts as threatening people, right…? Someone could get shocked and have a heart attack and die, right…? So if taking all that into consideration those people must be prepared to be ground to dust too, right…?”
Celty hurried to placate Shizuo, the direction of whose thoughts would clearly end in catastrophe.
—And that Slugger! Of all things, doing something like this…!
‘The police are searching high and low for the culprit, and I’m looking too, so let us do our jobs, okay?’
“…I got it. I’ll back down since you’re so against it, Celty, Tom-san…”
Gagging Shinra’s mouth as he spoke up unnecessarily, Celty relaxed for the time being.
“Yeah, thanks, Celty.”
After saying this, Shizuo stared straight at Celty—and stated a request of his own.
“But if you find the Slugger, make sure I’m first to know, okay…? Yeah?”
‘What?’
—Crap.
“If you find the culprit before the police, I just want to have a talk with that person.”
“Don’t worry, I just want to talk. Maybe there’s a much deeper reason why they did something like that…”
‘Ah, I’ll try.’
On the way out Tom had whispered, ‘Sorry, I’ll take some time to calm him down too,’ but even with the mental support of those words, after the two had left, Celty slid down bonelessly to sit in the corridor.
‘Yeah… Thanks, Shinra. I’m fine.’
‘I can’t see things ending well for us if he finds out I passed the Slugger to Yumasaki before him.’
‘So what do I do if I catch the Slugger now…?’
The next day. Midmorning. Raira Academy Library.
On the day that began the second half of the long holiday, Yahiro, who had volunteered as a library committee member to help organise the bookshelves, made his way to school.
There was less work to be done than expected, and at this pace they would likely be done before the morning was over.
“Um, President?”
“Do you… know about the Slasher case?”
The club president wore a friendly smile as he said this. Yahiro asked further,
“Hmmm, why do you think that?”
After a moment of hesitation, Yahiro told the club president directly,
“And why do you think that?”
Perhaps he was curious about what his junior was saying, lacking in confidence as it sounded; the club president replied while opening the window,
“Ah, yeah. …You might think I’m weird.”
It was airtight logic. Yahiro went silent.
“So, how do you think the Slasher is related to this?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“I thought maybe a mixed group like the Dollars could be working together for a common objective. That might account for the different methods used in the attacks…”
“Huh?”
The library committee president brushed the accumulated dust from the books out of the window, and said, evenly,
“I see… That is a possibility.”
“Ah, my friend said that too.”
“Mm. I think you can think of the Slugger targeting gangsters as a separate person for the time being. If you assume that, do you still feel weird when you think about your strategies?”
After being told this, Yahiro relooked information with his smartphone, and re-simulated his strategies to deal with a Slugger attack.
“…Thanks so much, President. I’ll think about it.”
The club president said this as he smiled and closed the window, almost as though he had seen through Yahiro.
“Oh, is it time? It’s weird to hear the school bell ringing during the holidays.”
“There’s one thing you don’t need to worry about. I don’t think it’s related to the Slasher.”
Was there anything to be relieved about if it wasn’t the Slasher?
While Yahiro rationalised this in his own mind, the club president smiled wryly and added,
After Yahiro had gone, the library committee president looked back at the window, and exhaled.
“The Voices are mostly gone… But it still affect my eyes, huh.”
At first, bitter. But then his smile grew reassured.
The curse had entered him when in the past, a man possessed by Saika had stabbed him repeatedly.
Finding those traces faint in the district, and hence confirming that his loved one was not involved in the Slugger incidents, reassured him like nothing else.
It was as if, just by knowing that, he saw no need to step into the underworld of Ikebukuro.
Meanwhile, Yahiro returned to his own workstation, thinking about the club president.
—Maybe he’s been working since before the rest of us came in.
With this, Yahiro went back to his own work. Not only his work as a library committee member, but as Snake Hands.
Oblivious to the echoes of the extraordinary beside him.
Raira General Hospital. Private ward.
“Are you okay, Horada-sempai?”
“Y, yeah. Thanks for the help.”
Horada felt a strange pressure from his Blue Square junior that had come to visit, but assuming it was his own imagined afterimage of the boy’s brother Izumii Ran, he shook his head to clear away the fear.
The pain came back when he shook his head, and Horada fell back onto the bed.
“N, nothing.”
“Yeah! I’m the man who was the face of Blue Square! What pride do I have if I back down now? Right?”
“Don’t worry; I kept some information from the police.”
Seeing the surprise on Aoba’s face, Horada felt assured in his own advantage.
He had told the police there had only been one Slugger.
Izumii had said to get to the culprit before the police. It was better to hide the truth from the police and confuse them.
—Saying two people ganged up and beat me up still sounds kinda lame…
“Well… I knocked down the first two or three just fine, but…”
“Even I can’t hold up against more than five people…”
Aoba fell into thought at Horada’s account.
—Oh shit. Shit, did I overdo it?!
Forgetting that this was exactly what he and his juniors went around doing, Horada waited, in cold sweat, for Aoba’s reply.
But surprisingly, Aoba reconfirmed it with a serious expression:
“Huh? O, oh. Isn’t that what I said? If it weren’t, you know there’s no way I’d have gone down! …I haven’t told the police about this part, so be careful.”
“H, huh?”
—Yosh, he’s actually quite obedient, isn’t he? He believed it just like that.
He optimistically chose to credit his natural charisma.
Unwitting of the thoughts turning in Aoba’s mind.
A few minutes later. Outside the hospital.
“Yo, Aoba, how was he?”
“Mm… Things might be more troublesome than expected.”
“There’s more than one Slugger… I more or less expected that, but it seems they also coordinate their attacks.”
With that, Aoba recounted what Horada had told him.
“…And that’s how it is.”
Aoba, though he half-agreed with his friend’s obvious suspicion, shook his head.
Aoba had grasped Horada’s character completely without even being told that he was acting on instruction of his brother—Izumii Ran.
Aoba, unable to reach the true conclusion of ‘pure coincidence’, felt increasingly disturbed by Horada.
—Did something happen in jail after all?
The two-faced personality of Aoba himself led him to be suspicious of Horada.
“That insignificant vibe he has could be a camouflage. A weapon, in a sense.”
“Look it up, won’t you?”
He had grasped the culprit’s agenda to some degree.
Multiple Sluggers, each with their own objective.
It was possible as well that a delinquent group was carrying out copycat offences to get rid of multiple eyesores at one go.
Aoba took out his phone, and began to type a message.
“The Headless Rider.”
The other gang members frowned in confusion, and Aoba grinned.
Saying this, Aoba pressed the send button.
But it exaggerated the situation just enough to fan the flames of its recipient’s unease.
[Celty-san.
This is sudden, but could you assist us in looking for the Slugger?
It’s likely that the Sluggers number in the tens.
In the worst case scenario, this could become a replay of Ripper Night.]
Shinra’s apartment.
‘What’s this?!’
“Which one? Let me see?”
His eyes grew blatantly irritated when he saw that the sender was Kuronuma Aoba.
‘I was surprised Aoba too would be asking me about the Slugger in the first place, but here he’s saying it might turn into Ripper Night, what do I do now! Why are there tens of Sluggers?!’
‘Are you saying now we have a demon hammer on our hands?!’
“I’ve heard about it… The demonic hammer ‘Bannanjin’, that possesses humans and amplifies their desires… Could it be…”
“Well, that aside, isn’t that actually a good thing, Celty? If there are multiple Sluggers, we can pass one to Shizuo, and the rest to Yumasaki-kun and friends. Aoba-kun can get the leftovers.”
Regaining her calm through her exasperation at Shinra, Celty stood from the sofa.
“I dunno. The media has been making a huge fuss over it, so some people might have been inspired to imitate.”
The theory made sense, and so Celty began to imagine the profile of a copycat offender.
—I doubt it could be anyone upstanding… At the very least, I don’t expect it to be an adult.
‘Well, in any case, it should be one of those young gangsters or delinquent students who don’t think before acting…’
Shirobishi Yōko was a serial assaulter.
She had full awareness of this.
But she believed it was wrongdoing in the name of justice.
She believed that therefore her crimes were forgivable, pushing all of the blame onto others, continued to assault complete strangers.
Yōko, 38 years old this year, was a self-proclaimed online writer, but in truth she earned only a few thousand yen through advertising, and was living off the inheritance from her parents.
However, she was hardly bothered by this.
Harmony.
Harmony of the times.
She could not be distracted by tending to such private affairs as maintaining the altar of her deceased parents.
This was what she truly thought; and deeming everything from her ceremonial duties to her parents to even the cleaning of her own home trivial and thus acceptable to ignore, she continued her fight against the unfair world with words as her weapon.
Even the few-thousand yen annual income she earned was due to the bombardment of comments on her site.
This was what she wrote on her site, but to put it simply, she was only picking fights with all of these parties.
What ‘disruption of harmony’ meant to her was, simply put, the stirring of people’s hearts.
Comics with explicit sexual content were naturally her enemy, as were all horror films depicting cruelty, police dramas with gunfights, and even art pieces portraying nudity.
It was debated whether the sculpture had had arms originally, or if it had been made armless from the start, but to Yōko how it became that way was irrelevant; the mere existence of it, acknowledged as a work of art, was enough to irk her, and she claimed it was a defilement of human society.
She was especially opposed to a media series titled Owl of the Peeping Dead.
She could not wrap her mind around the idea of ‘zombies’; of the dead returning to life and attacking humans.
To make it worse, these zombies were supposed to be all over the district of Ikebukuro.
To her, the launchings of the film and anime were equivalent to flooding Ikebukuro with gasoline and sewage at the same time.
From the moment there were residents desiring the presence of this horror, the ‘harmonious world’ she visualised had begun to crumble. At the very least, she herself believed this.
On a side note, she did not know the exact plot of Owl of the Peeping Dead.
She had never seen the manga or anime, much less the movie.
The setting of zombies appearing in Ikebukuro.
That was more than enough for her to despise it.
There were those who questioned her: ‘How do you know the content if you haven’t even seen it?’
‘I don’t have to see it.’
Of course the forum on her website and her social media accounts attracted drama; all ranging from those who tried logical persuasion to anonymous flamers flocked to her site.
She ignored the logical ones.
For Yōko, her vision of the world was itself justice, and she could only see any who supported alternative views as evil demons, or pitiful victims of brainwashing.
Because she presented herself as doing this ‘to ensure a beautiful future of our children’, often those who supported that cause would gradually be influenced by her. Her unshakable faith acted as charisma, in a sense.
Certainly they understood that her thinking was extreme. But being in a position to manage the illegal actions of her flamers, such as verbal abuse and death threats, was a clear advantage.
Despite all of this plotting going on around her, Yōko remained completely oblivious as she continued her activities.
The battle continued for a few years.
During Halloween the previous year, the companies producing and publishing OPD respectively had held an event to promote dressing as zombies.
‘But we only trashed the venue of that disgusting zombie event as a form of cleansing.’
But just then—a miracle occurred.
Someone dressed as an OPD character had committed assault.
Everything will end with this.
With this, the public would understand the horror of people whose hearts had been tainted by evil fiction.
They were both sincerely regretful and sincerely happy for the assault.
However—
What is this?
Hope became despair.
Confronted with this fact, she flew into her rage, as if her entire life had been rejected.
When suddenly, the thought struck.
Was it necessary for more precious sacrifices in the name of harmony?
Not the members of political groups that were trying to use her, but the small number that truly shared her views.
To sell their souls to the demon, so as to slay the demon itself.
“This is the only way, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Apologising, she would continue to assault the pedestrians even after they had fallen.
Each time she saw the blood flowing, she felt it keenly.
From the shell consisting purely of the filth that was Dark Owl.
When the day came that Ikebukuro was fully cleansed, this shell would shatter, and she would be reborn in the truest sense.
It was likely that until people realised the evil within Dark Owl, and the series OPD that contained the character, her steps would not falter.
But one day she noticed.
“Ahh, it’s come…”
She did not know if this Slugger was the original criminal.
She was convinced that through cleaning the streets of scum and creating a false harmony, this person was attempting to appeal to the public that OPD was safe.
There was only one way to fight back.
Yōko was enveloped with anticipation for the difficult battle ahead; her gaze did not falter.
Because all of this was for the sake of Ikebukuro’s future.
For the sake of Ikebukuro. To defend Ikebukuro from these evil usurpers.
On this day, once again, Yōko gripped the bandage-bound hammer that was the symbol of evil itself.
On a side note, this woman lived in Saitama, not Ikebukuro.
****CHAPTER END****
Interlude: Rumours on the Internet ③
Ikebukuro Information Site, IkeNEW! Version I・KEBU・KUR・O
Latest article, Admin’s Prediction! Two Sluggers in Ikebukuro?!
IkeNEW! Administrator’s Comment
“Looking closer I noticed something about the Slugger case-moja.
If you look at the cases on a map, the area where normal people get assaulted and the area where gangsters like bosozoku or colour gang members get assaulted are separate-moja.
At this point anyone can put on a Dark Owl costume and do anything, and blame it on the Slugger-moja.
Well, it’s started already, so it’s not important-moja.
Will the city fall into Dark Owl’s hands-moja?
Even so it’s strange-moja.
This is still going on even when everyone’s getting vigilant, so does that mean both sides have methods to escape the police?
If there really are two culprits, I want a round of applause-moja.”
Administrator Lila Tailtooth Zaiya
Excerpts from the site’s comments.
I already knew. More importantly admin what the hell’s that weird Snake Hands ad *(Comment was deleted a few minutes later) It took so long?! I knew before the holidays even started. Where’s the source? The news never reported the exact crime scenes or whether they were delinquents or not. Ahowowowowow Wait, isn’t it insensitive to ask for applause when people are getting hurt here? The admin is the culprit. Always with the moja, shut the fuck up. The culprit is a hostess. Is there really a Slugger? Are you sure it’s not just a ruse by the media? Oi, why do comments get deleted if we talk about Snake Hands? *(Comment was deleted a few minutes later) Snake Hands Snake Hands Snake Hands Snake Hands Snake Hands Snake Hands Snake Hands *(Comment was deleted and the commenter was banned)Twittia.
Excerpts of typical tweets from microblogging site Twittia.
The IkeNEW admin’s finally resorted to spreading paranoia? Not paranoia, looks like they just copy-pasted what people were arguing about on Twitter. Seriously? What an ass… Is the Slugger linked to the Headless Rider too? Must we blame everything on the Headless Rider? If we don’t think of suspects it might be hard to catch the real culprit… It was a joke, why so serious… Regardless, it’s probably Owl of the Peeping Dead that’s suffering the most. Protect the peace of Ikebukuro! #OperationEradicateOwlOfThePeepingDead The future of our children is being tainted. #OperationEradicateOwlOfThePeepingDead Protect Ikebukuro from these evil fictions. #OperationEradicateOwlOfThePeepingDead What… Yeah, if you don’t shorten OPD you’ll get spammed with these. Think it’s a PCChibukuro publicity stunt. It looks like there are tens of people in PCChibukuro. Are you serious. Do they not realise it’s counterproductive. I doubt they can differentiate reality from delusion. Dragon Zombie will be next, won’t they? Huh? That gang’s still around? The boss came back or something, they’ve been running about a lot recently. I wish the Slugger would just hunt down those bike gangs. Seriously. Dollars is gone, too. It’s really gone? What are you talking about? Isn’t it possible Dollars and Yellow Scarves are behind the scenes of this? Didn’t Dollars have a natural death already? Yep, natural death. They never announced they were disbanded. So it wouldn’t be surprising if they rise from the dead like zombies, right?****CHAPTER END****