Hattori commented, "Ya alright dere, Kudo? Ya seem a little spaced out." The distant look on Conan's face at the time didn't help.
/
That Hattori boy was definitely up to something, Akai knew. (No, actually he's a shinigami; Akai corrected himself, feeling a faint spark of a shinigami aura from the Osakan, albeit a low level one.) What Hattori had said – well, what Akai had lip-read of the conversation between Hattori and the boy - was suspicious. A low level shinigami shouldn't dare ever reveal private information about a superior – Hattori should have known that already.
Low level shinigami like this 'Hattori' were easy to read, bountiful and easy to pick off. That's why he'd chosen to betray heaven for the unofficial job of deathmonger or, to put it in a more understandable way, a single police unit for shinigami. Then again, he was the only deathmonger in existence and had sufficiently kept the peace between shinigami, angels and humans for many a human lifetime…including his (temporary) own.
/
Just to further confirm that he wasn't going crazy (and to reminisce about his days as Shinichi), Conan decided to tag along on a trip to the Teitan High cultural festival. A play was apparently happening, and Ran was the heroine – the princess!
Akai the crow, as was now usual for him, sat outside on a branch watching and waiting for something good to happen. His 'something good' came too soon: the princess of the play was almost a spitting image for the female half angel, half shinigami he'd had to break up with when he'd first come to the human world. There was too much controversy surrounding the 'half breeds' at that time, anyway, so it was probably safe to say he'd benefitted from leaving her.
Meanwhile, the actors came to a halt as the Spade Knight embraced the princess and Akai almost fell off his branch, surprised at how strong the boy's aura was. The very reason he stuck around the boy with the glasses – who'd become a teenager sometime between coming to the festival and now – was to keep that boy's aura in check since he was on a completely different level to his friend Hattori. If that aura became too intense, the humans' fragile bodies…or possibly their minds…would be affected in ways the fallen angel couldn't predict.
If an innocent human died because of a shinigami he'd been keeping tabs on, Akai would have to go back to heaven as a disgrace. Since he was already regarded as a disgrace in most angels' eyes, maybe that didn't matter but to the fallen angel, it did.
He peered into the gym building once again…where there was currently no corpse.
The situation was stable, but the crow fluttered off to put some aura barriers into place to be safe. However, by the time he returned, there was a male corpse, Hattori and the boy in the same vicinity.
A high level shinigami – 'high' being at least rank six when the highest is rank one - sentenced to an endless loop of life and death, Akai explained to the boy mentally, will die soon after they send another being to death, whether that being is an angel, human or other shinigami and will repeat that process for however long they committed their offence.
Just as Akai told him, a few seconds after this message got through, Shinichi keeled forward, an invisible force cutting off his breathing. When Hattori checked him, his pulse had disappeared and his eyes had become dilated like he'd seen death itself.
Then again, Shinichi had seen lots of death in his lifetime.