Chapter 96

With one arm severed by Amane, a bound Club Jam waits to be turned over to the Japanese Association of Assassins, treating his own capture as an elaborate game of restraint. Nearby, Shin pays the price for leaning too hard on his glimpses of the future and feels genuinely ill, snapping at Natsuki Seba for doubting him even as he privately savors having bagged one of Uzuki's people.

Amane presses his grandfather over why his father, Satoru Yotsumura, took his mother's life, and the old man tells the boy to seek that answer from Yotsumura himself. Long-buried recollections of his father begin to resurface for Amane, and his grandfather notes the strange twist that Club Jam's hypnosis is what unlocked them.

At the association's Western Japan headquarters, Director Fukumitsu learns that three assassination fronts, Sukiyaki Sizzler, Citrus Shop Sweetie, and the Arashiyama Sappo-Ji Murder Temple, have been leveled, leaving forty-six members dead. Suspicion falls on Yotsumura, cast out of the Order eight years earlier for turning on the branch's executives and now believed to be hiding somewhere in Kyoto.

Fukumitsu warns that fear is driving assassins to abandon the organization, threatening its profits, and rebukes a subordinate who dismisses the lone Yotsumura as harmless, stressing that even a single Order member can wipe out an entire branch. When the man threatens Nagumo's standing over the old failure, Nagumo's silent killing intent alone knocks him out cold.

Shishiba reaches Yotsumura and asks whether the renegade is working alongside Uzuki, given that both stand opposed to the association. Yotsumura signals that he acts on his own rather than under Uzuki's banner. As he readies his staff to meet Shishiba, Osaragi comes crashing in with a surprise strike. The chapter marks the first appearance of Director Fukumitsu.