In the ruins of Kushan Palace—reduced to rubble by the twice-reincarnated Terror Emperor—
countless demonic beasts of every shape and size were closing in on the two humans who had dropped from the sky.
But before any of them could close the distance, flashes of blade-light and cannon fire tore through them, reducing them to steaming heaps of mangled flesh. Only the acrid stench of blood lingered in the air, carried off on the wind alongside the smell of scorched earth.
Chris flicked the blood from the edge of his Soul-Release Blade with a casual motion, then slowly raised his head.
His gaze swept past the endless tide of surging monsters and settled on a massive creature in the distance—so huge that only the outline of its thigh was visible—roaring as it corroded the earth beneath a shroud of thunderclouds.
"Looks like Griffith still doesn't have the nerve to follow us and explore the secrets of the Backrooms together~"
Arisu Sakayanagi, dressed in an elaborate magical girl outfit, glanced into the distance and shook her head with a hint of regret. "Aw, what a shame."
"I thought the Hawk of Light would have some real nerve. Turns out when it comes to the unknown, the so-called God Hand is just a slightly fancier coward."
Chris's expression didn't change. He drew his gaze back from the distance and said offhandedly, "Well, whether or not that little display of ours pulled his attention, we've done what needed doing."
"Let's go. We're on the clock."
"If you still want to farm points here, feel free to stay behind and play with them at your leisure."
Sakayanagi rolled her eyes—a pretty, exasperated gesture—at Chris.
"Of course I know that."
"I just wanted to needle the God Hand a little before we left, draw his attention."
"It also buys a bit more time for Ichinose and the others."
She lifted her pale chin with total confidence. "After all, points earned here can only be used in the next exam. This is called planning ahead—you clearly don't get it at all!"
Chris just shook his head without answering, walking straight toward the center of the ruins.
There, standing alone amid the scorched wreckage, was a wooden security door—utterly out of place, yet perfectly intact.
He reached out and pushed it open. Beyond lay deep, unbroken darkness.
Chris turned and stepped through, waving casually back at Sakayanagi, who still stood where she'd been.
Sakayanagi murmured something under her breath at his retreating back, her pale cherry-blossom lips barely moving.
She snapped her fingers with elegant flair, conjuring the Romantic Cannon out of ribbon magic and blasting a few beasts trying to crawl out of the rubble for a sneak attack into mist. Only then, unhurried, did she follow Chris in through the wooden door.
The familiar disorientation of a floor transition faded after a moment.
Sakayanagi opened her eyes again.
At a glance, what lay before her and Chris resembled the very first floor they'd encountered upon entering the Backrooms—Level 0.
Damp yellow carpet underfoot, the ceaseless electric hum of fluorescent lights buzzing in their ears.
And a maze of corridors stretching endlessly out of sight, wrapped in monotonous yellowed wallpaper.
Of course, the scene before them didn't quite match a standard Level 0.
It was as if, layered atop the base floor, the surrounding walls were caught in a constant state of collapse.
The crumbling fragments that peeled away didn't fall to the floor at all—they plunged straight into a bottomless void beyond the cracks in the walls.
What exactly lay hidden at the bottom of that void, there was no telling for now.
Sakayanagi had no real intention of climbing down to satisfy her own curiosity, either.
She glanced down at her feet and noticed the cracks of collapse creeping inward from the corners like something alive.
She quickened her pace at once, closing the distance to Chris's side.
By then, Chris had already activated the Black Sphere Controller on his wrist.
Watching the light-and-shadow terrain on the Controller's holographic 3D map collapse in real time along with the world around them, Sakayanagi tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Could this... be a world meeting its end?"
"From perfectly intact, to a world plagued by all manner of problems—or simply targeted and devoured outright by the Backrooms' own rules—until all that's left are a handful of assimilated Backrooms entities, and finally, once every last drop of nourishment's been drained, it's just left to collapse?"
Chris stared at the screen, pausing before he spoke. "Can't say for sure yet. But there's no need to linger and test our luck in a world that looks like it's falling apart. Just grab some footage for reference and that'll do."
With that, he pulled out his phone and recorded a short clip of the crumbling walls around them along with the Controller's 3D display.
Sakayanagi leaned in to peek at the Controller's screen, her fine brows furrowing slightly. "From what the map's showing, the new 'door' isn't exactly close by..."
"Let's just hope we don't hit a sudden collapse halfway there and end up trapped with no way forward or back."
After all, the magical girl form she'd currently transformed into was modeled on Mami Tomoe—plenty of firepower, but no actual ability to fly.
Earlier, the only reason she'd been able to keep up with Chris, streaking through the sky like a shooting star, was by forcing her transformed body's Ki through sheer will to pull off Bukujutsu.
Even then, since the total amount of Ki in her body wasn't especially large and she wasn't skilled at using it, she'd struggled to keep it up midway.
In the end, she'd had no choice but to lash her ribbon magic tight around Chris's arm and let him play "porter" for a stretch of the trip.
The posture had been a little undignified, sure, but Sakayanagi honestly didn't care in the slightest.
The people below couldn't make out the details anyway.
From everyone else's point of view, all they needed to know was that she and Chris were "flying together as a pair"—and that was enough.
The whole point had been staking her claim.
Chris glanced sideways at her, tucking his phone back into his pocket. "In a place where the unknown could strike at any moment, it's better to move fast. I'll just carry you there directly."
Sakayanagi nodded slightly. She'd assumed Chris meant to draw the Enma Blade and slice open a direct passage through space to their destination.
Instead, to her surprise, he didn't draw his blade at all. He simply reached out and wrapped an arm naturally around her slender, soft waist.
An instant later—before surprise even had time to reach her face—the scene before her eyes blurred into streaking lines of light.
When the light stopped rushing past, she found herself standing in front of a door.
Not the wooden one they'd entered through, but a brand-new door carved with strange patterns she'd never seen before.
As for what exactly had happened in between, even with a magical girl's enhanced dynamic vision, she hadn't caught any of it.
"...Super speed?" Sakayanagi murmured under her breath.
Chris answered flatly, "Something like that. Figured I could pull it off, so I did."
This serum—the alien DNA that Megamind, from the movie Megamind, extracted from Metro Man's hair—was potent enough in the original film to turn an ordinary man like Titan into a mini-superman capable of sweeping streets with heat vision and lifting buildings by hand.
Even though Chris hadn't stacked the full version of Metro Man's power onto himself, on top of however many layers of his monstrous Steel Heart physique he'd already piled up...
just from the multiplier boost of this weakened serum alone, Chris could already reach speeds close to what Metro Man had displayed—near light speed.
As for the possibility that Sakayanagi might spread word of this feat, tempting others into redeeming the same item, only to find they'd ended up with a mere Titan-tier flight speed of Mach three or four? That wasn't something Chris needed to worry about.
After all, you know how it is—he'd always been special.
Come to think of it... a thought suddenly flashed through Chris's mind.
'The Black Sphere Combat Suit is set to boost the wearer's physical stats tenfold. Should that setting even apply to someone like me, whoseOutput token limit hit. Resume directly — no apology, no recap of what you were doing. Pick up mid-thought if that is where the cut happened. Break remaining work into smaller pieces.combat power's already this inflated?'
'Honestly, if you slapped another tenfold all-around physical boost onto Metro Man, it feels like you could go toe-to-toe with a base-form Superman on raw melee alone.'
'The stronger the foundation, the more terrifying the payoff—like Karna's golden armor from Fate, cutting incoming damage by ninety percent, growing stronger against stronger foes.'
But after a moment's thought, Chris decided it didn't really matter either way.
The Combat Suit, when you got down to it, was basically a baseline perk the Black Sphere system handed out to ordinary rookies.
From the perspective of the Black Sphere—or whoever was pulling the strings behind it—there was probably no real need to fuss over such minor balance details anymore.
In the face of absolute authority and overwhelming power, everything else was just noise.
Besides, the material of the Combat Suit itself wasn't anything special to begin with.
Against enemies capable of matching it, the suit's ring-shaped nodes could be blown out easily enough, causing the boost to fail and leaving the wearer at a disadvantage.
The further into the game you went, the more this thing seemed to lean glass-cannon, assassin-style.
Turning it all over in his mind, Chris reached out and pushed open the carved door before him.
Stepping into the new floor, what greeted them was a world of inverted, jumbled space.
Corridors ran upside-down, staircases led into nothing, and every direction was crowded with anti-gravity scenery.
This time Sakayanagi seemed to have gotten the hang of it. Instead of gawking at the gravitational anomalies around them, she simply reached over and tapped open the interface on the Controller at Chris's wrist.
Shrinking down the holographic 3D image, she took a glance and clicked her tongue faintly. "Another floor with no monsters at all, huh..."
"Could it be that this is the stage right before a world collapses—every living thing already extinct? Is it showing up in front of us over and over just to give us a warning shot?"
Her eyes flickered. "Or maybe it's some kind of hint the Black Sphere is giving us?"
Chris thought it over for a moment before speaking. "Hard to say whether there's really a connection. Let's just record it for now and analyze everything once we reach the new exit."
At that, Sakayanagi's eyes glimmered. She reached straight into Chris's pocket and dug out his phone.
Then, quite naturally, she grabbed his finger, unlocked the screen with his fingerprint, and pulled up the camera's video function like she'd done it a hundred times before.
Chris couldn't help but quirk the corner of his mouth. "Hey... isn't that a little too bold of you?"
Sakayanagi kept filming while glancing back at him with a soft laugh, mischief written all over her face. "What, is Chris worried I'll go snooping through your little secrets?"
"Don't worry, if I ever wanted to look, I'd do it right in front of you, out in the open. I'd never take advantage of a situation like that. Besides, do I really look like someone who can't tell what matters and what doesn't?"
With that, she boldly held her own phone out to him. "If you really don't trust me, feel free to look through my secrets any time you like~"
"Whether it's what's on my phone, or anything else."
"That's... actually not what I was trying to say. Forget it—just hold onto your phone."
Chris sighed, raising his arm again to scoop the diminutive Sakayanagi up around the waist.
As they suddenly lifted off the ground, Sakayanagi let out an obliging little "Whoa!" of surprise, winding her arms around his neck and leaning close to his ear, her breath warm.
"Chris, are you under so much pressure in the Backrooms that you just couldn't wait to grab a little sense of security from Arisu?"
"Though Mama Sakayanagi would love to say it's fine, that she can hold you close anytime, anywhere..."
"But I guess, with danger lurking everywhere like this, now really isn't the time..."
Before Sakayanagi could finish her teasing, she suddenly felt a firm-but-not-too-firm smack land on her rear.
She let out a small yelp, her composed, seductive tone breaking instantly and cracking into a note of flustered indignation.
Chris offered no reply at all, his face impassive as he carried her, streaking rapidly through the inverted, jumbled space.
This time, perhaps because Chris had deliberately slowed down, Sakayanagi could finally make out the bizarre scenery flashing past them.
But the phone's camera simply couldn't keep up with their speed, and everything on screen came out as a blur of afterimages.
Seeing this, Sakayanagi could only tilt her head up and nudge Chris's chest lightly with her smooth forehead, whining, "Big Boss, slow down a bit more! You're going too fast, the camera can't even focus!"
"..." Chris paused for a beat, then complied without a word, slashing his speed further.
"Okay, okay, this speed works. As long as it captures the general layout, it doesn't matter if the focus is a little off."
A few minutes later, Sakayanagi looked at the barely recognizable footage on screen and spoke with satisfaction.
At the same time, she was already scheming quietly to herself.
Once this expedition was over, she was absolutely going to edit and touch up the first half of this footage.
After all, Sakayanagi was no exhibitionist eager to broadcast her private life to the world.
As for the unedited original footage, though... she fully intended to let Amasawa Ichika and Honami Ichinose "accidentally" stumble across it later, in a moment of perfectly staged nonchalance.
Showing it to Amasawa was because, as the queen of Class A, Sakayanagi had long since grown sick of that White House underclassman who was always pulling little schemes in the shadows and acting so clever—it was purely to spite her.
As for showing it to Honami Ichinose... that was simply Sakayanagi's winner's instinct to gloat acting up.
Honami Ichinose, that consummate do-gooder, ran around all day like a wound-up clockwork robot with nothing on her mind but saving everyone else, never sparing a single meaningful moment to build anything real with Chris—and yet she still went and got jealous behind everyone's backs on a regular basis...
Just imagining the look on her face after watching the video—all that pain and wounded pride, followed by the pathetic realization that she hadn't even qualified for the race to begin with—
was enough to make Sakayanagi stifle a laugh.
As for whether Ichinose, once stung, might actually shake herself awake and change something about herself... under normal circumstances, Sakayanagi should've been guarding her territory fiercely, hoarding every scrap of it.
But after weighing it in her mind, she let out a small sigh. Fine, might as well let him add a couple more, within reason... Ichinose might be a little rigid, but she was still leagues better than a two-faced woman like Amasawa Ichika or Kushida Kikyo.
While an entire palace-intrigue drama played out in Sakayanagi's head, Chris carried her through the jumbled gravity field as if walking on flat ground, and soon they arrived before the entrance of the next floor.
Setting down Sakayanagi—her mind still churning with schemes—Chris turned his head and asked, "Got it all recorded?"
Snapping out of it, Sakayanagi held up the phone with a bright smile. "It's all in here. And even if it accidentally gets damaged in a fight later, no big deal—with your Crazy Diamond around, nothing's ever really broken for good."
Chris made no comment either way, simply reaching out to push open the door in front of them.
They stepped through. After the brief, unavoidable spatial disorientation of a floor transition, Chris and Sakayanagi found themselves in what looked like an abandoned mall's amusement zone.
Wherever they looked, colorful wallpaper covered every surface and bright balloons floated in the air.
An eerie nursery rhyme, tinny like an old music box, echoed through the air, lending the whole place a bone-chilling "kidcore" atmosphere.
Seeing that this floor, unlike the previous two, didn't reek of death, Chris still didn't let his guard down, checking the Controller on his wrist first thing.
This time, red dots representing monster entities finally appeared on the Controller's 3D map.
He tapped one open to check. All the red dots turned out to be a Backrooms entity called Partygoers.
Their trait was nasty enough: just getting bitten—or even taking an unprotected wound from contact—would assimilate a human, transforming them into one of these bright-yellow, smiling-masked creatures, absorbed into their hive mind.
The good news was that, aside from the massive numbers of Partygoers, no other monster showed up as a red dot anywhere on this entire amusement-park floor.
And based on the system's assessment, individual Partygoers weren't particularly strong, and the points for killing them were pitifully low.
Chris and Sakayanagi exchanged a look. After a quick discussion, they decided that on the way to the exit, rather than hiding, they'd deliberately make some noise, draw nearby Partygoers in, and pick them off at their leisure—might as well top up the point reserves.
And so, in this amusement park full of cheerful laughter turned horror show, a one-sided slaughter began.
Chris reaped them effortlessly with the Enma Blade and heat rays; Sakayanagi picked them off precisely with ribbon magic and her Romantic Cannon.
Neither of them needed to get close to deliver lethal blows to creatures that relied on physical contact to assimilate their prey.
It was almost a shame—since Partygoers shared information as a hive mind.
Once they realized the risk of engaging these two "prey" completely outweighed any benefit, the Partygoers—who should've been swarming their targets—seemed to concede defeat instead, voluntarily pulling back their siege of the area.
They actively avoided and gave a wide berth to wherever Chris and Sakayanagi stood, as if steering clear of a plague.
In the end, all told, the two of them only farmed a few dozen points.
Granted, if Chris had wanted to, with his super speed he could easily have wiped out every Partygoer on the entire floor in short order and come back for Sakayanagi.
But given the current limitations of the Black Sphere Controller's functions—
it only displayed monster intel and a flat map of the floor. Whether the floor itself hid any unexpected rule-traps or blind spots of spatial collapse, the radar gave no early warning of any of that.
If the two of them got separated mid-hunt and Sakayanagi accidentally fell through into some other dangerous floor she couldn't easily escape... trading that risk for a handful of points would be a terrible bargain.
So Chris didn't bother stirring up trouble with Sakayanagi over such small gains.
The two of them quit while they were ahead, followed the map's guidance to the exit for this floor, and pushed through the door together.
After all, though Sakayanagi's physical stats had been boosted, she still had no way to deal with a spatial anomaly on her own.
If she got randomly dumped into some other world or a death floor, forcing Chris to search for her like finding a needle in a haystack, that really wasn't realistic.
Over the next several hours, the two of them kept pushing through doors, passing through a string of different Backrooms floors.
There was an endless suburb forever wrapped in dusk; an endless hotel floor whose windows looked out on eternal storms; there was even a sealed-off study-like floor, a total trap—
one where the entrance door vanished the instant you stepped inside, leaving no physical trace of an exit anywhere.
If Chris hadn't had the Enma Blade—capable of cutting through spatial barriers—the two of them might genuinely have been trapped there to die.
It was after weathering this string of crises, one after another, that the two of them finally began to wonder.
Could it be... that the two special, monster-free floors they'd first encountered right at the start hadn't been a coincidence after all?
Had the Black Sphere system deliberately intervened to show them those scenes?
Had it been meant specifically as a hint for how to clear the Backrooms, or some worldview they needed to grasp?
Just as the two of them, still carrying that doubt, pushed open another heavy iron door—
after the familiar sense of weightlessness passed, they didn't find themselves back among those bizarre, logic-defying Backrooms structures.
What greeted them instead were bustling streets, modern skyscrapers rising into the clouds, and Japanese-language billboards clearly visible along the road.
"Where is this...?"
At first, gazing at this long-absent sight of modern city life, Sakayanagi didn't immediately notice anything off.
As far as she was concerned, this might just be another real-world floor the Backrooms had swallowed but hadn't finished assimilating yet.
Not until Chris, as usual, raised his hand to use the Black Sphere Controller, meaning to check for this world's hidden "door" and confirm whether any high-value monsters lurked nearby—
did the two of them spot something off right away.
This place really was, like No Game No Life, a fully intact world that hadn't yet been fully flattened into a mere floor by the Backrooms' rules!
But when Chris tapped open the details of the nearest few red dots on the 3D map, both their expressions turned strange.
[Target: Poop Devil] [Target: Mosquito Devil] [Target: Sea Cucumber Devil]
Looking at these lowest-tier monsters, each with a more bizarre name than the last, the two of them exchanged a glance and both saw the same speechless look reflected back.
Without a word, they both swiped past the mooks and turned their attention to the enormous red dot at the center of the 3D map—not too far off, and blazing far brighter than anything else.
[Target: Makima (Control Devil)] [Value: 165 points]
[Trait: Born from humanity's primal fear of being ruled and controlled, her power sits firmly at the top of this world. Using her control ability, she has signed an immortality contract with the Prime Minister of Neon—any lethal damage she suffers is randomly redirected as disease or accident onto Neon's citizens. Conventional means simply cannot kill her.]
[Ultimate Wish: To capture Chainsaw Man and use his concept-devouring ability to consume the remaining three Horsemen of the Apocalypse—War, Death, and Famine—thereby erasing all suffering from the world and building a perfect, sorrowless world under her absolute control. She can also perfectly wield the abilities of anyone under her control and share their sight. Powerful subordinates currently under her control include: the Angel Devil, the Future Devil, numerous Weapon humans, and Devil Hunters...]
[Fatal Point: The Control Devil holds absolute control at a conceptual level. The instant Makima subjectively judges another's rank or worth to be beneath her own, she can enforce unconditional, absolute control—over humans, Fiends, ordinary devils, corpses, even the very devil someone else has contracted with, seized right along with them.]
[However, conversely, against anyone with a fully independent will whom she judges to be her equal or superior, and who refuses to submit, Makima must actually fight them in combat—only after utterly defeating them, physically or mentally, can she claim control.]
"Makima... Looks like this is the Chainsaw Man world, huh." Having read through that whole long stretch of intel, Chris rubbed his chin, unable to help a sigh of admiration.
"So, now that we're here, what's Chris planning to do?" Sakayanagi teased, her eyes curving into a smile.
"Go take down this Miss Makima, then swoop in and save Student Council President Horikita, becoming the irreplaceable hero of legend in Suzune Horikita's eyes?"
Chris shot her an exasperated look. "Don't be ridiculous."
"Makima's life is directly tied to the entire population of Neon right now. Aside from someone like Chainsaw Man, with actual concept-erasure ability, nobody can lay a hand on her..."
"It's not just a trolley problem, ethically speaking," Chris sighed. "The more practical issue is—who's got the patience and stamina to kill a top-tier monster worth over a hundred points a hundred million times in a row?"
"I don't have the time to waste grinding her down."
Sakayanagi just gave a soft laugh at that. Her eyes gleamed as she fixed them on the blade at Chris's waist. "Is that so? But if I remember right, doesn't your Enma Blade have a setting that lets it cut through space and causality?"
"Sure, it's still just the un-upgraded 'knockoff version' from the Black Sphere shop, but if it can cut through even the Backrooms' spatial barriers... surely it wouldn't be entirely impossible to sever the conceptual contract between the Control Devil and the Prime Minister of Neon straight through causality itself, right?"
At her suggestion, Chris sighed again.
Honestly, if he wanted to, cutting the contract with the Enma Blade would certainly be possible.
But the problem was... if this fake Enma Blade, worth less than two hundred points, functioned exactly the same as the real one—
then why bother going through all the trouble of saving up points to upgrade it at all?
Just for that "half-demon bloodline" nobody was even sure had any side effects?
Honestly... he'd rather spend 400 points maxing out the Beta Box instead.
Turn into a weakened version of Ultraman, and with the terrifying tenfold boost from the Combat Suit stacked on top, one stomp would probably put him on par with some rank-and-file Ultra from the Land of Light anyway.
Thinking it over, Chris shook his head and offered an airtight excuse. "Whether we can actually cut a causal contract isn't something we can verify in a short amount of time."
"And what if it doesn't work? We'd end up pointlessly picking a fight with a hundred-point-tier enemy who's got at least a hundred million lives to burn through. That's a losing trade all around—no need for it."
Chris raised his arm to check the countdown. "Speaking of which, how much time do we have left before we're pulled from the exam? Enough to keep goofing off out here like this?"
"The Terror Emperor and Griffith we ran into earlier weren't worth an outrageous amount of points, but just to be safe, we should still find a chance to go back and check on things."
Hearing this, Sakayanagi raised her wrist too, checking her own watch to confirm. "One hour left."
"Not exactly long, but not that short either. Should be enough for us to pick up some extra points in this world along the way." She tilted her head slightly, thinking back over what they'd been through in the Backrooms.
"After all, aside from those Partygoers we farmed for a few points back in the amusement park floor, none of the physical monsters we ran into afterward in the Backrooms were worth much—all combined, they didn't even add up to fifty points."
"Can't have you, the ceiling of combat power himself, come all this way just to end up running a loss, can we?"
Chris pressed his lips together, pausing for a moment. "Hmm... when you put it that way, I guess you're not wrong."
Well, they'd come all this way—no sense leaving a mountain of treasure empty-handed.
Sakayanagi smiled, glancing sideways at the sizable scattering of devil-red dots spread across Tokyo on the Controller's screen. "The only problem we've got right now, though, is that one hour is cutting it awfully tight."
"Going by the scale on the Controller's map, if we advance at normal speed, wiping out all these scattered devils before the timer runs out would be way too inefficient—practically impossible..."
But before she'd even finished speaking, Chris had already reached out again without a word, wrapped an arm around her waist, and the two of them vanished on the spot.
All that was left behind was the trailing echo of Sakayanagi's half-finished gasp, slowly fading into the empty air.
Then, on this stage that belonged to devils, Chris showed both Sakayanagi and the whole world just how terrifying a true "speedster" could be.
Ten seconds! In a mere ten seconds or so!
Chris tore through like a black hurricane sweeping the entire city, wiping out every wild devil across all of Neon—every last one, save for the Primal Devils!
Powerful ones like the Earthquake Devil, the Oblivion Devil, and the Plague Devil, feared enough to trigger caution among the leadership of multiple nations;
weak ones like the Snake Devil, the Unemployment Devil, or the Kidnapping Devil still lurking around alleys preying on children who wandered off alone...
strong or weak, it made no difference. To the handful of Devil Hunters and ordinary citizens lucky enough to witness it, every single devil met death in the blink of an eye.
Some had their core hearts punched clean through; others were sliced into countless pieces by clean, decisive flashes of blade.
They didn't even have time to show off a devil's regenerative power before crumbling midair into ash carried off on the wind.
Honestly, from the perspective of Makima—who kept total control over the situation in Japan through the eyes of countless birds, beasts, and subordinate devils—all of this was more than a little alarming.
Not long ago, this group of outworld visitors led by Chris had, after all, decisively killed the Darkness Devil in Hell once already, forcing it to be reborn in the human world.
But in Makima's view, all of that had a clear explanation—it had all been built on exploiting a loophole!
Chris and his group had first learned of the Darkness Devil's weakness to light through Black Sphere intel. Then, backed by outside support from the Black Sphere, they'd recruited that Ultimate Animator capable of producing forced brainwashing footage.
With that animator's ability, they'd altered, at a subconscious level, the perception of "darkness" held by at least a quarter of humanity worldwide, drastically weakening the Darkness Devil's power at its very root.
And even then, only after setting up a targeted trap made entirely of mirrors had they managed to pull off the kill, and only just barely.
So Makima, as the Control Devil, wasn't actually afraid of the kind of weakening tactic they'd used.
After all, what she embodied—"control"—was a far more abstract, socialized concept compared to humanity's instinctive, physiological fear of "darkness."
Within the existing social system, it would be nearly impossible to pinpoint a single brainwashing subject capable of making everyone simultaneously abandon their instinct to submit and resonate against her.
But what Chris was displaying right now wasn't clever exploitation at all—it was pure, unadulterated violence!
Speed and power like this—even the full, unweakened Darkness Devil going toe-to-toe with it head-on wouldn't come out ahead!
Though Makima remained absolutely confident in the immortality contract bound to a hundred million of her nation's lives, and wasn't overly frightened by any of this.
Still... Makima's brow furrowed faintly, her expression settling into a rare gravity.
Her plan was, right now, entering its most crucial, closing stage!
The people over in America had already sensed the threat and were in the process of contracting the Gun Devil, preparing to send it across the ocean to kill her.
Makima, meanwhile, intended to use this very crisis to seize total control over the Gun Devil once it came for her.
From there, she'd turn Hayakawa Aki into a Gun Fiend, then use the controlled Aki and Power to cruelly kill them both right in front of Denji.
She might even make Denji do the killing himself.
Only by making Denji personally destroy everything he held dear, stripping him of every last shred of hope to keep living, could she tear apart the contract between him and Pochita, forcing him to hand control of his body back to the true Chainsaw Man she'd been dreaming of all along!
If, at this exact crossroads, some wild variable comparable to a Primal Devil at its peak suddenly showed up in Tokyo—
then everything she'd been scheming could very well go up in smoke.
Makima stood before a broad floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at streets thrown into eerie, dead silence now that every devil had vanished in an instant.
Her slender, pale fingers tapped softly against the window's edge.
No going head-to-head. At least not before she had Chainsaw Man in hand—she couldn't let him get in the way.
The Control Devil made her decision quickly.
She would voluntarily hand over the Black Sphere examinee that Hayakawa Aki had brought back, delivering them to Chris and his group.
That would buy a temporary peace—or rather, stall for time, delaying how long they stayed in this world.
And besides, as the Control Devil's own instinct urged her, Makima wanted to use the perfectly legitimate excuse of handing over Horikita Manabu to get a close look at Chris herself.
There was one thing she had to confirm with her own eyes: whether that man's pale-blue longsword could truly shatter her control at its very conceptual root.
If it could sever it... then she would have to spare no cost to erase this threat completely before Chainsaw Man ever arrived.
____
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