Episode 27: NATURAL ENEMY | DURRUN by Aito Kitazaki

Episode 27

Episode 27: “NATURAL ENEMY” The clock winds back. One hundred and seventy seconds before Sasara goes through a building, Soujun is crouched in the ruins with the case of three hundred million Lenny, and his plan is a simple one: shake the long-haired boxer, slip through to CHOFU, and keep the money out of other hands — delivering it to the shadow concealer has left his head entirely. Sasara finds him by punching through a wall, announces that the ruins are their ring, and the match starts whether Soujun agrees to it or not. So he reaches for his finest weapon, Submission Mode (Ultimate), the ultimate defeated face, built to make an opponent feel that hitting him would be the opponent’s own loss. Sasara looks at it, and hits him. The reason is the disclosure this episode turns on: Sasara was born with facial expression blindness, a condition listed among TOKYO’s rare incurable diseases that leaves him unable to read a single emotion from a human face. Every bluff Soujun has survived on is dead weight here, and the gesture of a terrified man gripping his trousers is taken for a boast about his fists — so Sasara tells him to trade punches fair and square and let his boxing do the talking, between digressions about Hamachi Suzuki, the diva of CHOFU. Cornered by a danger that cannot be avoided, Soujun does the arithmetic on what is left in his bottle: thirty seconds at the outside, half of that if he wants a second chance. Then Utaki’s phantom arrives with her leopard-print speaker, his mother’s promise surfaces through it, and a brain wired only for avoidance is rewritten. He drinks. The fists that follow are his own — but Sasara has been reading muscle, not faces, since he was a child.