Fight the monsters at your own peril, lest you become one. It’s an old adage, and a terribly true one, as Shiki Tohno has discovered in volume 2 of Lunar Legend Tsukihime. His power to destroy things and kill living beings by cutting along their “death lines” was put to the test in the first volume when he ended up in the service of one vampire, the pretty Arcueid, trying to destroy another vampire, the aptly-named Nero Chaos. That struggle devastated a hotel floor and left Tohno badly injured, and as he recuperates in hiding with Arcueid looking over him, he learns a bit more about the creature he’s paired himself up with and the monsters they’re both fighting against.
Arcueid may nominally refer to herself as a vampire, but she hasn’t drunk human blood — not once in her over eight hundred years of existance, knock on wood. She’s a “true ancestor,” one of the original vampires who have been around since time immemorial. Nero and his ilk are “dead apostles” — humans that have turned to vampiredom and pose grave danger to everyone, human and vampire alike. Arcueid’s mission — and now Tohno’s as well — is to hunt down these abominations and terminate them. The history lesson’s interrupted when the TV news begins broadcasting word of the massacre at the hotel… and Tohno’s classmate Yumizuka, the object of his unrequired affection, may have been at the hotel that night.
Night falls, and as soon as Arcueid has enough of her strength back, she and a now very deeply troubled Tohno set out to destroy Nero. The battle scene that ensues takes up the vast majority of the volume — it’s drawn out and incredibly violent, and during the process Tohno unlocks another native skill. He now not only sees the “lines of death” in everything, but also crucial “points” that can be struck at to create even more devastating effects.
There’s more — not only crucial details about Nero’s bizarre constitution (he’s not so much one being as a composite of many) but Tohno’s own. He has the capacity to become a killer, a monster on the order of the one he’s taking down — and what’s more, put his own life in danger to demonstrate that. It bothers him deeply that he’s capable of these things, especially when he made a promise to uphold a different set of personal standards a long time ago. The bad news is that he may not have the luxury of making that kind of moral choice anymore.
The final stretch of the book ties up a few loose ends for the volume, although not very convincingly. As it turns out, Yumizuka and her family weren’t at the hotel after all, and the way Tohno’s elder sister deals with his extended disappearance brings new meaning to the term “hand-waving”: she gets angry about it, and then amazingly takes on face value Tohno’s statements that he just can’t talk about it. Right. On the plus side, at least he faces up to her anger like a man, something I don’t think I could have said of him in the first volume. Volume 2 then concludes with some of the most blatant foreshadowing imaginable: Tohno telling himself “It’s all over now” — followed by Arcueid, on top of a building overlooking Tokyo, peering down into the crowd with squinting eyes.
Again, I’m pleased with the way this series has been able to balance a fundamentally dark story against some more light-hearted material. What I worry about is whether that balance can be kept, especially when some of the character-related elements of the story (Tohno’s sister, mainly) get dealt with in a faintly dismissive way.
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