We all know that dance is a form of communication, and we know that dance is a form of storytelling. In Wandance Volumes 11-13, the club members at Ichirin learn an important lesson about telling the right story to the right people at the right time.

Kabo is struggling more and more with trying to decide who he is, what kind of dance is his. It feels like Hikari is pulling further and further away from him. He's sincerely concerned that he's holding her back, and he wonders what she thinks of him. As a reader, we're limited to what we see, but from our perspective, it is obvious that Hikari thinks of Kabo as a partner in dance. As an adult, I want to yell at Kabo a bit about how that should be enough, but…it's a book and yelling at pages has proven to be highly unproductive over the years. All we can do is sit and watch as Kabo watches Hikari and hopes….

Events are ramping up for the Ichirin Dance Club. They've made the regionals, and this is On-chan's last chance to go further. The team comes up with an ambitious routine, designed to highlight their strengths as dancers. For the first time in this narrative, they fail. Dancers may dance for themselves; they learn, but if they want someone else to enjoy it, they must look up and outside themselves. Finally, Kabo begins to understand his own dancing.

The school festival is coming up, and the Dance club is starting to develop teams to perform. Kabo asks Iori to develop a house performance with him, and he asks Wanda to dance together with him. Overwhelmed and excited, Kabo flails a bit as we turn towards Hikari, who is getting pre-professional opportunities. She is seeing a future for herself, and she finds herself torn about breaking her promise to Kabo.

At this moment, we get a single panel that defines this whole series. It's not a particularly big panel or important in the narrative. But for one sudden moment, when a classmate says to Kabo that he and Hikari dancing together would be hot, we get a flash of just that. Kabo and Hikari, dancing, intimate, intense…and hot. Kabo is shocked by the imagined moment. We…are not. This is the endgame, surely. However, Kabo is not a manga reader or reviewer, and his shock is immediate. Hikari has expressed her jealousy of his dance, her uncertainties, and he finds that working with her, he is not stuttering. Kabo does reach past partnership towards something romantic, but Hikari turns away. Her eyes are only on the dance for now. This one panel was honestly breathtaking. It was only a glimpse, a throwaway comment by a teen boy at another teen boy about how hot dancing with the cute chick could be. Kabo, torn between wanting to dance with Hikari and wanting to be her boyfriend, waffles between having a vision of them…and for them. Hikari, while deeply moved by Kabo's dancing, still has her eyes on being the best in the world, with or without Kabo.

The other interesting facet of the narrative is the shape of the trash talk in the high dance club scene. In earlier volumes, we followed Kabo's gaze as he watched the male dancers. Now we are seeing that, as Kabo and Hikari get more and more traction and name recognition, other dancers trust them less, while rival teams are examples of friendships lost to competition. In dance, even in team dance, there can be only one lead, and that lead is (un)fair game.

The art here is still the main selling point. In this volume, we get a primer on street dance, and we are given the music the characters dance to, so we can feel the motion the 2D art implies. I don't know that I could tell when Kabo is krumping versus doing house, but the kineticism of the locking and popping is surprisingly easy to understand in these panels. In the middle of these teaching moments, we also get a primer on how not to be a teacher and how not to be a leader, as the dance team seriously considers which one of the second-years will take over the role of club president. They are taking it very seriously, as this decision will change the club's focus for an entire year, after all.

Now that Ichirin has lost their first and last, for the third year's competition, there will be a reckoning among the dancers. On-chan and her collaborative way of leading are heading out, and the team is about to choose a new president. The whole team is poised for a major shift. We are watching all of them, but our eyes stray back to Hikari and Kabo over and over. Their dance is what we all want to see, what we need to see. Will they get a chance to dance together at the school festival? Will they survive the turmoil of Hikari's budding career? And will Kabo decide that dancing for himself is enough? If you had told me at Volume 1 that I would care about the answers to any of these questions, I might have scoffed. Now, I find myself desperately wanting to see Kabo and Hikari be that hot dance team.