It's hard to talk about something like the first volume of Heavenly Delusion. It's a puzzle box story, asking many questions before offering any answers, making it difficult to assess in traditional ways.

The story opens in the school where Tokio and Mimihime have, by all appearances, spent their whole lives. It has an idyllic quality, where the children raised there seem happy and healthy, with normal childhood concerns like pop quizzes and getting into mischief. However, there's a sterility to it, with their clean sailor-style uniforms and the robot teachers. The Promised Neverland has trained me to be suspicious of these kind of environments, but unlike that, Heavenly Delusion doesn't offer a reveal by the end of the volume.

The story switches back and forth between the school and Kiruko and Maru, two young adults exploring the ruined landscape of Tokyo. They make vague allusions to some sort of disaster that killed most of the population instantly, and then left many of the survivors to slowly starve to death. Whatever it was also created vicious monsters, uncanny man-eating creatures with a shifting, half-melted appearance straight out of Parasyte.

The connection between the two stories is unclear so far, although Masakazu Ishiguro makes it clear that it exists. When Tokio imagines the two mysterious figures from outside, represented as shadows with masks for faces, the story jumps to Maru lying in bed. The deliberate juxtaposition builds the connection between the two, making it all but explicit that Maru is the person with Tokio's face and it's not just a case of sameface in the art style. Kiruko, meanwhile, seems to bear some resemblance to Mimihime, although that's not called out. However, there is nothing supernatural about Tokio and Kiruko in this volume, so while there is a connection, what that connection is remains ambiguous.

The puzzle box style of storytelling works particularly well for a long-form post-apocalyptic story like Heavenly Delusion. Exposition dumps tend to be clunky at best in visual media like manga or film, but shorter formats struggle to find a way around them. Here, information comes in drips and drops through environmental storytelling, and bits and pieces implied from characters' conversations. Although relatively few details about just what happened to the world have come clear so far, there's just enough bits and pieces to keep things intriguing.

Instead of focusing on the facts of the apocalypse, Heavenly Delusion looks at the much more human-driven elements of how people responded to it. Relatively few people are left alive, and those who remain have yet to pick up the pieces and rebuild. Much like the general world-building, this is developed through bits and pieces as Kiruko and Maru encounter different people. A group of bandits slaver unsavoriously at the sight of Kiruko, and refer to her and Maru as being part of the “lawless generation”. The proprietress of an onsen protects a maneater beast, claiming it contains her son's spirit. Even small touches, like inconsistent terminology, add a sense of chaos and recency to the mysterious apocalypse.

The details of how Kiruko and Maru met aren't revealed until the end of the volume - and even then, the flashback is full of ambiguity and unexplained details - but their relationship comes through strongly enough in the pages. Maru calls her “Sis”, even though they aren't related. Their closeness seems to be the result largely of their circumstances, as two people trying to survive alone in a dangerous world. She is his friend, but moreover his protector. Still, though their bond may be born of necessity, it's still an important bond, and the only one the two have.

The school sections are a bit less compelling, though interesting enough in their own right. The focus is spread between a large group of students, and builds up the mysteries instead of much character work. The children live a carefree life in a sort of neo-pastoral setting, tended mostly by robots with a few adults in charge. There are a few connections to the mysteries of outside, but the purpose seems to be more about contrasting their quiet life with the hard survivalism of outside. Once the boundaries between the two worlds fall down - and it seems a foregone conclusion that they will, in this kind of story - things will be interesting

There's a slight disconnect between Ishiguro's character designs and the rest of the world, and I'm not yet sure if it works. Most of his humans have a soft, rounded, almost potato-faced quality to them that contrasts strangely with their surroundings. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, but the difference between, say, Kiruko and Maru and the disreputable trio of bandits they encounter can feel a bit strange. Art like this can sometimes lean into “good” characters looking a certain way, with villains looking another, that can equate attractiveness with virtue.

Ishiguro makes great use of contrast particularly in building up atmosphere and setting. The school is full of sterile, clean lines: modern architecture, manicured lawns, and tidy sailor suits. Ruined Tokyo, on the other hand, is busy and broken. With the human population reduced to a few struggling to survive, everything man-made has begun to crumble. More windows and signs are broken than are intact; weeds are tearing apart sidewalks, overtaking buildings, and even sprouting in toilets. All this is realized with delicate, detailed linework, with what little shading is there done through pen-and-ink techniques such as crosshatching.

The volume ends with a character revealing an important detail about himself in the last panel. Without spoiling, suffice it to say that this thing is rarely handled well in fiction. It's impossible to say how the future volumes will handle it now that it's out in the open, and I want to give the series the benefit of the doubt, but the way he was framed earlier gives me a lot of pause.

The first volume of Heavenly Delusion does many things, and it does them well. It presents an intriguing mystery with an atmospheric setting. Its central characters think and act and talk like human beings, although the side characters are somewhat more exaggerated and one-sided. One thing it does not do, however, is give any answers. Not a single one. Becoming invested in series like this is a risk, since an unsatisfactory resolution or a single weak link in the narrative could cause the whole house of cards to collapse.