Ch. 25 Summary: Tatsumi and his assistant visit Shiina’s sword-fighting class. Shiina beats Tatsumi badly.
Ch. 26 Summary: Bungou investigates Sudou, and ends up having an interesting conversation with the naked girl living in his house.
In Ch. 25, Tatsumi meets Shiina, although neither realizes the other’s true identity. Tatsumi starts off on terrible footing, by telling Shiina what a nice name she has.
Bad move. She proceeds to beat the crap out of him when they practice fencing. Tatsumi is a sore loser. But he has much higher expectations of his assistant:
If she’d lost to the instructor, he’d have replaced her. Which is amusing seeing as how he himself lost to a little kid. Twice. This guy is totally heartless.
And despite learning that a child is involved who knows the sword-fighting technique, which doesn’t amount to much, he declares that it was worth the lives of the 200 people who died. Nuts. I assume that this was is why the chapter is titled “Redemption for the Forgotten”. Some redemption.
Mamiko’s Humanity
Sudou, Mamiko and Bungo could all be described as monsters. Yet it’s interesting how different they are. Both Mamiko and Bungo appear to retain some aspect of their humanity, yet in entirely different ways. Bungo retains his empathy, and cares for Satomi and even Tomonori’s grandmother.
Yet he can kill people without batting an eye. He does this by looking away from them as people and the harm he is causing. Mamiko, however, doesn’t look away:
She can list all the people Bungo has killed and the intimate details of their lives.
She tells Bungo not to look away from what he has done.
And then she tells him to kill even more people without batting an eye.
Bungo’s desire to look away from this seems much more human than Mamiko’s looking straight at the truth, even if it is Bungo that’s the one who killed them.
Mamiko still feels more human than Sudou, however, due to her naming things and apparent concern for Sudou.
Further Thoughts
The new Shadow Dragon is named Sheol. We’ll discuss this more when it shows up. But interestingly, Sudou doesn’t like to name the dragons. Perhaps this is because he’s progressed further than the rest, as Mamiko claims. He’s lost all desires, and become so inhuman he doesn’t even possess the human tendency to give things names.
When Mamiko mentions that she calls Sudou’s dragon child “Trickster”, the English translation adds a lot of information. In the original it only said he was called “Trickster, destroyer of the existing social system.” The rest is added.
OUCH.