Honey Trap Shared House Vol 1,2 - Seraphy is criminally cute?!
Honey Trap Shared House is a manga series written by Masamune Kuji and illustrated by Koichi Kozuki that started serializing in 2021 and is still ongoing, with 9 volumes released so far. I picked this series just because of the cute art, but I wasn't expecting it to be written by the same author of Maou Gakuen no Hangyakusha and other popular light novels.
The story follows protagonist Hayato Kiriyama, alias Bullet of the Shura, who is Japan's current top spy, apparently immune to any honey trap. He was tasked to act as a decoy and catch foreign targets by managing a share house and hinting that there is vital information in it to be stolen. This would allow him to lure many top spies and eliminate them.
And while the girls who arrive at the share house are definitely top spies, they are also childhood friends of Hayato, which complicates things because Hayato actually likes them a lot, making him vulnerable to honey traps. The heroines introduced so far are:
Seraphy Hiiragi, alias Blade Princess, affiliated with Russia, is an assassin skilled with blades. She has been deeply in love with Hayato since their childhood and wants to make him switch sides and eventually marry him. She takes instructions to set honey traps from his superiors, but she's innocent and easily flustered, causing embarrassing and cute situations.
Maria Rockwell, alias Devil Incarnate, affiliated with the USA, is a voluptuous femme fatale who loves alcohol and doesn't hesitate to use direct, overt seduction methods. She's confident, but Hayato's reactions actually make her get embarrassed, and she is not able to go fully through with it. Of course, she also loves Hayato and wants him to switch sides.
Emily Ashley, alias Alice, affiliated with the UK, is an 18-year-old spy who looks quite a lot younger than her age. She's the daughter of Hayato's former mentor, and she lived with him for a while after something happened that broke the relationship. She wants everything back and is ready to do anything to get him.
In the midst of this chaos, Hayato himself plans to make everyone else change affiliation and join him, as he doesn't want to hurt the people he likes. Of course, everyone assumes that the other parties are completely unaware that they're spies, which brings hilarity when their actions are so easy to see through.
Now I'm not fully sure where the story will lead, but I'm definitely on board to keep reading this till the end. Seraphy is my favorite so far by a wide margin because of her absolutely cute reactions, but I've seen online that there are more girls coming soon, so who knows what'll happen...
The end of the second volume goes hard with a cliffhanger showing Hyouka Wang, codename Ashen Girl, kissing Hayato in front of everyone else. She's clearly yet another spy, probably affiliated with China, so I'm curious to see where it'll lead the power balance in the house. So far, nobody has tried anything so daring...