From the back cover:
Fearing that his feelings will only lead to misery, Hyoue keeps his distance from Amane, leaving her confused… and open to a more aggressive classmate’s affections! Threatened with expulsion from school and besieged by restless ghosts, Amane’s life is in danger of collapsing—and her precious demon dog may be the cause!
Review:
Um, Amane is never threatened with expulsion from school in this volume. I have no idea where that came from. The boys have to take some supplementary lessons, but the penalty for not succeeding at those is repeating the school year, not expulsion.
My question from the last volume regarding Hyoue’s human form gets answered in this volume. There is a convenient seal on the island that keeps the koma-oni from leaving, so that’s what’s controlling Hyoue’s powers. He and Amane undergo quite a simple ritual and then, poof, suddenly she has no more issues controlling him.
Back in Tokyo, the chapter with the supplementary lessons is pretty lame, though it does feature Hyoue’s attempts at drawing, which are amusingly wretched. This is followed by a couple more lame chapters about some ghosts haunting Aoi’s film shoot. These would’ve been tedium personified but for some stuff personal stuff happening with the characters. After the binding ritual with Amane, Hyoue secretly requested the village elder to erase his feelings for Amane. Now, believing they’re gone, he’s been keeping his distance, no longer smooching Amane in order to feed on her life force, et cetera. So she worries, until cheered by Aoi, who curses himself for helping his rival out if only to see Amane smile.
So, yes, not great personal drama by any means, but at least it made the goofy plots (Takeuchi admits in the Author’s Note that she is “groping along in the dark”) tolerable.
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