Episode 8 · Sanda

Sanda

In a future Japan where children are scarce and guarded like treasure, Christmas is just an old story nobody tells anymore. Daikoku Welfare Academy keeps its students fed, safe, and watched. Santa? A fairy tale to the kids. To the adults, he is a threat with a whole unit on standby, the Saint Nick Pursuit Unit, ready to move the second he shows up. Then one morning Shiori Fuyumura calls Kazushige Sanda to an empty room and comes at him with a knife. Sanda figures it is some breakdown, a class rep cracking under pressure. He is wrong. Fuyumura is hunting an answer. Her best friend Ichie Ono vanished six months ago and was declared dead, and Fuyumura has decided Sanda carries the blood of Santa Claus himself, the one person who could grant her wish and bring Ono back. So she cuts him, again and again if she has to, trying to drag whatever sleeps inside him out into the open. Now a boy who only wanted to get through the school day is the target of a classmate who will not stop, and the school itself is hiding why it watches its students so closely. How far will Fuyumura go to force a legend awake, and what happens to Sanda if she succeeds?