Legend has done something that's pretty rare for the series I review. Not only has it held up through four whole volumes, but it's gotten even more interesting midway through its run.
Creative Staff
Writer/Artist: Kara and Woo SooJung
Translation: HyeYoung Im
Adaptation: J. Torres
What They Say
While Everyone is worried about the severe injury on No-Ah's right arm, the mysterious guy who kidnapped No-Ah's little sister comes along and tells them that the is actually You, who has the power of healing. Will Eun-Gyo be able to summon You, trapped inside her?!
The Review!
The fourth installment of Legend continues the trend from last volume of toning down the humor to shift things a slight bit more toward the serious side of the plot. Most of the gags here revolve around the resolution to Volume 3's ending: Eun-Gyo gives in to No-Ah's seduction with a comically minimal fight, then wakes up to find out the whole thing was a dream. Now that she's realized that she's attracted to No-Ah, Eun-Gyo spends the rest of the volume being jealous and just generally possessive of No-Ah, which Woo rolls into some great comic relief throughout the book. Eun-Gyo doesn't try very hard to hide the fact that she's mainly interested in No-Ah for his good looks, which builds to her kicking down a door while yelling "protect the pretty boy!" as part of the volume's most memorable joke.
But the events of Volume 4 really rotate around No-Ah, who we discover is hiding quite a bit about his past from Eun-Gyo (and, by extension, the reader). During the events of this volume, we're introduced to three different visitors who seem to know No-Ah and vice-versa. The first such visitor pops in to tell Eun-Gyo's party how to summon the spirits of the sword pieces they've recovered. The group settles down to sleep after this first encounter; No-Ah enters into a strange flashback-style dream while asleep, and after waking catches a glances of a second unnamed figure from his past. When rest of the group wakes up, No-Ah unknowingly leads them to a house surrounded by a flower garden tended to by the woman that he saw pass by after waking from his dream. She invites Eun-Gyo and the gang to stay with her until the morning, and this sudden hospitality (not to mention the fact that she spends most of dinner flirting with No-Ah) makes Eun-Gyo more than a little bit suspicious and jealous.
Both emotions turn out to be pretty on target; later that night, the woman enters No-Ah's bedroom with enough night jessamine incense to trigger him into another hallucinatory flashback. No-Ah's sense of deja-vu at meeting the woman is explained at this point, as we're introduced to her as Joo-Ji, his lover during a period in his past when he looked over the then-intact Seven Blade Sword. The story then cuts away to Yet Another Unknown Woman (along with the last of the three unnamed visitors mentioned earlier, whom she keeps in close company), who turns out to have set up the whole thing to lure in No-Ah and ambush him in his mentally disarmed state. It's not entirely clear at this point what this second woman or her underlings have to do with No-Ah, although the implication is that they don't want him to succeed in putting the Seven Blade Sword back together.
This volume of Legend is especially interesting for how often it keeps the reader in the dark about what's going on: I counted four new characters that No-Ah seems to have been involved with in the past, and in most cases we don't even know their names by the end of the volume. To add to the confusion, No-Ah's two dreams are fairly bizarre the series's standards, at least until we get a partial explanation a handful of pages later. To be honest, though, Woo's approach worked: I was hooked the whole way through the book, and I'm anxious to get my hands on the next volume in the hopes of getting some more answers. (At times like these, Yen Press's leisurely release cycle for this series can be frustrating -- as of this writing, Volume 5 is still six months away.
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