This is the volume where Corpse Party: Blood Covered comes into its own. In what would have been volume three of the original Japanese release, the story stops playing with unsavory romance tropes and trying to reinvent itself as Higurashi: When They Cry Lite and gets down to the business at hand: figuring out what on earth is going on with Tenjin Elementary and the people it has swallowed. Using anthropromorphizing words for the school feels increasingly appropriate as the story goes on – with the interdimensional nature of the building, allowing those trapped within to pass between interlocking worlds within the old school, there's a sense that the school itself is sentient somehow, playing with the students as much as the ghosts do. It seems to have symbiotic relationship with the spirits – it allows them free reign to terrorize and seek revenge while it controls the areas they patrol. It's probably the most fascinating part of the series thus far, and certainly one that sets it apart from other similar horror manga.

The focus in this volume shifts away from both of the point of view characters of book one, instead opening with the two students who were with Shishido when they were transported. The first omnibus ended with Shishido's apparent death (but until someone finds the body, I'm not buying that she's really dead; the other deaths have been confirmed by other people), and now class representative Shinozaki and Kishinuma, who has a crush on her, take center stage. We mostly read this part through Kishinuma's perspective. Despite starting the whole mess in the first place, Shinozaki is terrified, and this makes her prone to possession by the numerous ghosts roaming the halls of Tenjin. Kishinuma is desperately trying to hold her together and not give in to his jealousy of Mochida, about whom Shinozaki seems to talk nonstop. Whether she's really thinking about him or this is a ploy by the school to erode both Shinozaki's and Kishinuma's sanity isn't clear, but the toll it takes on the boy is evident. It renders him vulnerable to the ghosts, and where Shinozaki seems to at times be full-out possessed, Kishinuma begins to have terrible visions of death. This makes the final scenes from his point of view suspicious, as once again we can't assume an actual death based on his earlier hallucinations, as well as the fact that no one has yet found either his or Shinozaki's corpses. It's one of the cardinal rules of horror: never believe someone is dead until it is fully confirmed. We can agree that Shinohara's death in the previous book was real because it was seen by Nakashima and has been flashed to several times; likewise with a death this volume. Of course, there is the possibility that Shinohara's death is misleading, since it has only been officially seen by one classmate…

The latter half of the volume is given to the Mochida siblings, with first Satoshi taking lead and then Yuka. What is more interesting about this, and the final chapters of the Shinozaki/Kishinuma section, is that other students from different schools begin to play a part in the story. Through them, and the brief yet scary inclusion of Morishige, we can see the toll Tenjin takes on those trapped there. The goal of this is presumably to make the people just as frightening as the ghosts and the school itself, and in part this works. Morishige is the best example of it, as he appears to have a switch that he can flick on and off depending on how “normal” he needs to seem. The main fly in the ointment is really Yuka, who acts far too young for her supposed age of fourteen. While we can certainly buy that she'd be scared out of her wits due to the situation, she's got an element of “too cute to live,” acting more like the adorable sacrificial elementary student than a girl in her teens. This could become important later, given that Tenjin was an elementary school, but for the most part she's just annoying.

Although the series has found its feet and is improving, issues besides Yuka's personality remain. The sense of sameness to every hallway is doubtless intended to keep up off-balance and wondering which dimension we're in, but there's only so many times you can see the same broken floorboards or tattered classroom and be alarmed; likewise only so many bodies in school uniforms will be scary before it starts to become old hat. The fact that characters are only distinguishable by their hair is also a problem, and though Shinomiya does do some of the gore aspects well, others, like the little girl with only half a head or the body splattered on a wall, lack sufficient detail to be gross enough to scare. The fact that no one has any ankles is just an added annoyance. The story works best when it is inside the characters' heads, and at this point it isn't doing quite enough of that to classify this as good horror, although it is showing major improvement.

Corpse Party: Blood Covered may just be one of those stories where manga isn't the best format to showcase its gory glory. It is getting better, though, and this omnibus provides some interesting new information about the ghosts and their business, even if the clues as to why they keep pulling in new people feel a bit thin. Given that this book was better than the first, though, it seems likely that the next will also improve, maybe making Tenjin Elementary as scary for readers as it is for those trapped within its battered halls.