Trauma Ryoushi Kesshou - Kuon, can you stop kicking Haruto?
Trauma Ryoushi Kesshou / Trauma Quantum (トラウマ量子結晶) is an action/science fiction manga series written and illustrated by Aoki Hayato (who also worked on the manga adaptation of Macross F). It is completed with seven volumes released between 2010 and 2013.
The story follows Tokitou Haruto, a first-year high school student who is trying to overcome his past as a chuunibyou and live a normal school life. Apparently, in middle school, he was so engrossed in a science fiction novel (Legend of the Galactic Heroes) that he started talking to others as if he were a character from that series, which isolated him completely from other students.
Haruto is trying his best now, but a new and more significant issue arises. From time to time, everyone around him completely freezes on the spot as if time has stopped. He tries to brush it off as a dream, but things become very real when he meets Sakazaki Kuon during one of those freezes and learns that she is part of a team protecting the world from monsters called Kohakjal.
The time stop is caused by these monsters, which use it as a way to infiltrate our reality. Kuon and the other members of her club are trying to stop them using special powers called Negative Oracle. This power has a special characteristic: it improves in strength the more time its user spends doing something useless.
As you might expect, Haruto is one of the strongest Oracle users, considering he spent most of his middle school years memorizing every line of the novel and even practicing how to talk like the characters. The other members all have their own faults that make them more powerful when using the power.
The main characters (aside from Haruto) are:
Sakazaki Kuon: A first-year high school girl and the main heroine of the story. She is the "straight man" in most of her interactions with the other characters, which increases her stress level significantly. When she is back home, she loves to waste time playing with her cat and engaging in something called jichichuu (self-policing idiot) on online message boards. She basically goes around 2ch saying things like "off topic" or "read the rules" to people posting there.
Himegishi Riko: A second-year high school girl. She is extremely tall, looks more mature than even the males in the group, and has been trained since a young age to become the successor of her family's martial arts. As a rebound from all this pressure, she has become engrossed in shoujo manga, dreaming of having a romance like the ones she sees in those stories. She falls in love easily.
Baba Kazuya: A second-year high school boy. Often nicknamed Kazu, he is the stereotypical school idiot and is dense regarding romantic affection. Just like Haruto, he wants to have a girlfriend, but he is completely oblivious to all of Riko's approaches to get close to him.
Honestly, my favorite character is a toss-up between Kuon and Riko, and I can't really make up my mind. I liked Riko more as a heroine (both in terms of looks and personality), but Kuon's interactions with Haruto were the funniest, and it felt like the two had much better compatibility.
If you are interested in a light read, I suggest giving Trauma Quantum a chance. It is a solid comedy series with charming characters and a relatively well-thought-out storyline.
