Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 6 Chapter 2 Part 1

Chapter 2 Part 1

“Heh… Heh-heh-heh…” Akutagawa let out a deep-throated laugh. “An amusing taunt, I must admit. I would have been the biggest clown of the century had I given the president this envelope without looking inside.” Akutagawa shook Gin’s picture as he spoke.
“Do… Do you know her?” Atsushi asked.
After quietly staring at Atsushi’s stiff expression for a few moments, Akutagawa demanded, “Where is Gin?” Hatred spewed out of every pore of his body. “Answer me, or die.”
Seemingly unfazed, Atsushi simply observed Akutagawa and confessed, “I know where she is.” His voice was calm in every sense of the word. “But I can’t tell you.”
Akutagawa’s rage swelled.
“Tell me where she is. Now. I’ve been looking for her the past four and a half years, and I don’t plan on giving up now.”
“Oh, really? Four and a half years, huh?” The emotion in Atsushi’s voice suddenly receded until it had completely faded. “Then…”
There was the sound of something cutting through air.
Akutagawa bent backward, but a vermilion line appeared on his throat and a trickle of blood immediately ran down his neck before landing on the floor.
“…?!”
Something had sliced Akutagawa’s neck the instant Atsushi moved. However, he had no idea how he was attacked, nor did he see what sliced through his skin. If he had reacted even a split second later, his carotid artery would have been sliced open before painting the ceiling with his blood.
“That…attack…,” Akutagawa uttered while holding the cut on his neck. Atsushi was standing in his original position with lowered hips and his shoulders at an angle. He wasn’t holding any sort of blade or weapon…but a touch of blood was dripping from his fingernails. Akutagawa immediately understood what happened. It was Atsushi’s nails. He had approached Akutagawa so quickly that he looked like a blur before slashing his throat and returning to his original position.
“We have a rule in our organization,” began Atsushi as emotionlessly as before he assaulted Akutagawa. “We must immediately dispose of anyone who asks of Gin’s whereabouts no matter who they are, since she’s the boss’s personal secretary and spends every waking moment with him. Doing so would put the boss’s life in danger.”
“I see.”
Akutagawa’s overcoat began flapping in the air. It furiously wriggled as if it had a mind of its own while gradually spreading out around him.
“Your boss is a coward, but that is irrelevant. Tell me where Gin is.
She’s—she’s my sister.”
“Liar,” Atsushi promptly replied. “She doesn’t have any family.” “I’m in no mood to have a heart-to-heart to convince you.”
Akutagawa’s overcoat transformed into a spear, then immediately shot through the air. A battle to the death had begun in the cramped café. The blade of fabric was as quick as a bullet, but Atsushi simply tilted his head to the side ever so slightly, dodging the blow. Akutagawa launched another attack, but Atsushi twisted his torso and dodged again. Each blade pierced the wall behind Atsushi, littering it with holes.
Akutagawa retracted his extended blade and tried using it to attack Atsushi from behind, but Atsushi dropped to the ground on all fours, avoiding the blade without even looking back. He then slammed his hands and feet into the ground and leaped into the air as if his entire body were a spring. After hitting the ceiling on all fours, Atsushi immediately kicked off it and launched himself toward Akutagawa. He suddenly threw his claws at an angle, but Akutagawa predicted his attack and used his leftover fabric as a slanted shield. Atsushi’s claws created sparks as they scraped down the shield at the speed of lightning while tearing through the fabric before his fist smashed into the floor, leaving a crater as fissures ran about. A violent roar shook the café.
“I’m surprised you were able to block that,” admitted Atsushi as he quickly leaped back. “I can’t believe such a powerful skill user has gone undetected by our network for this long.”
Atsushi then swiftly hopped off the wall before swinging around Akutagawa and opening the café’s front door.
“The Armed Detective Agency has far exceeded my expectations… It’d be foolish of me to keep fighting right under my enemy’s nose like this. I need to report to the boss…and figure out why Gin’s photograph was inside that envelope as well.”
“Wait…!” demanded Akutagawa, but his body didn’t budge. Atsushi then slipped out the door and vanished without making a sound. Akutagawa stepped forward and tried to go after him, but that was as far as he got. He was bleeding copiously from his abdomen. The claws that cut through his fabric’s defense bored a hole in his side. Unable to even walk, Akutagawa fell forward onto the cracked floor. The last thing he saw before losing consciousness was the picture of Gin lying on the floor right in front of him. “…Gin…,” Akutagawa mumbled desperately before passing out.

Someone once said, “It’s human nature to lash out with violence. But if hurting others is your natural instinct…then you are nothing more than a mindless beast.”
The black night. Wavering darkness. The flames of hell roared, reducing the sinner to ashes.
“You just wanted revenge? Even if it killed you? Did you not even think of what would happen to your little sister if you left her all alone in a place like this?”
Something was burning my throat. It was a scream, it was a lament—a fire that no shouting or howling could extinguish.
It was regret.
All I felt was hate. Pure hatred. Hatred for not the enemy but the world itself. But it was hatred that motivated me to kill my enemies, and it was hatred that took my sister away. How did it come to this? Who stole my sister from me?
“Come find me once you figure out what makes you so weak. We’ll have a rematch. I’ll be holding on to your sister until then.”
It didn’t make sense. I couldn’t comprehend it.
Where should I direct this burning resentment, this feeling beyond despair? Who should I curse if I do not even believe in a god?
“Do not pursue the beast within you,” another voice told me.
I didn’t understand. It didn’t make any sense, so all I could do was act.
If I could get my sister back and atone for the mistake born from my anger, then perhaps I would be given a chance…to redeem myself. …A chance to atone for my mistake of feeling emotion.

When Akutagawa woke up, he was in the detective agency’s infirmary. He reflexively grabbed at his side…but nothing was there. His wound had completely healed without even leaving a scar. Akutagawa then began to look around the room until he locked eyes with Yosano, a hatchet in her hand.
“Oh, you’re awake,” she grumbled while placing down her hatchet and curling her fingers. “I had a lot of fun while you were unconscious.”
She then pulled out a piece of paper as if out of thin air. On the OK Card was a stamp in every square. Yosano, Oda, Kunikida, Tanizaki, Kenji, the president—everyone’s stamp was on that card. Yosano handed Akutagawa the card and headed for the door.
“Come,” she instructed, the hem of her skirt fluttering as she walked. “There’s something I want to show you.”

Kunikida, Tanizaki, and Kenji were already sitting in the conference room. As Yosano took a seat in one of the empty chairs, Kunikida said, “Watch this footage.”
A video started playing on the wall-mounted television. It showed a deck on a small ship somewhere out at sea. Two men were sitting while facing each other with a small table between them. One was a bald middle- aged man in a kimono while the other was a tall man in a black overcoat. Standing in the center between them was a nervous-looking individual wearing round glasses and a suit.
“This is footage from a clandestine meeting between two leaders from different organizations following a certain event four years ago,” commented Kunikida as he watched the video. “The older man is Chief Taneda of the Special Division for Unusual Powers, and the other is the underground organization Port Mafia’s boss, Osamu Dazai.”
“So that’s the Port Mafia’s…,” Akutagawa muttered absentmindedly to himself.
The Port Mafia was considered the most wicked and powerful criminal organization in all Yokohama, but not a soul knew their boss’s whereabouts, let alone his name or what he even looked like.
“The Special Division recorded this in secret with a super-telephoto lens just in case anything should happen. You would have to be a highly skilled agent in the Special Division to film the Mafia’s secret meetings, but Ranpo discovered that the government had this footage stored away in one of their facilities with other top secret information.”
Akutagawa surveyed the room and asked, “Where is Ranpo?”
“He currently has other business he needs to attend to, but he told me to show you the footage.”
“Akutagawa, it was actually Oda who obtained this video,” said Tanizaki, who was seated. “Even with Ranpo’s Super Deduction and Oda’s extraordinary skill Flawless, which allows him to see into the near future, it took them three whole days to sneak into the secret facility and steal the footage. That just shows you how extremely dangerous the mission was and how hard it was to get this information.”
That was when it hit Akutagawa. He had just recently been asked to watch over the orphans for three days while Oda was out of town on business.
“Now, look here.” Kunikida pointed close to the center of the screen. “Do you know what that is?”
After squinting at the screen for a few moments, Akutagawa quizzically replied, “It looks like an ordinary wineglass to me.”
“This is the glass of destiny. For you, that is.” “What?”
Kunikida turned back around and clasped his hands. “Are you familiar with directional laser microphones? It’s a surveillance device that uses lasers to detect and analyze sound vibrations in a distant object. In other words, it picks up on all surrounding sounds and echoes. This agent was able to use a laser on that glass and record what was being said during the secret meeting.”
Kunikida then synced the audio player in his hand to the video.
“The bureaucrats back at the Home Affairs Ministry are waiting for my report, but I feel like that’s not going to be enough. I’m sure they’d be thrilled if I brought them your head on a silver platter as a gift, though.”
The recording played in sync with the middle-aged man’s lip movements. It was Chief Taneda’s voice. And there was one other person— a tall young man in a black overcoat. He smirked faintly as he replied to Taneda:
“Oh, I hardly doubt I’m important enough for them to care. My head would stink up the place. Especially compared to the last leader of the Port Mafia, the great Mori—my predecessor. I’m just a nobody.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A little bird told me you gained your position as the new leader after assassinating Mori.”
“Oh my. That’s a chatty little bird you’ve got there.”
They both smiled, but their expressions were nothing more than masks to hide their true intentions. As he listened to them speak, Akutagawa suddenly slammed his hand against the table.
“…That’s him.” Akutagawa’s voice harbored the heat of lava. “There’s no way I could forget. That’s the voice of the man in black that I heard that day. This man is even the same height.”
After hearing that, Kunikida knitted his brow and let out a deep but short sigh. “That’s what I thought.”
“Where is he?” Akutagawa approached the screen. “Ranpo said he had a good idea of his whereabouts. Tell me. Where is this man? Where is Dazai?”
“Hold on.”
“Answer me!” shouted Akutagawa as he slammed his hand against the wall, causing the entire room to shake.
Kunikida, however, did not even flinch as he calmly replied, “Listen. We know where he is, but it isn’t possible to even get close to him. He’s on the top floor of the Port Mafia’s headquarters—the innermost room of an impenetrable fortress considered the most difficult place to sneak into in Yokohama. Countless enemy organizations that despise Port Mafia have tried to get inside, but none have succeeded. Army platoons, state-of-the-art tanks or armored helicopters, highly trained combat-oriented skill users— no one has ever succeeded. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you go there, you will die. So right now—”
“I don’t care,” Akutagawa insisted, cutting Kunikida off. “I fought one of Port Mafia’s skill users at the café on the first floor. He had my sister’s photograph and said she was the boss’s secretary.”
“Right.” Kunikida nodded solemnly. “The owner gave me a rough idea of what happened.”
“Then what are you still sitting around for? That person is about to inform his boss of what happened today, and his boss—The man in black knows that I’m looking for my sister. In other words, he’s going to either further tighten his security or simply disappear… In fact, we would be lucky if that was all he did. What if he decides to kill my sister to get me off his tail? There’s no guarantee she will be alive tomorrow. Now is my only chance.”
Akutagawa then turned on his heel and headed for the door. His visage was that of a fiendish beast.
“Akutagawa, wait!” Tanizaki stood before him. “Even you wouldn’t be able to make it inside! They’d kill you before you—”
“Move!”
Akutagawa shoved Tanizaki out of the way before he could grab Akutagawa’s arm. A blade of fabric grazed Tanizaki’s flesh.
“Ow!”
Tanizaki fell backward, then tightly applied pressure to his hand. On the back of his hand was a fine cut left by Akutagawa’s skill. He winced in pain and looked up at Akutagawa. When Akutagawa saw his face, he scowled faintly for a brief moment, then immediately averted his gaze and began heading toward the exit once more.
“Akutagawa!”