The people of Earth live in a society where vampires aren't just real but dangerous. Although humanity has been able to keep them under control and even take the night away as the vampires' natural habitat, some of them have adapted. Hesperides, a relatively new breed of vampires, have adapted over hundreds of years in order to be able to go outside during dusk when the sunlight is at its weakest and feast on humans.
Aburaya Shiro, a high school kid, lives in a town where there has not been a vampire attack in years, but adults keep warning them of going outside at dusk. Shiro and his classmates take this warning lightly and head out at dusk only to find out one of their classmates who they thought they knew well turns out to be a Hesperides. With all his classmates violently murdered, the only way Shiro was able to survive was with the help of a different classmate, Ichijoji Eruka, who doesn't seem to be entirely human herself.
Crime Zone is a manga by Kenji Yamamoto (also known for trash.) and Seigo Tokiya. The manga was serialized in Dragon Age magazine from 2011 to 2013.
This work contains example of:
- Action Girl: Eruka and most female vampires. One of Shiro's classmates attempts to be this at the start of the manga when she realizes that a vampire's been hiding amongst them, but it doesn't work out well. See Made of Iron below.
- Artistic License – Biology: The translator points out
that the basis for the girls' having superpowers has been proven to be utter bull.
- Becoming the Mask: Shiro's childhood friend, Ayase Kuze, was a double of his actual friend who was killed sometime prior to the story. She admits to having truly fallen in love with him right before getting killed. A new "Ayase" comes in and becomes the Bad Ass Normal of the crew soon after.
- Body Horror:
- Eruka's most powerful attacks require her to transform her limbs into strange weapons.
- Pure-bloods.
- Cannibalism Superpower: Eruka can transform her arm into a reptilian monster that devours her opponents.
- Good Samaritan: Early on in the story, Shiro manages to get away from the first pure-blood and gain shelter with some band members who were on their way to their studio. Since vampires are normal in the setting, they happily offer him shelter, stating that the sound-proof walls of their studio should be more than enough protection. This ends about as well as you'd expect it to.
- Gratuitous German: All over the place. At one point the translator has to explain that the German word the author used to represent Eruka saying "Release"note doesn't actually mean release, but that release was his intended meaning.
- I Have You Now, My Pretty: Shiro finds himself subject to the rare gender-flipped variant of this.
- I Want Them Alive!: The vampires are out to capture Shiro for some reason.
- MacGuffin Super-Person: The series starts off with Aburaya Shiro, the main character who thought that he was just an Ordinary High-School Student finding out that he is somehow key to the plans of the vampires who've been put on the run by humankind, and that the government has been keeping a close watch on him for years as a result.
- Made of Iron: All vampires. They can take a few bullets to the head and still stand up.
- Mercy Kill: Once someone's been bitten by a vampire, there's a limited amount of time until their Dunkkel organ forms. Once that happens, they're doomed to become a vampire, and killing them is the only option.
- Non-Action Guy: Shiro. Justified since he's a normal person surrounded by vampires and super soldiers.
- Our Vampires Are Different: Vampires in the manga come in three varieties: monstrous and very powerful pure-bloods (at the beginning of the manga it is said that only seven of them exist in the world), more or less standard vampiric "subspecies" (usually called hesperides, or hes for short), and artificially created "secret species"—human-hesperides hybrids.
- There also exist some exotic versions of hesperides: such as vampire sharks.
- Replacement Scrappy: In-universe. Most of Shiro's loved ones were killed two years prior to the manga proper, and the government replaced them with doubles. The double of Shiro's childhood friend actually admits that she fell in love with him for real before getting killed, and a new double soon comes in and becomes a member of the main cast.
