Hokuto no Ken Reverse Side Devil

Reverse Side Devil (北斗の拳 イチゴ味 デビルリバース外道伝 リバース サイド デビル) is a one-shot published in September 2018 in Monthly Comic Zenon. Written by Kawata Yushi and drawn by Yukito, this story dedicated to Devil Rebirth is part of the series of end-of-volume gaiden from Ichigo Aji. It is collected in the ninth and final volume of Ichigo Aji.

Synopsis

A young archaeologist, a specialist in South American giant myths, is led to a military installation hidden beneath a stadium. Behind an armored door sleeps a twenty-meter-tall man whom thirteen executions have failed to kill...

The giant beneath the stadium

The one-shot opens before the nuclear war, in a still-contemporary world. A giant appeared one day in a small mountain town, killed and injured over a hundred people, and wiped the town off the map in a single night. The army captured him at the cost of considerable resources, attempted thirteen executions, all of which failed, and has since held him in a secret facility built beneath a stadium, where the crowds conceal the comings and goings, nicknamed the Pireny prison. A young archaeologist is brought there. Behind an armored door, chained, the giant lies in a state of apparent death.

The agent who recruited him presents the file. No one had seen the giant before his appearance, but a wide, shallow cavity was spotted on a mountainside, and strands of his hair were found there, as though he had slept there for a long time. His memory is confused, and he speaks several languages, including one from South America that has been extinct for over a thousand years. The army leans toward the theory of an enemy biological weapon. The archaeologist puts forward the hypothesis from his own research: South American myths of civilizations destroyed by giants. Created before our era through the medicine and black magic of a vanished civilization, the giant supposedly first brought glory to the country that had conceived him by crushing its rivals, before destroying that country itself, then reappearing roughly every two hundred years, leaving behind only terror and a name: the Incarnation of the Devil, Devil Rebirth.

The army nevertheless seeks to use him. The archaeologist warns that if this is indeed Devil Rebirth, no human will be able to control him, and he must be killed while it is still possible. The agent replies that everything has already been attempted under the guise of research, and that apparent death is the best they have achieved. It is then that the sirens sound, the personnel are sent to the shelters, and the world is engulfed by nuclear flames. The final page finds the two men years later, standing before the ruins of the stadium. One asks whether this place still needs to be guarded in a world already destroyed. The other points to the life growing back around them; it is for that life that this door must be guarded. And when the agent calls him doctor, the archaeologist, who now wears the mask of the jailer from the original manga, corrects him: Splash.

An answer to the mystery

Reverse Side Devil tackles one of the thickest mysteries of the original manga. Devil Rebirth is a twenty-meter giant locked behind an armored door, and the reader never learns where he comes from. The gaiden offers an answer: a being predating our era, born of medicine and black magic from a vanished South American civilization, who returns cycle after cycle to annihilate those that follow.

The story also gives an identity to the masked jailer whom Jackal executes in the original manga to free Devil Rebirth. Beneath the mask, the gaiden places a pre-war archaeologist who remained at his post by choice. The canonical prison thus becomes a pre-war military installation hidden beneath a stadium.

The introductory page of the volume announces its ambition with the series' usual modesty: to unravel the mystery of Devil Rebirth, without guaranteeing success.