Black Bullet, Vol. 1: Those Who Would Be Gods (12 page)

“That’s an evil-looking gun you have, Kagetane Hiruko,” said Rentaro.

Kagetane laughed. “Good evening, Satomi.” The mysterious masked man in the tailcoat suddenly lowered his gun. Surprisingly, he had another custom Beretta in a different color. “This black one here is the machine pistol, Spanking Sodomy, and the silver one is called Psychedelic Gospel. My beloved handguns.”

“What do you want?”

“Actually, I came to talk to you. Won’t you lower your gun, too?”

“No.”

“Oh, dear.” Kagetane snapped his fingers with a click. “Kohina, cut off that troublesome right arm.”

“Yes, Papa.”

As Rentaro reflexively jumped backward, the sound of wind accompanied a lighting-speed slash that came at the place where Rentaro had been. Before he knew it, a girl wearing a black dress appeared next to Kagetane. Kohina made a troubled face and looked like she was about to cry. “Come on, don’t move, or I’ll cut off your head by accident,” she said.

Chills ran along his back, and he broke into a cold sweat.
Crap, I couldn’t see her sword at all. The next time she attacks—

Again, Kohina kicked up a cloud of dust and disappeared from sight. Even straining his eyes, he couldn’t follow her movements. Rentaro thought he was done for and squeezed his eyes shut.

With a clang, two bodies collided in midair and were blown apart with the sounds of scraping. Surprised comments came from both sides.

“I couldn’t kick her?” said one voice.

“What? I couldn’t slash her?” said another.

“Enju!” Rentaro yelled. Next to Rentaro was Enju, with scorching red eyes.

“Rentaro! Who are they?” Enju asked.

“The enemy.”

Kohina stood with her two swords out as if protecting Kagetane. Her personality seemed to change 180 degrees from her earlier timidity, and she stood firmly on the ground with her Varanium blades crossed in her unique stance. “Be careful, Papa. That one over there… She’s strong. She is probably a kicking specialist Initiator.”

“Oh?” said Kagetane. “You must have a pretty good Initiator for Kohina to think so highly of her.”

Kohina screamed, “You little squirt over there. Tell me your name!”

Enju hopped up and down until her face turned red. “You are little, as well. How rude! I am Enju. Enju Aihara, a Model Rabbit Initiator!”

Kohina kept her face down and grumbled softly to herself. “Enju, Enju, Enju… All right, I’ll remember. I am Model Mantis, Kohina Hiruko. In close combat, I am invincible.” Kohina changed completely
and pulled on Kagetane’s sleeve with a sad expression. “Um, can I kill the rabbit? I’ll just leave her head, so can I kill her?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, silly girl,” said Kagetane. “You may not.”

“Aw, I hate you, Papa!”

Kagetane said, “Oh, dear,” and fixed the placement of his silk hat, then turned back to Rentaro. “It looks like things have gotten complicated. Do you want to fight?”

Rentaro kept an eye on Kagetane without letting his guard down and looked around. They were in a residential neighborhood, so if they fought here, there would be more meaningless victims. After biting his bottom lip hard, Rentaro lowered his gun. “Hurry up and say what you have to say, moron. I’m sleepy and still have to study for a quiz next week.”

Kagetane snickered behind his mask and put his gun back in its holster, holding his arms wide open magnanimously with the moon as a backdrop. “Let me get straight to the point. Satomi, will you join me?”

“What did you say?!”

“For some reason, I’ve liked you ever since I first saw you. I thought it’d be a waste to kill you. If you join me, then I won’t.”

“I’m still a civsec officer, you know.”

“What of it? I am a former civsec officer myself. Unfortunately, there will soon be a wild storm that will bring Great Extinction to Tokyo Area. At the moment, I have some strong backup. If you become my ally, you can have money, women, power… I will give you anything you want.”

Rentaro did not say a word.

“Satomi, have you ever thought you wanted to change this unreasonable world? That the way Tokyo Area works is wrong? Have you ever thought that, even once?”

Before he knew it, the image of the girl whose name he didn’t even know resurfaced from the back of his mind. Her head flew back in slow motion, and blood spurted from her forehead. The blood dripped slowly, getting absorbed by the ground. There was the girl, with her eyes refusing to accept what happened, the police officers whose mouths twisted in evil pleasure, and Rentaro, too cowardly to run out to save her because he was afraid he would be killed to keep his mouth shut.

Seeing Rentaro’s hesitation, Kagetane pulled out a white cloth from his pocket and covered the ground, counting to three. When he pulled
the cloth off, an attaché case appeared beneath it. “From what I hear, apparently, you are not doing very well economically.” Kagetane used his foot to slide the attaché case over to Rentaro. When the case stopped in front of Rentaro, the lid popped open. Inside, it was stuffed with stacks of bills. “This is just a small gift to express my feelings.”

Rentaro stared at the stacks of bills without moving an inch.

“I hear you make that Enju over there pretend to be human and have her go to school? Why would you do that? Those girls are the shape of the next generation of humans that have gone beyond the current
Homo sapiens
. The only ones left after the Great Extinction will be us, the strong. Join me, Rentaro Satomi.”

Rentaro kicked the attaché case back with all his strength and shot it three times with his gun. The case jumped, and the bills were riddled with holes. Some of them floated out of the case like petals.

Kagetane looked at the attaché case riddled with holes for a while. “You have made a grave mistake, Satomi.”

“Mistake? If I made a mistake, it was that I didn’t kill you when I first met you, Kagetane Hiruko!”

“Fool! Will you insist on completing your jobs till the end? No matter how hard you work for them, they will only keep betraying you.”

Rentaro glared at Kagetane. Kagetane glared back at Rentaro. Rentaro wasn’t sure how long this went on, but after a while, they could hear the siren of the police car coming to investigate the gunshots.

Kagetane sighed. “We will pick this up again later, Satomi. I don’t like doing things this way very much…but see what happens when you go to school tomorrow. You need to start looking at reality.” Throwing that last line at Rentaro, he took a big leap backward and melted into the darkness.

Staring in the direction Kagetane disappeared, Rentaro asked Enju, “What do you think of his Initiator?”

“She’s strong,” she said. “Frighteningly so.”

“Can you beat her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see…”

The burden of Kagetane’s last words to him as they parted weighed down on Rentaro, and he couldn’t erase them from his memory.

“Is that true?” Rentaro stood as he squeezed his cell phone tightly. A number of his classmates who were idly chatting stopped in surprise and looked in his direction. Rentaro quickly lowered his voice. “I-I’ll be there immediately.” After folding his cell phone shut, he dashed out onto the school grounds and ran two buildings over to Magata Elementary School.

Hastily taking off his shoes and putting on the visitor slippers at the entrance, he went to the staff room and grabbed Enju’s homeroom teacher, who was just about to head to the classroom. His face was pale and thin, and there were large circles under his eyes. He was shorter than Rentaro, but even though it wasn’t that hot, he kept dabbing his handkerchief on his forehead, and his eyeballs protruded like he was nervous. “Oh, you’re the guardian…”

“What is going on? Is Enju really—?” Rentaro drew closer to him with a threatening look. Even though he knew that it was useless taking things out on her homeroom teacher, he couldn’t control his feelings.

The man answered incoherently as he took quick glances at Rentaro. “Yes, the rumor that Aihara is one of the Cursed Children appeared from somewhere. At lunch, the…harassment…directed at her began.”

“I can’t believe it… But…did Enju…deny it…?”

The teacher looked down as he began to dab his forehead repeatedly with his handkerchief. That was better than any answer. “Satomi, you had Aihara attend this school without telling any of us that she was one of the Cursed Children.”

“If I had told you beforehand, wouldn’t you all have just found a reason to refuse to admit her?”

The teacher looked away from Rentaro and started wiping his mouth with his handkerchief again. “I had Aihara leave school early because of the shock. I have no right to ask this, but will you go be with her, Satomi?”

Rentaro didn’t remember what path he took to go home. Unlocking the door, he entered the apartment panting, and a silent chill touched his skin. Enju was not there. She wasn’t anywhere.

His whole body shook with chills, and even taking off his shoes seemed to take too long. He checked the bath and restroom and opened all the closets. She wasn’t there. He started to turn pale at the thought that maybe she hadn’t even made it home, but opening her clothes dresser, he saw traces that she had at least been there once.

As Rentaro fell into a panic, he let out a deep breath and bent his knees, fumbling around in his pocket to call Enju’s cell phone. She seemed to have turned off her phone, so he sent her a few texts. He did not receive any response.

Rentaro took deep breath after deep breath and told himself,
It’s all right. This is Enju’s only home.
Rentaro kept waiting.

But in the end, Enju did not return home that day.

Rentaro opened his eyes slightly at the sound of a soft tapping in the distance. The first thing that came into the field of his blurry and hazy vision was the brown ceiling. The grain of the ceiling changed shape with a twist and turned into a person being chased by a boar. The person was fleeing desperately, but it looked like the boar would catch them soon.

He woke up with a start, and turned his neck to look around the room. He was alone. Enju hadn’t changed her mind and come home. His stomach was heavy with disappointment, and a headache that seemed like it was lying in wait attacked, making him crouch where he stood.

Looking out the window, the rain on the glass distorted the view. That was the source of the tapping earlier. His eyelids felt heavy and cramped, and he felt worse than when he went to sleep. He was nauseated now, too. Pulling the clock toward him to look at the time, he saw that it was seven a.m. It had only been about fifty minutes since he’d fallen asleep.

Because he hadn’t eaten anything since the incident happened yesterday, his stomach was so empty that it hurt, but he didn’t feel like cooking for himself. With his hazy vision and his head feeling like it was full of mud, Rentaro crawled to the fridge and, finding a half-full milk container, drank it dry. It tasted like bitter, half-solidified saliva.
He cracked open a raw egg on the side of the fridge and dumped what was inside into his mouth, then chewed some mustard greens and lettuce in desperation. His own actions shocked him, given that he was usually proud of the fact that he liked cooking.

After he got to the point where he could move around, Rentaro started putting away Enju’s clothes, which were scattered around the living room. The previous day, Rentaro had taken all of the clothes Enju left behind out of the closet and slept with them around him. Unlike Rentaro, who was poor, Enju had a lot of clothes in the latest fashions. That was how he felt after spending the whole night with them. Which reminded him, whenever Enju bought new clothes, she would pose suggestively in front of Rentaro, asking him over and over, “Am I cute? Am I cute?” How had he answered her then?

Rentaro picked up the syringe that had fallen in the crack by the dresser. Inside it was cobalt blue medicine in liquid form. Realizing that she hadn’t taken her medicine, he became very sad. Nothing would happen if she skipped it for a day or two, but if she didn’t take it for a while, the corrosion rate of her body would gradually rise.

“Damn.” Rentaro threw the syringe on the floor and held his head in his hands.

Pretty much every day, he took her to and from school, and when they came back to the apartment, Enju would be pestering him for food. She was critical of everything he made, which had motivated him to cook well.

That life had been broken to pieces. Rentaro stood up and looked around the too-empty eight-tatami-mat room. What was he supposed to do now?

He slapped his cheeks hard with both hands. It was obvious. He needed to do something. Taking off the uniform he wore every day, he took a shower, letting the hot rain strike his body and loosen his stiff muscles. After he got out of the shower, he felt a little more like himself. Putting on a fresh uniform and looking in the mirror, he saw that his cheeks were slightly hollow and that only his eyes were glittering, but he decided that it was good enough.

Checking to make sure he still had a close-up picture of Enju’s face on his phone, Rentaro took his wallet and went outside. Suddenly wondering how much money he had left, he opened his wallet and
laughed involuntarily. He would probably have to walk home, but he didn’t care. Rentaro jumped onto the train and got off at the last stop. Since it was early morning on a weekend, the entrance and exits were both empty. Raising his umbrella and looking into the distance to check where the Monoliths were, he walked unwaveringly toward the Outer District.

It had already been ten years since the Monoliths had formed the boundary that separated humans from Gastrea. The Tokyo metropolis was the only place that had remained whole after the Great War. The neighboring Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama prefectures all had pieces cut off by the Monoliths. It had been nine years since the Tokyo metropolis absorbed the neighboring prefectures and became Tokyo Area, with its forty-three districts.

The numbering system started from the middle of old Tokyo (the Seitenshi’s palace was in the First District), with the numbers increasing as one got closer to the border. The Outer District that Rentaro was heading toward was District 39 on the map. The Outer District referred to the border district connected to the Monolith, a no-man’s-land where no one wanted to live at the time.

Slowly, there started being fewer and fewer people, and he started seeing strange things here and there. There were gigantic footprints that didn’t look human and chairs that had blood stuck to them that wouldn’t come off. Inside a four-wheel-drive vehicle with broken windows that had turned red as though rust bloomed on them grew a mysterious reddish-purple grass out of the space between the cushions, luxurious in its thickness.

A message board created in response to the emergency was still covered with many layers of colorful papers after ten years.

“Sho, this is Atsuko. If you’re safe, please contact me here.”

“To Daiki Kato—I’m at your grandfather’s house.”

“This is my number: xxxxx. Koji Aso.”

“I’m looking for this boy.”
There was a picture of a boy about five years old attached.

“To Yoko. Dad and Fuyumi are fine…”
The rest was scratched off and couldn’t be read.

Rentaro had involuntarily started sweating uncomfortably. He felt like his necktie was tightening around his neck and loosened his collar.

This was a message board created by people who had been separated during the war in order to reunite with loved ones. With transmission base stations destroyed, cell phones were nothing but pieces of trash. This was probably a region that had been caught up in the war. The traces of the Gastrea War that were left behind still seemed fresh.

If he really wanted to remember the conditions from ten years ago, there were plenty of videos uploaded online, but there was no one who could watch them and feel happy about it. Once, a long time ago, Rentaro had watched a video called “Memento Mori,” and he remembered running to the sink afterward.

The farther he went, the more he could see, because with the collapsed buildings and dilapidated homes, there were fewer things to obstruct his vision. In the midst of that were conspicuously large factories that looked like they had been newly built. They were facilities for geothermal, steam, water, wind, solar, and nuclear energy. Japan had always been surrounded on all sides by the ocean, so it had strong ocean winds. Besides that, it had about ten percent of the world’s volcanoes, so it could make use of their geothermal energy, and because of its complex terrain, there were many extreme rises and falls, so it had strong waterpower, as well.