{Lighty Lively}

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Episode 25: Tsumihoroboshi Chapter 4 - Invasion of Earth

Summary

Rena has left her home for good, so she and Officer Oishi converse via the one and only public phone in Hinamizawa. Oishi informs her that the Sonozaki household may be after her because she possesses Takano’s research notes and Takano’s time of death is calculated to be before the Watanagashi Festival. Therefore, the woman who she met on the night of the festival actually might have been a zombie.
Keiichi and Mion are still searching for Rena. Mion admits that she had the chopped-up remains of Rina and Teppei dug up from their original dump site so to cover up Rena better. After she rides away on her bike, Keiichi suddenly gets an epiphany about where Rena might be hiding.

Two police officers poke around the Hinamizawa junkyard, in search of the elusive Ryuguu Rena. Rena notices them approaching and hunkers down in her van. The officers receive telecommunications about another possible whereabouts of Rena and leave. Rena thinks that Takano’s explanation about Oyashiro-sama is correct. She scratches her neck and finds maggots mingled with her blood again.

Keiichi follows his hunch and trudges into the Hinamizawa junkyard, where he finds Rena in process of moving out of the place to another secret place, since she doesn’t feel safe there anymore. Keiichi notices the band-aids and bruising around Rena’s neck, but she brushes the matter off. She asks Keiichi about the corpse pieces being moved and he confesses that Mion did it to protect her. It only enrages Rena further that her ‘friends’ hid this fact from her.
Rena tells Keiichi that the parasites behind the Oyashiro-sama hysteria in Hinamizawa are aliens and she refuses to lose them. She then collapses in a laughing fit and darkly states that she knows about what Keiichi did in the past, which he hasn’t told anyone since moving to Hinamizawa. The subject pains Keiichi a great deal because of the horrible things that he did. Rena declares that friends don’t have secrets between them and since Keiichi didn’t tell her about the secret of his past, he is not her friend. She then leaves the junkyard and Keiichi in his throes of anguish.

At school, Keiichi reveals his past to Mion, Satoko, and Rika because of what Rena said about there being no secrets among friends. Rika questions Keiichi what he wants to hear from them after telling them his story. Mion tells him that people have painful or sad things and failures that they don’t want to recall, and if she had to disclose everything in order to be a friend, then she wouldn’t need friends. Rika furthers their point by saying that there’s a difference between something that one shouldn’t be honest about and something that one must be honest about.

Keiichi sheds a tear (don’t mind the screen capture; it shows too many tears as the result of a composite of three shots) from hearing this. At that moment, memories of himself in a parallel universe, within the Onikakushi Chapter, surface in his mind. Keiichi’s erratic behaviors led him to mistake a marker for a syringe and murder Rena and Mion, even when Rena uttered her last words, “I believe you.”

Keiichi freaks out at the sudden influx of memories. While Mion and Satoko goes off to distract Chie-sensei from approaching Keiichi, Rika tells him that she can forgive him because she knows what happened, too. Keiichi understands that Rena’s current situation is identical to his in the parallel universe, so he vows to not give up and prevent the tragedy. Rika goes into Oyashiro Mode and proclaims that she will fight with him.
Mion returns from sidetracking and Keiichi embraces her while apologizing for distrusting in his friends. Mion blushes in confusion.
Kasai, Mion, and her mother, Akane, meet with Officer Oishi and two other officers. The Sonozakis present a suitcase full of Takano scrapbooks to the officers. The officers find that the alleged research in the scrapbooks is no more than occult fiction and junk. After accepting two terms from the officers, Akane implores them to uphold Rena’s rights and let her have a lawyer, if they ever catch her. The officers agree.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Hinamizawa, Rena walks on in full paranoia with her cleaver in one hand…

“What is astray, is the classroom in your memories.
What echoes, is the timer of despair.
What arrives, is the end of the beginning.”

Impressions
Some random observations and exaggerations:

-Rena has one heck of a hickey going on her neck.
-I unintentionally made Keiichi cry far more manly tears than he actually does, courtesy of Photoshop masking tool.
-Syringe = Marker!! OMG! I so called it all the way back in Onikakushi!
-Where did the poly-tank in the Next Episode Preview come from?!?!?

♥ Chie-sensei vs. Akane ♥