Gantz/26

The volume starts off with Kurono trying to come to grips with Nishi's pronouncement at the end of the recent mission and develops the love triangle relationship a bit more. Then it switches to Nishi. Just when you thought it's a slice-of-life episode with Nishi, it explodes into craziness like with the aftermath of the solo mission that Kurono failed. And here, I thought I guessed right that Nishi would just get killed off like Izumi... but it turns out Gantz saved him with an emergency mission. The team hit the ground running, no longer in Japan, but all the way over in Europe, where it appears that an all-out war is taking place - against statues. Gantz teams from all the world are gathered there (and dying left and right too). The investigator who appeared during the stint where Kurono lost his memories was the instrument in which an alien (I think) gave him information about a Gantz factory and that Gantz was deployed all over the world and televised for a select group of people. The revelations here are ridiculously over the top here (as usual), but not very believably so. There are just too many balls and too many teams for the world to not know about these used-to-be-invisible teams at all. Are there really so many aliens infiltrating the Earth that dozens of teams around the world can spend their time killing and training? It's probably just because the author is moving towards a finale that he had not thought of at the beginning. Well, suspension of disbelief is required. The enemies here are not particularly interesting (they're just.. well, statues), but the overarching feeling that something big is going to happen is pretty conveyed. I also liked how some of the other side characters were fleshed out here, despite the tragic nature of some of them.