♪I've Got a Beautiful Feeling / Everything's Going My Way♫

YesAsia.com uses USPS for its free shipping, so you can track an order once it makes landfall on this side of the pond. Thus, when it arrived in Illinois on Sunday, I was full of anticipation. Sadly, however, it arrived in Missouri four days later. I have no idea what was with that, but it somehow managed to get here this afternoon nonetheless—right after I'd finished rereading HELLSING.

In any case, I didn't manage to get any YuriHime Comics publications in this batch, but I still had one high-priority item: HAYATE CROSS BLADE Vol. 7. There'll be spoilers for up to that point, but there's only one person who has me on the friends list who's likely to ever read it, and I reckon she already has.

Ms. Zhū is still damn nifty, but more important was the much-awaited Shit-Bourgeois fight (or "kakumei vs. anarchy," as seems more appropriate now). I also notice that the ten battle is between the two S-rankers with weird belts. Ms. Inori must feel a bit left out, being the only one of the four combatants who speaks like a normal person.

Of course, with Ms. Mikado and Ms. Inori stepping into the spotlight, it's the perfect time to debut their Shigeru-Family mascots. Ms. Mikado gets tsun-dere points for her reaction to that. And I'm sure Ms. Kikkawa and I weren't the only ones surprised that Ms. Mikado took Shigeno rather than Shigerō.

We also get the first real glimpse of their background. I can't say I appreciate the direction of Ms. Mikado's motivation, but I do like her challenge to Ms. Inori the second time they met. I'm guessing that she was down about the business with Ryōichi, and it was the perfect time for Ms. Mikado to step in with a line like that. In the present day, it looks like Ms. Mikado is resigned to Ms. Inori's quitting because of it, but I'm hoping that it'll turn out all right, if Chopin's etude has anything to say about it. Also, it's interesting to note that the gender-like appearance and personalities of the heirs to the two rival corporations started out opposite one another and both reversed somewhere in-between. . . . (Ms. Amachi still has a lot of story left in her, so we'll presumably see what changed her at this point. Her father also looks rather young, if you ask me. . . .)

Meanwhile, the fight itself was predictably brief, even with the handicap. (Ironically, the word "punk" also has a similar meaning to "zako" in English.) The previous white-suit fight had a similarly obvious result, but Ms. Amachi drew it out for aesthetic purposes (although not as far as she claimed in the side story about the drama CD). Speaking of aesthetics, Ms. Shidō's and Ms. Tonami's custom blades looked rather cartoony to me. The latter is probably just because the basket hilt is too big in comparison to the more important blade, but in the former case I would have to commend Ms. Hayashiya for thinking up a logical reason for having a ridiculously large sword in a system that's essentially to first blood, even if it doesn't look good.

Also, the extras include the results of the second character-popularity contest (but not the episode-popularity one, oddly enough). The top two ranks are the same as before (which is perhaps why the numerical scores are not listed this time, as it made everyone but Ms. Kuga look pretty sad before), but I'm happy to have spent $1 to contribute to Ms. Mikado's placing at 4th, right behind Ms. Inori. As she already featured Ms. Kuga and Ms. Shizuma, Ms. Hayashiya instead included a gift illustration of the aforementioned runners-up (and our heroine) that would be suitable for daily_yuri if I could get a scan of it, but sadly no side story about them this time. Predictably, my other three votes didn't even manage to bump the poor side characters 20th place (which means they lost to what appears to be either a mascot or a cookie), but at least the captain of the nurse-tai appeared in one frame again, much to my surprise.

Coincidentally, Ms.? Maitake is in the middle of putting on a week-long HAYATE CROSS BLADE solo festival, centering on one couple each day. It sounds a bit lonely, so I at least will be sure to drop by on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Day 2 reminded me of something that I had overlooked: Ms. Hoshikawa and Ms. Tsukishima are now D-Rankers (last we heard), which means that they would be perfect targets for Ms. Nagi, who's going to be a big fish in a small pond when she gets there. She hasn't been mentioned for a long time except in the Kurogane×Shizuma battle, but I haven't given up on her. . . .