The Chainsaw Man world.
In so ways, it wasn't so different from the Naruto world. The weak were genuinely helpless, and the strong were nightmarishly powerful.
Take the final boss of this instance, the Control Devil Makima, her sisters the Four Horsen of the Apocalypse, or primordial terrors like the Darkness Devil.
Conceptual devils, rule-based devils. Entities that could hold their own in any universe.
The Gun Devil, by comparison, might not even crack the top five.
But raw physical destructive force? Sheer terror factor? Top three, easy.
In the original story, the Chinese governnt had sacrificed a full year of lifespan from every citizen in the country just to summon twenty percent of the Gun Devil, and even that fragnt rivaled a Perfect Susanoo in raw power.
Maybe it couldn't match a Perfect Susanoo blow for blow at full strength, but its range and area of effect blew it out of the water. At just twenty percent, it had sniped Makima's head clean off from five hundred kiloters away. No Susanoo could reach that far.
Worse, the thing had no cooldown, no recovery period, and could resurrect infinitely by consuming blood.
And what stood before them now was the Gun Devil at one hundred percent.
Japan. Hokkaido.
The snowfield looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse. Carnage in every direction, flesh and viscera strewn across white ground turned to hell on earth.
The Perfect Susanoo that had torn through half the planet in the real world not long ago, unstoppable and absolute, had been reduced to a limbless husk.
Half a shattered upper body and a skull with one side of its face blown apart. The limbs were gone, disintegrated under a barrage of bullets dense as monsoon rain.
Inside the cockpit, Makoto Nishikado gasped for air, drenched in cold sweat.
Then the ruined Susanoo dissolved like a mirage in the wind, breaking apart and fading to nothing.
He hit the ground hard.
Was it over? Had he lost?
"Makoto!"
"Sensei-kun!"
"Makoto!"
Airi and Marina Akizuki, Utaha Kasumigaoka, Mrs. Yukinoshita, gumi Kato, Ichinose Chizuru, Yotsuba Nakano... they rushed him like a wave, crowding around his collapsed form.
Utaha reached him first, pulling him into a tight embrace, letting his slack face rest against her chest. The cold sweat covering him, the pallor of his skin. Every woman watching felt her heart clench.
I've never seen him like this... Marina thought, dabbing at his forehead with shaking hands.
"Give him space! He needs air!" Ishigami Yu shouted.
But they weren't the only ones frozen by the scene.
Yusaku Kudo and Yukiko Kudo were tearing strips from their own clothes with trembling hands, desperately wrapping their son's wounds.
Shinichi Kudo's severed legs wouldn't stop bleeding. Every heartbeat sent a fresh wave of agony ripping through him, blurring his consciousness until all he could manage were small, broken whimpers.
Eriri Spencer Sawamura stood over Tomoya Aki, who lay curled on the ground clutching his crotch, screaming and convulsing. She was white as paper, hands hovering uselessly.
Her father stepped forward without a word, stripped off his suit jacket, and pressed it hard against the gushing wound, barely stemming the flow. But the pain tearing through that particular region had Tomoya crumpled in the snow like a wrung-out rag, teetering on the edge of death.
"Makoto! Makoto! Don't scare like this!"
Sekai Saionji's sobbing cry cut through the chaos.
Kotonoha Katsura had followed the crowd to Makoto's side before catching herself. She was... in the wrong place. But strangely, she didn't feel much real grief. Mostly just a hollow confusion.
Should I stay here, or go check on my "boyfriend"?
Elsewhere, Erina Nakiri and Mana Nakiri stared at the cratered, bullet-riddled snow. There was nothing left of Azami Nakiri's body to find.
Shattered corpses, clots of blood, splinters of bone covered every surface, impossible to tell which piece belonged to whom.
Alice Nakiri, Leonora Nakiri, Soma Yukihira, Ai Hayasaka... first-tirs in a death instance, every one of them. They stood ashen-faced and trembling.
As far as the eye could see, the earth was broken. All of Hokkaido had beco sothing worse than what Tokyo looked like after the real-world bombing. An extinction-level massacre rendered in snow and blood.
Their understanding of the world shattered with it.
Everything Makoto had done in the real world, all the chaos he'd unleashed, had been limited to central Tokyo and a military base. This was an entire city, an entire landscape, scoured clean of life.
This is what they've been fighting in?
More than a few people realized, in that mont, that superpowers weren't quite as enviable as they'd imagined.
Once a trace of color returned to Makoto's face, Mrs. Yukinoshita spoke, her voice tight with worry. "Makoto, that thing just now... what was..."
He didn't answer. Eyes closed, he focused on stabilizing the chaotic Chakra inside his body.
He'd already pieced together exactly when in the Chainsaw Man tiline they'd landed.
Thirteen years before the story began.
Aki Hayakawa's family had died in this very massacre.
"Darling! Shinichi's lost too much blood, we have to get him to a hospital!"
Yukiko's scream jolted everyone.
All eyes turned.
Shinichi Kudo, the savior of Japan's police force, lay on the frozen ground like a discarded rag. Both legs were gone below the knee. Raw at and exposed bone, dark blood still pumping out, soaking into the snow.
Every shallow breath tugged at the torn flesh, sending fresh bolts of white-hot pain through what remained.
"Is there even a hospital still standing out here?"
Yusaku Kudo, the world-famous mystery novelist, stared at the ruins of the distant city. His voice wouldn't stop shaking.
Kogoro Mouri stripped off his own jacket and pressed it against Shinichi's stumps, turning to his old friends with grim resolve. "Doesn't matter. We look. Yukiko, hold the wound. Yusaku, you're with . We find a doctor."
The words were brave. The devastation stretching in every direction made them ring hollow. But they couldn't just watch the kid die.
"I'll handle it."
Yukino Yukinoshita stepped forward, calm and steady. "I've trained in dical ninjutsu."
"Really?" Yukiko's swollen, red-rimd eyes lit up with desperate hope, grasping at anything.
She didn't know what dical ninjutsu was. She only knew the girl in front of her was like Makoto, one of the people with powers. That had to be enough.
Yukino knelt beside Shinichi, gathered Yang-nature Chakra into her palms, and channeled it gently into the wounds at his knees. The basic dical technique: Healing Jutsu.
"Um... excuse ..." Sekai crept up beside Yukino, voice cracking. "Could you maybe... heal Makoto too?"
The na made Yukino pause. She glanced instinctively toward Makoto Nishikado. He didn't need healing.
Then she followed Sekai's trembling gesture and understood. A different Makoto.
"Save ... save ... please, save ..."
Makoto Ito's face was a mask of blood and tears, begging Yukino over and over. He could feel it. The most important part of his anatomy, radiating a fusion of tearing, crushing, burning agony that had ani's most notorious walking libido on the verge of total collapse.
"Um, Yukinoshita... there's another casualty over here too." Eriri pointed toward Tomoya Aki, her voice unsteady.
The guy had spent years in the Naruto world and sohow still had worse physical conditioning than Ito Makoto. Sa injury, sa location, but Tomoya had already passed out cold from the pain. His body kept twitching involuntarily.
Yukino glanced at where both of them were wounded.
Her expression curdled.
The Healing Jutsu worked the sa way as Tsunade's Mystical Palm Technique. Yang-nature Chakra had to be concentrated in the palm and pressed directly against the wound.
She would rather die than put her hands anywhere near that part of either of them. Even destroyed as it was.
No. Anyone's. She didn't want to touch anyone's.
That was when Makoto's voice drifted over, lazy and unhurried.
"Use Fire Release to heat a stone into quickli. Pack the wound with it to stop the bleeding. Find a straw to use as a catheter, then wrap it with bandages. We don't have bandages, so tear up so clothes."
Every face in the vicinity went through the sa slow transformation.
How... do you know that?
What they didn't know was that Makoto's grades in his previous life had been thoroughly diocre, but he'd consud an impressive amount of random trivia. Ancient court eunuchs had their wounds treated with exactly this thod.
"Oh! Right!"
Sekai nodded frantically, then froze, her face flushing scarlet.
There was no fire here. And what was Fire Release?
"Ishigami. Bring a rock."
Utaha, Ishigami, and the others blinked.
Since when did their man volunteer to help people?
Confused or not, Ishigami grabbed a blood-spattered stone from the ground and held it out.
Makoto's right eye shifted.
Black flas erupted. Amaterasu. In seconds, the solid stone crumbled into a handful of pure white powder.
"Th-thank you!" Sekai bowed deeply, reached for the powder, then stopped dead. Her cheeks turned crimson. She turned to Kotonoha, voice barely above a whisper.
"Kotonoha... um... maybe you should do it."
It hit her. Ito Makoto's actual girlfriend was Kotonoha. An injury in that area should be handled by the one who had the right.
Kotonoha's pupils dilated to pinpoints. She looked as if she were possessed by Bocchi-chan, glitching out and sputtering: "Muri muri muri muri! (No way, no way, no way!)"
She had androphobia. She couldn't even hold Ito Makoto's hand. Touching that? Absolutely not.
Her eyes drifted, unbidden, toward Makoto Nishikado.
Sekai grimaced. Without an audience, maybe she could have managed it. But with this many people watching, and her official relationship to Ito Makoto being "just classmates"... there was no way.
And so Ito Makoto was left where he lay. Abandoned.
Tomoya Aki, at least, had Eriri's father helping. The man understood the tangled ss between his daughter and this kid, and no matter how much he disapproved, he wasn't about to let the boy bleed out.
But Ito Makoto had no one here except Sekai and Kotonoha. Not a single other person who knew him.
"Um... Makoto... just... do it yourself, okay?"
Sekai finally pushed the handful of powder toward him, guilt written across her face.
Ito Makoto, already cried dry from the pain, nearly broke down all over again.
It hurt. It hurt so much.
Ishigami turned to Makoto Nishikado, puzzled. "Senpai, why did you help them?"
The corner of Makoto's mouth curled into sothing between amusent and cruelty.
"I wanted to see what a eunuch looks like."
Dead silence.
He's a monster.
Ishigami's eyes lit up. He nodded crisply. "Understood!"
He strode over to Ito Makoto, scooped up a handful of the powder, and moved to apply it. If his senpai wanted to see, then this man absolutely could not be allowed to die.
Ito Makoto watched Ishigami approaching and felt humiliation, terror, and agony collide inside him. But survival was survival. He'd take it. He just hoped that down there... sothing could still be saved.
"Hm?"
Ishigami had just torn open Ito Makoto's blood-soaked trousers when his brow furrowed.
"What is it?" Sekai asked, panicked.
Ishigami's expression went flat. He raised the Flying Thunder God kunai in his hand and spoke without inflection.
"There's still a bit left. Not a clean cut."
The blade ca down.
A scrap of bloody flesh arced through the air and landed on the pristine snow.
"AAAAAAAAAAAGH!"
Ito Makoto's shriek tore across the bloodstained snowfield, more piercing and more wretched than anything before it.
Everyone went numb.
They'd thought Makoto Nishikado was ruthless. Turned out his underling was worse.
Yusaku Kudo crouched down and examined his son's wounds. A small asure of relief. Still critical, but he'd hold for a few more hours.
The sharpest mind in the Conan universe let his gaze sweep across the scene, his ntal processor running at full speed, before settling on Makoto Nishikado.
He'd spotted sothing.
Yusaku's deductive ability surpassed his son's, and his emotional intelligence was leagues beyond Shinichi's.
He'd never blurt out an accusation in the heat of the mont or dig in with stubborn pride.
After learning of Makoto Nishikado's existence, he'd already been quietly investigating the man's background and the complicated web of relationships around him.
And now, the people lying on the ground in critical condition just happened to be his son Shinichi, Tomoya Aki who'd been pursuing gumi Kato, and the Ito Makoto kid that Ishigami had been beating up when they arrived.
Then there were the ones who had no connection to Nishikado, or outright friction with him: Ryo Kurokiba, Soma Yukihira, Hayato Hayama, and others. They were hurt too, but not mortally.
His son, Tomoya, and Ito Makoto were the ones who'd genuinely lost half their lives.
Hard not to wonder. Coincidence, I think not?
But Yusaku was far more composed than Shinichi. His son would have already exploded with accusations by now. Yusaku swallowed his fury and kept it locked behind his teeth.
Keeping quiet, however, didn't an Makoto missed it.
Yusaku thought he'd hidden it well. But that flash of suspicion in his eyes, the barely perceptible tremor in his fingers from suppressed rage... they told Makoto everything.
"Sharp man."
Makoto turned his head slightly, eting Yusaku's gaze with an unreadable smile.
Every pair of eyes in the vicinity snapped toward him.
"Senpai, what do you an?" Ishigami looked back and forth between them, lost.
"He's wondering whether I let his son get hurt on purpose."
"That bastard!" Ishigami erupted. "There's no way Senpai would be that petty!"
"I did it on purpose."
Makoto said it like he was comnting on the weather.
Ishigami froze mid-fury.
Utaha, gumi, and the others quietly looked away.
That backfired fast.
Still, they knew clearing the filter from Ishigami's fan-goggles wasn't the worst thing. Better now than so catastrophic disillusionnt later. They knew exactly what kind of man theirs was. Flawed in a dozen ways, pettiness chief among them.
"Senpai was right to do it! That son of a B*tch deserved it!"
Ishigami's paralysis lasted exactly one second before the outrage resud.
Every woman present went silent.
Hopeless.
Even Erina and Alice Nakiri found themselves thinking the sa thing.
___________________________
EVERY 30 POWERSTONES = 2 BONUS CHAPTERS
User Comments
0 comments from readers