What lurks beneath?

The land is split between a heavenly realm where angels dwell and a lower realm made of wastelands. A band of angels is chosen to journey to the lower realm as an envoy from heaven, but the lower realm is fraught with danger.

Luckily, they have masked demonic bodyguards to protect them. The two sides have a purely transactional relationship until one angel, Dori, curiously peeks under a demon guard’s mask to find that demons have the same visage as the angels.

Could the demons they have been told not to fraternize with have more in common with them than they thought? What is preventing them from creating relationships in the first place?

As their journey commences, they find that the danger of the lower realm may come from a source close to them…

This is a unique manga that didn’t go the way I was expecting it to. To start off, we open with Christian-like imagery of angels’ wings and youth who are depicted in religious robes, also referred to as “angels” and “diving messengers.”

The child angels are tasked to visit the Lower Realm to observe and learn. They take a ship and land in a sandy wasteland, and when they are led to shelter, they are greeted by demons.

These demons obey every command the child-angels give them. One child, Dori, is particularly entranced by the demons, and the one assigned to him is called Mahaara. Dori mistakenly treats him like a person (“Pleasure to meet you!”) when the angels are instructed not to befriend the demons. They are tools, after all, and meant only to protect the angels and follow their commands.

This is kinda spoilery, but it happens so fast in the manga I think it’s ok to share…

One evening, Dori returns to his room where he has left Mahaara. He walks in on him attempting to change out of his demon guise–it turns out, it’s a costume.

Well, much more than that. The costume renders its wearer incapable of disobeying commands, and removes the sense of who and where they are. The demon mask is especially powerful in that regard.

Dori takes to this “new” Mahaara well, and they form a sort of taboo friendship, and Dori vows to keep Mahaara’s true form a secret. But they dance around what Mahaara actually is–Dori remarks that Mahaara looks “the same” as he does without the costume and mask, and Mahaara replies, “By no means! We can’t possibly be similar! We are nothing like you, your holiness.” Smells like a mystery to me. If not human, why human-shaped? And of course, the angels seem human too, as we haven’t glimpsed anything supernatural come from them yet.

Anyway, the angel-children set out to explore the vast expanse on which they’ve landed, demon guards in tow, and we slowly get more details about the worldbuilding, particularly the three realms (Heaven, the lower realm, and the realm at the bottom of the Earth), a strange seven-day storm, and other mythology that makes for an interesting tale.

But something doesn’t quite sit right with me–how much of this is truth, and how much of this is metaphor? I can’t quite shake that the kids might be in danger, as well as the demons, and wonder if the higher-up angels have anything to hide.

There is a little bit of that in play when the angel-child in charge takes a secret meeting with a mysterious visitor at the shelter compound one day, and the other angels eavesdrop and learn things they haven’t before.

By the end of the manga, we’re left on a cliffhanger announcing that “the project is a failure.” And I’m like, are these kids going to die?

There’s an interesting mystery at play here, and I just don’t trust the roles everyone was given in the story. I want to learn more about the world and the strange things going on in it. It’s not just the demons that are wearing masks, I think.

I look forward to the next volume.

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Divine Messengers & Demonic Guardians released today digitally from Manga Mavericks, and you can order it here from Manga Mavericks.