Trip to Hell

With Denji and Beam knocked out, the woman appears to praise Tolka's handiwork. Brushing aside his worry about shifting the body, she lays out how a Perfect Doll is made: by collecting a target's pity, worship, respect, and trust before turning them. She then transforms Tolka, revealing herself as the true Santa Claus, with the Elderly Man being yet another Perfect Doll she puppeteers. As Aki and the rest of the Hunters come to, Quanxi beats Yoshida and hurls him through a window, though he saves himself mid-fall with the Octopus Devil.

Indoors the others ready themselves to fight until Aki freezes, shaken and bewildered by what his future sight shows him. Outside, Santa Claus offers up the Elderly Man together with the three children owed to her under the Hell Devil pact, trading those lives to banish every person breathing inside the building down to Hell. Darkness swallows everyone within, while the crowd outside watches in horror as an enormous six-fingered hand descends and appears to crush the structure. An instant later, those who had been inside find themselves standing in a wide grassy plain beneath a sky blanketed with countless doors: Hell itself.

Opening Volume 8 within the International Assassins arc, this chapter recasts the assassin called Santa Claus, exposing the bench-bound old man as one more puppet and naming the woman as the real threat. Her Perfect Doll technique and the mass sacrifice to the Hell Devil escalate the danger sharply, stranding Aki, Quanxi, and the others in Hell and setting the stage for the surreal stretch that follows.