5 out of 5

This volume rushed by in an intense overload of information and action.  Reading it side-by-side with Blame! enhances its greatness, as we can see the similarities of their shared creator and how he honed his story-telling skills between now and then, while also giving fun food for thought on the connection between the two stories.  …Which just underlines the whole expanding world-building thing.

KoS continues to build on Tanikaze’s adaptation to the garde, taking him through a mini-cycle of a rise and fall from fame while using that same cycle to offer more details about the guana and Nagate’s fellow garde.  Narratively, Nihei’s structure is amazingly on point, jumping to just the right moments before, during, or after events to make the best of their impact or relevance; artistically, some of the big-scale moments are still sometimes hard to parse, but more in terms of understanding the action being shown than being able to pick out guana from garde, and I’m somewhat siding that with being a translation issue, as lines that my brain doesn’t directly recognize as letters are lain atop the art, and so it takes a momentum-breaking moment to work what I’m seeing.

That’s not on publisher Vertical, it’s on me for not speaking / reading the tongue, hence no rating dock.

The relationship stuff still seems sort of jammed in there – several characters fawning over Tanikaze – and feels, I dunno, dated in a way, this reliance on a cute girl / cute guy component, but in volume 2 it does serve as a good counterpoint to the story beat that follows.

A fully satisfying read, offering a lot of info and excitement while still leaving a ton to explore.