The angel Laila and her daughter, the hero Emi are still getting along terribly even after they cooled off following their parent-child fight. Maou is completely fed up with their antics, leaving him in a tight spot when Laila starts explaining the details of her "job" to save a parallel world. Unwilling to take her at her word, Maos demands to a visit to Laila's home. She tries to shoot down the idea but the group ignores her and so starts their journey to Nerima!
This volume ramps up the progression towards the next arc. Emi is forced to actually deal with her mother by the end of the volume and not in small part from Maou's efforts. We get movement on Chiho and Maou with a really sudden resolution of Rika and Ashiya. I won't run it, but it seems that Maou and life in Japan has Ashiya following his liege's playbook with people. It was really nice to see that from him and look back at his view of humans in the early volumes. This is mostly a Chiho centric volume though and that's not bad. She starts to assert herself more at the end and at some point Maou is going to have to deal with her feelings. We have yet to really get his view on her romantic interest in him other than what little he mentioned last volume, so that ever comes of this will be nice. We get to see where Laila lives and how she was able to be around Chiho to slip her the Yesod fragment. The reveal of her living space was hilarious for me. Her job background reenforces for Maou that she has been hiding behind the scenes in ways that left her family in danger and isn't really interested yet in listening to her request for help. Gabriel in the last chapter is more forthcoming on the stakes of what is coming. He then name drops the big antagonist of the Angel system in Ente Isla and it makes some of Chiho's questions about Ashiya's actions make more sense. Very good build up and excited to see what comes of the bomb drop in the last sentence of this volume.
I liked that this focused a lot on romance. We get to see Chiho talk with one of her friends at school, and re-confront Maou. Laila and Emi make a little bit of progress, although we still don't know all the specifics of what she wants Emi and Maou to do for her. Speaking of them, they're finally friends which is nice. Rika and Alciel At the end (on an annoying cliffhanger) we get some important information about the angels, the OG Satan, and also the reasons why humans have holy force, why angels are angels, etc. I look forward to seeing where all of that goes. Overall, a decent installment. I've greatly enjoyed the character development of the last two or three books, and I do look forward to seeing what Maou says to Chiho, as I suspect that will happen in the next book. Hopefully we'll soon move into the final arc of the series, which I think should be happening in maybe two books? The next book will probably be spent on preparation and working out a few things relationship-wise. 4 stars.
I took a long break from this series after burning out on it after volume 12, but it was just my luck that volume 13 is more or less aimed at organizing and summarizing the story up to this point. It does away with the action and instead focuses entirely on character relations, which does read quite well and feels interesting.