Dove

Yoru's strike leaves Denji a hollowed-out skeleton with his guts spilling through the hole in his chest. Reflex takes over: chains burst from his stumps, grab onto the surroundings, and haul his broken frame clear of the fight. Yoru looks on without interest, then climbs aboard her Super Chainsaw Motorcycle and tears after him, plowing through a hapless bystander on the way. Denji slams to a halt against a wall and tugs his pull-cord with his teeth, but with no blood left the regeneration fails.

Drawing near, Yoru notices that Denji has coughed up a dove, and the same anguish Asa felt after killing Bucky by accident wells up in her, making her instinctively veer aside. She is travelling too fast to brake cleanly, though, and the abrupt swerve hurls her from the motorcycle straight into a wall. Hemorrhaging, the War Devil asks aloud why the wound will not close. Denji supplies the reason at once: her contract makes American citizens absorb harm aimed at her, so it offers nothing against injuries she causes herself. Asa then surfaces, gazes down at the one borrowing her body, and asks why a single dove was enough to halt the killing of Chainsaw Man. Yoru answers that Asa cannot bear to see birds killed, which is why she held back.

Reduced to a skeleton, Denji escapes the battlefield by instinct as chains drag him away. Yoru gives chase on her Super Chainsaw Motorcycle, running down a bystander. A dove vomited up by Denji triggers Asa's residual guilt over Bucky, so Yoru swerves, crashes, and learns her self-inflicted wound cannot heal because the contract only covers attacks made against her. Asa awakens and questions why the dove stopped the kill.

This Volume 24 chapter of the War Devil arc clarifies a crucial loophole in Yoru's regeneration: it draws on American citizens only for harm directed at her, leaving wounds she inflicts on herself unrecoverable. Bucky's earlier death and Asa's lingering sorrow drive the dove moment, with both Asa and Yoru sharing the same body throughout.