Ichijō Mirai: "."
There was a subtle sense of being profiled by an elite FBI agent, but Morofushi Hiromitsu wasn't FBI, not even a police officer, just a police reservist.
He raised an eyebrow and answered dryly, "Yes."
"I don't remember much about my childhood," Morofushi Hiromitsu smiled, "but I guess I was in your state then, too."
"The reason for coming out of that sleepwalking state, if I had to say, would be..."
"I want to find the murderer."
The street lamps emitted a dull light, he stretched out his hand to the light source not far in front of him, and clenched his fist one finger at a time, "That was my goal, so I came to my senses, gritted my teeth and walked out of that dinner that reeked of blood, and took one step at a time to the police academy."
"And you?"
Morofushi Hiromitsu looked at Ichijō Mirai again.
Ichijō Mirai looked at the red marks on his face and clothes and asked, "Did you really walk out?"
The marks had dried, like dried blood, and they stood out, and didn't stand out, transforming the reservist, who hadn't suffered any physical injuries, into a wounded man.
"..." Morofushi Hiromitsu paused subtly and smiled, "In catching that murderer, it might come out completely."
"Do you want to catch your 'murderer'?"
Do you want to catch the murderer of Mr. and Mrs. Ichijō?
After some thought, Ichijō Mirai shook his head, "No."
He lazily put up his first finger, "One, the murderer is dead, I can't catch him anymore."
"Two, if there was a chance to catch him, I wouldn't catch him, I'd just kill him."
"Three," He put up three fingers and wiggled them, "you're probably mistaken, I have no feelings for him."
No hatred, no bitterness, no softness, nothing, just a passing glance and a handful of gunshots.
It's like a normal person walking down the street and seeing a piece of dog shit, not gritting their teeth and going up to arrest it in a bag, not suddenly feeling sad or remembering the warmth of this piece of dog shit in a dog's stomach, but just glancing at it, shifting their footsteps, and passing right by.
Within two minutes, passers-by will have forgotten the dog's existence.
Morofushi Hiromitsu: "I see,"
"A normal person should have feelings and emotions that are intertwined to promote reaction and action before reacting, but you're only reacting and acting, skipping the corresponding feelings."
"That's a bit weird," Ichijō Mirai gave the 'X' sign for denial, "you're making it sound like I'm not normal, some kind of traumatized stress disorder due to the tragic deaths of my parents at a young age that I've been indulging in too much to come out of."
He's not.
At least he doesn't care about Mr. and Mrs. Ichijō, or their murderer, and is even comfortable enough to hook up with the person suspected of being behind their deaths and get a code name.
"Yes, you're not," Morofushi Hiromitsu nodded in agreement and said in a joking tone, "I had the impression that you were describing me,"
"If the 'past' is an endless fog, you're not the one who stands in the middle of the cold fog in a sorry state, weeping and mourning, dwelling on the death of your parents."
"But neither are you the one who swallows the bitter pill of time, who steps through the mist, who is no longer cut off from the world, who actually steps into the world."
"But rather a powerful, fierce, solitary, self-contained mist hunter who travels through dangerous zones."
"I can step to the edge of the Mist, stopping at the border between the Mist and the earth," He added, gazing at Ichijō Mirai, "partly, perhaps, because I've just collapsed, and my mental world is a wasteland, but there's still a pillar left,"
"My brother."
He didn't move, the presence of his eyes was light but never shifted, catching Ichijō Mirai's reaction, "Even if I had to follow the legal process and be raised by an adult relative, and spend so little time with him that I could only see him perhaps a few times a year."
"But the feeling of having a real blood relative alive in the world makes me feel like a kite, with my family as the strings to the kite."
Slender, but firm.
Ichijō Mirai couldn't help but glance over and meet Morofushi Hiromitsu's eyes, somewhat puzzled: ...what's with all that concentration on him?
He thought for a moment, and politely complimented, "You're lucky, your brother's lucky, and you have each other."
Is that meant to be a compliment?
"Apart from parents, there's nothing in this world that's closer than a brother and then some."
"Sometimes, even parents aren't as close as 'blood brothers'," Ichijō Mirai said with a lack of interest, making up some completely boilerplate compliments and combining them with Morofushi Hiromitsu's personal situation, "It's amazing how even brothers who haven't seen each other much, even if they haven't seen each other very much, can feel close to each other."
"It's as if they've been living together all their lives, as if they've bridged the gap of time, right?"
How about this for a polite compliment?
Ichijō Mirai glanced over and realized that there was something different about Morofushi Hiromitsu's smile.
I couldn't tell you what it was, but it seemed deeper, more relaxed and softer.
"Yes," Morofushi Hiromitsu said, "blood relatives are different from anyone else."
"My brother is a police officer, and we're after the same thing, with a common goal, Mirai, you,"
The words circled around in his mouth, and he said, "Are you targeting, in part, the police officers who were there in the first place?"
The police officers who failed to solve the case, or who were in contact with the murderer.
"Not emotionally, just rationally, some of the members of the police force were targeted, put on an 'arrest list', or a 'purge list'?"
Morofushi Hiromitsu again paused for a few seconds before saying the last word.
That's not a bad way to put it.
Ichijō Mirai would have killed a part of the police if he had the chance.
A part of the police: all the police he saw when he was in a bad mood or in an overly happy mood.
He thought for a few seconds and answered honestly, "Yes."
"You just said that the real murderer of your parents is dead," Morofushi Hiromitsu added, "Is he the type of person that the police define? Or, was he a police officer?"
Ichijō Mirai: "Both."
This student was asking a lot of questions, Ichijō Mirai glanced over, "You're checking up on me, again."
"What did you find out?"
Morofushi Hiromitsu didn't deny it, "The instructors said something strange earlier, I'm a little concerned, there's a file on your mother in the archive,"
"In the afternoon, when you came home, I went through the files again and found something."
"A few years ago, a police officer was killed in the line of duty," He didn't look at Ichijō Mirai again, but lowered his eyes, "in a somewhat deafening and famous incident,"
"It was the first crime committed by a criminal, and according to the police's reconstruction of the scene, the officer's death was the bell that rang for a complete, no-holds-barred crime by that criminal, whose death set off a brutal, one-sided massacre."
...Wow, oh.
Ichijō Mirai raised an eyebrow, once again a little surprised.
This time, instead of Morofushi Hiromitsu observing his expression without looking away, he was observing Morofushi Hiromitsu's expression with interest.
Morofushi Hiromitsu's expression was light, as if nothing had fluctuated, and his tone was still gentle, "That officer, he served under Officer Ichijō-san,"
"And after he was attacked and disappeared into an alleyway by an unknown enemy, one of the police officers who went to support the search was a police officer by the name of 'Inuo'."
"Now, he was a police sergeant."
"A few days ago, when he went to pick you up from the holding cell," He said slowly, "I wondered how someone who had never spent time with you before could look at you with such respect and admiration."
"His gaze was undisguised, as if by looking at you, at your face, he saw the man who had tamed himself."
"I've also wondered why you occasionally say the surname 'Inuo' when you talk about the kind people who help you in training, and whether the existence of Officer Inuo is a coincidence, or something else?"
By this time, Ichijō Mirai had already decided that Morofushi Hiromitsu knew almost everything he needed to know.
He had already mastered most of the puzzle, and even if there were a few missing pieces, they could be deduced from the existing ones.
But why does Mr. Police Reserve have such a calm expression on his face?
Shouldn't he have a pretty face?
Incredulous? Disgusted? Shouldn't he at least be frowning?
Ichijō Mirai lowered his head and ran his eyes over Morofushi Hiromitsu's expression for a few moments, sadly not finding any negative or positive emotions, "Do you know what I'm thinking right now?"
"Thinking that I know too much?" Morofushi Hiromitsu guessed, "Thinking about how to kill me?"
And offering a location, "We're almost there, you can kill me there."
"When I came here, the others didn't know I was following you, and even if you took me out, they trust you as much as I trust you, and won't suspect you."
"You could really kill me, and I wouldn't resist."
"Suppose."
He raised his eyes, gazing at Ichijō Mirai, speaking slowly, "'Messiah' wants to be 'Satan'."
-'Messiah' and 'Satan'.
What a match, what an antithesis, what an inseparable pair of monikers.
They come from the same source, yet they are very different.
On the one hand, he is gentle and courteous, the sun that shines brightly, the saint who only lowers his eyes and suffers in silence even after experiencing the sufferings of the world, the Savior.
On the other hand, he is the night, the devil who brings coldness and darkness, violence and bloodshed, and betrays his companions, and is the destroyer of the world.
Who would have thought that 'Messiah', the shining sun of the police academy, and 'Satan', the criminal who inflicted three bone-deep wounds on Tokyo, were actually blood relatives?
If it wasn't the instructor's tip, the information in the file room, Ichijō Mirai's code name 'Messiah', the look on his face when he heard 'Satan', the incredible help he received from all over Tokyo during Disguised Criminal training, or the look of admiration and respect in the eyes of that Inuo police officer, if it wasn't the person who gathered all this information, then I would have to tell you that Ichijō Mirai is a blood relative of the criminal who brought three deep, bone-chilling wounds to Tokyo, 'Satan'?
If it wasn't Morofushi Hiromitsu who collected this information, no one would have ever found out.
No one would have found out, and no one would have dared to hypothesize such a shocking thing.
Only Morofushi Hiromitsu dared to do so, because he had approached his own kind step by step, and with the closeness to his own kind and the admiration for the strongest, he finally came up with the only end point.
All he could be thankful for was that, fortunately, it was not too late.
Fortunately, Ichijō Mirai was 'Messiah'.
The 'Messiah' who would command his classmates carelessly, who would bring victory after victory, who would shine brighter than the sun when he stood in the sunlight, who was a bit inept at human interactions and emotions, who was occasionally mischievous, who had a bad personality, and who was loved and hated at the same time.
'Messiah' and 'Satan' are the same, yet very different and fundamentally different.
They are the same in the sense that they have the same goal, which is to avenge the deaths of their parents by investigating them.
Whether Ichijō Mirai has a strong hatred for his enemies or not, there is no doubt that his goal is to avenge the deaths of his parents, as evidenced by the bank safe.
He may have been blinded to human emotions at a young age by the shock of being in a fog for too long, but even if he doesn't understand even a little bit of emotions, the direction he's heading in is still the direction of his parents' deaths.
What's more, Ichijō Mirai is not really ignorant.
Morofushi Hiromitsu could have deduced from the sound of the bell in the first case of 'Satan' that the direction in which he was heading was also the direction of Mr. and Mrs. Ichijō's deaths.
The difference is that 'Messiah' is light, and 'Satan' is dark.
Ichijō Mirai prefers to go through official, police, impartial channels, and investigate the deaths of his parents as a police officer, in the open and in the clear.
And 'Satan'...
Morofushi Hiromitsu believes that he has no qualms about killing anyone who is involved in the death of his parents, and that he will avenge his parents' death by killing them.
He doesn't care whether the case of Mr. and Mrs. Ichijō's deaths in the world of light is solved or remains cold until everyone forgets about it.
This is the difference between the two brothers.
Differences don't mean anything.
Perhaps in time, 'Satan' will recognize 'Messiah's' path, or perhaps 'Messiah' will recognize 'Satan's' path.
Morofushi Hiromitsu wanted to be optimistic and relaxed, expecting the former, but unfortunately, he felt that it was most likely the latter.
...The system of the Japanese police is so rigid, like a piece of zombie meat frozen for centuries, that only violence can break it down and build it back up.
Ichijō Mirai can't handle it alone.
Any later, and 'Messiah' might have favored 'Satan'.
But fortunately, it's not too late.
Fortunately, Ichijō Mirai is not alone.
Morofushi Hiromitsu looked at Ichijō Mirai, and spoke his greatest, the discovery that would most likely touch Ichijō Mirai's bottom line, and most likely be the cause of his own death, "Yes, I discovered your deepest secret, and found out that..."
"'Satan'."