Chapter 98

Bird and War (と) is the 98th Chapter of the Chainsaw Man manga and the first chapter of the Academy Saga.

Summary
Asa Mitaka is a high school girl who doesn't seem to fit in. She watches her classmates live carefree lives, hanging out with friends, having fun, and she can't help but resent them.

One day, her teacher Mr. Tanaka brings a Chicken Devil named Bucky into class, explaining that in three months, the class will kill and eat him in order to teach them how precious life is.

Three months pass, and Bucky becomes a sort of mascot for the students. Everyone seems to love him, except for Mitaka. She retreats to the school roof to eat her lunch when she is joined by the student council president. The president notices Mitaka's annoyance with Bucky and reassures her that it'll be dead in around 100 days so it's not worth worrying about.

Mitaka goes on to talk about how the city they live in is corrupt. She points out that there is a Chainsaw Devil running around playing Devil Hunter while there are problems going on around the city, and to make it all worse; now there is a Chicken Devil in their classroom.

As the weeks and months go on, Mitaka observes in annoyance how attached her classmates become to the Chicken Devil. Finally, three months after the day he was brought into class, Mr. Tanaka reveals that Bucky won't actually be killed and eaten, as this was all an elaborate lesson to teach them how precious life is, including the lives of Devils. To celebrate Bucky being pardoned, the class goes outside for a soccer game.

Mitaka joins them reluctantly, staying off to the side watching the students play instead of joining them. She is approached by Tanaka, who asks why she is all by herself, to which she replies that she goes to school to study, not to make friends. That is when, suddenly, Bucky jumps into her arms and calls her name. She is taken aback by this, as no one but the teacher and class president know her name. She realizes in this moment that all this time, she has hated everyone in school because she was jealous of them. She didn't realize that she just wanted to be like them. With Bucky inspiring something new in her, she decides to finally join her classmates in the game, when she suddenly trips and falls.

When she gets back up, she looks in horror as she discovers she has accidentally crushed Bucky underneath her, exposing his innards to the entire class. As everyone looks at Bucky's corpse in complete grief and terror, Asa vomits from shock and passes out.

Mitaka comes to school the next day and feels her classmates' stares, judging her. She returns home completely ashamed, wishing she would die. In the middle of the night, while she sulks in her bed, she hears her doorbell ring. Outside are Tanaka and the class president, who have come to walk her to Bucky's grave. They tell her that Bucky's spirit might forgive them if they visit him.

On the way there, Tanaka and the class president cross the street, and Mitaka stays behind. The class president realizes it's because Mitaka won't cross the street without the green traffic signal and begins to berede her for it for being a goody-two-shoes. She suddenly mutates into into a multi-headed colossus made of muscles and reveals that she made a contract with the Justice Devil, claiming that she and Mr. Tanaka had been having relations, but he had a thing for Mitaka, which held them back. Because of this, the only way for them to be happy is to kill Mitaka. She also reveals that her plan was for Mitaka to kill Bucky in order to humiliate her.

The transformed class president lunges at Mitaka with her claws, and in her last moments, Mitaka is in peace knowing that it wasn't her fault after all for killing Bucky, and that perhaps if she had lived a more selfish life, she could have had friends or even a boyfriend. Her face is then clawed open by the class president, and she is left on the ground with one of her eyeballs exposed.

In that moment, a Devil that takes the form of an owl appears above a streetlight. It tells Mitaka that if she wants to live, her body will belong to it. Her corpse suddenly reanimates itself and stands up, now claiming herself to be the War Devil. She attacks the class president, turning Tanaka's spine into a sword and the president's arm into a grenade, showing off her ability to turn objects into weapons of war. She claims that this battle is just her warmup and destroys the both of them with the grenade.

As she is walking away from the explosion, she sees a poster on the wall with Chainsaw Man's face on it, and vows to find him and make him vomit up nuclear weapons again.

Characters

 * Asa Mitaka
 * Bucky,  (Death) 
 * Mr. Tanaka,  (Death) 
 * Unnamed class president,  (Death) 
 * Justice Devil
 * Yoru

Trivia

 * This chapter's title, Bird and War, is reminiscent of the first chapter title of Part 1, Dog and Chainsaw.