Alice and Yukko are separated for the first half of the book. Alice, a Georgian who speaks Russian, tries to get by on her own in Japan when she has no clothes and only knows a few words of the language. There's a silly and forced moment when the story shoehorns her back into an Alice in Wonderland costume, but her adventure is interesting. Meanwhile, Yukko gets pulled into a world of conspiracies, cover-ups, and paranoia as she falls under the thumb of the government.

Rather than run with these two stories for a while, it feels like the creator was forced to start falling into the typical story developments that manga editors seem to favor. Before too long we have a big battle scene that introduces more powered characters and starts to explode what was a gory and claustrophobic little horror story into a battle epic. To tie into the Alice in Wonderland theme, the new guys are based on Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I expect we'll be getting the whole Wonderland cast before too long. (But I'm hoping to be proved wrong.)

And of course we have to have some up-skirt shots, 'cuz fan service.

I keep going back and forth on this series, but the final pages make me happy I still have one more volume on hand. ( )