Anime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Activity Room Incident

Chiba, Japan.

Today marked the entrance ceremony for the incoming first-year students of Sobu High School. A gentle early spring breeze carried scattered pale pink cherry blossom petals through the air, framing the vibrant, youthful faces of boys and girls mingling on the campus grounds. From the outside, it was a picture-perfect portrait of adolescence.

Yet, inside an activity room on the second floor of the main teaching building, the atmosphere was entirely different.

A girl with smooth, long black hair and striking golden eyes stood rigidly in front of the window. She wore the standard Sobu High School uniform, her delicate features locked into a mask of forced calm as she pretended to admire the campus scenery.

However, the tears threatening to spill from her eyes, her violently trembling pupils, and the uncontrollable shaking of her shoulders betrayed her absolute terror.

‘Can you see me?”Can you see me?’

To an ordinary person, the activity room was completely empty save for the solitary girl. It was so quiet one could hear a pin drop. But through the eyes of Yotsuya Miko, the room was a suffocating, living hell.

Over a dozen grotesque, twisted evil spirits surrounded her, their terrifying faces oozing a thick, suffocating black mist that dropped the room’s temperature to freezing. One of the spirits crouched in the far corner, but its neck had stretched out nearly five meters across the room, coiling through the air like a fleshy snake. Its head swayed back and forth mere inches from Miko’s face, its bulging, bloodshot eyeballs looking as though they were about to pop out of their sockets and drop onto her shoes.

‘Can you see me?’ the thing gurgled, its breath smelling of stagnant water and decay.

Faced with this nightmarish entanglement, Miko forced herself to maintain a blank expression. She gripped the edge of the windowsill, her knuckles turning white, and muttered softly to the empty glass.

‘Today’s weather is really, really nice.’

She was on the verge of sobbing. How could something like this happen on her very first day?

This was far from the first time Miko had seen evil spirits. Usually, as long as she played blind and pretended not to notice them, the entities would ask their chilling questions two or three times before losing interest and drifting away. But this time was different. She had been trapped in this activity room for almost ten minutes, and the horde of spirits showed absolutely no intention of leaving.

‘What should I do?’ Miko bit her lower lip, feeling her sanity fraying at the edges.

She desperately wanted to run, to throw open the door and flee down the hallway, but her legs had turned to jelly. If she let go of the windowsill, she would instantly collapse to the floor. And if she fell… these things would definitely realize she could see them.

Ignoring them was her ironclad rule for survival. But right now, even playing blind wasn’t solving the problem.

Just as despair threatened to swallow her whole, the sharp slide of the activity room door opening echoed behind her.

Miko turned her head as fast as she dared. A boy with messy black hair and dark eyes strolled into the room. He had a rather striking, handsome face and looked to be exactly her age.

A lifeline. Miko immediately realized this was her only chance to escape the encirclement of spirits.

“Um… classmate,” Miko said, her voice trembling violently as pleading desperation filled her golden eyes. “I think I sprained my ankle. Could you help me and support me back to the classroom?”

Under any normal circumstance, Miko would never make such an intimate request to a boy she had just met. But right now, pride meant nothing. If she didn’t get out of this room, the spirits would eventually realize the truth.

“Sprained your ankle?”

To Miko’s absolute bewilderment, the boy merely offered a polite, indifferent smile. Instead of rushing over to help, he casually slid the activity room door shut, locking them both inside.

Under her horrified gaze, he strolled over to a nearby desk. With practiced, elegant movements, he began pulling items out of his pockets and lining them up on the table, muttering under his breath.

“Let me see, what’s left that hasn’t been tested yet… a peach wood dagger, a few silver nails, and those talismans that are supposedly guaranteed to exorcise demons. Yeah, that should be about it.”

After organizing his strange arsenal, the boy looked up and flashed a bright, friendly smile.

“Hello. My name is Yozora. I’m a first-year student at Sobu High School, just enrolled today.”

Miko nodded mechanically, her brain struggling to process the situation. “My name is Yotsuya Miko, also a first-year student. Please take care of me.”

Manners out of the way, panic immediately reclaimed her. She nervously pursed her lips. “Um… can you please just help me get out of here first?”

The moment she spoke, every single evil spirit in the room snapped their twisted necks in unison. Dozens of hollow, bleeding eyes locked onto Miko’s face. A collective, hoarse roar squeezed out of their rotting throats.

‘Can you see me!?’

Miko’s entire body jolted, cold sweat instantly soaking through the back of her uniform.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Yozora coughed politely into his fist. He turned toward the grotesque mass of spirits crowding around Miko, raised a hand, and waved exactly as one might greet a neighbor on a morning walk.

“I can see you,” he said in a cheerful tone.

Miko froze. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks of absolute horror, and she instinctively screamed to stop him. “Don’t… don’t say it!”

She had no idea why this boy named Yozora possessed the Sight, but that didn’t matter right now. The critical issue was that he had just shattered the most important rule of survival! He had openly acknowledged them. If the spirits knew they were being perceived, it was all over. They were going to die here.

However, the ensuing reaction completely shattered Miko’s understanding of the world.

The moment Yozora’s words hung in the air, the horde of aggressive, terrifying spirits flinched. They scrambled backward, their twisted bodies violently shoving against one another as they huddled into the furthest corner of the room. On their grotesque, rotting faces, Miko saw an expression she had never once witnessed on a ghost.

Fear.

‘What… what is this situation?’ Miko stared in utter disbelief.

Evil spirits were afraid? What could possibly terrify monsters like these? Was it this boy?

Yozora looked at the trembling mass of ghosts cowering in the corner and sighed, shaking his head with visible disappointment.

“Aren’t there any stronger ones around here? Forget it, a control group is a control group. This will have to do.”

He picked up the peach wood dagger from the desk, casually walked over to the huddled spirits, and drove the wooden blade directly into the chest of the nearest ghost.

The pierced spirit let out a shrill, agonizing shriek that nearly burst Miko’s eardrums.

Yozora’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. He simply watched the gaping hole in the spirit’s misty chest slowly knit itself back together. Pulling a small notebook and a pen from his pocket, he began to jot down observations.

“Hmm… the lethality of a peach wood dagger against standard evil spirits is roughly equivalent to a steel blade. No special elemental damage or holy modifiers. Disappointing.”

He then proceeded to repeat the exact same violent action several times, swapping his weapons like a scientist running a clinical trial.

“Silver nails. The piercing effect seems slightly better than ordinary metal, but the localized damage is limited. Not worth the cost of the silver.”

He slapped a yellow paper talisman onto a ghost’s forehead. Nothing happened.

“This talisman is completely useless. That old swindler running the stall in front of the shrine actually scammed me. I have to go find him for a refund tomorrow.”

Having finished his careful data collection, Yozora slipped the notebook back into his pocket. He stood up straight, stretched his arms over his head, and let out a long yawn.

“Nice. Your contribution to science is appreciated. Work is done.”

Miko watched in paralyzed horror as Yozora opened his mouth. The bodies of the dozen evil spirits suddenly destabilized, collapsing into a massive, swirling vortex of black mist. The spirits shrieked and struggled, exuding a foul, heavy aura, but the suction was absolute. In one massive breath, Yozora inhaled the entire horde of ghosts straight into his stomach, swallowing them raw.

He patted his stomach lightly, looking entirely satisfied.

Seeing the terrifying entities reduced to a mid-day snack completely short-circuited Miko’s brain. Her psychological endurance finally snapped. Her legs gave out completely, and she collapsed onto the floor, bright tears spilling uncontrollably from her golden eyes as she sobbed in pure shock.

Right at that moment, heavy footsteps approached the hallway.

“Eh? Why is there crying coming from the activity room?”

The door slid open. A female teacher wearing a white lab coat over black suit pants stepped into the doorway, a cigarette unlit in her hand.

She froze, taking in the scene before her.

A cute, helpless first-year girl was collapsed on the floor, weeping pitifully as if she had just been subjected to the worst bullying imaginable. Standing over her was a male student, holding a wooden dagger in his hand, looking completely unbothered.

The teacher’s eyes darkened, her fists clenching instantly.

“What… is going on here!?”