Hayate The Combat Butler Chapter 438: Attention Please - Review and Synopsis

Look who's here too.

 Synopsis:  One month earlier, (presumably from the current timeline) Hina gets sent an invite from (allegedly) Hakuo’s sister school to deliver a speech in Australia. The letter comes with a business class airplane ticket especially for her. As the ticket is super-expensive, it’s an offer she can’t really refuse.

Should've ordered a salisbury steak to go with that, Hina

She finds herself all jittery and nervous in the waiting lounge of the airport while munching on what she says is some “strange food” and coffee, while wondering whether this will be her last meal. To add to this, a little boy and his father notice her and the brat starts laughing at her and talking her down for being so scared when there’s a 0.001% odds of the plane breaking down. True to her, “I hate to lose” persona, Hina glares at the brat and imagines scaring him out of his pants, but doesn’t actually follow through with it.

Troll father and son duo.

Before long, it’s boarding time and Hina gets seat 5A, which is right by a window. She fidgets around a bit pondering on whether it would be better to pull down the shade or not. While she’s doing this, it’s already takeoff time. Being acrophobic, she really thinks that she might die on this trip and starts muttering that she’d confess to Hayate if she makes it back alive. The takeoff goes pretty smoothly and she’s soon ready to just lay back and sleep off the rest of the nearly 10-hour trip to Sydney, but once again, fate conspires against her via a flight stewardess serving meals.

Suddenly, the plane goes through some turbulence and this totally shakes her up, but she decides to try to sleep it off… unfortunately, the plane is shaking too much for her to fall asleep.

Hata's an expert at adding insult to injury on his characters

From out of nowhere, Aika appears and offers to hold her hand. When Hina asks why she’s there, she nonchalantly responds that it’s because she’s the vice president. It seems she’d been watching Hina for some time and saw everything from her glaring at the little brat to her mutterings about Hayate. The chapter ends here.

Review: First of all… beach chapter effing where!????

With that out of the way, this was a pretty funny chapter which consisted mostly of fate conspiring to troll Hina (fate is also known as Kenjiro Hata, by the way).

She should've actually done this... little brat deserved it.

Not much  to say about this chapter except that I’m a bit confused as to when this actually takes place and whether or not it will be significant to the plot. It seems the actual receipt of the ticket took place inside Hakuo academy a month earlier, but it’s not clear whether this was a month before Hina’s plane trip or a month before the current timeline wherein everyone is set for a beach trip. If you ask me, I’d say this event – including the plane trip, is set a month before the current beach trip timeline.

Bawww face

The other interesting thing is that Aika suddenly popped up – which could mean that even this seemingly out of the way event could be related to the King’s Jewels given Aika’s connection with Mikado, or it could just be a random one-shot event that will probably be concluded next chapter.

I felt like this was a bit of a break from the main plot, but then again, I could be wrong. I guess we’ll find out pretty soon.