Edogawa Ranpo turned his grief into appetite, dragging along Nakahara Chuuya—who had wanted to return to Suribachi City—to go find something to eat.
For a moment, Nakahara Chuuya genuinely began to doubt which of them was actually younger.
By coincidence, Chuuya's breakfast had mostly digested by then. He was not a glutton, but his appetite was substantial, and life in Suribachi City had long conditioned him to crave the kind of food only proper restaurants could provide.
After glancing over the menu, Chuuya cautiously selected a signature set meal from the many tempting options.
"I want these! And these! Red bean mochi, strawberry daifuku, pudding, tamagoyaki—" Edogawa Ranpo rattled off a long list to the waiter without the slightest restraint, startling Chuuya into exclaiming, "Ranpo! You won't be able to finish all that!" During their time attending cram school in Tokyo, their meals had been provided by the institute, so Chuuya had never witnessed this particular brand of extravagance.
Stopped in his tracks, Ranpo reluctantly crossed off a few desserts he had only intended to sample out of curiosity.
"You're not getting rice?" Chuuya noticed the absence of a staple.
"These are enough!" Ranpo lifted his chin proudly, like a stray cat roaming free beyond the supervision of any guardian.
Seeing how confident he looked, Chuuya sat back down, obediently sipping the tea the waiter had brought over, and found himself thinking that this country kid somehow looked more like a proper city dweller than he did.
Ten minutes later, desserts and main dishes were served one after another, crowding the small two-person table to the brim.
Edogawa Ranpo dug in at once.
Remembering the contents of the earlier phone call, Nakahara Chuuya hesitated, then asked, "Ranpo, what kind of work does Mr. Akiya do?"
With his mouth full of red bean paste, Ranpo replied, "Didn't you call him Dad when we were out of town?"
Chuuya flushed bright red.
"Kids are still kids," Edogawa Ranpo said solemnly, "You already accepted Akiya taking care of you, and in your heart you acknowledged that way of addressing him. But the moment you came back to Yokohama, you got scared and changed how you called him."
Nakahara Chuuya muttered in distress, "Lower your voice. Don't say it so everyone can hear!"
"I really don't understand what you're worried about," Edogawa Ranpo replied.
"I'm not worried. Next time I see him, I'll still call him Dad… I'm just not used to it yet…" Chuuya stammered. Ranpo did not bother to look at his guilty expression. He lifted the miso soup and took a sip. Akiya had not been wrong at all—when the weather turned cool, drinking hot soup was the most comfortable and nourishing thing. Akiya must be very good at making soup!
"He's in the mafia, you know."
Out of nowhere, Edogawa Ranpo casually revealed Asou Akiya's line of work.
Ever since acknowledging Chuuya as his own, Asou Akiya had never restricted the contact between Edogawa Ranpo and Nakahara Chuuya. Ranpo, being someone exceptionally skilled at reading between the lines, naturally took advantage of that freedom and found himself a perfect conversational dumping ground.
Edogawa Ranpo smiled, his eyes narrowing into cheerful slits, and in some subtle way he even resembled Akiya's cunning. "The little orange cat's way of thinking sometimes slips beyond my predictions, so let me ask you this~ What did you think it was before?"
With his thoughts in a mess, Nakahara Chuuya answered, "Someone who works… at a large company."
"That kind of guess is way too boring," Edogawa Ranpo said.
"So what if it's boring!" Chuuya recalled the absurd host-club theories his companions had once floated and tried to gloss things over. However, Edogawa Ranpo once again put on that smug, all-seeing expression. "Ohhh, a host, then."
"I didn't say that, you're the one making wild guesses!" Chuuya insisted stubbornly.
Edogawa Ranpo split open his third bowl of red bean mochi, scooped out the filling with a spoon, and ate blissfully.
"What you say doesn't matter anyway. Akiya will definitely believe me."
"You…!"
"Are you going to bribe me?" Ranpo tilted his head cheerfully. "Like the kind of bribe adults give each other? I might consider accepting it, you know."
"Who would bribe a sweet-tooth addict like you?!"
"Sweet things are the best!"
"Shut up and eat the mochi part of the red bean mochi properly!"
"Nooo~."
Their childish back-and-forth made the server nearby stifle a laugh. No one took Edogawa Ranpo's words seriously at all.
What mafia, what host clubs—just kids indulging in their chuunibyou fantasies, that was all.
After filling their stomachs, Edogawa Ranpo dragged Nakahara Chuuya into an eyeglasses shop. Surrounded by neatly arranged displays of refined, fashionable frames, Chuuya grew visibly tense, afraid he might accidentally break something.
"Little orange cat, come take a look—what color do you like?"
"Huh? What is all this?"
Chuuya walked over and saw small boxed items in all sorts of strange, unfamiliar colors.
Edogawa Ranpo announced his deduction. "I'm guessing these are things that change your eye color."
At his insistence, Nakahara Chuuya tried on a pair of yellow-tinted contact lenses. His face twisted with distaste as his eyes struggled to adjust. When he opened them again, the pure, sapphire-blue of his gaze had turned green. Blue, one of the three primary colors, mixed with yellow could produce green—but green could never be blended back into blue.
Edogawa Ranpo leaned in close to inspect Chuuya's eyes and reached a conclusion. "Still looks pretty fake. You'd better keep some distance."
"Move. I want to see the mirror," Nakahara Chuuya said, shoving aside Ranpo, whose way of thinking clearly operated on a different wavelength. He stared into the mirror with fascination, seeing a version of himself with orange hair and green eyes.
Meanwhile, Edogawa Ranpo scampered off to find the shop owner and buy something.
Using the words Akiya had taught him—haggle! Never give adults the chance to cheat children into wasting their money!
The shop owner nearly cried.
What kind of family raised a child like this—sharp as a fox, clever to the bone?
After settling the bill, Nakahara Chuuya had already removed the colored contacts. He held the small box and the care solution in his hands and muttered, "Hey, why did we even buy something this troublesome? It's not cheap either. If I really wanted to see Randou-san, I could just hide in a corner and look from afar." In truth, he had never met Randou in person. He had only seen photos on Akiya's phone. Akiya had promised to let him meet him properly, but lately the man had been so busy that there had been no chance to arrange it.
"That's way too miserable," Edogawa Ranpo said, eyes wide. "What kid has to hide in a corner just to see their parent?"
Nakahara Chuuya lowered his head and kicked at a pebble on the ground. "I'm… different."
Ranpo shot back bluntly, "What's different about you? I might be dumber than adults, but I'm way smarter than you!"
Chuuya glanced at him—this guy really never learned, no matter how many times he got burned.
But when the words reached his lips—
The orange-haired boy pressed his mouth into a thin line, his deep blue eyes taking on a warm hue under the sunlight.
"You're right… I'm not that different at all…"
The human heart loves to build walls.
Just as Edogawa Ranpo clung to his mistaken understanding of the world, Nakahara Chuuya remained trapped by his past as something that had not been human. The boy who wanted most desperately to be human had forgotten something important: it was not that he looked down on ordinary people, but that he himself had insisted on placing distance between them.
In front of Asou Akiya and Edogawa Ranpo, he was nothing more than a child.
And children… always want to be loved by adults.
"Yoshi!"
The now "homeless" Edogawa Ranpo pointed straight down the road ahead. "Let's go track down the assassin!"
Nakahara Chuuya was completely thrown off by the sudden turn. "The as… assassin?"
Edogawa Ranpo's eyes gleamed with the light of pure intelligence—or rather, pure troublemaking—sparkling brilliantly.
"Akiya explained it very clearly," Ranpo said confidently. "Use your brain, Chuuya. What he said was, 'the enemy has defected, and the assassin is nothing to worry about,' but he never said that the assassin who shot him had already been caught."
Asou Akiya had bled.
That alone was unforgivable.
"So what are you planning to do?" Nakahara Chuuya gave up on thinking altogether and handed his brain over to Ranpo for full custody.
"To deal with people who do bad things, like an assassin," Ranpo said, pinching his chin as he bounced happily on his toes, "my father told me—you find adults to help, throw them into prison, and let them be reformed! When they come out next time, they'll behave like decent people!"
...
The consequence of letting one feral brat run free was that even the well-behaved child ended up getting corrupted.
Working together, the two of them forcibly made use of Kudo Yusaku's connections and actually got people from the National Police Agency involved to arrest someone.
Three days later—
A freelance assassin who had fled all the way from Italy to Japan was captured in a daze, utterly confused about how things had gone so wrong.
Edogawa Ranpo dialed Asou Akiya's number and bragged cheerfully, "Ah-ra-ra, I caught the assassin! Do you have anything you want to say to him? He looks like he's done so many bad things that he can't even remember what he did wrong."
Asou Akiya: "..."
At the dining table, the spaghetti in his mouth very nearly sprayed out.
Under Randou's stunned gaze, Asou Akiya hastily wiped the corner of his mouth, swallowing the food in a most undignified rush. He gestured at Randou with a sign that clearly meant "we'll talk later," while his mind frantically tried to sort out the logic of how events had unfolded.
Ranpo goes home → Ranpo discovers the shooting → Ranpo deduces the killer's information → Ranpo catches the killer???
Wasn't there a step missing somewhere in between here?!
With Ranpo's intelligence, locating the killer's whereabouts would not be difficult, but actually apprehending the killer was another matter entirely. Ranpo knew nothing about ability users; indirectly, that meant he also had no understanding of Chuuya's true combat strength. Otherwise, that little brat would have immediately called him to ask about ability user-related intelligence—after all, in Yokohama, there was no one who possessed more comprehensive information on abilities than he did.
Chuuya was not part of Ranpo's combat planning at all, so then… had he borrowed an external force?
External force—but where did that external force come from?
Asou Akiya mentally went through everyone Edogawa Ranpo knew, his heart pounding harder and harder, afraid that Ranpo's growth trajectory had once again veered off course by accident, or worse, that he had come into contact with Fukuzawa Yukichi far earlier than he should have.
The word "caught"… did he call in the police for help?
In the blink of an eye, Asou Akiya thought of Kudo Yusaku, a man with vast connections throughout Japan's law enforcement circles.
He fit the conditions for someone Ranpo could make use of almost perfectly.
With a splitting headache, Asou Akiya said, "Ranpo, remember to thank Mr. Kudo—and as for what to say to the killer…" He had originally intended to refuse outright, but then a memory surfaced of that moment when his own life had hung by a thread. Back then, if the killer had simply stopped hesitating and slit his throat without a second thought, he would already be tucked neatly into Randou's Illuminations, waiting to be mourned.
In a lifetime, how many people are lucky enough to succeed even once, without collapsing along the road to success?
"...Forget it. Just pass along one sentence to him."
"Say it quickly~ he's about to be taken away!"
The child's voice was bright and lively.
Asou Akiya's gaze met Randou's. Randou had tightened his grip on his knife and fork as well; he had clearly heard everything about the killer.
A softness settled over Asou Akiya's heart, and with it came a renewed sense of gratitude for the sheer preciousness of being alive.
The cautionary words he chose to leave the killer with were—
"You did well. However, a truly perfect operation is only complete after the assassination itself, and after the mouths of all killers connected to it have been sealed."
Originally spoken by Dazai Osamu to Mori Ougai when he was fifteen, the words were now retold by Asou Akiya, slightly revised, and cast back into the world.
They aligned uncannily with reality.
This heavy black pot—the blame—was solidly and irrevocably dumped onto Watanabe Yukisada, the man who had hired a killer to murder.
Who knew whether the police could even keep the assassin locked up? There was no way he would be stupid enough to admit his real identity!
Goodbye. Farewell forever! If you ever get the chance, go and take your revenge on your employer!
But to Edogawa Ranpo's ears, Uncle Akiya's words carried an entirely different meaning. After a round of enthusiastic mental embellishment, realization dawned on him: Akiya had negotiated with this man to spare his own life, completed the plan, and once that was done, the other party had lost all value!
Edogawa Ranpo paid no attention to the killer's fury. After delivering the message, he mockingly left behind words of his own.
"You're useless now, assassin."
Two meters away, Nakahara Chuuya stared intently at the killer, every muscle coiled and ready—if the man made a sudden move, Chuuya would step in at once and subdue him.
Unfortunately for him, the ring of surrounding police officers gave Nakahara Chuuya no chance to show what he could really do.
Hearing Ranpo's words, Chuuya was utterly confused. Wasn't this supposed to be about avenging Dad? How did it turn into a discussion about being useful or useless? There was no way Dad had hired a killer to assassinate himself, right?
Edogawa Ranpo abandoned the rest of them without a second thought. "Little orange kitty, I can go home and look for Akiya now!"
Nakahara Chuuya blinked blankly. "Did he agree to that?"
Edogawa Ranpo answered with absolute certainty, "He will!"
Inside the safehouse, Asou Akiya said wearily, his mind and spirit exhausted, "Randou, let's bring him back."
Cats really did need someone to keep an eye on them.
The corners of Randou's lips lifted slightly. Having likewise pieced together the rough course of events through logic alone, he said, "Akiya, you're really awful, you know—framing someone else like that." Setting that aside, he turned his appreciation to the Edogawa Ranpo his boyfriend had effectively taken in: reliable when it truly mattered, never dragging others down, and at home behaving exactly like a kitten that bounced and scampered everywhere.
"Ranpo-kun is a clever, good child. He helped you catch the killer and saved me the trouble of going out to hunt someone down myself."
The only regret Randou felt was that he hadn't been able to personally deal with the assassin, to let him experience something even more despairing than death.
Little kitty.
Tonight, you'll be rewarded with French-style red bean soup.