It’s time for a very short story but with only 20 pages it manages to properly develop two different romances. I would highly recommend this to any aspiring writers out there and naturally it’s a blast to read through as well. You won’t look at other romance titles in the same way after this one and you almost wish they could have made a whole series out of this.

The story starts on Christmas Eve with Ken preparing to assassinate a big crime lord on orders from his boss. He definitely doesn’t really want to do this but at the same time he feels trapped. He is basically out of money and feels like he’s never proven himself as a man. Ken hasn’t even been able to give his girlfriend Meg an engagement ring yet. Well, she’s not okay with this idea at all. Ken is a minor so he figures he would only go to jail for 5 years and then they could be together but Meg fears that he will have lost a part of himself. Fortunately an older man named Joe shows up and warns Ken not to go through with it.

See, Joe was in the same position 40 years ago and he actually succeeded in murdering his crime lord. What happened is this ended up making it so that he went to jail for far longer than 5 years. He was on the run for a long time even after that and couldn’t bear to show himself to his girlfriend. They had agreed to meet in front of the chapel on Christmas Eve but it took him 40 years to actually make it. He figured that the girl had forgotten all about him by now but it turns out that she had waited all the way until her dying day. Her grand daughter still goes there every year to pass on the message.

So Joe realizes that he really made a mess and wants to make sure that Ken doesn’t make the same mistake. Ken takes this message to heart and ultimately doesn’t sacrifice himself. It’s a really emotional scene and a reminder to never take the shortcuts in life. It’s the kind of message that hits hard because Ken was only a few minutes away from making a decision that would have ruined his life forevermore. That’s a tough pill to swallow.

Meg gets a lot of credit here too for telling Ken that this was a bad idea from the start. She knew that the easy money wasn’t going to make them happy and that turned out to be correct. While we don’t see much of Alice, I appreciated how loyal she was. She didn’t run around looking for a rebound or anything like that. There’s noting more romantic than hanging in there no matter what. They can have eternity in the future even if it didn’t work out in the present.

That’s the true spirit of romance, to never waver and remain together until the end. Even if things don’t work out the way you hoped like one person dies tragically young, you just keep on going with the memories and then make it to the end. I have high hopes that Ken and Meg will last as well since their devotion already appears to be very strong.

The art is really strong. You can see how similar it is to the Saint Seiya series and can imagine how good the fights would be. The artstyle is very expressive which works well for a story like this. Additionally the characters are all really likable. This is just a complete story and the pacing is also on point. It’s really impressive how much ground was covered in a mere 20 pages. It’s a reminder that you can really do a lot and can execute on an excellent story with even a limited page count.

Overall, I would recommend checking this story out. It’s a really good title for Christmas and is how you want to write a steady romance without needing to build it up for 50 volumes. You could believe in the bond here through the characters’ actions. Maybe one day they will make a short animated special of it or something like that. I’d definitely check it out and of course there are enough plot elements to make this into a movie if you really wanted to do that. You’d probably just expand on Joe’s story and we see how everything plays out in real time.

Overall 8/10