Anime Crossover: Eating Evil in a Daily World — Chapter 73

Chapter 73: Master-Level Fighting Tech and Tokyo’s Ability User

Looking at the muscle-bound freak vibrating with bloodlust in front of him, Yozora offered a perfectly pleasant, utterly hollow smile.

“Yes? Can I help you with something?”

Kure Raian didn’t hesitate. His face, which might have been considered handsome under normal circumstances, twisted into a demonic, jagged grin.

“Let’s fight!”

Yozora’s immediate internal reaction was simple: Are you out of your damn mind?

Then he reconsidered. Raian’s mind was, in fact, famously abnormal. This so-called genius of the Kure Clan could be accurately summed up in two words: madman and killer. Judging by his established track record, provoking a random stranger to a death match just because he heard some gym-goers gossiping about his strength was entirely on-brand for his twisted logic.

He wasn’t a true martial artist. The title of a Dōjō practitioner was just a convenient excuse for Raian to hunt down strong opponents and satisfy his overwhelming desire for slaughter. Nothing else mattered to him.

“I’m not really in the mood today.” Yozora yawned, waving a hand dismissively. “So, move aside.”

That casual dismissal, reflected in Raian’s dark eyes, instantly poured gasoline on his killing intent.

“Interesting. Very interesting.” Raian let out a frantic, grating laugh. He ground his teeth together, dropping his center of gravity like a beast preparing to pounce, his pitch-black eyes locking dead onto Yozora’s shoulders.

‘Still want to fight, huh…’

Yozora knew the basics of combat tracking. A highly trained professional assassin like Raian would read an enemy’s next move by watching the subtle shifts in their shoulders and hips. The intense focus proved the Kure killer was already treating this as a live combat scenario.

“Such a hassle. Fine, let’s get this over with.”

The moment the words left Yozora’s mouth, Raian vanished. With a ferocious snarl, he closed the distance in a fraction of a second. Bending slightly at the waist to channel the kinetic energy from his legs, Raian threw a brutal, unadorned straight punch aimed directly at Yozora’s chest. The sheer velocity of the strike tore through the air with a sharp whistle.

But what Raian didn’t expect was the absolute lack of impact.

Before his arm could fully extend, while his elbow was still slightly bent and the kinetic chain incomplete, Yozora casually stepped inside his guard and caught the incoming fist flat against his palm.

“Is that all?”

Hearing Yozora’s dry chuckle, a flash of cold clarity pierced through the frantic madness in Raian’s eyes.

“You…”

Raian’s killing intent spiked, growing suffocatingly heavy. After that single exchange, he realized he had miscalculated. The teenager standing in front of him was no ordinary civilian. His straight punch had been perfectly neutralized—smothered before it could reach its maximum destructive force.

This was genuine, high-level martial arts.

It sounded simple in theory, but given Raian’s monstrous explosive power, catching his strike mid-thrust required terrifying eyesight, flawless judgment, and immense physical grip strength. His movements had been entirely read.

‘Jeet Kune Do?’ Raian thought, though his body didn’t pause for a microsecond. His left hand instantly formed a rigid claw, hooking viciously upward toward Yozora’s lower abdomen to rip his organs out.

As established, Raian was no traditional Dōjō practitioner. The Kure Clan was a lineage of professional assassins refined over hundreds of years of selective breeding. He didn’t excel at sporting martial arts; he excelled at lawless, lethal violence where every single strike was meant to end a life.

A split second later, reality completely betrayed his expectations.

Before his left claw could even brush Yozora’s clothes, Raian felt his entire body inexplicably lift off the floor. The world tilted violently, and the white tiled wall of the locker room rushed up to meet his face.

Bang!

His skull slammed into the concrete wall with the force of a car crash. A normal human would have had their brains turned to paste on impact. Even with Raian’s freakish genetics, the combined kinetic force of Yozora’s throw and his own forward momentum left him seeing stars, a sickening wave of vertigo washing over his brain.

‘Tai Chi…?’

Raian had fought masters who cross-trained in multiple disciplines. But the kid standing over him was seventeen, maybe eighteen at most. How could someone that young master two entirely different martial arts to such a terrifying degree?

Looking down at Raian sprawled against the baseboards, Yozora maintained that same polite, infuriating smile. “Still want to go?”

Naturally, Yozora hadn’t spent a single day of his life actually training in a dojo.

He just had a very convenient cheat code.

To date, Yozora had devoured thousands of evil spirits. Among that massive buffet of corrupted souls, quite a few had been dedicated martial artists in life. Their greatest obsessions had been the perfection of their techniques and the pursuit of absolute strength. When Yozora ate them, those lifelong obsessions and muscle memories became his personal property.

He could review their decades of training from a third-person perspective inside his mind, rewinding, zooming in, and analyzing the biomechanics of every strike like watching a 3D VR tutorial. It was an instant technical download. Combined with the monstrous physical enhancements he gained from his spiritual diet, he had the perfect hardware to run the martial arts software.

His brutal proficiency with swords and blades came from the exact same source. He rarely bothered using actual techniques because, frankly, raw brute force was usually enough to paste whatever spirit he was fighting. But when dealing with a physical freak like Raian, he didn’t mind flexing a little skill.

“You bastard…” Raian spat a mouthful of blood onto the tiles and scrambled up, dropping into a low, four-legged crouch like a rabid dog. “I’ll kill you!”

The thick veins on Raian’s neck bulged against his skin, and his skin began to flush a deep, bruised purple as a terrifying pressure leaked from his pores.

“Removal…”

Before Raian could unlock his clan’s secret technique, the locker room door was kicked open with a deafening crash.

A young girl marched in. She had long, straight black hair cut in a traditional hime style, wearing standard workout clothes. Like Raian, her eyes featured pitch-black sclera and pale white irises.

She scanned the wrecked locker room. When her eyes landed on Yozora, a flicker of surprise crossed her face. But when she saw Raian, veins popping and his skin turning purple, that surprise morphed into absolute shock.

She stomped right up to the hulking killer, planted her hands on her hips, and barked, “Great-grandpa is furious that you snuck out! Everyone is looking for you. We are going back right now!”

“Tch… that damn old man.” Raian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Despite his grumbling, he straightened his posture, and the oppressive, violent aura bleeding from his skin instantly vanished.

He turned toward the door, grinding his teeth as he passed Yozora. “Kid, just you wait. The next time I see you—”

“Heh.” Yozora cut him off with a dry, mocking laugh. “You just got your face planted into drywall, and you’re still trying to act tough? Hurry up and run home. If you’re late, your parents are going to spank you.”

“You… you…” Raian’s face flushed a dangerous shade of violet.

If it were just a standard insult, he would have brushed it off. But he had just been effortlessly manhandled. Even if he hadn’t used his Removal to access his full latent power, getting tossed like a ragdoll was humiliating enough.

Worse still, Yozora’s mocking words hit a very specific, very repressed nerve. When Raian was a child, Kure Erioh—the terrifying Patriarch of the Kure Clan—had indeed subjected him to several extremely painful, highly humiliating spankings.

Raian shot Yozora a look of pure, concentrated murder, let out a harsh snort, and stormed out the door. He swore to himself he would wash away this humiliation with his own hands. He was going to tear this arrogant brat apart, joint by joint.

Once the hulking killer was gone, the girl with the hime-cut approached Yozora. She offered a bright, entirely innocent smile and held out her hand.

“My name is Kure Karura. I apologize for the trouble our clan member just caused you.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Seeing that Yozora had no intention of offering his own name in return, Karura didn’t push the issue. She turned to leave, but paused at the door when Yozora spoke up.

“A piece of advice,” Yozora said, his tone entirely flat. “You should get that guy out of Kyoto as fast as possible.”

Karura glanced back over her shoulder, looking at him with genuine interest, before offering a sweet smile and a nod. “Understood. Thank you for the warning.”

With that, she slipped out into the hallway.

Yozora looked around the cracked tiles and dented lockers, sighing as he rubbed the back of his neck. “What a pain.”

Raian was a monster by human standards, but he was still just flesh and blood. Without using any of his supernatural abilities, relying purely on his physical specs and stolen martial arts, Yozora could comfortably spar with him. But if he actually bothered to manifest the Pale Ghost Hand, it wouldn’t even be a fight. The sheer conceptual weight of Soul Manifestation—even something as basic as Yotsuya Miko’s Hyakume—was a complete dimensionality reduction attack against a purely physical fighter.

He wasn’t losing sleep over Raian’s little revenge vow. He was worried about the environment.

Kyoto wasn’t like other cities. Kyoto had the “doors.”

Humans harboring deeply distorted desires were prime real estate for powerful evil spirits. If the corruption went deep enough, the human soul would completely fuse with the entity.

Distorted desires.

Kure Raian was arguably the most mentally unstable, blood-crazed human Yozora had ever laid eyes on. He was a walking slaughterhouse, his entire psyche built around the joy of killing. He was the absolute perfect vessel for an evil spirit.

Worse, Raian had the physical hardware to back it up. Even completely unarmed, he could slaughter dozens of heavily armed riot police without breaking a sweat. If a monster like that got possessed and started a massacre in Kyoto, the resulting negative energy would severely destabilize the doors.

‘Should I just track him down and kill him now?’

The thought crossed his mind, but he quickly dismissed it. He had just fought Raian in a public gym. If the Kure Clan’s prized psychopath turned up dead in a Kyoto alleyway tomorrow, Yozora would be suspect number one. The Kure Clan weren’t the police; they didn’t need a court order or hard evidence to authorize a hit. Suspicion was entirely sufficient.

Yozora wasn’t afraid of a bunch of assassins, but dealing with waves of them would cut into his free time.

“I’ll deal with it if it happens,” Yozora muttered, tossing the problem to the back of his mind.

If Raian actually got possessed, Yozora would just rip his head off without a second thought. And if the Kure Clan had a problem with it, he would just have to exterminate the entire bloodline to prevent future annoyances.

Meanwhile, inside the Criminal Bureau Chief’s office at the Kyoto Metropolitan Police Department.

Yagami Soichiro, having just survived another grueling strategy meeting, sat heavily behind his desk and massaged his throbbing temples.

“The Onimaru Kunitsuna exhibition… why did it have to be scheduled right now?”

After pulling massive amounts of manpower from neighboring precincts and running his officers ragged with double patrols, the violent crime rate in Kyoto had finally started to dip. But before Soichiro could even draft a positive report for the higher-ups, this logistical nightmare dropped onto his desk.

A legendary national treasure like the Onimaru Kunitsuna couldn’t be valued in mere yen. If anything happened to that sword while it was on display in his jurisdiction, it wouldn’t just be a local scandal. It would dominate the national news cycle for months.

Failure was absolutely not an option.

His desk phone buzzed, shattering the quiet of the office. Soichiro’s deep frown softened marginally when he read the caller ID.

“Light.”

“Father.” Light Yagami’s smooth, polite voice came through the speaker. “How has work been lately?”

Soichiro allowed himself a small, tired smile. “Manageable.”

He was incredibly proud of his son. Light was brilliant, athletic, and conventionally handsome—praised by every educator he ever met as the absolute gold standard of a student. Better yet, Light had recently declared his intention to test into To-Oh University, with the ultimate goal of joining the police force to fight for justice, just like his father.

Between a perfect son and a sweet daughter, Soichiro considered himself a deeply fortunate man.

“Father, once the spring exams wrap up and the break begins, I’d like to come down to Kyoto to visit you.”

Soichiro’s smile widened. “That sounds wonderful. It’s been nearly half a year since I transferred here. We haven’t seen each other at all. Why don’t you bring your mother and sister? I’ll pull some strings to get a few days off, and we can spend some time together in the city.” He paused, adding with a stern but warm tone, “Assuming, of course, you maintain your grades during these spring exams.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Light replied, his voice brimming with effortless confidence. “I’ll be taking the top rank in the school again, just like in middle school.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I’ll let you get back to work, Father. Take care of yourself.”

In his pristine bedroom back in Tokyo, Light Yagami lowered his phone and ended the call.

He swiveled his chair back toward his computer monitor. The screen displayed a high-resolution news photograph of the Kyoto Municipal Kindergarten incident. The image showed heavily armed police cordoning off the area, the tension practically bleeding through the pixels.

But Light wasn’t looking at the police. His eyes were locked on the center of the ruined courtyard. Standing amidst the rubble was an ancient, rotting wooden door that had absolutely no structural reason to be there. Thick, viscous black mist seemed to be bleeding from its frame.

Light steepled his fingers, his mind racing.

All the hostages had miraculously escaped unharmed, yet the entire building had been leveled by a massive explosion. The official timeline of events completely defied basic logic. Light had tried digging into the police databases for the unredacted case files, only to hit a wall of high-level classified encryption.

That wall told him everything he needed to know. His father was hiding something massive.

If the case was truly solved and the perpetrators apprehended, there would be no need for a media blackout. Yet the police still refused to release the operational details of the rescue. Digging through the darker corners of the internet, Light had found scattered, quickly-deleted rumors about a mysterious man in a black mask saving the children, not the riot squads.

Normally, Light would have dismissed it as typical internet conspiracy garbage. But combined with his father’s evasive behavior, the physical impossibility of the explosion, and this bizarre photograph…

He leaned closer to the monitor, staring at the black mist that no one else in the comment sections seemed to notice.

‘Could it be… there’s someone in Kyoto with an ability like mine?’A cold, sharp smile touched Light’s lips.’Interesting. This rotten, boring world might actually have some entertainment left in it.’

Wednesday noon. Sobu High School, Class A.

It was the first day of the dreaded spring exams.

For Yozora, a standard first-year high school test was about as challenging as breathing. Given two and a half hours to complete the paper, he blitzed through the entire packet in under twenty minutes.

With over two hours left to kill, he crossed his arms on the desk and closed his eyes. He would have preferred to actually sleep, but falling completely unconscious risked his brain wiping Sakurajima Mai from his memory, so he settled for a light, meditative rest.

To the rest of the classroom, however, he just looked like a delinquent passing out immediately after the bell rang.

He wasn’t the only one. A few rows over, Touma Kazusa had face-planted onto her desk the second the papers were distributed. Unlike Yozora, who had at least filled out the bubbles, Kazusa hadn’t even bothered to write her name. Given her academic track record, leaving it blank was just saving the grader some time.

Whispers broke out among the students as the proctor looked away.

“Look at those two… they’re definitely fighting for dead last, right?”

“Is it even a contest? Touma is taking the bottom spot. Yozora at least pretended to write for twenty minutes. Even if he just guessed ‘C’ for everything, he’ll get a few points.”

“Ugh, whatever. We still have the afternoon block, and then all of tomorrow. My brain is fried.”

“Hey, we get Friday off though. Where are we going? Karaoke?”

“I heard that legendary sword, the Onimaru Kunitsuna, is on display downtown. We should go check it out.”

“Pass. It’s just a rusty piece of metal. Who cares?”

The general consensus in Class A was clear: Yozora was a lazy slacker who either slept through lectures or openly played games on his phone. There was no universe where he passed these exams.

Their perspective was tragically limited.

Behind his closed eyes, Yozora wasn’t worrying about his grades. He was currently running mental simulations on how to cure Sakurajima Mai’s Puberty Syndrome, calculating the exact threat level of the Kure Clan’s presence in Kyoto, and drafting a foolproof heist plan to steal the Onimaru Kunitsuna and return it to its rightful owner.

As for the exam?

Aside from taking the undisputed number one rank in the entire grade with perfect scores across the board, there was simply no other possible outcome.