Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 Chapter 4 Part 3

Time manipulation tampered with the fundamental principles of this world and overwrote them however the user wished. Time and space were equal from the universe’s perspective, after all, and time-manipulating skills had the potential to be as dangerous as Verlaine’s gravity-manipulation skill
—they could reshape the world.
Soon after Verlaine’s movement grew sluggish, a surge of Mafia attacks followed in the form of bullets, blades, and liquefied ground. Even though he tried to evade, he moved as slowly as if he were underwater. Verlaine’s face tensed.

Dazai leisurely observed the roars and gunfire echoing through the woods. He looked down at the hellish war zone as relaxed as if he were enjoying the night breeze.
“This is how the world works,” Dazai intoned. “It’s an absolute truth no matter when or where you go. Groups are stronger than individuals. People with special powers are stronger than groups. And…”
He smiled as the explosive blasts of battle gently caressed his cheeks. “Groups of people with special powers are stronger than individuals
with special powers. There’s strength in numbers.”

Verlaine enhanced his gravity laterally as much as he could, swiftly sending himself away from battle with enough force to overpower the skill that was slowing him down. His bones creaked from the extreme acceleration.
Verlaine’s judgment was not impaired, even in the face of danger. The situation was not completely hopeless. He was going to get as far from the wave of skill attacks as possible, regain his footing, then repel the enemies’ bullets back at them, sniping one skill user at a time. That was how he could win this.
There were still only three skill users. He was at a disadvantage, but it wasn’t dire—
Just then, Verlaine’s skin suddenly started bleeding.
He looked down at his sleeve, only to realize that his skin was peeling off and revealing the muscle underneath. Nevertheless, there was only a small amount of blood, and he hardly felt any pain, either.
He reflexively planted his feet on the ground, but the skin on his heels peeled off in his shoes; he could tell by the slippery sensation. But he still hardly felt any pain.
He immediately realized this was a new skill attack.
Verlaine could see his breath. His skin was freezing over; frost dangled off his eyelashes.
“Embrace the freezing love. Embrace the frozen flower’s petals as they scatter in full bloom,” came a shrill voice—yet another skill user.
She had long white hair and was wearing a white shawl. Even her breath came out white. Only the crimson rose on her chest had color. Each breath she took caused the nearby trees to freeze, crack, and shatter due to the frost heave.
Verlaine immediately recognized her skill. She could cool the temperature.
His skin was peeling off because it was sticking to his clothing after being exposed to the freezing air. In just the blink of an eye, his body had turned ice cold. It wouldn’t be much longer until his muscles and bones were frozen as well.
This skill was extremely dangerous. An attack that froze its target didn’t need to physically hit them, which meant it couldn’t be blocked through manipulating gravity, either. It was Verlaine’s natural enemy.
A sniper’s bullet pierced Verlaine’s shoulder, causing him to moan in agony. The bullet was cold; it froze the moment it came into contact with his skin, forming a column of ice that only continued to grow. The cold temperature slowly seeped into his wounds, eating away at his flesh.
The enemies’ attacks—slowing down time, freezing, and sniping—were a perfect match. They clearly devised a strategy that focused on hindering Verlaine’s strengths and exposing his weak points.
There was something else strange as well. Even though he’d retreated from the battle zone relatively quickly, the snipers’ attacks still didn’t stop. It was as if they knew exactly which way he was going to run. A target moving at this speed through a wooded area at night would usually be able to evade a sniper’s scope and avoid getting shot. So how were these people doing it?
“Kee-hee-hee-hee-heeee! What a sweet face. Hey, I promise I won’t tell anyone, but if you cry, drool, and apologize, I’ll sneak you outta here.” The voice was nearby. Extremely nearby.
Verlaine looked in its direction, but there was nobody around—no people, that is.
He saw a coin-size hole floating in empty space. It was as if the space had been burnt and was caving in on itself, leading to another dimension. On the other side of the hole was a black pupil quietly staring at Verlaine.
“Yep. It’s me, buddy. You’re bein’ watched. You’re never gonna be safe now. Even when you lock the bathroom door behind you, I’ll be watchin’. Kee-hee-hee-hee!”
The hole was small, making it impossible to see the speaker’s entire body. But that eye alone was enough. It was filled with evil. It was observing, tracking, and constantly reporting Verlaine’s location.
He reflexively launched a roundhouse kick at the hole. “Wuh-oh.”
It closed and disappeared before the kick connected. “Over here.”
The voice was coming from behind. Verlaine looked back to find a hole open in another location, staring at him—at its target.
This skill could connect space. The skill user was most likely in another, safer location observing the battle by linking different points of space. He himself didn’t attack, and he would immediately close his hole if attacked, so destroying him or the hole with gravity wouldn’t be possible.
Just how many skill users were sent here to battle?
“Kee-hee-hee! Here’s a present from all of us at the Port Mafia, filled with love!”
Peach flower petals shot out of the coin-size hole before surrounding Verlaine. The petals then began glowing white, which was another skill—
The instant Verlaine swiftly tried to evade, the petals exploded in unison.

Dazai had a good view of the explosion even from his seat on the train car. The white light chopped down trees and burned an afterglow of itself in the night sky. Dazai watched with a faint smirk.
“How does it look, Dazai?”
A middle-aged man appeared from inside the train. It was the man dressed in the boss’s attire—Hirotsu, the body double.
“Things are going smoothly, as you can see. It’s almost boring.”
Dazai pointed ahead. Explosions roared in the distance, and trees collapsed to the ground. Flashes of light followed by low-frequency pops from the sniper rifles continued without end. After removing his wig, Hirotsu put his usual monocle back on and narrowed his eyes.
“I’m impressed.”
“There’s no way it wouldn’t go smoothly after all the time I bought us,” said Dazai while elegantly crossing his legs like royalty. “Chuuya and I almost didn’t make it against Randou, so I made sure to thoroughly prepare this time. Four hundred and twenty-two of the Mafia’s best fighters and twenty-eight skill users—I checked that everyone in the Port Mafia who was currently available would be here to kill the so-called king of assassins.”
Cold mist and explosions lit up the scenery in the distance. Verlaine slipped between the trees to escape, but yellowish-white rays of light scorched the night sky and blocked his path. A new skill user had appeared. It was an extremely simple strategy: set traps and wait. Chuuya and Adam had previously mapped out a similar plan to defeat Verlaine, and this plan that Dazai came up with was essentially the same. He predicted the assassin’s next target, set up a trap around said target, and waited for
Verlaine to arrive to attack from behind.
The sole difference between the two plans was the scale. Dazai had the entire Mafia lying in wait. The overwhelming number of combat units was the key component to the trap, and it tipped the odds completely in the Mafia’s favor.
“This battle is going to last all night,” Dazai whispered to Verlaine in the far distance. “Verlaine, you are the perfect assassin. Your skills are unparalleled. I’ll bet you’ve never been caught and surrounded even once. You would never make that mistake. That’s why you’ve never been cornered by an entire organization of skill users. Randou himself was deeply concerned about your dangerous perfectionist streak, too.”
Dazai had suddenly taken out Randou’s leather-bound notebook. It detailed Verlaine’s birth and the circumstances around him.
“I will mourn for you, Verlaine,” he began, placing a hand on the journal as if in prayer. “I won’t mourn your death, but your birth. I doubt anyone else will, after all. The only one who’s pained by your birth is you. That’s why you fight. And yet…I think you’re amazing. You resented having been born, you resented the power that you possessed, and you resented the world. And because of that, you tried to accept this meaningless life. That’s something truly incredible. I don’t have that kind of courage. I wish we could have talked more… But it’s already time to say good-bye.”
Dazai stood up, turned his back to the battle, and began to walk away. “Dazai, sir?” said Hirotsu.
“Call me when it’s over.”
Dazai’s voice listlessly dropped to the ground. He kept walking. And the very next moment, a black wave swallowed the battlefield.
Verlaine observed the outside world through his muddied consciousness. Blades, bullets, liquefied ground. Cold temperatures, flashes of light, waves of heat. Poison mist and a barrier of sound. Every kind of attack was destroying Verlaine from all directions.
The soil liquefied wherever he landed, crawling up his legs until he was forced to push it away with gravity. Every breath he took froze his throat shut. The flashes of light temporarily blinded him while the sound waves reduced his hearing to nothing. Whenever he stopped moving, a shower of sniper bullets rained down on him. Even when he turned objects into high speed projectiles by manipulating their gravity, the demon’s long blade cut them all down. Every single one of these attacks worked together like precise machinery under the command of a young man with devilish intellect: Dazai.
This was what it means to be human. This is what humans are capable of when pushed to their limit. This is what I tried to become a part of but couldn’t in the end.
Verlaine inwardly laughed.
Look at them flaunt their humanity. Very well. Then it looks like I’ll just have to show them, too—show them what it means to not be human. I’ll show them the color of darkness this hell is buried in my heart—this hatred that not even Rimbaud could comprehend.

Verlaine opened his mouth, and the hatred immediately began pouring out along with a verse.

“Your hate, your set torpors, your weaknesses, your spite, All the brutalities you suffered long ago,
You return to us, all without evil, O Night,
In an excess of blood that every month will flow.”

The wind stopped. The rustling of the trees ceased as if they were trying to escape something. An invisible wave rippled through the air.
Thoughts crossed Verlaine’s ever-condensing consciousness.
Nobody understood that I’m not human. Nobody understood that I wasn’t blessed by any god, that I wasn’t birthed by a person—I was born from nothingness.
Rimbaud himself didn’t understand this loneliness, even at the very end.
I hated him, but not because he didn’t understand. I hated him because he pretended like he did.
Black snow-like mist began to dance around Verlaine—but it wasn’t snow. It wasn’t even matter.
It was darkness bursting into nothingness. A tiny universe.
Allow me to show them the hatred of something not human, the emptiness of being born without God’s blessing. I will show them the hell that slumbers within my truest self, within my core—and within the depths of my soul.
Verlaine howled. His roar transformed into black surging waves that began to compress the forest into nothingness. Verlaine’s hat flew off his head and vanished into the trees.
Dazai yelled into his radio to escape, but even his voice was swallowed by the shock waves. The nightmare had already taken shape.

The trapper—the skill user who could connect different points in space by boring coin-size holes in them—heard Dazai’s voice through the radio, telling everyone to run. That was also the moment he realized, peeking through his hole, that Verlaine had suddenly been swallowed by darkness and vanished. “What’s going—?”
Those were his final words.
The gravitational waves expanded in the blink of an eye and seeped through the trapper’s portal, making their way into the Mafia’s hideout. The abrupt twisting of space pulled his body through the hole. There wasn’t so much as a second for him to grab onto anything. The trapper’s face slammed into the hole, and even then, the gravitational pull didn’t cease. His skin touching the portal was slowly pulled to the other side. The gravitational wave grew even stronger until his flesh, bones, and clothing were sucked away like water spiraling down a drain. Eventually, nothing was left.
The hole in space vanished the moment the skill user died, returning the hideout to silence.

Verlaine floated in the sky.
He hadn’t jumped. He wasn’t gliding like a bird. He was ignoring gravity and hovering in midair. Mysterious runelike symbols surfaced on his skin and began wriggling as if they were alive. Explosion after explosion filled the air. Once one burst, another took its place.
Black particles softly fell to the ground like powdery snow.
Verlaine cackled. His laughter was far from anything human. The sound was closer to thunder, metal being sawed, or trees being split in twain.
It was a beast—a malevolent one.
The evil being—Verlaine—raised its right hand and materialized a black sphere. The sphere floated, sucking in the air and gradually expanding.

Dazai’s expression grew stern the moment he witnessed the black anomaly that appeared in the woods in the distance.
“What is that?” Hirotsu asked fearfully by his side. “The Gate’s been opened.”
Dazai’s voice was hoarse as if he were having trouble breathing. The very next moment, something black shot out from the space where Verlaine was floating.
“Get down!” shouted Dazai.

It came at him like a cannonball before landing on the caboose, approximately four cars away from where he and Hirotsu were standing. The two of them clung to the train as it violently shook like there was an earthquake. By the time the train car stopped shaking, it was a completely different shape.
Half of it was demolished while the rest was bent up like a crumpled piece of paper. It almost looked as if a giant had sloppily ripped the train car into pieces. The hill behind the train had been completely gouged out in a straight line along with any soil, rocks, or trees in its path. The destruction was far greater than what a single skill should be capable of.
“What on earth…just happened…?” muttered Hirotsu.
“It’s the same,” observed Dazai, his expression tense. “It’s just like when he escaped the research facility by instantly creating a hole through the ceiling all the way to the surface. It’s also the same phenomenon that happened two days ago when Chuuya leveled an entire city block. Apparently, Verlaine said he was “opening a Gate,’ and that right there is what’s on the other side. Take a good look, Hirotsu… That power’s in a class of its own.”
Dazai watched as the black sphere in the forest rapidly started expanding once more. The wind began to howl—a harbinger of destruction.

“No… What is that…? What is that?!”
The gloomy young man, who controlled the pocket watch in the sky, could do nothing but clench his trembling jaw in fear at the destruction hanging over his head.
A monster was controlling the black spheres.
One had dropped to the surface only a moment earlier, and that alone killed three snipers. The skill user who could produce rays of light died as well. But it wasn’t just any death. Their bodies were pulled apart like clay simply because they got too close to the sphere. They screamed as their flesh, blood, and bones—everything—got sucked into the black orb. No part of them remained.
Glaring down at the surface like a god was Verlaine. His eyes were not human. There wasn’t a glimmer of thought within. They showed no signs of strategizing or calculating. This being was reflexively destroying anything vaguely hostile in its environs—nothing more.
Two more black spheres emerged—one on each side of Verlaine about as wide as an adult human was tall. They were surrounded by faint aureoles glowing red.
The gloomy young man instantly knew that touching one of those meant death. No—simply being near one meant death.
“No… Why…? Why?!”
When he immediately turned around to run away, he saw a woman standing right in front of him.
It was the skill user with white hair and a white shawl who could freeze anything. She was idly staring up at the calamity in the sky, not alarmed in the slightest. She expressed neither fear nor animosity. All she could do was follow orders; the only time she felt something was when she was given orders.
A black sphere of destruction slowly descended upon her, but she didn’t run. She simply gazed at it as if she were admiring its beauty.
“Karen!”
His body was moving on its own before he could even process what was happening. The young man pushed the skill user named Karen away with his slender, frail arms, and the very next moment, his upper body was torn off at the waist by the gravity.
The black sphere quickly devoured his lower body while he was pulled upside down into the sky. He followed Karen with his eyes as she rolled off the cliffside he had pushed her over. She was out of the sphere’s range of destruction now.
Thank goodness, he thought with a smile, but even that smile was sucked into the sphere and disappeared only a second later. Nothing of the man remained.

Dazai was receiving rapid updates on the battle via radio:
Squad Three, annihilated. Squad Five, no survivors. Squad Eight, unresponsive.
He listened to the reports with his eyes closed, then stood, listening carefully as if it were music. His face was blank, emotionless.
“Dazai, sir. It’s time to leave.” Hirotsu waved Dazai over, urging him to run.
“It’s no use. There’s no escaping that power,” Dazai said languidly with his eyes still closed. “Verlaine was strong but not invincible. As extraordinary as his skill was, he could only manipulate the gravity of whatever he touched. That’s why we were able to overwhelm him with nonphysical skills like frost, light, sound, and time. But that Verlaine is different. Those black hole projectiles can crush people into dust even from a distance. They’re spheres of gravity that have condensed space to its absolute limit, and as long as gravitational waves can affect space itself, then no shield or wall can protect us from them. That right there is this world’s ultimate spear.”
He sounded as if he were singing an old nursery rhyme. Then he raised his hands in the air, perhaps so he could feel the presence of destruction with his entire body, even if only a little.
“Plus, he removed the persona directive restraining the skill and surrendered ownership over his body. That Verlaine no longer has the will of a human. This creature can’t be threatened or even reasoned with anymore; psychological warfare won’t work. It’s a demonic beast, pure and simple—and undoubtedly the strongest enemy the Mafia has ever faced.”
“Unbelievable…”
Hirotsu gulped audibly as he watched. He witnessed hills being hollowed out, trees being engulfed, and the terrain transformed. Screams of Mafia soldiers followed.
“And…” Dazai projected his voice as if he were reciting the final stanza of an ode to destruction.
“…everything is still going according to plan. We will stand victorious if our next attack succeeds.”