Hokuto no Ken OH!!GUY

OH!!GUY (北斗の拳 イチゴ味 オウガイ外道伝 OH!!GUY) is a one-shot published in November 2017 in Monthly Comic Zenon. Written by Kawata Yushi and drawn by Yukito, this story dedicated to Ōgai, the master of Souther, is part of the series of end-of-volume gaiden from Ichigo Aji. It is collected in the eighth volume of Ichigo Aji, released on December 20, 2017.

Synopsis

In the dead of night, flaming arrows rain down on the refuge where an old master is raising the very young child he took in. The assailants have come to put an end to the transmission of Nanto Hōōken…

A night of flames

The one-shot opens in the middle of the night. Archers hidden in the trees riddle the refuge with flaming arrows, and Ōgai urgently wakes the young Souther. Before the blaze, the attackers keep watch, the men sent inside have not returned. Ōgai then emerges from the flames, the child in his arms, recognizes their leader, Kōshū of Nanto Gayokuken, and warns that if they do not withdraw, none of them will leave alive.

Kōshū lays out his vision. The martial arts have lost all value against modernized armies, the survival of Nanto demands showing its strength to the world in a new form, and Hōōken, a symbolic school transmitted to a single successor, is merely an obstacle to the reform he intends to impose. Ōgai must disappear, and the young heir with him. The master responds calmly, even if he were to fall, the five other stars of Nanto would never submit, to which Kōshū retorts that it will suffice to bury them in the same manner. Souther offers to accompany his master into battle. Ōgai sends him back with a single pronouncement: defeat means death, and orders him to watch what Hōōken truly is.

The demonstration is a lesson. Where most Nanto schools cultivate cutting edge and speed, the essence of Hōōken lies in the power of the legs, whose impulse gives each strike a crushing force, and it is thus that invincibility is forged, the condition of survival for a school transmitted to only a single heir. Ōgai exterminates the troop despite their swords and firearms, interposes himself when Kōshū orders the child killed to extinguish the lineage, and strikes down the reformer, revolver in hand, with one final reproach: he should at least have died as a man of the fist.

By morning, the sanctuary is devastated. Ōgai announces that they must leave and hide elsewhere, until Souther grows up and can defend himself on his own. Along the way, the child spots a stork and innocently imagines it carrying a newborn to a family. Then he asks his master where the stork goes to fetch babies. Ōgai does not answer, and the final page shows them setting off down the road, toward the next refuge.

The stork and the orphan

OH!!GUY falls within the vein of Ichigo Aji gaiden that reveal the dramatic backstory of a character from the original manga. Ōgai, whom the reader only knew as Souther's master, is shown here in combat for the first time, in a textbook demonstration of Nanto Hōōken against a previously unseen school, the Nanto Gayokuken.

The gaiden completes the portrait of the young Souther sketched in Nanto of Meet by following him through his years of wandering, when his master still kept his sole disciple hidden. And the final question closes both stories upon each other: the child who believes in storks does not know where they get their babies, but the reader remembers the ruined village where it all began, and Ōgai's silence takes on its full meaning.

The title is a play on words on Ōgai's name, which sounds like the English interjection "Oh guy." The introductory page of the volume notes with amusement that, for once, the title came immediately, whereas it usually takes time to name the gaiden in the series.