Part 5
Kagami once again found himself dumped onto the outskirts of town.
Earlier, he ended up getting caught up in the moment and threw his fist at the man, but the man’s companions quickly showed up from nearby, resulting in Kagami getting beat up instead. They then brought him to a back alley via a small taxi known as an auto-rickshaw before proceeding to beat him up even further.
Despite the wet blood he could feel in the back of his nose from the hits he received to his head, Kagami was actually processing the situation quite calmly.
“I’m gonna get myself murdered at this rate.”
And then he passed out.
Upon waking up from the itchy mosquito bites on his cheeks, he found a beautiful starry sky stretched out before his eyes.
He was next to the Chao Phraya River which flowed through the middle of Bangkok. His blood-covered body was pathetically sprawled out across the ground, looking like a murder victim corpse you’d see in a cop drama.
All his money had been robbed.
With this, he had even lost the parting gift he received from that kind old lady.
“Why do you always screw up like this, you idiot!”
Kagami told himself off.
As he laid there on his back, looking at the star-filled sky, he found it unbelievable that he was even in this random corner of Bangkok. He felt so ashamed of himself that he began to laugh.
“You really are an interesting person.”
Tendou’s annoying cackling face showed up in his head.
Kagami’s body hurt all over, but he still managed to somehow return to his hotel.
He had no money whatsoever, but since he paid in advance for a week’s lodging, he still had a place to sleep for three more days. He still had some water left in his room as well.
He was still able to survive.
He had no idea what his next course of action should be, but he decided to just rest in bed for the time being.
And then he slept like a log.
“I’m going to Paris.”
Kagami dreamt of Tendou who nonchalantly parted with those words.
When he woke up in his dirty room with nothing but a bed, he felt like a hibernating bug that couldn’t move at all.
His face had swelled up from the beating last night, and its skin was like the surface of a pupa, crusty from all the hardened blood.
Stuck at rock bottom, Kagami once again thought back upon what had happened over the course of the last month.
After the final battle with the Natives, he was carried into a general hospital, where he would wake up and fall asleep again and again in an ICU. It felt like an endless cycle of dying and coming back to life, but he eventually managed to make it past the worst of it. After recovering to a sufficient degree, he was discharged from the hospital and returned to his apartment. But because of his complete lack of motivation to do anything, he simply wasted most of his time cooped up in his room under the blankets.
“What the hell am I doing?!”
It was then that he shouted at the ceiling as he laid in bed.
Spinning on the ceiling of the cheap Khaosan hotel that was currently above his head was a beat-up electric fan.
Beyond the blades that slowly spun with a systematic rhythm was a stain formed from some kind of liquid.
The stain looked like a monster that was mocking him for being unable to move from the pain. He eventually started to feel like it looked like his own face.
“What is this, an opposite mirror…? Screw you!”
Kagami turned over so that he wouldn’t have to look at the monster’s face.
His ribs hurt from getting kicked.
He had a fever as well.
His lips, cut-up from getting punched, were horribly swollen, and it hurt even to just swallow his saliva.
He needed to go to the hospital, but overseas travel didn’t come with life insurance.
There was no telling how exorbitant of a fee he would get charged if he went to the hospital without insurance.
And Kagami didn’t even have the energy to look for a hospital in the first place.
He had no choice but to rest and wait for recovery.
As he sunk into the thick sludge of drowsiness, he began to consider sleep to be his best method of escaping from the pain, and accepted that surrendering himself to those tiresome nightmares was his best course of action.
It was a tepid and unpleasant sleep.
When he woke up again covered in sweat, Kagami managed to get out of bed.
After shoving the lukewarm blood-tasting water from his bottle down his throat, he relieved himself at the bathroom while enduring the pain all over his body, and then headed back to his room to sleep again.
The monster on the ceiling looked a lot nicer than before.
It felt like that monster was the sole person who showed any concern for him in this foreign land.
But the fact that he felt that way only made him feel even more pathetic. In order to let the wind hit the heat rash that had developed on his back, he once again turned face down on his bed.
“What the hell am I doing?!”
At the same time, another thought floated up in his head.
“What am I supposed to do from here on out?!”
Those words that Kagami had been trying to avoid for so long reiterated themselves.
“What am I, supposed to do, from here on out?!”
They were the same words that went through his head when he woke up in his one-room apartment after that battle with the Natives.
He came to save Hiyori, but he couldn’t even find her hotel, and was now just lying on a bed with no purpose whatsoever. I’m such a hopeless idiot…
The walls of the cheap Khaosan hotel were dyed with the orange hue of the setting sun.
The scorching sun that deprived all living creatures of their motivation eventually moved to the other side of the Earth, and activity gradually returned to the nighttime town of Khaosan.
But Kagami remained immobile.
For a moment, he felt like he was at the ends of the Earth, but in actuality, he wasn’t even at the entrance yet.
Part 6
After his third day of sleep, he managed to recover from his swollen face and fever. During that period, he had grown as thin as a pencil from surviving off of nothing but his leftover water.
But he had to leave the hotel by tomorrow.
His body had wounds all over, all his money was gone, and he had even lost the postcard that was his sole lead. Kagami had been set back to a point even further behind than the start line.
He was already struggling enough to get by on his own, but when he thought about how Hiyori was likely suffering somewhere not too far away, he was quickly taken over with the desire to save her as soon as possible.
“I’ll just have to search through every hotel one by one… No, wait a second!”
Kagami thought things through again.
The man who had said that the address was Khaosan was none other than the Thai man that had put him through hell not once but twice.
“He might’ve been lying. In fact, there was never any reason to think that it wasn’t a lie. Why am I only realizing this now? Why am I such a goddamn idiot?!”
But just as he screamed those words in his head, the exit to his hopeless situation suddenly revealed itself.
“Have you been looking for me?”
A woman with bobbed hair speaking in broken Japanese was standing at the door.
“Huh? Who are you?”
“I’m Rin.”
“Rin… Huh?! Wait, you mean the one who sent that postcard?”
“Yes. I heard from a Japanese backpacker. He said there was a Japanese man looking for Hiyori and me. After hearing that, I came to look for you.”
“How is Hiyori?! Is she okay?!”
Kagami grabbed Rin’s shoulders as he questioned her.
“I don’t know. I’m just as lost as you are.”
“Huh?! What do you mean by that?!”
“She disappeared. Out of nowhere.”
“Disappeared?! No way…”
Rin nodded.
Kagami crumpled to the ground as if the energy had left his entire body.
“Are you okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m fine…”
Kagami had plenty of questions to ask Rin, but for the being, he asked for but one thing.
“Sorry, but do you think you could get me something to eat?”
“Huh?”
After learning that Kagami was completely penniless, Rin brought Kagami to a cheap restaurant she often went to.
It was a Chinese-styled restaurant with a variety of delicious-looking Thai delicacies lined up in front. Kagami wolfed down three bowls of porridge that had a wonderfully gentle flavor.
The streets were filled with beggars, street vendors, and filthy stray dogs as per usual, but Kagami, who was single-mindedly devouring the porridge not much unlike a stray dog himself, strangely fit in with the scenery.
It was then that Kagami slightly began to appreciate the country of Thailand’s tendency to put greed on full display.
Rin, a Korean backpacker who had studied abroad in Japan before, went over the details of what had happened.
She had first met Hiyori when she was visiting Ayutthaya ruins, which was about two hours away from Bangkok by train.
Since traveling alone as a woman was somewhat dangerous, they began traveling together and shared the same room when staying at hotels as well.
Hiyori joined Rin when they went to Bangkok as well, but since Hiyori’s condition started to worsen, Rin decided to send a postcard in order to get into contact with somebody.
But after realizing that Rin had sent the postcard, Hiyori vacated the hotel while Rin was away and disappeared somewhere.
“Huh? She kept it a secret from you too?”
“Yes. Hiyori and I were friends, and that’s why it makes me sad… I’m sure she has her reasons. She always looked so lonely.”
“Do you have any idea where she could’ve gone?”
“No. But she did say something strange… That she wanted to be reborn at the ends of the earth.”
“Reborn?”
Kagami painfully understood how Hiyori must’ve felt, considering the circumstances behind her birth.
But he still analyzed the situation calmly as he could.
“The ends of the earth? Where the heck is that?!”
Kamen Rider Novel Translations 