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Yûya’s Link
The Murderer
That Wraps It Up
Cynicism
Mentality
The protagonist.
The murderer.
Classmate.
Classmate.
Classmate.
Classmate.
Neighbor.
Asano Miiko’s close friend.
Detective.
Detective.
????
Most Powerful Entrepreneur
in the World.
Dreams don’t come true so easily.
Well, yeah. I mean, I can barely handle reality.
So, in other words, all wishes are nearly unattainable.
Well, yeah, but not all nearly unattainable things
are wishes.
Yeah.
It was an impossible, chance meeting to begin with.
PROLOGUE ■■■ ix
infinitely distant place. An enormous paradox of a world—
living inside of her imagination.
It wasn’t ignorance that allowed such a paradox to exist. It
mattered little which world was the true one and which was
false. If one side was real, then the other was fake, but if
reality was in fact fake, then both sides had equal value, and
equally lacked value.
That’s what I think.
So did Zerozaki.
In a sense, my relationship with Zerozaki was very much
like that. We realized we were the same, but we also under-
stood that, at the same time, we were completely different.
“I might have once become like you, so I feel a certain
affinity.”
“I definitely could not have become like you. That’s what I
like about ya.”
This was another fragment of us.
Truly nonsensical.
Ultimately.
PROLOGUE ■■■ x
But as soon as that dreamer of a girl reached out her grace-
ful hand and placed a finger on that mirror, all she would feel
was a void. Nothing but nothingness. The thing she had
allowed to exist, someone else had not. Moreover, the thing
she had allowed to exist didn’t mean anything to anyone else.
And this she finally realized.
For that girl, in that moment, without any exaggeration,
a world had been destroyed.
And so begins the story of the downfall of a single world.
A world that fell apart not due to the interference of an azure-
haired Savant or a crimson-haired Mankind’s Greatest, but
simply because that’s the way it was. When a fallacy bearing a
justifiable paradox descends upon a human failure and me,
a pile of damaged goods, everything goes back to zero.
So . . .
PROLOGUE ■■■ xi
My world is the coolest.
She was wide-eyed, her hands up in the air like she was doing
a banzai cheer. Maybe that was what she was doing, or maybe
she was surrendering. There was also the possibility that she
was just Muslim. Any of these was fine by me, but in reality,
she was probably just surprised.
Her shoulder-length hair had a reddish tint and was done
up in a sort of bob. Her clothes were nothing out of the
ordinary. They were ultra-plain, following the style of so
much of the Rokumeikan student body. All of a sudden, when
she sat down, she seemed much shorter—but then I realized
most of her height had come from her extra-tall London
boots.
She had a young face, so I couldn’t tell if she was my senior
or a peer. Judging by her demeanor alone, it would have
seemed plausible that she was my junior, except that being
that I was a freshman, that was pretty much impossible.
“Hey. Y’know, if you don’t respond, I’ll get lonely and
stuff.” She stared at me with puppy-dog eyes.
“Right,” I finally said. “Who are you?”
I was pretty sure this was our first encounter. But I’d
learned one thing in the past month: This weird little pocket
And just as I was trying to find the place for the seventh
queen, there came a knock at my door and a cry of “Ikkun!”
The chessboard went flying. Queens everywhere.
For an instant, my heart, not to mention my thoughts,
stopped.
I approached the door and swung it open. This time, it re-
ally was Mikoko-chan. She wore a pink camisole with a red
miniskirt, exposing a healthy and refreshing amount of skin.
“Morning!” she said with a wave. Then came the full-faced
grin. “Ikkun, guten morgen!”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“. . .”
“So the thing about friends is that they’re like, eh, you know,
like . . . y’know,” Zerozaki said with a cynical smile. The tattoo
scrawled across the right side of his face wrinkled unpleas-
antly.
“What do you think?”
I was wrong.
Boom.
The words shook me.
Aoii Mikoko.
My classmate.
Always cheerful, sometimes sad.
The girl who said
She liked me.
Death.
Nothingness.
....
A thunderous howl.
My vacant eyes shifted toward the direction of the voice
coming from the opposite riverbank. But nobody was there. A
small-framed, shadowy figure was charging this way against
the river’s current.
I didn’t even have to wonder who it was. I knew this
person as well as I knew myself.
“Heeeeeeeyyyyy!”
Zerozaki.
Zerozaki Hitoshiki.
Zerozaki Hitoshiki hollered as he leaped from the river and
charged up the bank. The one in black seemed momentarily
startled by this new contender, but after assessing the situa-
tion, released my finger and backed away from my body. My
Suddenly.
Everything.
Connected.
“Usami-kun, you say?”
“Yes.”
“You're sure?”
“Do I seem like the kind of person who would make up a
lie like that? This morning a friend discovered the body at
school. He's been strangled, just like Emoto-san and Aoii-san.
I’m at the scene right now.”
Now that she mentioned it, it did sound like she was
speaking so as not to disturb the people around her. She was
probably surrounded by police officers, medical examiners,
and gawking onlookers.
Akiharu-kun.
Hadn’t he said he would be next? Oddly, his words had
become a reality.
“Really . . .”
But this was probably no simple coincidence. If Akiharu-
kun had figured out the truth, then it would make sense that
he could foresee his own death. And yet even knowing this, he
had let himself be killed all the same.
“I’d like to ask you some things, if you would come . . .”
“Before that,” I interrupted, “I want to ask you about
Akiharu-kun’s body. Do you mind?”
“Yo. Is it over?”
As I exited Muimi-chan’s apartment, Zerozaki, leaning
against a telephone pole, waved a hand and called out to me. I
kept walking oast him without stopping.
“Yeah, it’s over,” I said.
“Now then . . .”
“Don’t be so spoiled.”
<Easy Love, Easy No> is a BAD ENDING. . . .
NI SI OI SI N
Born in 1983, take made his debut with the gorgeous, ultramodern
illustrations for NISIOISIN’s Zaregoto series. Just as that novel
cemented NISIOISIN’s reputation as one of the leading lights of
Japanese pop culture, take’s illustrations for these best-selling novels
made him a star in his own right. His first-class character designs
have captured readers’ hearts, and he is now ranked as one of the top
young illustrators in Japan. take loves cats and manga genius Osamu
Tezuka.
TYP E D OU T BY A FE W AN ONS ■ ■ ■
TYP E D OU T BY A FE W AN ONS ■ ■ ■