By Kana Akatsuki and Suoh. Released in Japan as “Shunka Shūtō Daikōsha” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sergio Avila.

After all the trauma of the first four, I noticed this one was a stand-alone volume, and I hoped that it might be a breather, a chance to relax and perhaps have a more lighthearted plot. And indeed the first half of this book fulfilled my wish. For the most part we have not had to deal with the supernatural person being in love with their minder in this series. Agents tend to love other agents, or other unrelated people. This also applies to the Archer of Twilight. Oh, sure, they are so ridiculously close to their minders that you can see the relationship as homoerotic (see my prior reviews regarding Hinagiku and Sakura), but we haven’t really had a romantic relationship until this book. Kaya is a teenager who is unable to deal with a crush, and her minder, Yuzuru, who clearly loves her deeply but is repressing it. The two of them push against each other, and get grumpy and sad, and it’s adorable. Well, until it isn’t.

Last time we met the Archer of Twilight, Kaguya, whose arrows brought about the night. The Archer of Dawn had a brief, minor appearance, but we get to know her here. After being chosen to be Archer, she was assigned a custodian, but he quickly found that walking up and down a mountain every day for years was too taxing for him. His son, however, Yuzuru, proved only too happy to step in and take care of Kaya. And now she’s in high school. She’s even able to go to an actual school, thanks to concessions from the organization behind all this. She’s a bit worried about Yuzuru, though, who’s so awesome and deserves so much better than staying with her his entire life. Even if she really wants him to, but is too shy to say so. And then there’s a landslide, and everything goes to hell.

While you can rest assured that the bad guys who want to control everyone and everything involved with the seasons and the day/night cycle are still here and still bad, I was rather surprised to find that they weren’t behind the natural disaster that leads off the second half of the book. Sometimes tragic stuff happens and it’s just because of natural causes. That said, the theme of this series is still present and correct. When Kaya makes the decision she does later in the book, she knows that she’s going to be punished for it. Everyone does, in fact, and other people are trying to take the punishment so she doesn’t have to. The best part of the book is when, in the epilogue, Kaya is told her punishment will end soon, she briefly feels it’s not nearly bad enough. Whereupon she’s told “You’re still in high school.” As these books go on, other people are bringing up over and over again what they are doing to children, and pushing back is becoming less a travesty and more a necessity.

We’re back to an arc next time, with more focus on Autumn, who played a major role in this book. Till then, this remains very well-written but also a bit worrying. These poor kids.

By Kana Akatsuki and Suoh. Released in Japan as “Shunka Shūtō Daikōsha” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sergio Avila.

Last time I mentioned that everyone in this book is an abuse survivor, and in this book it becomes even more clear that our heroes are all either children or traumatized when they were children, and the bad guys are adults who are seeking to manipulate them for their own ends. It even spells this out literally, with the leader of Doyen Turtle says how good it is that the Agents are young and easily manipulable. The kid we briefly saw in the last book is no exception, and the biggest plot twists revolve around making him have a complete nervous breakdown because of his powers and things he had no control over. Thankfully, the Agents and their Guards are all much better at this than the last arc,. and things actually go swimmingly… OK, partly as even the “good” adult characters are also manipulating everything behind the scenes. A lot of the main characters end up in romantic relationships, and there’s a reason for that – when you can only trust one or two people, you stick with them.

Picking up where we left off, the Agents of Summer are up on the mountain, and have met up with the Archer of Twilight. The other Agents and Guards are on their way there, but are being blocked by the usual insurgents and traitors, because we still have a battle between two organizations, one of whom wants (theoretically) to protect the agents and one who wants to “replace” them all. And then there’s Ruri and Ayame’s fiances, who are also on their way to the mountain… and it turns out Ruri’s fiancee is actually head of the “protect” organization. They both really love their fiancees, something they hope they can convey after all hell breaks loose. Oh yes, speaking of fiancees, Sakura gets a marriage proposal from Hinagiku’s brother, which would keep Hinagiku safe but make Sakura’s life a nightmare. She is, of course, considering it, because EVERYONE in this series hates themselves.

A lot of the back half of this is an action movie, so forgive me if I talk about the couples a bit more. We learn a lot more about Raicho here, who seems to be someone you would not want to trust. He’s never had a girlfriend longer than three months, and regards love as something he doesn’t want to bother with… till he meets Ruri. Ruri is his OTP, even if they get off on the wrong foot, and it brings out… not the best in him. There really aren’t any sweetness and light relationships in this series. But it does arouse his protective instincts. As for Eken, the cause of most of the “mountain” plot, he gets the plot twists, and they’re very good, forcing us to re-evaluate everything we’d been told – and then do it again later. He might be a bit annoying, but given that he’s been super traumatized and is having guns pointed at him, who can blame him?

So things are temporarily safe again, and Summer Is Icumen In, or at least getting married. The next book in the series is, finally, a stand alone, dealing with the other Archer, who we only briefly saw in this arc. Hopefully it will be less fraught. Please keep these poor kids happy, I beg you.

By Kana Akatsuki and Suoh. Released in Japan as “Shunka Shūtō Daikōsha” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sergio Avila.

Boy, the world that this takes place in really sucks, doesn’t it? This is an alternate Japan where the world relies on people with special powers chosen by the Gods (supposedly) to bring about the seasons, and in this book we also find out that there are archers whose arrows bring about day and night every day. When the Agents can’t or don’t do their duty, the area suffers. If the archers miss a day or miss a shot, the area really suffers. Those responsible are chosen right after the previous one dies, get no choice in the matter, and are, as we see in this volume, blamed for almost everything wrong with the entire country. Oh, and because this book loves to pile on, almost all of them have some sort of tragedy and/or abuse in their life, or are currently having it. The premise of this series is being able to overcome that and live happily, but man, it does occasionally make for depressing reading.

After the events of the last two books, everything is… not back to normal. For one thing, there are now TWO agents of summer, something that makes the conservatives in charge of the town of summer furious. There are, in fact, rumors going around that every single bad thing that has happened recently has been because God is angry at the current agents, and they should all be replaced for the greater good. Unfortunately, “replaced” means “murdered”. What’s worse, Ruri and Ayame both have their engagements broken, which completely traumatizes Ayame, who was secretly in love with her fiance (who loved her back, but both are so repressed neither one noticed). Meanwhile, in case you thought we wouldn’t be seeing Hinagiku in this book, no worries. Unfortunately, she too is dealing with the rumors, which state that the two years she spent recovering from trauma are why all this happened at all. Scapegoats for all!

This is another two-parter, and focuses far more heavily on the twin sisters Ayame and Ruri. We get flashbacks to their childhoods, and see exactly how being chosen as an Agent can be completely traumatizing, and can also damage a family – the twins’ parents are on their side, but there’s still a lot of friction, mostly as Ruri is acting like a 10-year-old who is being torn away from her twin and being forced to be an agent of God. Ruri does not at all fit the bill for the ideal agent… but neither does Ayame, who is so stressed and guilty over all of this that at one point she attempts to run away from home. In the present, the scene with the Town of Summer yelling at Ayame for causing all this by not letting Ruri die, and telling Ruri “the dead don’t get to speak here”, is jaw-droppingly horrifying, especially as it hits on Ruri’s own trauma specifically (she uses asterisks for the word “died” at the start of the volume, a common Japanese trope for a person avoiding thinking of trauma). By the end of the volume they’re being manipulated by unseen forces, but frankly, if it makes them more proactive, I’m OK with it.

All this and I didn’t even mention their actual fiances (another abuse survivor, and a man who we know little about but seems to be “likeable sociopath”). The next volume will be highly anticipated. Though also dreaded a little, perhaps.