Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 Chapter 4 Part 2

However, that individual stopped the train on a dime.
A powerful force sent the locomotive pitching forward, swinging the tail and derailing the train onto its side in the woods. The train moved like a raging iron snake that dug into the surrounding earth, knocking over countless trees before eventually coming to a stop.
The person who had watched the event play out—Verlaine—smirked with evident satisfaction. He had stopped the train head-on without even a scratch.
He began walking toward the car that Ougai Mori was in. He leaped over the train buried halfway in the ground and got past the electrical fire that had started until he reached his destination.
Ougai Mori was lying on the ground facedown. The entire train was on its side: The walls were now the floor, the ceiling and floor having taken their place. Mori had his back to Verlaine. He was stock still, a pool of blood slowly seeping out from under him.
Verlaine had investigated his target’s skill in advance. There was no secret a former spy couldn’t uncover. Ougai Mori didn’t have a skill that could save him from such an impact.
“That was too easy,” muttered Verlaine while approaching his target.
He would never be so foolish as to leave without confirming his target was dead. He was always prepared to finish them off on the small chance that they could still somehow be alive.
Verlaine rolled Mori’s body over. His eyes opened wide. It wasn’t Ougai Mori.
It was a man he had never seen before who was wearing clothes and a wig to look like Mori. But Verlaine was far from careless when it came to work. He had hooked up a hidden camera at the previous station that showed footage of the real Ougai Mori. When he grabbed the man to check his identity, Verlaine suddenly felt a hand against his chest.
“This was too easy.”
The skill’s powerful repulsive force sent Verlaine flying backward until he smashed through the train window and fell into the muck outside. He kept rolling, scattering dirt in the process, until his back slammed into a tree, stopping him.
“…Impressive.”
Verlaine placed a hand against the tree and stood up, wiping the dirt off his clothes while he sank into thought. He caught a brief glimpse of the man’s face. That plus the repulsive force led him to believe the impostor was most likely the Port Mafia member Ryuurou Hirotsu.
A body double.
The Mafia knew about the hidden camera Verlaine had set up, which was why they had Ougai Mori appear so they could swiftly switch him with a body double. In other words, they saw through Verlaine’s plot. Verlaine knew only one person in this country who could outmaneuver him with such dexterity.
“Hey, Verlaine.”
A small-framed man was seated on the edge of a toppled cart.
“Dazai,” said Verlaine as he picked up his hat off the ground by his feet. “I’ve heard people say that intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with age, but what you possess is extraordinary.”
“You messed up this time,” Dazai said dryly. “You let your emotions get the best of you. Anyone could have predicted your next move. Why are you so obsessed with Chuuya?”
“What’s so strange about a man being concerned for his younger brother?” Verlaine replied while wiping the dirt off his clothes.
“Everything about this is strange,” Dazai insisted. “Do you seriously believe you’re even his brother?”
“…What?” Verlaine narrowed his eyes.
“You saw what happened to Chuuya’s original self. There was nothing but bones left when he died,” Dazai added while dangling his legs off the side of the cart. “He looked almost exactly like Chuuya, and his skill was extremely similar, too. Not to mention there are plenty of other similarities between them. So what if that was the artificial skill-derived life-form, and the original is actually Chuuya, still alive and kicking, his only redeeming feature being his endless supply of energy? Would a layman who’s only read some old research papers be able to tell?”
“He isn’t the original.” Verlaine shook his head. “I’m not a fool. I wouldn’t mistake my target during an undercover mission. What I stole from that research facility nine years ago was, without a doubt, an artificial life-form just like me.”
“Either way, we can easily confirm with a quick check,” Dazai replied breezily. “Fortunately, the researchers back at the facility gave a demonstration on how to overwrite the character set inside Chuuya. I’m sure a few of them would be thrilled to teach us exactly how to do that once the Port Mafia kidnaps them. Then we’ll finally have our answer. We have plenty of time as well, fortunately.”
“You sound like you’re certain he’s human.”
“I am.” Dazai sighed, smiling. “There’s no way I could hate a man-made character string this much.”
After letting out a sigh, Verlaine began to walk toward Dazai with heavy steps as if he were about to finish a tiresome job.
“I would love to hear you kindly explain the evidence you’ve found that proves me wrong, but you have another job to do,” insisted Verlaine as he effortlessly walked up the hill that he had just rolled down a few moments ago. “You need to tell me where the real Ougai Mori is. It’s a tough job, I know. Real backbreaking work—literally.”
“In other words, you don’t plan on backing down, huh?” “Exactly.”
“All right,” replied Dazai as he aimlessly stared into space. He even looked a bit disappointed as he added:
“Then, you lost.”

A bullet from a sniper rifle directly hit Verlaine’s head.

His upper body bent back wildly until he hit the ground and tumbled into the muck. After rolling three times, he lifted his head and glared sternly at Dazai.
“A sniper? Do—?”
But before he could even finish his sentence, the sniper shot another bullet at his forehead. Verlaine placed his hands on the ground, catching himself before being knocked over sideways.
“Your skill only works on things you touch,” commented Dazai, looking down at Verlaine and swinging his legs. “That means bullets will actually hit you. Sure, you’ll instantly stop them when they land. But if we use a large-caliber sniper rifle, which fires several times more quickly than the average gun, we can physically hit you the moment you stop the bullet with your gravity like this. And…”

Dazai casually raised a hand, and immediately, bursts of fire appeared within the darkness.
Atop the hills, among the trees, within the muck, among the canopy of large trees—over fifty snipers had fired their rifles in unison at Verlaine. He howled as each bullet struck.
He tried escaping into the woods and manipulating gravity to protect his body. But just as he did, he was hit in the back by a sniper. When he tried to hide in a ditch, he was hit by a sniper on top of a tree. There was nowhere for him to run.
“How was he able to get this many snipers…in such a short period of time…?!”
A bullet pierced Verlaine’s clothing and dug its way into his skin. It didn’t injure him enough to make him bleed, but the number of snipers was overwhelming. There were ten shots per second, followed by twenty, and it only increased from there. It was as if the air around Verlaine had turned on him.
All Verlaine could do was cover his head and curl up on the ground, making himself as small as possible.
“You messed with the wrong guy, Verlaine,” Dazai said with a faint smirk. “I know exactly how to deal with someone who can manipulate gravity. Day in and day out, I’ve spent every waking and sleeping moment think about how I can annoy Chuuya.”
“Don’t get so cocky!” Verlaine grabbed a nearby tree and pulled it out of the ground while the bullets rained upon him. “Do you honestly think you can kill me just with a few pebbles?!”
He lifted the tree in the air to throw it at a sniper under the cover of darkness in the distance, but his arm stopped before he could finish… because the tree had been sliced into countless pieces.
“Oh my. You really do look like one of my subordinates close-up.”
It was the graceful koto-like voice of a woman. She had flaming-scarlet hair and eyes the same color. Japanese maple leaves decorated her red ombré kimono.
Most striking of all, however, was the masked demon by her side, also wearing a kimono. It was tall with long hair and was effortlessly raising a blade around the length of a child into the air as if it were weightless. Its golden kimono appeared to be melting from the knees down, making it clear that this being lacked a corporeal body.
“It was very selfish of you to try robbing me of one of my men. I’ll be willing to forgive you once I take one of your limbs. After I finish, you’d best leave my sight.”
Kouyou Ozaki, a gifted young swordswoman in the Port Mafia and Chuuya’s superior. She wielded a skill-derived life-form, a beautiful beast called the Golden Demon.
She spun her vivid peony-red bamboo parasol over her shoulder while twisting and pulling its handle, revealing a glittering silver blade: a cane sword.
“A skill user with the Port Mafia, huh?” Verlaine sneered like a wild beast. “But what can one skill user and two swords do against gravity?”
He lowered his stance to pounce at Kouyou. “Who said I was alone?”
Verlaine’s body sank into the ground. Astonished, he looked down at his feet to find the ground slowly swallowing them like snakes crawling up his legs. The stunned Verlaine nullified his gravity and jumped onto a nearby tree trunk lying on its side. However, even the sturdy tree trunk turned into liquid under his shoes and tried to swallow him.
“Hmm…”
He jumped once more, but the spot where he was planning on landing was already opening its mouth as if the sludge had a mind of its own, waiting for him.
“Gah-ha-ha! Run, boy. Run. The only reason a kid like you has survived this long is for my entertainment. Now, hurry up and die. I want that head of yours.”
A colossal tree trunk of a man emerged from the darkness of the woods. He donned a faded military uniform full of rips and tears, a judo belt, and tall wooden clogs. His hair was bristly like needles, and his arms crossed in front of his chest were dense like hundred-year-old trees.
One of the Port Mafia’s aces and a soldier who had survived the great war, he was known within the organization as the Colonel.
He raised a treelike arm in front of him and squeezed his hand into a fist. The earth immediately began to rumble. The liquefied ground, trees, and collapsed train all rushed toward the airborne Verlaine.
“His skill can liquefy mass and manipulate it…!”

Verlaine kicked off the first bit of liquefied ground that reached him and jumped back, but that area was already liquefied as well. Even if he tried to change directions to escape, everything above and below him was liquid. Even as he blasted it away with gravity, more liquefied earth simply took its place, giving Verlaine no chance to counter. To make matters worse, snipers shot him from every angle whenever they saw an opening.
“Tsk…!”
Verlaine increased the density of some faint dust in the air and used it as a foothold to jump even higher. He was trying to create distance. The Colonel’s matter-manipulation skill generally didn’t work on things out of sight; that was why Verlaine intended to hide in the woods, weigh down a boulder with gravity, then throw it at his opponent.
That was when he caught sight of something bizarre. It was a watch. There was a watch floating in the air.
It looked like an ordinary pocket watch: numbers on the face, hour and minute hands, a stem, and internal moving gears peeking out from the edge of the face. What was odd, however, was the size—about as large as a grown man’s torso. And it was turning to face Verlaine as if it were surveilling him. Verlaine, who had a wealth of knowledge on skills, immediately recognized how dangerous this watch was.
He ripped a button off his jacket sleeve, increased its weight by a few dozen pounds, and then tossed it at the watch. The meteor-like button, which had enough force behind it to take down an entire building, simply shot right through the watch. It destroyed the trees behind it and disappeared into the darkness.
“You can’t break it,” uttered a gloomy voice.
When Verlaine glanced in its direction, he noticed there was a young man sitting on the ground, pathetically wrapping his arms around his knees while looking up at him.
“There’s no point. It sees everyone. It sees me. It sees you. Eventually, you’ll have to die. It watches you until, one day, it’s caught right up you. I’m talking about time. It’s the enemy of us all.”
Both his voice and complexion were gloom itself. His clothing was ill- fittingly long, and the hems were frayed. His disheveled hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed for months, making it impossible to determine its original color. Anyone could see how bony he was even through his clothes.

He looked up at Verlaine while curling his finger as if to beckon him.
The floating clock’s hour and minute hands moved with a clink until they were both pointing at twelve. The next moment, the watch was drawn toward Verlaine until it was literally sucked into his chest. Verlaine tensed, searching for the vanished clock, but nothing was happening—nothing he could see, that is.
The liquefied ground latched onto Verlaine’s leg. Taken aback, he used gravity to push it off, then looked around. He was already far from the Colonel, yet the liquefied earth had caught up to him. It was bizarre.
Immediately, he was hit. A sniper’s bullet bounced off his head, sending him spinning through the air. He planted his feet into the muck, digging into the ground to stop himself.
Strange—the bullets were getting faster, which meant they were being deflected with a proportionate amount of energy when they struck him, even though he was stopping them with gravity.
Did the enemy switch to a more powerful firearm? No. This was…
The ground liquefied. Verlaine leaped out of the way before it could engulf him, but the tentacle-like liquid gave chase even more quickly than before.
He swiftly checked his surroundings. A leaf was falling from its stem due to the shock wave caused by the sniper’s fire. But it didn’t flutter in the wind. It fell straight down, piercing the ground. The attacks weren’t getting any faster.
“My time is getting slower…!”
“Everyone always dies, leaving me behind.” The gloomy young man glared at Verlaine with a perplexing grudge in his eyes. “My brothers, my parents—everyone. Time killed them all. But I can escape it with this special power of mine.”
A skill user who could manipulate time.
A cold sweat began to drip down Verlaine’s forehead. Time- manipulation skills were not only extremely powerful—they also defied common sense. As far as Verlaine knew, only a few people possessed such a skill with the most prominent perhaps being H. G. Wells, a former skill user engineer. Wells rose to notoriety as the worst terrorist who ever lived after creating the skill weapon known as the Shell and simply vanishing without a trace.