Anime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 53

Chapter 53: Art is an Explosion

“None of your business.”

Yozora offered no physical gestures to accompany his words. He stood perfectly still. An experienced veteran detective like Yagami Soichiro could easily extract a wealth of psychological information from a simple shift in posture or a twitch of the fingers, so Yozora gave him absolutely nothing to read.

“My identity cannot be revealed to you. But there is one thing.”

Yozora looked directly into the older man’s eyes. His voice, heavily distorted and masked by Hachishaku’s supernatural influence, carried zero emotional fluctuation. It sounded hollow, like a broadcast from a dead radio station.

“I believe your Metropolitan Police Department has already positioned snipers at various vantage points outside.”

Yagami’s expression darkened. The suspect had already deduced his tactical deployment. Still, this specific statement offered no useful intelligence. Anyone who had ever watched a cheap police drama knew that securing the perimeter and deploying snipers was standard operating procedure for a hostage crisis.

“Since you know that, you should understand that you cannot leave here today.”

“Is that so?” Yozora replied, his tone entirely noncommittal. He tilted his head slightly. “Commander Yagami, let me clarify something for you first. With my abilities, even if I stood right here without taking a single step, I could kill your snipers and every single Metropolitan Police Department officer surrounding this building. Do you believe me?”

Yagami’s pupils constricted. He shook his head, a harsh scoff escaping his lips. “Impossible. Are you claiming to be some sort of psychic? I won’t fall for such child’s play.”

“Then let’s make a bet.” Yozora smiled, enunciating each word with chilling clarity. “I bet the lives of all your officers that I am not lying. Commander Yagami, are you willing to take that gamble?”

Yagami tightened his grip on his service weapon, cold sweat beading on his forehead. He gritted his teeth, his analytical mind racing as he organized the limited intelligence he currently possessed.

Information one: The Metropolitan Police Department had established a flawless perimeter with zero blind spots, yet this masked individual had bypassed it entirely, appearing inside the Kyoto Municipal Kindergarten in a bizarre, unpredictable manner.

Information two: The suspect was entirely unarmed, yet he had slaughtered over twenty heavily armed robbers with his bare hands.

Information three: Based on decades of criminal investigation experience, Yagami could tell this man was supremely confident. This did not feel like an empty threat.

Watching the complex war of logic play out on the detective’s face, Yozora spoke with casual indifference. “Have you thought it through, Commander? If you don’t want all your subordinates to die here, then act according to my demands.”

Yagami remained highly skeptical of these supposed supernatural abilities. But at the gambling table, the raw odds of winning or losing were never the most critical factor. What truly mattered was whether one could afford the cost of losing.

The lives of every officer stationed outside constituted an impossibly heavy stake. Even as the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, Yagami could not bear that weight.

“What do you want to do?”

“It’s simple. I just want to leave.”

Yagami hesitated for a long, agonizing moment. Finally, he shook his head, his voice dropping into a stern, uncompromising register. “No. No matter what your underlying purpose is, killing is killing. You must come back to the Metropolitan Police Department for investigation today!”

“Is that so…” Yozora nodded slowly. “That’s really a shame. Come out, Hachishaku.”

The instant the command left his lips, the towering figure of a woman in a white dress materialized directly in Yagami’s line of sight.

“W-what is this!?”

Hachishaku’s impossibly exaggerated height and the suffocating, terrifying pressure radiating from her very existence made the seasoned detective break out in a violent cold sweat. The sheer wrongness of the entity defied all human logic.

“Don’t come any closer!”

Watching the giant woman slowly advance toward him, Yagami gritted his teeth and tightened his finger on the trigger. When her steps did not falter, he aimed his weapon directly at her pale leg and fired without a second thought.

The gunshot echoed through the empty hallway, but the result shattered his reality.

Hachishaku did not even flinch. Where the bullet struck her flesh, a hollow cavity simply opened up. There was no blood, no shattered bone—only wisps of dense black smoke drifting lazily from the wound.

“T-this… how is this possible!?”

Before Yagami could even process the impossibility of the situation, Hachishaku’s waterfall of long black hair surged forward like living vipers. The dark strands bound his body in an inescapable grip, violently yanking him off his feet and flinging him directly in front of Yozora.

Yozora squatted down. With one hand, he casually plucked the fallen pistol from the floor. With the other, he seized both of Yagami’s wrists in an iron grip, pressing the cold barrel of the firearm directly against the Chief’s temple.

“Let’s go.”

Yagami gasped sharply as a flare of intense pain shot through his wrists. When he forced himself to look up, the towering woman in white had completely vanished.

Was it a hallucination? What exactly was that thing? Was it even human?

Despite the sheer terror of the unknown, Yagami maintained his professional composure. Feeling the crushing pressure on his wrists, he silently logged another crucial piece of intelligence: the suspect possessed an astonishing grip strength that vastly exceeded normal human limits.

Using the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Bureau as a human shield, Yozora calmly walked out of the Kyoto Municipal Kindergarten building.

Fortunately, there were no reporters swarming the main entrance. The immediate crisis had concluded, and the media’s cameras were entirely focused on the heartwarming, tearful reunions between the rescued students and their parents. That was simply the nature of the news cycle.

Today’s headlines were already written. They would either scream, ‘Heavy Hostage Casualties: Can the Kyoto Metropolitan Police Department Bear the Public’s Expectations?’or’Hostage Crisis Perfectly Resolved: Kyoto Police Deserve Commendation!’

Either way, there would be no shortage of sensational coverage.

“Don’t shoot yet!”

Seeing their Chief being held at gunpoint by the mysterious suspect, the on-site deputy commander immediately screamed into his radio.

Hidden across the surrounding rooftops, snipers kept their fingers hovering over their triggers. Through their high-powered scopes, Yozora was completely locked in their crosshairs the moment he stepped into the open.

“Don’t be impulsive, we can discuss this!” The deputy commander took two quick, placating steps forward, his voice pitched to soothe a volatile criminal. “Whatever your demands are, just state them!”

To the eyes of the outside world, Yozora was merely dragging his hostage toward a random spot in the open courtyard. In reality, he was positioning himself directly beside the invisible threshold of the ‘door’.

Yozora remained entirely silent. The surrounding officers held their breath, terrified that a single wrong move might provoke the suspect into executing Chief Yagami. The scene fell so utterly quiet that the drop of a pin would have echoed like a gunshot.

After a few agonizing seconds, Yozora finally spoke, his tone dripping with casual indifference.

“Oh, by the way, Commander Yagami. There’s no one left in the building. As a parting gift, I’ll leave you with a message.”

“What message?”

Instead of answering, Yozora lifted Yagami’s entire body with a single arm and hurled him forward like a discarded bag of trash.

Seeing the hostage clear the blast radius, the deputy commander’s eyes widened. He screamed into his radio. “You are cleared to fire!”

But he was a fraction of a second too late.

Yozora’s figure began to blur and fade from existence. As he vanished, a small plastic detonator slipped from his pocket, accompanied by his final, mocking words.

“Art is an explosion.”

Boom!!!

The moment the button clicked, a deafening shockwave shattered the dead silence of the courtyard.

Inside the main teaching building of the Kyoto Municipal Kindergarten, blinding flashes of hellfire erupted from the structural pillars.

For a brief second, time seemed to crawl to a halt.

First came the blinding light. Then, the violent outward expansion of the concrete walls. Finally, the structural integrity failed entirely, giving way to a cascade of deep, thunderous cracks and a catastrophic collapse.

“Chief Yagami!”

The deputy commander lunged forward, tackling Yagami to the ground and covering his ears against the concussive blast.

Accompanied by a violent tremor that shook the very earth, the kindergarten building was reduced to a mountain of pulverized dust and twisted rebar.

“What was that!?”

Staring at the smoking ruins of the collapsed structure, Yagami’s pupils dilated in absolute shock. His chest tightened as two violently conflicting emotions warred within him: lingering terror and bitter regret.

The terror stemmed from a simple, chilling fact. If that mysterious person hadn’t intercepted him, he would have led his tactical assault team directly into that building. They would have all become buried corpses beneath the concrete rubble.

The regret was purely professional. Following such a devastating explosion, the physical evidence left at the crime scene would be completely obliterated.

Who exactly was that guy?

…

Meanwhile, within the Inner World version of Kyoto.

Even after successfully crossing the threshold of the ‘door’, Yozora did not relax his guard in the slightest.

He stared into the suffocating expanse of thick black mist rolling out before him. From within the dark fog, a bizarre, maddening sound echoed outward—like the overlapping whispers of thousands of unseen voices speaking in unison.

“The real battle has only just begun,” he murmured to himself.

The most dangerous aspect of this entire operation was never the armed kidnappers, despite what Yotsuya Miko and Yuigahama Yui might have believed. Yozora knew from the very beginning that a squad of amateur thugs and a perimeter of ordinary police officers posed absolutely zero threat to him.

The true test was waiting on the other side.

Because this was his very first time leaving the Inner World through a specific ‘door’, only to return to the Inner World through that exact same threshold.

In other words…

He had given the Evil Spirits the perfect opportunity to gather their forces and lay a trap.