Ajin, vol. 13 review

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Image used here from the Amazon page for review purposes only.)

Ajin, vol. 13 (Good Afternoon, 2017), by Gamon Sakurai. Grade: A-.
Satou and his two cokeheads have gotten into the safe room with the Prime Minister and his guards. Satou uses his smartphone to send out a message to the news media that he's been "forced" to take action against the goverment against his will. He's got the Prime Minister in the room with him, and he's going to give the government two hours to capitulate before implementing the next phase of his plan. After turning off the phone's camera, he proceeds to shoot his prisoners in the heads, then goes into the next phase anyway.

Back at the abandoned love hotel, Kou tells the rescued fireman about Satou, and they do a sweep of the building before leaving to rejoin the others. They discover the programmer, Okuyama, sleeping after being hit by the tranq dart. He did rig a lithium battery to explode over his chest. This blows up now, resetting him, and Kou and the fireman jump back and prepare to shoot him again. Okamoto wants out, and offers to hand over his smartphone if the other two let him get away. He says that he'd always thought those two were the weird ones - when faced with overwhelming evil, the "smart" thing to do is team up with it until it's safe to run away. That's what he's doing now. The fireman takes the phone, and he leaves with Kou. Okamoto then deletes every single online record containing information on him, pulls all the hard drives out of the the PCs in the room, douses it all with gasoline, and torches the room. He tells his black smoke ghost that it looks like they're all alone again, (the ghost acts confused) and they leave.

The TV news stations cover the story about Satou, and Kei and the others get into a multi-way on-screen smartphone chat to figure out what Satou can possibly do in just 2 hours. Meanwhile, the remaining government and military leaders are arguing their options, too. Kei has gotten into the air base, and he's pretty sure that Satou plans on using one of the jets there. He races out to the runway, and finds a brochure for the aborted open house and air show. Looking through it, he latches on the presence of an F-15 that was to be used in the show. He doesn't know what F-15s are, and the fireman yells into Kou's phone that it has a dual engine at the tail. During this, Satou has climbed up through an escape vent from the safe room to the surface of the air field, down at the end with the jets. He gets into the nearest F-15, buckles himself in, and taxis to the runway before taking off. Kei, looking for jets with two engines at the tail, sees Satou approaching. He uses a pair of pocket binoculars to look into the cockpit before being overwhelmed by the backwash when the fighter blasts over him. As Kei is on the runway, he's spotted by one of the TV crews, and they broadcast his face to TVs everywhere. In the hospital, Kei's mother and sister see him (his mother calls him "stupid" again), and in a prison elsewhere, one probably-forgotten hothead witnesses his friend on the communal TV. The friend's associate in the prison, an Ajin, notices this.

I may have made a mistake in the volume 12 write-up, in that the base leader that got killed by Satou in the initial invasion was not Kouma. Kouma, who had been part of the Ajin research group with Tosaki, has reached the Army's planning center, where his commanding officer is having all the records shredded to limit his exposure in case Satou finds them. Kouma is disgusted at this show of cowardice, so when he gets a call from Tosaki, he agrees to have his men placed under Tosaki's command. Kouma's boss threatens to shoot him if he doesn't drop the phone right away, and Kouma says, "If you're going to shoot me, shoot." The commander pulls the trigger, but doesn't have the guts to aim the gun at Kouma when it goes off.

It turns out, that with the F-15, Satou can hit Mach 2.6, and reach the Diet Buildings in Tokyo in under 50 seconds. Further, Kei was able to tell, through the binoculars, that Satou's left arm is missing. He's going to pull a variant of the fried chicken trick. Satou had his arm cut off and left on a table in the safe room underneath the base. He's wearing a bomb vest, and aiming the jet at the building that one of the remaining men on his "kill" list is in. The vest explodes, destroying Satou's body, just as the jet slams into the building and wipes out the target and everyone else nearby. With his body vaporised, the only place the black smoke can go is to the arm, where his entire body gets restored. Kei figures that with a 5-minute cycle time, Satou can take out 20 targets within a 3000 km radius in the two-hour limit.

Izumi, Tanaka, the fireman and Kou want to know what Kei's next move is, and as Satou blasts by in a second jet, the boy says "We can't stop him." The others are stunned and wonder if he's given up. Instead, he says that Satou's Achille's heal is his left arm. If they can get to wherever it's being kept, they can try lowering it by a rope into a narrow sewer pipe or something. The next time Satou materializes, he'd be encased in concrete and rock, and there'd be no space for his ghost to get in to rescue him. But, where's the arm? The fireman remember's Okamoto's phone and presses the one icon on the screen. A map pops up with a bunch of google map GPS markers. Six of the markers are close together, and may represent the stooges Satou used to help shoot the soldiers at the air base. Those guys are still clustered together, guarding a group of hostages, but they've spotten Kei and are currently approaching to find out who he is before killing him. That leaves three other markers relatively nearby, which may be where the arm is.

Izumi and Tanaka reach the outer air base wall, where they spot the ladder the two coke heads used to get inside. A few minutes later, Kou and the fireman get to the same spot. Then, the stooges get close enough to Kei to start taking shots at him. One shot blows off his right index finger and destroys the phone he'd been holding. Satou flies his jet into another building. Kei shoots one stooge in the head, but is outnumbered as the others encircle him. Before they can do anything further, though, someone snipes them from above. Kei looks up to see a troop carrier chopper. A couple of extremely well-armed and armored soldiers rappel out and tranq him. One of the soldiers has a wrist-mounted face recognition system aimed at Kei. The system identifies the boy as "a friendly." The soldier kills Kei to reset him, and when he recovers, he's surrounded by 5 men wearing "Anti-Ajin Forces" signs on their backs, all pointing out away from him. One of the soldiers asks him for orders, and he tells them about the remaining map markers. The soldiers side with him, and they advance to Kei's target.

In the prison, the one Ajin prisoner tells Kai to make his break for it when the time is right after they get to the exercise yard; just run for the wall and don't look back. At the same time, the cokeheads are cutting off Satou's arm for the next jet attack. Elsewhere in the base, Kou and the fireman discover their target - an emotionless guy on the third floor of a nearby building who starts shooting at them. They get into the building, but are separated by the guy's ghost when it attacks them. The fireman reaches the room, and learns that the guy is prepared - he's poured gas everywhere, which he ignites. This triggers the sprinkler system, which makes it harder for both of them to control their ghosts. However, he also has a tranq gun aimed at the fireman, and is sure he can't miss at this range. Tanaka and Izumi run into a ghost that speaks to them, and it identifies Tanaka. When the ghost runs forward, Tanaka tells Izumi to leave and find the Ajin operator, just as a second ghost arrives and throws Izumi through a warehouse window. Up above them, the operator of both ghosts is crouching on the roof of another building, and he goes into a rant indicating that he has issues with his father. Tanaka and his ghost rush forward to fight the operator's two ghosts. And finally, Kai is in the prison courtyard. He stands up, catches the eye of his associate, and runs for the wall. Something he can't see grabs him and takes him soaring up into the air. It's a big winged ghost, and it tells him that before they can reach the air base, it will probably break up in mid-air and the boy will have to fend for himself after that. Kai is ok with this.

Summary: Oh yeah, things have come a long way from volume 1. The art has really improved, and the pacing is heart-stopping. I'm really looking forward to the next volume (this was a very fast read, although there was a lot of more-difficult military-related kanji that I don't know). Highly recommended if you like violent action manga.