Chapter 197: 3 Seconds

The bandaged boy, shaken by this Chainsaw Man and his monstrous look, tries to shield the Devil by claiming she was only joking, but the impostor dismisses it and the two come to blows. The exchange ends with the new girl sliced in half, an outcome the Fake Chainsaw Man himself finds suspicious, since the fight should not have been so simple. Noticing the student he was supposedly protecting standing in stunned silence, the impostor keeps insisting he is right, asserting that neither he nor the Justice Devil within him is ever mistaken.

The boy, by contrast, is enraged, convinced Chainsaw Man has murdered an ordinary classmate for nothing. Mid-argument, the Fake Chainsaw Man spots the Devil's severed arm seize the student, siphoning his life away to resurrect the fallen Horseman. Rising again, she reads the impostor's stance and fighting style, concluding he must be a close-range combatant and nothing more. She warns him he has three seconds to live.

Almost the instant the threat leaves her mouth, the Devil is beheaded. Her severed head shrieks for help while the Fake Chainsaw Man remarks on how genuinely weak and pitiful she is. The quick reversals underscore the impostor's lethal speed and his contempt for the Horseman, even as the ease of his victories hints that something larger is being misread. The chapter sits within the War Devil arc and Volume 21, with the bandaged student dying over the course of the fight.