A screeching halt!

The recklessly driven black sedan came to a stop by the roadside. Dazai kicked open the car door, grabbed his phone from the driver’s seat, leaving behind his black coat and firearm inside—no one dared to touch the vehicle of the Yokohama Port Mafia.

He sprinted all the way back to the clinic and at the entrance, he gathered up the trembling Hyakki in his arms.

“It’s okay.”

Dazai didn’t look at the shattered glass or the spider-web cracks in the concrete. He placed his hand on Hyakki’s head, pressing the spiritually shattered figure against his not-so-strong chest. In that instant of recognition of reality, Hyakki reached the depths of despair, where no one could approach him except his Dororo.

Dropping his eyelashes, Dazai noticed the missing mask on Hyakki’s face, and a glint of coldness flashed in his turquoise eyes.

Then.

He mimicked comforting scenes from movies, repeatedly stroking Hyakki’s smooth hair, imagining the figure in his arms as an injured beast covered in blood, gritting its teeth and weeping.

“I won’t leave you behind. Come with me to the Yokohama Port Mafia.”

Dazai thought he could coax Hyakki along, or at worst, struggle a bit to help him into the car.

But Hyakki curled up on the ground, gripping onto the door.

“Hyakki!”

Dazai’s voice heightened, realizing his urgency. Patiently, he pried open Hyakki’s fingers, the prosthetic ones unable to grasp the door, and placed them gently around himself.

Since the morning, Dazai had understood that he didn’t mind Hyakki’s kiss.

Such a pure kiss was rare in a lifetime.

Women admired his youthful and handsome appearance, men feared his devilish mind. No one looked beyond Dazai’s body to see the essence of his soul. He had encountered only Hyakki, and Hyakki had only him. They were the incomplete halves of a circle in this world, indispensable to each other. Meeting each other was their greatest fortune. Dazai found someone he could protect with his intelligence, while Hyakki’s strength kept their enemies at bay.

This time, completely out of Dazai’s control, “kind gods” somehow transformed Hyakki into someone who refused the outside world.

Dazai could deduce some truths.

Hyakki came from an unknown ancient place, a truth confirmed by Bai Lan.

—The other was a visitor from a different world.

Despite Hyakki’s tragic upbringing, he surely had loved ones in his own world who raised him, taught him to fight, and painstakingly crafted a mask that best fit the realities of his face.

Blind and deaf, Hyakki had no idea he had crossed through time and space.

Eventually, he would know.

Dazai couldn’t see Hyakki’s tears. The boy without eyes had been deprived even of the right to shed tears. Dazai didn’t want to feign comfort through Hyakki’s beautifully cold mask, telling him that everything would pass.

How false that would be, how impossible to easily abandon one’s world.

How sorrowful, never finding familiar people or things again.

“You” had been abandoned by the world.

“Hyakki…” Dazai discarded the intricately crafted mask that had sculpted his features, and the restored skin bore testimony to the efforts made in this world, where the past had faded away, leaving only the future. He hoped those hollow eyes would regain their cold, gray-brown hue, that his nose would be straight and his entire face perfect — things stolen from Hyakki at birth by a heaven that did not desire perfection.

Yet Hyakki couldn’t perceive Dazai’s thoughts, enveloped in an embrace from someone unguarded in the darkness.

No cold, no warmth, just the return of the person who accompanied him.

“Dororo…”

His throat was hoarse from crying, his tongue absent; how else could people communicate?

He feared whether the one embracing him loved him as he imagined.

A beast that could endure with just a thread of love, unable to find familial or romantic love, wounded by the brightness, shed armor and helmet to curl in a dark corner, refusing to see this world.

“Am I deluding myself? Do you not really like me, just pity me…”

“Will you still be my Dororo?”

“What do you want to say?” Dazai grasped his hand, put it down, was clear attitude,” –