Half an hour later, Akizuki Kouzou's screaming finally stopped.
A few of the girls who'd been covering their eyes the entire time worked up the nerve to glance over. What they saw would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
That pixelated mass could no longer be called "human."
A brief bit of trivia: the average bull measures nearly fifty centimeters in that department. Which is why back in his old world, internet slang named it after a bull.
"Ahahahaha! Ahahahahaha!"
Replacing Kouzou's screams was Makoto Nishikado's deranged laughter, channeling the manic energy of the Uchiha clan's finest lunatics all over again.
Shuchiin Academy had no shortage of well-bred young ladies like Fujiwara Toyomi, girls who'd accompanied their parents to all manner of high-society events. They thought they'd seen it all.
Not this.
Every last one of them stood frozen, faces drained of color. That laughter echoing across the livestock yard sent a shiver crawling down their spines.
Weeee-ooo... Weeee-ooo... Weeee-ooo...
Sirens. Faint at first, then rapidly closing in.
The wall of students surrounding the yard turned to look. Several police cruisers tore through the campus gates, officers spilling out before the vehicles had fully stopped, rushing toward the scene.
Leading the charge was the portly Inspector Megure.
Someone had called the cops. Obviously.
Then again, this was the Detective Conan world. The police were reliably useless, always arriving after the deed was done.
Yesterday, when Kudou Shinichi called the cops, they'd shown up fast enough.
The difference in response time probably came down to who was making the call.
The officers who poured into the livestock yard took one look at the aftermath, and Sato Miwako, Takagi Wataru, and the rest went slack-jawed.
Just yesterday they'd seen a decapitated corpse. Sawanaga Taisuke. That had been bad enough.
And now, barely twenty-four hours later, someone had invented an entirely new way to break their minds.
Worse still, the culprit was the same person.
"Freeze, Makoto Nishikado!" Sato Miwako barked, surging forward with her signature grappling technique.
Makoto sidestepped and stuck out a leg. Tokyo's finest flower of the police force ate dirt.
He turned to face the rest of them, that mocking grin still plastered across his face.
Behind Megure, the Division One detectives—Sato's loyal army of simps—saw their goddess hit the ground. Guns came out instantly, every muzzle trained on Makoto.
"He's going to get arrested," Kotegawa Chisa murmured.
Uzaki Hana clicked her tongue. "What a shame... I actually thought he was pretty cool."
The reason was simple enough. She hated Akizuki Kouzou too. Every time she sat in that man's class, his beady little eyes roamed over the girls like he was browsing a catalog.
The words had barely left her mouth.
Makoto vanished.
An afterimage flickered, and he appeared eight meters overhead, diving headfirst toward the ground. The officers with their guns raised hadn't even begun to track the movement.
A few sharp-eyed students caught it in that split second: his eyes had turned an eerie, impossible red.
Then, still in midair, he crossed his arms and flicked both wrists outward, as if hurling something invisible.
Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!
Streaks of shadow rained from above. Every sidearm in every officer's hand was sheared cleanly in two.
The students closest to the front, Fujiwara Toyomi among them, looked down and saw what had done it: throwing stars, identical to the shuriken used by ancient ninja.
Some had sliced through the guns.
Others had sliced through the wrists holding them.
"Is he... even human?"
Severed firearms and severed hands littered the ground. Somewhere in the crowd, Yukinoshita Haruno stared, mouth hanging open, whispering to no one.
She was the one who'd called Megure.
Yesterday she'd heard about some stranger slapping her little sister at school.
As a devoted, borderline-obsessive older sibling, there was no way she could let that slide.
The moment she spotted Makoto on the university campus, she'd dialed the police without a second thought.
Given Haruno's personality, she probably would've preferred to destroy him herself, slowly and personally.
But she didn't dare.
Here's the thing about Haruno: at her core, she and Makoto were cut from the same cloth.
Both of them lived for entertainment at other people's expense. The key difference was that she only picked fights she could win.
Against someone stronger? Not a chance.
And certainly not against a lunatic who committed murder in broad daylight. God only knew what someone like that would do if provoked.
Megure and Sato turned out to be the luckiest officers on the scene. No lost hands, no ruined weapons.
Megure hadn't drawn his gun because he'd been giving orders from the rear, and Sato had already been face-down in the dirt when the shuriken flew, so Makoto hadn't bothered with her.
Even so, the two of them were shaking.
They'd assumed he was just abnormally strong. But this... this was something out of a superhero movie.
Makoto landed, swept a disinterested gaze over the groaning, writhing officers, and strolled away.
Pathetic. There's no satisfaction in bullying people this weak.
Not until his silhouette vanished entirely did Megure snap out of it.
Realizing that he and his subordinates had just been humiliated in front of hundreds of students, the veteran officer's face burned. Twenty-plus years on the force, and this was what it had come to.
But there was no time for wounded pride.
"Ambulances! Get ambulances here now!" Sato shouted, finally finding her voice.
Elsewhere.
Having dealt with yet another piece of trash he'd wanted to destroy since his previous life, Makoto was in an excellent mood.
Time to find a quiet spot and train.
He didn't bother with a Transformation Technique disguise. He walked the streets alone, face bare and unhurried. Without any dead weight tagging along, the real world held nothing that could threaten him.
And given how thoroughly he'd just terrified the local police, those idiots would need at least a week or two before they worked up the courage to come up with a plan.
A light breeze drifted past.
From the top of the slope ahead, a white beret lifted off someone's head and floated toward him on the wind.