Bungo Stray Dogs Vol. 8: Storm Bringer Read online

  Copyright

  Bungo Stray Dogs, Volume 8

  KAFKA ASAGIRI

  Translation by Matt Rutsohn

  Cover art by Sango Harukawa

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  BUNGO STRAY DOGS Vol. 8 STORM BRINGER

  ©Kafka Asagiri 2021 ©Sango Harukawa 2021

  First published in Japan in 2021 by KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo.

  English translation rights arranged with KADOKAWA CORPORATION, Tokyo through TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY, INC., Tokyo.

  English translation © 2022 by Yen Press, LLC

  Yen Press, LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact the publisher. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Yen On Edition: June 2022

  Edited by Yen On Editorial: Rachel Mimms

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Asagiri, Kafka, author. | Iwahata, Hiro, author. | Rutsohn, Matt, translator.

  Title: Dazai, Chuuya, Age Fifteen / Kafka Asagiri ; illustration by Sango Harukawa ; translation by Matt Rutsohn

  Other titles: Dazai Osamu no nyåusha shaken. English

  Description: First Yen On edition | New York, NY : Yen On, 2019. | Series: Bungo stray dogs ; Volume 8

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019005328 | ISBN 9781975303228 (v 1 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975303242 (v 2 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975303266 (v 3 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975303280 (v 4 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975316570 (v 5 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975316594 (v 6 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975337117 (v 7 : pbk) | ISBN 9781975343309 (v 8 : pbk)

  Classification: LCC PL867.5.S234 D3913 2019 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005328

  ISBNs: 978-1-9753-4330-9 (paperback)

  978-1-9753-4331-6 (ebook)

  E3-20220517-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Insert

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  [CODE;01]: Nothing more than 2,383 lines of code some researchers wrote off the top of their heads

  [CODE;02]: The dead feel no emotion

  [CODE;03]: I want to see Chuuya suffer as a human

  [CODE;04]: O grantors of dark disgrace

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Sango Harukawa’s Storm Bringer Rough Sketch Gallery

  Yen Newsletter

  On Life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,

  Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.

  —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”

  Prologue

  The nighttime forest veils wickedness.

  No matter the country or era, there was never a time when evil didn’t lurk in the woods at night. The form it takes, however, is always changing. One night, it could emerge as a darkness so thick you might not even be able to see your own two feet. And on other nights, it could turn your path home into a seemingly endless maze. It could even be the fangs and saliva of a starving beast.

  This forest’s wicked form that day was light.

  An orange light. An ominous luster wiggling to the beat of a song that couldn’t be heard.

  Fire.

  A hole in the night that all living creatures naturally feared: a forest fire.

  The crackling of the trees as they burned sounded like guttural screams.

  Fires are not fussy like people. They devour everything in their path without a single complaint, slowly fattening themselves up with wickedness.

  This forest would likely be reduced to mundane black ash by sunrise. That was how the forest was going to die. It would be a good hundred years or so until it came back. The culprit—the one who dealt the final blow—was lying at the center of the flames.

  It was the remains of a passenger airplane. The engine’s fans were still spinning—proof it had crashed just a short while ago. The body was bent straight down the middle, and one of its wings stuck out of the ground like a gravestone.

  Nearby villagers began gathering to put out the fire and rescue any survivors, but their faces were immediately tinged with despair. No one could have survived this crash. The aircraft’s torn body had been blackened by the heat; the metal craft painfully shrieked. It appeared that the fire had already made its way inside. Simply walking through the cabin would surely melt one’s shoes into the floor within seconds.

  Overcome with hopelessness, the villagers started examining what was left of the aircraft. Then a boy approached the wreckage. He was from a nearby village and had a hatchet for felling lumber in his hands; he’d brought it with him to chop down however many trees it took to keep the fire from spreading. A mere child like him, however, could only attempt to mimic what the adults were doing. His tiny hatchet wasn’t even sharp or sturdy enough to chop down his grandfather’s bonsai tree.

  Nevertheless, the young boy approached the downed aircraft. There might be survivors. The adults would surely praise him if he saved someone. He imagined himself being lauded a hero, and his heart began to race.

  But his ambitions proved deadly. One of the iron doors, which somehow managed to remain attached to the wreckage, let out a metallic clank before snapping off and flying straight toward the boy. Nobody present would have been able to make it in time to save him, even if they tried. This was a heavy, sturdy door rapidly descending from a high altitude. A villager screamed as the door crushed the child’s head like putty—

  —or at least, that was what everyone thought was going to happen.

  A hand grabbed the iron door, stopping it. But it wasn’t a villager’s hand. It belonged to someone within the aircraft.

  “Is this the place? Finally,” that person said calmly.

  A tall man wearing a blue business suit appeared. He was European, but his age was hard to place; he was most likely in his twenties or thirties. His gaze was distant in spite of the roaring flames surrounding him. Unlike the devastated aircraft from which he’d emerged, he didn’t have a scratch on him.

  “I had no idea commercial airplanes experienced so much turbulence when they landed. But as they say: Everything is an experience, and experience is everything. Are you okay?” he asked the boy. “No need to thank me. Saving and protecting humans is my duty. At any rate, you’re bound to get hurt hanging around a place like this. It doesn’t help that these doors just seem to pop off, either.”

  “Huh…?”

  While the child’s eyes rolled back, the man in blue hopped out of the airplane and landed on the ground before slowly checking his surroundings.

  “Hmm. This was
not in my external memory database. Do all airports in Japan have this many trees? Now, I understand that sixty-seven percent of this country’s total land area is forested, but choosing to build an airport here seems a bit illogical. There aren’t even any roads. I suppose that means I will have to head to my destination on foot. Humans make absolutely no sense to me sometimes.”

  The man wore a serious expression as he dubiously cocked his head to one side.

  “Um…s-sir…,” the boy mumbled timidly. “Just who are you…?”

  “Ah, my apologies. Human society considers it rude to not introduce oneself, yes?” The man slipped a black badge out of his breast pocket. The boy couldn’t read the silver text in the center.

  “I am a detective, property of Europole. My model number is 98F7819-5. I was created by skill user engineer Dr. Wollstonecraft and am the first autonomous humanoid supercomputer for law enforcement use. My code name is Adam—Adam Frankenstein. It was a pleasure meeting you. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a mission to attend to.”

  The young man bowed and began to leave until he came to a sudden stop.

  “Oh, right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “Do you know someone by the name of Chuuya Nakahara?”

  Nothing more than 2,383 lines of code some researchers wrote off the top of their heads

  Chuuya Nakahara didn’t dream. For him, waking up was like a bubble emerging from within mud.

  Chuuya awoke in his bedroom. It was a dreary room: just four walls, a floor, and ceiling all drenched in bluish darkness. The furnishings were extremely sparse: a bed with some sheets, a small bookshelf, a tiny safe built into the wall, a desk at the center, and a book about precious stones tossed atop it opened to a random page. That was everything.

  The morning sun peeked in through a slit in the curtains like a membrane splitting the dreary room in half. Chuuya sat up, his chest coated in a faint sheen of sweat. Swirling within his chest were the remnants of some intense emotion, although he couldn’t remember what emotion, exactly. He’d been like this every day as of late.

  Chuuya gave up trying to remember and left his bedroom to take a shower. He thought about who he was while the hot water poured down his body.

  Chuuya Nakahara. Sixteen years old.

  After joining the Port Mafia a year ago, he made a name for himself with unprecedented speed. The organization recognized this young man’s talents and thereby granted him this apartment. And yet Chuuya had no interest in money or power. They brought him no happiness because he was missing something far more important: a past.

  He didn’t know who he was.

  Chuuya’s earliest memories were of when he was abducted from the military research facility nine years ago. His life before that was just a curtain of darkness—pitch-black emptiness darker than the darkest night.

  After drying off, Chuuya went to change. He placed a hand on the wall, and it opened without making a sound, revealing a clothing rack. Every article of clothing was high-end without a wrinkle in sight. He picked a shirt at random, slipped his arms through the sleeves, then fastened them with emerald cuff links. Once dressed, Chuuya looked at himself in the mirror and lightly clicked his tongue before leaving the room.

  When he left the building, a car instantly pulled up as if it knew he was coming. A man from the Port Mafia dressed in a black suit and sunglasses was driving the black luxury car. He stopped by Chuuya’s side and opened the rear door for him without saying a word.

  “The usual place.”

  That was all Chuuya said to the driver before getting in the car, sitting down, and closing his eyes.

  The black luxury vehicle drove smoothly through the heart of the city using the main thoroughfare. Every street and intersection was packed with commuters driving to work, but the Port Mafia car slipped past the traffic via side roads. It was as if they’d cast a spell that kept the other cars out of their way.

  “Where are yesterday’s transaction records?”

  “Right here.”

  Chuuya skimmed the documents the driver handed him. They were printed using a special ink that made them impossible to copy or reproduce, plus they were written in code to prevent the police from using them as evidence if they ever got their hands on them.

  “Looks like we’re having another good week,” Chuuya said apathetically. “What a drag.”

  His job in the Port Mafia was to monitor the circulation of smuggled jewels. Per unit weight, jewels were some of the most valuable goods in the world. Amethysts, rubies, jade, diamonds: Expose a few elements to heat and pressure, and the resulting stones possess an incredible kind of magic the moment they begin changing hands. Smuggled jewels simply possessed a condensed version of said magic. They were like the shadows created by the brilliant glitter of gemstones. As long as there were jewels to be sold, stolen ones would follow. And there were countless shadowy places where contraband gemstones sprang to life.

  A poverty-stricken miner in a gem-mining district would steal precious stones for a little extra cash. A burglar would break a jewelry store display with his gunstock before leaving with the goods. Then there were pirates who’d sink merchant boats carrying precious stones and loot them. Sometimes criminals would even mug celebrities and rip the necklaces right off their necks. In gem-mining districts run by anti-government forces, precious stones could even be used to purchase weapons or drugs.

  Precious stones born from such darkness could not live in the world of light. That was where the Port Mafia came in and bent a few rules. First, they would shed light on all the shadowy stones that arrived at port in Yokohama; a smuggler would then bring the gems into Yokohama proper where a pawnshop would buy them before passing them over to a professional who cut them so nobody could verify where they came from. Necklaces became bracelets, bracelets became earrings, and earrings became rings, giving the gemstones a second life. The new stones were then appraised by a Mafia-backed appraiser who would make an official certificate of authenticity for each one before they were circulated to the wholesalers and sold at high-end jewelry shops.

  The smuggling of precious stones was an extremely lucrative business and important source of income for the Mafia. Bypassing customs and intermediaries within mainstream distribution channels resulted in massive profits. Nevertheless, these magical stones always led to violence and bloodshed, and the only thing that could stop this violence and maintain a stable system was even more violence.

  Chuuya had been filling this role perfectly as of late—almost too perfectly. Even many old-timers in the Mafia were impressed, since there wasn’t a single soul who thought a sixteen-year-old kid could manage a black market for gemstones with such ease. Yet others—although few in number—weren’t surprised in the least: those who had fought the Sheep when Chuuya was their leader. Chuuya, the Sheep King, had crushed any Mafia member who’d gotten in his way; there was nothing strange about him mastering a couple of jewelry markets. But he didn’t care about anyone’s surprise, or praise, or even envy. The one thing he wanted was something they could never give him.

  Chuuya half-heartedly tossed the documents onto the seat next to him as if he were throwing a pebble.

  “Who knows how many more years it’s gonna take at this rate,” he griped somewhat bitterly.

  The driver pretended not to hear.

  The luxury car arrived at the tranquil residential area right on time. Other than the cawing greenfinch flying low, the area was utterly silent—no trains or cars within earshot. The Mafia car quietly drove down the street until it stopped in front of one particular establishment. This brick building housed an old pool hall, and the sign outside read OLD WORLD in faded letters. The neon lights weren’t turned on, since the place wasn’t open yet.

  Chuuya got out of the car, and the car left just as quietly so as not to disturb the peaceful location. He opened the door to the pool hall…

  …and was met with five guns.

  “We ain’t open yet,” a man growled as he pressed a handgun
to Chuuya’s head.

  “We’ll let corpses inside, though,” said another man. He had a sawed-off shotgun at Chuuya’s chest.

  “Pretty careless to come alone, Jewel King. Wouldn’t you say?” sneered yet another man, his gun aimed at Chuuya’s side.

  “Not even you would be able to block every single one of our attacks in this position,” commented another man with his pocket pistol pressed up against the back of Chuuya’s neck.

  “So what’s it gonna be, Gravity Boy? I promise I’ll make it quick and painless if you start crying and apologize now,” taunted the last of the five men. This one was standing right in front of Chuuya with a long-barreled gun pointed right between his eyes.

  Chuuya was deadlocked. If he attacked any one of them, the others would immediately open fire. If he tried to retreat back out the door, he would be shot from the front. If he took a step forward, he would be shot from behind.

  Chuuya didn’t react. His expression didn’t even change. The tension was thick enough to cut with a knife as five index fingers tightened around their triggers.

  Bang!

  A hollow blast echoed through the street.

  Chuuya stood stock-still as numerous bloodlike streams slid down his head—from multicolored party streamers.

  “Happy one-year Port Mafia anniversary, Chuuya!”

  The pool hall rang with the five men’s cheerful shouts. Chuuya looked around the room with an annoyed glare.

  “…What is wrong with you people?”

  White smoke was still coming out of their guns. Chuuya’s head was covered in colorful streamers, and confetti was still raining from above. The men grinned at the sight of Chuuya decked out in party goods.

  The five of them were members of a peer support group within the Port Mafia. And not just any ordinary support group—they were the future of the organization, all either the same rank as Chuuya or higher. Every member was under twenty-five years old, which was why they were referred to as the Young Bloods—the young wolves of the Port Mafia.

  After heaving a deep sigh, Chuuya walked toward the back of the pool hall with a distant expression, not even greeting any of the attendees.