After Returning to Yokohama, I Rely on a Mishmash of Secret Identities to Save the World - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Labyrinth (Part II)

The weather was clear and the sun was bright. In this somewhat cramped city of Yokohama, the seaside was a rare place with an open field of vision.

Along the coastline, a wide and level road was built upon a long embankment. Looking far into the distance along the road, one could see the stacked shipping containers of Yokohama Port. The port, which should have been bustling, now had a sparse flow of people, with only a scattering of black suits loitering nearby.

Mm, black suits.

“Nakahara Chuuya” raised a hand to his forehead to peer out, saying with implied meaning, “Reaping without sowing isn’t a good habit.”

Following his gaze, Dazai Osamu likewise saw that group of black suits: “How can this be called reaping without sowing? ‘Chuuya’ and I are good friends, after all.”

He deliberately emphasized the pronunciation of “Chuuya.”

—Since you want to pretend to be Chuuya, then your intelligence is my intelligence, you know.

(Chuuya: I thank you!)

In a place where the other couldn’t see, Dazai Osamu quietly gagged at his own words.

Ugh, being friends with a slug, just thinking about it was a bit disgusting.

Oda Hoshimi, who was donning the Vest, was similarly speechless for an instant.

…Good friends? Who was the person who constantly badmouthed Chuuya-san in front of my brother!

However, even though both people present knew that Dazai Osamu was telling lies with his eyes wide open, nobody exposed it.

“Nakahara Chuuya” sighed: “‘I’ having such a friend is truly unfortunate.”

“Eh? To say that about me, how cruel.” Dazai Osamu complained in a spoiled manner, “At least we used to be colleagues…”

Masked beneath his voice, an imperceptible click sound echoed.

Feeling the hard, cylindrical object pressed against his back, “Nakahara Chuuya” stopped his footsteps.

“According to what I know,” the man behind him spoke with a smile, though the action of his hand wasn’t that friendly, “Chuuya shouldn’t have a long-lost twin brother?”

“Tsk.”

This man who looked exactly identical to “Nakahara Chuuya” gave a light scoff, turning around without any reservation whatsoever, appearing to completely disregard the firearm that was practically shoved into his face.

“Ha… how boring. I thought you could act for a while longer.”

Dazai Osamu raised an eyebrow: “Could it be that you thought your acting skills were very good?”

“Awkward acting is also very tiring.”

Furthermore, this person hadn’t been seriously disguising himself at all.

Although this “Nakahara Chuuya’s” tone made people displeased, the small habits inadvertently revealed between his gestures were just too obvious in Dazai Osamu’s eyes.

That was… the etiquette and upbringing that only belonged to a grand family with extremely deep foundations.

Back then, he himself had also spent several years to rid himself of this so-called family imprint.

“Heavens! People who play the empty-glove-white-wolf trick can be this righteously self-assured now, this world is truly terrifying!”

The man held a face identical to Chuuya’s, putting on a flamboyant expression to point fingers, causing Dazai Osamu to feel a burst of aversion: “Can’t you use your own face?”

“My own face?” ‘Nakahara Chuuya’ abruptly laughed out loud, “How do you know… this isn’t my own face?”

“Host, this character design of yours… is it a bit OOC?…”

“Isn’t that nonsense?” Oda Hoshimi was multi-tasking, sparring with words against Dazai Osamu while rummaging for items in the system space, “Given such a piecemeal character design, it would be a miracle if it wasn’t OOC. Gojo Satoru isn’t a riddle-man either.”

Yesterday after drawing this bizarre combination, Oda Hoshimi’s hands went numb. The so-called Vest was actually the system utilizing the Lord God’s authority to implant corresponding data into the World. The world needed time to adapt to foreign data, and the person manipulating the Vest also needed to perfect the Vest itself to accelerate this progress. Otherwise, the Vest’s movements would be restricted.

The degree of completion for a Vest’s character design was linked to the world’s acknowledgment. Apart from obtaining the acknowledgment rating of local residents, the character design reported by the system already had a file within the World, so he couldn’t exceed the scope of the Vest’s personality too much.

The trouble with piecemeal Vests lay precisely in this. Oda Hoshimi could neither completely refer to Gojo Satoru, nor take Dazai-gaa’s character design, and Chuuya-san’s was even more unsuitable; corresponding adjustments had to be made according to the actual situation.

This derived another problem—how to not be OOC under the premise of already being OOC?

Fortunately, the Lord God didn’t truly want the world to be destroyed. After submitting the situation up, He spent a lot of effort to mete out a little energy, returning the props he had accumulated from doing missions previously, and even indicated that as long as the character’s experiences could justify themselves, He could help resolve a bit of OOC within a reasonable scope.

Oda Hoshimi flipped through this pile of useless things that were less like skills and more like atmosphere-makers, feeling that the amount of sighing these past two days was more than the past few years combined.

“See if the acknowledgment value has risen.”

Little Seven said helplessly, “You were exposed the moment you met, how could the acknowledgment value… eh? It rose?!!”

Although it was only a little bit, it had indeed grown.

Oda Hoshimi wore an expression that showed it was within expectations.

For a suspicious person like Dazai-gaa, one had to let him find clues by himself from the details. Those senses of violation he deliberately displayed just now—such as the air and habits of a grand family, behavioral logic, and differences in personality profiling—totaled up sufficiently to let Dazai Osamu temporarily pluck his Vest out from the identity of a conspirator intentionally disguising as Nakahara Chuuya and think toward other directions.

Dazai Osamu paused, asking curiously: “Your own face? Could it be that you truly are Chuuya’s long-lost brother?”

Could this person have run out from some laboratory?

“You can also understand it that way.” ‘Nakahara Chuuya’ shrugged, his words vague.

“However, I didn’t come to acknowledge family.” He glanced at Dazai Osamu with disgust, “You wasted quite a bit of my time.”

“Sorry, sorry~”

Dazai Osamu said sorry with his mouth, clearly possessing absolutely no heart of repentance, even pushing his luck further: “Since you’re already here, how can we not acknowledge family? How about this, you come to my house as a guest, and I’ll go contact Chuuya to meet with you?”

He brandished the firearm in his hand, making this invitation appear even more solemn.

Even though the atmosphere of their dialogue could still count as relaxed, the heavy aura of darkness lingering around Dazai Osamu’s body made people have no doubt that his hands had stained not a few human lives.

—If it weren’t for the fact that Oda Hoshimi understood him well enough.

Mm, if it were the Dazai-gaa who used to mix around in the Port Mafia back then, he might still have to worry a bit, but the current Dazai-gaa wouldn’t easily fire a gun.

“Woohoo! Found it!” Oda Hoshimi’s eyes lit up, finally turning up a suitable skill.

“Forget it.” ‘Nakahara Chuuya’ waved his hand indifferently, glancing toward the diagonal side, “There’s still someone waiting for me, you know.”

Right at this moment, Dazai Osamu’s hand holding the gun trembled for an instant. An inexplicable sense of crisis enveloped his surroundings, giving him a sensation of being locked onto by a certain line of sight. His sharp five senses, under the pressure of the line of sight, subconsciously transmitted the feedback of danger to his brain—even though this line of sight possessed absolutely no malice.

—”Lock-on”

Effect: Causes a specific target to experience the sense of crisis of being locked onto by a strong individual.

Dazai Osamu let out a light chuckle, not showing it on his face, but his hand slowly lowered: “That’s true, it was my rashness.”

As expected, there is a companion… what a pity.

“If you don’t want to acknowledge family, are the two of you also here to investigate the missing-person cases?”

“It’s not ‘two’.” ‘Nakahara Chuuya’ generously gave out the intelligence he wanted, “We barely count as an organization, I suppose.”

“Though that group of fellows are all weak and stupid, to the point where this kind of matter requires me to personally take action.” He complained half-truely and half-falsely, “There’s no choice, who told me to be the organization’s No. 1.”

Dazai Osamu: “…”

For some reason, he suddenly saw the shadow of several acquaintances on this fellow…

Ranpo-san… no no no, Ranpo-san isn’t that begging to be beaten!

However, Dazai Osamu refused to acknowledge that this subtle, begging-to-be-beaten temperament was somewhat slightly similar to himself.

“May I know the name of your esteemed organization? Perhaps if there’s an opportunity, I can still go pay a visit?”

“The organization’s name…” ‘Nakahara Chuuya’ pinched his chin in a contemplating gesture, then suddenly raised his head to split into a large smile.

“—We’ll speak of it if there’s fate, you know!”

His figure instantaneously became transparent, quickly melting away into the sunlight.

Dazai Osamu’s pupils shrunk, subconsciously extending his hand attempting to grab the person, grabbing empty air as expected.

“Tsk.” He gave a light tsk. After checking the vicinity a few times and confirming that the person couldn’t be found, he only then kept his gun and departed.

“It seems to be a not-so-small trouble…”

The light, slow voice dissolved into the sea breeze.

Waiting until Dazai Osamu’s silhouette could completely no longer be seen, a head quietly poked out from behind a certain reef beneath the sea embankment.

“Is he gone?”

Little Seven checked the scanning results once: “Gone, gone!”

Oda Hoshimi let out a long sigh of relief.

The range of “Short-Distance Teleportation” was extremely limited. It could only be paired with the similarly short-effect “Optical Camouflage” to barely achieve this effect.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to directly teleport back to properly put on a good show, it was truly that… there was no energy!

The energy to use just these few skills was saved up only because he turned off the skills of the “Nakahara Chuuya” Vest. After all, for a thing like intelligence enhancement… the difference between having it and not having it wasn’t very big.

Oda Hoshimi thought sorrowfully, manipulating the Vest to look toward the sea surface.

“Nakahara Chuuya’s” blue eyes followed along, surfacing a trace of a bizarre purple light.

Far away inside the apartment bedroom, Oda Hoshimi was operating at full horsepower. A heavy blackness spread within his eye sockets, his crystal purple eyes discerning every shred of clue upon the sea surface through the Vest.

In his vision, the clear seawater that originally reflected the blue sky and white clouds gradually became chaotic. Strands of grayish-white mist broke through physical limitations, shuttling and swimming beneath the sea surface like living things.

Shrouded between the seawater and mist, a colossal, dark architecture whose entire form couldn’t be clearly seen loomed indistinctly.

Directly above the architecture, a centipede-like rift squatted upon the sea surface, looking as if it weren’t on the same layer as reality, letting the waves wash over it, remaining completely unmoved.

“As expected… it is the ‘Labyrinth’…”

He muttered in a low voice. After confirming the architecture’s location, he slowly closed his eyes, and then without any hesitation, took a few steps forward.

Both feet leaving the towering reef, the handsome youth fell straight into the sea.

Just as he was about to touch the sea surface, white mist welled up from the water like steam, abruptly swallowing him up, and then carrying the youth along to submerge once again into the seabed.

The weather was clear and the sun was bright. No one perceived this tiny interlude.

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