Anime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 50

Chapter 50: The Professional Actor’s Demeanor

Upon hearing this, the Pale Ghost Hand couldn’t exactly respond with words, but it made its feelings perfectly clear. Spreading its five massive fingers, it threw itself onto the ground and rolled around twice in a blatant display of refusal.

“Muri muri muri! Dame dame dame! Can’t do it, can’t do it, absolutely cannot do it!”

Yozora stared at the phantom appendage with deep disgust. “Are you seriously trying to act cute right now? Don’t sicken me.”

Of course, he was only joking around.

The ability of Soul Manifestation, a concept deeply rooted in idealism, actually shared a multitude of similarities with the very Evil Spirits they fought. For example, his Pale Ghost Hand and Yotsuya Miko’s Hyakume both operated under a strict, unbreakable rule.

They had to make someone “see” them.

In order to inflict physical harm, the entity had to manifest within the target’s field of cognition. Otherwise, they would be reduced to the state of ordinary Evil Spirits and mundane humans—completely unable to interfere with one another, simply passing straight through like empty air.

According to the intelligence analysis provided by Rio Futaba, the fundamental truth of the supernatural world was that weapons did not harm Evil Spirits. The catalyst for damage was the Psychics themselves, anomalies like Yozora and Yotsuya Miko.

To put it simply, Yozora could easily obliterate an Evil Spirit using a standard silver nail. But if an ordinary, non-psychic human picked up that exact same nail and swung it with all their might, it would only serve as mild amusement for the monster.

Yotsuya Miko had once raised a rather pragmatic question regarding this rule.

“Why not just use high-yield explosives to level the entire area where the ‘door’ is located?”

Leaving aside the sheer, unhinged violence of a high school girl suggesting domestic terrorism, the idea actually possessed genuine feasibility. The only prerequisite was that the entire process of placing, arming, and detonating the explosives had to be executed personally by either Yozora or Yotsuya Miko. If an ordinary person pushed the detonator, the unfinished building would certainly crumble into dust, but the supernatural “door” hidden within its architecture would remain completely untouched.

In short, just as Rio Futaba had theorized, this was a power brought into reality entirely by “cognition” and “observation.”

“It seems I’ll have to use that move,” Yozora muttered to himself.

Under Hachishaku’s deeply puzzled gaze, he didn’t bother to sneak through the shadows or formulate a tactical breach. Instead, he brazenly walked straight through the front door of the kindergarten activity room, making absolutely zero effort to conceal his presence.

“Hello, everyone.”

Hearing the heavy footsteps echoing from the doorway and Yozora’s cheerful, smiling greeting, the kidnappers inside reacted instantly. Over twenty dark muzzles snapped up, the metallic clatter of safety catches disengaging filling the room as every single gun locked onto his position.

“Who the hell are you!?”

It wasn’t just the armed criminals who were terrified. Even the kindergarten staff and the trembling children huddled in the corner were thoroughly startled by Yozora’s appearance.

The visual was undeniably horrific. The pale golden light of dusk streamed in through the shattered windows, scattering long, bloody shadows across the floorboards. Standing directly in the center of that dying light was a mysterious figure draped in a heavy black overcoat. A full-coverage black mask obscured his face entirely, his long black hair tied back, leaving only a pair of pitch-black eyes visible through the slits.

He looked exactly like a deranged serial killer stepping onto the stage to commit a massacre!

Facing down a room full of heavily armed kidnappers who were treating him as a lethal threat, their fingers tight against the triggers and ready to fire a hail of bullets at any second, Yozora simply tilted his head. He put on an exaggerated expression of hurt surprise and sighed helplessly.

“Eh? You guys really don’t recognize me?”

Immediately after, without even pausing to take a breath, Yozora rattled off a rapid-fire string of names.

“It’s me! Sato-kun, Kobayashi-kun, Takahashi-kun, Suzuki-kun, Ito-kun, Yamamoto-kun… man, you guys really forget easily.”

As he casually tossed out the names, his dark eyes were carefully observing the micro-expressions of the armed men across the room. When he hit the surnames Sato, Takahashi, and Yamamoto, he clearly saw three of the kidnappers flinch. A brief, obvious flash of confusion flickered in their eyes, and the tension in their shoulders dropped by a fraction of an inch.

“Oh, come on, you really don’t remember?”

Staring down the barrels of over twenty guns, Yozora showed absolutely zero fear. His voice was laced with a warm, nostalgic smile as he casually strolled right up to one of the men who had flinched, greeting him with the friendly tone of an old drinking buddy.

“Hey, Yamamoto-kun, we even grabbed a few drinks together last time, did you seriously forget? And that other guy was there too, he was having a blast! We even swore we’d go drinking together again next time.”

The kidnapper named Yamamoto, thoroughly disarmed by Yozora’s incredibly confident and familiar tone, couldn’t help but show a deep hesitation on his face. The muzzle of his assault rifle dipped slightly toward the floor.

“Dr… drink? Did that really happen?”

“Eh, you really forgot?” Yozora teased, his tone turning conspiratorial. “Fine then, I’m just going to tell everyone in this room about that incredibly embarrassing thing you did when you were blackout drunk last time. Sound good?”

“No, no, no, please don’t do that.”

At this point, the kidnapper named Yamamoto was completely hooked, line and sinker.

The citizens of Japan were simply too sheltered. As a transmigrator who had lived through two entirely different lifetimes, Yozora felt a deep obligation to give these criminals a little shock of classic telecom fraud.

It was the oldest routine in the book. Hey, hey, it’s me, can you hear my voice? Yes, yes, I’m that guy, I have a huge emergency right now and I need you to transfer some money.

Even the surnames he had rattled off were carefully calculated, representing the absolute most common family names in all of Japan. Unless his luck was astronomically bad, in a room of over twenty men, there was a statistical guarantee that at least a few of them would possess those names.

Yozora didn’t even need to invent a specific story. The human brain was a wonderful tool for self-deception. Mr. Yamamoto had already begun frantically searching his own memories for a time he had done something humiliating while drunk, and his subconscious automatically stitched the blurry face of whoever had been present that night onto the masked figure standing in front of him.

“Oh! Oh, aren’t you that guy?” Yamamoto’s face lit up with false recognition. “Why are you here today?”

Yozora offered a mysterious, knowing smile and waved his hand, gesturing for the surrounding kidnappers to lean in.

“Come closer. I have some extremely important news to tell you guys.”

Naturally, because of the full-coverage black mask, absolutely no one could actually see the smile on his face. But could he afford to slack off just because his audience couldn’t see his expressions?

Absolutely not!

This was the ironclad dedication and professional demeanor of a master actor!

Hearing his hushed, urgent tone, coupled with the fact that one of their own companions seemingly vouched for the newcomer, the surrounding kidnappers involuntarily lowered their guard. They gathered around Yozora in a tight circle, leaning in to hear whatever vital secret he had brought to the operation.

Yozora smiled beneath the fabric. He slowly swept his gaze across the men crowding around him, and then spoke in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“Kill them all. Leave none alive.”

The very instant those words fell from his lips, before a single kidnapper could even process the command, the towering, white-clad figure of a woman reflected in their dilating pupils.

And the Pale Ghost Hand, hanging like the Sword of Damocles, materialized directly above their heads.

Hachishaku’s silky black hair instantly hardened into a barrage of lethal needles. Her dignified, breathtakingly beautiful face contorted and split, revealing the true, nightmarish visage of an Evil Spirit. With a sickeningly wet sound, just a few strands of her elongated hair whipped outward, effortlessly piercing straight through the throats of seven kidnappers in a single strike.

Simultaneously, the massive Pale Ghost Hand descended. Like a human casually crushing a line of ants, its five fingers slammed down. Accompanied by the horrific, teeth-grinding display of shattering skulls and snapping spines, it directly pressed five of the kidnappers from the tops of their heads all the way down into the floorboards, reducing them to a pulpy, unrecognizable bloody mess.

Humans were truly fragile creatures.

Even if they had been manipulated, twisted, and enticed by the whispers of an Evil Spirit, it did not mean they possessed the actual durability of one. The moment the condition of “seeing” was met, the kidnappers had technically gained the ability to harm the Pale Ghost Hand and Hachishaku.

The fatal flaw in that equation was that they were completely, utterly dumbfounded. They could only stare in frozen horror as their companions—who had been standing right next to them a fraction of a second ago—were instantly transformed into a terrifying smear of gore stuck to the linoleum.

Yozora certainly wasn’t going to miss an opening like that.

His figure blurred like a phantom, flashing directly in front of a surviving kidnapper. His right hand clenched into a tight fist, shooting upward in a brutal, kinetic strike that connected dead center with the man’s Adam’s apple.

With a crisp, sickening crack, the cartilage caved in. The kidnapper’s body dropped straight to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, the light of life instantly fading from his wide eyes.

“I might be a professional exorcist,” Yozora said, his voice calm and dry as he stepped over the fresh corpse.

“But, I am also exceptionally good at killing people.”

[Inorin’s Note: Yozora’s scam here is a direct reference to the “Ore ore sagi” (It’s me, it’s me scam), a highly prevalent form of telephone fraud in Japan where the caller pretends to be a distressed relative or friend to trick the victim into handing over money. By using the most common Japanese surnames, Yozora weaponized statistics to force a false sense of familiarity.]