Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru - Volume 8 - Chapter 2.7

 Brutality falls from the heavens

The gloomy office building was empty.

At first, I thought the White Tengu terrorist might have run everyone off, but there didn’t seem to have been any fighting. It was as if there was some good reason people had never been there in the first place.

“Maybe there was a power outage, and they couldn’t get any work done, so everybody went home?”

“That could happen. I’d rather believe that instead of assuming they got spirited away by the tengu.”

Using our phones as flashlights, Natsunagi and I made our way up through the thirty-five-story office building. The elevator wasn’t an option thanks to the power outage, so we took the stairs, checking each floor for people…and the White Tengu.

“Can you still hear that voice?”

“Yes, it’s still above us. I can’t make out what it’s saying clearly, but…”

A mystery voice only Natsunagi could hear. How did that work? —But there was always a reason, a cause, for everything. That was why time flowed smoothly, and why the world turned without kicking up any contradictions. At least on the surface.

That surface wasn’t totally smooth, though. There were inconsistencies; you just couldn’t see them. Maybe the ones who quietly resolved these contradictions behind the scenes were the Men in Black, and maybe Pandemonium did the opposite. A crowd of invisible demons that technically shouldn’t have been there were using natural phenomena to make the contradictions apparent, advertising the fact that they existed.

We traveled around the building, checking thoroughly, and forty more minutes passed before we finally found something promising. It was standing in front of a big window on the twenty-seventh floor.

“…What is that?” Natsunagi was gazing at the leader of the demon horde, her face tense. It was about ten meters away. Technically, we didn’t know if it was the White Tengu or not. If it had matched the description I’d been given earlier, even if it was grotesque, I might have been able to accept it a little more easily…but the thing lording over the office was a dog.

Not a red-nosed tengu. A white dog.

Even so, it obviously wasn’t just a stray. Not even the biggest breeds grow to over three meters long.

The dog was vaguely wolflike, and its golden eyes were locked on Natsunagi and me. The tension in the air kept us still. Was this what frogs felt like when they were staring down a snake?

“Kimizuka, what do we do?” Natsunagi tugged at the cuff of my sleeve. We’d found the target, but now what?

Rill had told me how to seal the White Tengu the previous day, while we chatted about random other stuff, and I put it into action.

“Are you the leader of Pandemonium?” I got up the nerve to speak to it…but it didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t; I was talking to a dog.

“Kimizuka, if you ever became a pet owner, you’d be the type who never shuts up because you don’t have friends to talk to in real life…”

“Not fair. They call it a tengu. I thought it might understand human speech.”

Besides, I’d gotten this method straight from Rill, and she was an expert: “The way to deal with the White Tengu is to listen to what it has to say. That’s all.”

However, if we couldn’t understand each other, we were out of luck. It would be last night’s murder of crows all over again.

“I guess I should have had Rill domesticate me more thoroughly, huh.”

“Because you could have talked to it as a fellow dog? Don’t think like that; it’s not that simple.”

As we were bantering, the White Tengu moved, like it had understood us anyway. Shifting heavily, it lifted its huge body and opened its enormous mouth.

“■■■■■■■■■”

It said something, but I didn’t know what. My ears had caught a noise that sounded like the growl of a beast. It really hadn’t seemed like intelligible words.

“—Huh?” Natsunagi murmured. Still a little startled, she said, “It was you?”

“Don’t tell me that’s the voice you were hearing.”

“Yes. It’s the one I heard before we entered the building. I’m positive.”

“I see. So you would have made a better pet than me, huh?”

“Double-kill! That’s not it.” Natsunagi’s expression was serious. “It’s word-soul.”

I flinched slightly at the term.

We’d discussed that ability at Drachma’s clinic. It was likely that Hel had used that power in combination with her red eyes to force others to do what she said.

“Technically, this ability is a little different from hers. I don’t know how to put it, though. It’s as if it’s speaking directly into my brain. That’s what it feels like anyway.”

“…Frankly, I don’t get this at all, but you can tell what the White Tengu is saying on instinct?”

Natsunagi nodded, although she didn’t look super confident. “I think so.”

Could she understand the White Tengu’s words because she’d also used word-soul once? Hel’s personality had left Natsunagi, and we’d thought that ability had left with her, but…

“■■■■■■■■■■”

The White Tengu spoke again.

Nodding, Natsunagi attempted to interpret. “He says he’s here as a representative of the demon horde. He wants to make us his apostles. …What’s an apostle? Do you know?” Natsunagi asked me. Apparently, the words appeared in her mind whether she understood what they meant or not.

“He probably wants us…well, you…to act as a sort of messenger for him.”

Natsunagi nodded, then listened to the White Tengu.

“This world holds several devices for recording its past and future. The sacred tome, the clock of the end, the locked box, and beings like myself. They are there as warnings.”

Maybe because Natsunagi wasn’t completely following, either, she relayed the White Tengu’s words in fragments. What kind of warnings?

“Is the warning something like Don’t threaten the safety of the slumbering demon horde?”

“No.” Natsunagi shook her head. “He’s going to tell us.”

Tell us what?

“If nothing changes, in the near future, both the demon horde and the human race will be swallowed up by an enormous cataclysm.”

“An enormous cataclysm? A new global crisis?”

I had so many questions, and the next thing I knew, the White Tengu’s eyes had turned to me. The beast’s large mouth spat out word-soul again, and a moment later, Natsunagi interpreted. “It will destroy the world from the outside. It has a…code for that purpose. Only someone in the opposite position can stop it.”

Still incredibly vague. All I got was that the White Tengu was prophesying an enormous cataclysm or an attack by a great evil, but what was the deal with a “code”? What did that mean? And what about “the opposite position”?

As I waited for the White Tengu to continue, something in my jacket vibrated. At first, I thought it was Drachma sending word that Rill had recovered, but no, my phone was ringing. The text on the screen read “Fuubi Kase.”

I’d been planning to reach out to her if we ran into trouble we couldn’t handle. What was she doing contacting us? I hit the TALK button, but before I could say Hello? her voice burst out of the speaker.

“—Run!”

I almost jerked the phone away from my ear—she was so loud. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Fuubi Kase sound like that.

“Ms. Fuubi, what the heck…?”

“He’s already climbed to the top!”

He? “He” who?

Before I could ask, thunder rumbled.

“—! Natsunagi! Get down!”

The sound wasn’t thunder. That roar was the sound of the ceiling cracking open and crashing down right in front of us.

Then he dropped down from the cavern overhead.

“■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■!!!!”

This time, even I could tell the White Tengu was screaming.

Its huge, white-furred body had been pierced by a greatsword, the intruder’s weapon.

A large man stood over the bloodied tengu. Was his body naturally gray, or was that iron armor? There were all sorts of blades stuck into his broad back and shoulders, from military swords to blades light enough to wield one-handed. Or no—were they growing there?

The man pulled the greatsword out of the White Tengu’s body. Dark-red blood spattered, but the white dog didn’t yelp. It was already dead.

“Natsunagi, get back.”

That was what a cool guy would say at a time like this, but I was dripping with cold sweat.

The enemy stepped down off the White Tengu’s corpse, then slowly turned our way.

He was easily over two meters tall. I finally got a look at his face, but it was covered by an iron mask that only left his mouth exposed.

His lower jaw jutted out like the jaw of a dinosaur I’d seen in a picture encyclopedia when I was a kid, and the iron mask couldn’t contain it. The teeth were much too big and sharp to belong to an ordinary human. His long tongue writhed, and I got the feeling that this was the gaping mouth’s version of a smirk.

“…Kimizuka. What…is that?” Natsunagi had grabbed my arm, and both her hands and her voice were trembling.

I didn’t know this guy. I’d never met this kind of brutality.

Still, for some reason, I instinctively knew his name.

Even as I thought It can’t be that and Please don’t let that be it, I said it aloud.

“He’s the supernatural Gluttony.”