The two girls kept their serious expressions, as if they still believed they were maintaining my cage.

Shit, I got it. Simple and brilliant. Dazai couldn’t reveal who he really was, couldn’t explain his ability — first, because it would expose his identity, and second, because it was way too impressive and would draw unnecessary attention. But he couldn’t be completely powerless either, or the Brits wouldn’t have given a damn about him. So, he made up some random persona with a bullshit ability — some weak-ass illusion magic.

And now he was pretending… by not pretending. He just nullified the barrier, while the girls kept thinking it was still there.

Dazai was a fucking bastard, but I had to admire his problem-solving skills.

I mean, on one hand, it was brilliant. On the other, it was pure insanity. It reminded me of how I was recently baffled by Atsushi’s reckless, Darwin-defying bravery — but Dazai was the same way, just on another level. He picked himself a disciple in his own image — there was even a weird kind of fondness in that thought. But at least Atsushi risked his life to protect his friends. Dazai, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy pushing the world’s limits just to see if it would push back. If I do this, will I get my ass kicked? What about this?

All of Dazai’s genius plans — the ones I’d seen in action, at least — had one thing in common: he relied on nothing but sheer, insane confidence. One wrong step, and he’d be fucking dead. And yet, he carried himself like everything was perfectly planned, destined for victory.

And now? He’d just stuck his head into the lion’s mouth. Mine too, while he was at it. Decided to “defect” to the enemy, fully expecting me to figure out his trick on my own, no explanations given. Yeah, he’d dropped a hint about Double Black, but he’d also pissed me off so I wouldn’t think about it until later.

God, it was infuriating! Would it kill him to just tell me the plan? Did his tongue not work or what?

Then again, I wouldn’t have agreed. I’d have told him to fuck right off — what did any of this have to do with me? Why was I the one covering his ass?

Speaking of asses.

The moment I got up and stepped into the aisle, I unexpectedly felt Dazai’s hand on mine. No, not like that — normal human urges weren’t his thing. His brain was too damn rotten from overuse, and everything else rotted away with it. What actually happened was that something hard and rectangular slipped into my back pocket.

When I made it to the bathroom — my ever-present guards thankfully staying outside — I checked what he’d planted on me.

It was a passport.

At first glance, it looked exactly like mine, photos, stamps from my travels and all. But there was a catch — my real passport had a wavy corner from that time I spilled wine on it, and customs officers always bitched about it. This one’s pages were smooth. A fake. An illusion.

I already had a pretty good idea whose handiwork it was — Dazai’s current partner from the Agency, that tall, bespectacled pain in the ass, Kunikida. Wonder how his magic notebook actually worked. These conjured objects probably vanished eventually, like elf gold in fairy tales. Still, the shit you could pull off with an ability like that… Imagine if we had that guy and his book in the Mafia. But he was one of those self-righteous types — try pulling the stick out of his ass, and he’d just beat you to death with it.

Inside the passport was a credit card.

The name on it: Joushi Ikita.

So now I was Mr. Ikita, too? Great. A made-up guy with a split personality. Not that I needed the card — I had my own — but I appreciated the gesture.

There was also a piece of paper.

5609
Truth
1 or 2?
3
221

Real fucking funny, Dazai. Might as well have written it in code. Or ancient Greek.

The first number was obviously the card’s PIN — credit cards are useless without a passcode, and out of all the numbers on that note, only one was four digits long.

“Truth” was easy to figure out too. I’d heard Wilde bragging about how he could see through people’s lies, like he was some kind of human lie detector. If his ability actually worked that way, my best move was to keep my mouth shut until I figured out the specifics. Dazai lied like he breathed, but apparently, his bullshit didn’t count.

The rest? No clue. But I could work backwards — what did Dazai want from me?

He probably didn’t want me to lose my ability, like Akutagawa and Atsushi did. Not that I thought I mattered to him that much, but he’d already thrown the bait, distracted attention onto me, and slipped into Saint Joanne’s inner circle as one of her “own.”

Most likely, his grand plan boiled down to getting us both near Joanne and her subordinates. He’d nullify their abilities, I’d wipe them out — Corruption or no Corruption — and boom. The end. Classic. Everyone would die, Dazai and I would ride off into the sunset. A Double Black masterpiece polished to perfection.

Or maybe a slight variation — Joanne might try to “cleanse” me first instead of killing me outright. Dazai would touch her, I’d pretend I’d been purified, and then, at the perfect moment — boom, massacre.

Like I said, I knew Dazai too well. You didn’t need to be a genius to see where this was going.

But what about the rest? Why the card and the PIN? If everything went smoothly, I wouldn’t even need them.

That’s when it hit me. The credit card wasn’t for food or a place to stay. It was a contingency plan. That’s why the PIN was at the top of the note — step one of the “shit hits the fan” protocol.

Not that I could imagine what could go wrong — our plan was perfect. Like… well, like my Corruption (when Dazai was there to keep me from dying). But still. If things did go south…

That explained “1 or 2.” Dazai wanted to know how many of the Brontë sisters I could take down without him and without Corruption. There wouldn’t be any outsiders in the Equalists’ lair — his “illusion” trick wouldn’t be needed. He couldn’t just nullify Wuthering Heights or whatever the fuck it was called. So how was I supposed to break free from another electric cage?

There were three of them, but Dazai only had two hands (insert dirty joke here). One sister was clearly extra, and the odds of him touching two at once were slim. Hell if I knew whether I could handle one or two of them solo — we hadn’t exactly sparred. Whatever. I’d say “one,” just to make his life harder. Let him figure out how to deal with the other two.

If I was right, the last two numbers had to be a place and time for a rendezvous.

“221”… Maybe 221B Baker Street? Sherlock Holmes’ address?

Jesus Christ. Did Dazai really just arrange a meetup at the Sherlock Holmes museum? What is he, ten?

That just left “3.” Three days? Three hours? From when?

Guess I’d find out.

See? I can do deduction too. I’m not completely stupid.

“Aww, Chuuya, looks like the flight attendants took pity on you and dug up a couple of stale sandwiches,” Dazai sang out as I dropped into my seat.

I silently flipped him off, hoping he’d catch the true meaning of the gesture (one finger, you know). Well, aside from the obvious one, which was also very much intended.

Still, I ate the damn sandwiches. Not the worst I’ve ever had.

Same drill, same abracadabra hocus-pocus (seriously, fuck this), and we cleared passport control at the airport. Lucky for us, one of the girls — Charlotte, I think? The slightly taller one — was hauling a heavy suitcase. The barrier duty had fallen to Anne and Emily, now refreshed after her nap (she was the one with the mole on her cheek), and those two were exactly who Dazai nullified. No idea what he’d have done if all three of them had been on guard at once. But he’d have figured something out — improvisation was kind of his thing.

That nasty habit of treating people and their actions like pieces on a chessboard? Yeah, that came straight from Mori, the bastard. Dazai was still nowhere near Mori’s level, though — Mori had been playing this game for ages, like he could see a hundred moves ahead. But Mori — he was smart as hell, sure, but the guy sucked at improvisation. Even I could throw him off sometimes with a well-timed wisecrack. Not that Mori would’ve liked me saying this. At all. 

Mori was the strategist. Dazai was the tactician.

No one could predict who’d come out on top when they finally faced off (not “if” — sooner or later, one of them was gonna try to take the other out, everyone knew that). But there was no doubt — when it happened, Yokohama was gonna shake, and heads were gonna roll.

So, Heathrow airport. Turned out to be a real place, not just something from the books.

Hello, London. The capital of Great Britain!

Honestly, I was expecting Joanne and her cultist crew to be waiting for us the moment we landed. I mean, given how much that bitch had it out for me — not me, Dazai, well, you get it — she should’ve come charging in at full speed to get a look at the big bad guy herself.

Didn’t love that idea, though. It meant we'd have to deal with her right there in the airport, and airports are packed with people… Yeah, yeah, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” When I’m not drunk and feeling like shit, I can get behind that maxi… whatever the hell… that unpleasant little saying. But if we were gonna raise hell, I’d prefer to do it somewhere a little more… deserted.

But no one showed up.

Charlotte stepped aside to make a call. Came back, said to her sisters:

“She says tomorrow. There’ll be a ceremony.”

The fuck kind of “ceremony”? Sure as hell ain’t a wedding…

“And we have to guard him the whole time? ” Anne groaned. “I’m dead on my feet already…”

Charlotte sighed.

“We’ll get home soon. You can sleep, just not too long — I’m exhausted too… Mr. Ikita, Oscar, if your flight wasn’t too tiring, Madame Joanne would like to speak with you now. And you—”

All three of them turned to me with the kind of glares people reserve for cockroaches in their cereal. Like I fucking chose to be here.

“You’re coming with us.”

“And if I, say, start screaming my head off for help on the way? What then?”

“We’ll knock you out again,” Charlotte said matter-of-factly. “And by the way, prolonged unconsciousness can lead to a coma. Repeated instances, even more so.”

Considering they were planning to kill me or something tomorrow, that wasn’t the scariest threat in the world.

Still, I’d prefer to be awake for my own execution, so I decided not to push it.

“Let me guess,” I muttered sourly. “You wanna be a doctor?”

She gave me a surprised look. Figured she’d just ignore me, but no — cold as ice, but she actually answered:

“A biologist, actually.”

And with that, Dazai waved me a cheery goodbye and took off with that pretentious rich prick Wilde — no idea where, maybe a hotel. And me? The sisters dragged me along with them.

We ended up near Spitalfields Market. Whitechapel, I think. The old hunting grounds of Jack the Ripper. Honestly, it was exactly how I imagined — total shithole. No murderers prowling the streets (in daylight, at least — who knows about nighttime), but plenty of hookers, drunks, and homeless people. Plus, nowadays, junkies too.

Guess how I know so much about Jack the Ripper? Dazai. He got me into all that about ten years ago. All that sick crap that Mori had been filling his head with non-stop.

The sisters’ apartment was tiny and disgustingly clean.

Didn’t look like three young women lived there — no posters of boy band pretty boys, no fluffy animal slippers. Just narrow, neatly made beds, no clothes strewn on the floor. Boring as hell.

But hey, better than sleeping on the streets of Manchester or wherever they were begging before Joanne gave them this “job.”

Still, the place wasn’t as soulless as I expected. When you hear “cult freaks,” you picture blank white walls, crucifixes over every bed, a dozen Bibles, and a closet full of whips for self-flagellation — y’know, the whole guilty sinner aesthetic.

But this? This was normal.

A little TV, books on the shelves — fairy tales, a couple of detective novels, a textbook called Microbiology: University Course (so she wasn’t kidding, huh…). Even art books — Waterhouse, Beardsley — someone here liked paintings.

I watched Charlotte unpack her suitcase, stacking boxes of Japanese sweets and packets of green tea in the kitchen cabinets. Guess they did the full tourist routine in Yokohama — maid cafés, anime districts, hot springs, all that shit foreigners go nuts for. So they were real people after all. Not just brainwashed Amish-or-something-like weirdos.

Then, on the kitchen floor, I spotted two empty cat bowls — one with dried-up food stains, the other just water marks. Hadn’t been used in a while.

“Where’s the cat?” I asked. “Dead?”

That’s when they finally zapped me.

And I blacked out.