Unlike the last few volumes, this volume has no full story to tell and is instead a continuation from the previous story with the Mystery of the Old School Building Case, and the second story, Murder Collector Case, which begins in this volume, continues to the next volume.
During late noon clean-up duty Kyuu and Meg get caught into a pickle as they find out about some of the mysteries of a trapped man as they find a jail cell beneath the school. However things get serious as an infiltrator assumedly from the main villain group of this series, the criminal organization Pluto, manages to lock both of them behind a trick door and a steel door. It's unlike that anyone would ever find them there... but it's better to try than not try! As Kyuu tries to find a way out of the locked jail, things take a turn for the worse as a seemingly poisonous snake that was dropped into the room through a small jail cell feeding window by the person who locked them, manages to bite Meg's leg...
Kyuu focuses on sucking the poison out of Megumi's leg and reads the DDS notebook which contains information on what to do during different types of crises. It doesn't take long for the two of them to realize that the snake which was in the room had been dropped in by someone else in order to kill them, so the steel door must've been locked on purpose for some reason as well. Meanwhile Kinta, Ryuu and Kazuma get notified that the two other Q Class members still haven't gone home. Thus, the trio decides to head back to DDS in order to find clues of their whereabouts. In there, there are some of the A Class members still in school who then decide to help the squad to find the missing two somewhere in the old school building. The rest of the case is basically just Ryuu and co. going over what Kyu and Megumi went through in the previous volumes as they help the two escape from the dungeon.
As there is a high possibility of Pluto targeting the members of DDS, the teacher community of the school is in uproar. How is it possible to find out the identity of the infiltrator if they've potentially hidden themselves not just with top-grade plastic surgeries, but also with peak-performance acting. A Pluto infiltrator has no problem completely becoming someone else so that no one is able to find out their true identity. A real spy.
Naturally, the DDS also investigated the basement in which Kyuu and Meg were locked in. From there, they found the notebook written with blood left behind the person who was kept in there... Kyuu theorizes that the person had managed to escape that jail cell by attacking his / her capturer. But who could've that been and why was that person kept in there? There notebook is decades old and there're signs of murder being committed that've been left behind. Apparently the original criminal had been caught, jailed and managed to reintegrate into society, but there's clearly something amiss about the mystery of the old school building:
1) Who was trapped in the dungeon and why?
2) What's the purpose of the hidden room?
One also has to wonder about the identity of the construction designer Kuzuryuu Takumi who loves making trick puzzles that create illusionary sights of things as he was he one to create that hidden door which leads to the jail cell in the basement... what could this all mean? Dan Morihiko personally decides to get to the bottom of this decades-old mystery with the help of his secretary and right hand men who teach at DDS. At the same time Ryuu seems to suspect that his caretaker - or whatever - might've had a hand in trying to kill Kyuu and Megumi.
Murder Collector Case
After couple of volumes of short to medium length stories, we're back in business with yet another long tale. The class is in session for the Q Class in the Dan Detective School. Their unnamed teacher shows the class photos of a decomposing body from a murder case. Even though everyone else is disgusted at the sight of the body, Ryu won't even flinch. Instead, just from seeing a single photo he was able to pinpoint that the victim was murdered and killed elsewhere by a semi-wealthy person. After class their principal Dan Morihiko calls for Ryuu and Megumi.
A rumor's been circling the internet at a great speed of a top-class student having snuff videos in his apartment. In other words, a video which shows a real heinous crime known as murder being committed; the death of a girl student Namie who went missing at one point. The problem here however is that the video "collector's" identity was never found out as apparently the one who found a snuff video in his apartment skipped town and disappeared in fear.
Although it may just be nothing more than a rumor, the Dan Detective School decided to butt in to investigate matters due to a missing persons report regading a girl who disappeared a month ago from a prestigious Shibusawa Institute had come in. What matters here is to find out whether or not that girl's disappearance has to do with the 'Collector'. And to do that Meg and Ryuu will be infiltrating the Shibusawa institute meant for the most genius children, and pretending to be students there. Also this case doesn't focus on Kyuu, but Ryuu, we get a nice moment in the beginning of te case in which Ryuu promises to protect Meg if someone tries to come after her life again.
As the duo arrives at their temporary new school the entire first chapter of the case is spent on Ryuu and Megumi trying to get used to how the class operates as no one wants to even look at them and everyone seems kind of annoying. Even the teacher is trying to pick up a fight with Ryuu by giving him a math problem meant for top university students... which Ryuu unsurprisingly immediately solves.
This showcase of pure genius from Ryuu's part continues to impress everyone in this high school. Anyway, the goal is to catch a criminal and perhaps even the rumor-spreader, so after our main duo manages to get to the best class in the school, the special "A Class", next we get to know the cast of characters for this case:
Murasaki Misato (27), English teacher,
Tominaga Masashi (15), 1st year student; he apparently won the drawing lot to get in,
Tooya Kuniko (15), 1st year student,
Asabuki Maya (15), 1st year student,
Kogure Junya (15), 1st year student and the top of the class,
Oobayashi Kazuki (16), 1st year student at risk of getting dropped out; everyone thought he was the 'Collector',
Shibusawa Gakuin (17), 3rd year student,
The idea of world-wide web (the internet) plays a heavy part in this case. One of the core concepts we're introduced to are "rumours" - if one does something notable, those actions will often quickly be posted on the net and start to spread as rumours.
As the 3rd year student Shibusawa introduces Ryuu into the dorm, what awaits them in Ryuu's room is a computer that's been turned on with the word "Collector" showing on it. Next thing they witness on the computer is a video clip of a man grabbing a knife and stabbing another person. However Ryuu quickly realizes that it's simply a fake video - prank by somebody on the campus. Meanwhile Megumi arrives to her dorm to notice that the next room from her has the name plate of the girl who went missing a month prior.
After settling down, Ryuu and Meg start to hunt for the person who pulled the video prank on Ryuu with the help of the DDS's pocket book's fingerprints detection set. It doesn't take long for them to track the culprit to be the top of special A Class's students, Kogure Junya. However right when they figure this out, a mystery person whom he knows invades Junya's room and attacks him. This leads to a tense situation where Junya is taken away by this attacker somewhere, and after waking up tied to a chair, the attacker takes a video camera out of their bag...
The investigation portion of the Murder Collector Case jumps between Ryuu investigating Junya's room as a scene of crime as the boy went missing, and Megumi investigating the girl who went missing, Ogura Emina, with rest of the case suspects / school students who wanted to gather to play detective and to do that everyone had gathered together to form a detective club. However that detective play party has the culprit among them: a person willing to kidnap Megumi in order to use her in the next snuff film as a "supporting character" and it's Ryuu's mission to save her.
Up until this point on the case has had quite nice tense atmosphere to it as the idea behind snuff film murders happening in school setting is really unnerving, however it's also been kind of... bland? The mysteries presented which the characters crack are either not solvable to the reader or they're just something that the reader can hand-wave off and move to the next page. It's quite odd how unnecessarily stretchy these longer cases feel in comparison to the last few volumes' short cases.
After Ryuu Amakusa manages to save Megumi, there's a problem: the other person in that snuff video room, Junya, had seemingly lost his life from being whacked on the head with a glass bottle while he was tied to a chair as Megumi was forced to watch it all unfold. The culprit realized that Megumi and Ryuu are part of DDS, and the culprit might've something to do with our criminal organization Pluto as well. It doesn't take long for the culprit to kill another person cold-blooded and show it on the Snuff Theater link that the culprit seems to post on the school's website. And the perp always focuses on the clock, as if it was telling the real time.
I like that regarding this second murder, the suspect the police have is less likely to have been the culprit as on the video the 2nd victim shows a way with her hand for the suspect to enter her room. Right before her death she'd said to Ryuu and co. that the person the police think of as the most likely suspect is definitely the "Collector". Thus, as Ryuu points out, it's unlikely for someone to let someone who they think is a blood-thirsty killer into their room.
This case has been "fine" and "alright" so far. Nowhere near as uninteresting as the previous volume and I don't see the trick being anything as bad either. The idea of a snuff film creator killer is a very interesting premise for a case as is the school setting, but those weren't really presented as well as they could've been. The case does have quite a bit of tension to when the first victim gets kidnapped and filmed when the killer smashes the glass bottle on his head, but that's also the only notable thing going for this case. As this volume doesn't have any full cases on its own, this case also continues on to volume 8. At the end of the 7th volume Kyuu arrives to the institution Ryuu & Megumi are in, which kind of made this case less appealing as this has happened in quite a few cases so far - just last volume we had the idol-themed case where Kyuu went to investigate alone with Class A's Yukihira, and at the end of the case the other Q Class members arrived to the scene to solve the case. That has also happened multiple times before. So, seeing similar type of writing being used for our main characters is kind of bland... just like this case so far. It's a long case, it's fine and it's alright, but there's just nothing really going for it at the moment. The killer might connect to Pluto in some shape or form perhaps so hopefully the ending amplifies my enjoyment... But from the mysteries we've solved of the case so far (not the murderer's identity which I still don't know about for sure), almost everything's been quite standard fare with no real flavour to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment