A certain mysterious maiden
Creative Staff
Story: Kazuma Kamachi
Art: Kiyotaka Haimura
Translation: Andrew Prowse and Yoshito Hinton
What They Say
In Academy City, magic and science coexist in an unwavering power struggle – and Toma Kamijo has been caught up in the middle of it ever since he met Index, a magical nun who has been implanted with 103,000 ancient texts. When Toma learns from magician Stiyl Magnus that a shrine maiden is being held captive at an Academy City cram school, and that someone from the magical realm might be involved, the one-time enemies team up to save the girl. But it isn’t long before the rescue mission takes a turn – will Toma be the one who needs rescuing?!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Thanks to the results of last volume, our hero Touma Kamijou is left without his memories, attempting to fill in the role of himself from the previous book without anyone noticing. This proves to be a bit of a challenge, but he perseveres to prevent damaging Index’s feelings. As Stiyl is given the task to rescue a girl called Deep Blood with the ability to slay vampires (the existence of which proves vampires exist as well), Kamijou and company meet a strange shrine maiden in a shop. Of course, she claims to actually be a “magician”, but before she can really elaborate she’s escorted away by her “cram school teachers.”
Stiyl then meets up with Kamijou again, carefully making sure Index isn’t involved in the conversation. It turns out Deep Blood is being held in Misawa Cram School, which acted as a sort of strange technological cult. To make matters worse, an alchemist named Aureolus Isard then stepped in and hijacked the school and took Deep Blood captive. Stiyl finally reveals that Deep Blood’s proper identity is a girl named Aisa Himegami, and much to our hero’s surprise, she turns out to be the girl he met earlier. With a personal stake in the matter, Kamijou agrees to join Stiyl in the raid.
The prep school turns out to be quite a trap in and of itself, with a barrier splitting the building into two sides of a coin, which can’t properly interact with one another. Furthermore, our heroes face students forced to form a great magical power, a copy-Isard with the ability to turn people to gold, and the villain himself, with the unthinkable ability to seemingly make his words reality. Though they face surprisingly few vampires, will our heroes be able to save Himegami? And does she even want to be rescued?
In Summary
Though the last volume ran into a similar issue with Mikoto in particular, this volume has a serious problem with underused concepts using up space. In particular, vampires feel like a real key term this time around, with a character focused on them and a whole ton of words dedicated to discussing them throughout. However, outside of some brief background/flashback bits, they end up not really factoring into the story in a significant manor whatsoever. It’s bizarre to clog up the book so heavily with concepts and ideas and then completely fail to use them. Kamijou’s condition inherited from last time around is also touched on quite a bit without really doing much of note, though that at least feels like something that will certainly be important in future volumes. As for what’s actually here, it’s decent but not especially mind-blowing. The most interesting bit is honestly the way the setting of the main battle itself works, which is rather intriguing and brings up some neat ideas and concepts. Stiyl also gets some nice moments and feels like a more developed character here, which is nice to see. The battles are also solid enough and should keep readers involved. However, the main villain here and the new character are honestly rather flat and don’t manage to make as much of an impression as they should, though they aren’t terrible either. Ironically, the villain from the midway point is probably a bit more interesting than the main bad guy, which is funny considering what he turns out to be. It’s definitely a shame that this volume doesn’t manage to be anywhere as near as tight as the first one, and in the end it’s honestly just serviceable rather than anything exciting. Hopefully the next volume will manage to get things back on track, as the series definitely has potential, even if this book doesn’t really grasp it as well as it should.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: N/A
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: February 24th, 2015
MSRP: $14.00
I feel you’re going to have to get use to concepts coming up that are only teased. Without spoiling anything, It’s a long series and most of the time it will be foreshadowing for future events with the introduction of the concept only being a set-up.
I feel you’re going to have to get used to some concepts being teased in such a way. Without spoiling anything specific, most of the time, it’s introducing and setting up concepts that could be foreshadowed for later on. It’s a long series.