Battle Royale 3 (Ultimate Edition)

These take a while to read since they’re actually three volumes in one.  I may have complained last time that there weren’t that many deaths.  I know I at least thought it.  This time, damn near everybody was killed.

The first book in this volume dealt with the pair that was rigging up explosives to blow up the school.  Some really horrible things happen, and the basketball player/computer hacker messes things up badly when a new kid joins the pair and the hacker tells him to take a hike because he doesn’t trust him.  The kid doesn’t listen, and the little wimpy kid with the hacker doesn’t understand why they can’t all just ban together.  The kid refuses to leave, and things happen that nobody can take back.  While everyone’s trying to sort this stuff out and hustle out of there in order to blow up the school before it’s surrounded by unsafe zones, the yakuza kid comes through and does what he does best.

There’s a total bullshit scene where the hacker tries a last-ditch effort, with his guts duct taped in his body, to blow up the shed he’s in and kill the Yakuza kid.  The yakuza kid survives in an extremely unlikely fashion, and then survives again when shot at, like, point blank range.  This guy is immortal.  I really honestly hated him A LOT until I read the next book in the volume, which made this one look saintly.

I’ll be honest with you.  I can’t handle Hardcore Souma.  I can handle all sorts of blood and sex and violence and bad characters, but for some reason, I just can’t handle them in the combination she dishes out, possibly because she’s been created to be the most amoral, horrible person ever.  I just read a book with Lucifer as one of the main characters, and not even he was this bad.  Every time Souma shows up, you have to pray that the least that will happen is that someone will be disembowled.  No such luck, and there’s an entire volume of her manipulating two geeky boys, tempting both of them with sex, and then trying to kill them.  It goes into her backstory, where she was molested as a child.  Let me tell you, this doesn’t make me like her any more.  It’s really, really horrible, I promise.  She also masturbates over the dead bodies.  Holy shit was this volume gross, as well as crossing-the-borderline pornographic.

Somewhere in this volume, there is a scene between the yakuza guy, the martial arts good guy, and a rich kid wearing a helmet.  The rich kid was really insane, and I thought this scene was pretty good.  For once, I sort of agreed with the yakuza kid.

The third book in the volume dealt with the main character and all the girls he wound up shaked up with.  They all formed an alliance right out of the school, pretty much every girl who wasn’t Hardcore Souma or the girls she hung around with.  This was a pretty good volume, as the danger element is sort of slowly built up by having one of the girls be a somewhat poorly balanced religious fanatic that sees the main character as a demon.  Her weapon is also total bullshit, but the scene at the end of the volume was truly hardcore and amazing in a violent sort of way.  I think this is probably one of the most Battle Royale moments in the series so far,  and I would go so far as to say the best if I didn’t think that would make me sound like a bad person.

There are six volumes left and about ten people still standing.  There’s one group who hasn’t been shown yet, but I’m not sure how the series is going to maintain the huge amount of action that was in this volume with only ten people.  And when I say action, I mean killing, because that’s why I read this.  You can always have Hardcore Souma play with them one by one for the rest of the volumes, and I’m sure that would fill stuff out, but I would rather other stuff happen.  Like her being killed immediately.