Rico, through his last report, and Holo continue to recount what happened in the last town they visited before Rico was suddenly and brutally murdered by the one-eyed man and the other ayanashi try to piece together what the inciting incident was.
As it turns out, the ayanashi organization has some hidden and truly dark secrets that play a role in many of the things Holo has experienced in the past few months and it seems that all of this is coming to a head.
As I mentioned in my previous review, I was shocked to see that Ayanashi was going to be wrapping up in this fourth volume given how many tantalizing plot threads were still being introduced in volume 3. While it’s clear that the series should have been longer, I can say that the series does wrap up better than I expected, even if Yukihiro Kajimoto lampshades the number of plot points that had to be axed in the bonus pages of volume 4.
The sad thing is that I don’t think Ayanashi needed to be a terribly long series in order to satisfyingly resolve all of these points! If the series had been eight volumes long, or possibly even just six (both of which would still be pretty short runtime as far as shonen series are concerned) I think it would have been perfect so it’s frustrating to see that for whatever reason this was not to be the case.
Regardless, Ayanashi barrels through its final volume, finishing the flashback, providing more explanation on what the characters think is up with the one-eyed man (and we see nothing to contradict their speculation), and then explain in a hurry some of the secrets of the ayanashi organization that the series hadn’t even really hinted at so far.
“Explain” is a better word to use here than “resolve” and I think Kajimoto made the right call. It does mean that this volume feels more like the end of an arc rather than the end of a story, especially with the number of “problems” that still need to be fixed, but they are now problems where Holo and company have a plan and are in a much better place to face them. I do feel that Holo’s character growth overall was a bit too quick. He goes from being almost completely unsociable in the first volume to begrudging quite quickly; the flashback at the beginning of this volume shows that the groundwork for his growth was actually laid before the story started, but the death of his brother simply made him detour a bit.
Overall I’m sad to see this series go. It had great art for a debut series, a setting that was slowly coming together (and amusingly it was technically an “isekai” for certain characters), and just had a surprising amount of warmth to it. Kajimoto sadly doesn’t appear to have created any other works since this one but if they ever put out another I’ll be sure to give it a shot!