Kami no Tou: Tower of God – 10

「悲しみの先に」 (Kanashimi no saki ni)
“Beyond Sadness”

If you’re getting a notion that Tower of God is coming nowhere close to telling a complete story in 13 episodes, you’re certainly right. I have no inside information on what the production committee’s plans are – my working assumption is that we’re one and done, because I don’t see this series as being all that profitable. But in truth your guess is as good as mine, and it’s certainly not impossible that more anime is in Kami no Tou’s future. I’d love to see it as it, would be a shame for things to end basically at the beginning, and while the manhwa loses its way pretty badly there’a a lot of really good material to go through before that happens.

As with last week there’s a lot to unpack here (the anime can’t be accused of frittering away what time it has), starting with the Khun-Hoh situation. It’s not totally made clear in the anime (and it’s been a long time since I read this portion of the manhwa), but apparently Khun’s plan was to manipulate Quant (this intellectual matchup is obviously not a fair fight) into protecting Rachel so as to thwart Khun’s plan to use Hoh to eliminate her as his competition. That’s some serious five-dimensional chess from Khun right there.

After a too-brief check-in with the best Jahad princess, taking the long way up while the examinees get the fast route, Chibi-Rak finally makes his appearance (the result of pissing Yu Han Sung off). Rak is a riot at any size, but there’s a definite aura change when he takes on this new form. Bam informs his friends that Rachel has been paralyzed from the waist down as a result of her injury – while Rak is prepared to talk him out of abandoning his quest to climb the tower, it’s not necessary – Bam says he’s going to go it anyway as Rachel’s legs.

Bam, ever loyal, arranges for Hoh to get a funeral, which both Rachel and Khun manage to get through with a straight face. This is also an excuse for most of the examinees to get hammered, while Bam and Rachel have a little private talk. Rachel is all over the map, but Bam is nothing if not consistent – his devotion to her is complete. Meanwhile Yu walks in on Lo Po Bia the onigiri having a chat with his real bosses, but having been found out, things with Yu don’t go quite as he expects.

As for the results, there are no major surprises – apart, perhaps, from Rachel passing. But Yu declares that her injuries preclude her from continuing. Khun tries to intervene by volunteering to take the much harder administrator’s test (which Lero-ro has told him about) in exchange for Rachel passing, but despite his cockiness Yu informs him that it’s impossible. Only an irregular can request to take that test, and noble scion Khun is hardly that. But he gets a major surprise when Bam announces that he is – and he’s willing to make the same deal.

It’s always hard to know with a skilled bullshitter like Khun, but he seems genuinely shocked that Bam is an irregular. Nevertheless, he stays the course – putting on a charade for the others to try and convince everyone to help Bam pass the test. There’s an incentive here besides loyalty – if you can survive it, this offers a faster path up the tower – and everybody pleads their own reasons for tagging along. But they’re all in – leaving it up to Bam to secure the opportunity by grace of the administrator (who he’s meeting for the second time).