Bungo Stray Dogs : Stormbringer

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The forest at night hides a certain wickedness.

There hasn't been a time in any country during any era where the forest at night wasn't evil.

However, how that evil took shape varied. It could appear as the darkness swallowing up your feet, or it could appear as a labyrinth that made you lose sight of how to get home. Sometimes, it could be a starving beast that bore it's drool covered fangs.

At that time, the evil of the forest was "light".

A light with an orange hue. An ominously glowing light that twisted and turned, dancing to music only it could hear.

Light.

A hole in the night that could do nothing but keep all living creatures frozen in fear.

That light was a forest fire.

The trees burned with a dry scream. Unlike humans, the flames didn't have preferences. They consumed any and everything without complaint, and the fatter they got, the more evil flowed out.

Come morning, the forest would be just a boring collection of black charcoal. That was how a forest died. It would come back to life, but only after a hundred years.

The criminal that fatally pierced that forest laid in the center of the flames.

It was the debris of a passenger plane.

The engine's rotary wings were still spinning, implying it had just crashed. The two wings had broken from the fuselage, vertically piercing the ground. It was almost like a gravestone.

The villagers of the surrounding area had gathered in an attempt to put out the fire and save lives. But soon, the villagers' faces were filled with despair. In a crash like this, there was no way there were survivors.

The separated fuselage was scorching hot, and the metal seemed to scream with a high-pitched sound. It seemed like the flames had reached the inside of the aircraft. If, hypothetically, you were to walk into the aircraft, your shoes would probably melt to the floor.

With feelings of hopelessness, the villagers began to check the wreckage.

A boy approached a piece of the debris.

He had come from one of the nearby villages.

He held a hatchet meant for felling. To help stop the spread of the fire, the boy thought to bring it to cut down any trees. Though really, he was just imitating the adults. His tiny, little axe didn't look like it could cut down even his grandfather's bonsai tree.

But even so, the boy approached the debris. There might be survivors. If he saved somebody, then the adults would give him lots of praise. The boy imagined himself as a young hero, and his heart began to throb.

That ambition proved fatal.

One of the iron doors that had barely been hanging onto the debris came off with a clunking sound and fell towards the boy.

There was no one close enough to save him.

The iron door was sturdy and heavy, meant to withstand atmospheric pressures at high altitudes. Someone let out a scream.

The iron door mashed the boy's head like a snack—

Well, not quite.

A hand grabbed the iron door and stopped it.

It wasn't any of the villagers hands. The hand came from inside the passenger plane's iron door as something stepped out.

"Have I finally arrived?"

Said the hand's owner in a calm voice.

What appeared from the passenger plane was a tall man wearing a blue suit. He was European, but his exact age was unclear—probably in his twenties to thirties. His eyes were cold despite the flames, and even though the destruction of the passenger plane left quite a scene, he didn't have a single wound on his body.

"The landing was a bit rough, but everything is important to experience—Now, are you alright?" The young man in the blue suit turned towards the boy under the iron door. "Don't worry about paying me back. It's my duty to save and protect human lives. But still, I'm injured in such a place... This door is like a standard—once fallen, it never returns."

"Huh... eh...?"

The boy's eyes held both guilt and innocence.

Meanwhile, the young man in the blue suit jumped to the ground, getting a good look at his surroundings.

"What? This wasn't in the external storage's database. Is Japan's airport really so densely populated with trees and shrubs? Even if this is a country where 67% of its territory is forests, isn't this an illogical place to build an airport? If you don't even have a road, you'll have to walk to your destination. Honestly, I have no clue what humans are thinking."

The young man shook his head with a somber face

"Uh... um, you..."

The boy asked in a timid voice.

"You... um, who in the world are you?"

 "Oh, my bad. In human society, it's bad manners to neglect to introduce oneself." As the young man said that, he took a black badge from his suit pocket.

The boy couldn't read the silver string of letters drawn in the center of it.

"This machine is a detective for Europole, and is used for business purposes. Model number 98F7819-5. I'm the first humanoid, autonomous high-speed computer in the world's police agencies, manufactured by the gifted engineer Dr. Wollstonecraft. Codename Adam. Adam Frankenstein. It was nice meeting you. I have a mission to attend to, so I'll be taking my leave."

The young man bowed and started to leave, but said, "Oh, that's right," and turned his head back around to the villagers.

"You wouldn't happen to know anyone named Nakahara Chuuya, would you?"