Chapter 20

is the twentieth chapter of the Fire Force manga series.

Summary
Takehisa calls Akitaru and informs him on the situation at Special Fire Force Combine 5, much to Akitaru's shock at how quickly they finished the job. Initially meant to be a pretend collaborative-combat training between the two brigades so that they have an explanation for their fued, Shinra, Hibana and Iris discuss how they are going to explain their two brigades' confrontation if it ever comes down to it, and decide to hold a dinner party with both brigades instead. Shinra alludes to Hibana's sudden cooperativeness, which Hibana feels as though she can't help it since she's fallen for his heroic nature. At the dinner party, Hibana and Akitaru start talking about the recent events. Akitaru questions her decision to share her secrets of the phenomenon with the 8th, to which Hibana expresses that her mind had been enlightened by none other than Shinra, to which Akitaru agrees the boy is an important member of the 8th. Hibana then reveals that since she'd experimented on various dead Flame Human bodies, she realized that some of them differentiated from each other, and suspects that somebody is creating artificial Flame Humans; though this isn't the entire truth of the phenomenon. She goes on to assert her desire to crush the person behind this, as they may have been the ones who burned the sisters as The Holy Sol Temple. Akitaru, initially uneasy by Hibana's experimentation on dead bodies, acknowledges and states that they share the same goals. Hibana then claims that all the artificially-created Flame Humans are concentrated around the Shinjuku district, which happens to be area the jurisdiction of the 1st Special Fire Brigade. At the Cathedral, Karim Flam, Rekka Hoshimiya and Foien Li all rendezvous with Leonard Burns about the supposed combat exercise between the 8th and 5th, understanding that the 8th has finally made their move.