“This world must face destruction. It is your heart and your heart alone which transforms the Alone.”
Summary
Akane tries to get to know the enigmatic Kuroki Rei better, who rejects all her advances and would prefer to keep herself to herself. After she is chastised by a mysterious black bird over her mission to destroy the Manifestation Engine, Rei tries to scale the Engine and destroy it herself without the help of the Alone, and ends up falling in the ocean and washed away by its currents onto a beach, where she is found the next day by Akane, who takes her home to nurse her back to health.
Impression
I was very amused at the episode starting with a blatant Akane ass-shot, not that it wasn’t appreciated of course. The rest of the episode wasn’t so…intellectually shallow though, and many revelations were made. As speculated they focused mainly around Kuroki Rei, the mysterious girl with previously unknown intentions that’s been going around powering up all the Alones, making them much harder for Akane and her friends to defeat. Initially Rei did come off as a very hostile person, acting completely anti-social, and unwilling to talk to anyone outside of class, much less Akane herself – the person Rei knows she’s making life harder for by powering up each Alone she fights. She’s coldly rejected both Akane’s attempts to talk and her invitation to join their group for the extra-curricular summer camp, which didn’t market her out as a very likeable person.
But even so, I’m getting the impression that she’s not a bad person at all – she didn’t give it a second thought and saved a random little boy as she passed by a street, who would have gotten crushed under a steel bar otherwise. Her expression while bird watching is completely different to the persona she puts on when interacting with others, and by then I was under the impression that she’s just a girl who drew the short straw in life. Rei’s entire apartment being pretty much empty apart from one bird (Piisuke) was ominous enough, and the appearance of an otherworldly, clearly evil black bird didn’t help the situation at all. You could infer a lot about Rei’s circumstances through what that bird said – it’s safe to say it’s not from Earth, and is an agent of the Alone in some way, managing to coerce Rei under her control by offering her something that she’s willing to do anything to get – the lives of her parents, who died in the meltdown of the Manifestation Engine that also resulted in the death of Akane’s father. Both Akane and Rei have experienced similar losses from that meltdown, but here’s where the two do completely separate things – while Akane’s trying to live her life on the bright side, Rei can’t seem to let her loss go, and is clinging to all the memories she has of her parents, including the front door key to her old house. True, Rei’s gone through a lot more than Akane, but surely the destruction of the Manifestation Engine can’t be a rational price to pay for what might not even be a promise that bird will keep. And with the bird torturing and pressuring Rei to carry out her mission, I feel sorry for her more than anything.
It probably wasn’t a good idea for her to try and scale the side of the Engine, and somehow destroy it from there. Putting aside the questionable means she must have used to get the machine guns and bombs she did, there’s no way there wouldn’t be ample security all around the Engine, which is literally supporting the energy supply of the entire world. Clearly she’s not confident in the seven more chances she has to power up the Alones and destroy the world through the Engine, hinted at by the seven feathers left remaining on her neck. Anyway, with regards to Akane she’s safely now in the “reluctant friend” category – she’s buckled pretty far against the might of Akane’s overflowing friendship, letting Akane call her Rei-chan and take care of her while she was recovering. Even when presented the opportunity to power up an Alone, she’s already struggling with the difference between her morals and Akane’s take on not harming anyone else for the sake of her parents, and I can see future episodes centering around Akane trying to convert Rei to her cause in a Nanoha x Fate styled manner. I’m sure she’ll come round eventually though – it’s a rule of thumb that cute girls don’t stay antagonists for too long.
So to sum this up, Rei is someone from an another dimension and the manifestation engine that was in her world was something that destroyed her home planet. She then made a contract with some kind of demon, and is given a specific number of chances to destroy Akane’s engine on her planet. If Rei is successful, then the demon can recreate Rei’s world to what it was before.
Few question arise though… Where are the Alones coming from? Why are they coming in one by one? Are they possibly responsible for the destruction of Rei’s home planet? Why do the Alones want to destroy the engine?
I was just thinking over the past few episodes that a single engine supplying energy for the whole planet is too good to be true. Is the engine taking in energy causing some disruption from somewhere else? Maybe the Alone’s planet is collapsing because of this disruption in flow of energy? That would explain why the Alones want to destroy the engine. If this is the case then they are like soldiers going to war… Well all these are still just speculations. I just thought I’d share what i thought here as well. XD
That’s an intriguing thought, I hadn’t speculated that possibility at all – but now you mention it, handling energy that powers the whole world could easily be causing some sort of dimensional disturbance elsewhere, especially now we’ve seen beings like that bird and Rei that aren’t native to Earth.
It also makes sense given that Kenjirou somehow knew the Alones would be turning up sooner or later, and as he was the creator of the Engine, he’d know more about its power sources and possible implications more than anyone.
The posssibility of the Engine causing trouble for other worlds is something I’ve been considering as well. I don’t imagine something would want to go around destroying it just at random otherwise… especially given the crow’s comment about destroying Akane’s world. It sounds like the crow intends to do to Akane’s world what was done to Rei’s, and it claims that somehow that will allow either it or the Alones to restore Rei’s world.
Personally I think it’s lying. Something that goes around schemeing to destroy worlds full of people is not a nice being in general, why should I trust it to have any interest in restoring a world that’s already been destroyed, assuming it could ever even be capable of such a thing? More than that, how do we know it wasn’t responsible for the destruction of Rei’s world in the first place? A disaster at the Engine destroyed her world… that seems to be exactly what it’s trying to cause in Akane’s world.
I believe the thing caught Rei when she was vulnerable, took a lost girl who had just seen everything she knew, everyone she loved burned away in front of her eyes, and promised to make everything right if she would just do one thing for it. In that moment of course she would have agreed to do anything to bring everyone back.
I agree that there’s no way the bird will be keeping its promise especially as its such a wild claim, and Rei’s probably going to realise that far too late. Assuming its affiliated with the Alones, it’s possible they’re trying to do this in defence of their home world, but self-defence vibes aren’t what I’m getting from that thing, given how malicious it seems.