Killing Bites has started its final chapter. Hero’s Inc. published the first part of the last chapter on Friday, October 9, 2026, moving a manga that has run since 2017 toward its ending.
The series is written by Shinya Murata and drawn by Kazasa Sumita. The two launched it in Monthly Hero’s in March 2017, and it later moved to the Comiplex website, where it still serializes. Hero’s Inc. shipped the 27th compiled volume on June 29.
The publisher has not said how many parts the final chapter will take or when the last volume will arrive. Calling this release a first part points to the ending being serialized across more than one installment, which is how the platform usually handles the last stretch of a long-running title. The first part lands more than nine years after the series debuted, and Hero’s Inc. has not signaled any change to the release schedule for what remains.
What Killing Bites is about
The setup is simple and nasty. Yuya Nomoto is a young man whose friends duped him into a plot to kidnap a high school girl. By the time he works out what happened, they are dead, and he is pulled into Killing Bites, an underground bloodsport where fighters called Therianthropes, gene-edited humans built for combat, fight to the death for the organizations pulling strings from the shadows.
The series leans on the idea of ordinary people caught inside a tournament run by money and power. It mixes brutal fights with a conspiracy layer, and the tone sits closer to horror than to a straight sports manga.
The anime
Killing Bites got a television adaptation that premiered on the Animeism block on MBS and TBS in January 2018. It ran for 12 episodes. An unaired director’s cut later streamed worldwide on Amazon Prime Video, and Sentai Filmworks licensed the show for home video. For a lot of viewers outside Japan, the anime is where the name started, which is why an ending in the manga carries more weight than the volume count alone suggests.
On the English side, Mangamo picked up the manga for its service, giving readers a legal digital option.
The creator
Shinya Murata has stayed busy. He launched Shinoblade, a fantasy ninja series drawn by Daichi Matsuse, in Kadokawa’s Manga BAR in September, and Akujo Ranking with Wakata Wakuta in Monthly Dragon Age earlier this year. Killing Bites is the title that established him, and its ending closes the longest-running project on his list.
Why it matters
Long series tend to end in stages rather than all at once, so the first part of the final chapter is a signal, not the finish line. Readers following the story in collected volumes can expect at least one more book, even though the exact release date has not been announced. It is a busy stretch for ending manga, with Hirayasumi wrapping on October 19 among the other titles closing out this month.
For anyone who only knows the series from the 2018 anime, the manga kept going for another eight years after the show stopped. The ending now being written covers ground the anime never touched, and the final volume will be the first place that material is collected in print.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Hero’s Inc.
Featured image: Promotional art for Killing Bites by Kazasa Sumita and Shinya Murata, via Anime News Network.
