Chapter 178

Kindaka waves off Sakamoto's request to be his master, calling it too much bother while he owes Nagumo money. Sakamoto counters that he will foot the bill himself, funded by taking over the JAA and opening stores nationwide. Shin realizes Kindaka is still a JAA assassin and a possible threat, but Kindaka surprises him by agreeing to help, driven by his reluctance to rejoin the JAA and his distaste for the current chairman. Seeing promise in Shin and Heisuke, he chooses to train the two but not Sakamoto, reasoning that a fighter at Sakamoto's level would need brutal training against a certain someone.

Reading a newspaper, Torres grumbles at a horse-race prediction app yet decides to keep using it rather than waste the money spent. He spots Sakamoto and, convinced killing is the surest path to profit, launches an attack. Sakamoto vaults over a speeding car that smashes into a pool-toy store, then blocks a rope-and-ball swing by inflating a beach ball. He loops swimming goggles around one attacker's neck and snaps them back to fling him off, snags a second armed man's head in a pool skimmer and slams him into a pole, and jabs at a third with an ice-cream stick before hooking the man's shirt and hurling him to the ground.

Torres approaches and asks why Sakamoto spared them; Sakamoto recognizes him as one of the Order. Judging the bounty too small, Torres urges Sakamoto to kill more people so it climbs, comparing the current sum to pocket change against his own JAA debt. Recalling Kindaka's words, Sakamoto concludes that the finest training for him would be to fight the Order.

Kindaka agrees to train Shin and Heisuke after Sakamoto promises to clear his debt by seizing the JAA, but declines to teach Sakamoto himself, hinting he must train against a stronger foe. Torres ambushes Sakamoto in a pool-supply district, and Sakamoto fends him off using improvised weapons without killing anyone. Torres pushes him to raise his bounty by killing more, and Sakamoto decides that fighting the Order is exactly the training he needs.

Titled Means and End (Shudan to Mokuteki), this is the one hundred seventy-eighth chapter of the JAA Jail Arc. It ran in issue 38 of 2024 on August 19, 2024, and is collected in Volume 20. Nagumo and Asaki appear only in mention, and the chapter leans on Sakamoto's trademark improvised combat.