Teenage Mercenary webtoon anime lands at J.C.STAFF for 2027, with Manabu Ono directing and Hiroyuki Sawano scoring

Hiroyuki Sawano's music is coming to a high school hallway. The composer is part of the newly revealed team behind the TV anime of Teenage Mercenary (Nyugaku Yohei), which will broadcast in 2027.

The staff surfaced first at Crunchyroll's showcase at New York Comic Con on October 8, where the series was one of several new anime the platform unveiled. A few hours later, on the morning of October 9 in Japan, LINE Digital Frontier, the company behind the LINE Manga app, issued a press release with a teaser visual and an announcement video.

J.C.STAFF is animating the series, with HAYATE as producer. Manabu Ono both directs and handles series composition, and Koji Haneda designs the characters while also serving as chief animation director. No voice actors, broadcaster or month have been named yet.

In the Japanese edition the lead is called Soma Tatewaki. At eight he is the lone survivor of a plane crash, and with his memory wiped he spends roughly ten years fighting abroad as a soldier for hire. Once his past comes back to him, he heads back to his family and transfers into the school his younger sister Yurina attends, where he ends up shielding her and his new friends from violence. LINE Manga pitches it as an action story in which its hero simply outclasses everyone in his way.

YC writes the webtoon and Rakhyun draws it. It debuted on Naver Webtoon in Korea in November 2020 and arrived on Japan's LINE Manga in April 2021, topping the app's annual ranking of serialized titles in both 2023 and 2024. LINE Digital Frontier counts about 940 million views in Japan as of October, and 2.84 billion worldwide as of September.

To celebrate, LINE Manga has opened the first 30 episodes for free reading until 23:59 JST on October 22, and is handing out ten gift tickets that each unlock one episode.