I have had enough of being the honest man, the yes-man who can only nod to other's will.
In this life, I want to lie. I want to weave the grandest, most heaven-defying lie I possibly can.
—Asou Akiya
…
When he first arrived in this world, the initial rush of exhilaration quickly gave way to a hollow bewilderment. Asou Akiya understood, with a cold clarity, exactly what he had lost.
He remembered every incident of his former life, yet the faces and names of his family drifted just beyond reach, like reflections seen through rippled water. It was as if he had been reborn after drinking only half a bowl of Meng Po's soup; still half-aware, still dazed, he had stumbled into existence once more. He had been nothing more than an utterly ordinary fresh graduate: no great storms weathered, no dazzling achievements, merely a decent internship and a bland, predictable routine. Then, between one blink and the next, he found himself in a place that was not his own.
The moment he caught sight of the five towering buildings of the Port Mafia, his heart nearly tore free of his ribs and leapt into his throat. Not a single person around him spoke Chinese. By some inexplicable grace he now spoke fluent Japanese, and with a few hastily improvised performances he pieced together his new identity: a Japanese orphan whose parents had perished in the crossfire of mafia wars.
In that instant he knew he had escaped a dull but safe existence.
A new crisis of survival had arrived.
If he were some transcendent genius, that would have been one thing; geniuses can carve a place for themselves in any world. The problem was that he rated his own intelligence squarely in the middle of the pack: not quite enough to stand among the extraordinary, yet comfortably above the hopeless. The moment he crossed into a two-dimensional realm crawling with monsters of talent, he suffered an immediate dimensional downgrade.
Counting cards with his eyes alone? Impossible.
Sowing discord in men's hearts with a whisper? Impossible.
Building a nuclear bomb with his bare hands? Laughably impossible.
Forget rising to the pinnacle of life; he could not even remember how to manufacture glass or soap if his life depended on it.
Are those the sorts of things a normal person is supposed to have memorized by heart?!
The reason Asou Akiya's heart was hung suspended by a thread was painfully straightforward: he had already recognized exactly where he had been flung. This was Yokohama, Japan's second-largest city, and the organization he had just joined as its newest and most expendable grunt bore the name Port Mafia. Every last one of its upper echelons possessed a supernatural gift; for those without, sudden death was not a tragedy but a statistic.
Yes, this was the world of Bungo Stray Dogs.
And this world showed no mercy whatsoever to ordinary thugs who merely wanted to survive.
The body he now inhabited was sixteen years old, a fresh-faced bottom-feeder in the Port Mafia's ranks. Meanwhile, another sixteen-year-old by the name of Dazai Osamu—what rank did that monster hold? Sub-executive. and he's not the sort who climbed by nepotism, either; he had clawed his way up through raw, terrifying talent until a single offhand sentence from him could send a man to his grave with a smile.
"Sixteen-year-old me…" Akiya lifted his hand and stared at the faint, delicate lines etched across his palm, the barely-there callus earned from gun practice. "I really do look like some nameless extra scurrying across the background."
"I'm screwed."
"A whole week has passed, and still no sign of any special power awakening."
His fingers curled into a fist until the knuckles blanched bone-white, and the most spirit-crushing words he had ever spoken slipped out between clenched teeth. Abilities were not handed out like participation trophies; no matter how special a traverser believed himself to be, the laws of this world would not bend an inch to accommodate him.
In the cracked mirror of the bathroom.
A beautiful boy with ink-black hair and eyes the color of midnight stared back, his expression shrouded in gloom. Bewilderment lay thick across those refined features, and his gaze—dull, ashen, utterly defeated—seemed to look straight through the glass into some unreal void where no spark of life could take root.
He wrapped a few bandages around his neck and threw an expensive coat over his shoulders, and he could probably pull off a passable Dazai impression on the spot. In his own estimation, this face was the only thing about him that met the impossible beauty standards of a two-dimensional world; his looks alone could fight above their weight class.
But what good will his looks do for him?
He had no gift—or at the very least, he had felt absolutely nothing that could be called a gift so far.
The current boss of the Port Mafia, the next boss, and even the boss after that—all of them judged solely by power. How, then, was someone like him supposed to stay alive in an organization where the mortality rate was a cruel joke?
How was he supposed to live brilliantly, gloriously, without wasting this second chance at life?
"System?"
"Cheat code?"
"Golden finger?"
"Chat group? Forum?"
"Main God? Great Orb of Light?"
"Angel, demon, yokai, spirit, god… I don't care what you are, please, just give me one measly traverser's power so I can survive until the day the plot actually starts…"
Asou Akiya could no longer restrain the frantic anxiety clawing at his chest. He drove his fist straight into the mirror with every shred of feeble resolve he could muster. The center shattered in a spiderweb of cracks; his knuckles slammed against the wall behind it, and shards of broken glass dug deep into his skin, sending white-hot pain lancing through his hand.
The endless, throbbing sting dragged him mercilessly out of his daydream.
[You were an ordinary person in your last life, so why on earth did you think you could escape mediocrity in this one?]
[Idiot.]
[Ninety-nine percent of gifted individuals are born with their powers.]
[The remaining one percent has absolutely nothing to do with you; every last one of them is a dragon or phoenix among men.]
The black-haired boy sank into a half-crouch on the floor of the apartment his parents had left him, and a low, muffled laugh began to spill from his throat.
"Another lifetime, and still this hopelessly average aptitude?"
"It's… unbearable."
They say even kings and generals — are they born to greatness, or can any man seize it?
Could a single transmigration really turn someone like him into that kind of legend?
…
One year later.
Asou Akiya was seventeen now, still nothing more than a small-time hood in the Port Mafia. His marksmanship was essentially nonexistent, his hand-to-hand barely past beginner level. Fortunately, his long-dead parents had been members of the organization, and that lingering connection still granted him a few scraps of resources and protection — enough that the old-timers did not single him out as the dumb, cute rookie to torment.
The original owner of this body had once had the chance to attend school and study properly, but after his parents died, all desire for books vanished. In a moment of panicked desperation to protect himself, he had stumbled into the mafia and never found a way back out.
Because — the moment he signed on, he had sold both his life and his future to this place.
He could not bring himself to blame the original owner for his stupidity; doing so would only make him look twice as foolish. To gain anything in this world, one must pay a price, and that truth was not merely something to pay lip service to. From this day forward, he was Asou Akiya. Whatever Asou Akiya had done was now his own doing; there could be no shifting of blame, no disowning of the past. He had to walk this path to its end and ensure he did not end up as nameless cannon fodder who never even earned a single line.
The rough voices of the Port Mafia veterans shattered his reverie.
"Akiya! Quit slacking and get those protection fees listed properly!"
"Yes, sir…"
Asou Akiya spent the rest of the day running in circles until night finally granted him a moment to breathe.
In these years, the Port Mafia had reached the height of its early glory, firmly establishing itself as the undisputed king of Yokohama's underworld. The current boss had not yet descended into madness; though his methods were brutal, his body remained strong and his mind sharp. The timeline that would turn him into a raving lunatic obsessed with nothing but slaughter still lay seven or eight years away.
There was no Mori Ougai yet, no Dazai Osamu, not even Ozaki Kouyou. This was the complete blank period before the original story began. If he wanted to survive, he had to throw himself body and soul into the Port Mafia and become part of its machinery.
At seven in the evening, Asou Akiya—who was mercifully off night duty—finally clocked out. He rolled his aching shoulders, too exhausted to squeeze in even the most basic physical training. As he headed for the exit, his sharp eyes caught sight of a superior emerging from the main building.
"Good evening, Mr. Hirotsu! Heading home now!"
Hirotsu Ryuurou, impeccably dressed in a suit, cut a tall and dignified figure. The elegant middle-aged man carried himself with refined grace and treated subordinates kindly. At the greeting he inclined his head politely.
"Good evening, Asou-kun."
The simple fact that the man remembered his family name was the fruit of an entire year of quiet, persistent effort on Asou Akiya's part.
His parents had shared no particularly deep bond with Hirotsu Ryuurou; there would be no tearful embrace, no solemn vow to watch over their orphaned son. Luck like that did not exist for him. All he could do was build the connection himself, one careful greeting at a time.
This same Hirotsu Ryuurou was currently one of the Port Mafia's Ten Captains, and in the future he would rise to become a Hundred-Man Commander.
In other words, undeniable executive material.
Asou Akiya threw an exaggerated salute, half-joking, half-earnest. "Mr. Hirotsu is the very beacon that lights my path forward!" Hirotsu was thirty-one this year—nineteen years away from the Armed Detective Agency massacre, seven years away from Mori Ougai's ascension. For Asou Akiya, this veteran was the most reliable marker on the timeline, a living calendar of everything yet to come.
After all, the man would live to see fifty and witness every earth-shaking event that followed.
Hirotsu spoke plainly. "Go get some rest."
He was perfectly aware the boy was trying to curry favor, and he did not mind it in the least. He was more than a decade older, a recognized gifted in the organization, and he had no objection to guiding a promising junior—so long as that junior could prove he was worth the investment.
Asou Akiya let a small smile curve his lips, but just as he turned to leave, he gathered every ounce of nerve and blurted out a single sentence.
"Rather than Asou-kun… I'd much prefer it if Mr. Hirotsu called me Akiya-kun."
"Uh…"
"I'll work hard enough to deserve it."
The black-haired boy bounced lightly on the balls of his polished shoes, flashed a triumphant V-sign with his fingers, and darted away before the flattery could curdle into something cloying.
Hirotsu Ryuurou stood frozen for a heartbeat, then shook his head with an amused chuckle. "That little rascal."
The kid certainly had more personality and fire than most.
What Hirotsu did not see was the way the smile vanished from Asou Akiya's face the instant he turned his back, the way those dark eyes held no trace of fawning or warmth, only the cool detachment of someone playing a strategy game with no quest rewards, no save points, no second chances.
It was not hard to understand, really; from the bottom of his soul he craved recognition from these living, breathing characters who had once existed only on a screen.
Back in the small apartment he kept near Port Mafia territory, Asou Akiya rubbed the stiffness from his cheeks, shrugged off his suit jacket, and let the suffocating pressure of the workplace slough away like an old skin. He slipped his feet into soft house slippers, flung himself onto the living-room sofa, and finally released a long, luxurious sigh of relief.
He had successfully shed the last traces of the awkward university student and transformed into a slick little office survivor.
Yet that was nowhere near his final goal.
He wanted far more; he wanted to shatter the ceiling that pinned down every ungifted soul.
"Akiya and Chuuya sound almost identical when you say them in Chinese*," he muttered to the empty room, "but in Japanese they don't resemble each other in the slightest."
*{Note: In Mandarin, 秋也 (Akiya) is pronounced Qiū-yě and 中也 (Chūya) is Zhōng-yě — both end in "-yě" and sound strikingly similar. In Japanese, however, アキヤ (Akiya) and チュウヤ (Chūya) are completely different with no overlap.}
Asou Akiya dearly wished he could grow into someone as formidable as Nakahara Chuuya, yet a man must know his own limits. He shook the idle fantasy from his mind and began counting the years with cold precision. "According to the timeline I remember, I'm thirteen years older than Dazai Osamu and seventeen years older than the protagonist, Nakajima Atsushi. That puts me firmly in the uncle generation."
At the young age of seventeen, Asou Akiya inexplicably suddenly felt ancient.
The television was already on, and the entertainment segment happened to be reporting that the famous actress Fujimine Yukiko — the angel-faced, ever-changing, the chameleon star beloved by cameras — had officially announced her retirement from the silver screen in order to emigrate to America, marry, and raise children.
Perfect.
After an entire year, he had finally stumbled upon another unmistakable footprint of the anime world.
He and Kudou Shinichi's mother belonged to the same generation; Fujimine Yukiko was only three years his senior. By the time the first season of Bungo Stray Dogs actually began, the story of the detective boy shrinking into a child would only just be getting underway. Poor future detective — whether he would even be able to call himself "Edogawa Conan" remained a giant question mark. With neither Edogawa Ranpo nor Arthur Conan Doyle publishing anything in this world, could Kudou Shinichi really pull the name "Edogawa Conan" out of thin air like some miracle born between cracks in a rock?
Asou Akiya was absolutely certain that, as of right now, Conan Doyle had not yet released the Sherlock Holmes stories. Given Doyle's real-world fame, the odds were overwhelming that the man himself was one of Britain's Transcendents.
He swallowed the urge to rant and forced his mind back to the Bungo Stray Dogs cast, searching for anyone who might be roughly his own age.
Suddenly, a single name slipped past his lips.
"Ran…"
He bit the rest of the word off before it could fully escape.
Randou — true name: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud.
In the three-dimensional world, a French poet; in this two-dimensional one, a European intelligence operative whose gift manipulated space itself. At the peak of his power he had stood among the Transcendents, one of the supreme apex predators on the global stage of gifted combatants. The original work never specified Randou's exact age, but according to Asou Akiya's own calculations, the man was extremely likely to be almost the same age as he was right now.
"No, I can't keep talking to myself like this." Asou Akiya bit down hard on his tongue. "I have to get rid of this apartment within the next few years. Without any means to protect myself, a single careless secret slipping out would be enough to leave me dead without even a whole corpse to bury."
Sakaguchi Ango had already been born — nine years younger than him — and his ability, Discourse on Decadence, allowed him to read the memories embedded in objects.
After penciling in the future demolition of the apartment onto his mental schedule, Asou Akiya hugged his pillow to his chest and let out a giddy little laugh. "Heh… a nobody like me? No big shot is ever going to waste time noticing the weird things I mutter."
Everyone says that to survive in this world you have to pick a faction and cling to the right thigh.
He wanted to cling to the thigh of the next boss, Mori Ougai!
The problem was that the man was only twenty-two this year — absurdly young — and might very well still be studying medicine at Tokyo University. That, Asou Akiya thought bitterly, this is exactly the tragedy of arriving too early and having too little power to make anything happen.
"The closest… the nearest plot point I can actually reach…"
"Three years from now."
"The great explosion in the Yokohama Settlement."
Asou Akiya's black pupils widened slightly, and he sank into thought, as though he could already see the magnificent inferno blooming in the future.
That single terrifying blast would swallow tens of thousands of lives and erase entire districts from the map.
And afterward —
Two very special individuals would appear amid the ruins.
One would be a blank-slate Nakahara Chuuya, still innocent as untouched snow.
The other would be Randou, gravely wounded and stripped of nearly all his memories.
This is the perfect opportunity!
Taking away even one of them would be like seizing a treasure beyond price!
After a full year of drifting through life in a fog, unable to find any crack in the wall that confined him, Asou Akiya's eyes began to burn brighter and brighter — the light of a man who had finally torn through the paper covering his window and touched the raw, screaming madness of this world.
"Who says an ordinary person can't defy heaven and rewrite fate?"
His voice trembled with something barely contained — excitement, terror, or both — as the words spilled out in a half-laugh that was almost a sob.
"Everything… everything can still be changed."
His own memories tangled and churned with those of the body's original owner… This boy's parents had been murdered by an ability user, and there was no avenue for revenge, no chance the Port Mafia would ever lift a finger to avenge a nobody's family. If the day ever came, though, Asou Akiya wanted to settle that blood debt for the soul whose flesh he now wore.
In this hidden underworld, the talented could bathe in blood and still command respect; ordinary men could only stumble numbly along the path laid out for them, pretending to be deaf and blind to everything around them.
"We… are both still so young."
Asou Akiya closed his eyes, and for the first time he felt genuine gratitude that fate had not stripped away the memories of his previous life.
They were useful.
When he opened his eyes again, the feverish gleam had cooled into something sharp and rational. He walked into the study, pulled out a plain notebook, and began to write down every calculation he could make about the timeline three years from now.
[Three years from now, the military research facility in the Yokohama Settlement will explode. The exact date is unknown, but it is suspected to be in April — the reasoning being that Nakahara Chuuya's birthday falls on April 29th. Given Chuuya's personality, there is an extremely high probability he will choose the day his "humanity" is born to eternally commemorate the day he himself was born.]
[Other possibilities cannot be ruled out. Provisional window: April 28th to 30th.]
[Next, location.]
[If I want to arrive in time, with a plausible excuse, and search for Randou and Nakahara Chuuya the moment the blast ends, the best move is to use money earned from stock trading to rent a property nearby. I can request leave or claim an external assignment and linger in the vicinity during those critical days to watch.]
[No — renting would be too much of a coincidence. The area is far from Port Mafia territory. I should buy a house outright. Property near the Settlement is certainly expensive, yet it is also an excellent long-term investment.]
[The explosion will be catastrophic: the ground will cave in, movement across the surface will be nearly impossible. I must train in climbing and drastically improve my stamina. The instant I secure either of them, I have to withdraw immediately to a safe zone and lie low, avoiding the flood of investigators from the Special Division for Unusual Powers and the inevitable Port Mafia sweep.]
[In this era, surveillance cameras are nowhere near widespread — that should be safe enough…]
[But I must never underestimate the ability "Discourse on Decadence."]
Asou Akiya's only real advantage was a decent memory. He had always loved reading, and the anime he adored he had rewatched and dissected until every frame was burned into his mind. That obsessive recall had given him a treasure trove of intelligence on every major character from the original story.
He chewed on the end of his pen, brow furrowed in painful concentration. "How do I disguise my presence? Sakaguchi Ango's ability is far too broken. A cautious man like him will never overlook someone who rushes to the scene first."
Even if the blast radius is enormous and reading memories from debris will be difficult, a man cannot gamble on details.
Details decide victory or defeat!
"Let me think this through. Randou was a European intelligence operative who infiltrated a Japanese military installation. Nakahara Chuuya was the living vessel for the entity 'Arahabaki' sealed inside that same facility. Both of them are black-file existences with no official records. Any attempt to explain them through proper channels would collapse instantly — especially Randou, who will be gravely wounded and amnesiac. He'll need immediate medical supplies. In the original story, that's probably how the Port Mafia found and recruited him."
"What excuse could possibly let me appear at the explosion site without raising suspicion?"
"Panic? Desperation? I need a loved one caught in the disaster. Only when someone truly precious is in danger will a person lose all reason and sprint straight into mortal peril, defying every instinct for self-preservation."
Asou Akiya dragged the tip of his pen across the page in a slow, deliberate circle.
Time passed.
His heartbeat began to thunder in his ears as he finally noticed the two words his hand had scrawled without permission.
[Wife.]
[Son.]
It was as though fate itself leaned close and whispered into his ear: Do you want to live a dazzling life this time around?
Asou Akiya pressed both palms to his face, fingers splayed just enough for a gaze that was seventy percent exhilaration and thirty percent madness to gleam through the gaps. Unbidden, the image of Randou from the anime rose in his mind: that insufferably proud French beauty, that tragic and overwhelmingly powerful ability user who had been abandoned by the very comrades he trusted.
The excuse was so outrageous it made his heart stutter just to consider it!
He was willing to bet that not even most Transcendents would dare dream up something this suicidal.
"After staying single for so long… am I finally about to become a winner in life?"
"Verlaine—"
"I really think a green hat would look perfect on you!"
He was going to claim Randou for himself with nothing but the strength of an ordinary human — and right from the starting line he would cuckold a Transcendent-class monster like Verlaine!
The man you were willing to abandon? I'm taking him.
—
Author's note:
Asou Akiya × Randou
Randou is the character who appears at the beginning of Bungo Stray Dogs Season 3 — the one responsible for the birth of Chuuya's human personality.