All Aboard

Kashima opens with the retractable blades in his left arm, slashing at Sakamoto's face, but the shopkeeper springs clear. Sneering that Sakamoto's bulk makes him sluggish, the cyborg brags that more than seventy percent of his frame has been rebuilt with laboratory hardware and writes his foe off as livestock awaiting slaughter. Sakamoto answers that he carries weapons too, then produces a handful of ordinary junk: markdown labels, an advertising flyer, and a novelty mechanical pencil.

Kashima looses a laser from his arm, dismissing the clutter, yet a thumb-flicked shard of pencil lead spears his left eye. Boasting that one eye is plenty, he abruptly goes dark as a discount sticker lands square on the other. Sakamoto slips behind him, whips him through a concrete wall with a belt, and observes that leaning on a weapon's specs is the mark of a second-rate fighter. Laughing, Kashima admits he does not even know how to die.

A flashback shows Kashima as a haunted young man standing over heaps of the dead, approached by Kei Uzuki, who argues that noble justice cannot exist without evil. Where the world recoiled from him, Uzuki marks an X across his mouth in blood and vows to accept every part of him, and for the first time Kashima feels embraced. Back in the present he fights for that acceptance as the duel leaps onto the roof of a passing train, where a forearm wire lashes Sakamoto to the rails and drags him across the gravel.

Sakamoto rides a loosened railroad sleeper like a board, cuts the binding with the flyer, and yanks Kashima's own line to fling him into the tunnel wall. Both smash through the windshield of the driver's cab, the cyborg's limbs barely held on by straining internal wires. Water he tries to drink pours straight through his torn belly, and as he loses track of his foe, a slimmed-down Sakamoto sits calmly nearby before driving a kick into his cheek, musing that an immortal opponent removes any fear of killing by accident.

Under the title "All Aboard" (Kakekomi Jōsha), this twenty-ninth chapter fills 19 pages of the Lab Arc and appears in the fourth volume. It was first printed on June 28, 2021, in issue 30, with Sakamoto and Kashima sharing the cover. The chapter reveals Kashima's origin and his devotion to Slur.