Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 8 Chapter 4 Part 9

“Who gives a shit about the mission?!” Chuuya yelled while being pulled with immense power. “What happened to your dream?! I thought you were gonna make an all-android detective agency!”
Two seconds went by before Adam answered.
“My dream is to protect humans.”
His voice was clear and kind like a parent protecting their child.
“And that dream is about to come true.”
Chuuya’s body was abruptly pulled out of the dark space.
He instantly passed through the powerful gravitational field at the edge of the space, then slammed into the earth. He broke his fall, skidding across the ground and getting covered in dirt.
“I get to protect you. I couldn’t ask for more.”
Adam’s contented voice came through the receiver before turning to static.
And then it was gone. “Wait!”

A giant sphere of heat.

The crimson photosphere looked like it could touch the heavens. A flaming membrane enveloped the beast, followed by a shell of heat that covered its feet to its head like a giant bubble, which then imploded.
Everything in its path melted. Trees caught fire before almost immediately carbonizing and eventually turning into nothing more than white smoke. Even the ground underfoot boiled into flowing sludge that evaporated.
Although the inside of the fiery shell was hell itself, the outside was astonishingly quiet. The trees just beyond the shell calmly rustled in the wind; nothing but brilliant light escaped the shell’s interior.
The sphere of fire condensed and began incinerating the beast. It howled in agony, but even the air it breathed was pyrolyzed. Not a single sound leaked into the outside world.
This singularity weapon—known as Annihilation—was created by a skill user engineer in Great Britain and incinerated only whatever was inside the blast radius. Based on one skill user’s ability to traverse time,

Annihilation could produce a singularity. It was one of the Three Calamities produced during the war and was known for its unparalleled thermal output with a maximum radius of a few dozen miles. Naturally, it was banned from official use.
Chuuya sat down on the ground with a thud and simply watched the event play out before his eyes.
The time-proof cable that had carried him outside was incinerated in the heat. It was originally going to be used to trigger the weapon remotely. The Shell, which used the quantum uncertainty of time and heat, triggered a fluctuation in its surroundings’ time, hence why the time-proof cable was needed. But not even the cable could withstand the bomb’s overpowering heat. Its external coating melted as the inner sealing came undone, dispersing the particles and deactivating the cable before quickly vanishing.
All that was left in front of Chuuya was Adam’s arm and the seared end of the cable. He took a quiet breath.
At last, it was over. The celestial sphere, having fulfilled its role, turned into smoke and disappeared. What remained was a perfect circle carved into the melting earth, the untouched trees outside its range of annihilation, and Demonic Beast Guivre’s burned-off black tail.
Nothing else remained—not even a mere fragment of Adam. “Oh. Huh. Didn’t expect to see you alive, Chuuya.”
He looked back in the direction of the malicious voice to find Dazai walking over from within the trees. Dazai threw something, but Chuuya caught it before it hit him.
Verlaine’s black hat. It had flown off and disappeared right after Verlaine opened his Gate.
“Dazai.” Chuuya turned his quiet, piercing gaze on him. “I don’t feel like arguing with you right now.”
“They found N’s body,” Dazai told him, utterly disinterested in what Chuuya had to say. “The monster crushed him to death…which means the last person who knew whether you’re human is gone. Does that bother you?”
“I dunno. I…” Chuuya stared at ground zero. But before he finished his sentence, he looked back at Dazai as if he had realized something. “Hold up. I know how you work. You found a way to see whether I’m human even without N, didn’t you?”
“You know me too well.” Dazai smirked shamelessly. “We captured a few of N’s subordinates at the research facility. They may not know the truth themselves, but they at least know how to read the command sequence inside you. I only received a brief lecture, but well, I’m sure we can figure it out after I take a look inside you and analyze you for a few days.”
“I’m not gonna let a creep like you look inside me.”
“What? Oh, come on. Let me have a peek. It sounds fun. I promise I won’t show anyone else!” Dazai’s dark smile obscured his true intentions. “They also told me how to determine if you’re human. If you are, then there should be records of your life before you got taken in for research— basically, logs of the memories of your childhood with your parents that got erased. That’s how we’ll check. Sound good?”
“First of all, just imagining you being the only one who knows what’s inside my head makes me wanna puke! If anything—”
He wasn’t able to finish his sentence. The earth violently shook, then faintly trembled as if in fear.
But before Chuuya could even brace himself for what was coming, something else occurred. His head started pounding as if a bomb had gone off inside.
“Gwah?!”
Chuuya placed a hand on his head. He wasn’t injured. This headache was not caused by a physical wound.
Something was flowing into his head. Something invisible. “Hate,” someone said.
It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t even a word. It was a more primitive, sinister emotion.
“Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. It’s all so despicable.”
His headache swelled with each wave of this emotion until it was racing through his skull.
“What’s wrong, Chuuya?”
When he looked at Dazai, he realized he was the only one who could hear the voice.
It was his voice. He wasn’t dead.
The ground suddenly sloped. Chuuya and Dazai grabbed onto the ground and caught themselves from slipping. They looked around, yet the earth didn’t seem to be moving or damaged in any way. But the trees were leaning to one side and pebbles were rolling—all toward a single point.
The black tail began to bubble. Particles of darkness emerged. They heard what sounded like mud boiling as gravitons scattered about, contracting like a heartbeat, then squirming and changing shape.
Chuuya noticed that the ground wasn’t slanting—the black tail was producing a gravitational force that was pulling them in. It was merging with the earth’s own gravity to the point that it felt as if the ground was tilting downward.
“This can’t be happening.”
Adam incinerated the beast using a weapon powerful enough to alter the course of modern warfare. Or so it seemed.
And yet the tail was wriggling into a black cluster and trying to take some sort of form.
“So that’s what’s going on,” said Dazai with a stern expression while glaring at the darkness.
A fissure opened within the earth. Something was peeking out from within the lump of darkness. It resembled the face of a reptile.
“Watch out!” Chuuya yelled.
Manipulating gravity, he leaped sideways, grabbed Dazai, and rolled into the woods on the other side.
Darkness gushed through where they just were. A black torrent was radiating from something. It did not appear to be an attack, but rather as if a void had suddenly appeared within the earth.
The ground was instantly split in two. In a flash, black light passed through the soil and hit a group of buildings in the distance. A few city lights wildly flickered before eventually cutting out.
“…!”
Chuuya and Dazai were rendered speechless. Fortunately, the buildings were far from the urban area of the city, but if something like that were to hit the heart of Yokohama, millions would die in a heartbeat.
“Was that…graviton radiation?” Dazai’s face was tense. “How is that possible? Its range is even longer than before.”
A monster was emerging.
Its shoulders materialized, followed by its chest. Its head was shaped similarly to the beast Guivre, but its two glowing red eyes were positioned almost exactly like a human’s. Its arms were thick, its torso robust. The beast gradually emerged from the cluster of darkness, pulsating as its body kept on growing.
“Don’t look at it, Chuuya,” whispered Dazai. “It reacts to emotion. Do not even think about it. Look at something else.”
Chuuya slowly turned his gaze toward the ground, but the beast’s ever- growing body was gradually obscuring the moonlight. It blocked out a portion of the light until eventually it engulfed everything within view.
“You won’t be able to burn that thing with fire,” Dazai said, still looking at the ground. “No matter how powerful a skill weapon you use. That thing that looks like a giant monster—it isn’t even made out of physical matter. Limitless energy stored in the singularity is simply condensing in a single location. That beast doesn’t have any organs or vulnerabilities. It will continue moving until the singularity’s infinite energy is exhausted.”
“And how long is that gonna be?”
“Maybe a week? Maybe a year?” Dazai looked at Chuuya with a tense smile. “Maybe it’ll continue moving forever until the end of the world. Its energy is limitless, after all.”
The beast began to move, shaking their entire bodies with a single step.
Chuuya and Dazai looked up. This monstrosity was even larger than it was a moment ago. It surpassed anything a living creature was remotely capable of.
Its mouth was large enough to swallow a house whole. Its eyes glowed, and its shoulders swelled. The massive dinosaur-like body was emitting energized bolts of lightning simply due to the waves of energy produced with each step. The earth sank underfoot as the monster’s claws hollowed the ground and knocked down countless trees.
This bizarre creature that defied human imagination was Demonic Beast Guivre’s true form.
“It might’ve absorbed the singularity energy from that fiery sphere a moment ago,” Dazai muttered in blank amazement. “The researchers in Europe probably never experimented using two skill weapons against each other—and for good reason, obviously.”
Chuuya turned his gaze in the direction the monster was heading. “Damn it. It’s heading toward the city.”
“It won’t be long before people in the city see it. And once that happens, it’s going to react to their gazes and destroy everything in sight until there isn’t anyone left to look at it.”
Chuuya suddenly grabbed Dazai. “Then what’re you doing just standing there?! If Yokohama’s destroyed, there’ll be no more Port Mafia!”
“What do you want to do, then? Grow big, too, and have a fistfight with it?” Dazai’s icy gaze met Chuuya’s. “It’s hopeless. Isn’t it obvious just looking at that thing? A singularity’s like a loophole in the rules. That monster is a manifestation of something that shouldn’t exist in this world. Humans don’t stand a chance against it. There’s nothing we can do.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Chuuya said, sternly holding Dazai’s gaze for several seconds. He then let go of Dazai and stated firmly:
“There is something we can do about it. I’m sure of it.”
Dazai listlessly dropped to the ground in a seated position. “Ha-ha-ha.
This is getting interesting. And what are you basing that on?” “Verlaine—I saw a memory when I was inside him.”
“A memory?”
“It was when he broke me out of the facility and was escaping. He argued about me with Rimbaud, and then they battled. He must’ve fought Arahabaki soon after, and he survived.”
Dazai’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Now I see what you’re getting at.” “Yeah, there’s a way to defeat singularity life-forms. That’s why he was
showing me that memory.”
“Let’s hear the details,” Dazai said with a smirk.