#the fear of war to that scale grows slower than in a spawn of seconds lets be real

[my-fancy-hat]

I don't think the fate of Asa and Yoshida is settle in this conflict nor that Yoshida's strike is aimed to kill Asa (fjmt is an expert in making us believe things that aren't), for the simple reason that both of them still have not completed their own personal arcs nor have reached the culmination of their development, especially Yoshida, a character who remains a mystery for what he allows us to see from him. However, this last chapter showed a new facet of Yoshida which overthrows a previous assumption that us readers had about him.

Kishibe himself praised Yoshida for his combat skills and his templance as a devil hunter: a few screew loose reflected in a malicious almost childish smile while killing a man barehand. It comes natural for him to act as a weapon, the problem is to be human while being trapped in a problem/system way bigger than him. This time, he's about to kill Asa Mitaka, another enemy for PS, but the feeling is not the same as we saw in part 1: he's tired, definitelly sad. He knows he won't find joy in getting his hands dirty with her blood. It's safe to assume he doesn't want to do this. But, why now? why Asa? what change?

The maximum exposure of his personal conflict was through his conversation with Mitaka about the advantages of solitude through the construction of parasocial relationships, and how both of them should better continue down this path, an advice he assumed it would help her to content her need of connections: his own theory of happiness.

This topic is what later drags Asa Mitaka into a depresive episode due to the dissapointment of her attempts to connect with people, and how she cannot stop herself from becoming attached and creating expectations from relationships that barely exist to only end with her feeling stupid and miserable, where the last nail of the coffin were Denji standing her up on their second date and Yoshida rejecting her feelings again all in the same day. Why do I mention all of this? If you think that Asa is quick to create ideas in her mind out of her extreme emotional starvation, we can say the same thing about Yoshida. His phylosophy of interpersonal relationships takes an expector seat in the movie about his own life, where his feelings are well secured out of the reach of what the screen projects, where he's away from the pain and dissapointment to interact with the reality of rejection. While Asa suffers because she's stubborn and doesn't give up trying again and again to someday end her pain, Yoshida accepts and lives with it as an unchangable reality.

Yet, I believe his theory started to fail to him even before he noticed, during his time in highschool his world-view started to crack little by little (most likely by Denji's influence on him). Even if he didn't share significant moment with the rest of the cast, he enjoyed his time as a highschooler and, well, it isn't what parasocial relationships are about? happiness comes from the ilusion of companionship, and during all this time we've seen Yoshida chatting with someone or reacting about his surroundings in a group, especially with Denji at his side, feeding this needed ilusion of belonging. After all, the deep of these bonds doesn't matter but they're still important/meaningful to the person in question.

Maybe this expression shows that he does care about the people he spend time with pretending to be human just as them, maybe feels sorry to destroy this little life he believes doesn't fit into but had the opportunity to experience. He wants something like that for him too, a normal life where his lack of humanity isn't in the way to his desire of connection.

This is why I find this line very powerful for him to say, he apologize because he couldn't be of help to Asa, to have separate her from Denji while securing her to follow his theory of happiness, and by that to have made her situation worse than before and for things end up like this. He failed to fight the unchangeable once again.