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| Ai didn't want to grow up. Or, rather, he
didn't want to grow up in Hole. Instead, he ran away to pursue
his dreams in another world - a world full of magic and danger.
In this sense, he can be loosely paralleled with Peter Pan
escaping to Neverland. |
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But he didn't go alone. On his way to
the sorcerer world, he saved five homeless kids from
abuse at the hands of sadistic bullies.
These were Dokuga, Tetsujo, Ushishimada, Saji, and Ton.
They became not only the first members of the CrossEyes
gang, but also its five core Officers.
Growing up on the streets exposed them to all the
callous cruelty of the world.
Since they couldn't use magic, they were considered
worthless, and society placed them on the level of
humans from Hole. As such, they were nothing but test
subjects for sorcerers, and could be mutilated and
killed without consequences.
With nothing to lose, and their whole lives to repay
him, they were Kai most loyal and zealous followers. |
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Yet they themselves couldn't explain why that
was. We have no indication that Kai ever asked them to join him,
ever forced them to do anything for him, or even proposed the
idea of creating the CrossEyes gang. They did that on their own.
Mesmerized by Kai's eerie charisma, they cheerfully allowed
themselves to be pulled into a world of smoke and rotting flesh.
Perhaps it was because their childhood had taught them that life
was cheap. Perhaps it was a desperate grasp at hope by an
oppressed minority. Perhaps there was an element of revenge now
that the tables have turned.
Whatever the reason, they retained an air of innocence about
them, not unlike that of Peter Pan's Lost Boys. After all, what
were the Lost Boys except a gang going around murdering pirates?
Like the Lost Boys, the CrossEyes cast off the security of
social norms to lead a more dangerous life of greater freedoms.
But, instead of pirates, their rival "gang" was magic users. |
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It is doubtful that Kai cared about
any of this. He was only interested in accumulating dead
bodies. Eager to please him, his Officers killed and
robbed for him. They welcomed new recruits and organized
the gang's activities. They likely started the tradition
of getting cross tattoos to show solidarity with Kai and
to
keep track of their members.
In return, Kai shared with the CrossEyes his expertise
in medical science.
He taught them how to level the playing field against
magic users through knowledge of their anatomy. By
striking at points on their body which produce smoke,
they could cut off their advantage in both abilities and
range. In effect, this made the CrossEyes more efficient
killers.
Kai also tried to teach them how to acquire the magical
abilities of others, the same way he did, but all the
attempts of his makeshift scientists to replicate this
were spectacularly unsuccessful. Perhaps this was
because Kai started out as a human from Hole, and the
CrossEyes were sorcerers. |
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| But Kai's farthest-reaching aid to
magically-challenged sorcerers was the byproduct of his
experiments: black powder. |
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Black powder came from the little
devil-shaped tumors inside of sorcerers' heads. These devils
were the source of their magic, and were probably also the
anchors of their soul, since resurrection magic required their
revival. Kai cut these tumors out of sorcerer heads to
appropriate their magic - and he collected a lot of heads!
By taking black powder, sorcerers branded useless by society, or
even those that couldn't emit smoke at all, had their powers
temporarily amplified to those of
pretty good magic users. This
was another way to level the playing field since the powder
did
nothing for magic user elite. Maybe the amplification effects of
the powder were limited by the strength of the magic user. Black
powder was addictive, and respected magic users considered it
shameful.
Interestingly enough, the Officers themselves never used black
powder, though they ran an elaborate distribution chain for it. |
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There was an enormous market for
black powder among the general public. It gave people a sense of
self-worth, let them find steady work, and allowed them
to protect themselves.
It also created new employment opportunities for drug
dealers, and many joined the CrossEyes purely for
financial gain.
The Officers weren't above using such individuals for
their cause, but they did keep them to some basic
quality standards. One guy who tried to sell fake powder
was expressly concerned that he may be disciplined by
them. |
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| Black powder was the main source of funding
for the CrossEyes, but Kai only made a limited supply before he
had to leave. |
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Despite their religious devotion to Kai, the amount of
corpses at their disposal, and the care with which they
must have tried to imitate his work, the creepy guys
from Kai's lab weren't able to make more.
Everyone was getting desperate, but no amount of prayer
and offerings to Kai's wax figure was able to bring him
back.
To make matters worse, the lab was raided by En's
Cleaners and burned to the ground.
When the last of the black powder ran out, things seemed
bleak for the Officers. |
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In the years that their Boss was
gone, the Officers did their best to keep the CrossEyes
organization alive.
Dokuga acted as the unofficial leader, possibly because
he was the only one who knew why Kai left in the first
place and was the last person to have seen him.
Though they endured many hardships, never once did the
Officers waver in their loyalty to their Boss, always
clinging to the hope that one day he would return.
And one day he did.
Yet he didn't seek them out, and they were probably
among the last to hear of it.
On TV.
Granted, he probably had no idea where they were. But
even when they contacted him by phone, overjoyed and
excited as they were, he remained aloof and simply hung
up.
Kai was a man of few words, so the Officers didn't take
it personally. This only made them more determined to go
see him.
It does, however, show Kai's tendency to take his
Officers for granted. In fact, after the phone call, he
immediately started operating on himself, fully
expecting them to come up to his apartment and take care
of him like mindless little robots. |
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Before the Boss left, he entrusted
Dokuga with his favorite pair of daggers. It was an
honor that meant the world to Dokuga, and one for which
he was willing to risk the lives of his friends.
Yet when the Officers were finally reunited with Kai, he
took the daggers back as if Dokuga was just a shelf
he left them on all these years. He barely even
looked at his Officers. |
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If Kai ever cared about his Officers, he
certainly didn't act like it. And why should he? When it came
down to it, sorcerers were nothing more than test subjects and
body parts to him. He only saw them for the powers he could get
from them, and the only reason the Officers and the rest of the
CrossEyes were still alive was because their abilities didn't
spark his interest.
After Kai decimated the En Family, the whole sorcerer world was
turned on its head. Social outcasts were now in power, the magic
user elite were on the run, and the masses flocked in droves to
join the CrossEyes. |
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But Kai didn't do it for them. He
only killed En because he wanted his powers, and because
he was a potential threat to his goals. He only took
over En's manor because it was a suitable base for the
climax of his experiments. Any value he placed on the
new influx of followers was that of convenient worker
ants he could use to carry out his tasks. And they
didn't mind, since they just wanted security and to get
high off black powder.
But the Officers, in their sincere devotion to the Boss,
did at times wonder if they meant anything to him. They
all
idolized him, and believed in the good he could do
for their world, but they also feared him.
Saji felt as though they didn't even exist to him,
and that he only had eyes for some future goal that they
didn't understand.
Ton countered this by saying he believed the Boss
cared about them since one time he sorta noticed him and
shared a burger.
Nobody was troubled by the Boss' ways more than Dokuga.
He consciously understood people's tendency to be
"fascinated by a powerful presence whose nature they
don't understand," yet he still couldn't help himself. |
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| He was drawn to Kai like a moth to a flame.
Even though he knew, better than anyone, what Kai was capable
of. |
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Kai only wanted power.
And he was willing to kill enemies and comrades alike to
take it, without the slightest hesitation. |
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But Kai wasn't some dumb sadistic
brute. He was a hands-on scientist whose methods were as
brutal as they were calculating.
To fulfill his ambition of becoming the ultimate magic
user, Kai needed to amass more and more power, which
meant he needed more and more bodies.
With nobody left to stop him, Kai launched the final
phase of his preparations: wholesale genocide. |
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Even his Officers didn't expect this.
Despite all their hatred for magic users, they never
wanted to kill them all, and they privately expressed
their doubts and disgust.
Nevertheless, they were on the frontlines of the
assault, following their Boss' orders. They led the
CrossEyes to mercilessly massacre hundreds of people a
day to appease Kai, and directed an endless flow of body
parts to be shipped to him from the field.
Many magic users fled and, to his credit, Kai let them.
He instructed his followers to only go after those that
stayed behind, since he took their confidence as
indication of their abilities. He was mainly interested
in the strong.
Kai was now amassing an enormous collection of heads.
Mountains of them were piled up in his new and improved
laboratory, their devil tumors cut out to feed black
powder into a bioengineered suit. |
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When Kai determined that he gathered
enough ingredients, he initiated the Rainpocalypse. It
never rained in the sorcerer world, but Kai made it
pour, indifferent to the fact that it made the whole
city writhe in agony.
His Officers managed to crawl over to his chambers in
time to watch him be engulfed in a swirl of corpses and
emerge as what I call "Darth Kai." It was a giant with
four heads who breathed magic smoke and leaked
concentrated black powder, yet was as incompetent as a
newborn.
And so, the CrossEyes Officers were confronted with the
harsh reality that the Boss they built their lives
around, and were willing to kill and sacrifice
themselves for, was a complete stranger to them, with
unknown motives and questionable regard for their
wellbeing.
Yet they had gone too far and done too much to give up
now. Besides, he left them with little choice but to
follow through with his mysterious plan. |
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It's unclear whether Kai expected to become an oversized
baby, but what little coherency he had left prompted him
to return to Hole, so it seems he didn't intend to stay
in the sorcerer world.
He had effectively left his Officers
to answer for his bloodbath after tearing down
everything they thought they stood for.
Perhaps he also intended to take his Officers with him,
but that is not the life they wanted. They truly
believed that Kai could help create a less oppressive
society. Now they were reviled as the oppressors, and
even their own CrossEyes turned against them.
They weren't able to take a step without watching their
backs. |
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