Well, that escalated quickly.

Mao is kind of the forgotten stepchild of the spring season. It’s the newest fantasy from a legendary female mangaka by an old-school studio, sure. But it’s the one hardly anybody is talking about. Sunrise is no Bones (which originally spun off from it). Mao sells decently, but it’s not an overall top-20 volume seller like Yomi no Tsugai. There’s no big-name director like Andou Masahiro involved here. It sort of clips along under the radar, doing it’s thing, barely drawing any attention.

I tell you what, though – Mao sneaks up on you. It’s not as instantly grabby as Yomi no Tsugai, but it steadily builds momentum as it progresses. It may suffer from being more obviously self-derivative but it still has a really compelling premise. And it’s sneaky good in terms of production values, too. There is something to be said for pedigree – a mangaka willing to let the audience in on their secrets slowly. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that nothing is quite as it initially appeared with this series.

In fact, I’m not exactly sure anything can be taken at face value at this point. Nominally Nanoka has returned to the “present” on August 15, 2019. That means she’s been missing for a month. But while she does have 500 messages on her phone, her grandfather hasn’t bothered to submit a missing persons report. And then there’s those smoothies, which are obviously off in more than just taste and aroma. Yet Nanoka keeps drinking them as instructed. Fortunately this time she remembers the “antidote” Mao gave her (his choice of words really should have made more of an impression on her) and pops one. And soon the memories start coming back – the ones the smoothies are clearly suppressing.

I don’t know who “Grandpa” is, but it’s pretty obvious he’s not Nanoka’s grandfather (whoops). That man was dying on the day she got into the accident, ten years earlier. I thought maybe he might be the Byouki himself, but that doesn’t quite fit. Is he even human (Uozumi certainly isn’t), or even “real”? Nanoka does the smart thing and races back to the shoutengai (Shiraha-kun spots her doing so this time) – Mao is the one she should be asking for answers. When she arrives in the past he seems to be gone, perhaps having heeded her advice to flee before the great earthquake. But he’s actually still in town, he’s just been asleep for ten days. If this quake is really going to happen, it’s an opportunity to confront the Byouki that he just can’t pass up.

He doesn’t have to wait long. This is the fated day, the quake hits, and all hell breaks loose (the Mune-itachi soon arrive to spread the fires). And just as Shiraha’s accounts said, a giant cat’s face is visible in the sky. We hear from the Byouki (Matsuyama Takashi) for the first time. He’s got lots of interesting things to say, though demanding that Mao give his body back is the first of them. Perhaps the most interesting is that both he and Mao were “framed” 900 years earlier – on the day Mao’s master was killed and his fate was sealed. Mao takes a form we’ve never seen before – and Nanoka recognizes it as the seven-tailed beast she saw on that fated day when she lost her parents.

Just what the heck is going on here? Who is the “Nana” whose name is referenced? Is it possible that the Byouki is not a villain after all – or at least not the villain? At the very least he still wants a vessel very badly – and once he recognizes that Nanoka too carries his blood, he’s willing to switch to Plan B. As if all that weren’t enough, the Nanoka from ten years in the “past” – so 86 years in the future – shows up. And the Byouki kidnaps her through a portal and escapes. What we know is that Mao’s beast form is the Byouki’s original body, and that the two were somehow “fused” on that day 900 years ago. The Byouki is probably bad, but I get the feeling that when he says nothing will be settled by he and Mao battling each other, I suspect he’s telling the truth.