Chapter 1: Wrong World
Wrong GuyThe devil had no name.
That was the first strange thing.
Every devil Denji had ever met carried something — a title, a concept, a piece of the world that made them real.
The Gun Devil. The Bat Devil. The Darkness Devil.
This one had nothing.
It sat across from him in a space that wasn't quite a room. No walls. No floor. Just grey nothing stretching in every direction.
The devil looked like a torn piece of paper given a face — flat, white, with two holes where the eyes should be.
"Chainsaw Man," it said.
Denji scratched the back of his head.
"Yeah."
"I have a contract."
"Cool." He yawned. "What do I get?"
The devil tilted its paper face.
"You get to live."
Denji stared at it for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
"Man, I've heard that one before." He crossed his arms. "Every devil says that. What do you get?"
The paper devil was quiet.
Then it said: "I get to see what happens."
That was a weird answer.
Denji didn't like weird answers. Weird answers usually meant something bad was about to happen and nobody wanted to explain it properly.
He opened his mouth to say no.
Then the grey nothing swallowed him whole.
He hit the ground hard.
Asphalt. City smell. Car exhaust and something fried from a street vendor nearby.
Denji lay face-down on the pavement for a few seconds.
He did a quick mental check. Arms — there. Legs — there. Chainsaw cord in his chest — there. Pochita's heartbeat — steady, a little annoyed.
"Okay," he said to no one.
He pushed himself up.
Seoul.
Or somewhere that looked like Seoul. Big buildings. Signs he couldn't read.
People in dark combat gear moving fast down the street like they were late for something important.
Nobody looked at him.
That was weird. Usually people looked at him, especially when he was lying face-down on the sidewalk in his Public Safety jacket with dried devil blood on his sleeve.
He stood up and looked around.
Down the block, a massive crack split the air itself — shimmering blue-purple at the edges, maybe twenty meters tall.
People in that dark combat gear were streaming toward it, not away.
"What the hell is that," Denji said.
A woman in tactical gear jogged past him without slowing.
"Gate's been open for forty minutes," she said into a headset. "All available hunters, rank B and above—"
She was gone.
Denji looked at the crack in the air.
He looked at the street vendor.
He looked back at the crack.
The vendor was selling something that smelled like meat on a stick.
Denji's stomach made a decision before his brain did.
He was halfway through his third skewer when the screaming started.
People — civilians — running now, away from the glowing crack.
The hunters who'd gone in were coming back out, and not all of them were coming out whole.
Denji chewed slowly, watching.
A thing crawled out of the gate behind them.
It was big. Easily four meters.
It looked like someone had built a knight out of black bone and bad intentions, with too many joints in the wrong places and eyes that glowed the color of old blood.
The hunters regrouped. Shouting to each other. Some of them had weapons Denji didn't recognize — not guns exactly, not swords exactly, something in between.
The bone knight swatted three of them aside like they were nothing.
People were still running and screaming.
Denji finished the skewer.
He looked at the vendor. The vendor had already fled. There were two more skewers left on the grill.
He grabbed them.
Then he pulled the cord.
The chainsaw sound was always the same.
VRRRAAAHHH.
It cut through the screaming and the shouting and the sounds of combat like it always did — sudden and loud and deeply wrong in a way that made human instincts go quiet.
The hunters went quiet.
The bone knight went still.
Denji walked toward it with a chainsaw for a head and two more skewers in his left hand, and he was still chewing.
The bone knight lunged.
Denji ducked under the first swing without thinking, drove the chainsaw up through the joint where the arm met the shoulder, and kept walking forward.
The arm came off. Black ichor sprayed across the pavement.
The knight staggered, swung with the other arm.
Denji cut that one off too.
Then he cut the thing in half at the waist.
Then he cut the top half into smaller pieces just to be sure.
Then he stopped.
He detransformed.
Regular Denji again. Messy hair. Tired eyes. Blood on his jacket — his own and not his own mixed together.
He looked at the remaining skewer in his hand.
It had survived.
He ate it.
The hunters stared at him.
One of them — a woman with short dark hair and sharp eyes — had her hand on a weapon she hadn't drawn yet. She was staring at him the way people stared at things they hadn't categorized yet.
"Who are you?" she said.
Denji licked the stick clean and tossed it.
"Denji." He looked around at the mess he'd made. "Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?"