Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) (10 page)

Togusa started the engine at the exact same moment. One of the thugs reached for the handle of the passenger-side door, but Kadota’s fist flew out of the open window and put a stop to that.

“Y-you—you—you saved us!”

“Hey, it’s all good. Sorry for being late to our meeting spot!” Karisawa said, cackling.

The van was surprisingly cramped, with the rear being taken up
by Mikado’s trio, Karisawa, and Yumasaki—and a pair of girls who Mikado did not recognize.

The girls in the very back of the van were possibly twins, because aside from one having glasses, they looked exactly the same.

“Um…what are you two doing in here?” Aoba Kuronuma asked, surprised.

They know each other?
Mikado wondered, but before he could say anything, they heard an obnoxious horn from outside and a dull thud against the side of the van.

“Damn, they found us,” the driver grunted, irritated. Mikado looked out of the side windows. He thought the Yellow Scarves they’d ditched had caught up in their own car, but instead, what he saw through the tinted windows was a gang of modified motorcycles bearing men in striped gang uniforms.

“Stop the damn caaaah!”

“Gonna fry ya up in motor oiiil!”

“What happened to our backup?!”

“They can’t come; they found the Black Rider! We’re supposed to join
them
now!”

The gang of bikers shouted back and forth among themselves, but Mikado couldn’t make out their messages from within the van.

“Wh-what’s going on? What’s happening right now?”

“Well, you see, I have an unfortunate announcement. You basically jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Too bad, so sad. We are currently inhabiting a troubled dimension just as treacherous as a certain academy city researching supernatural powers. We’ll just have to wait for the saga of the one whose right hand will bring down this ugly illusion…”

“What in the world are you talking about?!”

“Let me just make sure: Do you know any doctors who look like a frog? That’ll bump your odds of survival up about ten percent. Actually, speaking of frogs, Hakusan Meikun would work, as well.”

Mikado gave up on interacting with Yumasaki’s utter nonsense and turned to Kadota in the front passenger seat instead. When their
eyes met through the rearview mirror, the older man looked a bit apologetic.

“Yeah, some…stuff happened. Sorry.”

“Wh-whaaaaat?!”

Thus began a guided tour of Ikebukuro that was more thrilling than anyone asked for.

The group was locked into a deadly chase without a finish line.

Just at the moment that the next step was impossible to predict (if you even wanted to)—

They heard the whinnying of a headless horse approaching from the front.

“A dripping blackboard eraser! The after-school extracurricular activities never stop when the town becomes your campus! Tokyo’s dangerous horizon wafting with the scent of shining roses, Ikebukuro…

A proud eagle wanders the heights, seeking to slake her ashen lust—the high school girl!

Among these girls who caress the borderline between passion and destruction, our special reporter witnessed a rare sight: the ‘yamanba’ crone fairy!”

Thus read the shameless front cover of
Wakahime (Young Princess) Club
, an adult magazine. It was meant to focus on a certain subset of youth culture and package it for consumption to an older audience, but this particular publication, owing to its very peculiar angle and marketing, was well known for trailblazing its own very niche direction.

On the cover were two women in school sailor uniforms, clearly well over twenty years old, posed in a provocative manner, with a number of holy Buddhist seals placed on their legs below their skirts.

On the center foldout, the seals came into play once again, covering the most sensitive feminine area in a photo that was as erotic as it was confusing.

It was difficult enough to look at a pornographic magazine in front of others—particularly in a classroom when there were girls around—but the obviously slanted aesthetic of this one made it especially awkward.

But in a first-year classroom at Raira Academy, one person read this magazine right out in the open.

“Oooh. Ahhh. Ohhh. That’s hot. Very nice. Wish I had this body, ya know?”

This figure, leaning back in her chair and smirking to herself, was clad in a black-based school uniform that did not belong to Raira Academy. She wore glasses and had a simple smile without a hint of cosmetics covering it. In short, she looked just like a bookworm who should be hiding in a corner of the library, poring over the literary greats like Natsume Soseki or Osamu Dazai.

“Oh man, that’s good stuff. How do you get boobs this big? Milk? Is it milk? What if you just pour the milk right on the boobs and then rub it into the skin? Will that help? What do you think?” she asked the boy sitting next to her with a dazzling smile.

The boy being questioned turned red with a look that said,
Why are you asking me?
and flopped down onto his desk, glancing at her.

While they both had glasses, this girl was the polar opposite of Anri Sonohara otherwise. While Anri had a calm, shadowy maturity to her, this girl had eyes that flashed with mischief behind the lenses and the natural brightness of personality to match it.

And this girl was the one gleefully flipping through the porno mag.

She had a long black skirt and thick glasses, a combination that screamed “honor student.” Not the type of girl you would expect to read something like
that
.

But she continued rifling through the centerfold pictures with an innocent smile on her face, dropping unwanted comments to the boys on either side of her desk.

The boys didn’t know what to do. They were utterly at the mercy of a girl they’d only met half an hour earlier.

Raira Academy, first day of school

Raira Academy was a coed private high school in southern Ikebukuro.

It had a different name just a few years earlier, but it earned its current name when it merged with another local high school.

The campus grounds were not that large, but the school maximized the use of what space it had, so it didn’t feel cramped. It was also close to Ikebukuro Station, which made it an attractive school to people from the suburbs of Tokyo who wanted to commute from home. The average test score and difficulty of getting in were on a slow rise, and its past rumors of being quite a slum before the merger were now a distant memory.

There was a nice view of the surrounding terrain from the higher-altitude campus, but the looming sixty-floor building just ahead did not brook any feeling of superiority. On the other side of the school was Zoshigaya Cemetery, which gave it a slightly lonely atmosphere for being in the middle of a metropolitan city.

Of course, when the students were there, that lonely feeling was nowhere to be seen, crowded out by the oasis of youth at the heart of the capital.

After the school opening ceremonies were finished, each classroom got down to the business of student introductions.

But among them were a few notable outliers.

First, every class had to have its clown—someone who looked for laughs in the hope of livening up the room or sometimes fell on their face and just made things awkward. Some of them were so dense that they couldn’t even realize their jokes weren’t landing.

While some stood out intentionally in their search for stardom, others couldn’t help but stick out by virtue of their size or looks. Others flubbed their own names when doing introductions, which quickly slapped them with the “ditzy” tag.

The Ritual of the First Impression presented a largely insurmountable wall to others, to varied emotional reactions.

Given the nature of the academy, it was rare for people to wind up being classmates with kids they’d been with since middle school or even earlier. Excluding classmates from Raira Academy Middle
School or the other junior highs in the immediate area, you were lucky if you had one or two old friends in your class.

So the mask of the first impression was surprisingly heavy in regard to its effect on one’s personal relationships for the next year (or three). People are more than their appearances suggest, as the saying goes, but that quote held no water if there wasn’t someone around capable of seeing that inner personality, and there was no guarantee that such understanding confidants would be among one’s classmates.

The first impression would lead to the creation of social groups and exert a powerful influence over lunch cliques, classwork teams, and other gatherings.

It all came down to whether you could blend into the class or not. That was the ritual being held when a student made his or her introduction to the rest of the class: the first test of the school year.

And whether they realized this importance or not, there were two students who clearly did not pick up on the signals.

One was the bespectacled girl in Class 1-B.

“I’m Mairu Orihara! Orihara is spelled with the characters for
fold
and
field
, while Mairu means ‘dance’ and ‘flow.’ Nice to meet you! My favorite books are the encyclopedia, manga, and porn mags!”

Her introduction itself was brief and ordinary enough that most of her classmates took the final bit as a forced joke. But her black uniform stood out quite a bit among the green-based Raira uniforms.

What she said next, however, completely changed the feeling in the room.

“I go for both teams when it comes to love and lust! But the spot in my bed for men is already spoken for, so don’t even try! I can go out with as many girls as I want, however, so keep that in mind when you propose a relationship!”

The other student was a girl in Class 1-C who also stood out quite a bit.