Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 4 Chapter 4 Part 7

Chapter 4 Part 7

The fan in the office stirred the lukewarm heat in the room. The sunlight diagonally peeking through the windows painted the floor white. The indoor plants bobbled their heads with the faint breeze.
“It’s…soooooo…hotttttt…” A detective lay forward onto his desk like a popsicle melting. “Why did the air conditioner have to break now of all times…?”
“Someone’s apparently coming to repair it at noon.” “I’m gonna be a puddle by then.”
The usual members were gathered at the office that day: Dazai, Atsushi, Tanizaki, Kenji, Ranpo, Yosano, and Kyouka. Only Kyouka seemed cool; she didn’t sweat even a drop, and she stared at her overheated colleagues in wonder.
“Ugh! We have all these elite detectives, and there’s still nothing we can do about this?!” Ranpo cried in despair. “Is there seriously nobody here who can cool the place down with their skill?!”
Everyone exchanged glances.
“It feels like there’d be… But there isn’t.”
“Ugh…” Ranpo fell prostrate over his desk. “That does it. Let’s all go somewhere to cool off. It can be the president’s way of thanking us for our efforts on Standard Island.”
“I like that idea,” replied Tanizaki after lifting his head. “But where exactly would we go?”
“I like the mountains,” Dazai muttered to himself.
“Yes, the mountains would be nice,” agreed Atsushi with a nod.
“I agree. The higher the elevation, the cooler it’s going to be,” added Kunikida.
“You can’t be serious,” Ranpo chimed in. “You go to the beach when you wanna beat the heat.”
“No more oceans!” everyone shouted in unison.
After taking note of each member’s haggard stare, Ranpo stood up unenthusiastically. “Hmph. Suit yourselves,” he pouted. Ranpo hadn’t had a chance to enjoy the ocean, since he wasn’t on the case. “I’ll be cooling off at the café on the first floor. Tanizaki, Kenji, follow me. It’s my treat.”
“Our pleasure.”
Ranpo, Tanizaki, and Kenji retired from the office together.
“Man… I could really go for some matcha ice cream from Uzumaki, too, right now…,” muttered Dazai as he watched them leave.
“You’ve got work to do!” Kunikida barked while tossing a stack of paperwork on Dazai’s desk. “You need to finish your report of Standard Island, and make it snappy. The Division is growing impatient.”
“Whaaat?” complained Dazai, clearly put out. “I mean, I guess I could do it, but… Kunikida, do you have any way I could cool off? Like with your skill?”
“I know a way you could really cool off, but it doesn’t have anything to do with my skill. Want to give it a try?”
“Wait—really? How?”
“Stop your heart for two minutes, then let me resuscitate you.”
“…I regret everything.” Dazai stared at Kunikida with reproach. “I’ve already had enough of being revived right before I think I’m finally gonna be able to die. Fine, I’ll write the report. Would that make you happy? Atsushi, hand me those files.”
“Oh, okay.”
Atsushi promptly stood up, began shuffling through the papers, then pulled out the documents the agents compiled. The first thing he noticed was a picture attached to the cover.
“Huh?” said Atsushi. “Is this…?”
“Oh, you haven’t seen it yet? Those are the post-findings of the investigation.”
The picture showed scraps of metal littered across the island coast, but Atsushi saw something familiar among the weather-beaten metal. It was a black briefcase. The clasp was broken, and the mechanism inside had been destroyed. It was so thoroughly ruined to the point that only those who knew what it once was would be able to tell what they were looking at.
“That was the one thing I wanted to check before leaving the island, so I got everyone to help me find it.” Dazai shrugged. “It was completely broken beyond repair, probably a little past noon right after it was stolen from the fifth basement floor.”
Gab was the one who stole it…which means…
“That kid had no intention of ever using the weapon,” Dazai said, shrugging again. “He probably stole it to destroy it so that nobody—not us nor the Special Division for Unusual Powers—could get their hands on it. He was just trying to stop the weapon in his own way. But, well, I figured as much.”
The island’s guardian…
Even after the man Verne ceased to exist and gave life to the pure skill life-form, Gab continued to be the guardian of the island. Perhaps that was the predestined role he had been given before birth, and his reason for existence as well.
“By the way…,” began Atsushi as if he suddenly remembered something. “I asked Kunikida to look into the colonel’s past, but…we never figured out the secret the colonel wanted the public to know. Did you manage to figure it out?”
“Noon was the time my men were given orders to attack. By our own headquarters, even.
“But it was all just a scheme to turn them into war criminals— traitors. They ran for their lives while people called them the Mimic soldiers, and eventually…they drifted to Yokohama and died in vain, from what I hear.”
Atsushi got help from other detectives, looked into past incidents and the colonel’s history, and even received assistance from private detective agencies abroad to look into records of wars that matched what the colonel had said. But he couldn’t find a thing. There were no records of the colonel’s troops being made into traitors or any foreign former military parties dying in Yokohama.
“You won’t find anything,” Dazai suddenly said while turning his gaze out the window. “The Division made sure to completely cover it up. You won’t find any records of their deaths, nor will you even find a single photo accidentally taken of them as they were walking around town. The Division is good at jobs like that, after all.”
“Dazai, do you know anything about them?”
But Dazai didn’t say a word as he stared at a point in the sky with an elbow resting on the table. It was as if his eyes weren’t focused on the scenery outside but were watching vivid memories playing back in his mind.
“I feel bad for the colonel, but there’s no reason to dig up the past and disclose to the public what happened to them,” Dazai revealed in a flat voice. “They died satisfied. Now is their time to rest.”
Atsushi felt as if he could see the white smoke of a cigarette rising in Dazai’s eyes. Was he just seeing things? Atsushi’s mouth opened and closed, unable to put into words what he needed to ask until…
“Is now a good time?” Naomi asked, standing at their side. “One of our regulars from the museum sent us a request.”
“What is it?” Kunikida turned around and took the files Naomi was holding out. “An escort request? Well, that’s sudden.”
After running his eyes through the file, Kunikida turned his gaze to Atsushi.
“Atsushi, get ready. We have a job to do. It appears some thieves left a calling card.”
A calling card? Well, that’s pretty old-fashioned…
“The thieves were witnessed checking the place out when the calling card was found. One was a large, bald man, while the other appeared to be a middle-aged businessman.”
“Huh?”
Could it be?
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s probably just a coincidence.
There’s no way those two are alive. You saw their bodies.”
He had a point. Their wounds were clearly fatal, and they didn’t look at all alive. Plus, Gab stole the boss’s skill and was using it. He could only absorb skills from people who died on the island.
“I really do respect the guy. He gave me something important.”
Gab… The living skill just born…
Why did Gab kill Virgo and the boss? Back on the island, I thought maybe Virgo had learned something he shouldn’t have when he was hacking into the information terminal, but now that I think about it, Gab would’ve been able to neutralize him without killing him. Cruelly slitting his throat didn’t seem like something Gab would do.
Plus, Gab was supposedly able to use multiple skills through absorbing the skills of others, but he only ever showed two of them: the one that made

him look young and the one that allowed him to manipulate the stone arms. During those fourteen years of accumulating skills, if he’d absorbed the power to resurrect someone after putting them in a state of suspended animation or something like that, then that’d explain the contradiction. But if he’d actually had a skill like that, then Gab would’ve never intended to kill anyone in the first place—
“Atsushi, you there?” Kunikida’s voice suddenly dragged Atsushi back into reality. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“O-okay!”
Atsushi quickly followed behind Kunikida. He glanced at Dazai on the way out, but Dazai just smiled and shrugged without saying a word.
I’ll never know what Gab’s true intentions were, but I’ll be able to find out if the boss and Virgo are alive once I solve this case. All that other stuff can wait until afterward. And if the boss really is the thief, I already know how to catch him.

Once he opened the door to the detective agency, a cool breeze suddenly came fluttering inside and blew through the office.
Summer was still far from over—and life even more so. What were skills? What were Gab’s true intentions? Atsushi had so many questions, and the road to the answers seemed to go on forever. But perhaps Kunikida was right: Atsushi still had plenty of time to think. He had friends he could count on as well. As long as he kept moving forward, there would come a day when he would reach the answer.
After walking outside, Atsushi was met with vivid-white cumulonimbus clouds in the sky. The brilliant sunlight drenched the emerald-green trees and reflected off their leaves.
“I owe you one.”
Atsushi turned around at the sound of the sudden voice to find a familiar individual standing under a tree.
“Wells!” Atsushi gushed with a smile. “You’re okay!”
“Thanks to you I was able to erase the embarrassment of getting stabbed from my life. You have my gratitude… Now, I heard that the military police have given orders to the Armed Detective Agency to arrest me, an international terrorist. Is that true?”
“Yes. Kunikida received a written request earlier,” Atsushi said as he thought back to it. “But he immediately tore it up and threw it away.”
“I see.” Wells closed her eyes and smiled. “Well, I should be on my way to the next catastrophe. As I will continue to do until I draw my last breath and am forgotten in the flow of time…”
“Please at least say hello to everyone before you go.” Atsushi looked at

Kunikida walking up ahead. “Kunikida’s right over there. I’m sure the others would love to see you as…”
Atsushi turned his gaze back to Wells and froze. Nobody was there. All that was present was the sunlight filtering through the trees, creating stripe patterns in the air. Atsushi continued staring at the empty space.
He suddenly had a thought: What if Wells the time traveler never existed in the first place? Could the ability to manipulate time itself have been nothing more than the result of something like a summer shadow meddling with everyone’s timeline?
A skill that manifested as a shadow…
Atsushi wasn’t sure how much of the world was actually there and how much of it was merely a shadow, but all one could do was move forward. Atsushi opened his mouth to say something, only to decide against it, and then ran over to catch up with Kunikida.
It was a long, endless road.

(end)