To stop creatures from urban legends from maturing and wreaking havoc on their school, a group of elementary school students are forced to observe and document them.
You can check out chapter one of this series for yourself below!
Author
Genre & Tropes
Info about this series
Buy the volume for yourself!
*Please note that I am an Amazon affiliate! That means I may make a small commission, at no extra expense to you!*
Official Synopsis (Yen Press)
The day started out pretty normally. Kei Nimori was just going to elementary school as usual and although he thought it was weird that his name and some other random person’s were written on the chalkboard, he didn’t pay too much attention to it—until night fell. After being sucked into an alternate dimension of his school, surrounded by horrific monsters and a pile of corpses, he has to fight just to survive! The only question is, can he keep it up until flight becomes an option again…?!
My thoughts on this volume (Slight Spoilers!)
While I was reading the first chapter, I couldn’t help but mentally compare this to one of my favourite horror manga, Re/Member // カラダ探し. Both series follow supernatural events taking place at an alternate dimension-version of a school, and both use a supernatural force to make a select number of students to do some horrific task. That is where the comparassons end however, and I found After-School Duty to be a series that does a good job of standing on its own.
In this manga, we see seven children forced to come to an alternate dimension of their school every Friday for “after-school duty”. While there is a lot of mystery and not a whole lot to be explained, the students are told what the “duty” is. Namely, they are to observe and document one of the horrific creatures that lives in the school. While I say there are seven students teleported every Friday, there is one who is a bit of a mystery—I don’t want to spoil their storyline, as it’s a large part of the overall mystery!
There is not a single thing that happens in this volume that isn’t terrifying. We start with our protagonist, Kei, seeing his name written on the chalkboard at school, assigning him to “after-school duty”. Of course, at the time he thought it was just a prank, so he goes about his day not thinking much of it… only to somehow be teleported back to what looks like his school when he went to bed that night. While this school does look quite similar to his school, there are some notable differences—graves and corpses lie at his feet, there’s a noose tie around his neck, and worst of all, there’s what can only be described as a monster staring at him.
While we watch all of this happen to Kei, I can only assume the rest of the students forcibly dragged to this night school went through a similar ordeal.
I found the lore behind all of the monsters to be quite interesting! We learn that living in the night school, are perhaps hundreds of undeveloped urban legend monsters. Every year, a few of these monsters are given a change to develop and become complete, eventually breaking free into the real world to cause mayhem. The reason that the students are brought into the night school is to stop this from happening. Not by fighting, but by observing!
This is such a unique and interesting concept, and I really loved the idea that calmly logging the monster and their behaviours would stop them from growing! Urban legends grow from spreading their fear from person to person, so if their entire legend is logged and kept where no ordinary person would ever come upon it, they won’t be able to grow!
Maddies Manga 
Leave a comment