Killing by Proxy

"Chen Lei triggered a hidden rule." Kannazuki stated it as a fact.

Ryuk stopped chewing.

He tossed the remaining half of the apple into his mouth and crunched through it, core and all.

His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

"No." Hanging upside down from the ceiling, Ryuk licked the juice from the corners of his mouth with his long tongue. "No, he didn't."

Kannazuki's pen hand remained still. He looked up.

"He didn't?"

"Chen Lei is just an ordinary human." Ryuk released his claws, flipped his massive body in midair, and landed squarely on the single bed. The battered bed frame groaned in protest.

"He doesn't have a notebook, can't see shinigami, and doesn't even know about the game behind all this.

How could he possibly trigger a rule on purpose?"

Kannazuki set down his rollerball pen.

He leaned back in his chair, his hands folded in front of him.

"You just said, 'You mustn't kill him,'" Kannazuki repeated Ryuk's words.

"You didn't say, 'You can't kill him.' There's a huge difference."

Ryuk tilted his head, his bulging red eyes fixed on Kannazuki.

"'Can't kill him' would mean Chen Lei meets some objective condition that makes him immune to the notebook.

For instance, he uses a false name, or his lifespan has already run out."

Kannazuki began picking apart the logic in an even voice. "But he's alive.

His name and photograph have been on the municipal police bureau's public noticeboard for ten years.

He can't be immune."

Kannazuki stood up. He walked to the window and opened a narrow gap in the curtains. It was dark outside, and the streetlights had come on.

"'Mustn't kill him' means that writing his name would have consequences I couldn't bear.

Or that it would violate some absolute restriction." Kannazuki turned around and looked straight into Ryuk's eyes.

"You said the Creator added three hidden rules.

I've always assumed those three rules were restrictions or rewards for the notebook's owner."

Kannazuki paused for two seconds.

"No." Kannazuki rejected his own deduction.

"You lied."

Ryuk spread his mouth in a grin, exposing his jagged fangs.

He gave a hoarse laugh.

"What did I lie about?" Ryuk asked.

"The number of rules."

Kannazuki returned to the desk. "You're a hedonist.

You enjoy watching humans struggle in the dark.

You'd never show your entire hand.

Three was just a number you tossed out offhand.

The Creator might have added five rules, or even ten.

You're using the number three to fence in my thinking."

Ryuk said nothing. He merely gave his black feathered wings a flap.

Kannazuki planted both hands on the desk.

"There's another possibility." Kannazuki leaned forward. "The Creator's new rules aren't aimed at me at all."

"Then who are they aimed at?" Ryuk countered.

"You," Kannazuki said, enunciating every word.

"The Creator imposed absolute restrictions on you.

To obey the rules, or avoid punishment, you had no choice but to speak up and stop me from killing Chen Lei."

Dead silence settled over the cramped rental room. Only the ticking of the wall clock's second hand remained.

Ryuk watched Kannazuki. Suddenly, he erupted into a piercing, bizarre laugh. He rolled around on the bed, his wings sending the sheet flying.

"Gahahahaha! You're so interesting, Light!" Ryuk sat up, tapping his nails against the bed's metal frame.

"Guess all you like.

I'm not telling you anything anyway.

Like I said, I'm only here to watch the show.

But I can guarantee one thing: the moment you write Chen Lei's name, this game ends."

Kannazuki straightened up. He watched the shinigami reveling in delight.

He asked no more questions. He knew he couldn't pry a definite answer out of Ryuk.

But he had narrowed down the possibilities. The rules were more complicated than he had imagined, and they very likely involved the shinigami's own survival.

Kannazuki sat back down in the folding chair.

He sensed something strange.

He hadn't slept for two days and two nights. Over those forty-eight hours, he had endured intense physical exertion and extremely tense psychological confrontations. By all rights, his head should have been splitting, his thoughts sluggish.

But they weren't.

His brain was working extraordinarily fast. Every step of his earlier deduction had formed instantly in his mind, perfectly clear and free of interference.

He could even recall every word Chen Lei had spoken in the interrogation room, right down to the scratches on the second button below his collar.

He clenched his fists. His knuckles cracked sharply.

The feedback from his contracting muscles was unusually responsive. Strength filled his limbs.

This wasn't normal.

The incandescent bulb cast a dim light over the cramped rental room.

Ryuk's massive body crouched on the single bed.

He held the half-eaten Red Fuji Apple in his hand.

His bulging red eyes shifted as he watched Kannazuki sitting deep in thought on the folding chair.

The shinigami grinned, exposing his jagged fangs. He was happy, with even a hint of malicious delight.

"Heh-heh." Ryuk crunched through the apple core, his throat bobbing.

"Since you've worked so hard and given me apples, I'll give you a little hint."

Kannazuki didn't look up. His gaze remained on the black notebook on the desk.

"Under normal circumstances, we can't kill Chen Lei."

Ryuk flapped his black feathered wings, stirring a cold gust that sent the scratch paper on the desk rustling.

"We can't kill anyone in the authorities, either.

But under certain circumstances, we can."

Kannazuki's pen hand stopped in midair.

He raised his head and looked straight into Ryuk's eyes.

He was speechless.

Utterly speechless.

Kannazuki looked at the winged monster before him.

A scheming bastard who knew every secret, yet insisted on shredding the rules, mangling them, and doling them out a scrap at a time.

The Creator had given them three new rules, but Ryuk refused to reveal them all.

Now he had offered the paradox of "can kill, but can't kill," clearly enjoying the sight of a human struggling.

But Kannazuki let none of that emotion show. His face retained the dull, placid expression peculiar to a delivery worker at the bottom of society.

Tension spread through his chest.

Chen Lei was an enormous obstacle.

The veteran detective's intuition was frighteningly accurate.

Unless he dealt with him soon, every step of the coming purge would be a struggle.

People in the authorities couldn't be killed.

Kannazuki's mind began racing.

What did the authorities represent? The machinery of the state, the foundation of order.

The Creator had introduced the Death Note into the real world to watch an entertaining story unfold.

If the notebook's owner could simply write down the names of the highest leaders and paralyze the entire nation's command structure in a day, this world would collapse instantly.

If the game ended too quickly, it would lose its entertainment value.

So the Creator had given government personnel an absolute shield.

As long as they wore that uniform, as long as they remained within the system, the notebook's direct killing rule wouldn't work.

"But under certain circumstances, we can."

Kannazuki silently repeated the latter half of Ryuk's statement.

The shield wasn't permanent. It had loopholes.

What did the authorities and Chen Lei have in common?

Their status within the system.

A flash of insight shot through Kannazuki's mind.

How could he make a police officer stop being a police officer?

Strip him of his status.

If Chen Lei were expelled from the Party and dismissed from public office for serious misconduct, if he became a wanted criminal...

His "official shield" would fall away on its own.

Then writing his name in the notebook would take effect immediately.

That was the first solution.

There was a second.

The original Death Note had an ironclad rule: if the specified cause of death would kill someone whose name hadn't been written down, that cause would be invalid, and the target would die of a simple heart attack.

But the Creator had changed the rules.

What if the Creator allowed killing by proxy?

If I can't write Chen Lei's death directly, could I write down a death-row inmate's name and control him into killing Chen Lei before he dies?

Kannazuki stared at the rollerball pen on the desk. His thoughts grew clearer and clearer, the chain of logic closing into a loop.

"Light."

Ryuk's hoarse voice interrupted Kannazuki's deductions.

The shinigami hopped off the bed and brought his enormous body close to Kannazuki.

His deathly pale face nearly touched the tip of Kannazuki's nose.

"Have you noticed anything lately?" Ryuk tilted his head and licked his lips.

"Your thoughts have been moving a little faster lately.

You're starting to grow a brain."

Kannazuki's pupils contracted.

He leaned back in his chair, putting distance between himself and Ryuk.

His thoughts were moving faster.

Those words were a key, instantly unlocking every question Kannazuki had about his condition.

He closed his eyes.

Forty-eight hours.

He hadn't slept for a single minute while facing Chen Lei's high-pressure questioning in the interrogation room.

Normally, his head would have been splitting by now, his concentration scattered. He might even have been hearing things.

But he felt astonishingly good.

His mind was as clear as if it had just been rinsed in ice water.

His logical deductions came faster than they had in all his previous twenty-five years combined.

He could even clearly recall the orientation of the seventh pattern on the hallway carpet when he had delivered food to the Grand Hyatt's third-floor banquet hall two days earlier, and the number of blood droplets that had splashed onto the wall when Sun Ming fell.

Perfect memory.

Kannazuki opened his eyes.

He held out his right hand, spread his fingers, then abruptly clenched his fist.

His knuckles cracked like popping beans. The force of his muscle fibers' contractions and the speed of their feedback had reached a terrifying balance.

He picked up the utility knife he usually used to cut tape.

His wrist flicked slightly.

The blade danced between his fingers, so fast it became nothing but a silver blur.

Its edge skimmed his fingertips without leaving a single cut.

Absolute muscle control.

Kannazuki stopped. The utility knife came to rest securely between his index and middle fingers.

"The more people the notebook's owner kills, the more developed his brain becomes.

His memory and muscle control improve by the same degree." Kannazuki looked at Ryuk, his voice steady but carrying an unquestionable certainty. "The effect is permanent."

Ryuk froze for a moment.

Then the shinigami erupted into roof-shaking laughter.

"Gahahahaha!" Ryuk flew around the cramped room, his wings striking the walls. "You guessed it!

You actually figured it out yourself! That's right! This is the Creator's gift!"

Kannazuki tossed the utility knife onto the desk.

So that was how it worked.

Zhao Gang, Wang Hu, Zhang Wei, Sun Ming, Lei Bao, Li Jianguo.

Six lives.

The deaths of these six men had not only cleared the trash out of Linhai City, but also fed some kind of dimensional energy they had left behind back into Kannazuki.

This was a game of evolution through slaughter.

The more evil people he killed, the higher his intelligence rose and the stronger his body became.

The creator had given him not only a weapon to judge life and death, but also the perfect vessel to wield it.

"You just said people working for the authorities can't be killed, but under certain circumstances, they can."

Kannazuki stood up, walked to the sink, and turned on the tap.

Cold water washed over his hands.

"Since I've already figured out one hidden rule," Kannazuki said, turning off the tap and grabbing a towel to dry his hands, "I'll guess another."

He walked back to the computer desk.

His gaze settled on the black Death Note.

"In the original rules, the notebook can't control people to make them kill.

But in this world, this notebook can control people to make them kill."

Kannazuki looked at Ryuk.

Ryuk's laughter stopped abruptly.

The Shinigami crouched atop the wardrobe, his bulging eyes fixed on Kannazuki.

Two seconds later.

"Gahahahaha!" Ryuk burst out laughing again. "Human, you're a real monster! That brain of yours works better than a Shinigami's now!"

Kannazuki did not smile.

Confirmed.

The loophole in the official shield was to kill through someone else's hands.

Chen Lei couldn't be killed by writing his name directly in the notebook.

But Linhai City had no shortage of desperate criminals with blood on their hands.

All he had to do was write those criminals' names in the notebook and control them to attack Chen Lei.

Even with an official shield, Chen Lei couldn't stop physical bullets and blades.

That was the way to break the deadlock.

Kannazuki sat back down on the folding chair.