Chapter 73: Everyday Life No More

Lying beside Denji and Aki, Power has stopped screaming and muses that she perhaps slew the Darkness Devil down in Hell, a claim Denji breezily accepts. A phone call interrupts their dishwashing and pulls them to the bureau. There Makima announces that Division 4 is off the Gun Devil case, yet Denji and Power must still go, since the two would raise the division's standing. She tells Aki to leave unless he means to come. Denji signs on, chasing his promised wish, and Power follows to stay at his side; an uneasy Aki then asks back in, which Makima grants at once.

The operation, she reveals, is already underway, and the Gun Devil has long been beaten and locked away, found dead soon after its first strike and carved into pieces handed to nations worldwide. The guns turned on Devil Hunters, she adds, were human-made: despite a global firearms ban, governments secretly flood the black market to keep fear of guns alive, which only feeds power into the Gun Devil's scattered fragments. Aki grasps that destroying it means defying every superpower, and Makima dubs the scheme a kind of war.

On a bench outside, Aki stares skyward while Denji and Power, still thinking the job is just a kill, question his gloom. He explains that even a slain Gun Devil would be reclaimed by Japan, feeding endless hostility and ensuring the creature never truly dies. Denji argues it must be mortal, or Makima would not dangle a wish. Then the Future Devil grants Aki a glimpse ahead, and dread seizes him. Alone that night he summons it, learning the near and inescapable future shows Denji killing him and Power, after which the one devil that all devils dread will emerge.

Makima reassigns Denji and Power to the Gun Devil operation and lets Aki rejoin. She discloses that the Gun Devil was killed early and divided among nations, and that governments deliberately spread illegal guns to sustain global fear and empower its fragments. Aki realizes the mission pits the bureau against every world power. The Future Devil shows Aki a vision of Denji slaying both him and Power, heralding the worst devil of all.

The chapter belongs to the Gun Devil arc and Volume 9. Its title, Everyday Life No More, marks the end of the calm domestic stretch. The plan Makima names a kind of war reframes the entire arc as geopolitical rather than a simple monster hunt.