イクサガミ(天) ⚔️ Week 8

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イクサガミ(天) :crossed_swords: Week 8

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Week 8 July 18th 2026
Chapter(s) and sections 漆ノ章
Start page 256
End page 287
Page count 31
Stop percent 85%
Last week week 7
Next week week 9

Vocabulary

Discussion Guidelines

Spoiler Courtesy

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  1. Any potential spoiler for the current week’s reading need only be covered by a spoiler tag. Predictions and conjecture made by somebody who has not read ahead still falls into this category.
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Character names

Full Name Details
嵯峨愁二郎さがしゅうじろ Our protagonist
槐えんじゅ Explains the rules of the game
双葉ふたば Young girl our protagonist picks up at start fo the game
響陣きょうじん 上方 dialect speaking stranger that is friendly to us?
化野四蔵あだしのしくら one of the 義兄弟, seems scary bad, participating in the game
衣笠彩八きぬがさいろは only female 義兄弟, participating in the game
カムイコチャ Ainu we encountered during the game
橡つるばみ Handler of us, checks points at checkpoints
貫地谷無骨かんじやぶこつ Legendary warrior known for liking to slash everyone
菊臣右京きくおみうきょう Feminine warrior, likes 1 on 1s and saved 双葉 once
Maps for reference

map1
map11023×732 280 KB

map2
map2864×1214 104 KB

Participation

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Chapter 7

This week we learn a bit about Shuujirou’s wife and how she became a doctor. This was quite exceptional back in the day (of real Japan), and there were very few women who were doctors. Interestingly, some of them studied medicine in Germany (which was also quite common among male Japanese doctors). I researched a few female Japanese doctors, but none of them seemed to have been the role model for our fictional female doctor here.

In the story, our heroes board a ship to speed up their journey as it is quite the shortcut to go across a small part of Biwako. Of course it’s quite dangerous because if they get attacked on the ship, they cannot flee and are forced to fight. Nonetheless, they take on the risk, and of course they are attacked by three men who had kidnapped another ship! They try to keep the promise they gave to Futaba as well as possible, but it was not entirely doable. Also they afterwards reflected on the fact that it was a lot more dangerous to keep the enemies alive, as they had experienced. Nonetheless, they were happy they could save the lives of at least a few of them, and that they could hand them over to the police. But it’s quite sad that so many of the tags get lost because people fall into the water… I wonder how many will really be able to make it to Tokyo with the required amount of tags.

I must confess I have sometimes trouble properly visualizing their fights. E.g. this time I thought our heroes would jump onto the other ship and fight there, but then Shuujirou was back with Futaba as soon as she got attacked, and the remaining one of the attackers also seemed to be on the same ship… that confused me a bit. But then again, I am not really running a deep analysis on these sentences, so that’s probably the main reason why I sometimes take a wrong turn, mentally.

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Enjoyed your thoughts and summary as always.

According to what we learned in an earlier chapter the organizers plan to give the last people passing the checkpoint all the points that are lost. Although I’m not certain how they plan to track this. They do have the count of plates from the last checkpoint and people scouting for corpses and cleaning up like we saw in the last chapter. But the guy who accidentally fell into the water will surely not be tracked correctly by the organizers.

Still, I expect quite a few people to be able to make it to Tokyo.

I think you misunderstood something. The boat they were on was trying to flee, but the other boat pursued them and was faster. As soon as the boat was close enough the 3 attackers jumped on our heroes boat to attack. One didn’t even make it to the boat since he was hit midair and just hit his head against the side of our protagonists boat. The captain of the boat the attackers came from took the chance and instantly fled, therefore the whole fight took place on the same boat.

Shuujiro wasn’t as close to futaba as he’d like because kyoujin was in a struggle with 番場 going overboard and trying to take kyoujin down with him as well. Shuujiro was about to go help him. That’s when the doctor and his helper took the chance to attack futaba. Shuujiro was warned by kyoujin, while he went overboard, and could protect futaba by a hair’s breadth.

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Ah, thanks for your explanation! The part I misunderstood was who got ready to jump onto the other ship - I thought it was Shuujirou and Kyoujin jumping onto the other boat so that they wouldn’t put the innocent passengers in danger because of the fighting, but obviously it was the other way around - the attackers jumped. The rest of the scene I got quite okay, I think :+1: