Bungo Stray Dogs : Stormbringer

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My name is Adam Frankenstein. I'm a super-calculator that can sing and dance for the Europole authorities.

Really. There is nothing I can't do.

The weather was very nice that day.

The sunlight pierced through the clear blue sky and showered the ground. It's rays reflected glittering light against the windows of buildings, similar to a showcase at a jewelry shop. That light was like a program, both inorganic and systematic. I felt it was beauty made for a machine like me more so than humans.

I was walking down a main street with a paper bag held against my chest.

Inside were chocolates, hard candies, and various types of gummy bears. All of them were for my future partner—Chuuya-san.

Just as charging was a necessity for a machine like me to function, consuming sugar was necessary for humans to perform their daily activities. And more than anything, the consumption of sugar increased their overall feelings of happiness. Worrying about the happiness of my partner—I really am a fantastic investigator. Much better than a human would be.

I continued walking towards my destination, receiving strange looks from the residents of this foreign country as I passed.

On the way there, when I passed by a stall on the street corner, a fantastic idea flashed in my mind. If you want to get sugar, or rather glucose, into your brain efficiently, you should put powdered sugar directly into your mouth. That's the most efficient way. So I bought a plastic bag of powdered sugar at the corner stand.

At about the same time, the customer next to me was buying an item I had never seen before.

"What is this?" I asked the clerk.

"What, you don't know? It's gum."

My education module was fully equipped with knowledge relating to investigating, but it still lacked such knowledge outside of that expertise. To compensate for my lack of knowledge, I immediately bought the item.

I walked along a stone-paved alleyway, passing through a residential district lined with European style brick buildings. A fresh breeze was blowing. The outer layer of my skin that was damaged by yesterday's flames had been restored and now functioned properly. My damaged parts had also been replaced with new ones. In other words, I'm good as new and feeling revitalized. I'm sure that if I were a human, I would be humming a song right now.

While walking, I tossed a piece of the gum I had bought earlier in my mouth. Almost immediately, I noticed that my XP gauge drastically increased.

It was amazing, this unknown flavor.

I chewed on the gum for several seconds before swallowing it with a gulp.

One more piece. There were eight sheet-like pieces of the gum stored back to back in their container. Eaten like this, there soon wouldn't be any left. The one fault to this thing called gum was that each product was packaged with a low quantity.

After swallowing and reaching for a third piece, I arrived at the place I was supposed to meet with Chuuya-san.

I opened the building's door and loudly called out a greeting.

"Good afternoon!"

I was in a church.

There were over a hundred attendees sitting on either side of the chapel. Everyone was dressed in black and silently hanging their heads. There was a boys choir clad in red robes, their voices high and gentle as they mourned for the dead. The ceiling of the church was so high, the wavelengths of the boys' singing voices reflected against one another, causing a resonating sound you could hear throughout the entire church. Perhaps due to that the atmosphere in the church became otherworldly, like it was a place between heaven and the earth.