Chapter 17

When Chūya Nakahara caught hold of him, Kamiki Yūhaku tilted his head and met his gaze. His red eyes were devoid of emotion as he simply looked at Chūya.

"You don't need to think of me as your responsibility."

"Or rather, I'm grateful to you," Kamiki Yūhaku said.

"Huh?"

"Thank you for losing control back then. That's why I survived." Kamiki Yūhaku smiled. "My life may have been tragic, and it may be unimaginable to others. Of course, that's true. But I've never regretted coming into this world, just as every time I see sunlight, I remember the flames that shot into the sky back then."

Chūya Nakahara let go of him instinctively. "Why?" he murmured.

"Probably because I met a good person." Kamiki Yūhaku sighed. "I haven't had much luck in my life. Maybe all my luck went into meeting him."

"All right, I have to go find Little Crow. I can't leave it alone in the dark."

Kamiki Yūhaku turned and walked on. His black clothes almost blended into the darkness, as though he were about to dissolve from this world. It was as if he had never belonged to this world: his smile, his manner, everything about him was separated from it.

It was as though he had died at some point, and all that remained here now was a fragment of Kamiki Yūhaku's lingering attachment.

"But!" Chūya Nakahara shouted. "He died, didn't he?"

Kamiki Yūhaku's footsteps stopped at that instant.

"Don't just go pretending you're happy. When you need to cry, cry out loud." Chūya Nakahara looked at his back. "Aren't you tired of living like that?"

Kamiki Yūhaku lowered his head. He didn't answer, only continued walking calmly.

"Kamiki," Chūya Nakahara called his name.

"Learn how to cry."

Kamiki Yūhaku didn't stop walking, but Chūya Nakahara felt he was about to lose control.

Ango Sakaguchi had found the man who had saved Kamiki Yūhaku back then. His name was Kambe Kazuha, a brilliant doctor who also wielded a scalpel at the operating table. But unlike those inhuman researchers, he picked up a scalpel only to save lives.

After the explosion in the French Concession, Kambe Kazuha had been sent there as a doctor and found Kamiki Yūhaku beneath the rubble. He had been about to notify the government when he saw the remains of the laboratory.

As a doctor, he understood what had happened there the moment he saw those things. He was deeply shocked, and soon afterward made a bold decision.

He resigned from the hospital, took Kamiki Yūhaku away, and helped the child who had been forced to struggle for survival in the laboratory return to the world.

Kambe Kazuha had done quite well, whether it was leaving the hospital or secretly taking Kamiki Yūhaku to live somewhere isolated from the world, trying to soothe his pain.

Until an accident happened.

Chūya Nakahara didn't know what the accident was. He only knew that after compiling a list of Kamiki Yūhaku's missions during his first three years in the Port Mafia, he had organized the information following Osamu Dazai's suggestion. In the end, he discovered that after joining the Port Mafia, there was only one thing Kamiki Yūhaku had truly taken the initiative to do.

Namely, wipe out the Kōrai-kai.

In his first year with the Port Mafia, Kamiki Yūhaku had been sent by the ruthless previous boss to help build up the information department as a newcomer. Right under the previous boss's nose, he had used his position in the department to drive the Kōrai-kai into a corner, little by little. Within half a month of the Kōrai-kai's destruction, Mori Ougai killed the previous boss and became the new leader.

No one had noticed, not even Mori Ougai.

Kamiki Yūhaku had disposed of all the unusual files. As a member of the Intelligence Unit, he had been in a position to do so. Chūya Nakahara had only found this information after going to great lengths to track down an old member of the Port Mafia's intelligence team, who had records he had copied out by hand back then.

So why had Kamiki Yūhaku gone to such lengths to destroy the Kōrai-kai, even joining the Port Mafia to make use of its power?

There was one and only one possibility.

Kamiki Yūhaku had been taking revenge.

...For Kambe Kazuha.

Chapter 17

Kamiki Yūhaku had two families.

One was his family of origin, the people who had given birth to and raised him. They had treated him wonderfully when he first came into this world. Kamiki Yūhaku accepted that he had become a child and accepted his new family, but disaster struck sooner than he had imagined.

After walking out of that explosion alive, he returned to a familiar place and found his family shattered.

The people who had loved him had parted ways. Every day, they longed to forget him, to leave their grief behind and face new lives.

Kamiki Yūhaku had lost his first family.

Of course, Kamiki Yūhaku didn't blame them. Everyone was ordinary, after all. Everyone wanted to cast aside their pain, hoping love would bring them happiness and move them, rather than leave them with the pain of loss. Kamiki Yūhaku understood. He had an adult's soul, and understood it better than anyone.

So he left, unwilling to disrupt the happiness they had pieced back together.

He still had a second family. It was a simple one: an impossibly gentle doctor and a clever crow.

Kambe Kazuha often said Little Crow might be an Ability Beast, which was why it understood people so well. If it had been Kitada Hiro, he might already have experimented on Little Crow to determine whether it really was a previously undiscovered Ability Beast. But in Kambe Kazuha's eyes, Little Crow was Little Crow. It was an individual in its own right, and a member of their family.

Yes, Kambe Kazuha was the kind of person who treated animals as family.

"As long as there are feelings, even members of different species can become attached to each other. So it doesn't matter that it's a crow," Kambe Kazuha always said.

Kambe Kazuha taught Kamiki Yūhaku to respect life and cherish himself. He told him that growing flowers wasn't meant to give himself painful stimulation, and that there was still light in the world. All he had to do was look, and he would see that the sun was never stingy about shining on everyone.

Kamiki Yūhaku believed him.

He began to learn how to smile, imitating Kambe Kazuha's gentle manner and adorning himself with the most innocent appearance. Kamiki Yūhaku almost believed he would find

salvation

He almost believed he could walk toward a good future.

But disaster struck.

The kind doctor Kambe Kazuha knew well that the most dangerous place was the safest. To evade the government's pursuit, he and Kamiki Yūhaku lived in a lawless zone, where he occasionally took patients as an underground doctor to support them. In a place like Suribachi City, there was an unwritten rule.

You didn't attack a doctor.

So Kambe Kazuha should have been safe. He took no part in any conflicts, rarely even went out, and devoted his thoughts to Kamiki Yūhaku every day.

That day, he sent Kamiki Yūhaku out to buy medicine, taking That Crow with him. Faced with Kambe Kazuha's doting-father look, Kamiki Yūhaku didn't refuse. He never imagined that this would become the thing he regretted most in his life.

When Kamiki Yūhaku returned with the medicine, he found the house engulfed in flames. The fire burned on as the residents of Suribachi City watched coldly. Kamiki Yūhaku stood in front of the house, the flames reflected in his red eyes, and that fire burned its way into his heart.

The crow circled the burning house in panic. It failed to get inside and even had a tuft of feathers burned off, exposing its flesh-colored body.

That day, Kamiki Yūhaku was fifteen.

The Kōrai-kai had committed the murder and arson. One of their executives had been shot in the lung during a gunfight and was hanging on to life by a thread. They found Kambe Kazuha and demanded he operate on the executive, but a major operation like that was almost impossible in a place without proper medical facilities.

Kambe Kazuha did his best but still failed to save him.

The enraged Kōrai-kai had long regarded Suribachi City as their territory. They believed Kambe Kazuha had been unwilling to save their executive, so they broke the rule, killed him, and burned his body.

The Kōrai-kai made no attempt to hide it. They believed they would soon replace the Port Mafia as Yokohama's leading organization, so what did killing one doctor matter?

Kamiki Yūhaku joined the Port Mafia to avenge Kambe Kazuha. Still young, he lacked the ability to destroy an entire organization, but the Port Mafia had that power. So he pretended to be an orphan wandering Suribachi City

orphan

stranded in Suribachi City and was taken in by the Port Mafia.

Whatever department he was assigned to, it wouldn't stop Kamiki Yūhaku from taking revenge. Joining the information department was the best possible outcome.

At the time, the Port Mafia's boss was still the previous leader. He was terminally ill, and his personal physician, Mori Ougai, had been treating him. In the pain of his illness, his □□ grew ever more severe. Everyone in the Port Mafia feared for their safety, and the Port Mafia kept stirring up trouble.

Kamiki Yūhaku made use of that chaos, adding a few inconsequential things to the intelligence reports. Little by little, he strangled the Kōrai-kai to death as though choking a rabbit.

On the day the Kōrai-kai was destroyed, Kamiki Yūhaku sat alone in his office, gazing at the sky in the distance. Nothing registered in his red eyes.

His life, his everything, had already drifted away.

All that so-called love had brought him was suffering and grief. Kamiki Yūhaku, who could feel no physical pain, nevertheless felt pain. It was an agony that had never caused him to lose his composure like this, even on the operating table. He even had to grip the stem of a thorny flower and watch blood flow from his palm before he could calm down.

A dull, numb sensation lingered in his fingers. Little Crow cried out in alarm, perching on Kamiki Yūhaku's wrist and pecking at him repeatedly in an attempt to make him let go.

But he didn't cry.

After losing his sense of pain, he had finally lost the ability to cry as well.

Kamiki Yūhaku had said he couldn't leave Little Crow alone in the dark.

But in truth, Kamiki Yūhaku was the one who had been abandoned in the dark.

Whether he became a bad person or a good one, all Kamiki Yūhaku wanted was to struggle out of that darkness. He couldn't see anything, and even if he cried and shouted, "Help me," no one would reach out to pull him up. So he had no choice but to pull himself up with all his strength.