Angel Sanctuary Vol 13
Setsuna is starting to make a habit of flipflopping between deep angst and speeches. Actually, that’s nothing new. He mopes a lot about the last volume. Can’t really blame him. Or Kira and Kato deciding to bully him out of it. I am amused that one of Kato’s objections is that Setsuna is making Kurai cry. I wonder if he’s decided that making girls cry is a bad thing now, or if it just means that her head is no longer in the proper position to be used as an armrest if she’s crying.
We also have Kurai in pigtails, which is amazingly cute, though Kaori Yuki seems to be getting more and more prone to dressing her up gothloli style.
I think Kato was also randomly stripping in the background at one point after being dragged into the fountain by Setsuna. Kira was making a speech at the time, though, and I was busy enjoying the Kira while it lasted.
Kurai gets the “stay behind” speech again when the boys go off to rescue Sara and Zaphikel, but at least this time, it was “stay behind and gather armies to rush to our rescue” instead of “stay behind and concentrate on looking cute so guys will want to rescue you.” Somewhere in there, Kurai also remembered seeing Kira’s face on a demon lord when they were in hell. I don’t blame her for forgetting about that. I did.
Back in heaven, a mad scientist wants Kato for his body. This is far less slashy than it sounds. (I hope. My brain is still adjusting to Rosiel/Katan…)
Meanwhile, Raziel tells Setsuna he’s a loser and goes off to be a pintsized badass and storm Heaven to rescue Zaphikel. This is far more convincing than it should be. During this, Sevothtarte is having the time of her life torturing Zaphikel. She seems to have either been concerningly in love with Anael, or to have had a concerning love/hate thing going for her. Or both. It’s also randomly confirmed that by suspicions are correct and Sevothtarte is Lailah. (WOO!)
Then Sevy cuts Zaphikel’s hair so that it’s in the same style it was back when he was an assassin/mass murderer stealing her beloved Anael away. Then she has his wings cut off, which turns Zaphikel into a cannibal. This results in a scene where Raziel offers himself to Zaphikel as food as if her were the damsel in a romance novel. This would be much less concerning if I weren’t convinced that Raziel is Zaphikel and Anael’s child.
There’s also a person who is using an evil eye (literally) to make Setsuna try to kill Kira, until cannibal!Zaphikel stabs out his eye.
Kira also spends a lot of the volume in military uniform. There’s almost too much going on to appreciate that.
In an odd little aside, Sara compares herself to Rapunzel, but comments that in her case, neither the prince nor Rapunzel has long hair. That seemed odd, until I remembered Alexiel, though I can’t recall if Sara knows about the Alexiel bit. You’d be surprised how easy it is to forget that your leads are reincarnations of angels who are siblings in their current incarnations, and how much of that each one knows.
Rosiel looks more and more like a woman every time he shows up. Time to start the “Rosiel is a man! A man!” chant again.
In a side note, Kaori Yuki mentions that her editor said to stop adding so many characters all the time. I’m not sure she listened.