Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) (26 page)

Chat room

Sunshine, Sixtieth Floor Street, Ikebukuro

One evening a few days after the incident, Kururi and Mairu were out on a shopping trip, with Egor tagging along behind them as the pack
mule. The bandaged man was carrying a huge number of bags from department stores for the twin girls, wondering, “You have so many clothes already, and now you buy more?”

“…We’re just…getting started.”

“No complaining, Egor! We fronted your treatment money, and you just let Celty get away from us!”

They had picked up a lost bag of money and were using it to curry favors, a truly brazen decision. On the other hand, who knew how the law would treat cash lost by a nonhuman being? Still, they were undeniably guilty of using someone else’s money.

“Forgive me for speaking out of turn, mistress,” the hit man said smoothly, bowing with a hint of sarcasm, but Mairu didn’t mind. She grinned toothily.

“Well, whatever! I do forgive you! In a way, those biker gangs were chasing after us! And we can claim that we saved you from it! So thank us! Special thanks! Canadian thanks!” she babbled nonsensically, puffing up her chest with pride. Kururi sighed and thwomped her.

“Ouch!!”

“…Don’t be…stuck up.”

The hit man straightened up and resumed following the sisters.

In conclusion, Kururi and Mairu’s actions could all be explained as an extension of a simple desire: to see the Black Rider and expose its identity.

They picked up an envelope belonging to the Black Rider. Based on a certain source of information, they learned that the name Celty on the envelope belonged to a courier who manipulated the Black Rider, and so they put a plan into motion.

In exchange for the medical funds, they had the staff of Russia Sushi put on a little act for them. The manager hid his face and made contact with Celty, along with the bag containing Egor hidden inside. When they reached either Celty’s base or a resting point, Egor would contact the twins’ phone—according to the plan.

It didn’t seem right to ask an injured man to do this, but Egor claimed that he was “good at that sort of thing” and took the lead in accepting the job.

In truth, if they wanted to meet Celty, they could have just asked Simon, and he would arrange a meeting—but Simon himself assumed this was some kind of prank, thus setting up the twins’ grand Celty-capturing plan on a one-way trip to failure.

In other words, for the simple purpose of meeting someone, they set up a complex, dead-end plan that used up all of the million yen they found.

Ultimately, all of that money found its way back to Celty’s household.

“So in the end, the one who caught all those bikers in the tunnel under the train tracks was Egor? Isn’t that crazy? I knew you were something special, so I guess you must be some kind of Russian super-soldier! You should come to my dojo sometime!”

“…That’s amazing.”

“No…it was thanks to someone else.”

This was how Ikebukuro’s greatest troublemakers gained the troubling tool of violence—but they didn’t really think much of it at the time. They stared at each other.

Two souls in love who spent very different lives in their desire to return to one being.

“Anyway, let’s buy the ingredients for tonight’s stew and go home! You should eat dinner with us, too, Egor!”

“…Well, I won’t be in business for a while. If you don’t mind my company…”

“…Shabu-shabu.”

Even these girls with their many contradictions were welcomed silently into the city’s embrace.

As if the city itself desired a fresh new breeze to run within it.

Chat room

Along Kawagoe Highway, Ikebukuro

“All right, is everyone paying attention?
Sagohachi
-style means ‘three-five-eight,’ and that refers to the ratio of the pickling ingredients! You create the fermentation base using three parts salt, five parts koji yeast, and eight parts rice! That’s all it takes, but it’s the magic ingredient that will help you make all kinds of food!”

This excited cooking commentary was coming from a girl with a scar on her neck and a pink apron with “Seiji Love” written on the front—the stalker, Mika Harima.

Celty couldn’t help but feel slightly wrong as she watched the girl wearing her own face executing a perfect meal.

Her bounty was gone, and she was taking advantage of her newly returned freedom to take cooking classes. She had reached out to Anri first, but Anri said that she couldn’t cook, either. Next was Karisawa, who was good with her hands, but it was revealed that she had no skill with traditional Japanese cooking.

Celty’s ultimate goal was to cook
sagohachi
-style pickled sandfish, so she needed someone who could handle traditional cooking—and of all people, Anri brought her to Mika.

Naturally, Seiji Yagiri tagged along. When he saw Celty, he asked, “You aren’t searching for your head anymore?” When she nodded to indicate this was the case, he seemed oddly emboldened and said, “Guess I gotta search on my own, then…”

Celty could tell that Mika was listening in on that one-sided conversation, which made the dullahan feel rather uncomfortable. On the other hand, she had to admit that Mika’s cooking was first-rate.

With just a few fancy knife flourishes for some little appetizers, Mika finished up the fermentation base for Celty’s long-awaited
sagohachi
dish. Excited about the prospect of serving dinner to everyone, Celty had made sure to buy some fish on the way to the lesson, but it wasn’t that simple.

“Okay! Now we just put the fish in here and let it sit overnight!”

Overnight…?

Once she realized that it meant there was no dinner for that evening, Shinra smacked a fist into his palm and said, “Let’s have a stew.”

“We can call everyone we know to come over and have a hot pot party.”

Meat, meat, veggies, meat, veggies

Meat, meat, veggies, meat, veggies

Tofu in sesame sauce, veggies in ponzu

The fat level determines what goes on the meat.

If there was any poetic description for the state of the apartment, it was these four bars from an old commercial. That was how lustily they tore into the hot pot.

On the top floor of a luxury apartment building along Kawagoe Highway, the massive dining area was so full of heat that it seemed cramped. About ten people were seated around a large table, which featured two portable gas stoves bearing equally large stew pots.

It was a varied group crowded around the pots, from students in uniform to a man in a bartender’s outfit to a Caucasian woman.

“All right, we’ve got some more meat coming up!” said a grinning young woman bearing a large tray and wearing an apron fashioned out of a body-pillow cover with a manga character on it. What ensued was a thoroughly impolite chopstick battle for control of the goods.

But one person sat on the sofa in the living room on the other side of the dining area, observing the fray. The observer was in a thorough state of relaxation, but there was one abnormality about its silhouette.

The black shadow with legs crossed on the sofa had no head above the neck.

A young man in a white coat sat down next to the figure. Despite the lack of a head, the black shadow pulled out a PDA and began to type a message.

“You aren’t going to eat?”

“I’m full just from seeing you smile,” he said, an odd statement to a person without a face.