The mysterious creature that got the fifth Abe Morino appears again and flies off with someone.
Ami and Kozue talk about the recent disappearances which the Tengu is rumoured to be behind and Ami remembers a story where a Tengu stopped someone from hunting hawks in the Edo period, and another one where a Tengu took a kid named Torakichi to another world. Of course Maya dismisses this and Kozue is ready to go Tengu hunting but her net lands on Fumiaki.
During class Maya remembers the driver’s words and when she tells Fumiaki about this he laughs in her face, so she goes on to say that the origin of Tengu is from shooting stars possibly relating to UFOs and their beaks could be breathing masks. All of this possibly relates to a scouting party from the aliens that invaded in 2012 and therefore may be related to the Key of Nostradamus, and to Maya they may have killed her father.
As he heads back Fumiaki bumps into Chihiro who tells him to tidy up his clothes and asks why he’s been talking to Maya a lot, so in order to divert her attention he comments on her hair only for it to make her fall in love with him since he’s the first one to say something like that. He notices her breasts and decides to peek into the future to see what would happen if he hooked up with her, and walks away when he sees her with his would be children and him dead behind them.
Fumiaki eventually makes it back to his apartment and his landlady gives him a fright when she warns him about the trash, he collapses on his futon and flicks on the television to see his younger self on a variety show. This makes him nostalgic for his memories with his mother calling him Fumiaki instead of Bunmei and eating his favourite food, curry for dinner.
As he wishes to return to those times he remembers that he really has and dials the number to his old house, however when his mother answers it he can barely get a word out as he hears his younger self in the background. With a tear in his eye he sees a restaurant owned by his landlady’s sister and orders a plate of curry. Things seem to take forever but it’s love at first sight when he sees the waitress who brings it to him. Since all the fans he once had only cared that he could bend a spoon he asks for some chopsticks instead, and just as he’s about to take a bite the waitress, Mikaze Nakegawa calls the boy on television Fumiaki instead of Bunmei.
She gets called away and he leaves with a nice impression of her, he hears something but doesn’t think it could be the Tengu. The next day Kozue is gone which Ami puts to her leaving the school to train for a bit, later Maya asks Fumiaki about the Tengu investigation but with Mikaze on his mind he couldn’t care less. She spots JK with his rods who tells her that he has to find a Tengu for his class on Youkai.
Fumiaki goes to the restaurant again and Mikaze asks him if he’s the new teacher at Waldstein Academy, he goes back to the restaurant again and again and on one of these visits Mikaze gives him a free pudding cup before coming to ask if he wants to look around the town with her.
Of course he agrees and waits for her at the train station when she arrives she surprises him again with the car he had always wanted, a Porsche and after she helps him put on his seatbelt they drive off. They go from spot to spot and at each stop Fumiaki is looking more and more nauseous from Mikaze’s driving, meanwhile Maya maps out the disappearances and gets a hunch about the Zouzan Bunker. Fumiaki and Maya eat oyaki together which leads to an indirect kiss when she offers him some of hers, she then tells him how traditionally oyaki would be covered in ash and they set off for the Zouzan Bunker.
The Zouzan Bunker was built during the later stages of World War II and was where the Japanese Army’s HQ and even the emperor were set to be moved to, as Fumiaki and Mikaze walk together he catches her when she slips and she clings to his arm since it’s scary for her without anyone else around, so Fumiaki puts up a brave front and feels as if his entire body has become his arm. Behind the safety barrier Maya comments on how happy he is. When they see the Senbazuru Mikaze can’t hold back her tears later telling him how those cranes were for the workers who died during the bunker’s construction. He goes to put his hand on her head and she runs into his arms while he thinks of how kind she is to cry for something like that.
Back in the bunker Maya is being chased by the same mysterious creature, she aims her crossbow and fires however it wasn’t alone.
The next episode starts off with Fumiaki learning that both Maya and Kozue are missing from Chihiro, who in her infatuated state asks if he wants to look for them with her, which leads to him hastily making an exit. While he starts searching for the missing students Chihiro’s subordinate asks why she’s like this towards Fumiaki and she simply questions whether it’s wrong to fall in love.
Still searching, Fumiaki meets the a group that’s searching for the missing people, Mikaze also happens to be there so they set off together in her car. After talking with the driver from the first episode Mikaze races to the Amato Shrine. At first it doesn’t look like much but by chance Fumiaki knocks a stone that leads to an underground passage, he tries to use not having any flashlights to go in only to see that Mikaze already has two of them.
Meanwhile, JK and Smile with a giant monkey wrench have teamed up in the search for Maya. Back in the underground passage Fumiaki still tries to act brave and Mikaze asks if they can hold hands, while they walk she tells him how the mountain, Minakamiyama was originally thought to be a pyramid and aside from that there have been many strange incidents surrounding it. A drop of water breaks Fumiaki’s act and he runs away scared, at the exact same time Chihiro describes him in her diary as the exact opposite.
He quickly realises that he abandoned her and starts searching, when he thinks he’s found her he bumps into Maya with her crossbow. He tells her that everyone’s looking for her and she tells him about what she was attacked by inside the Zouzan Bunker, and when the idea that the mountain is a pyramid comes up, she properly explains how Sakai Katsutoki made this claim before and had named another possible pyramid. When she finds out he’s lost as well she hits him.
They head on until they find an entire cavern lit up by the stump of a tree, Maya recognises this as a world tree which has appeared in mythology throughout the world and that the pyramid was to protect it. They photograph it but all that they see is a wasteland, Fumiaki slides down and falls into a giant pile of poop where he finds the fifth Abe Morino’s phone. He tries to show Maya but she doesn’t want him within three meters of her, a giant moth swoops down so they run for it.
Outside JK picks up on something and he and Smile double take as Maya and Fumiaki, still being chased by the moth run behind them. They end up in another cavern and when Maya lectures him on how he should act as an agent from the future, Fumiaki reveals that it was all a lie. After losing his psychokinesis he begged for a living by faking it, one of the resistance members found him and told him he’s now the sixth Abe Morino. Instead of being smooth when they questioned him he was actually terrified when he heard what happened to the fifth and had to be thrown in struggling to get away.
If anything this lowers Maya’s already low view of him and as they keep walking, she tells him how that was the Tengu but more precisely a mothman. As she wonders whether her father’s notebook could save them from them they find themselves in another cavern, filled with cocoons with the people who had disappeared inside, when they try to free Kozue they make a little too much noise which wakes up all of the mothmen. Once again Fumiaki gets scared and runs off, this time abandoning Maya, until he reaches an exit and is just happy to be alive.
Meanwhile Maya fights off the mothmen and saves Kozue, when things look bad Smile and JK come to the rescue and start taking them down. However there’s way too many of them so JK reveals his true passion to be music as he pulls out his keytar and starts hitting the note that they can’t stand, they take the chance to get away and bump into Fumiaki outside.
A bomb goes off inside and they decide to head back to the school after Maya calls Fumiaki a coward as they head back without him, he meets up with Mikaze outside and lies that he had just saved the missing students. Chihiro receives a report that the caves have been sealed and still thinks that Maya is trouble.
Next Episode:
Thoughts:
During the third episode we got to see Fumiaki get a bit of development after being introduced in the last episode, where we learned how he felt nostalgic for his past and how his mother was the only one to call him Fumiaki when everyone else would call him by his stage name, Bunmei. Which if anything he resented since anyone who called him that only saw him as the boy who could bend spoons. This led to an important scene for his character in this episode where he tried to call her but couldn’t even get a proper word through, this was more than enough for him though.
This nostalgia also led him to the restaurant where he met Mikaze, voiced by Minori Chihara, who in his eyes was simply perfect and kept getting better and better, from calling his younger self Fumiaki to having the car he wanted when he was younger. However with all of this she seems a little to good to be true and there’s probably going to be more to her, especially since he didn’t take a photograph her with his phone like he did with Chihiro. It was nice to see fall in love with him for complementing her hair since it really adds more to Chihiro’s character than being a potential villain at the moment, and when Fumiaki decided to checkout what would happen if he hooked up with her was pretty funny. This episode also brought up the Tengu that was mentioned before and the idea that their beaks could actually be breathing masks was pretty interesting theory.
In the fourth episode we saw Fumiaki going to look for Maya and Kozue, and in order to impress Mikaze he put up a brave act and try to find an excuse not to go into the caves, unfortunately neither of these really worked out since she already had flashlights and he abandoned her when a drop of water hit him, which may have been a bit frightening when you consider what they were talking about in there but it doesn’t really seem like a reason to run off screaming.
This led to him bumping into Maya and it was revealed that he had been lying when he told her his backstory, one of the interesting parts of the truth was that he had lost his psychokinesis and it introduces the possibility of him somehow getting it back later on somehow. Mikaze could possibly working with Chihiro given how prepared she was when they went inside and how she was waiting outside when the charges went off, since someone would have had to prepare them. Once again JK and Smile proved to be pretty awesome arriving just in time for Smile to hit around some of the mothmen with his monkey wrench and saving the day with JK’s keytar.
And like how the idea of Nostradamus’ Prophecies has been incorporated into the story, I liked how this episode added the idea of there being pyramids and the world trees that appear throughout mythology all over the world, there’s just something about things being completely unrelated yet still appearing throughout the ancient world.
Maya calling Fumiaki a coward when they found him outside was pretty powerful for how simple it was, as her opinion of him would have been at an all time low not only after lying but for also completely abandoning her when things weren’t looking so good. And usually something like this can cause a character to try to change somehow, but considering how he acted in front of Mikaze it doesn’t look like he will. However the series is still only four episodes in so there’s plenty of time for him to grow if the production team decides to take this route and how his dialogue in the episode preview seems to hint this.
Gin_no_Dangan 