Seraph of the End: Guren Ichinose: Catastrophe at Sixteen (manga) Series

Prequel to the original hit manga series, Seraph of the End!

Detailing the events before the apocalypse, 15-year-old Guren Ichi­nose enrolls at Daiichi Shibuya High, a magical training school.
Witness his trials as he must hide his true strength even as he is trampled on at a school for the insufferably privileged.

When darkness descends, who will you turn to for help?

With less than two days left before his father’s execution, Guren finally opens up to his friends and asks for their aid after watching Mahiru get whisked away by vampires. Together they set off for Kyoto to try to bring Guren’s crazed childhood love into custody, and on the way manage to capture a live vampire and a mysterious piece of cursed gear that Mahiru herself had been wielding. But will this major harvest be enough to spare Guren’s family and followers from the guillotine hanging over their heads? 

Meanwhile, time is quickly running out before the foretold catastrophe on Christmas. Guren helps the Hiragis launch a full-scale war to wipe out the Brotherhood of a Thousand Nights and put a stop to their Seraph of the End project, but all is not what it seems…

Would you doom your love to death to rescue your family?

Desperate to save his retainers and friends, Guren makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives up his humanity to accept the demon in his cursed gear, thereby transforming himself into a demon as well. His newfound demonic powers help him protect the people important to him, but the victory is short-lived. Hours later, the Imperial Demons’ presumed heir, Kureto Hiragi, takes all of Guren’s family and their followers hostage and presents Guren with an impossible choice: track down and kill his childhood love Mahiru Hiragi within a month, or watch as the Hiragis execute everyone in his clan—starting with his father. 

Left with no more to go on than cryptic messages about a secret research project that could destroy the world and whispers of an underground city of vampires, Guren must confront the most consequential choice of his life. And all the while, the clock counting down to catastrophe is ticking…

What would you sacrifice to save the ones you love?

Guren just barely escapes his first encounter with the disturbed product of forbidden experiments and one of the terrifyingly powerful vampires whose ire they’ve roused, but the battle takes a heavy toll. It leaves him with a permanent stain on his soul and more questions about what exactly his childhood sweetheart, Mahiru Hiragi, is after. And what does her prophecy about the world coming to an end actually mean? Before he can get any real answers, however, Mahiru begs him for an unthinkable favor: to kill her by his own hand. 

But war waits for no one, and soon Guren’s friends and personal guards come under savage attack. With no time to spare and thousands of lives in the balance, Guren must measure love against madness, and the survival of his friends against his own humanity.

What price would you pay to come out on top? 

After a devastating attack on Guren’s ­high school, war has officially broken out between his family’s mortal enemies, the Order of the Imperial Demons, and their rival syndicate, the Brotherhood of a ­Thousand Nights. Amidst the chaos, Guren’s childhood love Mahiru Hiragi leaves him with a chilling prophecy: this year, at Christmas, the world will come to an end.

In his struggle to decipher the riddle and piece together a path to survival, Guren is forced to relinquish his last illusions of freedom and serve the Imperial Demons’ presumptive heir. But when Guren’s first orders dispatch him and his friends on a mission straight into the jaws of all-but certain death, he must decide whether to abandon his ambitions and live to see another day or make a deal with the devil destined to send him down a one-way road to hell.

How far would you go to get what you most desire?

For Guren Ichinose, a fifteen-year-old magic user born into a lowly clan, that journey begins when he is forced to enroll at an academy run by his order’s mortal enemies. There, while endlessly tormented by his insufferably privileged classmates, Guren must hide his true strength and weave his way through intrigue and deceit amid the rising winds of war.

This all-new manga adaptation of the standalone light novel prequels to the hit manga Seraph of the End follows Guren as he takes his first steps toward inevitable calamity—the apocalypse that ushered in the reign of vampires.

It is a tale of catastrophe, of star-crossed love, lies, and the search for an escape from destiny. How far will Guren go, and what—or whom—must he sacrifice for his ambitions?