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ArabicAnime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 49
Chapter 49: Amateur Kidnappers
After painting the linoleum floor with a fresh coat of red and white, Hachishaku’s expression remained entirely placid. Even after personally crushing a human skull, her dark, hollow eyes hadn’t shifted in the slightest.
An Evil Spirit was, ultimately, an Evil Spirit.
Yozora wouldn’t suddenly change his view of Hachishaku just because she was currently on his payroll. A tool’s morality depended entirely on the one wielding it. As for the act of killing itself—well, that just depended on who was on the receiving end.
“Disguise yourself and lure them out.”
Hachishaku gave a slight nod. She turned her towering frame toward the main activity room down the hall.
This spacious hall was originally designed for kindergarten plays and afternoon naps. Now, the space that usually held a warm, innocent atmosphere was suffocated by the muffled sobbing of children, the trembling whispers of teachers trying to soothe them, and the heavy, pacing footsteps of armed thugs.
As an infamous urban legend, Hachishaku didn’t operate on mindless instinct like lesser apparitions. She leaned against the doorframe, peeking inside just enough to confirm there were no other Evil Spirits lurking in the rafters. Then, she squeezed a strained, desperate sound from her throat.
“Come… someone, help.”
The voice spilling from her lips belonged exactly to the kidnapper whose head she had just turned into paste. The pitch, the panic, the slight gravel in the tone—it was a flawless replication. Mimicry was her oldest trick, and even though she was working for Yozora now, she hadn’t let her core skills rust.
Inside the room, the faint call drifting from the corridor made the pacing thugs freeze. They exchanged uneasy glances.
The leader—a tall, burly man sporting a thick beard and gripping a semi-automatic rifle—scowled. “Find two guys to check the perimeter,” he ordered, his voice a low rumble.
Two men immediately broke off from the group. Gripping their handguns tight, they slipped out of the activity room and stepped cautiously into the hallway.
What greeted them was a ghost story in motion.
The desperate voice of their comrade, which had initially sounded just a few meters away, began to retreat. With every step they took, the pleas drifted further down the corridor, yet never faded completely. It dragged them along, step by step, until they reached the dead end of the hallway.
Even a complete idiot would have realized the trap by now.
“Hey, what the hell is…”
Before the man could finish his sentence, a thick bundle of pitch-black hair lashed out from the shadows. It whipped around their throats like steel wire.
“Ugh… ugh…!”
Both men were hoisted off the floor, their boots kicking at empty air. They dropped their guns and clawed frantically at the dark strands crushing their windpipes, tearing at the hair with all their strength. Blood seeped from beneath their fingernails as they scratched their own skin raw, but the suffocating grip didn’t loosen a fraction of an inch.
“Just ordinary humans?”
Yozora strolled out from behind Hachishaku’s towering figure. He glanced at the two thugs, their faces already swelling into a deep, bruised purple. He waved his hand dismissively.
“Kill them.”
Hachishaku tilted her head. The black hair wrapped around their throats instantly hardened into rigid spikes, piercing straight through their necks with a sickening crunch.
Watching the two bodies slump to the floor with their eyes bulging in death, Yozora crouched down. He picked up one of the discarded handguns and turned it over in the light.
The quality was absolute garbage. The metal was scratched, the grip was worn smooth, and the slide rattled loosely.
These guns were in worse shape than an RTX 4090 that had been running in a crypto mine for two years, a pair of AJ1s worn through a marathon, an overworked donkey that had pulled a millstone its entire life, or a fantasy saintess who had been locked in a goblin nest for three days.
In short, they were cream puffs. One squeeze of the trigger and they might just blow up in the user’s hand.
“Looks like we aren’t dealing with a professional team.”
To verify his theory, Yozora nudged the corpses and inspected their hands. Just as he suspected, their fingers lacked the thick calluses that came from years of tactical firearm training. Pulling back their collars revealed plenty of scars, but they were jagged lines left by knives and pipes, not bullet wounds.
The profile was obvious. These guys were low-level yakuza.
Which brought up a glaring question: why would a bunch of street-level gangsters bother holding up a kindergarten?
If they wanted a quick payout, they would hit a jewelry store or an underground casino. Even if they were desperate enough to try extortion, taking an entire building of toddlers hostage was just begging for a police sniper to put a bullet between their eyes. It was career suicide.
There was only one logical explanation.
This entire crew was being puppeteered by an Evil Spirit hiding in the shadows, driving them to commit this absurd stunt. The funniest part was that the yakuza themselves clearly had no idea. They were meat puppets dancing on strings, fully convinced these were their own brilliant ideas.
People manipulated by an Evil Spirit were fundamentally different from those actively possessed. If someone intervened and snapped them out of the hallucination in time, they could easily survive the ordeal.
Yozora, however, had absolutely zero intention of doing that.
It wasn’t a matter of good or evil. It was simple pragmatism. When facing a room full of armed, twitchy enemies, a single second of hesitation or misplaced pity could result in a stray bullet catching him in the shoulder. He could save them, sure. But why bother?
Meanwhile, back in the activity room.
“Why the hell are they taking so long?”
A jittery kidnapper pressed the barrel of his handgun against a teacher’s temple. His eyes were bloodshot, his facial muscles twitching into a feral grimace. “This is pissing me off. How about we just pop a few of them right now to send a message?”
The bearded leader shook his head, a chilling, unnatural smile stretching across his face.
“Don’t rush it. We wait. When the Metropolitan Police finally lose their patience and breach the doors, that’s when…”
He raised his left hand, revealing a heavy, taped detonator. His expression twisted into the fanatical devotion of a cultist.
“We’ll give Kyoto, and all of Japan, a surprise gift they’ll never forget!”
Hearing the leader’s deranged declaration, the remaining color drained from the teachers’ faces.
The children were too young to grasp the gravity of the situation, crying only because of the loud noises and scary men. But the adults understood perfectly.
This was never a ransom job. The thugs hadn’t made any demands because they didn’t want money. They were just using the hostages as bait, waiting for the police tactical teams to storm the building so they could detonate the explosives wired throughout the kindergarten.
It was a suicide bombing.
Outside the classroom doors, Yozora peered through the narrow window panel. He clicked his tongue. This was going to be annoying.
The muzzles of the cheap guns were waving around erratically, inadvertently sweeping across the huddled hostages every few seconds. If these guys were hardened mercenaries, it would actually be easier to handle—professionals had trigger discipline.
The problem was that these idiots were amateurs. Even if an Evil Spirit was guiding their overall actions, their physical reflexes were still those of jumpy street thugs who had barely fired a gun. If Yozora kicked the door down and startled them, their fingers would instinctively clamp down on the triggers.
Honestly, even if a few hostages caught a stray bullet, it wouldn’t affect Yozora’s life in the slightest.
But as any true gamer knew: if you were going to clear a stage, you aimed for the perfect playthrough with all achievements unlocked. Yozora was no exception. He refused to take a sloppy victory screen.
After calculating the angles for a moment, he glanced over his shoulder at the Pale Ghost Hand floating silently in the air behind him.
“I’ll leave the setup to you,” Yozora murmured. “Go steal the bullets right out of their magazines.”