Manga / Plunderer

The Flash Baron

To steal away everything in this country. That is my purpose.

It's the year 305 of the Alcian calendar, and the world is currently entirely controlled by "numbers." Every human born is branded with a "Count." This Count can be anything; the amount of kilometers walked, or the amount of people who have said your food is tasty. If your Count drops to 0, you will be sent into the Abyss. After Hina's mother's Count dropped to 0, her last request was for Hina to look for the Legendary Red Baron.

Cue several years later, when she comes across a man claiming to be the Red Baron who seeks to take her Count and the mysterious Ballot she possesses that was given to her by her mother. When there seems to be no more hope, a man in a mask appears and the truth becomes clear.

Plunderer is an action-fantasy manga story by the creator of Heaven's Lost Property, Suu Minazuki, in 2014 and is currently on-going. The anime adaptation premiered January 8 2020, with a simultaneous dub by Funimation.

---

Tropes:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: The Starbouts where one wagers their count against another. The loser loses all of their Count barring a single point, and someone with a higher Count can issue whatever commands to someone with a lower Count that has to be obeyed or else it drops. So if you lose and don't obey then you're pulled straight into the Abyss.
• Abusive Parents: Shumeran's mother drank and beat him for having the same eyes as his father. Then eventually she grabs a knife to gouge them out, managing to get one.
• Accidental Murder: Shumeran kills his mother as a child when his genes awaken while she was trying to blind him. On the other hand, bitch had it coming.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: The current ruler of Althea is a child, due to her parents early death. Then she gets murdered by the Special Service.
• Affectionate Nickname: At one point in the story Rihoto is working as a dessert vendor and is dressed in a pudding costume. Characters who met him at this point occasionally call him “Pudding” or “Mr Pudding”.
• After the End: Alcia is actually set 300 years in the future from the Abandoned War, which is when several countries waged a war to lower the population of humanity due to dwindling resources.
• The Ageless: Those who were blessed by the Althing or underwent the Aerial Ace project stopped aging once they suffer from immense regret that leaves them wanting to die.
• Amplifier Artifact: The ballots are this for those who underwent the Aerial Ace surgery, enhancing their powers as a multiplier.
• Amusing Injuries: Rihito suffers these often.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Lyne gives one to Rihito as she's dying of bloodloss. She acknowledges she fell in love with him, but Hina is the only one he loves.
  • In return, he gives Hina a confession afterwards.
• Apocalyptic Log: Nana's Love Letter.
• Art Shift: From normal to super-deformed as the situation dictates.
• Black-and-White Morality: Jail was extremely determined to follow orders and the law and make others to respect it without much caring if people were suffering for this. Fortunately he learns fairly quickly to chill out thanks to Rihito and Lyne.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Rihito, when he gets pissed.
• Berserk Button: Seeing Rihito in his Special Service uniform after becoming the new leader set Tokikaze off.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Firenda.
• Break Her Heart to Save Her: Rihito makes a show of callously dismissing Hina and "stealing" her Ballot before running off in the early chapters. It's revealed shortly afterwards he specifically did so to ensure that both the military and thieves wouldn't go after Hina, seeing as the Ballots are highly valuable and highly illegal artifacts. Hina calls him out on his lies the next time they meet.
  • He does it again later on, intent on taking out the military after revealing that he was the one who killed her father.
  • Pele does it to Lyne after being revealed to the Piercing Baron, even going so far as dislocating her shoulder and calling her "[his] toy" after she spared him from a kick to the face. She still comes back for him as he falls to his apparent death after being stabbed and dropped off a cliff by Shumerman.
• Break the Cutie: The war did a hell of a job doing this to Sonohara and Rihito.
• The Bus Came Back: The Aviator Pelmo from Chapter 4 returned in Chapter 42, having been sent to the Abyss and somehow rigging a parachute from her clothes to survive the fall down.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Rihito's opinion, which agitates Hina.
• Chick Magnet: For a guy whose 1000+ high Count is how many girls have rejected him, Rihito has a lot of girls crushing on him.
• Child Soldiers: The pilot of the helicopter in Chapter 8 is a child who can't even be more than 6. And in the Abandoned War they started brainwashing children specifically because they noticed Rihito wouldn't kill children.
• Cooldown Hug: Hina attempts this when Rihito's bloodlust takes over. It doesn't work.
• Cool Old Guy: Alexandrov Grigorovich, the mentor and adopted father of Jail. He's even older than he appears as he's an aged but immortal Captain Alan.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Once the drugs in Sonohara's system wear out and Rihito loses control to his own bloodlust, he basically beats her like a ragdoll until Jail steps in.
• Despair Event Horizon: Doa reached it some point in the past after becoming a baron and killing hundreds of children that were brainwashed to kill Rihito, as they were the only ones he wouldn't kill.
  • Tokikaze reached it after watching the love of his life being stabbed by Rihito and being left behind to watch the children after Class 1-A killed themselves to leave more resources for them.
• Dragged Off to Hell: Anyone whose count falls to 0 gets pulled into the Abyss by countless hands with no escape. Unless they have a ballot, which staves it off. If they survive the fall, then they're stuck in a Crapsack World that has little resources.
• Driven to Suicide: The remainder of Class A ended up committing suicide since they were taking in orphans and lacked resources after being abandoned by the Barons. [[spoiler:However as of Chapter 35, Doa reveals they may still be alive at the Wall of Paradise. They're not. They're actually clones filled with utterly twisted sadism.
  • Shumerman's wife, who killed herself thinking she was incapable of conceiving a child. Shumerman later learned after her death that he was the infertile one.
  • All the adults beneath the Abyss do this once their children are weaned, leaving Tokikaze to look after them.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Done in Chapter 28 for comedic effect.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Jail Murdoch's ballot allows him to conjure anything with iron.
• A Father to His Men: Shumerman's lectures only involve reading children's picture books to his class. Justified with Rihito, who became his adopted son.
  • Invoked with Alan, who takes the brunt of an RPG blast from harming Class A then laments that 'daddy' [himself] was unable to protect them. This likely stems from the fact that he wasn't there to save his own children in the past.
  • Invoked with Tokikaze, who raised the children of the Abyss himself for the last 300 years.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Rihito and Jail start out as enemies, but through numerous Teeth-Clenched Teamwork moments eventually come to respect one another.
• Flash Step: Rihito's ability as the Flash Baron.
• Floating Continent: Althea is floating in the sky where the lack of fuel below means that few could get to it. Banning flight was a means of preventing it from being discovered.
• Frameup: Alan gets framed for assassinating the ruler of Althea and her royal guard by the Special Service.
• Gravity Master: Doa, the Aerial Ace from the 300 years in the past, manifested his Count in this form. He uses it to pin Rhito down and then bring an entire ruin crashing down on him.
• Heel–Face Turn: Tokikaze now works with the residents of the Abyss and intends to have them take Althea.
• Heroic BSoD: Rihito spent 200 years after the Abandoned War not speaking and huddled up in the corner while wearing a mask. The reason for this is because he believed he personally killed his adoptive brother (and Hina's father), Tokikaze.
• Heroic Second Wind: Rihito gets one in Chapter 34.
• Hidden Depths: Doa; when introduced he was a bully and acted like he didn't care about human life. Later chapters show flashbacks of him and how much he despised war as well as his feelings towards Sonohara. Specifically, how he has feelings for her due to her defending him when he was younger, and not wanting to let her get hurt, deliberately played the role of a bully to chase her away.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Lyne is considered fat by the other girls because she has a little extra flab compared to them in swimsuits.
• Homing Projectile: Sonohara's bullets can not only bend out of the way of an obstacle, but track targets to the end of the world because of her Count "Persistence". That's why she's known as the "Pursuit Baron".
• Hope Spot:
  • Doa releases the captive group rather than subject them to the baron surgery when he believes them to be uninvolved. Unfortunately, right afterwards he subverts it after he sees they have the original ballots and decides to kill them all for trying to undo the world they went through hell to make while also drugging Sonohara back into insanity.
  • Rihito convinces Tokikaze to stand down and abandon the use of Nuclear Weapons, only for it to be revealed to be a trick so that the Secret Service led by Pele could act.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Rihito is roughly two heads taller than Hina. Inverted during the School Enrollment arc however, as she was One Head Taller than him before his Aerial Ace surgery.
• Human Weapon: Rihito. During the war, he was dominated by his bloodlust and so they kept him locked up in a straight-jacket only tossing him out on the battlefield while drugged up to kill. He only snapped out of it later on after he killed his adopted brother.
• I Have Your Wife: Tokikaze takes Hina for the purpose of making him suffer.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Doa seems like an obnoxious bully when we meet him but later on it's revealed he genuinely does care for Sonohara and during the war, he was forced into the difficult position of having to save Licht by killing child assassins who went after Licht since Licht couldn't kill them himself.
  • Despite Jail’s seemingly cold demeanour, he genuinely does care about his subordinates and goes out of his way to protect innocent civilians.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Doa; while opposed to the main characters bringing Alica back to the ground, he does has a point for not wanting it to happen. Him claiming the Baron's went through hell to achieve Alica was correct. Doa, being a soldier during the war killed many to help achieve it. Not wanting to bring it down and starting another war is justified in a sense.
• Kick Chick: Lyne. Unfortunately for her, it leaves her flashing virtually everyone else since her military skirts are short.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Tokikaze's Count is the "number of times he's killed those he loves"which is every child he's raised to adulthood. The ballot's count is over 500,000, making it the highest in the series.
• Leave No Witnesses: When a helicopter pops out of the Abyss, members of the government begin to cover it up by killing everyone else including the other members of the military and civilians.
• Love at First Sight: Nana fell for Rihito shortly after she woke up and the war was over. She stayed with him for 300 years after that but realized that he would never accept her as a bride because of what happened.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Tokikaze is revealed to be Hina's father.
• Magical Accessory: The Ballots. They grant super-natural powers to "Counts" for those that hold them.
• Mercy Kill: Tokikaze is asked to kill the adults who won't kill themselves as tradition.
• Nuclear Option: After the fallout from the Abandon War, one of the first Ballots passed was that nuclear weapons were forever forbidden. Tokikaze rescinds the ban and then launches one as a threat, set to hit where it won't affect them but still has thousands to use and threatens to use them if they fight back. Before they try to retaliate they immediately try to reinstitute the ban.
• Orphan's Plot Trinket: Hina inherited one of the seven Ballots from her mother before she fell into the abyss.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Alexandrov came home from work to see that his children had been murdered for the sake of food.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The School Enrollment arc. Though it's a Justified Trope as the series takes place in a future After the End and that was right before it happened.
• Playing with Fire: Alan's ballot allows him to create flames hot enough to melt iron.
• Population Control: The true purpose of the Count in Althea.
• Psycho Serum: There's an injection the Barons can receive to drive them to insanity.
• Really 700 Years Old: The Barons and those blessed by the Althing all eventually stopped aging, leading to this trope.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Rihito and Jail respectively, right down to their outfits.
• Refuge in Audacity: Both discussed and played straight when Rihito was peeping on the girls. Since the instructors were set up to catch him, he figured he could just walk into the girls bath and they wouldn’t notice, only to fall for the Schmuck Bait of them switching the signs. Later, Jail who wasn’t aware of the trap, did end up walking into the girl’s room and they were too shocked to do anything.
• Revealing Skill: Pele's response to having a gun pointed at her back in Chapter 6 when normal military personnel wouldn't know how to revealed to Rihito that she was formerly a member of the Special Service.
• Revenge: Tokikaze spent the last 300 years training in order to get revenge on Rihito. Or so he tells him.
• Russian Roulette: Under the influence of the Psycho Serum, Sonohara tries to torment the group by doing this. However, Hina takes the gun and calls her bluff by pulling the trigger on herself repeatedly.
• Scars Are Forever: Alan's scar never healed completely despite his immortality.
• Second Love: Jail for Nana and Pele for Lyne.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Nana sends the group back in time to try to change what happened to their world and prevent Rihito from becoming an Aerial Ace, but none are able to in the end. The best they can do is make promises to try and make things better for the future Aces.
• Smoking Is Cool: Alan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his mouth.
• Split Personality: Sonohara and Rihito both demonstrate this when using too much of their power. It's a side effect of the Aerial Ace project that comes from Shumeran, the original donor.
• Spot the Thread: Jail immediately figures out that if they simply needed a majority count they could have simply have reclaimed four Original Ballots instead of all seven. Tokikaze later figures out that it was because they needed people who had Shumeran's blood to do a vote.
  • He also figured out that Alan didn't have Nana send him back into the past to save his own family because it meant that Jail would die.
  • Hina notices that Rihito's corpse is too clean, despite the fact that he wasn't breathing. Sure enough, he fell into the same coma condition he had in the past.
• Stable Time Loop: What the Set Right What Once Went Wrong sadly turns out to be.
• Street Urchin: Jail was one before Alan found him.
• Super-Soldier: The Aerial Aces.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: In the early part of the story whenever Rihito and Jail have to work together they do so reluctantly, mainly due to Rihito’s status as a fugitive and Jail’s uptight demeanour.
• The Promise: Two are made during the School Enrollment arc. The first is that Jail promises to play with Nana as much as she likes when they return to future. The second is that Hina promises to have Rihito's child and start a family with him so that he won't be alone.
  • Notably both try to keep these promises when they meet up again in Chapter 28.
  • Rihito and Doa made one in the past to end the war as quickly as possible by killing every enemy they came across. Rihito trying to cancel the ballot would have resparked the war and broken the promise.
• There Are No Adults: In the Abyss, there's a tradition where adults will kill themselves so their children will be able to have enough supplies to live. Those who can't bring themselves to do so ask Tokikaze to kill them painlessly instead. The only exception until recently is Tokikaze, who personally raised them from children.
• This Is My Boomstick: Sonohara and the Special Duty Unit's appearance with guns catch the locals completely off guard. They don't even know what's killing them. That's because Althea was purposely isolated from the rest of the world and their technology made to stagnate outside of the Special Service Unit.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: A very important topic is this manga.
• Tragic Dream: Shumeran wanted to have a family, with a wife in child. However, his wife couldn't conceive and ended up killing herself thinking it was her fault. He later learned that his body can't produce children, meaning he lost everything because of factors beyond his control.
• Tricked-Out Gloves: Jail's Ballot.
• Unishment: Since Schmelman did nothing but read picture books, Class A preferred Alan’s approach to teaching, where he’d punish everyone for Rihito’s peeping as it involved actual training. Some even encouraged him to keep doing it.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Althea is a flourishing land. But only because the Althing is stealing what little food and resources were left from the other countries in the world. Even when some point out Althea has been doing research into their own cultivation, it doesn't change all the evil that has been done.
• Walking the Earth: Hina traveled alone for years looking for the Red Baron after her mother's death. Nana and Rihito have also been doing the same since they escaped from the military.
• War Is Hell: What the students of Class A learn when it comes to their doorstep.
  • Doa especially felt this way, leading to him deciding to kill every enemy they came across to end it as quickly as possible.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Tokikaze. There's only enough resources for the Abyss or Althea, and one can't survive when the other is flourishing. To make sure that the kids he's raised get their shot, he's willing to undo everything.
• Wham Shot: Chapter 7 ends with the "Abyssal Demon" in fact being a helicopter. It's the first hint that something is wrong, and where the plot really starts rolling.
• Wham Episode: Despite starting off as a fantasy adventure in a world of people having numbers, it soon becomes something much darker.
  • The entire School Enrollment Arc reveals that 300 years ago, On Earth, humanity started a nuclear war due to developing too fast. Then something from the sky fell to Earth, which would become Althing, the shadowy hands that take people's count. Humanity would first use Althing to get rid of nukes, before preparing for war in March. Rihito was once a young lad in the dying world, becoming a member of Class A, who sought to become "The Non-Killing Army." Then, the rest of humanity screws Japan over by having a secret Polling to wipe them out early, removing the restrictions and starting the "Abandoned War", which would end with Shumerman, Alan, and Lena using Althing and the Seven Original Ballots to create Althea and turn the Earth into the Abyss.
  • Chapter 39 is effectively "everything goes wrong". The Special Service assassinates the ruling queen and her guard, framing it on Alan. He gives Rihito his original ballots before seeing what looks to be the rest of the class that had died hundreds of years ago, armed with weapons meant to kill him. Hina gets stabbed in the back while riding with Rihito. And Tokikaze climbs out of the Abyss to confront Rihito.
  • Chapter 43: Tokikaze broadcasts his intentions to all of Althea and uses the majority vote to stop Althea from plundering all of the Abyss' resources, prevent bannings due to Counts, and then rescind the ban on Nuclear Weapons with the intention of invading the next day. He also reveals how Hina's mother survived for 300 years so that she could be born.
  • Chapter 46: It's revealed Pele is actually Colonel General Gespenst Zerlegen of the Special Service, the Pierce Baron who killed off leading officers during the Abandonment War.
• Whole Some Crossdresser: Jail does this to infiltrate the Capital.
• Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Shumerman, who never believed in Class A's idea of their non-killing army and merely used them to filter out the weakest links in his army. Rihito thinks that this isn't his normal behavior, so something is wrong.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Even in his maddened state, Rihito never killed a child during the war. Eventually the enemies exploited that.