Hoaquin is upset at Rachel's weakness and vows to not let her participate anymore. No way it will end just like that, though; there's definitely something up with Rachel. If I had to guess, she's aiming for the Slayer Candidate position. I'm interested to see if Rachel will survive this arc and cement herself as an antagonist - there's still clearly a lot we don't know about her, Baam has been chasing after her without success practically the entire season. I don't want this arc to end with things just going back to how they were. We still know very little about FUG, except that they seem to be literally responsible for every bad thing the heroes encounter. Yuri's presence, after not having been around Baam since the first few chapters, seems promising, but this happened before at the end of Season 1 and they ended up not meeting.
Then again, I absolutely loved the end of Season 1, so if SIU can pull off a similar feat here I would be glad.
We get some other cutaway scenes that I don't think were wholly necessary. Yuri comments about Kun having shown some skill in the last chapter, notes that the conductor doesn't seem to have much time, and one of them says they should continue watching. Kun is sitting while his team is celebrating contemplating things we already know. I'm sure he's foreshadowing that Vicente is planning to betray Wangnan's group (seriously, he's been suspicious as heck ever since easily forgiving Wangnan for backstabbing him), but I still think it could have been done in a way that actually gives us more information. Prince's group gets a scene where they recap the fact that, yes, they've just been stuck in a cage for a month doing nothing. So much for those three's (Akraptor, Miseng, Prince) big badass introduction in beating the Mirotic Guardian just a bit earlier in this arc; once again they seemed doomed to becoming fodder. I still have some hope for Wangnan, but the rest I can't see actually truly mattering again. They mention seeing something and then the scene cuts away. Basically these three scenes only served to assure that something deeper is going on, but don't try to give us anything really substantive.
Even though this isn't the typical shounen, right now it sure feels like a pretty cliche tournament arc where we get boring cutaways of characters commenting or talking between every fight but not actually doing anything.
Second stage kicks off in an enormous, labyrinth-like engine called 'The 74th Motor Section'. The name is weird as heck and kind of sucks the drama out of the scene, but I get the intention. Its supposed to be an enormous engine for the Hell Train that doubles as a battle stage, and the Hell Train is so huge that apparently there are at least 74.
We get an explanation of the rules for the second game 'Transferring the Sweetfish'. The part about splitting into teams and navigating the labyrinth to the core is pretty straightforward, but the Dallar aspect really starts to get confusing. They can steal Dallars by fighting with the enemy, use 15 dallars to lock doors and avoid fighting, but the part about the amount of Dallars doubling or even quadrupling I'm not sure about. Maybe I'm missing something. Only Kun seems to have the multiplier applied, and it only multiplies the sum of his teammate's dallars. I guess because he's the only one with more than 10?
Overall, I'm a bit conflicted over the Dallar Show game in general. Keeping track of who has what seems like it could bog down the narrative, and so far it doesn't actually seem like it's really necessary. Without the Dallars it would be a be a simple labyrinth run which I guess SIU doesn't like doing, but by adding them we now have to keep track of who has what and what they can afford to do. Except, in my mind, SIU clearly knew that what he gave out in the preceding chapters wasn't enough to make things interesting, so he added the complicated 'doubling, tripling, quadrupling' system. I think there are much simpler ways he could have gone about this. Not that I dislike the concept completely; I once ran a roleplay with a similar challenge called 'Points Game' that I remember fondly.
This whole chapter was set up, so we'll see how the action unfolds next time. I'm not expecting Baam's team to maintain their lead for long.
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