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ArabicAnime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 28
Chapter 28: The Professional Exorcist’s Guidance
Respect was respect, but Miko Yotsuya hadn’t forgotten she was staring down the exact same problem.
To eat, or not to eat?
Suppressing the rising bile in her throat, Miko gritted her teeth. She steadied her breathing, pinched her chopsticks, and slowly reached into the bento box to retrieve a single fish ball.
Right at that second, a grotesque, elongated tongue whipped out from the surrounding darkness. It darted toward the morsel pinched between her chopsticks with blinding speed.
Despite her desperate attempt to maintain a blank, unseeing expression, the sudden ambush broke her composure. Her right hand gave a violent tremor.
Fish balls were inherently smooth and notoriously difficult to grip. With her fingers shaking so badly, the slick surface immediately slipped free from the wooden chopsticks, plummeting toward the dusty floor.
Tap.
The fish ball hit the concrete. That faint, almost inaudible thud acted like the starting gun of a hundred-meter sprint. It instantly shattered the fragile peace, triggering a violent shift in the hundreds of evil spirits crowding the room.
“You… can see!”
“You… can see!”
“You… can see!”
Twisted, mangled apparitions writhed and contorted, their chilling roars echoing off the walls. Tears welled up in Miko’s golden eyes. She looked back at Yozora, her voice breaking into a terrified stammer.
“I… I’m so sorry… I—”
“It’s fine.”
Yozora waved a hand dismissively. He pulled out his phone, checked the glowing screen, and offered a relaxed smile.
“You lasted exactly forty-seven minutes. You made it all the way up to this floor and even got to the point of eating your lunch. You did great. Now…”
He set his own bento box aside and stood up. Brushing the imaginary dust off his clothes, he strolled forward, placing himself squarely in front of Miko. He looked out at the hundreds of restless, agitated spirits. The casual smile vanished from his face, replaced by a cold, predatory focus.
“My turn.”
He brought his hands together. Under Miko’s disbelieving gaze, a thick wisp of black mist bled from his palms, stretching and solidifying until it formed a pitch-black, guardless blade resembling a Tang Dao.
He leveled the tip of the dark sword at the writhing horde.
“You can see!” he mocked, his tone dripping with dry amusement.
Provoked, the hundreds of evil spirits surged forward as one, unleashing a cacophony of ferocious shrieks as they lunged at the solitary boy.
“Spear.”
Facing a literal wave of hellish abominations, Yozora merely whispered a single command. The black mist coalesced in his left hand, forging a long, jagged javelin of pure darkness.
He leaned back, adopting a flawless throwing stance, and hurled the spear with devastating force.
The sheer kinetic impact of the black projectile tore through the air, skewering dozens of spirits in a straight, brutal line. It carved a temporary void straight through the center of the black tide.
A second later, an abomination with a jaw unhinged to impossible proportions lunged for his neck, spewing foul black fog. Yozora didn’t even blink. He simply reversed his grip on the Tang Dao and drove the blade down, pinning the monster’s distorted skull directly into the concrete floor.
He casually glanced over his shoulder, delivering a mid-combat lecture to the trembling girl behind him.
“When dealing with these things, destroying the head is always your best bet. Most of them die instantly. But just to be absolutely safe, you want to grind them down into powder and watch them dissipate into nothing. That’s the professional guarantee.”
Miko sat frozen, her vocal cords completely paralyzed by shock.
Every time Yozora swung his weapon, the results were absolute. Even if the black blade merely grazed a spirit, the entity would instantly disintegrate into ash and smoke, wiped from existence.
A few of the faster, more cunning spirits managed to slip past the arc of his sword, closing the distance to his body.
It didn’t matter.
Before their decaying claws could even brush his clothes, jagged black spikes erupted from Yozora’s shadow, impaling the attackers and reducing them to the same hollow nothingness.
‘Is this… is this Yozora’s true strength?’
Miko watched the massacre unfold, her golden eyes wide with absolute disbelief. She found it impossible to reconcile the sheer violence of this spectacle with any traditional exorcism lore she had ever read.
He wasn’t expelling them.
He was slaughtering them.
There was a brutal, unadorned beauty in how he dismantled their overwhelming numbers.
‘Damn, almost got ambushed by these trash mobs,’Yozora thought, casually wiping out another cluster.’Good thing I was one step ahead. Dropping a Substitute, sealing with Myojinmon, summoning the Great Golden Dragon, and popping Deep Forest Emergence right in the middle of my ultimate… Are you hurt.jpg.’
Just as the massive horde was rapidly thinning out—either butchered by his blade or devoured by his shadows—a sickening, wet sound echoed from the stairwell. It sounded like a massive crowd of people huddled together, whispering in perfect, overlapping unison.
Miko couldn’t decipher a single word of the frantic murmurs.
She only knew that the second the sound reached her ears, every hair on her body stood on end. A fresh wave of cold sweat instantly soaked through the back of her school uniform.
“Th-that’s…”
Whoosh!
A foul gust of wind swept through the hall, carrying the sheer physical force of a passing freight train.
A colossal monstrosity slithered out from the stairwell. It was four or five meters thick, shaped like a grotesque python. At the very front of its bulbous head was a long, vertical slit, and nestled deep within that fleshy gap was a single, twitching vertical eye.
“What the hell is that?!”
Yozora paused his slaughter, staring at the new arrival in genuine bewilderment.
“Why does this thing look so much like a tur—”
Before he could finish the word, rows of razor-sharp, gleaming teeth peeled back from the edges of the slit on the python’s head.
The frantic, overlapping whispers swelled into a deafening roar.
The tip of the monster—a horrifying amalgamation of an eye and a maw—snapped forward like an arrow released from a heavy bowstring. It bypassed Yozora entirely, lunging straight for Miko with vicious intent.
Faced with the sheer scale of the attack, Miko’s brain simply shut down. Her thoughts flatlined.
All she could see were those two rows of jagged teeth closing in, framing that single vertical eye brimming with endless, suffocating malice.
“Sigh. No choice.”
Seeing the monstrosity target his client, Yozora’s expression finally shifted. For the first time today, he looked like he was facing a genuine nuisance. He dismissed the black Tang Dao, raised his right hand toward the lunging beast, and let out a low, commanding growl.
“Come out.”
The moment the words left his lips, a colossal, deathly pale hand materialized in the air right in front of Miko. Its five fingers ended in wickedly sharp, obsidian nails.
‘That’s… that’s the one I saw on the train…’
Miko instantly recognized the grotesque appendage. It was the exact same giant hand that had crushed the spirit on her commute.
So this, too, was just another one of Yozora’s abilities.
Before she could process the implications, the pale hand clamped down. The five obsidian nails ruthlessly pierced through the thick, fleshy hide of the snake-like abomination.
Instead of blood, thick geysers of black mist erupted from the puncture wounds.
The bulbous head of the snake spirit thrashed and twisted wildly, clearly experiencing agonizing pain as it was crushed in the giant grip.
Coincidentally.
As Yozora slowly clenched his own right hand to mimic the crushing motion, he sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
Why did this specific evil spirit have to look exactly like that?
Watching it get squeezed so violently made him feel a strange, empathetic twinge. A certain part of his own anatomy began to ache in phantom solidarity.
[Inorin’s Note: “Substitute, Myojinmon, Great Golden Dragon, Deep Forest Emergence” are all high-tier jutsu references from Naruto, highlighting Yozora’s inner chuunibyou gamer monologue as he casually slaughters the spirits. “Are you hurt.jpg” is a literal translation of Chinese internet slang where users verbalize sending a meme image to mock someone.]