Demon Slayer Vol. 12: The Upper Ranks Gather
- ISBN
- 9781974711123
- Publisher
- Viz Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 98–106
- Anime
- Season 3: Swordsmith Village Arc ep. 45–55
Season 3 of the anime begins on this book's first page, which makes it the easiest seam in the series. Season 2 ends at chapter 97 and Vol. 12 opens at chapter 98, so a viewer who has finished season 2 starts here and re-reads nothing. What they start with is a slow book, and it should be said plainly. Chapters 98 to 106 move Tanjiro to the hidden village where the Corps' swords are made, bring two Hashira to the foreground, and spend their middle on a hot spring, a sulking swordsmith and a training doll. The enemy does not reach the village until the last chapter, which is titled 'Enemy Attack'. The first chapter is the exception, and the volume is named for it: 'The Upper Ranks Gather'. Buy it for that chapter and as the front door to Vols. 13 to 15, not for itself.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Chapter 98 is Muzan summoning the surviving Upper Ranks to the Infinity Castle after the death of Upper Six, the series' first look at them as a group. He berates them for failing to kill the Ubuyashiki family or find the Blue Spider Lily, and sends two of them, Hantengu and Gyokko, after the swordsmiths. Everything after that is arrival. Haganezuka refuses to forge Tanjiro another sword, so Tanjiro goes to the village to plead. At the hot springs he meets Mitsuri Kanroji, the Love Hashira, and Genya Shinazugawa; in the woods he finds Muichiro Tokito, the Mist Hashira, bullying a boy named Kotetsu over a mechanical training doll built in the Sengoku period. The doll is 'Yoriichi Type Zero', chapter 103, and the name is the volume's real cargo: it is modeled on the swordsman the last third of the series turns out to be about, and it has a sword more than three hundred years old hidden inside it. The anime spends a 49-minute opening episode on chapters the manga takes at a walk. Read together with Vol. 13, the slowness is a fair price. Read alone, this is a book in which the hero argues with his blacksmith.
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