Bungo stray dogs One Shots

Ranpoe - Bleeding

How can you kill someone? There are quite easy ways to do so. Though then you have to get rid of the body.

You could use a knife and stab their heart out. You could take a gun and shoot them in the head. You could strangle them. Beat them to death. Let them fall a building. Poison them. And the list just goes on.

There are so many ways to kill a person and Poe knew most of them. Since he needed to kill his characters in so many different ways. He had to come up with solutions that even Ranpo wouldn't figure out. Poe even knew how to kill someone with nothing more than a toothbrush...

Yet he never really wrote about the most effective method. A method is so effective it wouldn't leave any traces behind. A method that wouldn't remark you as a culprit immediately if figured out.

How did he come to know this method? It was a not so surprising answer actually. The mafia boss had told him the ultimate secret. The one that both he and Dazai had used only on rare occasions. Why only at rare ones? Because it was the cruelest method of them all.

To kill a person you didn't exactly need to kill them. No, you only needed to shatter their whole being. Destroy everything they are, what they want to be. You have to kill their emotions, their time. You have to show them that their life will end soon enough and that they are worth nothing. So that they will live only as a shell from then on.

It was a horrifying thought. That you could harm a person so much with only words as a weapon. That you could kill them without leaving a trace. That you could shatter someone's heart so easily.

Poe had thought a lot when Mori and Dazai would use such methods. Though at times, when Poe looked into their eyes for a brief moment, he could see a sense of sadness, a loneliness that he wasn't able to understand. It seemed to be the same for every mafia member though. They had this dark look in their eyes even if they smiled. Poe wasn't able to recreate it in his books but it felt like everything stopped for a second when he noticed.

Maybe those tactics weren't used for their opponents but were a scar that was prominent in the mafia. Perhaps they were all hurt and destroyed. Shattered in the core with nothing to hold on to. Maybe that's why they thought it was the cruelest method...

The writer on the other hand never took their words that seriously. After all, you could always stand up and go on. Dazai had picked up his pieces and now glued them piece by piece together. Poe thought that life would go on and that you would have to do so as well.

But now? Now he wasn't sure anymore. He didn't even know how he ended up in this situation. How long has he been there? Who knows...

It had been a normal day until then. Poe wasn't even sure if it was still the same day. He had been knocked out and brought into this weird room. Someone who thought he could use him to get some information about the agency. Yet that person never listened when Poe said he was meeting his rival to bring the books he had written!

The situation seemed to become more hopeless with every second that had gone by. They didn't kill him. They didn't plan to do so, Poe could figure that much out. Though they still wanted to get some information out of him.

Poe looked at the floor beneath him. Small splotches of blood were scattered beneath him. By far not so much that it would be lethal or anything. More as if you had been cut in the arm or elsewhere and it would just stop after a while.

What was the best way to kill someone? Killing someone psychologically seemed effective for Poe now. The victim in chains slowly losing hope that someone would help them. Screaming for help after they kept quiet for weeks. Being kept alive with food and drinks yet you couldn't do anything. You were helpless just like you were as a child.