Reading Report: 23 August 2026

8月31日のロングサマー

Last reading report in America for this visit. (Almost) three months flew by, and I can't wait to return again, hopefully sooner rather than later. Next time I update the site it will be from Australia.

砂漠

I managed to finish this book ahead of schedule. Yippee!
The last main section, Winter, made up the majority of the content, and then there was a brief time skip to the final Spring of Kitamura's university life where he reflects on how things have changed.

After identifying the next target of the Host Hustlers (my term not theirs), Kitamura, Nishijima, Toudou, and Hatomugi (Kitamura's girlfriend) stake out the house waiting for the crime to happen so they can report it to the police. They're interrupted by Nakamura, a police officer who has been a side character since the last home invasion back in Summer, who tells them to go home, it's police business now. They refuse to leave and instead decide to ring the doorbell of the house to see if anyone is even home, since if the victim is home they'd all be wasting their time anyway. While doing that, Presidentman appears suddenly and starts assaulting Nakamura. The whole commotion brings more police into the scene and Kitamura and his friends decide it's unlikely anything will happen that night since the home has become too high profile for the time.
Kitamura finds out that the Host Hustlers are camping out at an abandoned clinic, and on his way home he meets up with Torii and Minami. Suddenly they hear the voices of the Host Hustlers and Torii rushes in to confront them. Even though it seems dire, Torii pulls out some surprising kickboxing skills and he knocks two of the guys down. The last one runs off towards the clinic and the group moves to follow him. Then the last guy gets into his truck and drives down the narrow alleyway to run Minami over. Of course at this point all the pieces came together. Minami is threatened by the same thing as Torii, and she mentioned way back in Spring that she had once moved a car with her mind. Torii shouts the make of the car to her and it seems to fly over her head, saving her life.
I thought it was a pretty clean resolution that wrapped up Minami and Torii's stories, though it was kind of sad Nishijima couldn't be involved somehow.

The last Spring section was just fine. It wraps up the general themes of the story and reminds us of all the ways the group managed to "make it snow in the desert" in that first year of their schooling.
Overall I liked 砂漠 quite a lot. The characters simultaneously managed to become more nuanced while also becoming more identifiable archetypes, and I felt invested in the success of Kitamura, Nishijima, Torii, and Minami (unfortunately Toudou and Hatomugi were just sort of okay). I was sort of hoping the "mystery" of Presidentman would wrap into some other story thread (I was kind of hoping he would be the kickboxing instructor, Abe Kaoru), or that the Host Hustlers would fold into some other storyline, and some of the characters felt a bit underused, like Koga-san, the elderly retired private investigator, and Asou and Washio who kind of come and go within a single event. The writing felt a bit different to what I expect from Isaka Koutarou, but it was nice to read something outside of his usual style.

魔女が下す鉄槌マレウス・マレフィカルム

After finishing 砂漠 I decided to finish the week off with some manga. I had both volumes of this short series so I decided to read it. This is a manga by the same mangaka as メガロザリア and the shared DNA is definitely noticeable. The story is about a young witch called Maypha who takes a liking to a Robin-Hood-esque golden-hearted thief called Chloe. Maypha is not very worldly and she makes very severe assumptions about the intentions of others, leading to her attempting to kill several people to take them out of the clean picture she's painted around herself and Chloe. Meanwhile a city guard called Gerarle gets inserted into the triangular drama because his wife is a witch and he wants to avoid drawing the attention of witch hunters to the city, so he sets out to dispose of Maypha. Maypha turns out to be capable of world-changing magic powered by her love for Chloe, and that pulls Gerarle's wife and daughter into the drama. Despite being only two volumes long, quite a lot happens to even more characters not mentioned here. The "twist" at the end of the story was fairly well set up, though I wasn't totally convinced by Chloe's affection towards Maypha. It was pretty good.

8月31日のロングサマー

As per usual, I picked up and read this manga the moment it came out. It was a pretty good volume. The couple agreed to live together (but still don't consider themselves to be dating), and the volume was mostly them figuring out what that meant exactly. They go shopping and buy condoms ("just in case"), and plan a breakfast for Takagi to cook in the morning. There were two lengthy scenes where Suzuki ran cartoonish scenarios in his head to figure out how to respond to a situation (the first was a TV host lecture bit which has been used at least once before that I recall), and the outcome of both seemed to work in his favour. There were some real signs that the pair are growing closer and we're getting closer to some kind of conclusive moment for the two of them.

モンスターハンター

A mix of Wilds and P2G this week. In Wilds I started using the Bow and had a lot of fun. I completed the フリーチャレンジクエスト against ヌ・エグドラ.

In P2G I slowly worked through most of the 7★ village quests and unlocked the urgent quest against モノブロス and モノブロス亜種, which I found to be quite challenging and fun with sword and shield. I really need to craft a proper high rank set though, I'm still using リオレウス亜種 but the defence is falling off even with a bunch of upgrades.