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ArabicAnime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 40
Chapter 40: A World Dominated by Evil Spirits
After that brief exchange of lighthearted banter, the suffocating tension gripping Yui Yuigahama and Miko Yotsuya finally began to dissipate.
Yozora stood near the center of the room, casually relaying the intel he had just violently extracted from Hachishaku. As he spoke, Sabre sat obediently at his feet. The golden retriever wagged his tail with enthusiastic, rhythmic thumps against the floorboards, looking up at the exorcist as if he were the greatest person in the world.
In stark contrast, Hachishaku was curled into a pathetic ball in the darkest corner of the room. The infamous eight-foot-tall urban legend trembled uncontrollably, her eyes wide with a primal, glassy terror. She looked less like a fearsome yokai and more like a wounded lamb waiting for the slaughter, radiating an aura of misery so deep it almost elicited a twinge of pity.
It was exactly as Yozora had deduced.
This desolate, gray-tinted wasteland was the other side of the World, connected by the anomalous ‘Door’ located in Kyoto. Even a resident entity like Hachishaku had no concept of how long this shadowed dimension had existed.
But one absolute truth remained clear.
The legendary underworld, hell, the netherworld, the world of the dead—every mythological term humanity had ever invented to describe the afterlife was simply a blind guess pointing toward this exact World. It was, fundamentally, a one-to-one architectural replica of Kyoto. The only difference was the local demographic. Instead of breathing humans, the streets were populated entirely by wandering Evil Spirits and grotesque ghosts.
Hearing the sheer scale of their predicament, Miko frowned deeply, her golden eyes reflecting a heavy unease.
“When we encountered those ‘Doors’before, we never actually crossed over into another World,” Miko said, her voice tight. “Let alone the fact that there wasn’t even a’Door’ anywhere near Yui and me this time. How did we end up dragged into this alternate Kyoto?”
Yozora shook his head slowly. He raised a hand and pointed a lazy finger toward the shivering giantess huddled in the corner.
“Actually, you, Yui, and Sabre already came into direct contact with the ‘Door’. You just didn’t realize it.”
Miko blinked, utterly stunned. She turned her gaze slowly toward Hachishaku. An expression of pure incredulity washed over her face as the pieces clicked into place.
“You… you mean to tell me there’s a ‘Door’ inside her body?”
“Bingo,” Yozora said, offering a dry nod. “The only reason the three of us got sucked into this World is because Hachishaku couldn’t handle the sheer output of the ‘Door’ she absorbed. It overloaded, and we got caught in the resulting spatial backwash. A fortunate coincidence, really.”
He paced a few steps across the room, his tone shifting into an analytical drawl. “Under normal circumstances, an Evil Spirit of Hachishaku’s caliber is roughly on the exact same tier as your Hyakume. The only reason she managed to instantly crush your summon was because she was running on the massive power battery provided by the ‘Door’ inside her.”
“I see.”
A visible wave of relief washed over Miko’s shoulders. She exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
For a moment, she had genuinely believed her newly awakened Hyakume was just inherently useless, a weak manifestation utterly incapable of defending her against a famous threat like Hachishaku.
But fame was a deceptive metric. Thanks to certain modern internet subcultures and a relentless stream of highly questionable, adult-oriented fan works that were entirely inconvenient to explain in polite company, Hachishaku-sama’s reputation had been artificially inflated to god-like status.
In reality, a yokai like her was little more than a trickster who mimicked voices to abduct gullible children. She was leagues away from the truly terrifying, ancient great yokai that haunted the deepest abysses of lore.
Her Soul Manifestation wasn’t useless at all. The enemy had simply been operating with a massive, unnatural cheat code.
With that realization settling in, Miko’s mood lightened considerably.
“Wait a second.”
Yui, who had been listening to the exchange with a tilted head and a half-lost expression, suddenly chimed in.
“If that’s how it works, why did Yozora get pulled in too?”
Before Yozora could even open his mouth to formulate an excuse, Yui tapped her chin, her eyes narrowing in sudden realization.
“Hmm… and now that I think about it, how did you even know Miko summoned Hyakume in the first place? Weren’t you supposed to be arriving way later?”
“Could it be…”
Yui looked at Yozora with wide, innocent eyes, a teasing spark igniting in her gaze. “I get it now! You were worried sick about Miko’s safety, so you were secretly camping nearby the whole time. You just stayed hidden in the shadows so she could successfully awaken her ability under pressure, right?”
“It was just a coincidence.”
Yozora maintained a perfectly flat, unperturbed expression, his voice betraying zero emotion.
“I simply happened to pick up a local commission. Yuigahama-san, were you aware that a little girl’s grandmother recently passed away in the very apartment building you live in?”
“Really?” Yui blinked, surprised. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Naturally. It’s a massive apartment complex, not a tight-knit rural village. It’s perfectly normal for neighbors to be strangers.”
Yozora offered a noncommittal shrug before continuing his explanation. “After the grandmother died, the little girl claimed she kept hearing the old woman’s voice calling her name from the hallway in the dead of night. She started exhibiting severe sleepwalking symptoms. If her parents hadn’t possessed the paranoid habit of deadlocking the security door before bed, she would have wandered right out into the dark. The consequences would have been fatal.”
He crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall. “To make a long story short, the hospital found absolutely nothing wrong with the kid. The parents got desperate and tracked down Old Deng. Old Deng pawned the job off on me. Combining that case with the geographic data you provided earlier, I deduced there was a highly active Evil Spirit hunting in this specific grid—and not just your run-of-the-mill trash mob, either.”
“Coincidence. Right. It’s all just a big coincidence.”
Yui giggled lightly, covering her mouth with her hand. She leaned in close to Miko, whispering directly into her ear with a teasing lilt. “Miko, even though he talks like that, he really does care about you a lot.”
Miko’s face instantly flushed a brilliant shade of crimson. She coughed twice into her fist, desperately trying to clear the sudden, thick awkwardness hanging in the air.
“D-don’t talk nonsense.”
Desperate to escape the teasing, Miko pivoted hard, throwing a half-serious, half-panicked question at Yozora to change the subject. “So, what’s the actual plan? How do we leave this place?”
“It’s simple.”
Yozora stretched his neck, joints popping softly in the quiet room. “Instead of banking on blind luck and spatial probability like last time, there is a highly stable, guaranteed method for traversing between Worlds. We just sit tight and wait here until five in the morning.”
Yui tilted her head, her twin buns bouncing slightly. “Why five o’clock?”
“Have you ever heard of Oumagatoki?”
“Ouma-what?”
“Oumagatoki. Demon Time.”
“Demon-who?”
Yozora stared at her, his eyes deadpanning hard enough to bore a hole through her skull. “Do not test my patience right now.”
Miko, having poured over countless ancient supernatural texts and occult grimoires, naturally recognized the terminology. She looked up, her brow furrowed in genuine confusion.
“Wait, I remember reading about Oumagatoki. Doesn’t Demon Time specifically refer to dusk?”
“Correct.”
Yozora nodded approvingly. “Dusk is the twilight hour when the boundary thins, allowing Evil Spirits to bleed over into the present World. However, the window when ordinary, flesh-and-blood humans like Yuigahama-san can safely pass through a ‘Door’ and return to the present World is the exact inverse of dusk. It occurs roughly between five and seven in the morning. I prefer to call it Dawn Oumagatoki, or Human Time.”
He gestured vaguely between himself and Miko. “For Psychics like us, the rules are a bit more flexible. Whether it’s Demon Time at dusk or Human Time at dawn, we can freely force our way through the ‘Door’ and travel between the two Worlds.”
Miko bit her lower lip, her mind racing as she processed the mechanics.
“So… as long as we can physically locate the ‘Door’ somewhere in this World, we can use it to return to the real Kyoto? That sounds…”
Her voice trailed off, and she cast a deeply worried glance toward Yui.
According to the intelligence Yozora had ripped from Hachishaku, this place might look like Kyoto, but it was a literal ghost town infested with an ocean of roaming Evil Spirits.
Miko knew her own spiritual reserves were completely bottomed out. Her head throbbed with a dull ache, and there was absolutely no chance she could manifest Hyakume again anytime soon. Worse, they had Yui with them—a completely ordinary girl with zero combat capability.
Miko had absolute faith in Yozora’s monstrous strength. If he were operating solo, he could undoubtedly carve a bloody path straight to the ‘Door’ without breaking a sweat.
But dragging two dead weights through a city of monsters? That was a tactical nightmare.
Catching the dark spiral of her thoughts, Yozora let out a low, dry chuckle.
“Relax. I didn’t keep Hachishaku breathing out of the goodness of my heart. I kept her alive specifically for this exact logistical problem.”
He cast a cold, sidelong glance at the trembling giantess in the corner. “Once the clock hits five, she is going to personally act as our transit system and send us straight back to the present World. She has the power of the ‘Door’ fused into her core, after all.”
Hearing the sheer pragmatism in his plan, the remaining tension finally drained from Miko’s body.
So that was the angle. It made perfect sense now. She had been wondering why Yozora, a man who habitually treated terrifying Evil Spirits as disposable snacks, would ever spare a creature like Hachishaku.
He didn’t spare her. He just needed a portable, living teleportation waypoint.