Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 4 Chapter 2 Part 2

Chapter 2 Part 2

At the top floor of the Port Mafia’s headquarters, its leader, Ougai Mori, muttered to himself:
“…Well, this isn’t good.”
He bitterly smirked while watching the infernal flames until he, too, turned into black ash.

Yukichi Fukuzawa stared out the window in his office at the Armed Detective Agency.
“…It looks like we were too late.”
As he calmly closed his eyes, the melting building engulfed him, and he then disappeared.
Countless people… Countless lives…
They all vanished in the flames. Memories, regrets, bonds, promises, records, obsessions, ambitions, love, and unfulfilled lives were left behind —and yet it was as if all those lives had never existed in the first place. There was only ash of black and white.
Kunikida and Dazai witnessed the event as they ran down the island’s stone pavement.
“What’s going on?!”
Broken handcuffs still hung from Kunikida’s wrist after he escaped the hostage cellar.
“That’s the skill weapon,” said Dazai in a strangely soft voice. “Seems we didn’t make it in time.”
“That’s a skill…? Impossible. That goes beyond the scale of what a skill can do!”
The diminishing fiery shell reached them as well. It melted everything in its path, starting with the corner of the island. Even the ocean water boiled until it evaporated, then turned the molecules into plasma as if that weren’t enough. The plasma vapor, thousands of degrees hot, removed their flesh and carbonized them to the bone. Not even Dazai’s power to nullify other skills could nullify the collateral plasma vapor. He and Kunikida became but shadows, burned onto the pavement—but even that pavement instantly melted away.
Dazai muttered something the moment he vanished, but even the air that came out of his mouth turned into plasma, never to be heard.
“Wh-what’s happening?! Why…?! How…?!” shouted Atsushi as he gazed at the scenery below. The island, the ocean, Yokohama—everything had gone up in flames, and the wave of heat was heading right toward the center of the island. The colossal dome was steadily heading toward the blast’s epicenter. It was only a matter of moments before it reached Atsushi.
“This way!” screamed the blond terrorist who called herself Wells. Standing by the window, she tied a wire around a pillar and looped the other end around the pulley at her waist. She fired a bullet into the glass window, creating a radial crack that she relentlessly kicked. The window shattered, sending countless shards of glass to the surface.
“What are you doing?!” Wells yelled as she waved Atsushi over. “But…!”
Atsushi hesitated. He didn’t know what her intentions were. He didn’t know if he could trust her. Moreover, he found it hard to believe there was even a way to escape from the incoming wave of heat.
“Do you not want to save your friends?!”
My friends.
Atsushi could see the faces of everyone in the Armed Detective Agency
—his friends who were somewhere inside this heat wave.
The friends who accepted me for who I am. Atsushi sprinted. He took Wells’s hand. “Jump!”
Wells and Atsushi leaped out the broken window together. They descended from the top floor of the tower toward the ground. All Atsushi could see around him was the approaching crimson dome that covered the sky. The sea boiled. The heat wave instantly scorched Atsushi’s throat. The seawater rapidly vaporized and expanded, creating a shock wave that was approaching the tower even more quickly than the Shell. It looked like the end of the world. Wells unhooked the wire from her waist midair, flipped her blond hair, and landed on the surface. Atsushi transformed his arms and legs into those of a tiger and landed on all fours.
“There’s a doorway leading underground in the forest up ahead! Run!”
Wells immediately waved her arm and gave instruction. Atsushi ran without saying a word. Before long, he found giant, hinged iron double doors embedded in the ground. Attached to the middle of the doors was a massive lock sealed with chains.
“We’ve got less than ten seconds until the heat wave gets here! There’s no time to unlock it! We have to pry it open!”
Wells then pulled a military-grade knife out of her suit and thrust it between the chains. Utilizing the principle of leverage, she slowly wrenched the doors open.
There was no time to waste. “Please—step aside!”
Atsushi stood in front of Wells, thrusting her away from the door. He transformed both of his arms and began thrashing the chains with his tiger claws. After two, three hits, the weak part of the chain cracked and broke, exposing the lock, which Atsushi immediately grabbed.
“Ahhhhhh!!”
His tiger arms rapidly grew. The cast-iron lock, which was about as big as Atsushi’s face, began to creak under the tiger’s pressure until the welded parts shot off one by one. Unable to handle Atsushi’s strength, the lock let out one last shriek before it was ripped in two. Wells promptly grabbed on to the iron door and forced it open with all her might.
“Get inside!”
It went without saying. The heat wave was already burning off Atsushi’s eyebrows. Atsushi immediately threw himself into the dark pit without even looking inside.

“Higuchi! Where are you?! Answer me!”
Akutagawa called out to her in the woods. The heat wave had singed his eyelashes. The surrounding trees burst into flames, unable to handle the hot winds.
“So this is Annihilation…,” observed Akutagawa in the midst of the heat wave. His voice cracked from the surge of burning vapor searing his throat. The heat scorched his skin and vaporized the moisture around his eyeballs, which felt like being stabbed in the eyes. Nevertheless, Akutagawa faintly smiled.
“I see… So this is the end… This is my ending.”
Although the trees flared up around him, Akutagawa’s expression was calm.
“This is far different from how I imagined it, but perhaps this is how it’s supposed to be.”
The wave of heat got even closer. Akutagawa’s black overcoat writhed and took shape, seemingly stretching through different dimensions before transforming into a large black scythe. It sliced the space before him, immediately cutting off the heat wave approaching from the seaside and protecting him. A rip in space—Akutagawa’s skill, Rashomon, was able to cut through anything, regardless of whether that something was space itself. Being sliced open with an exposed surface of discontinuity allowed the space to block anything from passing, even if that was a heat wave that would destroy the world.
“However…,” muttered Akutagawa.
The rip in space closed, allowing the heat wave to approach once more. The surface of discontinuity would close in a mere few seconds. Not even Akutagawa could block the heat wave of death forever. He walked through the woods. Creating rips in space one after another, he managed to create somewhat of a shelter around himself. The heat wave, the burning trees, even splashes of melted building attacked him. He cut through space to protect himself from each strike, creating new tears immediately after the previous ones disappeared. Akutagawa continued to walk, but even then, the end was near. No longer able to sustain itself, the island began to sink. The rumbling of the land would not even permit him to walk any longer. He dropped to his knees.
“Even if one were to bathe in the eternal wind and simply become foam in the great sea without ever knowing who they were—without even getting a farewell…,” Akutagawa muttered, facing the heavens as if he were reciting a poem, “…the heart shall not move, for it is nothing compared with the loneliness of passing…without you ever knowing.”
The Shell itself was almost hovering over him. The surrounding heat wave had already exceeded several hundred degrees Fahrenheit. No more than a puff of heat slipped through the corners of the tears in space, but his flesh instantly bubbled and burned away. But even then, Akutagawa smiled.
“Right now…that is the sole thing that brings me sorrow.”
Akutagawa’s body disappeared in the flames as he left nothing more than a smile, never to reach another soul. Atsushi crouched in the abyss. “Ouch…”
After jumping down the hole past the iron doors, he ended up in a giant underground room. His hands and feet painfully tingled from breaking his fall when he hit the bare stone floor.
“You awake?”
He heard a voice coming from the middle of the room. A single desk stood there in the dimness, and by its side was the blond woman. It was an unusual space. The square room’s walls, floor, and even the ceiling were made out of bare stone. The only source of light was an object on top of the desk. Atsushi felt something was odd before almost immediately realizing what that was: The room wasn’t hot. The blistering wind outside was scorching enough to burn hair. No matter how far underground he may have been, no place on the island should be this cool. Moreover, there was no noise. Surely even now, the Shell was scorching the island. It didn’t make sense that they couldn’t hear the roaring of buildings and even the island itself being destroyed. And yet, it was silent.
“Where am I?” muttered Atsushi as if he were asking himself. “Are we not on the island anymore?”
“We’re still on the island, unfortunately,” confessed Wells as she stood in the center of the room. Her flat voice, which concealed any semblance of femininity, echoed against the walls. “This room will soon disappear as well, but my skill is delaying time and slowing down what’s happening outside.”
Wells placed a hand on the light source. After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Atsushi could finally make out what it was. It was a camera. The one Wells had been dangling around her neck was now sitting on the table, and a pale light emitting from the flash bulb was illuminating the room. Atsushi looked to his sides, then up. He should have been able to see the iron doors they came through above him, but they were no longer there. Only darkness crept into the room. The ceiling was melting.
“We don’t have time, so I’ll be brief,” Wells suddenly stated. “The weapon was activated, and this island along with the nearby land now ceases to exist. The blast destroyed everything within a twenty-two-mile radius. The Shell’s maximum temperature is approximately one hundred eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit. According to my prior calculations, around four million people were killed.”
“Four…?!” gasped Atsushi. Four million people meant that almost everyone in Yokohama was killed.
“A weapon created during the end of the war known as Annihilation— the Shell—was the sole cause. Somebody smuggled the weapon onto the island and detonated it. I sneaked onto the island to stop it, but I failed. And…you know the rest.”
“W-wait!” Atsushi cut in. “Aren’t you the terrorist, though? And how do you even know so much about that weapon?”
“The answer is simple—because I created it.” “…!”
Atsushi was at a loss. Wells explained in a dispassionate tone, “The nations of Europe sent a certain group of skill users to war fourteen years ago. Hugo, Goethe, and Shakespeare—the Transcendents, as they were known—clashed, resulting in the most war casualties and damage in history.”
Atsushi couldn’t say a word. He knew about the war, but this was the first he ever heard of skill users being involved.
“I worked as an engineer for England in skill-weapon development,” Wells calmly continued. “We were conducting experiments in England during that time that intentionally awakened skill singularities to integrate them into weapons… Are you familiar with a skill singularity?” Atsushi replied that he wasn’t.

“A singularity is when two skills cancel each other out and create something different from either skill. Let’s say someone possessed the skill to always trick their opponent, but their opponent had the skill to always uncover the truth—what would happen? What if someone with the ability to concentrate energy into one spot used their talent at the same time as someone with the ability to disperse energy? Usually, one skill would beat out the other. However, on rare occasions, both skills will interact and produce unbelievably profound results that go beyond what normal skills can do. That is a skill singularity.”
“Then…that celestial sphere was created from a skill singularity…?” Wells tousled her blond hair and nodded.
“Exactly. My skill allows me to locally manipulate time. We combined this skill with various magical effects—in this case, the ability to create a talisman that produced a fiery shell. After combining these two skills and generating a singularity, the skills went far beyond their limits.”
While walking, Wells continued, “Are you familiar with the uncertainty principle?”
“‘Uncertainty principle’…?”
“Regardless of skills, there exists an uncertainty between time and energy in this world. With the product of energy ∆E—which occurs in a short span of time ∆t—∆E and ∆t can only take a fixed value proportional to Planck’s constant h. The product is fixed, so ∆t converges to a fixed value, and ∆E will diffuse and take a large value. If ∆E converses into a fixed value, ∆t will become coextensive. This is the uncertainty.”
“Um…,” Atsushi spluttered with some embarrassment. “I am really sorry, but…I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh,” replied Wells with a nod. She didn’t seem to mind at all. “Put simply…say you have a lit match. For a trillionth, of a trillionth, of a trillionth, of even another trillionth of a second, even the small flame of a match can possess high energy powerful enough to set the world on fire— the fluctuation of energy, so to speak. However, the greater the energy, the shorter the span it can exist. Therefore, it will never affect the outside world.”
Atsushi began racking his brain to process what she was saying. A large amount of energy that only exists for an extremely short amount of time…
A skill to manipulate time…and a singularity… “Oh…!”
“Do you get it now?”
“So you used your skill to forcibly change that short burst of powerful energy into a massive ball of fire?”
“That’s essentially the gist of it,” said Wells, nodding. “I adjusted this camera—the machine that presides over the skill to manipulate time—and expanded ∆t, thus breaking the uncertainty principle and locking this massive ball of fire in the real world. It sounds easy, but…”
But Wells didn’t finish her sentence. She let the words never to be spoken slip away into the air. After pondering for a moment, Atsushi spoke up.
“And someone—not you—got ahold of that horrifying weapon and detonated it on the island.”
“Yes.” Wells slightly frowned. “I don’t know who they are or what they’re after, but I’ve essentially narrowed down the weapon’s location— the fifth basement floor of the top secret zone, which is located at the innermost part of the island. I’m not sure of the exact room it’s in, though.”
Wells then clapped her hands and said something that took Atsushi by surprise:

“You will return to the past, find whoever is behind this, and steal the weapon.”
Atsushi was dumbfounded. “……What?”
“I’m sorry, but there’s no time. You’re going whether you like it or not.” “P-please hold on,” pleaded Atsushi in a panic. “‘Return to the past’?
‘Steal the weapon’? What are you talking about?”
“It’s just as I explained earlier.” Wells raised a hand into the air. “Existence uncertainty. Think of it in terms of how energy, ∆E, becomes bigger as the amount of time, ∆t, gets shorter. The existence of a tiny bit of energy can spread from the past to the future. Just like this.”
A radial light projected from the camera’s lens and painted a diagram of pale light in the air.

“If time were a river, then the energy—all the matter in this world— would be like a ripple on the water’s quiet surface. We exist together around the rings of the ripple. While it’s easy to believe that existence is but a single point on the axis of time, we exist on a somewhat wider scale such as the ripple. Existence stretches from upstream—the past—to downstream, the future. Of course, the ripple grows weaker the farther you are from the center until it eventually disappears. But as I mentioned, the span of time— the ripple—is smaller the greater the energy. If it’s a small amount of energy, the ripple is large. Therefore, they exist on a broader plane from the past to the future. My skill, Time Machine, uses that ripple’s amplitude and makes the world think that the center of the energy—that the existence—is in the past.”
The camera suddenly projected a hologram of a quiet river flowing downstream. A small ripple appeared in the center.
“That ripple is you,” said Wells as she pointed. “The energy a single human possesses is vast, so the ripple is extremely narrow, as you can see. You would only be able to go a few seconds into the future or the past. If you wanted to return close to even an hour into the past, your energy would need to be much smaller. Let’s take my earlier example. Since ∆t and ∆E are constant, you would need to make the energy smaller if you wanted to increase the span of time.”
Wells wagged her finger, causing the ripple in the river to grow until it was slowly undulating multiple times in size.
“I get that we need to decrease the amount of energy to go back a few dozen minutes in time,” began Atsushi, “but how is that even possible?”
“Easy. You just have to quit being human,” replied Wells in a frank manner.
“…Huh?”
“Instead of sending an entire human back into the past, we’ll send but a small part. That way, you can go further into the past and prevent the weapon from being activated.”
“Wait, a ‘small part’…? What exactly do you mean?”
“It’s simple, really.” Wells pointed at her head. “We’ll send your memory signals into the past.”
Atsushi couldn’t comprehend what she meant. “My what…?”

“Human thought and emotion are nothing more than neurons firing in the brain. Memories root themselves in brain cells through these electrical signals. In other words, it’s data. The energy of your memory signals is extremely weak on its own.”
Wells swiped her finger once more, switching the projection image. “The energy of a person weighing sixty kilograms is approximately 5.4
quintillion joules if using the mass-energy conversion equation E = mc2. This is far too large to send into the past. However, the energy of neural firings is nothing more than the electric potential of sodium traveling through a potential difference of a few dozen millivolts. While it cannot be unconditionally compared to a skill that manipulates time, it is like the difference in energy between the sun and a sneeze.”
While Atsushi didn’t quite get it, she didn’t appear to be lying. At the very least, he understood that the plan was to use her skill to send his memories into the past.
Wells suddenly turned her gaze to the ceiling. “We’re almost out of time.”
When Atsushi looked up, he noticed gravel beginning to fall from the ceiling. The time inside the room was catching up with the outside world.
“When sending the signals from the brain’s memories into the past, I can only safely send them back thirty-three hundred seconds—exactly fifty-five minutes. That will be your second starting point.”
Atsushi suddenly realized the camera’s light was getting stronger. The once-dim room was now as bright as day.
“The reason I’m counting on you is because I cannot send myself back into the past. My skill only allows me to send someone once, and I’ve already sent myself back during the war.” Wells’s voice slowly faded as it was swallowed by the light. “I have been witness to a great number of incidents and accidents that I’ve used this skill of mine to avoid. In fact, I’ve been involved in so many accidents that people treat me like a terrorist now.”
The radiant light had become so powerful that Atsushi could no longer keep his eyes open. He covered his face with his hands and tried to avoid the blinding light, but no matter how tightly he shut his eyes or covered his face, he couldn’t block it out.

“I said I was going to send you back whether you liked it or not, but if possible, I’d like to hear how you feel. Do you wish to stop the weapon, save your people, and protect your friends?”
Even while Atsushi was drowning in the unbearable light, her words clearly reached his heart. But he had already made up his mind while listening to her explanation.
“Yes,” Atsushi firmly replied.
“Good.” Wells’s serious expression relaxed slightly. “One last thing. Do not tell anyone about the future that you know. Work alone as much as you can. One person greatly changing their actions could affect another’s. It’s a small island. It won’t be long before the enemy catches wind of what’s happening… Now, the time of detonation in our current present was twelve noon. But if your friends change their actions, then it’s highly likely the enemy could change their mind as well, thus detonating the weapon even earlier.”
The light was getting so powerful that Atsushi could even feel it pushing against him. He opened his mouth to reply, but his voice was drowned out by the light. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t even stand under its pressure. That was when Atsushi realized it. This wasn’t light. This was the power of the skill coming out of the camera and taking the form of light.
“I’m counting on you.”
Only Wells’s cool voice clearly reached Atsushi for some reason. The control over time that had been protecting the room thereupon vanished. The time outside caught up with the room, and the scorching winds blew into the underground. The violent gusts, which were hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit, destroyed everything. All was swallowed by the crimson cyclone. Eventually, the Shell itself lowered upon the room, evaporating all that was left. Wells and even the camera melted into nothingness. A moment before, it looked as if a dark shadow fell from the sky, but there was no way to check. That was the last thing Atsushi saw. Everything disappeared out of sight. Even his consciousness ceased to exist…
“Atsushi, what are you doing standing on the bow?! If you fall overboard,
we’re leaving you behind!”
Atsushi’s heart skipped a beat at the sudden voice. He felt as if his breathing, his heart, his blood—as if everything stopped. He couldn’t talk. His head was blank, and he had no idea what was going on. He stood over the vast ocean. The high-speed ferry cut through the waves, splashing Atsushi with seawater.
“Ah…mn…”
Atsushi tried to speak, but his mouth did nothing more than open and close.
“Atsushi? This isn’t the time to be spacing out. Do you seriously want to fall into the ocean that badly?”
He could hear Kunikida’s voice, but he couldn’t turn around. “Kunikida…”
That was the only thing he could manage to get out of his trembling throat. The ocean was blue as far as the eye could see. The seagulls squawked in the sky above. There was nothing dangerous hanging over the sea. No Shell. No heat wave. Nothing.
“There is a zero percent chance of rainfall today. Southerly winds followed by southeasterly winds. The waves will range from three feet to five feet tall. In addition—”
“Kunikida,” said Atsushi after finally turning around, “what time is it?” “What? It’s 11:05. Why?”
It was fifty-five minutes before noon.
“At any rate, I need you inside. This isn’t a vacation, I’ll have you know. We’re about to have a meeting regarding our latest job,” barked Kunikida while closing his notebook. Atsushi then unsteadily followed him inside.