:re Chapter 149

Tsukiyama's outburst leaves everyone speechless. He insists that Kaneki always carried compassion for humans and ghouls alike, even after facing countless investigators and losing his memories, and that such a man would never slaughter people out of revenge. Weeping, he asks whether he is alone in wanting Kaneki to be happy, reminding the others that in his current state Kaneki cannot read, drink his coffee, speak with those he loves, or hold his own child. Nishiki Nishio cuts the speech short, admitting he only wants to give Kaneki an earful for dragging him around since Anteiku, while Banjou wishes Kaneki would lean on others and Hinami simply wants to thank him. When Touka struggles to name her unborn child, Tsukiyama offers a flurry of suggestions that she turns down, and the mood lifts. Frustrated that she cannot steer the group into idle spectating, Itori leaves just as Ayato Kirishima returns from the depths of the 24th Ward with rescued ghoul children.

At his mother's grave, Akihiro Kanou reflects that he and his father poured their lives into a task that could never truly be finished, taking pride only in having completed his part and hoping that Kurona Yasuhisa, watching from a tree, might redeem herself. She strikes at him with her kagune, knocking away his umbrella. Kanou explains that Kichimura delivered on his promise and that Dragon will finally force the Washuu Clan's hidden ghoul research into the open, advancing medicine rather than just quinque-making. He laments that such medicine might have saved his mother. The Washuu, he says, descended from a Middle Eastern lineage of repeated cannibalism that let them become kakuja from birth, which is why he built his experiments around the powerful Rize Kamishiro, using her to craft the prototype Kaneki, to alter Kurona, Nashiro, Seidou Takizawa and Amon, to mass-produce subjects like Hazuki and the Oggai, and to hand Kichimura a nucleus. With the prototype having consumed the mass products and claimed that nucleus, his work is done.

Kurona counters that none of it matters if Dragon razes the city, but Kanou is unmoved. She rages that his selfishness turned her and her sister into one-eyed ghouls and demands he die to atone, yet he denies any regret, envies her freedom from grudges, and turns a gun on himself, apologizing once more before firing. Kuramoto Itou and Ayumu Hogi later find only his body, Kurona gone, and Mabuchi relays to Marude Hide's cryptic promise that their insurance will surface with Kanou dead. Kimi Nishino and the other assistants bring Matsuri Washuu their data on Dragon.

As Tsukiyama, Nishiki, Banjou, Ayato and Miza debate reaching Kaneki while the CCG is occupied, Miza suggests tunneling underground, drawing Nishiki's jab that they will free him around the time he turns eighty. Then Ayato hears something, and Touka goes to look, finding Hide, flanked by Amon and Akira, cheerfully asking whether they would like to go dig Kaneki out.

Tsukiyama's plea reframes the survivors' grief into a wish to save Kaneki. Kanou reveals the Washuu bloodline and his experiments behind Dragon before killing himself. Hide arrives with Amon and Akira, offering to help the ghouls dig Kaneki free.

This eighteen-page chapter ran in issue 2017-51 on November 16, 2017, within the fourteenth volume. Its title, 破竹, is read as Hachiku, meaning "splitting bamboo," an image of unstoppable momentum.