Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 Chapter 1 Part 7

“Please wait, Chuuya!”
But Chuuya eventually escaped into a dark tunnel. It was a long, almost pitch-black pathway that made it hard to see how far he had gone.
“You cannot outrun me!”
Adam leaned forward and took off running in a position where he could transform air resistance into lift. This aerodynamically ideal sprinting form allowed him to swiftly bypass one car after another until he disappeared into the distance.
“Yeah, I know.” Chuuya snorted, hanging from the ceiling. He had manipulated gravity so he could stick to the dark ceiling and hide.
After waiting two minutes, he released the gravitational force and dropped back down onto the ground. He wiped the dust off his body and set off on a stroll.
“A British investigator, eh?” Chuuya muttered as he stared toward the tunnel’s exit. “What’ve I gotten myself into?”
Just then, a luxury car pulled up beside him.
He looked over and saw it was a black passenger vehicle with tinted windows that obscured the interior from view. The glass, body, and tires were all bulletproof. It was one of the Mafia’s.
A man wearing a black suit emerged from the driver’s seat and delivered a single message:
“The boss wants to see you.” “Oh, a mailman,” said Chuuya.
Mailman was code used for a certain role in the organization. These individuals delivered messages for the Mafia whenever someone was too busy to deliver the message for themselves, or if they couldn’t go out in public, or if the information they were sending was too sensitive to deliver by phone or letter.
Mailmen would go anywhere to deliver a message. They didn’t speak much and kept their interactions to a minimum—plus, they were rich. Even the simplest message netted very handsome rewards. And with good reason, of course. If the police or an enemy organization ever tried to get any information out of a mailman, the mailman’s only choice would be to fight them off; if that wasn’t possible, then they had to kill themselves and take their secrets to the grave.
The mailman before Chuuya was tall, with a black hat and sunglasses hiding his face. The poster child for mailmen everywhere. He quietly waited for Chuuya’s reply without saying any more than he needed to.
“Did he mention why he wants to see me?” asked Chuuya.
“Not exactly.” The man wearing the black porkpie hat shook his head. “But he already summoned Piano Man, Albatross, Doc, Lippmann, and Iceman for the same reason. They’re awaiting your arrival.”
“Them, too?” Chuuya raised an eyebrow. “Oh, right. They mentioned something like that on the phone earlier. Anything else you can tell me?”
“Just one thing,” the mailman added in a hushed voice. “It has to do with Arahabaki.”
Chuuya frowned. After looking at the mailman for a few seconds, he nodded. “All right. Let’s go.”
He then made his way to the passenger seat. After slightly adjusting the brim of his hat, the mailman got behind the steering wheel. However, before getting in the car, Chuuya randomly decided to take another glance back at the end of the tunnel…and what he saw made him jump.
“Ack!”
A shadowy figure was charging toward them. No ordinary person could possibly run that fast.
“Chuuya! Wait!”
Adam hadn’t slowed down even a little, and his gait gave no indication that he was tired.
“Son of a…!” Chuuya griped as he hopped into the passenger seat. “Go!
Drive!”
Chuuya looked back once more as he shut the car door. That was when he heard something rather unpalatable.
“Chuuya, get out of the car!” Adam shouted as loudly as he could while he sprinted. “That’s Verlaine!”
Chuuya reflexively looked over to the driver’s seat. At almost the same moment, the mailman smirked, albeit faintly, and slammed his foot on the gas. The car immediately shot off like a bullet, causing Chuuya to slam back into his seat.
“Damn it…!”
“Fasten your seat belt. Otherwise you’ll bite your tongue,” the mailman calmly instructed.
“Stop the car!” Chuuya yelled as his right hand reached out to grab the steering wheel with the speed of a swallow. No ordinary person would have even been able to see his hand…but this man was different. He punched Chuuya in the jaw before Chuuya’s hand even touched the steering wheel.
“Guh!”
Chuuya’s upper body jerked back, and the back of his head slammed into the window, leaving numerous white cracks across the glass.
“Oops. Forgive me,” the man said as he continued driving. “You’re a lot lighter than I thought you’d be. Are you getting enough to eat? You know I worry about you, as your big brother.”
“You’re gonna pay for that, asshole!” Chuuya’s face was overcome with rage.
He sat back up almost instantaneously, launching his fist at the driver like a bouncing billiard ball in a right hook that used all the muscles in his upper body. The punch had the weight of an iron ball and the deadliness of a guillotine behind it, leagues faster and heavier than when he’d reached for the steering wheel a moment ago.
And the driver…simply caught Chuuya’s fist with a single hand as if he were catching a baseball.
“What…?”
“Your punches are light, too.” The man continued facing forward, eyes still focused on the road. “You’re going to be assassinated within seconds if you keep fighting like this.”
The man had caught a punch that would have demolished an iron pillar
—but a smile was playing on Chuuya’s lips.
“Huh. I guess that means you’re pretty heavy, eh?” The man suddenly sank into his seat.
“What?!”
He continued to gradually sink as if he were sitting in a swamp. The leather seat was unable to withstand the extreme weight. The metal painfully shrieked as it bent and warped while various parts of the seat scattered everywhere.
A gravitational wave expanded from Chuuya’s fist until it engulfed the driver. The extreme gravitational pull ripped the sunglasses right off the driver’s face, but they didn’t bounce off the car floor; instead, they shattered into hundreds of pieces upon contact. The car body began to creak, gradually losing the battle against the driver’s weight, which was over ten times what it had been mere seconds ago.
“Didja really think I was just gonna let you assassinate me like that?
Hope ya like being squished.”
Chuuya didn’t weaken his skill but instead increased the amount of force he was using until the man was two times—then three times—four times— five times heavier than he was a second ago. But all of a sudden, Chuuya’s eyes narrowed dubiously.
“What the…?”
He couldn’t increase the weight any further. Chuuya unleashed another gravitational wave from his fist, but the flattened driver’s seat didn’t make a sound, let alone change in the slightest.
“Is that it?” the man asked calmly even though he should have been suffering under the powerful gravitational force. He then squeezed Chuuya’s fist, causing the impossible to happen: This time, Chuuya was the one to suddenly sink into his seat.
“Gwah!”
The passenger seat beneath him bent in two; the frame snapped and shot out of the cushion. The seat adjuster snapped as well, sending the seat’s back straight into the rear of the car. Chuuya was tightly pressed into the seat, ever so slowly sinking. His entire body was being pushed downward, paralyzing his arms and legs. The wires in the seat’s frame popped one after another and pierced the vehicle’s interior.
“I told you. Your big brother knows best,” the man said, his dark-brown eyes narrowing with a smile.
Chuuya couldn’t reply. He could hardly even breathe. The enhanced gravity was crushing his lungs. Still squeezed against the seat, he turned his bewildered gaze to the man.
“Listen,” the man intoned, one hand on the steering wheel. “I didn’t come here to assassinate you. Why would I ever do that? You’re my one and only brother, after all.”
Chuuya’s entire body creaked under the intense pressure. He clenched his jaw and growled, “I don’t remember…ever having a…European brother.”
“Allow me to correct you, then,” the driver coldly stated. “Because I’m not European. I’m not even human, just like you.”
“What…?”
“Have you never felt the world was a cruel place?” The man’s voice was as sweet as a lullaby, his gaze as dreary as the night sea. “Why am I me? Why are you, you? Nobody can tell us that. My goal is the opposite of assassination. I came to save you.”
“Ha-ha… I think I’m good.” Chuuya grinned like a wild animal as he fought against the pressure. “I dunno about you, but I’m human.”
“You’re not.”
The statement was bone-chilling.
“You aren’t human. You’re 2,383 lines of code.”
Those words held an unusual weight to them as they echoed through the car. It felt as if a nuclear explosion had gone off in some faraway land.
“What the…?”
An empty sadness filled the man’s eyes. “Military researchers tried to artificially remove skill users’ special abilities, and they were successful,” he explained. “Half successful, at least. Naturally, machines can’t control skills. You need a human soul for that. But that also means the human mind limits the output. That’s when the researchers came up with an idea. They decided to trick the skill. They made the skill think that there was a human controlling it. The persona models—imitation humans with fake souls— were created for that reason. An extremely simple character string of rules for behavioral principles and a formula for emotions, all created in order to trick the skill. And that particular string was 2,383 lines long. Do you get it, Chuuya? Your soul is nothing more than 2,383 lines of code some researchers wrote off the top of their heads.”
“Bullshit,” Chuuya spat, forcing every last bit of air he could out of his throat. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true.”
“Don’t lie to me!” he shouted. “I was born in a countryside village by the beach! My friends proved that! I even have a photo to back it up!”
“False information put out there by the military. That’s all it is.”
Chuuya used every muscle in his body to fight back, but the gravity grew even stronger and pushed him down again. He could no longer talk, let alone open his mouth.
“Sleep well, Chuuya.” The man’s voice was terrifyingly kind. “By the time you wake up, you will be in another country on the opposite side of the ocean. And a year from now, you’ll be grateful for this moment we had today.”
Chuuya tried to argue, but not even that was possible anymore. His blood was pooling from the pressure, and his face was pale. The blood flow to his brain was slowly being cut off; the light in his eyes began fading.
“I disagree.” Suddenly, an electronic voice came from the car’s sound system. “In fact, I believe Chuuya will be very angry with you…because you are a terrible driver.”
Out of nowhere, the steering wheel veered left—even though no one was touching it.
“What?!”
The car swerved wildly, rapidly accelerating into the next lane until it dived onto the sidewalk. As the driver let go of Chuuya to grab the steering wheel, the gravity holding down Chuuya disappeared, and the passenger door simultaneously opened.
A hand reached into the car and grabbed the barely conscious boy. That hand belonged to Adam, who pulled Chuuya out of the car while latched onto the side of the vehicle. He clutched Chuuya tightly and covered his head before leaping away and rolling onto the ground. The driver of the out-of-control car glanced at Adam.
“Oh, look who it is,” joked the man as his lips curled into a smirk. “It appears destroying that airplane wasn’t enough.”
Adam met the jeering man’s smirk with a cool gaze.
The man then slammed the brakes, but the fast-moving vehicle did not stop. It flew over the median strip and landed in a large intersection where it was T-boned by a semitrailer with a meteoric impact. The collided vehicles rolled like spinning tops and sent strips of metal and glass scattering across the road. Nearby pedestrians turned their heads at the commotion in utter astonishment.
Almost immediately, the fuel in the semitrailer caught fire, creating a massive explosion that spit metal and fire into the air. This was no typical city scene; it all happened without a moment’s warning, like something out of a war zone.
“Wake up, Chuuya,” Adam pleaded. He shook Chuuya, the flames illuminating the boy’s profile. “I made that truck crash into him. Now is our chance to escape!”
“Damn…it…,” Chuuya groaned with a shake of his head as he tried unsteadily getting to his feet. Unable to wait for him to get up, Adam grabbed Chuuya and started running, but he glanced back out of the corner of his eye to check the destruction.
That was when he saw something staggering.
Flames roared from the semitrailer in the massive intersection. Black smoke rose into the sky. And a man in a black suit was standing in the center of the chaos.
It was Verlaine.
His eyes were closed as if he were taking a nap. He stood there unscathed. His clothes had nary a wrinkle even though he had just been struck by a semitrailer that weighed over ten tons.
The flames from the explosion blurred the air around him. He stood with both legs piercing the ground; radial cracks spread from the asphalt beneath his feet. Only when Adam noticed the semitrailer was split in half did he realize what had happened.
The moment the two vehicles collided, Verlaine had increased his body’s density via gravity manipulation and pierced through his vehicle and into the ground. All he had to do after that was remain upright and withstand the semitrailer’s impact. His body tore through the truck like a knife cutting through warm butter.
Verlaine opened his eyes, then looked at Adam. That instant, Adam’s threat level increased exponentially. Realizing he wouldn’t be able to escape on foot in such an open area, Adam made a hard right and slipped into a narrow alleyway. His digital brain pulled up a local map that he used to rapidly calculate optimal escape routes. He then identified the route with the highest probability of survival before sprinting for it with the speed of a bullet.
Adam dashed down the alley, kicked off the wall, and veered to the right at the fork. When he increased his speed even further, his proximity sensor’s alarm went off at its highest level.
“Behind you!” Chuuya shouted in Adam’s arms.
Without even looking back, Adam threw Chuuya to the ground and rolled along the street. A massive black object shot like a cannonball through the air, right where Adam’s head had been a split second ago, before smashing into the building up ahead.
It was a car—the mailman’s car that Verlaine had been driving up until a few minutes ago. The vehicle, which most likely weighed over a ton, had just soared straight over their heads. The instant Adam realized Verlaine had thrown it, he looked back mid-roll and pulled out his Europole-issue service pistol, aiming it in Verlaine’s direction.
But there was no one there.
A voice suddenly came from the opposite direction:
“Upon reflection, humans use the word lonely far too casually.”
Adam swiftly turned around and saw Verlaine—he was on top of the car with its entire front half piercing the wall. He sat leisurely on the trunk like a king on his throne, his jacket fluttering in the ever so gentle breeze.
“People know nothing about true loneliness. They foolishly believe that loneliness is simply not having a family or anyone to talk to.”
Adam analyzed the situation. Verlaine had thrown the car while he was sitting on it. That was how he managed to catch up with Adam and Chuuya so quickly. Adam rapidly calculated a few different scenarios, but each one ended in despair. There was no running away from someone who could throw an object and launch himself atop it using gravity.
“True loneliness…,” began Verlaine in an elegant tone reminiscent of a violin solo. “True loneliness is the comet traveling alone through the universe, surrounded by vacuous space and nothingness at absolute zero. It would never have the chance to be seen by someone or approached by another. The dismal silence would simply continue for eons. Could you even imagine it? No one could… That is, except for you, Chuuya.”
Chuuya placed both hands on the ground to support his unstable body as he tried to stand up. “What are you…getting at…?”
“There’s just one thing I want,” Verlaine replied with a refreshing gaze. “That’s why I’m only going to say it once.”
The moment Verlaine gently smiled, the dangerous scent that followed him vanished.
“Come with me, Chuuya.”
Chuuya didn’t reply. Neither did Adam. They couldn’t even move.