The Girl from the Other Side 7

 
The Girl from the Other Side 7

Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2019

 

 

The seventh volume of The Girl from the Other Side is pretty action-packed.
 

The last volume ended with two cursed human soldiers finding Teacher's and Shiva's new cabin. One confronts Teacher outside, the other searches the cabin, trying to find Shiva's hiding spot.

 
The Outsiders who came to talk to Teacher help him defeat his soldier. The soldier searching for Shiva is starting to turn into a tree and has gone blind. She initially sneaks past him, but he throws his sword at her as she's getting away, and gives her a frightening cut on her back. He catches her, then turns all the way into a tree in his moment of triumph. Shiva is caught in the branches until Teacher can come cut her free.
Teacher cleans and bandages Shiva's back, but there's a bigger problem - she has a patch of blackened skin on her chest that looks like a very slow-moving version of the Curse. 

 
The visiting Outsider counsels Teacher that Shiva could be healed by stealing the soul from another human and using the soul-stuff to heal Shiva - although it also notes that this is only a theoretical possibility. Although the Mother of the Outsiders imbued them with the ability to steal human souls and tasked them to do so (to 'steal back' the souls she claims were stolen from her originally), none of them have ever actually managed to do so successfully. The technique is tricky.

 
Teacher feels really guilty about Shiva's condition, and is prepared to kill to help her. He goes out and finds a band of not-yet cursed human soldiers (who are also hunting for him and Shiva, natch.) He severely wrecks up their campsite during the night, and gets into a duel with the leader. He loses and gets his foot chopped off, though setting fire to the camp does chaotically disperse the threat of the soldiers. See what I mean about this one being action-packed?

 
When Teacher hobbles back to the cabin to check how Shiva is doing, she's missing... Did she go off alone for some reason? Did a soldier make it home faster than the injured Teacher? Or, my personal guess, did the visiting Outsider seize the opportunity to fulfill its mission (which it openly declared last volume) of bringing Shiva back to its Mother in the lake?