Once more this thrilling crime manga mixes it up with some comedic moments in this omnibus, which sees things take a big turn for those at the top.

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and hitman The Fable, currently working at a design company under the name Akira Sato, has been given a job to make some flyers. Meanwhile his pretend sister Yoko is sharpening up her own fighting skills.

However things at the Maguro Group (who are hiding the two) are taking a turn for the worse. A group led by the shunned Shuichi Sunagawa has arranged to try and assassinate at least one of the senior members of the group. They do so by poisoning their food, leading to the murder of one of the top two members. This also results in a vacancy within the higher ranks of the organisation, and Sunagawa’s plans to take it for himself. The main issue is how Sunagawa and his gang can get rid of his rivals for the same post.

While this obviously leads to great drama with the issue of who is going to die at the top of the organisation, depending on how the poison works, as well as the fighting within the group, this whole set-up also leads to one of the more comic moments in this edition. One of the people Sunagawa decides to stop is a guy who organises orgies. When Sunagawa’s goons turn up post-orgy to sort him out, the man in question is wearing nothing except a frilly maid apron, a single cat-paw mitten, a single leather cuff and a loose ball gag, which makes for a bizarre sight, given all the action that is going all around him.

One downside to this, however, is that while most of the action is focused on the Maguro Group, little happens to Fable/Akira himself in this collection. In this omnibus, it is mostly the intrigue of the inner workings of the organisation. Yoko arguably has more laughs with Fable/Akira, when she gets involved in a remote drinking battle with someone she had previously beaten before. That’s not to say Fable/Akira is totally left out, what with his limited understanding of Valentine’s Day, not helped by the fact that he doesn’t really like chocolate, which causes problems with the Japanese custom of boys getting chocolates from girls on that day.

Production-wise, we get the odd colour page and a few translation notes. Otherwise nothing appears to be problematic with either Adam Hirsch’s translation, Adam Hirsch’s lettering, or the editing from Ben Applegate and Thalia Sutton. Abigail Blackman once again does a great design for the cover.

As for what we can expect next, well, one thing we do know is that we are now deep within the latter stages of The Fable. There are only three more omnibus collections left after this, so it would appear that the struggle between who will gain control over the Maguro Group will become the main focus of the rest of the story. In what exact way The Fable, Yoko and their friends will get dragged into all of this remains to be seen.

Our review copy from Kodansha was provided by Diamond Book Distributors.