Late September.
"Hahaha, the little orange cat should be calling me big brother now!"
In the Slum District, Edogawa Ranpo—currently the very definition of "unemployed and staying at home"—stood with his hands on his hips, laughing wildly at someone in front of him.
The way he addressed Nakahara Chuuya shifted along with Akiya's thoughts; whatever Akiya was mentally improvising, Ranpo could more or less guess it.
Nakahara Chuuya sat on the steps, idly playing with a brightly colored little toy in his hands. It was the same kind of yellow rubber duck that Asou Akiya had asked Ranpo to deliver to him. Akiya didn't know the precise dynamics between the two boys, so he tried his best to keep things fair—if fairness proved impossible, then that would be Verlaine's fault. After all, he was a good father who raised both his lover and his lover's ex's son.
Chuuya's expression was downcast, and for the moment he still hadn't managed to adjust.
He now had two fathers of the same gender, yet his biological father, Randou, had lost his memories and couldn't see him. Even though Chuuya willingly stayed in Suribachi City with his companions, it was impossible to say he didn't long for familial affection at all.
After listening to Ranpo's smug boasting, the orange-haired boy glanced at him, then crushed the squeaking yellow duck in his hand without hesitation.
Pop!
Ranpo's laughter came to an abrupt halt.
His green eyes widened. Edogawa Ranpo immediately realized that Randou's son was not someone to mess with—strong enough to beat him senseless if it came to it. Then he reconsidered. The world was fair, after all: the little orange cat wasn't as smart as he was, so his stats had clearly been dumped into strength instead.
"Hey, little orange cat, don't be upset," Ranpo said cheerfully. "I'll give you one of my yellow ducks."
He pulled another duck out of his pocket and generously shared his joy with Chuuya.
"Don't call me little orange cat," Nakahara Chuuya said irritably. "I have a name. Call me Nakahara Chuuya. And besides, I don't know you—we're not close, so don't even think about being my big brother."
"Nakahara… Chouja?" Ranpo scratched his head and played dumb. "That name's way too long. Hard to remember."
"It's Chuuya!" Nakahara Chuuya ground his teeth.
Ranpo immediately changed the subject and said brightly, "The old man told me to take you to the municipal library. You can't just fool around all day—we need to study French and Latin. Want to come with me?"
Chuuya's expression stiffened. "I'm… studying English."
Ranpo looked genuinely shocked. "What's the point of learning English? The old man should've taught you that ages ago, right?"
Chuuya: "..."
Ranpo continued to stab him right in the heart. "The old man speaks four languages. We should at least learn four too, don't you think?"
Faced with the crushing comparison to a genius, Nakahara Chuuya felt an unprecedented pressure toward studying.
"N-no need," he said.
He started backing away.
"No need to be polite," Ranpo said cheerfully. "The old man said that once I teach you properly, he'll buy me dagashi!"
With a completely carefree tone, Edogawa Ranpo dragged Nakahara Chuuya—who clearly had immense strength yet didn't dare resist at all—straight toward the library.
Standing before a translation dictionary thick enough to be a weapon, Chuuya finally felt the true weight of knowledge.
Arahabaki terrified.jpg
Ranpo flipped pages at random beside him, deliberately making shua-shua noises. "This is sooo boring. It's way too easy."
A few hours later, Nakahara Chuuya's soul had practically left his body.
Edogawa Ranpo twisted his head to look at the nine-year-old boy. Eh? Since when did he fall asleep? He is even blowing little bubbles as he slept.
"..."
Ranpo then looked around at the other people in the library.
The adults sitting nearby with books in hand all wore expressions that were hard to put into words as they watched the scene of these two children—one big, one small.
Putting themselves in his place, the adults felt as though they were the orange-haired boy who had fallen asleep.
Too miserable.
Only nine years old, and already forced to study such dry, tedious languages.
"Thank goodness there's Chuuya," Asou Akiya thought afterward, a faint sense of guilt rising toward his own kid. Chuuya really did live up to being a brick—wherever he was needed, he could be hauled over and put to use. He could even serve as bait to lure Edogawa Ranpo outside to play.
During the day, Ranpo played around outside. At noon, he spent his allowance on lunch. In the evening, he went home to mooch dinner.
After a whole week of this, he was having the time of his life.
What surprised Asou Akiya the most was that Ranpo actually got along fairly well with Randou. In front of Randou, the boy seemed to restrain himself a little—he didn't dare leak any lethal questions, nor did he provoke Randou's mental state. This limited-edition, "temporarily adopted" version of Ranpo was far more obedient and adorable than any other version, at the very least because he wouldn't call home crying that he was lost!
That's right.
Thirteen-year-old Ranpo never got lost!
Ranpo was born with a terrible sense of direction, but his brain was sharp. With sheer reasoning and memory alone, he could always work out the way back!
This made Asou Akiya unable to stop thinking—should he "seal" Ranpo's deductive abilities, forcing the boy to find some other reason to prove that he was "not ordinary"? In the novel version of The Untold Origins of the Detective Agency, it was mentioned that Ranpo's mental state back then was on the verge of collapse. He stood at the edge of a cliff, unable to comprehend this absurd, irrational world. Fukuzawa Yukichi, being poor with words, had made up the excuse on the spot that Ranpo was an ability user in order to save the child.
Who could have guessed that such a simple lie would actually succeed?
It gave Ranpo thirteen full years of breathing room, allowing him to break free from his cocoon and emerge as a butterfly at last—someone capable of standing on his own.
So how, exactly, should he raise Ranpo…?
Tonight's dinner was French cuisine, prepared by Randou himself.
Edogawa Ranpo ate the lavish meal cooked by a Transcendent with a conflicted expression—it really wasn't to his taste—while simultaneously stretching out a hand toward the coarse sweets on the table, their bag still clipped shut. Randou lightly tapped the back of his hand, and Ranpo immediately shrank back, obediently withdrawing it.
Asou Akiya laughed and said, "Ranpo, there's something I've been wanting to say to you for a long time. Do you know what it is?"
Hearing Akiya's words, Edogawa Ranpo's eyes lit up and his brows danced as he answered eagerly, "You're going to raise my allowance!"
Randou thought to himself, You wish.
Asou Akiya's expression flattened once more, his face settling into a mafia-like indifference.
"I'm twenty-two this year. Next month is your fourteenth birthday. Strictly speaking, that makes me about eight years older than you."
"Ohh, eight whole years~."
Edogawa Ranpo glanced left and right, biting down on his knife and fork as one of his bad habits resurfaced.
Randou shot him a look.
Ranpo lowered the utensils at once, his face full of grievance.
Asou Akiya spread a temptingly conspiratorial smile—one that nearly made Randou laugh out loud—because he said—
"Ranpo, call me big brother, and next month I'll give you a birthday surprise."
"...Call you… big brother?"
Edogawa Ranpo looked utterly baffled as he protested, "Wouldn't that mess up the generational hierarchy? I already told the little orange cat that—"
Suddenly, his foot was stepped on beneath the table by Asou Akiya, and Ranpo immediately snapped his mouth shut.
Asou Akiya let out a sigh. "Forget it. Just call me Akiya."
There was a particular custom in how Japanese people interacted: as long as the elder gave permission, the younger could address them by name.
He absolutely did not want to keep wearing the title of Uncle any longer.
Edogawa Ranpo nodded haphazardly, focusing on his meal. He stuffed the foie gras into his mouth, his face twisting into a miserable expression.
Why did people even eat fatty liver?
Next time, he decided, he would definitely wait until Akiya was the one cooking before coming back to mooch a meal.
After dinner, the two people at the table retreated to relax and entertain themselves, leaving the kitchen entirely to Asou Akiya. Silently thanking whoever had invented labor-saving kitchen appliances, Akiya rolled up his sleeves and began tidying up.
In the living room, the two of them were playing chess.
Randou remained utterly calm—even after being utterly annihilated, wiped out without a single piece left standing. His expression showed neither joy nor sorrow.
Edogawa Ranpo, dancing recklessly along the edge of courting disaster, shouted, "Don't go easy on me! Mister Randou, you're definitely just as amazing as Uncle—no, as Akiya! Back in my old home, my mom was always stronger than my dad!"
Randou replied evenly, "First, I am not a mother. Second, have you already forgotten what Akiya just taught you?"
Reading the room instantly, Edogawa Ranpo switched gears without hesitation. "I'm just not used to it yet! I'll call him Akiya next time, for sure."
Randou inclined his head, letting the earlier topic drop entirely, and calmly set up a new game.
An impressively steady mindset.
He truly did not care about winning or losing on the chessboard.
Edogawa Ranpo immediately felt the tedium of merely being someone's playmate. His gaze wandered around the room, which still retained traces of the shared life of Asou Akiya and Randou. From the smallest, most trivial stains, he could already read the quiet intimacy between the two of them.
Confirming that their relationship was stable, Ranpo muttered to himself, "What is Uncle even afraid of?"
Even something fake could eventually become real.
When he turned his eyes back to Randou, Edogawa Ranpo sensed no overt danger, yet his instincts made him settle down and behave.
Somehow… somehow, he feels as formidable as a mother.
Asou Akiya emerged from the kitchen and asked, "Ranpo, have you finished the book The Night Baron that I gave you?"
Edogawa Ranpo stopped playing chess and stretched lazily. "Finished."
Only when it came to fields he excelled in did he become openly self-satisfied, revealing the sharp brilliance of his deductive mind. "Who the killer was was obvious at a glance. There was no need to rack my brains at all—it was even easier than writing a letter!"
Asou Akiya was not surprised.
The Night Baron series of detective novels was hugely popular in Japan, written by Kudo Yusaku—the father of Kudo Shinichi. According to Detective Conan, his powers of deduction were said to surpass even his son's.
However, novels written by geniuses of that caliber were still far from enough when placed in front of Edogawa Ranpo.
"Would you be interested in writing a detective story of your own?"
"Eh?!"
Edogawa Ranpo jolted upright with a thump, both hands gripping the edges of his chair. When he clearly saw the faint smile on Asou Akiya's face—and grasped the unspoken meaning hidden behind it—he received the message loud and clear.
"Uncle… Akiya, you really think that highly of me?" Ranpo asked hesitantly. "You think I actually have the talent to write novels?"
"Yes."
Asou Akiya led the idle, household-wrecking Ranpo into the study, pressed pen and paper into his hands, and said, "You still have three hours before bedtime. Write me a short story—no more than five hundred words."
Ranpo lit up with excitement. "So many ideas are suddenly popping up—I've never written a novel before!"
"I'll come back in two hours," Asou Akiya encouraged him.
He took the draft he had been working on for some time, closed the study door, and went to the living room to discuss the novel with Randou. Randou's role was to polish the prose and refine the earlier chapters that had already been written. When he reached the scenes involving intimacy, Randou read them straight through without changing expression, then offered his opinion calmly: "They're quite restrained, but don't let Ranpo-kun see this."
Asou Akiya explained, "Ranpo flipped through the first few pages and then lost interest in what came after."
Randou frowned slightly. "So does he understand, or doesn't he?"
Asou Akiya wrote at a furious pace. "Half-understands, I suppose."
In the world of Bungou Stray Dogs, almost everyone was single; those with actual sexual experience could be counted on one hand, and within the Armed Detective Agency, no one dared to corrupt Ranpo.
Randou set down the first half of the draft and leaned closer to Asou Akiya's side, watching him write without the slightest hesitation. "Akiya, why are you able to write novels so quickly?"
Asou Akiya answered cheerfully, "Because I already have the plot in my head."
He wasn't chasing literary awards anyway.
As long as he was happy, that was enough.
Two hours slipped by. Asou Akiya rubbed his aching wrist and finally finished ten thousand words, written in a scrawl so messy it barely qualified as handwriting.
Randou had been watching from the sidelines until he was numb. This man truly could make things up out of thin air. Getting into danger, slapping faces, turning the tables, killing in retaliation, sleeping together—every kind of plot tumbled effortlessly from his pen. He even claimed these were just feel-good web-novel formulas that didn't need to be examined too closely.
That kind of speed alone was enough to make other Japanese writers weep bitter tears.
A rough draft of an entire novel in seven days.
"Randou, could you help me check this over?" Asou Akiya said. "I'll go take a look at Ranpo's results."
"All right…"
Randou answered a beat too late.
The kind of person who never wanted to read his work a second time once he finished writing—someone who delighted in cutting corners—that was Asou Akiya to the core.
In the study, Edogawa Ranpo had clawed his hair into disarray. His eyes darted away, and for once he did not look especially confident as he slowly handed over his debut work to Asou Akiya.
So short.
Asou Akiya glanced over the word count, then looked at the title of the story. His eyebrow twitched noncommittally before he sank straight into the chaotic, topsy-turvy fog of Edogawa Ranpo's prose.
What… is this?
What kind of incoherent nonsense have you written?
Edogawa Ranpo, have you given any thought at all to the readers' intelligence? It needs to be protected, you know!
Countless remarks rose to Asou Akiya's throat, only to choke there. In the end, he let out a quiet sigh and pulled the blissfully content Ranpo into an embrace.
This was not Mr. Ranpo of the real, three-dimensional world; this was the childhood Ranpo of the Bungou universe.
He was astonishingly brilliant—and clumsily naïve.
"You wrote it very well."
There was no scolding, only the kind of praise adults give with a guilty conscience, fully aware they are lying.
...
Probably a Novel:
"He's really poor! After committing murder and theft, he doesn't think about the consequences at all. Such tiny problems—an adult could solve them with a flick of the wrist, so why did I end up discovering them? Well then, based on the cases I've seen and the writing instructions I was given, I'll write something called a "detective novel." Please read carefully. Below is the story: murder, theft, dumping the body—the location is terrible, the corpse has started to stink, birds have come to peck at it, no one will come to save him, no one! This world full of monsters will eventually devour those who are unqualified, won't it…"
—Edogawa Ranpo.
{Note: Peak writing!}