Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Volume 19 by Clamp

In the land of Infinity, Sakura, Princess of the Clow, has been fighting Chess-style battles using Fai, Kurogane and Syaoran as her pieces. But in her meteoric rise up the ladder of "Chess" players, she has attracted the attention of the family that controls the games, much like the Mafia. The others can feel that someone is watching them, and though they don't know who it is, they theorize that it might be a competitor wanting to get a leg up on them or the family running the competition.

But Sakura has a reason beyond retrieving one of her memory-feathers, and the others wonder why she has kept up the competition when she doesn't need to. But aside from the Prize money that they need to pay Yûko with, Sakura has her eyes on an additional prize offered by those who win the tournament.

Just before the final competition, Eagle, son of the ruling family, invites Sakura to dinner, alone, without her companions. He seems to know that she isn't from this world and asks her about her motivations in entering the contest. She won't answer all his questions, but we see that she has regained another power she once had: the power of sight. Her brother's friend, the High Priest, could see everything, and she only gets quick, incomplete glimpses of the future to come, but she has forseen a future that she will do anything to change, and for that, she wants the power offered by Eagle's family: the power to travel through dimensions just once, on her own, to a world she cannot choose.

Eagle assures her that if she can win the final battle, he will summon "her" and that "she" will take Sakura to the new world. But can Sakura win in the final battle when Eagle is her opponent, and he's stacked the deck by getting her to agree to fight with only one piece, and his is an automata, unable to feel pain? And even if she is able to win who is this "She" that can take Sakura to another dimension?

Quite an interesting volume, as we get to see that Fai might be covering up both his feelings and his motivations, but so has Sakura. She wants to travel alone, without the others, to track down the Syaoran that travelled with her for so long. She and the others have seen the destruction he wrought on one world, and to fix it, Yûko wants the money prize from the Chess tournament. But Sakura wants the other prize so she can stop Syaoran.

And of course, characters based on character designs from other Clamp manga show up here. Eagle is Eagle Vision of Autozam from Magic Knight Rayearth, and his brothers are Lantis and Geo Metro, also from Magic Knight Rayearth. The Automata is Hikaru, from Clamp's Angelic Layer, and "She" is "Chi", from Chobits. And the Hikaru from "Angelic Layer" is named after the Hikaru who is one of the Legendary Magic Knights from Magic Knight Rayearth. Plus there is Yûko and Mokona, and Mokona also originally appeared in Magic Knight Rayearth. It was like a "Magic Knight Rayearth" Character reunion!

But here we finally get to see that while Syaoran might be the only character with a fairly straightforward motivation, which is to get Sakura's memory feathers back and to protect her along the way. His other motivation is to stop his evil duplicate. But Sakura, who up until this point has seemed fairly childlike and straightforward in motivation as well, has hidden depths and can conceal her plans from her companions, who have a hard time not being decieved since she has never shown any sign of doing this in the past. This makes Sakura a much more interesting character than before, and much deeper as well.

I enjoyed this book, and even though I read book #20 first, I still felt a sense of anticipation as I got to the end as for what would come next, which rather amazed me. Even though I knew Sakura won the contest and survived Fai's blow with the sword, I didn't see it coming until almost the very end. I truly recommend this series, and will recommend it as a series that is much deeper than it seems on the surface, with hidden depths in each character coming to the fore the longer we read. Very well done.