Knocking off a youngster doesn't mean much to him as long as his ambitions move forward.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- For the most part, the story is pretty tame and wholesome, even when it comes to the work Loid does. However, whenever we see Yor on HER job, the manga spares no detail in showing just how gruesome and horrific the career of an assassin can be. Bloody corpses everywhere, sometimes even seeing the kills on-panel, with Yor herself having no response to any of it, on some occasions having phone conversations where she acts cheerful or cute while covered in the blood of her most recent targets. We even see a flashback showing that she's been like this, taking murder contracts and treating them like they were just normal jobs to make ends meet, since she was a young girl raising her younger brother.
- On that note, Mission 11 makes no bones about showing the brutality of the SSS, including affable, dorky Yuri, in interrogating the informants and spies they catch.
- Mission 1 has Loid return home from getting info from Franky, but becomes suspicious after noticing that the barricade he put on his front door is slightly off. Sure enough, Edgar's thugs broke in earlier and after Loid beats them up, finds out that they took Anya and then gets smashed in the back of the head by one of the thugs. Meanwhile, Anya's Bound and Gagged with Edgar planning to use her as leverage against Loid to recover his precious blackmail material which he still doesn't know that Loid destroyed it already. After one of his goons suggests that maybe just embarrassing evidence of a toupee isn't worth it, Edgar immediately kills him in front of Anya, ironically using a pistol with a silencer. She's legitimately terrified now that she's being threatened by a real-life bad guy compared to her favorite cartoons.Anya: (genuinely terrified after reading Edgar's thoughts) He's gotta be a real bad guy!
- Mission 2 has Yor's coworkers discussing how being a single woman is suspicious at 27 in the series' version of The '60s' Cold War, and even if they were joking, the idea of turning Yor in as a potential spy of the West in Ostania just for not having a boyfriend and being socially awkward is horrific, given earlier they were discussing how another single woman in her thirties who was reported on by her neighbors and arrested.
- Mission 3 has Loid taking the family out for material to repeat in Anya's school interview. One stop has the family listening to an Ostanian politician desiring peace between Ostania and Westalia with the Ostanians jeering him. Anya reads that quite a few of them would much rather declare a war to kill every single Westalian.
- Loid and Yor's cold yet murderous anger towards Housemaster Swan for bullying Anya to tears in Mission 5; while neither parent raised their voice above a whisper, Yor glared at the creep with blood-freezing rage, cracking her knuckles to restrain herself from tearing him apart on the spot. The solid oak table shattered by Loid's fist spoke deafening volumes for the sheer fury of his silent hatred towards the Sadist Teacher burning in his eyes; had he not redirected his wrath into the fortunately-present mosquito on said table, the impact would have snapped Swan's worthless neck like so many dry twigs on the spot.Loid: Restrain yourself... Twilight!
- It's a chilling testament to Loid's mastery in the art of death for him to so accurately redirect the momentum of such a lethally-powerful blow at the very last moment through a target as tiny and fast as a mosquito; Twilight is just as terrifying a warrior as his wife, if not quite as superhuman. This scene reminds you that being an adorable family notwithstanding, the adult Forgers are still experienced professional killers with a primal, murderous rage that boils just beneath their humane surface. Housemaster Swan should count his blessings that both Yor and Twilight are not willing to kill over insults, or his casual mockery of this deadly family would have put him in a pine box six feet under. The anime makes this even more horrifying by having the impact sound almost like a gunshot, emphasizing just how deadly the punch is.
- The fact that Yor is so scatterbrained she routinely came home to young Yuri while covered in blood is both hilarious and also unnerving. One can see where Yuri got the idea she was working herself to near-death over trying to provide for him.
- In Mission 16, a boy named Ken is messing around near a pool when he accidentally falls in and can't swim up because of a broken leg. Anya, being able to read minds, is the only one who can hear his cries for help well across the hospital. She is absolutely frozen in place, stuck between two horrifying possibilities: hearing a child slowly die, or risking the possibility that Loid might scorn her for her psychic powers. Out of options, she runs to the pool herself and almost drowns trying to save Ken.
- As Loid points out, a drowning child can be very easily missed due to both how fast it happens, and how people underestimate just how quietly a drowning can occur. Especially the drowning of a child. The fact that this happened in a room with adults, along with the boy's overseer arriving seconds behind his drowning, highlights a terrifying event that would have any parent of a small child waking up in a cold sweat. The adults themselves are appropriately horrified at not having noticed. This whole scenario is an aversion of Hollywood Drowning, where the kind of drowning shown is most accurate as to how it would happen in real life.
- Mission 18 ends with Anya being discovered by isolationist terrorists. Keep in mind these aren't hardened soldiers or government agents but college students.
- Not only are they college students, but their plan is horrifying as well. Their plan is to strap bombs to the collars of DOGS and have the dogs suicide bomb a visiting Westalian minister. Then there's also the state of the dogs themselves. It's clear by the look in the eyes of the dogs and their living conditions in chapter 17 that they have been heavily abused. College students have gone full terrorist and animal abusers in the name of causing a full-blown war.
- The leader Keith shows himself to be the most deplorable of the group. While all of them are extremely xenophobic and possess a desire a war to kill every single Westalian, Keith is fully willing to kill Anya to keep their plans secret when the rest of the members are noticeably uncomfortable with the idea. He later kicks "Doggy" when it refuses to go with him, and when he realises his trap might kill innocent civilians, he simply notes that they should be proud that they'll die for their country.
- While Yor's panic is somewhat played for laughs, especially with the ridiculous scenario she comes up with in her head (thinking that Anya was being forced to marry someone based on rumors she heard), the whole situation of losing your child in a crowd is still a very real fear for parents of young children.
- And while Yor's Game Face that sends the vicious, snarling attack dog that Keith sent at her running with its tail between its legs (and also terrifies Anya) is also played for laughs, the sheer animalistic fury on her face is terrible to behold. While the Thorn Princess will do her best to grant you as painless a death as possible, only lapsing into Tranquil Fury, if you dare try to kill Yor Forger's daughter in front of her, she'll rip you to pieces unless you flee.
- It turns out that the future the Bond can see is mutable, based on current events. When Anya and Bond meet for the first time, Anya sees her whole family from Bond's perspective, smiling and happy. After Bond helps protect her from the terrorists and Yor saves them both with her combat skills, though, the happy vision changes to one of devastating grief. By reading Bond's mind, Anya finds out why: In the next half-hour, the remaining terrorist's bomb will kill Loid and start a war if Anya and Bond can't find a way to change it.
- Anya seeing the vision caused her to get interested and run after Bond. This was what led to her being caught by the terrorist who decided to move as a result. Meaning that Anya seeing the first vision is what caused the second. In other words, Anya almost got Twilight killed by accident.
- Incidentally, the other vision is presented as Anya finding Loid's corpse personally amid the wreckage of the bombed-out building.
- Twilight, the best agent that Westalis has at its disposal, gets killed by a bomb set-up by college-age punks, rank amateurs. That, by itself, is terrifying, even if it only would have happened due to a mistake made by another agent.
- The moment Anya remembers she can't tell time really lets it sink in how terrifyingly out of her depth she is. She may not be even six years old. At her age, doing practically anything unsupervised would be a terrifying adventure they probably wouldn't be up to the task of, even if it were something as simple as going to the store on their own, or riding a train to visit a friend or relative. And now it's become the responsibility of this four-to-five-year-old girl to find and disarm a bomb, or her father will die, and she doesn't even know how long she has to do it.
- Every single bit of the Handler's speech in Mission 20 drives home how much War Is Hell: people have lost limbs, smelled rotting flesh, found their friends, family and/or lover dead and/or in pieces from combat or other attacks, some grew desperate enough to eat tree bark or even human flesh because there was nothing else to eat, and many soldiers with PTSD struggle to muster the will to kill people or kill with abandon after dehumanizing their enemies, with some even taking their own lives later out of guilt. Given the sheer level of hatred she shows for the ignorance of these wannabe revolutionaries (or as she calls them, "foolish children"), it's implied she personally experienced a fair amount of what she speaks of, either firsthand or secondhand.
- Bond's flashback in Mission 22, revealing he was put through Electric Torture by the scientists who experimented on him.
- Despite being Played for Laughs, Yor's Imagine Spot of inviting Anya to her assassin job for an occupation-related school task in chapter 29 ends with Anya watching as Yor brutally murders the target, describing an attack to the throat in the process. What makes it worse is unlike previous mind readings, Anya has little reaction, implying she has become Conditioned to Accept Horror.
- The first meeting with Donovan Desmond in Mission 38 has him reveal exactly why he's so dangerous; he's so lacking in empathy or understanding for others that he considers his own children to be total strangers. Apply this perspective to Cold War-esque politics in a political party leader and the consequences could be terrible.
- The Carnival of Killers on the ship. There's dozens of them, all are highly skilled to the point some even got a hit on Yor (with the Katana-wielding one posing a legitimate threat to her), and they're all after a woman who just wants to leave the country and stay away from their client, the man that helped her get away, and a baby.
- Possibly the most horrific part is that these assassins are the ones with moral standards: early on a member without such scruples was promptly stabbed and thrown off the ship for gleefully suggesting that the band expediate the process by killing every mother-and-baby onboard, on account of the others being professionals who only kill their targets and those who get in the way, and not murderous maniacs. When Yor is fighting the last one it's discovered that Snoops, the informant coordinating the assassins, has planted bombs all around the ship to make sure the targets would die and used a type favored by Westalis extremists to try and start another war. Because the client dabbles into arms trafficking and thus would make bank if the cold war turned hot.
- Yor in Mission 48 looks absolutely terrifying when she jumps the chain-wielding assassin. Like a monster out of a horror movie.
- While awesome and as deserving as it is, some of the assassins die pretty horrifying deaths courtesy of Yor:
- The Knocker assassin in Chapter 47 gets one of Yor's daggers right through his head, pinning him to the wall. And even before that, his dead-eyed unblinking stare after shooting into Olka's room is chilling. We get a shot of his legs twitching in post death spasms as Yor's manager instructs his body be taken into the room and to be careful to avoid leaving a blood trail.
- Mission 52 has a shock-baton wielding assassin get his own shock baton shoved into his mouth, electric end first. While we don't see too much of the aftermath apart from blood spraying from his mouth, it's certainly not a fun way to go.
- The brawler assassin that follows gets it even worse, where Yor uses Razor-Sharp Hand to impale him several times. There's a lot of blood splatter (to contrast the fireworks going off in the distance), and the guy's torso is basically ripped apart when he hits the ground.
- Mission 62 is in multiple parts, which dig into Twilight's hinted-at backstory in more detail. The first part has the opening shots of the previous war between Westalis and Ostania, where a peaceful day in the kid's life is interrupted by Ostanian forces shelling his town. It's basically War Comes Home writ large.
- The second part promptly reveals that he only survives the initial shelling because of a toy helmet bought the previous day; the attack kills the woman he was speaking to a second ago, and later panels show the bridge and the abandoned ammo depot where his friends played are similarly flattened. The first ten pages are devoted to seeing the poor kid's shell-shocked reaction to his destroyed town, and it doesn't get better.
- The brief shot of a purse and a single shoe in the rubble is simple, evocative, and terrifying. Both of them look like something either an adult or a child might have. The fact that we don't know what happened to the owner - were the items dropped in their flight? Did they survive? Were the items blown off of them? - makes it that much more horrific and sudden.
- A few months after the war begins, he finds his mother's corpse during an air raid. We don't see the scene, but we don't have to, because his screams tell us everything we need to know.
- When Twilight joined the Westalis Army under a fake name by lying about his age, he made it a point to avenge his hometown, parents, and friends by killing as many Ostanians as possible, and managed to rack up a sizable kill count, represented by him sitting atop a mound of corpses. When he meets Frankie, who had just desert from the Ostanina army, Twlight considers killing him right there and there simply because they're enemies, and despite the fact that Frankie is unarmed and begging for his life. Twilight doesn't kill him because Frankie made him laugh when the latter said he didn't want to die "without first being with a woman". Frankie's statement and Twilight's reaction serves as Mood Whiplash over the implication that Twilight is a war criminal due to wantonly murdering surrendered Ostanian soldiers.
- Mission 69 brings up the "Red Circus" extremist group Yor nearly entirely slaughtered in Extra Mission 2, with its leader Billy Squire and his faction coming out of hiding, and the SSS has noted he's planning something. His scheme? Hold Anya's school bus hostage. He uses a taser-like weapon on the teacher in charge of the bus in front of the kids, then shoots the tire of one of the cars following them, and threatens the kids at gunpoint into silence straight after.Billy: Good morning, Eden Academy students. As the nation's elite, you've probably figured out what's happening. We are the Red Circus, and we've hijacked your bus. If you want to live, you'll do exactly what we say.
- Mission 70.
- Bill Watkins standing up in defiance against the terrorists also reveals that the bad guys know exactly who they are taking hostage - the children of the nation's elite - to the point that the ringleader can accurately identify Bill, Damian, Becky, and two other students by sight. It’s unknown how they got that information.
- WISE gets ahold of the news, but Twilight is currently on an undercover mission in a different region. He won't be able to reach Ostania in time even if they contact him immediately. Anya doesn’t know that her father can’t save her now.
- Anya gets an Explosive Leash clapped on her after successfully getting a message out that their bus is being hijacked. Fortunately, the next chapter reveals that it was a dud since Billy doesn't intend to kill his hostages, but the idea of strapping such a dangerous weapon to a child isn't a pleasant thought. Not to mention, only Anya and the terrorists know that it's a dud, so everyone else on the bus remains terrified witless (and shocked/baffled at how Anya remains calm about the whole thing).
- Mission 73 ends with the secret police prepared to storm the bus and Billy starts to consider surrendering, but Anya reads the mind of his cohort and is horrified to learn that unlike the fake bomb collars she and Damian are strapped to, he's carrying a real bomb which he plans to set off and take every single hostage with him once the police get close.
- In Mission 74, Yor grows concerned when Anya isn't home by evening. An Eden Academy staff lies to her and says the field trip ran long, but Sharon tells her that the trip was canceled. Her ensuing terror is encapsulated in a single shot of her widened eye. Given her field of work and her tendency to catastrophize, countless horrible scenarios must have run through her mind until she sees Anya again safe and sound - and she might have no idea how close Anya actually came to death, if not for the bravery of her daughter and many other characters.
- Mission 75 gives us a look inside the mind of Melinda Desmond and it’s... disturbing, to say the least. In the span of a few seconds, she alternates repeatedly from thoughts of extreme love and care for Damian (with Anya mentally comparing her level of affection to what Yuri feels for Yor), to outright wishing he had died in the hijacking, seeing him as a burden to her, etc. The whole scene is encapsulated by Melinda's near instantaneous switch from a normal, loving mother to a demented-looking woman with a fiendish Death Glare, looming over her son like she's seriously contemplating whether or not to murder him right then and there. It's made further unsettling that her negative thought bubbles read by Anya turn into black ones, which are normally reserved for assassins with Killing Intent.
- Also noteworthy is the fact that she started thinking negatively the second her son brought up Donovan. What happened in the Desmond family to inspire such hatred against an innocent child? What did Donovan do to Melinda?
- Mission 84 ends with a cliffhanger where Nightfall, of all people, goes into an Unstoppable Rage. Eyes wide open with bulging veins, and her face turning blood-red, she's ready to absolutely brutalize the person right in front of her in the worst way imaginable.
- During Mission 85, the moment Nightfall gets the opportunity to strike at Wheeler without risk to Twilight, she lunges at him in an enraged blur of motion. Wheeler manages to block her initial swing, but to his horrified shock, her strike hits much harder than he was anticipating: thanks to Nightfall's Uninhibited Muscle Power, not only does she break his arm, her own arm goes limp, having been broken in multiple places from the sheer force and impact (with most of her other limbs becoming either broken or dislocated as well).
- Mission 89 reminds the readers that Yuri is thoroughly messed up and complicit in a messed up system. He gives wannabe activist Bobby Bockle a brutal Breaking Speech that even Chloe had to say was harsh. When Bockle refuses to cooperate, Yuri stands up, slams the table, grabs the former thug's collar, death-glares him in the face, and continues his tear-down with another speech that surely serves as a prelude to unimaginable torture. There's a shot of the outside of the SSS HQ, and Yuri is next shown preparing to go check out the address that Bockle named as the Circle's headquarters, even though Bockle had claimed he wouldn't say a thing. The close-up shot of Yuri is monstrous, his eyes turned into scribbles that extend into the whites and look like voids.Do you think anyone really manages to keep their mouth shut throughout an interrogation? Supposing one did, it would only be because his interrogator had neglected to do their job. Do you think your ideals will actually hold up through proper torture? Because that's something that only ever happens in books and movies. And I don't say that as a threat. It's a fact. I'd be happy to prove it to you.
- Mission 93 introduces Demetrius Desmond, Damian's older brother, in person, and like Melinda before him, what thoughts he carries are ominous. The difference is that unlike with his mother, Anya can detect almost nothing from his train of thoughts, besides a few "I don't understand [X]" and him barely able to bother trying. Damian's thoughts show that Demetrius's eyes appeared more normal when he was younger, and that he was their father's favorite (something which may no longer be the case, to the boy's shock)... implying that something happened which led to his current state of catatonia, further boosted by Melinda's deliberate living apart from the Desmond household.
