Ragna Crimson vol 2 by Daiki Kobayashi

Ragna has now teamed up with Crimson, who for reasons unknown wants to rid the world of dragons. Their next target is Disas Trois, the Tempest Cell, a dragon who harnesses the power of the wind to destroy towns and people. A band of hunters comes across Ragna and Crimson, and Crimson cleverly manipulates information out of them about the Tempest Cell, whom the hunters are all running from. Ragna, after using all of his strength in the last battle at the end of volume one, can't move his muscles from exhaustion. Crimson decides to use non-magical guns and embue them with Ragna's Silverine powers so that the bullets will be deadly to Disas Trois. As the group of Crimson and failed hunters re-enter the destroyed down below the Tempest Cell, they find Disas Trois mutilating the women of the town with his wind power, slowly cutting their limbs until they perish from blood loss or pain. Elsewhere, we meet another dragon monarch who is working against the humans and deploying her dragon soldiers to various human cities. 

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Despite the title being two of the characters' names, I am not sure at this point who the main character is and who I should be rooting for. Crimson seems like he is going to betray it all at some point since we still have no idea what his motivations are for destroying his fellow dragons. Ragna, at the beginning of this series, was a perfectly good character, but since he abandoned Leo, I'm having a hard time finding any sort of connection to him. This volume has a lot more Crimson in it, which might be good considering we just met this character, but there's nothing about Crimson that I'm particularly interested in. The "experiments" Disas Trois is conducting on the townspeople seemed like a cheap way to get some gore onto the page. This character is prone to extremely long bits of dialogue that can take up most of the page, which seems like a random character trait given his fondness for killing and bloodshed. Why does he want to talk to so much if he'd rather just slice people up? After an ok start to the series, this volume didn't really compel me to keep reading.

Sara’s Rating: 6/10
Suitability Level: Grades 9-12

Reviews of previous volumes in this series: vol 1

Publisher: Square Enix
Publication Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 9781646090570 (Paperback)

​Tags: Rating: 6/10, Suitability: High School, Manga, Fantasy, Action Adventure