Bungo Stray dogs : Dazai's Entrance Exam - Light Novel 1

Chapter 1

The seventh.
It rained this morning.
It was a quiet and cold winter's rain, with such an intense cold as is typical of the season.
I pray that I shall live ideally.
I must play the part of one who follows ideals. I must walk forward without fear and without hesitation.
I pursue the honorable future I dream of, for what great satisfaction I receive from my devotion to my daily duties!

If you were to climb up a certain hilly street near the Yokohama harbor and continue just beyond it, you would find the office of the Armed Detective Agency.
It is a building with reddish-brown brickwork. The building has had quite a few years under its belt, and so the strong, salt wind off the ocean has entirely coated the drain spouts and telephone poles with rust. Despite its exterior appearance, it has been constructed quite sturdily; an enemy with a machine gun could while away at the outside without the interior receiving so much as a scratch.
I can say this with a good degree of confidence, because in our past experiences, the enemy with the machine gun has been, by no means, metaphorical.
However, the Agency actually operates out of the fourth floor anyway; the other floors house other, quite respectable tenants. The first floor is home to a café, the second to a law office. The third floor is currently vacant, while the fifth floor holds miscellaneous storage space. We often find ourselves in the café's debt before payday, and when on the occasion that our work causes trouble, we go apologize to the fellows at the law office.
At the time this story begins, I was riding the elevator on my way into work.
I stepped out to stand in front of the door as the elevator descended. A sign hung on the door which proclaimed in a plain font "The Armed Detective Agency".
I checked my watch. I was expected to arrive at work at 8 am, meaning that I had 40 seconds to delay somehow.
Seems that I had run a bit early, hey?
It is my creed to be a strict adherer to scheduled timeliness. While I waited my 40 seconds, I flipped through my notebook and double-checked the day's schedule. I had already checked it once at breakfast, once when leaving the dormitory, and once while waiting for a traffic light, but I have never heard of anyone dying from checking their schedule too much.
I had already committed my work schedule to memory, so I turned it over in my mind as I read. Straightening my collar, I checked my watch once more.
... All right.
"Good morning," I said as I opened the door.
"Oh, morning, Kunikida! Take a look at this! It's bonkers!" There was Osamu Dazai, popping up right in front of the door, grinning. "I've finally arrived! Ah, and what a wonderful world this is! For this, this, is the world of the dead, the gate to hell itself! It's just as I imagined it! Look at it! Misty haze crawling over the ground, moonlight smashing itself against the windows, pink elephants whirling and dancing in the western sky!"
Dazai pranced up and down in front of the door, waving his arms about in exaggerated gestures. What a nuisance.
"Heh heh heh heh, what a marvelous work of literature! The Complete Guide to Suicide! Why, to think I could achieve this pleasure, this delightful setting off down the road to death by merely eating some mushrooms growing off some little, backwoods mountain path! Marvelous! Heh heh heh!"
His eyes refused to focus. His black pupils trembled in little spasms.
One of the clerks beseeched me, teary-eyed, "Please do something, Mr. Kunikida!"
It seemed he had been in this state for a while now.
I glanced over at Dazai's desk.
There lay that blasphemous book he bought the other day, The Complete Guide to Suicide, opened to a page entitled "Death by Poisoning – Mushrooms". Next to the book lay a slice of mushroom on a plate which had been bitten.
However, when I peered closely at it, it appeared a slightly different color than the mushroom shown in the book illustration.
"Hey, hey, Kunikida, you should come with me to hell too! Look, endless wine, endless food, and endless perfume of beautiful women!"
"Please help us, Mr. Kunikida, we've done everything we can already..."
In short, it seemed the mushrooms Dazai consumed were less of the "death cap" variety and more of the "madcap" variety.
Every morning when I arrived at work, I always attended to my predetermined business in a predetermined order. If a single day did not proceed the way I had planned right from the very beginning, do you suppose I could then follow the plan on subsequent business? The answer is a decisive no.
Ignoring the wiggling and weaving Dazai and the pleading and sobbing clerk, I went to my own desk.
I placed my bag on my desk just as I always did. I turned my computer on. I opened the window just as I always did.
"Whoa! There's a huge sea anemone out there, Kunikida! It's! It's eating a banana! And ever so considerately setting aside the nearby, white party-blower!"
I poured myself a cup of coffee just as I always did. I disposed of a few unnecessary papers from yesterday's work.
"Oh, I've got it- we've all gone naked; we're all naked, and we're paid because our approval ratings are so high! But it can't be as simple as that, no, for us all to be naked, so instead we've all gone kitted out in full body tights! Everyone has gone off in tights to the bank and danced the hopak!"
I checked my messages just as I always did. I took a sip of my coffee.
"I hear a voice... ooh, it's, it's in my head! ... Why, it's a little old pops! He's whispering to me, he's saying, 'Go to Tokyo; in Tokyo they make food with miso which tastes different, and you need to try i-"
I kicked the frolicking, skipping about Dazai in the back of the head and sent him flying. Dazai hit the wall and passed out.

Let us start at the beginning.
If someone were to give this man an exam to test his ability to be a human being, he would, without a doubt, score zero points and be disqualified – and he had been my coworker for only four days at this point.
"We have a new hire?"
One day, when I was summarizing documents, I was called to the president's office.
There, I was asked to look after a new detective he had hired.
That was rather unexpected.
Although we did earn our livings as armed detectives in a world of violence and battles, I had not heard word of our present number of detectives being insufficient. Come to think of it, at the time I myself had a side job two days a week, teaching algebra at a school called the New Tsuruya Academy.
Of course, recently, what with the azure flag terrorist incident, the repeated disappearances of Yokohama tourists, and conflicts with a criminal organization called the Port Mafia, the number of cases requiring an armed detective had only risen. It was also true that the number of violent cases that our main detective Ranpo could not cover had grown as well. So perhaps our president's decision to accept a new person was due to him noticing this issue.
The president contemplated for a moment and then said, "Let us have him introduce himself. Enter." He called the last to the office door.
A young man, his whole face lit up with a grin, came in. "Thanks for having me."
He wore a sandy colored coat over a Western style open-necked shirt. He was rather tall and quite skinny, with unkempt black hair and an air about him like he cared little for keeping his personal appearance in good order, but nevertheless, his features were somehow graceful. The bandages wrapped around his neck and wrists slightly drew my attention.
"My name is Osamu Dazai. I'm twenty years old. It's a pleasure to meet you."
Twenty. The same age as me.
"I am Kunikida. If something comes up that you need help with, be sure to ask me."
"Oh! Are you the amazing investigator of the Agency that everyone talks about? You're such an inspiration!" the man who called himself Osamu Dazai cried, grabbing my hand for a handshake against my will and pumping it exaggeratedly.
At that very moment, I suddenly noticed a chilling, piercing light in this man's eyes that vanished as quickly as it appeared.
It was like he was calmly appraising his new coworker. No, he stared at me like he could see right through me to my very personality and mindset, as if he were a heavenly sage-
But in the blink of an eye, the sage's stare vanished, and Dazai's face returned to its usual blankness.
Perhaps my eyes deceived me, or perhaps it was a trick of the light.
I rallied myself and asked, "Very well then, Dazai, how did you come to be a detective here? This is hardly the sort of place where anyone may walk in and start."
"So I've heard. Back when I was unemployed and grumbling into my cups at a bar, I just so happened to find a kindred spirit in the man sitting next to me. He challenged me to a drinking contest with the promise that he would help me find a job if I were to win. Well, he meant it as a joke, for he would have helped me had I won or lost, but I won in the end, at any rate."
Who could that have been?
The president said with a serious expression, "That man was Mr. Taneda of the Special Abilities Department. He visited me yesterday and introduced us."
It took my breath away to hear Mr. Taneda's name dropped so casually as that.
Taneda of the interior ministry's Special Abilities Department was hardly someone the average citizen had ever even heard of, for he was the director of a kind of secret service. The department's business was to control ability users and regulate news about them. I had heard that Taneda was instrumental to the President forming the Armed Detective Agency as well.
Even the President could hardly refuse a referral from Mr. Taneda.
"I look forward to working with you, sir," Dazai said.
Whether or not he was aware of the disquiet nested inside of me, our new coworker showed off his white teeth to us as he smiled.
But at any rate, whether or not a great government authority thought him a man of character, his mushroom eating and subsequent jaunt to another world were really an enormous nuisance to me.
This was the third day of being paired with Dazai.
I knew no peace for even an hour, nor could I focus whole-heartedly on work, and the number of complaints pouring in on the phone continued to climb higher.
Whenever I took my eyes off of him, he would say he was going to drown himself and then fling himself into a river, or say to be careful and then go off to drink at a bar, or say he received a divine revelation and run off to flirt with a pretty girl. Quite fittingly for a twenty year-old man-child, he only did what suited himself and smashed my schedule to bits.
Well, despite all that, a work assignment was a work assignment, and he was my subordinate, after all. The President had tasked me to look after him, so to give up after a pitiful three days would fly in the face of the President's trust in us and our pride as Agency members.
"How is our newest employee?"
Presently, we were in a chess parlor near the Agency. It was a small, single room floored with tatami matting, in which both the President and I sat together playing a game of chess.
"He is an utter disaster," I said. "He's like if devils, ghosts, and other creatures of ill-fortune all amalgamated into a single person."
I moved my rook forward on the cypress-wood chess board. The piece tapped against the wood grain with an echoing sound.
"But, well, I will manage at any rate."
After our duties were completed, the President and I always went to the chess parlor and played a few matches. The room itself was traditionally styled and empty apart from myself and the President sitting on our feet in front of the board.
"I apologize," he said, and moved his knight. It was a fine move which took my bishop.
"Not at all. There is also the issue with Mr. Taneda. ... Why did he send a person like that here?"
Even as I spoke, I searched for my next move. I aimed for the right side of the board so as to capture his queen- no, the most I could do would be to place him in check in two moves. Even if I held out on the other side of the board, he could come down the middle, and that would be the end of me. There were no more efficient moves for me. It seemed like there was only a bit more time before our evenly matched game turned into checkmate.
"Mr. Taneda has a rather extravagant personality, but he has quite a talent for discerning capable people, which is enough for me. I do not know if, perhaps, he discerned this young man's extraordinary talent or not."
Certainly, I had heard talk of Mr. Taneda's judgment proving truly exceptional. Without that, such a weighty task as commanding a secret service of the interior ministry would be quite impossible, after all.
But, nevertheless- "extraordinary talent"? Him, the man who didn't seem to have anything between his two ears but mud?
"I am of the same opinion as Mr. Taneda. Dazai passed both the written and the practical pre-exam with full marks. He is of superb quality- indeed, to a dangerous degree."
"Dangerous, you say...?"
"I had one of the office staff look into Dazai's personal history. However, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I turned to a friend of mine in the military police's intelligence division, but nothing turned up to the point that it is ominous. It is as if someone has carefully erased his entire past."
How strange indeed that even the intelligence division of the military police were unable to turn up a thing in regards to his past.
"Perhaps there is truly nothing there, and he's done nothing of note thus far in his life."
"Perhaps. Or if perhaps not-" The president furrowed his brow more than in his usual expression as he continued, "Have you heard of Dazai's ability?"
"No, not yet."
Now that he mentioned it, I was aware at the time that Dazai was an ability user, but I still had not heard what powers he possessed.
"Dazai's ability has the power to cancel any ability he touches."
I couldn't believe my ears.
The power to cancel other abilities. At first thought, it seemed a simple, hardly flashy ability, but among abilities, his was especially unorthodox, for this single ability used on its own could thwart the entire system of abilities.
My ability, Doppo Poet, gave me the power to manifest objects into reality by writing them in my notebook, tearing out the page, and focusing intently on it. However, I could not manifest any objects larger than the notebook itself. Much could be said for its versatility and high degree of excellence, but it still did not surpass the stage of being "merely helpful". I had been told that it is best to have one's essentials on one's person from the start, so I used it only in conjunction with that.
But Dazai's ability was different.
Theoretically speaking, without Dazai, there very well might have been innumerable enemies we would have been unable to defeat. But even the strongest ability user in the world would become no more than an ordinary person before Dazai.
It would have been no surprise if ability user organizations the world over sought after him.
"So... is this what you are saying? The esteemed Mr. Taneda sits down for a drink and just so happens to sit next to an ability user with rare talent and just so happens to form a rapport with him. And this man, with the brains needed to score perfect marks on his written exam even while performing odd words and actions, just so happens to be unemployed and joins the Armed Detective Agency, a company that one simply cannot join without outside assistance, entirely without a hitch. So you're saying this is too good to be true?"
"I don't know if perhaps we are overthinking the matter. But the Armed Detective Agency has many connections within the government and military police. Due to the nature of our work, we must deal with a large amount of information pertaining to secrets of the state."
Certainly, for a member of a criminal organization, the Agency's cooperation with the police made the ratio of ease of entrance to the number of benefits attractive enough for many previous infiltrations.
But suppose that Dazai was indeed a secret agent that infiltrated the Agency?
Was he really enough of a talented person that he managed to hoodwink Mr. Taneda?
The Dazai?
"Kunikida. I want to entrust his entrance exam to you."
I nodded. The entrance exam the president spoke of was assigned to every generation of detective- what was unsaid was that there was more to the exam than met the eye. A detective wasn't considered to be a true member of the agency until they completed the exam.
"I will have you accompany Dazai to his jobs to determine the authenticity of his nature. The moment you have a suspicion that he is some sort of spy or secret agent, he can be fired without any hesitation. And if, perhaps, the moment arrives where you find a sign of him having an otherwise wicked, evil nature-"
The president produced a black automatic pistol from a bag lying behind him and handed it to me.
"..."
I took the pistol wordlessly.
It was heavy.
"You will shoot."
"Yes."
If Dazai were involved in some sort of nefarious plot, it would have been the Agency's duty to stop him in his tracks.
A person who carried the detective license of the Armed Detective Agency was granted police-like authority. They were in this condition allowed to carry a handgun or portable blade. They could also extract information from the police. More than anything else, through their investigative authority, it was possible, if one were so inclined, to disrupt the criminal investigations of the authorities, falsify police information, wiretap and secretly photograph important facilities, and every other sort of wrongdoing. In the worst case, it would not have been impossible for a terrorist to perform subversive activities in said important facilities, stealing the lives of hundreds or thousands of people.
The black steel pistol lay in my hands, silent and unfeeling.

The moonlight washed over the rippling bay.
I walked through the traffic from which one could overlook Yokohama Harbor. The evening hubbub rivaled the sound of the waves while the town's lights rivaled the moonlight itself.
Dazai followed me, bobbing along behind me.
He had wasted half the day with his mushroom scandal and seemingly only recovered his ability to attend to his duties now.
"Kunikida, you know your ability that you used before- Doppo Poet? Show me it again."
"I shall not. I do not reveal my ability carelessly. Moreover, it consumes a full page of my notebook each time I use it. The artisan who produces these notebooks creates no more than one hundred of these products within a year at an exceptional price. I suppose you would use it for some cheap gag or the like, no?"
I checked my wristwatch and looked back over my shoulder.
"Never mind that now. Dazai, pick up your pace a little. We will be late to our agreed upon time at this rate."
"All this talk of time, Kunikida, but as far as I can recall, we never agreed upon a particular time to meet our informant, correct?"
"No, we spoke over the phone and said approximately 19:00."
"And it's now 19:00 exactly. The place is only a five minutes' walk from here, so we won't be late."
"You absolute buffoon! When I say 'approximately 19:00', I mean the twenty second interval from 18:59:50 to 19:00:10 by my own watch!"
"You're the one carrying the watch, Kunikida, not me..." Dazai grumbled as he walked.
Speaking of my watch, every morning as I woke up, I used a special device to synchronize my watch with the standard time so that any measurement error would be less than a second off.
"Thanks to someone eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, an entire day's work went to waste. Don't you try that a second time. If you do eat mushrooms again, make sure you actually get the deadly poisonous ones."
"Why, but I had such fun for a good while there."
"Aren't you better now? Are you still seeing your pink elephants in the sky?"
"Elephants? Don't be ridiculous; elephants can't fly. The flying ones are the purple elephant shrews."
Perhaps he was no better after all.
Whenever I talked with him, I gained the suspicion that he was an utter idiot.
This man, a secret agent? Evil?
The most evil act he seemed capable of committing was jumping onto the train tracks and disrupting the train schedule.
But be that as it may, if Dazai was the average bozo, then the decision would have been simple- his dismissal would have been the best choice. Or rather, I certainly hoped and dreamed for that.
"Dazai, you remember the matter of the case we are on our way to, correct?"
"It's a purple elephant shrew extermination."
"... I've been considering this for a while now, but are you doing this on purpose?"
Dazai responded promptly with a laugh. "Ah ha ha. You mean this case? The haunted house investigation."
I scowled at him.
The day before, I had received an email addressed to me detailing a job. It read as follows:

Dear Sirs and Madams,
I hope this message finds everyone at the Armed Detective Agency in good health.
I have a most earnest plea for you good folks, and although you must surely be otherwise occupied, please heed my plea.
To be frank, there is a building in which a bizarre happenstance occurs night after night, so I request the services of a detective of yours.
The building is supposed to be unoccupied, but every night, ghastly groans and whispering voices can be heard coming from it; furthermore, a faint light can be seen flickering in its windows. I request your services to set my own heart and the hearts of the others living in the vicinity at ease.
It is such a very basic request, but please discover if this is a prank or not, and if it is a prank, please determine the reasons and methods for it. I would be most pleased to learn the truth of this matter.
It is only a very little, but I have had the fee sent to you. I should like a receipt for it.
Furthermore, I would like you to keep the details of this request a secret; although it is really a very selfish thing to ask, I do request it of you good people.
Thank you very much for your time. Please have a wonderful day.

Really, what a roundabout, verbose message, but the gist of it seemed to be "Please investigate the strange noises coming from a nearby building."
Right after I received the message, the fee arrived at the Agency by mail. When we opened it and inspected it, we found they had made allowances for the expected expense and paid double the market price for such a fee.
We had no reason to refuse their request. We planned to do the usual investigation.
But- we did have one concern.
The request was made anonymously.
If we didn't know who the request came from or where they lived, how were we supposed to contact them to complete the job? Nothing about this was defined. Perhaps they intentionally hid this information, in which case we couldn't deliver the investigation results either.
Therefore, Dazai and I, before heading off to the job together, set off to find the request giver and fix this mess we had fallen into.
"Perhaps our client is some evil demon that harbors ill will for us. They've tricked us detectives and are now lying in wait inside the haunted house for us to come along so they can bite into us and drink-"
"You're a fool. Ghosts who send emails only exist in horror stories."
Still, even if we were up against a ghost, I wasn't scared.
We walked to the harbor's warehouse district as we idly chatted. The cluster of red-brown brick warehouses floated up out of the gloom in the dark night which repelled even the moonlight.
We stepped into an old warehouse smaller than the others.
It had a high ceiling and walls so damaged by the salt wind that the plaster peeled off of them. I sniffed as I pushed the buzzer for the office – it smelled like the iron machinery parts and motor oil stored there, along with old dust and the smell of time itself.
There was a sound like sliding metal and the electronic locks released.
"Come in," a high-pitched voice answered from inside the room.
I passed through the heavy birch door equipped with a number of remote locks and walked into the office.
The room was a bit smaller than 30 square meters. The walls and floors were covered with electronics, the blinking of diodes illuminating the gloomy room.
At the center of the room sat a line of computers, their fans producing a noise like the growling of stray dogs. On top of a desk stood four LCD monitors, each shining a different image in blue-white light.
"Hey, hey, Specs. Still doing whatever your notebook tells you?"
"Don't talk so high and mighty, informant. If we turned in the evidence we have to the right source, you would spend the next ten years living in jail. Your late father would sob in his grave."
"Don't you talk about my father."
The informant, reclining at his desk with both feet upon it, was no less than a fourteen year-old boy.
He had large eyes and short, cropped hair. No matter if it was summer or winter, he wore his only good white sweater. He was a small boy, but the glint in his eyes was as cutting as broken glass.
"Besides, aren't you late? That's pretty rare for you. What, is this some kind of date?" The boy lifted his little finger and grinned impertinently.
"You are entirely wrong. A date is done with the woman I have decided to marry. And the wedding is planned for six years after that, according to my 'Future Plan' page in my notebook," I said while rifling through my notebook.
"What? Specs, you've got a girl you plan to marry?"
"That I plan to have in four years' time," I answered seriously.
The boy's eyes were wide and his jaw dropped. "Ah, I see..."
"An adult is one who lives by their ideals and plans. Watch and learn, boy."
"Hmm... I already knew the gist of Kunikida's personality, but that just now was kinda out there.." Dazai stepped through the door and appeared behind me.
"Oh, a new face. Who are you?"
"Hey. I'd introduce myself to you, of course, but Kunikida here is about to say my name anyway, so what's the point?"
"Boy, you should introduce yourself before asking the names of others. And Dazai, don't go making predictions about what I'll do without permission."
"Specs sure likes the word 'should'... well, whatever. The name's Rokuzou Taguchi. I'm fourteen."
"I discovered this fool trying to hack the Agency and tossed him away myself," I added, just to be thorough.
"Man, enough talking about that. Hey, you can hand over the report on it already."
Three months ago, Rokuzou launched an outside internet attack on the Armed Detective Agency's records and threw all of our detectives into a turmoil. Of course, we would never neglect taking precautions in the electronics department. Once our panic calmed down, we immediately traced the attack back to its source and caught our culprit.
In the end, I was able to corner the boy, and he accepted becoming an informant working in cooperation with us on the condition that I did not hand over a report containing plenty of incriminating evidence over to the military police.
"Did you find out the sender of the email I gave to you?"
"You're a real slave driver, Specs. I couldn't have been working on it before now, now could I? Give me a bit longer."
The task I had given him was to determine the name and whereabouts of our client. What with Rokuzou's skill in back-tracing emails, I hardly thought it would be a challenging task.
"I've been busy with that other job of yours – tracking down any traces of those missing people. Shouldn't that go first?"
"It should," I agreed.
The case of the repeated disappearances of Yokohama tourists.
At first glance, none of the victims were connected to one another save for that each failed to turn up one day and were never seen again. The number of victims was now up to eleven.
The main investigation had been going on for a month by this time. The victims had but little in common, except that they were all people from outside of Yokohama and that they had all apparently walked off and vanished on foot. It was such a challenging case that not even the first step towards cracking the case had been found.
I had assigned Rokuzou to make a report of the victims' actions prior to their disappearances. His job was to discover any records of trains taken, taxis ridden, or anything else of the same sort, but the results were unsatisfactory.
Dazai, his interest evidently piqued, butted in with, "What case is that? This is my first time hearing you mention it. Do tell me all about it."
"I'll tell you about it properly later," I said, changing the topic.
I had my reasons for avoiding telling him. We intended to set aside the resolution of this case for Dazai's entrance exam. I planned to disclose the information to him at the right opportunity.
"Hmm, you're training the newbie, huh? Specs is up there climbing the corporate ladder."
"And what a stubborn superior he is; it troubles me so. – Oh, that reminds me. You are Rokuzou, correct? You're a hacker? How about slipping me, real casually, any of Kunikida's weaknesses or embarrassing photos?"
"Hey, Dazai! Don't try to find a way to threaten someone when you're standing right in front of them!"
"Oh, I got you, newbie. I've got the one thousand yen, the ten thousand yen, or the one hundred thousand yen options – which one would you want?"
"You mean you really have some to sell?!"
Wait, wait, wait. I needed to calm down.
"Don't make fun of me. I don't have any weaknesses. The kid is only bragging; don't humor him, Dazai."
"... Hmm," Dazai said with a meaningful glance at me.
"Hey, if you don't believe me, that's no skin off my back. I only sell to customers who do believe. Still, if Specs pays in advance, I'm cool with you guys deleting that evidence document now too."
"Who's paying you? You haven't found any of the information I asked for! We're leaving, Dazai."
Grabbing Dazai by the nape of the neck, I walked briskly out the door and put the boy's room behind me.
... One hundred eleven thousand yen, huh...

That evening in the warehouse district was devoid of any signs of people.
Dazai and I waited at the roadside for a taxi we had called to come pick us up.
The headlights on the cars rushing back and forth dragged drifting tails of light behind them. Yellow shadows. Golden ribbons. A fragrance dispersing crimson light. The white, far-reaching headlights shaved away the building shadows. The nightlights reflected in the cars' windows flowed away like a liquid before my very eyes.
The powerful sea wind sent the clouds off, sweeping them away, and the moonlight cast the harbor town into black and white shadows.
"What a delightful boy he was," Dazai said, staring at the night sky with a smile.
"Introducing you two to one another was a mistake. It would be best if you paid no mind to that entire affair."
"May I ask a question?"
"What is it?"
"Why are you caring for that boy, Rokuzou?"
Dazai seemed serious when I looked at him.
"You gave him a job for some reason I don't know. The Agency should very well be able to trace the steps of these missing persons, shouldn't they? You also could have held that entire conversation over the phone, but we still came out all this way on foot."
I was silent. It was challenging to give a simple answer to this question.
"Is it related to his father? You mentioned him a bit earlier."
I looked up at Dazai automatically.
"I'm right, aren't I?" Dazai laughed when he saw my expression.
"... His father was a fine police officer. He is dead now."
There was nothing for it; I began to explain.
"He once cooperated with the Agency in pursuing a criminal. This criminal was a true villain, destroying both state and business institutions. Despite the police frantically searching for him, it was like they never found him."
"Is this the azure flag terrorist case you were talking about?"
"Yes."
Such a brutal case it was, with hell breaking loose across the entire country, that the army and police were even brought in.
"Our agency was the one who eventually found the criminal's hideout, and we reported it to the city police."
"That was nicely done!" Dazai gasped in admiration.
"Yes, it certainly was. But at the time, the army, the public safety group, and the police all combined into one to work together, and in the process, the chain of command intertwined into a confused mess. To make matters worse, the criminal caught wind of us and barricaded himself inside of his hideout. He also stockpiled an enormous amount of explosives."
The memories came back to me. The city police barking out orders over phone calls. Arrest him. Stand by. Contradictory orders flew past one another.
"The instructions were so disordered that only five people made it to the scene in a timely manner. Their orders were to storm the place and take control of it expediently.... But what could five people, none of them Special Forces nor ability users, do against the 'Azure King'?"
But none of the people realized their efforts were futile. If they had been told to invade the hideout, then they would have done nothing else.
"In the end, the criminal was cornered and set off the bombs, dying in the explosion. The five police officers there perished as well."
"- And one of the officers was Rokuzou's father, correct?"
"Rokuzou had lost his mother quite young and lived with his father. The father seemed to be quite a respected police officer."
I clenched my fists.
"I was the one who gave the police the information about the hideout."
What if I hadn't told any of the higher-ups in the command chain? Or what if the Agency stormed it ourselves?
"It's like I was the one who killed him."
"That's wrong. However you look at it, the police authorities giving the orders – and to a larger extent, the criminal detonating the bomb – are the ones at fault."
"You could say that. But that's not how Rokuzou sees it, I think. Or else he wouldn't have hacked the Agency as a sort of revenge."
I thought that Rokuzou bore a grudge against the Agency. I never verified that face-to-face with him, but-
"Rokuzou's father is no longer with him. That's the reality of the matter. Someone needs to take care of him and occasionally knock some sense into him instead. And it turns out that I can do that. It is convenient."
"You're quite the romanticist, Kunikida," Dazai said with a sigh and a wry smile.
I did not think myself a romanticist, nor did I understand very much of what constituted romance.
And yet all those who knew me well enough to be called friends or acquaintances told me, "You are a romanticist." I did not very well understand why (even though I constantly said the only way to live was by following ideals).
The taxi pulled up in front of us as I pondered this. The driver waved his hand.

People have all sorts of experiences when it comes to taxi drivers.
Ones with clean cars, honest and upstanding ones, those who are experts of all the backroads about town, perhaps ones who are experts at driving, ones who are cheerful, invigorating young men, or those who grudgingly put their first thought to economizing the customer's meter, for example. Each of these qualities are quite fine things in their own way, and there is little difference of opinion on this from one person to another.
That being said, there was only one thing I wanted from this taxi driver.
"My goodness, it has been a while, Investigator Kunikida. Today is a good day for detective work, isn't it? Your glasses look very good on you, just like always; you see, I go about my job driving everyone around, and I know when my customer's glasses are good or bad for them. If they're elegant, if they're from good stock, you know. Your glasses are very good ones, Investigator Kunikida! I can guarantee that, yes I can."
"I am begging you; please be quiet for a moment and drive."
In the first place, what on Earth determined if glasses were from "good stock"? What a foolish statement. – But I was slightly curious.
"A taxi driver should be silent. Have none of your passengers told you this before?"
"Oh no, I have never been told that. Rather, during the ride, my passengers don't say a thing at all. That's because I'm chatting the whole time."
I knew how the public saw this taxi. It was a booby trap.
Dazai and I were taking the taxi to our job location. I could no longer see the city lights in the darkness outside of the windows, and the sparse tree shadows swept the cloudy moonlight and fell away behind us.
Of course, we did not end up in this booby trap of a taxi due to sheer bad luck or on accident. I purposefully called for this one. And why was that?
To get information.
"Dazai, do you remember the Yokohama tourist repeated disappearances case I mentioned earlier?"
"Yeah, with the guy Rokuzou's looking for?"
"Yes. There have been eleven victims. There was a witness to two of the victims prior to their disappearance – and that witness is our driver."
I pointed at the small man in front of us.
"You may call me an eye witness, but all I did was drive them from the harbor to their hotels, you know. One of these was a woman on holiday, and the other was a man on a business trip."
"Are you certain they are the people in these photographs?"
I pulled out a couple of photographs from my breast pocket. They were photos of the victims captured by security cameras at both hotels. They each fell into one of three categories- the person entering the building, the person during the check-in process, or the person departing the hotel the next day.
"Yes, I have no doubt that those are the ones. They wore the same clothes as in the photos. I drove them to those hotels."
"Okay, so, Kunikida, when are you going to tell me about this so-called disappearances case?"
"... Now's as good of a time as any, I suppose."
I began to explain to him the general outline of the case.
About one month ago, a forty-two year-old man who came to Yokohama for a business trip suddenly vanished. Following his tracks confirmed that he went from the harbor to the hotel, checked in, spent the night, and set off into town the next day. But the man failed to turn up at his meeting, and he did not return home either. All of his belongings were left in his hotel room, and he seemed to have walked away on his own and vanished.
The other victims all roughly followed the same pattern - all traveling alone, participants in expeditions and the like - for a total of eleven people. They did not share age, occupation, or residence; their sole strand of connection was that they had come to Yokohama alone. The police were coming to the city for clues as to their steps after leaving their hotels, but eyewitness information was nonexistent. Just like smoke or the fog, these people had completely vanished.
The police were taking great pains in their investigation on the most likely possibility, that these events were kidnappings. But in this enormous city, there did not seem to be a single place where a person could be alone enough to be abducted without any eye witnesses. Furthermore, the families received no ransom notes, and the motives for abducting these persons remained unclear.
Dazai listened quietly up until this point but now chirped, "But there is a motive, isn't there? Trafficking."
"What?"
"I mean, kidnapping someone and then selling them. As far as I know, the victims were all healthy adults, correct? Hearts, kidneys, eyes, lungs, livers, pancreases, bone marrow – well, it's not like you'd earn a fortune in yen if you sold them in a foreign market, but even then, the bodies of eleven people would be a treasure trove. A single person could become very wealthy."
"It's true, I have heard it said such things are distributed on the black market – but you are disturbingly well-informed of this."
I thought the common man's knowledge would be limited to films and fictional tales.
"Nothing disturbing about it. You see, you hear the most interesting things at seedy bars on the edge of town."
It was a fishy explanation. He sounded as if he were making excuses.
Well, then again, everything about the man was fishy.
"... So are you saying that these missing persons came here for the purpose of meeting with an organ merchant? Saying 'Please buy my organs'? Going out of their way in the middle of their business trip or whatever else?"
"You're right, it is a bit forced. When it comes down to it, it's not about buying and selling organs but the fact that they disappeared. They could just as well have employed a service specializing in disappearances, taken on new names, purchased new paperwork, and slipped away without a trace, for example."
"But nevertheless, if they went into town to connect with the service, wouldn't they have been picked up by security footage or seen by witnesses?"
"Aren't the services supposed to be masters of disguise?"
"Oh, now that you say that, I've heard of something like that," the driver said. "In the photography industry and such, there are techniques that turn even men into appearing as women. I hear that first you stuff silk floss into your cheeks to change the shape of your face, and-"
"I'm not listening to your chatter," I said, quickly cutting off the driver who seemed about to embark on another long monologue.
"Oh, it just occurred to me. Look at these photographs; aren't they both wearing glasses? I made a connection! In other words, this is the 'Repeated Glasses Disappearances Case'!"
I peered at the photographs. It was true that the victims in those images wore glasses. One wore a black frame, the other, a gold.
"All right, Kunikida, now's your chance to shine!" Dazai cried.
"What are you talking about? Not all of the other nine victims wore glasses. Don't call this a connection."
As far as I remembered, four of the nine wore glasses, two wore sunglasses, and the remaining three wore none.
"Shoot. ... Well, it can't be helped. We'll use you to lure out the criminal in some other way, now won't we? The culprit is targeting tourists, right? So you should wander around Yokohama wearing rubber wellingtons, a red and green plaid shirt, knickerbockers, and a rucksack. Stand on the side of the road with an enormous camera, taking picture after picture, and say 'y'all' in every sentence."
"What are you suggesting?!"
"'What are y'all suggesting?!'"
"Do you call that a strategy? Absolutely not!"
"'Absolutely not, y'all!'"
"Don't be so presumptuous!"
"Oh? Then you should go out naked but for a top hat and barrel down the street on a unicycle while yelling about your preferred type of woman."
"Now you're changing the entire purpose of this enterprise!"
"If that's how it is, Investigator Kunikida, then you should read about disguising yourself as a clo-"
"You be quiet!"
Arrgh, if it wasn't one, it was the other!
I grew angrier by the minute.
"Dazai! Grow up a little! When are you going to start taking your work seriously?"
"Oh, but I'm always serious."
That would be beyond awful if true.
"All right, then how about this?" he asked. "I promise to become a detective of integrity starting immediately. I will only perform honest investigations, examinations, and deductions. O, my worthy superior Kunikida, I shall astonish you such that from tomorrow on, you can leave the entire job to me, no problem – I'll become such a fine man that you'll slap your knees from the shock."
I didn't believe a word of his chatter.
"And how soon is this 'starting immediately'?"
"From the moment I step out of this taxi."
Hmm.
"Really now?"
"Of course. A suicide-ist never goes back on his word. ... But that being said, what will I get in return for this?"
Oh lord, here it comes, I thought.
"What do you want? I refuse to raise your salary or give you only the easy jobs."
"I don't mean anything that large. There's only a little something which I've been interested in for a while."
Dazai stared intently at the driver. His eyes practically sparkled with curiosity.
"... Let me drive."

"Aaaaaaaaaaaah!"
"Wa ha ha ha ha! I'm the wind!"
"Wait, Dazai, stop, please, aaaaaah!"
"Whoo hoo!"
"Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no-"

"And look at that, we made it in one piece!"
"I... will never let you drive again..."
We opened our doors and stepped out, Dazai with a spring in his step, and I practically fell out into the road.
The taxi driver was out cold in the passenger seat. I wondered if he wouldn't come to his senses until tomorrow morning.
"What, are you motion-sick? How sloppy," Dazai remarked. I slightly wanted to murder the man.
This was not motion-sickness. My legs wobbled so that I could not stand. I had no sense of balance. My limbs trembled such that it was all I could do to stand like a newborn calf.
I had never felt so weakened before, even in my vigorous martial arts training.
"Now, let's get cracking on that job! I'll work hard, just like I promised!"
Let me rest for a moment, I wanted to say, but it was a hard thing to admit after how much I had nagged him to get moving earlier.
"This looks like the spot all right. ... By the way, Kunikida, how do you feel about ghosts and monsters?"
"Ghosts? ... Do you think I'd be fit for the Armed Detective Agency if I were scared of ghosts? Weapons ought to be more of a threat than evil spirits, I should think."
"I'm glad to hear that. For you see, that over there is the place we're supposed to investigate."
I followed Dazai's pointed finger with my eyes.
There, nestled in the mountainside, stood a ruin of a black building.
Steeped in shadows, crawling with signs of death and decay, this mysterious place was none other than an abandoned hospital.

Why?
Why did we end up investigating this place in the dead of night?
Every person is sure to fall ill at some point in their life, I thought to myself. There are no perfectly sound minds and no perfectly sound bodies. The hospital bears witness to every person's birth and death. It is, so to speak, the boundary line between this world and the next, the world of the living and the world of the dead.
That this hospital had been abandoned and left to fall into disrepair only made it all the more eerie. Moonlight crept in through the broken windows and illuminated the subtle, beautiful blue shadows of fallen rubble and the anemic purple of stagnant puddles of water.
The courtyard in front teemed with spider lilies of a poisonous-looking red.
"It's dark... I can't see at all."
"I still feel good about this."
Dazai kept up a light pace and soon out-distanced me, who by comparison reluctantly dragged my feet down the hall.
The walls had largely decomposed and collapsed; wires dangled from the rotten ceiling. Most of the equipment had been stolen, and the hospital rooms were reduced to homes for bugs.
Who in the world would choose to walk into a place like this, I wondered.
"Our job is to discover the truth about these sounds and lights which come from here, night after night. We do not know what we might find. Be on your guard."
"Okay... But of course we know what we'll find, Kunikida. Aren't you being too cautious?"
I glared at him.
"What are you talking about? Preemptively making up your mind and underestimating an opponent is barbaric and foolish. Anyone worthy of the Agency knows to always prepare for the worst."
As I reiterated the importance of caution, I dropped into a crouch and assumed a stance to prepare for any sudden attacks as we continued down the hallway.
"Are you, by any chance, scared?"
"I-I-I-I-I'm not scared! Are you an imbecile?!"
"Okay, then let's hurry up and go."
"You fool, in movies like this, those who act cocky and make impulsive moves are the first to fall victim to the monster."
"What do you mean, movies like this?"
"Never you mind that; just go on ahead. I will guard from the back."
"But I don't want to take the lead... Oh yes, it's too dark for me to see. Can we get a light?"
I had already thought of that. I did very much want to use one. But...
"Someone is here in this hospital. I'm concerned that they will run away if they see our light. We'll have to use the light of the moon from here on out."
"Hmmph."
We continued into the darkness. The building creaked in the strong wind. The sound of dripping water came to me from somewhere inside.
The hospital was surrounded by vast forests and sprawling, open countryside, with not so much as a single house anywhere nearby. The leaves on the columns of the black trees in the forest flapped in the raging wind, forming their own rustling song.
I thought back to the job letter. What did they mean, "others living in the vicinity"? There was no one about for kilometers. The only "others" possibly living nearby were foxes and bears.
- So then, who in the world was our client?
- They did not sign their letter.
- Perhaps, just perhaps, our client was an evil spirit bearing us ill will.
Dazai's words returned to me.
We could see nothing but darkness surrounding us on all sides. The crying of the wind blowing through a hole in the building reminded me of a woman's wailing.
...
I didn't believe in ghosts or anything of the sort. I was an algebra lecturer and a student of chemistry and physics, that is to say, a man of the physical sciences. Tales of vengeful spirits taking on the form of the living were no more than wild ideas dreamed up in fear of facing the dark.
I wasn't scared. I wasn't trembling, and I definitely wasn't crying either.
Suddenly, Dazai screamed, "There it is!"
Aaaaaaaaah!
My heart leaped into my throat.
Dazai glanced back at me with his mouth hung open in shock. He studied my expression and then slowly, yet deeply, smirked at me.
That little...!
"Should I fire you on the spot?!"
"Oh no, Kunikida, you just seemed a little tense, so I thought I'd take your mind off of things."
"I don't understand you at all!"
I brushed past Dazai and went on ahead.
Shit, it was incredibly dark. I couldn't see at all. And because I couldn't see, my eyes tricked themselves into believing something lurked in that darkness.
My darkness-blinded eyes suspected a breathing beast where only thin air stood.
It was dark.
It was so very dark.
I couldn't take it any longer.
"Doppo Poet - flashlight!"
And then there was light.
By the end of our search, we did find several signs of intruders.
A trace of some kind of wheeled luggage dragged across the ground. Footprints from a dress shoe. A scrap of clothing lint. However, there were no clear signs of either the nightly intruder nor any other looter.
The small flashlight I manifested with my ability guaranteed visibility. But it did not begin to dispel the deep pitch-black of the hospital.
I was quite literally going down a dark path - if I shined the light in front of me, my feet disappeared in the great sea of darkness, while if I shined the light at my feet, the path ahead became a black void. I continued forward gingerly, but there was no progress to be made in our search.
Finally, Dazai grew tired of it and said, "This has to be a joke. Let's go back."
"Now, hold on a moment. What ever happened to 'honest investigations, examinations, and deductions'? Does a detective give up this early? We must find more evi-"
"No need. Take a look at this."
Dazai held up a dark-colored cord pinched between his fingers. Both ends sunk into the floor and disappeared. No, that wasn't -
"Is that - a wire?"
If it was indeed a wire, then it was relatively recent. It was plainly different from the hospital's time-worn internal wiring. I presumed it had been installed some months ago.
"If we follow the wire, we'll be sure to find something."
Dazai passed the wire hand-over-hand to find its end. It was cleverly hidden and buried, but we eventually reached it.
Dazai lifted it and said, "This... is a video camera. Someone must have secretly put it here. This can't be the only camera either. My goodness, our client called us out here on a fake job to take secret pictures of Kunikida scared stiff of and crying at ghosts. What a fiend."
"I-I'm not crying!"
"Of course you're not. After all, it's really not so bad. This little darkness wouldn't even frighten a child."
"..."
"Well, in the first place, if there even were any hospital ghosts, they wouldn't have a lot of fight in them, I should think. Because they died sick, right? If they died in an accident, they're supposed to haunt the spot where the accident happened. But those ghosts don't have it in them to kill you either. Why, at their worst, they'd only be regretful or rueful. 'I didn't want to die,', that sort of thing. Ah, what a shame; I take such pains to die, and here it is, being wasted on these ungrateful saps."
"Dazai... hey, don't... say that kind of stuff here..."
W... what if a vengeful spirit were listening?
"But at least, if there's one that does hold a grudge against the living, then she must be some emaciated woman with tuberculosis. She would be rending her lovely hair in grief, saying, 'Oh how I hate them, oh how jealous I am of the living, please save me from this dark abyss, please pull me from this crueltyyyy, oh, how cruel - my blood, my bones, my flesh, my guts, oooooh'"
"Heeeeeeeeeelp!"
A woman screamed shrilly, and in my surprise, my heart almost leaped out of my throat.
But a moment later, a realization hit me with the force of a bucket of cold water dumped over me-
That scream was from a living person.
"Where did that..."
"This way! Hurry!"
Dazai dashed down the dessicated hallway without any hesitation.
I ran down a short flight of stairs and across a hallway in the direction of the scream, kicking up rubble as I went.
I arrived in an underground area. The ceiling, in its rotten state, had fallen into the hall. A kitchenette, a pharmaceutical storage room, a radiation photography room, and a morgue were lined up next to one another.
Following the source of the scream, I barged into the kitchenette.
There she was!
A woman's right arm, frantically waving, stuck out above the surface of the water in an enormous clothes washing cistern!
I rushed over to the cistern, and as I looked into the water, I saw a woman in her underclothes at the bottom. One arm was shackled to a knob at the bottom of the cistern.
She couldn't break the surface because of her shackles! She would drown unless I did something!
"What is this-!"
"We need to break these iron bars!" Dazai yelled, seizing the fixed cover on top of the cistern which prevented the woman's escape.
I grabbed it with both hands and shook with all my might. Even if it was locked, it was not in any way outside of my physical capabilities.
I locked eyes with the woman underwater. Hers were a reddish-brown color. She opened them as wide as they could go, and they pleaded with me.
Save me.
"We're rescuing you right now! Go to the end of the cistern!"
I waved my arm to indicate the movement. She noticed and tucked herself into a ball against the cistern wall.
I pulled out my handgun. Turning off the safety, I aimed at the cistern.
"Get back, Dazai!"
I aimed so the woman inside would not be hit by the ricochet and shot the outer wall three times.
The bullets etched a series of holes and cracks into the wall. Water spilled from the cracks.
Then I delivered a powerful roundhouse kick to the center of the cracks!
The rotational power delivered through my heel pierced the porcelain and mortar of the wall and smashed it to pieces. A huge hole opened up, and a deluge of water poured out.
As the water erupted from the tank, the woman's face finally emerged from beneath the surface of the water and she began to breathe again almost desperately. A wave of coughing soon followed. It seemed we were just in time.
Dazai twisted an enormous tap and stopped the water.
"Are you all right?" I asked. I passed her my handkerchief through the grating. The woman accepted it with still-trembling hands.
"It looks like someone tried to drown you," Dazai said. "Did you see the culprit?"
It was all the woman could do just to breathe through her violent coughing, but she finally began to speak with her throat still clogged.
"I was kidnapped. I suddenly lost consciousness the day I came to Yokohama for work - and when I woke up, I was here."
Dazai and I exchanged a meaningful look.
Dazai and I worked in tandem to break the grille and cuffs to free the woman. I fired repeatedly at the lock's underside to break the cylinder lock the grille had been triple-locked with.
"My name is Nobuko Sasaki. I'm a professor at Tokyo University. I fell unconscious upon my arrival in Yokohama... and came to this room."
Miss Sasaki was dripping wet and pale-faced but bravely explained her circumstances to us.
"Miss Sasaki. Do you know how many days it has been since you were kidnapped and lost consciousness?"
"Please forgive me... I was unconscious, so I cannot give any great detail... but from my health and my hunger, I think it has been more than three days..."
The victims of the Yokohama tourist repeated disappearances case had all vanished in a period of thirty-five to seven days ago. If this woman's words were to be believed, then there was a high likelihood that she was the twelfth victim.
Dazai stood silently nearby with his arms folded, deep in contemplation of something.
Miss Sasaki had long, black hair and a fairly slim build. She was probably about my age.
She shivered. Her clothes were taken in her abduction, and she was only clad in her undergarments. She had borrowed Dazai's overcoat and wore it like a haori, but what with being half-naked and entirely drenched in the dead of night, it was no wonder she was shivering.
The arms she hugged to herself and the legs she stretched out on the floor were surprisingly slender. The clothes clinging to her skin traced bewitching curves. On the other hand, her skin appeared a pale white just short of transparent.
The wet hair clinging to her neck shed droplets of water that trickled down to her chest. For some irrational reason, I averted my eyes.
"What is more, I believe there are others trapped in this building as well! I heard voices."
"What?"
The other victims? Were they confined in this building as well?
"I'll show you! This way," she said, staggering to her feet to guide us.
But.
"... Wait," I said, touching Miss Sasaki to stop her.
"Dazai. What do you make of this situation?"
Dazai told me with a straight face, "Miss Sasaki's sexy."
"Be serious!"
He folded his arms. "... It's too good to be true."
"We came to an abandoned building on the pretext of investigating mysterious lights and voices. However, we instead discover a victim from another case, the one of repeated disappearances. The two cases have no connection and are supposed to be very different, if you remove the fact that we are responsible for both cases... Miss Sasaki, when did you last see your abductor?"
"Forgive me, I never saw them clearly... but when I came to, the tap was already on, and the water was close to my face. I think the criminal turned the water on no more than five minutes before I woke up."
It was then that she shouted and we heard her. What close timing.
"Then they were here very recently. I can't believe the culprit wouldn't have noticed us walking by practically under their very nose. So why did they do this?"
"Perhaps they panicked when they realized we were here, or perhaps-"
Was it a malicious trap?
However, it was out of the question to back out now in fear of a trap.
If any other victims were confined in this building, it was our duty to free them.
"It has been thirty-five days since the first victim's disappearance. If they are still confined here, even now, then it is now a matter of life and death. Dazai, watch her and follow me."
I headed down the hall carrying my guns.
As soon as I sent a message to the local police for the sake of caution, Miss Sasaki guided us to the morgue. Corpses being items of value, the door required greater protection from theft than the others, and as such it was quite solid and made of iron. Furthermore, it was locked tight. This made it an ideal place for imprisoning the living as well as the dead.
I ensured there were no traps, then destroyed the lock and burst into the room. Crossing both wrists, I simultaneously pointed one gun at the lights and the other in front of me.
The morgue was a frightfully dark room no more than ten meters in length. Almost everything in it had been relocated (or, perhaps, stolen), leaving it empty and desolate. What little there was to speak of was a broken stretcher, a ripped body bag, and pull-out metal coffins installed in the wall.
There was nothing else besides that. No one, dead or alive. No, there was-
Something in the center of the room moved in the light's reflection. I shined the beam of light on it.
"Please... please help us..."
They were alive. Four people were crowded into a metal cage flush against the wall. Like Miss Sasaki, they were all clad in simple undergarments.
"Where are we?"
"I heard a woman screaming... how did we end up here?"
"Calm down. We're here to rescue you. We've already rescued the screaming woman as well. Is anyone hurt?" I asked.
"N-no. But still, what is this place? Why are we here?"
I took a closer look at the cage. It was on the wall across from the door and looked to be for transporting fierce wild animals or some similar purpose. I thumped its wire grating side. It would have proved difficult to remove the grating with such tools as I had on me. The cage itself was simplistic but sturdy, so I assumed it would be time-consuming to destroy.
"Hmm. An electronic lock terminal, huh," Dazai mused, peering closely at the lock. "An encryption, a biometric identifier, or a password... Open sesame! Flash and thunder! I have lived a life of much shame! Aww, you won't open? Guess I'll have to break you."
What was that last one?
"To break it, I probably have to do this-"
Just as Dazai touched the terminal, Miss Sasaki shrieked as if she had been struck. "Don't! You mustn't touch the lock!"
Dazai turned in surprise. A red light lit up on the terminal.
A puff of white smoke spread throughout the cage. I ran up to it without thinking and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my eyes and throat.
One of the people in the cage screamed, "It's poison gas!"
The pain flooded my eyes with tears. My vision grew hazy. The world blurred. Everything seemed to spin. I had accidentally inhaled some. But I couldn't abandon those trapped in the cage. I had to get to them.
"Don't get any closer! It's too late!"
Someone grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Shut up, I thought. I have to save them. I can't let them die.
That's my ideal. That's how the world should be.
"Kunikida! Hurry!" Dazai yelled from behind me.
No. This was wrong.
"You mustn't!"
Miss Sasaki clung to me to stop me. Why? Why did she stop me? I couldn't let people die. I couldn't let anyone die right in front of-
Dazai dragged me out of the room. I screamed something, but I didn't remember a bit of it later.
All four people trapped in the cage died.

Word count : 11,338