Review: Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 6 by Mizuho Kusanagi

Yona of the Dawn, Vol. 6 by Mizuho Kusanagi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yona finally meets Jaeha, the Green Dragon. Unfortunately, Jaeha has no desire to follow her on her quest! Yona offers to help Jaeha and his fellow pirates, so Captain Gi-Gan challenges her with a perilous quest to test her courage. Will Yona be able to pick the Senju Herb from the steep cliff face of the Vanishing Cape?

This volume has Jae Ha meeting Yona at last and deciding whether or not he wants to follow her as was destined. He absolutely refuses to join her just because she is the King Hiryuu (something that she doesn’t think she is) and even though she asks for him to lend his power to her, he doesn’t agree. But Yona has more than revenge on her mind – while in the town of Awa, she has seen the plight of the common people and when she learns that the pirate crew that Jae Ha is a part of have altruistic motives, too, she asks to help them out. But out of all the people in the group, she is the one without any talents or skills to contribute so the captain, Gi-Gan challenges her to pluck some obscure medicinal herb off a mountainside cliff. Yona, who is sheltered but also out to prove herself, agrees and so she gets to show her mettle.

The story takes a break from the main storyline and delivers a pirate arc that is pretty good. They want to save the citizens of Awa from the tyranny of the local government official who is involved in human trafficking and though Yona isn’t a magical dragon or a prodigious kid, she still is brave and relentless and full of fire. Like Jae Ha, we see it again as she shows valor, concern for the well-being of the people in her found family, and a righteous sense of justice as she hatches a plan to go undercover. There’s also a scene between Yona and Hak that hints at ‘more’ but that slow-burn romance is quite far from developing, I am guessing.

On the whole, it is an exciting story arc and not just because of the pirates.

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