The last volume of Biscuit Hammer ended in dramatic emotional fireworks, as Taro's death prompted Sorano to discover new power within herself and find purpose in her own life. There's little to match those cathartic peaks in this fourth volume; this one is much more leisurely and even in tone, largely dedicated to pulling the Beast Knights together as a unit as the battle moves towards its final stage. It makes for a less visceral and poignant read than the last couple volumes, but this is still a respectable installment in an excellent manga.

With Taro gone and Sorano's story told for now, this volume spreads its focus much more widely, dabbling in stories that explore the relationship between Mikazuki and Yuuhi, Yuki and Subaru, and Taiyo and all the rest of the knights. Early on, Yuuhi finally accepts Mikazuki's challenge, and the two have a duel that ends up shedding new light on Mikazuki's relationship with his dead brother while bringing him and Yuuhi closer together. Yuuhi's character growth has occasionally been depicted in terms of big dramatic moments (like when he broke free of his grandfather's chains), but in this volume, the character writing embraces a welcome subtlety. It's easy to see in the ways both Mikazuki and Yuuhi have changed that they've somehow sanded off each other's worse (or at least more insular) instincts - Yuuhi's gained a confidence and playfulness he never had before, and Mikazuki's wild battle-drive has been tempered by the consideration of his friend.

This more restrained storytelling is exemplified when the story drops a quiet bombshell - the sudden death of Yuuhi's grandfather. Given his grandfather's teachings were the initial source of his misanthropy, you might expect this twist to provoke some major change in Yuuhi; but instead, he takes the truth of the situation peacefully, in a chapter full of quiet scenes of him trying to sort out his feelings with his family and friends. Biscuit Hammer's “quirky storytelling” is often used to undercut conventional action drama in funny ways (like whenever the villain Animus shows up to hang out), but in chapters like this one, it's clear that this refusal to embrace conventional drama can also result in scenes that feel more emotionally “real.” And while other characters like Taiyo experience more conventional catharsis in their arcs (when his growing bonds with the Beast Knights causes him to reject Animus), virtually every character in this story is given a quiet dignity and emotional interiority that makes them more than just cogs in a narrative. Biscuit Hammer is remarkably good about making you care about every one of its characters.

That said, not all the material here feels equally powerful. The relationship between Taiyo and the eleventh golem, the first that actually speaks and questions its own existence, is a strange and compelling bond throughout these chapters, but its conclusion left me somewhat unsatisfied. Additionally, Yuuhi's spirit-journey up the stairs of the dream-reality, prompted by a challenge from Anima, also felt like a bit of a retread, and far more on-the-nose in terms of shounen storytelling than the material with his grandfather.

That sequence also stretched the artistic limits of the manga, as Yuuhi's challenge was represented by a bland set of stairs that only emphasized Satoshi Mizukami's serious difficulties with perspective and distance. Characters often feel like they're pasted to wall-backgrounds with no actual vanishing point, and you'll often see objects depicted as if Mizukami was looking at three sides of them at the same time. It's also clear Mizukami has yet to figure out the finer points of human anatomy, or horse anatomy, or tree anatomy. The visual pacing of the big battle scenes has improved (Mizukami uses strong use of negative space to create visual punchlines, and the choreography of characters in space is now clear more often than not), and there are a good number of expressive faces, but Biscuit Hammer's art remains, well, “endearingly rough” throughout.

Overall, aside from the rough art and relative lack of cathartic peaks, this volume of Biscuit Hammer is still full of endearing surprises. The humor remains as strong as ever (I particularly liked a moment when Yuuhi momentarily got excited about his pit trap working, and then collected himself to do a Cool Glasses-Pushing Pose), and the weighty, ambiguous themes regarding the value of life and the nature of children and adults are still coursing mysteriously through all of the story's turns. Taiyo's lack of faith in others stems from his poor relationship with his family, but the camaraderie of the Knights gives him purpose. Both Yuuhi and Mikazuki look up to Shinonome as an “adult,” but then try to act as adults to the younger Knights in turn. And complicating all of the emphasis on gaining courage and growing to become someone others could look up to is the consistent presence of death, a meaningless equalizer that makes a melancholy joke of all of us. There's a poignancy and emotional complexity that really helps Biscuit Hammer stand out among its contemporaries. I'm eager to see where it goes next.