Chapter 166

Haruma reaches the scene as Gaku and Takamura clash. Takamura runs Gaku through the arm, but Gaku turns the wound into an opening, kicking the swordsman and his blade across the room until Takamura stabs the ground to halt himself. Haruma tries to spike a metal ball at Takamura from behind, yet Takamura slices it apart without so much as turning. When Uzuki orders a retreat, Gaku and Haruma refuse, telling him the JAA cannot be brought down while Takamura still lives.

A flashback drifts back to the Al-Kamar orphanage, where a young Uzuki wonders aloud why they must become assassins and complains that killers are always cast as villains, since he can be neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Haruma mulls it over and comes to understand him a little, prompting Uzuki to remark that the two of them are cut from the same cloth.

In the present, Uzuki joins the assault and warns the others that Takamura's sharpened sense for murderous intent offsets his failing eyesight. As Gaku and Haruma press from the front, Uzuki loops behind and snares Takamura's arm with his blade-whip, tossing one end into a rising lift so the machine drags the limb off the katana. Takamura catches the weapon in his left hand, then speaks plainly for the first time, mocking the idea that he is senile before severing his own trapped arm. He catches the falling forearm, presses the clean cut back into place, and grips his katana once more with the reattached dominant arm, sneering about a world crowded with the unworthy as he cleaves Haruma in two.

Gaku, Haruma, and Uzuki commit to killing Takamura, arguing the JAA cannot fall otherwise. A flashback deepens the bond between Uzuki and Haruma at the Al-Kamar orphanage. Uzuki reveals Takamura senses killing intent to make up for poor vision and pins his arm with a blade-whip and a lift. Takamura speaks clearly for the first time, cuts off and reattaches his own arm, and slices Haruma in half.

Under the title False Madman, this is the one hundred and sixty-sixth chapter of Sakamoto Days and part of the Assassin Exhibition of the Century Arc. It ran in the twenty-fifth 2024 issue on May 20, 2024, and covers nineteen pages within Volume 19. The cover lines up Takamura, Gaku, Nagumo, Sakamoto, and Uzuki. Kashima appears in a flashback recalling how cleanly Takamura once severed his own arm.