Mars: Vol. 2

by Fuyumi Soryo

Synopsis
Rei promised Kira that he would protect her from anything and everything, but he never knew how soon his chance would come. When a conniving classmate steals Kira's original painting, Rei quickly stands up for her, but his efforts are hardly rewarded. He gets kicked out of school, and now it looks like he might become a permanent dropout. Suddenly, "good girl" Kira finds herself in the middle of a bad situation. She'll need more than a little luck if she ever wants to rescue Rei and salvage her hopes for a future romance.

Review
There's really two things that happen in this volume. The first is Kurosawa, a fellow art student, steals Kira's mother and child painting, which he uses to win an art contest. Interestingly enough, Kira doesn't care about that, she cares that her painting was stolen, because now she can't give it to Rei like she promised. Rei, however, becomes much more upset, and beats up Kurosawa. I, personally, was furious that he stole the painting, and was quite gratified when Rei taught him a lesson. I would never do such a thing, but it's nice when a character can do what you can't. You sort of live vicariously though them. It's pretty scary too, how Rei can just do stuff like that. I've heard of soldiers sometimes turning the conscious part of their brain off so that they are able to kill people. I get the same feeling from Rei, and while it is scary, he's not really a sociopath. It's just that he's not worried about consequences, like the rest of us are. I wonder why.

The second thing is that Rei had an identical twin brother, Sei, who died. He's still really affected by it, by the way has these attacks whenever it affects him too much. Not much is really discussed about Sei in this volume, though.

Kira and Rei are definitely getting closer in this volume, they share their first kiss and such. Kira even skips school to check on Rei. I keep looking forward to what's going to happen with them.

Final thought: I'll keep collecting this series.