Tokyo No. 1 Colony, Part 3

The two players crossed paths once before, an encounter Yuji has no memory of. In the present, Rin tries to atone for his old passivity by guiding Yuji to Hiromi Higuruma. Megumi has his own escort, but Remi steers him into a face-off with a different player named Reggie rather than the lawyer he is seeking.

Years earlier in Sendai, Rin and a classmate were cornered by bullies. Rather than resist, Rin smiled, played along, and stayed out of trouble, a habit he leaned on because it kept him untouched while occasionally bringing him small rewards. When a stranger stepped in to defend the bullied kid, Rin assumed another fool had blundered into the fray, until that newcomer, the Tiger of West Junior High, dropped all three aggressors with one blow each. Asked by Yuji whether he too needed help, the intimidated Rin could barely answer. The flashback closes on the present, where both are now registered Culling Game participants.

Megumi and Remi exit at a station, and Megumi voices doubts about routing through Ikebukuro toward Shinjuku, since plentiful supplies there draw other players. Remi insists the path is simple for her and that she has a base nearby to rest in. Meanwhile, Rin brings Yuji to a theater Higuruma uses as a hideout. Excited to have found his target so fast, Yuji thanks Rin and heads in, brushing off the warning that Higuruma once thrashed Haba. Inside, Yuji is startled to find Higuruma soaking fully clothed in a bathtub, declaring he no longer cares about anything and is trying things he never would have. Yuji senses Higuruma is not an incarnated sorcerer from the past but a former ordinary person, so he proposes a deal: let him spend Higuruma's points to add a rule and shut down the Culling Game.

Higuruma refuses, intrigued by the Culling Game's possibilities and disillusioned with ordinary law, wanting to study how its rules punish offenders without trials. When Yuji presses, the lawyer rises from the tub with a gavel and his shikigami at his side, ready to fight. In the parallel thread, Reggie reveals to Megumi that Remi tricked him, prompting Megumi to summon Divine Dog: Totality in fury. The chapter sits in the Culling Game Arc and corresponds to anime Episode 55.