The actors on the stage were giving it everything they had.
But for a transmigrator and an ability user, the play itself was painfully dull.
No matter how passionately the actors shouted, how fervently they begged for God's forgiveness or cried out for the judgment of angels, it could not change the fact that the playwright, while drafting the script, had mixed in too much personal bias—forcefully weaving ability users together with mythological tales, drifting away from reality and yet simultaneously betraying it, struggling to depict ability users from the limited viewpoint of someone without abilities at all.
Occasionally, within that nonsense of a fabricated script, there were moments that accidentally hit the mark—such as the awakening of abilities, and the loss of control that could follow.
"Akiya, are there really people who can't control their power when it suddenly awakens and end up losing control?" Randou's attention predictably veered away from the plot itself. He listened intently as the actors spoke about ability users, his focus oddly sincere. "And why do they say that abilities can't bring happiness? Shouldn't someone be happy to gain power?"
With a string of questions circling in his mind, Randou finally drew a conclusion. "This doesn't look like something you'd write, Akiya. Your wish-fulfillment stories are always crystal clear—if an opportunity appears, you seize it; if you gain power, you master it. You believe people should live with ideals and convictions."
Asou Akiya shrugged. "The script on stage wasn't written by me."
The thoughtful look on Randou's face instantly collapsed into boredom. He gave Akiya's palm a suggestive squeeze, hinting rather than saying outright, "This playwright isn't as good as you."
Asou Akiya: "..."
You just want me to write a script for you to watch, don't you?!
"I'm not good at this kind of exaggerated, overblown style. Let's watch something by Mr. Shakespeare instead," Asou Akiya said, desperately trying to divert the brand-new idea that had just sprouted in Randou's mind.
Randou suddenly laughed. "The developments offstage are more unexpected, though."
Out in the audience, Edogawa Ranpo was loudly mocking the plot, casually exposing who the murderer was among the actors on stage.
For a moment, everyone who overheard him was brutally spoiled.
Thanks to the actors' earnest performances, the audience was fairly satisfied with the first half of the play, and the intermission soon arrived. Asou Akiya and Randou both chose to remain inside their private room, just in case they happened to run into Edogawa Ranpo.
Even so, it wasn't long before a clear, youthful voice appeared outside the door of the VIP box.
"Is anyone in there? Whoever's inside, come out and submit to an inspection!"
"..."
Asou Akiya did not respond at all. He simply turned to look at Randou. Randou smiled faintly and extended his subspace ability over the door, sealing it completely—so that no matter where Edogawa Ranpo had managed to obtain a key from, he still could not get in.
Outside the door, the black-haired boy fussed about for a while before Mrs. Egawa arrived just in time.
"What are you doing? There are important guests in here! Their identities are not a problem!"
"So secretive…" Edogawa Ranpo muttered. "Someone's clearly inside, but they won't come out."
Edogawa Ranpo's sharp eyes fixed on the private box. He felt certain there was something wrong inside—perhaps the true culprit was hiding there! The conclusion had no concrete basis, yet it brimmed with that unmistakable Edogawa Ranpo–style intuition.
Fukuzawa Yukichi spoke calmly. "Since the theater manager has given her assurance, let's go check elsewhere."
He glanced at the box, which offered an extremely high level of privacy, and guessed that it was locked from the inside.
After some persuasion, the stubborn Edogawa Ranpo finally gave up on investigating the private box. He stomped his way downstairs, thud thud, leaving behind Asou Akiya and Randou, who had not made a single sound the entire time. Inside, the two clinked their glasses cheerfully and enjoyed fine wine beneath the air conditioning.
"Randou's ability really is the most convenient~."
"Akiya, you always manage to help me discover new ways to use it."
These two utterly irresponsible parents would never admit to their "child" that they were watching his growth process in real time.
And the only person capable of exposing them—Natsume Souseki—
was writing a script within a script.
Natsume Souseki had disguised himself as an ability user named "Asano Takumi," intending to lure out members of the V Organization, while also creating an opportunity for Fukuzawa Yukichi and Edogawa Ranpo to form a bond. In other words, the play unfolding in this theater was "spectacular" beyond measure. Counting Asou Akiya, who belonged to the fake-scriptwriting faction, there were a total of three scriptwriting factions involved. Two adults were jointly tempering a young, script-genius Ranpo, thoughtfully leaving behind a psychological shadow to decorate the other party's "childhood."
Once the second half of the play began, the "accident" finally occurred.
In the middle of his performance, the male lead, Murakami Tokio, suddenly collapsed and died on the stage, his chest seemingly pierced straight through by a sharp blade!
Randou blinked once. "Dead?"
Asou Akiya replied calmly, "Not dead."
Randou pointed firmly at Murakami Tokio, who lay at the center of the stage below, bleeding profusely, and said with absolute certainty, "Dead."
Asou Akiya smiled amiably and answered again, "Randou, your eyesight really isn't very good."
Randou stubbornly held his ground. "I clearly saw something like a blade—whoosh—pierce straight through him! Judging by the depth of the wound and the amount of blood loss, this person wouldn't last long enough to even make it to the hospital!"
Asou Akiya proposed a wager. "Whoever's wrong does all the housework by hand for an entire week."
Randou hesitated at once. He glanced at the convincingly corpse-like figure on the stage, then quickly changed his tune. "No bet."
Housework could kill a man.
With the ability "Illuminations" at hand, wouldn't it be better to make someone else kneel down and scrub the floors?
Asou Akiya reached out and pinched the soft flesh at Randou's waist. Tickled, Randou jumped to his feet and dodged to the side.
"Akiya, you're bullying me!"
"My Randou isn't as innocent as he used to be," Asou Akiya said with a sigh of mock regret. "You would've agreed without hesitation back then."
"That was because I didn't understand!"
"Alright then—whatever my wife says is right."
"Akiya—don't come any closer, I'm ticklish! Next time let's bet on something else, I don't want to do housework—"
An ability user who possessed the overwhelmingly powerful ability known as "Illuminations," yet in the middle of playful intimacy with his lover, he trembled like a frightened quail and was effortlessly caught and pulled into an embrace. Asou Akiya reached out and gave the soft flesh at his waist an exploratory squeeze, clicking his tongue in amazement. "You'd rather wear fleece-lined pants than put on a few more layers on top. Just how much do you care about your image?"
Randou looked at him with his ash-gray eyes and said gloomily, "I don't exercise much. If my waist gets thick, it won't look good."
Asou Akiya sweet-talked without restraint. "Even if you got fat enough to weigh two hundred jin, I'd still like you."
Randou: "...Thanks...could you maybe use a different comparison?"
Under the clear warning radiating from "Illuminations," Asou Akiya no longer dared to tease Randou so recklessly.
Tch—men with power really are different.
He can fight back now.
"Let's go. Leave the aftermath here to Ranpo and Fukuzawa-san. Once we're back, I'll need to think about how to explain ability users to Ranpo," Asou Akiya said, unwilling to submit to questioning by the city police. Before slipping away with Randou amid the confusion, he sent a message he had prepared in advance to Edogawa Ranpo.
[Ranpo, solve this mystery. This is the extracurricular homework I'm assigning you.]
[And also—]
[Abilities are something that truly exist.]
[Use your reasoning to find the culprit. Don't put yourself in danger. If you have questions, come home and ask me.]
[I am looking forward to your transformation.]
Those words were the expectations of a parent toward a child, and Asou Akiya had quietly taken on the heavy responsibility that should have belonged to Ranpo's parents.
...
"Hey, silver-haired uncle, hurry up and solve it already."
The defensive walls around Edogawa Ranpo's heart were far stronger than Fukuzawa Yukichi had imagined.
He did not believe Fukuzawa Yukichi's explanations, nor did he believe in a world where anyone other than himself was anything but an idiot.
Precisely because of that, Edogawa Ranpo showed little interest in the murder case at all. He was convinced that the adults would resolve it effortlessly, and that asking a mere child like him to step in was nothing more than a joke—surely the grown-ups had already seen through everything.
As chaos erupted on the stage, Ranpo's first reaction was to rush over to inspect the body. Then he rose onto his tiptoes, trying to gain a higher vantage point on the stage so he could look toward the VIP box. The figures who had just left from there looked astonishingly familiar, uncannily like his own guardians. Joy burst through him on the spot, and he felt certain that he had returned to a place of safety.
Akiya had come back to Yokohama City! And he hadn't told him—he even came here to watch a play!
Even before the text message arrived, Edogawa Ranpo had already pulled out his phone, staring at the screen and waiting.
—Akiya wanted him to solve the case, and had acknowledged the existence of abilitiy users.
"What? Ability users exist?"
"My extracurricular homework is this?!"
Having guessed wrong, Edogawa Ranpo felt a wave of frustration wash over him. He had wracked his brain and drafted hundreds of words' worth of theatrical critique, yet Akiya always managed to ambush him with homework when he least expected it.
"Ranpo!"
Fukuzawa Yukichi called out to stop the black-haired boy who was about to bolt, only for the boy to shout back at full volume, "I'm going to investigate the murderer!"
Fukuzawa Yukichi: "???"
Before long, an ambulance arrived and carried away the actor who had already lost his pulse. The city police, who had sealed off the theater in advance, began checking the number and movements of the audience—and discovered that three people were missing. They were the registered attendees "Asou Akiya," "Randou," and "Asano Takumi": two young adults in their early twenties, and one middle-aged man of thirty-five.
Fukuzawa Yukichi fixed his gaze on the city police officer and asked, "Are you certain the name was Asou Akiya?"
Good grief—there was killing intent in that stare! Patrol captain Tamura, one of the three city police officers present, took a half-step back and tensed up. "Y-Yes. That is the name."
Fukuzawa Yukichi's chest rose and fell as he suppressed his anger. "I understand."
Ranpo's guardians had been here earlier. And now they had left.
To sit high up in a VIP box, watching the spectacle while disregarding a murder case unfolding below—such behavior could hardly be described as belonging to good people!
Outside the theater.
Having taken an internal passage and departed safely, the two of them sat inside the car. Randou asked where they were headed.
Asou Akiya gave a wry smile. "We're going to Bankoudou."
The way he had lectured children before—now it was his turn to receive criticism from Natsume-sensei.
"No, before that—" Asou Akiya seemed to think of something mid-sentence. "Randou, is there a curry shop nearby? Let's order several different flavors of curry rice and have the restaurant's delivery staff send them to the city police's underground detention center, thanking them, as ordinary citizens, for their tireless work day and night."
#The Deeper the Self-Reflection, the Thicker the Stack of Pages — Please Accept My Profound Realization#
On the other side, the matter was already drawing to a close. The truth behind the murder warning letter was that the male lead of the play and the editor had conspired together from the start. Murakami Tokio had never died at all; he had merely used stage props to fabricate a murder scene. Murakami Tokio wanted to stage a performance that the audience would remember for the rest of their lives, while behind the playwright stood other forces pulling the strings. He was nothing more than a chess piece, and the theater was used as the venue to kidnap ability users who came to watch the play.
The most ridiculous part was that the person they kidnapped was Natsume Soseki himself. This big shot was having the time of his life—so much so that even Edogawa Ranpo failed to notice anything amiss about "Asano Takumi." After rescuing him, Ranpo had judged him to be nothing more than a victim of abduction.
Edogawa Ranpo had already unraveled most of the mystery. What remained was one final, tantalizing secret.
What was the organization that had murdered the playwright, staged the illusion of a death, and abducted "Asano Takumi"?
And what was that organization's objective?
"Hey, silver-haired uncle, why are you looking at me like that?" Turning around, Edogawa Ranpo caught sight of Fukuzawa Yukichi's complicated gaze, as though Ranpo were some sort of abnormal existence. He planted his hands on his hips and declared, "I'm just finishing my extracurricular homework and running errands for you adults. You're not allowed to laugh at me for sticking my nose into other people's business!"
Fukuzawa Yukichi replied, "I won't laugh."
Ranpo's tone weakened, suspicion creeping in. "Really? You won't laugh, you won't scold me, you won't think that I broke your game rules, that I'm an overreaching child who doesn't know his place—"
"I won't." Fukuzawa Yukichi closed his eyes, suppressing the heavy weight in his chest. He could no longer stand by and do nothing.
A genius like this must not be led astray.
For the nation, for society, and for the people, it would be an immeasurable loss. Just imagining such a future made him feel suffocated. Who, in the end, could restrain Ranpo? That guardian who let him grow wild without guidance?
No. He could not place his trust in Asou Akiya. He had to shatter Ranpo's self-deception.
"You are special, Ranpo."
"Huh?"
"Trust your own mind," Fukuzawa Yukichi said steadily. "You are special, fundamentally different from other people. Ninety-nine percent of this world is unbearably foolish; they are nowhere near as clever as you imagine them to be."
"Here we go again," Edogawa Ranpo snapped, irritation surfacing. "Are you really going to start lecturing me about this kind of adult 'lie' again?"
He was clearly losing patience.
"The reason you think it's a 'lie'," Fukuzawa Yukichi continued, "comes from your parents and your guardian, doesn't it?" He decided to take a gamble. "In order to protect you and let you grow up happily, they fabricated the illusion that you are not special in this world. You believed that completely. But your guardian has been hiding things from you, hasn't he?"
Edogawa Ranpo's gaze wavered. "There are… some things he hasn't told me. But Akiya would never lie to me."
Fukuzawa Yukichi replied coldly, "Has he never lied to anyone else?"
Ranpo fell silent, words caught in his throat.
"I've met people like that before," Fukuzawa Yukichi said. "They are exceptionally skilled with words. They lure others into traps with language, step by step, until there is no escape. How can you be so sure you haven't been deceived?"
Edogawa Ranpo suddenly looked up. "Because he was the first person who ever told me that I wasn't wrong!"
Pain clenched Fukuzawa Yukichi's heart. What kind of past had this boy lived through?
"Silver-haired uncle," Ranpo said, flustered but increasingly resolute, "when I first came to Yokohama, I couldn't communicate normally with anyone at all—" He tightened his resolve as he spoke. "Only Akiya was different. He didn't know me, and yet he knew what I wanted to do, he knew what I had done. He cared about me the way my parents did. How could someone like that ever lie to me?"
Fukuzawa Yukichi stepped forward and said, "At most, that only proves that both he and you are not ordinary people!"
Edogawa Ranpo turned his head away. "I don't believe you."
Akiya is an idiot.
If he really won over Mr. Randou by lying to his own spouse, then the day the truth is exposed will be a complete disaster.
"Is he truly flawless in your eyes?" Fukuzawa Yukichi pressed on, step by step, trying to tear apart the shadow clouding Ranpo's heart. "Ranpo, think carefully. The person you know—does he really have no cracks at all? In his everyday life, is he really just an ordinary man?"
Edogawa Ranpo answered in confusion, "He's just a regular salaryman. He gets off work every day and spends time with his wife and kid."
Fukuzawa Yukichi nearly choked on his own breath. Did geniuses these days really have to be this… mundane?
"What exactly are you trying to say?" Ranpo snapped, anger flaring. "Are you forcing me to doubt my guardian? You're saying all this without any evidence—there's no way I can believe you!"
This time, Fukuzawa Yukichi was the one driven into a corner, left speechless.
What should he say?
Say something—quickly!
The child was already panicked and furious!
He could not afford to miss this moment. If he did, that mental barricade would slam shut again, and it would end in failure just like last time.
Overwhelmed with anxiety, Fukuzawa Yukichi saw through Edogawa Ranpo's loneliness at last. It was the fear of facing the world alone, the weakness of desperately clinging to another adult he perceived as an equal—or even someone of a higher "rank."
"Your guardian is an ability user!"
The words slipped out of Fukuzawa Yukichi's mouth before his mind could catch up.
Edogawa Ranpo's expression froze.
Once the words were spoken, Fukuzawa Yukichi felt as though his soul had drifted out of his body, as if he were possessed, and he continued without thinking, "You are an ability user too…"
And just like that, the door to a new world was thrown open—
Even more coincidentally, everything began to line up at once: Asou Akiya's almost prophetic foresight in his actions, the dangerous sense of pressure Randou gave off, and the occasional loss of control in Chuuya's "dark red power"…
The world was no longer ordinary. One by one, the veils of incomprehensible mist shrouding people were torn away.
There was only one truth!
Edogawa Ranpo's breathing grew rapid, his heart pounding wildly, his blood pressure spiking as heat rushed to his face and his cheeks flushed red. Being at that age of adolescent delusions, he especially longed for something supernatural, dreaming of becoming a hero who could save the world like a superhero. He leaned closer to Fukuzawa Yukichi, grabbed hold of him, and shouted in a trembling voice, "My whole family are ability users?!"
[No—!!!]
[What on earth did I just say?!]
Only then did the silver-haired man realize what he had done. His legs felt nailed to the floor as the soul of a swordsman let out a silent wail.
Edogawa Ranpo decisively pulled out his phone and dialed Chuuya's number, rudely disturbing his younger brother late at night over in the Slums.
"Chuuya! Chuuya! Are you an ability user?!"
"Hah—why are you asking such a stupid question in the middle of the night? Did you hear that from Dad?"
The sleepy voice of the boy came through the phone.
Fukuzawa Yukichi felt as though he had just experienced a hair-breadth plunge from hell to heaven, his brain buzzing loudly as the world spun around him.
[What… is going on?]
That night, after retrieving the longevity charm, Nakahara Chuuya was in a rather good mood and answered Ranpo honestly, "I am an ability user. My ability is gravity manipulation. I didn't mean to hide it from you—Dad wanted you to discover it yourself. He said the day you realized it would be the day you truly grew up."
Edogawa Ranpo jumped in place and burst into peals of laughter.
"Hahahaha—!!!"
"I get it now! I get it now! So this is what the world is really like—ahhh!"
It wasn't deception.
It was a well-intentioned concealment!
Everyone was living in a world of ability users; those adults who seemed like fools were the truly ordinary people! Only they were different—Ranpo-sama's entire family were ability users!
How wonderful. Everyone had been waiting for him to discover this truth! Wakaka!
...
Passing through the lobby, the middle-aged man under protective custody suddenly coughed, bent forward, and clutched his chest in visible distress.
The city police officer accompanying him cried out in alarm, "Sir? Sir—what's wrong?!"
"I… lack oxygen." Natsume Souseki straightened up, forcing himself upright. "Give me a moment to catch my breath. Let's go to the second floor—there are too many young people here, I can't breathe properly."
Asou Akiya was unreliable. Fukuzawa Yukichi was even more unreliable!
You two bastards!
This child—I can't teach him anymore! Let him grow however he wants; he's already gone crooked!