Full Metal Panic Volume 01 by Shouji Gatou and Retsu Tateo

Kaname Chidori is your typical high school student: beautiful, popular and confident. But according to a terrorist group, she possesses the powers of people known as "The Whispered" and they are therefore out to kidnap her and bring her mysterious abilities on their side.

To prevent this possibility, the anti-terrorist organization known as MITHRIL assigns Kaname a protector; the Japaneae teenager trained in the terrorist camps of Afghanistan, Sosuke Sagara. He's young enough to pass for a high-school student, and possesses enough weapons training and know-how to be the perfect protector for her. Well, it looks that way on paper, at least.

Because Sosuke was trained in Afghanistan and in a camp which trained freedom fighters, he doesn't know the slightest thing about Japanese culture or how to fit in to a typical Japanese high school. Kaname is assigned to show him around the school, but his penchant for bursting in on her when she's half-dressed, or when he goes around blowing up the school shoe cabinet because someone might have tampered with Kaname's shoes quickly gets on her nerves.

But when she ditches Sosuke to meet an admirer whose admiration turns to rage when she politely lets him down, she is attacked by other men who think she believes she is too good for them. Here, she regrets ditching Sosuke, but is saved from the men by... none other than Sosuke, firing a gun filled with rubber riot-suppression bullets. But because she has told him off for following him around, he leaves once he has rescued her, citing her not wanting to see him. The next day, she hands him a bento box she made herself and says she won't mind seeing him today, all in thanks for his rescue.

After this, they get thrown together more often, and do work for the headmaster that has Sosuke facing off against a veritable army of ne'er do wells and gang members. Sosuke only escapes through his usual lightning-fast reflexes and the application of quantities of high explosives.

Finally, when Sosuke pisses off the gym teacher by firing a gun during lunch, the teacher decides to get back at him by sabotaging the lunch when Sosuke and Kaname are assigned to make and guard it. He doesn't count on Sosuke's military ordinance when it comes to protecting the buns that are due to be served at lunch, and the score ends up at Sosuke 3, Gym Teacher 0 before the gym teacher resigns from the stress.

And then, worried by more reports of danger to Kaname, MITHRIL assigns another officer, the smooth ladies' man Kurz, to protect Kaname along with Sosuke. But can they get along together without completely pissing her off and causing her to reject both of them?

I like this series, and I am glad I read it before I picked up its more comedic cousin, Full Metal Panic Overload, as I like the more serious story better. Make no mistake, there is still plenty of comedy in the series, mostly around the fish-out-of -water Sosuke's attempts to fit into Kaname's High School, but it's more restrained.

Kaname comes off pretty well, being a mostly level-headed young woman who has something of an explosive temper where Sosuke is concerned, but who can see that he is protecting her, and does his duty, even if he's extremely gung-ho and over the top about it. Sosuke is waay out of his depth in Japanese High School, and tends to overdo the military solutions to problems he encounters, but you do start to feel something for him, especially when you see the hurt he feels when he is sure that Kaname hates him.

This leads to Kaname eventually coming to care for Sosuke deeply later in the series, but for now we can see that he does care about her. If he didn't care, he wouldn't give a fig that she didn't like him, he'd still do his duty. That he's worried about the possibility presages a romantic relationship somewhere further down the line, but given that Sosuke at this point wouldn't know an emotional response if it walked up, introduced itself to him and whacked his brains out with the 2 ton comedy hammer, he has a lot further to go to make him ready for a relationship than she does.

I've read the first 8 books of this series, and want to look up the other series to acquire, but reading this book again brought back the things I liked about the books: the mystery of who and what the whispered are, the relationship between Sosuke and Kaname, and the relationships between Sosuke and his fellow officers in Mithril. I look forward to getting and re-reading the other books in the series.