Books: Lunar Legend Tsukihime #2

Fight the monsters at your own peril, lest you become one. It’s an old adage, and a terribly true one, as Shiki Tohno has discovered in volume 2 of Lunar Legend Tsukihime. His power to destroy things and kill living beings by cutting along their “death lines” was put to the test in the first volume when he ended up in the service of one vampire, the pretty Arcueid, trying to destroy another vampire, the aptly-named Nero Chaos. That struggle devastated a hotel floor and left Tohno badly injured, and as he recuperates in hiding with Arcueid looking over him, he learns a bit more about the creature he’s paired himself up with and the monsters they’re both fighting against.

Arcueid may nominally refer to herself as a vampire, but she hasn’t drunk human blood — not once in her over eight hundred years of existance, knock on wood. She’s a “true ancestor,” one of the original vampires who have been around since time immemorial. Nero and his ilk are “dead apostles” — humans that have turned to vampiredom and pose grave danger to everyone, human and vampire alike. Arcueid’s mission — and now Tohno’s as well — is to hunt down these abominations and terminate them. The history lesson’s interrupted when the TV news begins broadcasting word of the massacre at the hotel… and Tohno’s classmate Yumizuka, the object of his unrequired affection, may have been at the hotel that night.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.