Chapter 447 - 58: Stars

Chapter 447: Chapter 58: Stars

Getting access to a helicopter already put them far beyond ordinary criminals. Nobody had clearly seen the bullets drop out of the air, and in a situation like this, nobody was going to stop and notice the strange absence of bullets striking things either.

Yimi had been tackled down by Kogoro. Since she could not see what was happening, she did not use the bullets she had caught to counterattack. Kogoro, meanwhile, took advantage of Irish’s pause to reload—really, his moment of stunned hesitation—to check on the detectives who had joined the pursuit. From where he was, he could only see that Takagi had been unlucky enough to have his arm injured when Inspector Megure landed on him while diving for cover.

Rapidly assessing the situation, Kogoro lunged over, yanked the handgun from Takagi’s waist, and aimed it at the helicopter during that brief opening, even though he had not been a detective on the force for many years.

"You bastard! How dare you point a machine gun at someone else’s daughter!"

Bang! Bang!

The first shot struck the hand Irish was using to hold the machine gun. Kogoro had been off the force for years, and his instincts still told him to disarm the other man and take him alive. But at that same moment, he saw the two snipers standing beside Irish.

So he changed the angle of his second shot and decisively blew the helicopter pilot’s head off.

"Who the hell is this guy?"

One of the snipers, Korn, immediately threw aside his precious sniper rifle, leaned forward, and tried to take control of the helicopter.

He managed to stabilize it by the narrowest margin, but the helicopter tilted as it flew away. Korn did not try to straighten its course completely. With so many police officers present, they had only had one chance for a hit-and-run attack. Once that opportunity was gone, there was no second round.

The moment Conan saw this, he rushed into the elevator. He did not even have time to wait for the other officers and repeatedly hammered the close-door and down buttons.

Seeing that, Honjo Kazuki almost seemed about to have a trauma response. His sister had died precisely because she failed to get into an elevator, but the pain in his arm clearly did not leave him enough attention to spare for anything else.

Conan raced down from Tokyo Tower and looked around for the young woman who had agreed to hold his skateboard for him. He could not find her. Instead, he spotted Ran, who was also looking around.

He and Yimi had broken into the weather forecast broadcast earlier, and Sonoko, who happened to be watching television at the time, naturally called Ran to say, "That glasses brat is about to run off with your little sister."

Conan instinctively tried to avoid Ran. As he reached the landscaping outside, however, someone tapped him on the shoulder.

"Why are you running, so fast?" Yimi asked.

"!"

Conan jolted in fright.

What was wrong with this brat? She was like a ghost. I took the elevator—how did she get down here?

Then again, what she had done just now really had looked like something a ghost would do.

"Did you see that onee-san? The one who was holding my skateboard!" Conan asked urgently.

"Are you looking for her?" Yimi sniffed the air, but in human form her sense of smell was not better than a dog’s nose.

"I have to catch that helicopter! Someone inside knows my real identity! That could put all of us in danger!" Conan could only hope Irish had not yet sent his identity to the Organization, though that hope felt extremely slim.

If they could arrest them first, there should still be a chance... But how was he supposed to catch up to a helicopter, much less stop it?

"Danger!" Yimi did not understand most of what he said, but that one word was enough for her to realize how serious it was.

Conan had said that he had to catch the helicopter. It was impossible for Yimi to fly while carrying him. Tatsumaki’s lessons in psychokinesis had been utterly useless. Yimi herself could fly without a problem, but if she grabbed Conan, there was a real risk she would crush his tiny body. Using psychokinesis in front of ordinary people might also drive them crazy.

So Yimi copied what she had seen in cartoons and shoved two fingers into her mouth before blowing as hard as she could.

"Fwoo—"

No whistle came out, but the gesture was what mattered.

In any case, as Conan stared at the sight in utter disbelief, the beggar he had been unable to stop thinking about came riding a black horse straight out of the landscaping, leaving the nearby pedestrians equally stunned.

Yimi jumped surprisingly high. Famine caught her and pulled her up into his arms while Yimi directed him to reach a hand toward Conan.

Conan tried to jump but could not get high enough. Famine scooped him up from an almost impossible angle and set him behind them.

Conan barely managed to grab the sackcloth in front of him before the horse whinnied and charged down the road with acceleration that would put a sports car to shame.

"How did you ride a horse over here?" Conan demanded of Famine in front of him, utterly unable to understand, but Famine ignored him completely.

Before this, Conan had always thought that if the Black Organization could develop a drug that shrank people, developing one that turned people into animals would not be especially strange.

If people could turn into animals, then escaping the Organization like Ai had would not be strange either. And if people could escape like Ai, then having a "Black Organization Victims’ Association" would not be strange.

In short, after watching Famine do a good deed today and then running into Yimi immediately afterward, Conan had guessed that Yimi was the little cat the "knight" carried. By the same logic, he also thought the hoofbeats Akai Shuichi heard that night might have been the "knight" himself turning into a horse.

Conan was still curious how they could control those transformations so freely, but now Famine had personally ridden over on an actual horse, leaving him confused all over again. Could there be a third person who turned into a horse for the "knight" to ride?

"They’re getting away!" Conan cried. In fact, the helicopter had already disappeared from view during the time he spent coming down the elevator. Only now, after the horse closed some of the distance, could he barely make out a speck in the sky again.

A vehicle on the ground could never catch something flying through the air, at least not in a city. An aircraft did not need to weave around buildings that blocked both its route and its line of sight.

Their direction was clearly right, because along the way they saw the helicopter’s original pilot thrown out, his body hitting the ground in a horrific state.

After Conan shouted, he noticed the scenery around them begin whipping past twice as fast as before. The scales hanging from the knight’s hand shook wildly in the wind. The horse was actually accelerating again!

Conan had to cling to the person in front of him with all his strength just to keep from being thrown off. Perhaps his ability to manage even that much came from regularly using his modified rocket skateboard to parkour through the city.

He could only be grateful that an adult in front of him blocked most of the airflow, even though that adult was not particularly large. He could not imagine how uncomfortable Yimi must be sitting at the very front.

To keep himself from vomiting, Conan had no choice but to close his eyes. He could no longer judge how much distance they had covered.

"Hey! How did you get down from the tower just now? Those bullets stopped in midair—did you do that?" Conan still found time to ask about the scene he could not understand.

Nobody answered him.

"I’m asking you, Yimi. What did you do to Honjo-san’s arm?" Conan asked again, only to realize the horse had already stopped.

Did we catch them?

The answer was no. As said before, how could something on the ground easily chase something in the sky? What now blocked their path was an enormous river stretching as far as the eye could see.

Conan could not tell which river it was. It might have been the Edogawa, or perhaps something even larger. In any case, there was absolutely no way for a horse to cross it, and the helicopter continued receding along the river.

"Damn it!" He clenched both fists and hammered them against his thighs, squeezing his eyes shut.

"What happens, if you can’t catch them?" Yimi suddenly asked.

"It’s over." Conan’s face went pale. He pressed his lips together. "The Black Organization will come assassinate us. Ran, the Professor, Haibara..."

Conan stopped there because Yimi suddenly took something out. The movement was obvious enough that, even with someone sitting between them, he could tilt his head and see it. He had no idea where she had gotten the thing, but taking it out now seemed completely pointless.

...

"Hey, is that horse chasing us?" The other sniper in the helicopter, Chianti, held her rifle and aimed toward the riverbank.

"Hm?" Irish used his uninjured hand to pick up the sniper rifle Korn had abandoned and looked toward the opposite bank through the scope.

He happened to catch sight of the frustrated Conan.

"Hmph. You probably won’t believe this, but that brat is actually the high-school detective Kudo Shinichi after being shrunk." Irish truly had not had time to report it to the Organization yet.

Vermouth had been the one assigned to help him. Because of Pisco, Irish was rather hostile toward that woman. As for the person originally scheduled to meet him, it should have been Gin. Even before Gin betrayed him, the bastard’s reputation had never been particularly good. Irish had heard that Gin liked abusing his subordinates.

"A shrunken detective? What are you talking about?" Chianti asked blankly.

Before Irish could explain, the other hand that Kogoro had wounded trembled from the pain as he exerted force, causing the scope to shift toward the front of the horse.

He saw a white-haired little girl holding a sniper scope and aiming it toward them as well.

What is that brat doing?

Irish was just as confused as Conan, but when he connected it to what he had witnessed at Tokyo Tower, an ominous feeling surged through him.

"What is that?!" Chianti screamed.

If Conan had simply said that all Yimi needed to do was silence everyone on the helicopter, she would not have had to go to so much trouble.

Yimi was a good child. Even though she had already stopped bullets once, she still kept to the rule that she could not reveal her psychokinesis in front of ordinary people.

Conan seemed to have discovered something already, so what she had done before was not really workable anymore. But the smart kitty had thought of another way to avoid being discovered. She planned to throw something over there and kill those people with it.

Yimi had never done this before and could not guarantee it would work. Her aunt had told her that Tatsumaki could do something like this.

Conan could sense that Yimi had done something. By now, Yimi had already lowered the scope in her hands, yet sheer biological instinct made Conan feel an extreme sense of unease.

The river churned. Something seemed to change in the air currents above it.

Back at Tokyo Tower, Mizutani tilted his head up and once again saw the romance that he and Nanako had treasured in the middle of the clouded sky.

Stars.

Or rather, a meteor forcibly dragged down from beyond the heavens.

It tore a circular hole straight through the surrounding clouds. In Conan’s field of vision, it grew larger and larger as it approached the helicopter.

There was no possible way to dodge it.