Chapter 257: Tengong Society Intel, Reunion in Hell (Patreon)

The Backrooms, on a floor with an unknown number.

Dim fluorescent lights flickered overhead. A musty smell seeped out of the yellowed wallpaper, stirring an irritation in the gut that no one could shake.

"Squelch!"

A ridiculously oversized black greatsword swept through the air like a gale and cut a long-armed, faceless entity clean in two as it lunged out of the shadows.

Black blood splattered across the wall and was absorbed almost instantly, before it could leave so much as a stain.

Guts, the black-clad swordsman who had swung the blade, drew a ragged breath and flicked the residue off the steel.

Beside him, Skull Knight sat silent and watchful on his skeletal warhorse, while Schierke gripped her staff tight, feeling out the flow of the air around them.

Horikita Manabu pushed up his faintly glinting glasses and glanced down at the Black Sphere Controller spread open on his wrist.

After a quick check of the floor's entity traits and scores, he pulled out a custom notebook and wrote the details into the floor file.

Not far from his side, Ex-Machina Shuvi hovered in midair.

"Surrounding entities confirmed eliminated," Shuvi said without expression.

"Good work."

Horikita Manabu gave a slight nod. His feelings were mixed.

Honestly, their original plan had been to follow the Lady of Clockwork's footsteps. She had logged off as a member of the Tengong Society, and they wanted to see what that Mysterious Merchant did outside of exams, and who was working behind her.

It was a shame that plans never kept up with reality.

Gojo Satoru had stopped them back then, and it had only cost them a little time.

But that little time meant that by the time they followed the Lady of Clockwork into the Backrooms, they had already lost her trail.

'If we'd moved just a bit faster back then... maybe we could have caught up.'

Horikita Manabu sighed silently to himself.

Still, he had no intention of wasting time on regrets.

Since the chance had slipped away, he would simply keep searching the Backrooms for a new breakthrough.

They would meet again in some exam sooner or later anyway.

Then, floor after floor, as they pushed deeper, they witnessed many native worlds that the Backrooms had not yet fully swallowed and assimilated.

There was a modern world where giant steel behemoths fought Kaiju across the Pacific.

There was a Digital World made of data, devouring itself and evolving.

Every one of those worlds was magnificent in scale, yet each was struggling at the brink of destruction, with no spare attention for the Backrooms behind their doors.

Even so, Horikita Manabu hadn't come away from the journey empty-handed.

Setting aside the wrecked technology of all those worlds that Ex-Machina Shuvi had copied, the discovery in the Pacific Rim world alone was enough to excite him.

After helping that world's military kill three Category Five Kaiju that had burst out of the sea,

Horikita Manabu noticed a familiar green hourglass emblem on the Jaegers that rushed in to help. It was identical to the one on the first Mysterious Merchant, and to the one on the Tengong Society member who had appeared in the Chainsaw Man world!

He asked around, then cross-checked the answers with the intel Shuvi pulled by hacking the local database.

Horikita Manabu's guess had been right. They were from an organization called the "Tengong Society."

According to the locals, the Tengong Society was an interstellar, inter-species law enforcement agency.

They apparently joked about themselves as "plumbers who fix leaks," specializing in plugging the strange rifts that appeared throughout the universe.

And that world had been able to build giant mechs capable of holding off the alien invasion, stabilizing its defensive line, only twelve years ago, thanks to the technical support of one such "plumber."

So that was how it was...

'As long as the Tengong Society is actually active across all these worlds, following the Backrooms' junction points should let us reach them again.'

'And if we do meet them, given how they operate, it isn't impossible to learn some hidden intel from them.'

Horikita Manabu gathered his thoughts and addressed the group.

"Let's go. Get ready to enter the next door."

Then he pushed open the wooden door in front of him and stepped across the threshold.

The salty tang of the sea vanished, replaced by a gloomy, oppressive atmosphere.

Horikita Manabu looked up.

There was no sky overhead, only countless doors of every shape hanging upside down in midair.

Beneath his feet stretched an endless grassland, but the breeze that brushed it carried only an eerie, sultry heat.

"This place is... Hell?"

It wasn't the abyss of religious myth where the dead stood trial, but a demon domain born from human fear.

The high-score red dots on the Black Sphere Controller, like the "Oblivion Devil" and the "Famine Devil," gave him a strong sense of déjà vu.

But a large part of the reason was something else.

The moment Horikita Manabu stepped into this world, his mind felt as if it had been forcibly wrapped in a layer of sticky gauze.

And at the edge of that gauze, an eye seemed to be watching his every move.

Combined with the hints Chris had dropped now and then, it wasn't hard for Horikita Manabu to guess whose eye it was.

But he didn't retreat, and he certainly didn't turn and flee back to the Backrooms to escape her grip.

By Chris's old assessment, Makima was, in a sense, a warped kind of human love.

Her ultimate goal was to erase all of the world's pain and build a utopia under her absolute control.

A "dictator" who craved order and control that badly would never let her own world be destroyed.

So Horikita Manabu reasoned that, against a higher-dimensional threat like the Backrooms, trying some form of cooperation with her wasn't out of the question.

The only thorny issue now was this:

Makima clearly had no concept of "equal cooperation," and she might even try to bring outsiders like Skull Knight and Shuvi under her control for her own use.

But Horikita Manabu had a trump card of his own.

If the party returned to the Backrooms, the physical separation between dimensions would be enough to void Makima's control at once.

What was more, Horikita Manabu glanced down at the Black Sphere Controller on his wrist.

On the holographic radar, several green dots marking allies were glowing: Miyabi Nagumo, Fūka Kiryūin...

Now that his own people had been dragged into this world too, Horikita Manabu felt he couldn't back down so easily.

At the very least, he had to get the valuable intel he'd gathered on the Tengong Society and the Backrooms into the hands of Advanced Nurturing High School.

...

On Chris's side.

He had briefly talked things over with Ichinose and the rest of the group, and confirmed the next steps.

After that, Chris didn't linger at the FSF. He took Hiyori Shiina and Morishita Ai and walked straight into the Backrooms.

It had to be said that having Hiyori Shiina along was a real pleasure.

Both for the emotional value and for the sheer efficiency of clearing maps.

[Rasiel] could look up most of the intel on the current world, saving them an enormous amount of trial and error.

Every time they stepped onto a brand-new Backrooms floor, Hiyori only had to ask the angel softly:

"Does this floor have any special rules? Has the Mysterious Merchant ever left a trace here?"

Once the answer came back negative, Chris could use the Enma Blade to cut open space, take the two of them past the worthless junk floors, and move straight on to the next.

Over and over, with astonishing efficiency.

In terms of process, it wasn't all that different from Horikita Manabu's group groping their way forward. The only difference was that Chris's side was a "speedrun style" playing with a full-map wallhack on.

Since there was no high-intensity fighting pressure along the way, Hiyori even had the leisure to chat with Chris.

"Chris..." the girl lowered her voice and asked softly, "why has Morishita been following us this whole time?"

"I checked with Rasiel, but I can't find the reason she came here."

"Don't tell me... you two are actually relatives in real life?"

Hearing such an absurd guess, Morishita Ai, floating inside the Mountains and Rivers Map, kept her expressionless poker face. Only her eyes moved slightly, as if curious how Chris would answer.

Chris gave a helpless smile and spread his hands.

"Honestly, I'm pretty curious about that myself."

"What Morishita and I came up with is this: in an earlier exam, I kept her inside the [Mountains and Rivers Map] for safety. That probably threw off the system's judgment during exam settlement, and the process never ended properly."

Chris explained slowly, "So now she's basically a bound spirit stuck inside the Map, like a glitch."

Hiyori thought about it.

"So that means Morishita has already cleared the second stage of the death judgment, and skipped straight to a ghost state where all that's left is the final Revival Round?"

"Looks that way." Chris nodded, then frowned slightly. "But what worries me now is something else."

"We've got a two-week gap between exams. What happens to Morishita Ai and the others' Revival Rounds then?"

Hiyori knit her brows and thought it over seriously for a moment, then pursed her lips and said:

"From what we know, the Revival Round should run in sync with our normal exam schedule."

"But take the Revival Round that Kanzaki and Shiranami are about to face..."

"Without the lucky breaks where we helped them before, going up against those monsters nearly from scratch, they'd have almost no chance of clearing it."

The girl paused.

"Maybe, under the presiding god's mechanism, Revival Rounds have been run many times already without us knowing."

"It's just that the difficulty was so high that none of them succeeded..."

Morishita Ai: "..."

"That's possible too." Chris smoothly took the out she'd offered. "As for the exact judgment mechanism, we'll have to take it one step at a time."

"Anyway, things are different now. Everyone's going all out farming points in the Backrooms, and the point inflation is getting wild."

"If everyone can afford the 100 S Points revival permission, whether the Revival Round gets played hardly matters."

"Mm."

Hiyori nodded in full agreement.

"If we don't count the presiding god secretly raising the difficulty later, these two weeks of farming in the Backrooms alone would be enough to max out all our gear and leave plenty of points to revive everyone."

"It's just..."

A shadow of worry crossed her brow.

"I'm afraid that when the final exam arrives, the Black Sphere will raise the monsters' strength ceiling to a height we've never seen."

Chris answered helplessly.

"Nothing we can do about it. It's an unavoidable paradox."

"Either you stay put at school and train step by step with limited resources and a limited scope, or you do what we're doing: boldly charge into the Backrooms to farm points and look for intel on how to break through."

"But whichever road you pick, most people naturally want their future and their power in their own hands."

"Myself included."

Hiyori sighed. She knew Chris was right, so she didn't dwell on a problem with no solution.

She lowered her head and looked around.

This floor was unlike the classic Backrooms floors full of yellow wallpaper and humming. It had a deep blue sky and rows of tall buildings, more like a separate world that the Backrooms hadn't yet destroyed.

With practiced ease, she laid her hand on the pages of [Rasiel] and silently recited the questions she'd repeated countless times:

'What's abnormal about this world for us?'

'Has the Mysterious Merchant left any trace here?'

'Are there any items or monsters worth my attention?'

If nothing went wrong,

as usual,

[Rasiel] would list, within seconds, the types of monsters on the current floor worth killing and their scores, plus at most two intact wild items they could pick up on the cheap.

After that, they'd head to the next floor.

But this time, something unexpected happened.

Dense ink kept surfacing on the pages without pause...

Even Hiyori Shiina, who was calm by nature, widened her eyes in a rare show of surprise.

She rubbed her eyes, something she almost never did, and once she was sure her vision wasn't playing tricks, she turned sharply to meet Chris's gaze and took a deep breath.

"Chris... Rasiel says someone from the Tengong Society has been to this world!"

"And not long ago, Oriana, the Mysterious Merchant, and Student Council President Horikita Manabu from the upper year both came through here too!"

Chris's eyes lit up.

He immediately raised his wrist, opened the Black Sphere Controller, and projected a three-dimensional image into the air.

After studying the scattered red-dot data on the screen, he thought for a moment and said, a little puzzled:

"The monsters here are huge, but their evaluated scores don't look that high."

Hiyori lowered her head and read aloud as the history on the page kept filling in.

"Rasiel says the Tengong Society staff member who descended here back then was a humanoid, hulking rock life form."

"His whole body was covered in a reddish-brown rocky shell with protrusions all over the surface, and he could freely control gravity."

As she spoke, an image of Gravattack appeared above Rasiel.

"It was in the darkest hour, when the Kaiju first appeared, that he helped design and refine the mech technology humanity uses to fight them."

"That's why humanity hasn't suffered devastating losses even now."

The girl paused. "But after making sure humanity could defend itself, he left this world."

Chris stroked his chin and pressed thoughtfully.

"When did he leave?"

Hiyori checked the timeline and answered, "Twelve years ago."

"Twelve years ago... twelve years!?"

Chris deliberately gaped, putting on a thoroughly surprised look, and went on:

"Twelve whole years, and this world still hasn't been completely swallowed and assimilated by the Backrooms?"

"Could it be that the Tengong Society guy did something to stabilize this world before he left?"

Hiyori shook her head regretfully.

"I thought so too at first. But Rasiel didn't tell me anything more about that 'Galilean.' It's as if that part of history has been blocked by some force."

The girl guessed, "Maybe he did some repair work on the dimensional barrier around the world. It's beyond this world's concepts, so Rasiel couldn't record it."

Chris nodded cooperatively and steered the conversation to the next stage.

"In that case, can we check which way he left?"

"If we can, we could follow him."

"After all, Hiyori, your Rasiel can view causal trails. In a sense, we could trace the thread all the way to the dimension where that Tengong Society member is right now!"

Hiyori nodded. "That should be doable."

But she glanced at two other entries and hesitated before warning him.

"However... the 'door' that Student Council President Horikita and Oriana pushed open when they left isn't the same direction the Galilean took."

"Then did Horikita and Oriana leave by the same route?"

"If they went the same way, it's fine to drop the Tengong Society lead for now."

Chris made the call casually. "That plumber left twelve years ago anyway. The time gap is already huge, so a little more won't matter."

"Besides, we have the Enma Blade. As long as Rasiel remembers this world's coordinates, we can come back and track him whenever we want once we've dealt with what's in front of us."

Hiyori listened, and a faint smile rippled across her face.

That crisp, decisive style, with every fallback already figured out, was classic Chris.

"They went the same way," she confirmed. "But before we follow their trail out of this world, Chris, do you want to go collect something first?"

Chris froze, then understood.

He pointed to a red dot at the edge of the Controller screen, one bigger than any Kaiju.

"Hiyori, you mean that thing? The one that's just a wreck now, but in the data description, at full form could burn surface civilization to ash in three days: a 'God Warrior'?"

Hiyori hummed in agreement and explained.

"It was crushed by the Galilean's gravity strike back then, and now it's just a deformed carcass with intense radiation."

"But with the continuous biological experiments and research humans here are doing to fight the Kaiju, it seems it could wake up before long..."

The girl sighed.

"From what Rasiel has shown me, I can't see anyone in this world capable of handling that runaway bioweapon."

"Once it wakes, that's a true end of the world."

Chris thought it over. He wasn't a saint, but he couldn't walk away from people about to die either.

"In that case, let's toss it into the Map and take it with us."

He summoned the scroll and spoke calmly.

"We can't just watch these idiots set the Earth on fire while we dust off our pants and leave. Standing by isn't an option."

...

Meanwhile, deep in the Hell of the Chainsaw Man world.

In truth, when Death Devil forcibly dumped Miyabi Nagumo, Fūka Kiryūin and the rest into Hell, every one of them had braced for the worst.

They had quickly formed up, charged their weapons, and prepared to die at any moment.

After landing, minutes passed that were long enough to choke on. Aside from some bizarre-looking low-level devils lingering in the distance and not daring to come close, no devil leapt out to ambush them.

But combined with the radar scans from the Black Sphere Controllers in their hands, it wasn't hard to confirm that they were indeed in Hell.

For elites as proud as Miyabi Nagumo and the rest, who had planned their tactics before even entering the exam site and meant to hunt the "Gun Devil" and even Control Devil Makima herself,

being swapped into Hell for no reason, with no room to resist,

meant something very frightening in itself.

Someone far stronger than them had marked them from the very start!

And since they had already run background checks and power rankings with their items when they first entered the Chainsaw Man world, the identity of that someone wasn't hard to guess.

It could only be one of the apex devils: Darkness Devil or Death Devil.

Of the two, Darkness Devil had already been defeated by Chris and the others. They had also fought it countless times in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, using all sorts of tricks, so its habits and abilities were completely clear to them.

That option was quickly ruled out.

The only possibility left was Death Devil, listed in the codex with a terrifying score of 270, the final destination of all living things.

And with an opponent who had overwhelming strength and mastery of space,

they were now in Hell without a spatial item like the [Enma Blade], so they had no way to return to the human world on their own.

To be at such an absolute disadvantage, with their lives entirely in Death Devil's hands...

for Miyabi Nagumo and Fūka Kiryūin, who considered themselves strategists and were now far from weak,

it wasn't quite unbearable despair, but it certainly stuck in the throat and left a very bad taste.

They held their defensive formation in place and waited warily for quite a while, yet Death Devil never appeared or made any move to attack.

"We can't keep wasting time like this."

Miyabi Nagumo adjusted his state.

After a moment's thought, he ordered the team to go on the offensive.

In the end, they started hunting the other devils wandering Hell.

There was no choice. Passive defense and infighting did nothing but add to mental fatigue and solved nothing.

They had come to the Chainsaw Man world for S Points in the first place!

Even knowing Death Devil was lurking in the shadows, they could never accept standing still and leaving a treasure mountain empty-handed.

At most, they just switched the monster-clearing routine to a rotation system.

One group wore Combat Suits and took point on farming, one group fell back to rest and recover stamina, and the rest held radars and watched the surroundings for any stirring, standing guard on the flank.

Miyabi Nagumo's group took turns like this and started rapid farming in Hell.

Under Death Devil's terrifying pressure, they even set aside the idea of saving points as a hidden trump card.

As soon as someone's points reached the threshold, they used the Black Sphere Watch system in hand to redeem fully upgraded gear immediately and arm themselves!

In that situation, with everyone in god-tier gear and firepower at full blast,

Miyabi Nagumo, seated on a freshly exchanged flying hoverbike and surveying the field through its onboard radar, suddenly noticed several new green dots on the Controller's holographic interface.

"All of our people are here. Where did new friendly signals come from?"

Miyabi Nagumo raised an eyebrow and casually tapped the dot to see the details...

The newcomer was Horikita Manabu!?

Seeing that familiar name, Miyabi Nagumo did feel an instinctive surge of joy, like a day apart feeling like three autumns.

But his long habit of thinking like a superior, along with the sense of crisis Death Devil had brought, brought him back to calm.

He remembered that back in Gojo Satoru's world, Horikita Manabu had stated outright that he had already been controlled by Control Devil Makima.

Now, two decently strong companions, Skull Knight and Ex-Machina Shuvi, were at his side.

In a way, that could serve as proof that he was the real Horikita Manabu and not some demon's disguised illusion.

But it also couldn't erase the fact that he'd been controlled by Makima!

Out of absolute caution, Miyabi Nagumo didn't send the main force straight over.

He called only Fūka Kiryūin, the strongest fighter available.

The two peak combatants would split off from the main force and probe Horikita Manabu's real condition.

After all, if Horikita Manabu really was under Makima's forced control and had become a puppet trap she'd planted,

then whether the people with him had also been controlled was anyone's guess.

If something unexpected did happen, with the mobility of Miyabi Nagumo and Fūka Kiryūin, getting back to the main force would be no problem.

As for the rest of the main force, each of them held a fully upgraded Black Sphere item, and their firepower was no joke.

But Black Sphere's physical gear was clearly not enough on rigid barrages alone against devils embodying human abstractions with strange abilities, and someone still had to coordinate in the center.

So having the two of them split off to probe was the optimal solution at the moment.

As for this arrangement, Fūka Kiryūin privately thought it wasn't really necessary and even felt Miyabi Nagumo was jumping at shadows.

After all, according to the intel Chris and Ichinose had posted in the mutual-aid group chat about Horikita Manabu and Control Devil,

Makima could only control a strong person by beating them in a direct fight and instilling an absolute "I am stronger than you" awareness in the depths of their heart.

With Skull Knight's and Ex-Machina Shuvi's abilities,

Control Devil, whose eyes were fixed entirely on "Chainsaw Man," clearly wouldn't bother to control them directly.

She certainly wouldn't spare the effort to make a special trip to Hell and go to such lengths.

But since Miyabi Nagumo's arrangement was based on safety concerns, Fūka Kiryūin had no intention of refusing or arguing over such a small matter.

There was no harm in staying alert.

However, by the time the two of them actually reached Horikita Manabu's position,

what they didn't know was this.

In truth, in the real-world Tokyo that corresponded to Hell,

Makima, who controlled the whole situation, had already succeeded in controlling the Gun Devil and begun her next plan.

She first turned Hayakawa Aki into a mindless "Gun Fiend," then used Denji's feelings for Aki to make him kill his best friend, who was both brother and father to him, in a breakdown.

Then, just as Denji's mental defenses were about to collapse and he came to her seeking comfort and the salvation of "being her dog,"

she blasted Power apart right in front of the defenseless Denji, as Power arrived carrying a cake to celebrate his birthday!

With every bond cut by her own hand, if that still wasn't enough to push Denji into complete despair and make him hand his body over to Pochita,

she wouldn't even mind adding a controlled Horikita Manabu to set off a firecracker and liven things up.

Unfortunately, Makima didn't know either that this timeline had already been riddled with holes by Chris and the others' intervention.

Thanks to the hints and outright warnings from Hayakawa Aki and Horikita Manabu,

compared with the original storyline's Denji, whom Makima trapped step by step and who to this day vaguely believed he'd brought misfortune on himself,

the Denji in this timeline had already pieced together, in the back of his mind, an outline of the hand pulling every string from behind the scenes.

If Chris's predictions held,

once Hayakawa Aki became the Gun Fiend and the tragedy occurred beyond repair,

the enormous shock, linked with all the earlier clues, would make Denji understand Makima's true face.

And in a way, that would make him easier to manipulate through Makima's plan.

There was no helping it. That was just how Denji was.

But it would also trigger the deal Chris had made with Death Devil.

Once Chainsaw Man and Control Devil went to war, Miyabi Nagumo's group would all be teleported back to the battlefield in the real world!

...

And so,

when Miyabi Nagumo steadily landed his Black Sphere hoverbike in front of Horikita Manabu,

after a brief exchange of greetings,

from Horikita Manabu's evasive eyes and the odd tone that occasionally slipped into his answers,

he finally became sure that the man in front of him hadn't had his mind twisted by Makima yet. He was still himself.

The corners of Miyabi Nagumo's mouth rose uncontrollably.

He strode forward and threw his arms around the man he both respected and resented.

"Heh heh... I never thought we'd meet again so soon in a hellhole like this."

Miyabi Nagumo laughed softly in Horikita Manabu's ear.

"Just as I thought. The bond between us really is fate, isn't it, Horikita."

Horikita Manabu was thoroughly unsettled by the sudden warmth.

He curled his lip in disgust, shoved Miyabi Nagumo away with force, and stepped back.

"Spare me."

"Is this exam the Chainsaw Man world again?"

Horikita Manabu frowned and warned him. "Who's your target? Whatever you do, don't provoke Makima... She has a damage-transfer contract with everyone in Japan. Unless her control rules can be undone, we can't wear her down."

"And she probably read the intel about you and the Black Sphere out of my head when I didn't know. She won't be unprepared!"

Listening to Horikita Manabu's analysis, Miyabi Nagumo felt no pressure at all. Instead, he laughed without a care.

"Relax, President Horikita."

"In a sense, our main target this time really is Control Devil."

"But then again..."

Miyabi Nagumo was about to use Horikita Manabu's mouth to mislead Makima about their plan.

But before he could get the words out,

without warning!

"Whoom!"

A violent sense of spatial distortion swept over the two of them in an instant.

Miyabi Nagumo and Fūka Kiryūin, standing guard beside him, saw everything go black.

The next second, the two were gone, and the main force in the distance had left Hell along with them.

Ex-Machina Shuvi, left behind, tilted her little head slightly.

"Spatial fluctuation detected..."

"Preliminary inference: targets have undergone ultra-long-range spatial displacement..."

"Attempting to capture fluctuation frequency, initiating reverse analysis program."

Watching Shuvi slip back into her absorbed learning state, the tall Skull Knight shook his head helplessly.

The soul flame in his eye sockets flickered, and he was about to say something.

"Crack!"

A deep blue spatial rift appeared in the void before them!

As Horikita Manabu watched in shock,

Chris, who had learned of Miyabi Nagumo's group's situation from Hiyori Shiina and locked onto the coordinates,

stepped out of the rift as if crossing a short distance, the [Enma Blade] in his hand.

"Yo, everyone. Long time no see."

Chris sheathed the blade and waved at the wary Skull Knight.

Horikita Manabu recovered from his brief stupefaction.

He stared at Chris's face, and one huge question surfaced in his mind.

"Chris?"

Horikita Manabu asked in surprise,

"Whose exam is this, really? Yours, or the upperclassmen's?"

"Why do the green dots I just saw on the Controller screen all belong to upperclassmen?"

Faced with this barrage of questions,

"Well, about that..."

Chris stroked his chin and deliberately drew out the ending.

"It's kind of a long story..."