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「夜宴」 (Yaen)
“The Banquet”
This series sure knows how to pack in a full house. If the current cast of characters weren’t enough, we now have Jack the Ripper (Saitou Souma) in our midst. You know he’s bad news when Lupin of all people give up the diamond as a lost cause. Jack, not content to rest on his crimson laurels, motivates the re-emergence of Moriarty’s criminal gang in pursuit of a high spec body made of monster flesh. I suppose this would make him as Shinuchi 2.0, begging the question of how Shinuchi will match up against him. In this deck of crazy monsters and humans, Shinuchi is a true wildcard, not having been expected to survive the brutal oni hybrid experimentation and escaping alive out of the lab.
The face offs of wit against wit was truly riveting. First off, we had Shizuku holding her own against Carmilla, blades crossed and fangs bared. Vampires are traditionally the supernatural creature that possesses the utmost seduction and Carmilla here vamps it to her advantage with her kiss of death, turning the tables at the last moment. That is until Shizuku managed to get the upper hand thanks to stabbing with a cross.
Professor Moriarty is working awful hard to create the word’s ultimate monster hybrid and to complete his work, they need the werewolves (and I highly suspect his version of recruit is not the dictionary version). The question is, what does he get out of it? Perhaps satisfaction of intellectual curiosity (which, as his ally Frankenstein’s monster could testify to, can be thin ice to walk on).
Since the premiere, they’ve been steadily building up the conflict between the supernatural hunters and the supernaturals themselves, which is now coming to a head with the Royce Insurance group. Case in point, Lupin and Shinuchi, though initially pitted against each other, team up to incapacitate Reynold (which unfortunately doesn’t work). We have the one total extreme with the Royce group at one end and most likely M’s group at the other end creating new monsters, which places Shinuchi, Lupin, and the Phantom squarely in the middle as the ones caught up in this battle.
That Reynold survives having a heavy organ thrown on top off him and can walk and talk with a giant gash in his head suggests some sort of super human abilities. Ironic how he goes on about hating monsters, when he is not exactly human himself.
Everyone’s in deep shit now. We (and they) thought Shinuchi and Aya were the strongest, near invincible but turns out the new kid on the block, Jack, has them beat. A hybrid between vampire super senses, oni strength, and Aya’s immortality isn’t going to be an easy or even doable match in a fight. The battle of wits was strong here too and thankfully, Shinuchi manages to hold his own. That was a nicely played twist at the end where Shinuchi managed to nab the diamond from Jack.
Unfortunately for our detective gangs (and fortunately for pure entertainment value), it looks like M’s organization didn’t need the diamond. As Shinuchi hints at the end, Jack already solved the diamond’s code and won’t be far behind them in pursuit of the werewolves in the aptly named “Forest of Fangs”.