Dec 07, 2025
And it's over. I liked the ending and I'm glad it went into the bittersweet route rather than just pure bitter(well, specifically, I liked the ending the chapter prior to this one set with out main girls. I don't care so much for the cats, sorry Time)
All in all, this was the most action and adrenaline packed out of any entry I've read for this contest, for good and for bad. No sense talking too much about the pacing because that's been something you knew was a problem for at least a month, but gonna say I really missed some more chill and development for our girls, especially Ryou and Fuji who were by far the most interesting two.
Also, with how big of a character "trait" Toki's earlier carelessness was, I kinda expected her to somewhere at somepoint get burned and learn some kind of lesson, but instead the topic kinda just faded out and never truly got addressed.
On the plus side, the story was rarely ever boring. Stuff was always happening, flashy, edgy and overdramatic, but in a good sense, because it was exactly what the story wanted to be, and what I singed up for when I started reading it. A bit shallow at times, yeah, and some of the endgame dialogue like the one from the power of friendship and the "why I fight" chapter were cringey and undercooked, but that's another consequence of the word limit, the ideas itself could work if developed with more Time(heh). And some fights were flawed like I mentioned, but throughout most of the story, especially the earlier half when pacing wasn't such a glaring issue, I was just having a blast eating up fight after fight with some humor in between. The Fujiko nicknames are my favorite "running gag" by far, and ironically one thing I would hardly find repetitive even if it got much more used than it ended up being. The romance... was there, I mean, can't ask much from a pure action story, but at least the truly heartfelt interactions were cute even if the buildup to them was kinda plain.
My final verdict is this: it may be a flawed story, but it was also very goddamn fun to read.
