This…was an odd volume of School-Live!. It goes from the end of an arc to the moment of truth in just a couple of chapters, and then we get a deus ex machina in the form of — wait for it — a robot virtual assistant lie detector.
Told ya this was a weird volume.
Yuki and her friends decide to leave the college and head to Randall Pharmaceuticals. They believe it’s their best hope in order to figure out the truth about the zombie outbreak as well as ensure Kurumi’s infection doesn’t get worse. The college ladies decide to stay at St. Isidore to protect the place and work on gathering supplies, but the School Living Club does find one person to come along: Shiiko Asaoi, who is interested in research. Considering the way she looks at Kurumi and quickly notices her condition, Shiiko is presented as a potential mad scientist. From the cover, though, she could be a mad scientist or a perverted one.
Regardless, the journey to Randall is the perfect time for some action. After all, they’re going to the potential center of the outbreak. Surely this is going to a tough journey since just getting to St. Isidore took a while.
…Oh, they made it. And they’re in. And now they’ve already found the password to the computer system, have taken some phones for their own use, and figured out that Randall has made a digital assistant named Bowman-kun who can do voice stress analysis. The time it took you to read that sentence is about as long the manga takes to show all those things.
So even though Shiiko and the others have figured out the cause of the zombie apocalypse, the whole journey and discovery is very underwhelming. Especially the sudden “oh, now we can tell what’s the truth or a lie”. Bowman-kun was introduced just to reveal something a little later in the volume, and it is a lazy way to do so.
However, it’s the character interactions that redeem the lackluster plot. The stress of the whole situation begins to build up, with Kurumi’s condition is at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Yuki, as usual, is cheerful and optimistic, aka her hat-wearing self. But at times, the literal and metaphorical girl underneath the hat comes out. She may come out to support Kurumi, but at other times, hatless Yuki is forced to accept that things aren’t always so easy and simple. There are a lot of sweet moments as the manga focuses on its overall theme of friendship, my favorite being the sleepover at the very end. As the girls start to decide their next move, seeing the School Living Club together without all the college girls takes me back to the first and best arc of School-Live!
If only this volume had the slow buildup from back then…Everything else is just way too rushed, and I’m guessing the creators are trying to wrap the story up soon. I don’t know how they plan on doing that, but I hope it isn’t as out of left field as a digital lie detector.