Creative Staff
Story: Masaki Hiramatsu
Art: Takashi Tensugi
Translation: William Flanagan
What They Say
As her teammates look on in horror, Niko succumbs to the taint that has overwhelmed her soul gem and she transforms into a terrifying witch. But there is little time for the Pleiades Saints to grieve – this new witch has gone on the attack! Left with no alternative, Mirai strikes down her friend to save the rest of the girls. Is there any power that can save the Magical Girls from their fate?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Faced with Niko’s witch form, the girls panic, uncertain as to whether or not they should fight back. When Saki is slightly injured, though, Mirai goes berserk and uses her teddy bears to blast away her former friend. Everyone starts to panic at the fear of turning into a witch and the sight of Niko’s corpse and then… Niko walks up perfectly fine. Apparently the Niko that turned into the witch was her “preliminary,” the price for her contract, a fact that is not explained any further and just kind of dumped there.
The group then goes to Mirai’s teddy bear museum, which also happens to be filled with naked Magical Girls kept in tubes. Apparently the Pleiades Saints capture Magical Girls before they turn into witches and hold them until they figure out a way to beat the system. The girls then decide to give Kazumi her memories back, which starts off with incredibly short flashbacks showing each of the girls’ suffering that apparently drove them into some kind of suicide pact. However, before they could end it all, Kazumi swoops in and shows them a fight with a witch, apparently using the fear to protect themselves from the situation to show them that they really want to live after all. She then takes them home, and we enter a flashback within the flashback showing how Kazumi became a Magical Girl, deciding to limit her wish to giving her grandmother just a little more time, deciding that extending her life against her wishes would be wrong (but fixing the immediate illness is still okay for whatever reason). As the flashback winds down, we see that when the girls learned what Juubey and company are doing, Umika used her memory-rewriting headbutt ability to make him work for them.
Back in the present, Satomi schemes to kill Kazumi. Using Saki as a puppet, she attacks the other girls and kidnaps Kazumi. As the volume wraps down, Satomi reveals that the previous information was misleading, in that the true girl in the flashback was named Michiru Kazusa, and Kazumi is the thirteenth in a line of attempts to stuff the remains of the witch back in her corpse, making a sort of clone. Will Kazumi’s chipper nature be able to overcome this shocking reveal, or will she crumble and fall before Satomi?
In Summary
This volume once again remains an absolute mess. The artwork still prevents action from coming across properly at all (in addition to making the book look awful, of course), and plot doesn’t exactly move smoothly or naturally. Most egregious is the start of the volume, which tries to guilt trip you into feeling bad for the characters only to abruptly and awkwardly yank it back. The book also tries to offer some development for the characters, but they shotgun it off ridiculously fast so it just falls apart. It does fortunately have one halfway decent moment, though, in the reveal of Kazumi’s true identity. It’s only about three pages in a sea of crap, but it fits well with the nature of the anime and isn’t messed up too badly by the artwork and dialogue, so that’s something. Hopefully the series will be able to grasp onto this moment and drag itself up to a level that could be called readable, but looking at the rest of the book that still seems unlikely.
Content Grade: C-
Art Grade: D
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: C-
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: December 17th, 2013
MSRP: $11.99
