The flashback continues! This time showing us how Fai came to be in Seresu, and what made him leave (basically, Ashura is a coldblooded fiend...or is he? [He is.]) Kurogane tries to snap Fai out of his pity party by drawing his sword against him (!!!), and once snapped out, Fai dukes it out with Ashura as more of his past is revealed and Sakura's body is in danger.
I finished this volume feeling confused. Part of it was visual, part of it was story. While it really was a treat to see Kurogane and Fai actually fight each other, that, along with Fai fighting Ashura, were kind of hard to make complete sense of in one reading. I've never had a problem with CLAMP's actions scenes before, but this time there just seemed to be way too many magic swoops and swirls (even more than usual). This hurt things a lot, especially near the end of the volume, where a bunch of black swirls spread out everywhere. I eventually realized this was supposed to be some sort of sphere closing in around them, but it was very hard to notice that until the end of that particular sequence. Don't get me wrong, there are still some nice visual moments throughout the volume (this is CLAMP), but there were just as many moments where the effects were overdone, and ended up hurting the clarity of some scenes. There was also this bit (when Kurogane first draws his sword), where Kurogane slashes and all of sudden the area he slices cracks like a glass wall, and a bunch of shards fall, each with an image from Fai's past. The effect was nifty, but I couldn't help wondering...where did that wall come from???? Was it some sort of projector screen where they were viewing Fai's past? If so, there was no evidence of that at all in this or the previous volume, until Kurogane broke it.
There were also some story elements that just seemed iffy. It seems like Fai's memories were tampered with, but because no one ever says this outright(well...Fei Wang says something to that effect near the end), it makes things kind of confusing. The biggest point of confusion involved the curses, though. Fai's first curse was that he'd kill someone with more magic power than him, and that one's already been activated and done with. At the end of the previous volume, Fei Wang says something along the lines of "Your second curse, you need not remember it. From here on you will be trumping moves of my plan," which makes it sound like the "trumping" is the second curse, meaning Fai would be his puppet. But then the second curse activates near the end of this book and it's something completely different, which threw me for a loop. It took a trip to Wikipedia (at the risk of spoilers!) to sort things out. The problem was the bit in the previous volume. It seems that in between the "second curse" phrase and the "trumping" phrase, there was some block of memory that was censored. The problem was, there was nothing that visually or textually implied that, making it seem like the second phrase followed right after the other. Maybe that was their intent, though. Coincidentally, that trip to Wikipedia also cleared up another point brought up in this volume regarding Fai's back tattoo. I shouldn't have to resort to Wiki to understand things. Also, I, and possibly CLAMP, completely forgot that Fai became a vampire not too long ago, so when I remembered that fact, I was kind of surprise that it didn't come up even once in the most Fai-centric story so far.
Essentially, while I'm almost sure there are no gaping plotholes, because of CLAMP's writing style, it feels like there are. I guess by now I should just accept this as CLAMP's style. Show us random things (like Kurogane's completely nonsensical action at the end), and only explain it after we've racked our brains trying to understand it.
All in all, it was a flawed, but not terrible volume. Confusions aside, the storyline was resolved and we got some closure regarding Fai's past, and it was great to finally see Fai going all out.
Now, Yuko, come and explain everything next volume, thanks.
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