The next chapter in The War Arc is now available, chapter 292! While Hiroshi's words hinted at it last chapter, this chapter starts making where things are going a little more clear. The fighting between friends and classmates makes it clear that something very serious happened while Yuki and company were away.

You can see now why I say this is a darker arc. This is largely only the tip of the iceberg for the arc. There is much worse. However, the whole friends fighting friends sets a dark tone for things. Explanations will be coming in future chapters, but when the situation crashed into everyone like it did, there is not really time for questions any longer.

One of the things that was hard and took some time to figure out was Hiroshi's power. Like I've done with most of the characters at this point, I decided on what their powers were going to be a long time ago. I went through and just gave them all powers. Since the way that Yuki granted powers was based on things that fit with their character, I wasn't going to specifically design powers as the plot needed them. They were going to have them and I'd deal with it when plot came to them. Which did not make it easy for Hiroshi, since it requires me knowing Japanese children games to make his powers work. It's a cool idea and I liked it both at the time decided on it and even now. It's just not an easy thing to do. It took a lot of research. And I will likely make up some games myself as things Hiroshi invented, but I will also use traditional Japanese children games as well.

The other fun part was making use of Yuki's continued genre savviness. Since he is well read, he can easily make use of that knowledge to make significant leaps in logic that are otherwise not normal, as called out by Yori. It's not the first time he's done it, but I do try to use it when I can since it is an important aspect of Yuki.

Enjoy!