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Nobuaki Tadano's 7 Billion Needles, evidently, is a take on Hal Clement's Needle.

Though it seems everyone but the former's creator's explicitly identified the latter as inspiration, it's obvious when you take a very general summary of them both: two aliens, one a hunter and one his murderous prey, come crashing down to Earth. Far from humanoid, they co-opt human bodies to continue their interplay.

The differences in Tadano's adaptation keep that generality; Clement's amiable islander protagonist becomes a withdrawn city-dweller whose relationship with the hunter is much more reluctant. Their search for the other's host is much less of Tadano's plot than it is Clement's; of the former's four 100+ page volumes, only the first's really dedicated to that (in fact, it's pretty much all of Clement's; after that, stuff diverges, but in a very natural way.)

Without the suspense of who the hunter's opposite's influencing, 7 Billion's free to go ahead and reveal that unlucky in the first chapter, then depict their merger. And so we also get to see a little more of the prey than Clement showed us, and boy is it a piece of work, as is the subplot.

(Several scans from six 20+ page chapters in a 150+ page volume.. oh, and a couple of pages of folks getting some rather arterial deaths.)

Which begins one night on a Kaiko High school trip, when she (Hikaru Takebe) forgoes dinner with her classmates to go stargazing on the beach.

Headphones to her ears, she watches the skies. A star shoots overhead, and she thinks about her youth on an island (entirely different than Needle's Bob Kinnaird's, as the second volume shows), back when.. hey, wait a minute..

" That's not a shooting star! "

No, she isn't suddenly saved; the next two pages are an anatomical depiction of her burning.

And she burns, that's for sure; she burns, she does burn, yeah she does burn.. in the corner seat by the window in a Kaiko classroom several days later, learning all about probabilities.

She wonders why she was thinking of the event, then shrugs it off; it doesn't matter. Nothing really does, so long as she has her 'phones; crank 'em up, pay what needs to be paid in the way of attention (it's never said she's a poor student, I think) and tune out everyone else's happy nattering.

This social turtling's not gone unnoticed, and that's the way she likes it too; up by a pillar, watching the world go by, she's accosted by her homeroom teacher. These, he says, are the years she'll never have again; she should be out amongst her peers, one of the voices that make up the chattering crowd.

She begs off for the day in response, because that's just not something she cares to do, and is out the door before another platitude crosses his mind.

But her retreat does not leave her unharassed, as she watches the world from a public park bench..

.. only to shock the dog like it was a monkey.

(Nice little shorthand for how she feels about the world, this scene is.)

John's not what a dog should be in something like this, is he? It takes a shock to turn him against Hikaru, and he's perfectly fine with our handsome friend there..

..which he shouldn't be, because Mister Azuma here, Mister Shunsuke Azuma, is just like Hikaru. He's a skinship too, but for the bad alien, and he ain't the cool mystery that he surely must've appeared to be when first this ran in Monthly Comic Flapper.

But that's next chapter; we don't know any of that now.

We don't even know that Hikaru has a passenger, until that bite heals completely and a voice that surely isn't tracks 25/26 crackles on her 'phones: " You died once. You burned up without a trace. "

When she takes off those 'phones, volatile with memories of her flaming death, there comes another truth: " I did something unforgivable.. You can't live without me. "

That, it would seem, tears it for her..

..and for her muffs there.

The loss of her protective mechanism gives her cause to vent; her anger comes welling out through her hands, a " Damn you! " crosses her lips, and KA-BLAM goes the air in front of her..

And that is a lesson she's going to learn a few times before all's said and done, as will Shunsuke in the little time he has left.

Back at home with her aunt and uncle (her mom's dead of natural causes, her dad of.. again, Volume 2), she listens to the voice inside her head.

The next day, a new pair of silencers on, it's still going on about how it's plasma, how it lives inside her head, how it doesn't want to destroy her and so can't leave, its verbosity annoying Hikaru.

Meanwhile, Shunsuke's cool facade is rapidly proving itself atypical:

This is pretty much the closest we get to what Shunsuke must've been like before the hunter's other got into him; it's interesting to think about the implications of " He shouldn't be around sharp objects. "

Luckily, the worst he does today is slicken them with sweat..

And run parallel to Hikaru's hunter's narration:

That something, he says, is called Maelstrom, and it could kill the whole universe if it had the chance (a step up from Needle's Criminal.)

And to make matters worse, it just might be somewhere in Kaiko right now.. perhaps in the closet Shunsuke's panting heavily in?

(Evidently, the both of them choose moments of emotion to really assert themselves.. and, of course, emotion's what triggers their host's awakenings of power. Hm.)

Shunsuke/Maelstrom's scream rips through the school, but everyone dismisses it as a joke, except for the Hunter.

He makes Hikaru seek it out, on pain of further exposition; she begs out of class to the bathroom, mulishly reluctant:

And, it would seem, so's he. He strikes in a pounce, barreling out the window without confronting her. But he leaves a real mark in one pass, one that requires the Hunter to take the wheel from an understandably shocked Hikaru next chapter..

This one's got real parallelism going; the two of them begin to really understand the things that they are now.

Shunsuke, at least, is giving in to Maelstrom's will. All alone amongst trees, the cheese slides off his cracker to the tune of words in him: " You.. "

(Supportive omnicidal maniac, isn't it?)

And so Maelstrom has an outside voice, of sorts, which he wastes no time trying out:

Oh hey, it's John Dog and his owner, out for a walk! Maelstrom takes this opportunity to do what, one suspects, he wanted Shunsuke to do back in that closet:

John flees, and Maelstrom ruminates on his apparently damaged foot (in passing; nice delayed reaction): " Tsk. Her.. "

Expositing to Hikaru elsewhere, Hikaru's indweller tells us why Maelstrom kicks like a velociraptor: see, he came to Earth before during the Cretaceous, and took a very interesting hostform:

Giant pterodactyl wings on an apatosaurus.. he must have been bored! (And yes, that's dramatic typography, not a reminder for the forgetful. Or a trading card.)

The point is, he was a contributing factor to the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Oh, and something about bits of him explaining some of the larger specimens found.. that actually gets paid off later on, I think. Point is, he remembers what he likes from the species he's done for, which is nice.)

And now that Maelstrom's realized his old friend's come back, the chances of a repeat performance have increased.

So Horizon (that's his name revealed this chapter, just in time for me to run out of indirect references) finally gets Hikaru to commit to hunting down Maelstrom.

And as this indicates, Clement's Hunter had a much easier time of it with Bob:

Maelstrom certainly has an easier time of it with Shunsuke, fixing his broken foot.. just look what the two of them got up to during the night:

It's nice to know the space horror can find joy in socks that fit, isn't it?

So this chapter's both of them investigating, to find the other.. if only Maelstrom's hatred for banter and Hikaru's reticence weren't complicating their respective aims:

They make progress in their own way, though; Hikaru saves a phone in a deadpan page:

And Maelstrom, who has a terrible memory for faces, zeroes in on hairstyles:

Learning, in the process, the travails of being a superpredator in civilization:

Hikaru, though, only gains two new friends of the "eat on the rooftop" kind on the grounds of " Wow, she's awesome. Let's hang out with her! "

And Maelstrom.. decides to shake things up:

Right when Saya comes walking by, ponytail up. " This is my last try. " he thinks..

So while Horizon and Hikaru begin to figure out the common factor behind Maelstrom's killings (detection really isn't as much an element as it was in Clement's Needle, which makes sense with its unwilling protagonist), that white-haired psycho interrupts Saya's basketball practice with the same routine he's tried on the other victims.

And just like that, he throws the mask away:

" I knew it, " he says, " self-control doesn't suit me at all. "

It's right about now that Hikaru makes the connection, and rushes off to save Saya. By next chapter, though, the gym's a bloodbath.. and Maelstrom is transforming with the stuff of his victims.

(I think this is the same biologic that gave him winged apataosaurus.)

" ..That line! "

And she does, rather resolutely.. so Maelstrom reveals a better form, vrapping out of his Shunsuke-suit:

" Give me your fear! " he howls. " All of it! "

Then a chair bounces off his head; Saya somehow got up to the rafters:

And so here the two stand; one's a monster, the other's human. It was a fun ride, but direct as it was, it had to end like this..

.. with Horizon speeding up Hikaru something fierce, so that he has the time to offer her the only proposal to save her new friend. Only his full power can do it, but he absolutely will not do it without her complete consent, so..

Clement's Needle ended much the same way, with the Hunter asking our hero to commit to the symbiosis full-time. The circumstances're different, the pacing's different, but the answer's still the same: " Yes. "

And so, we hurry off to the conclusion..

GRAAAAAA!, BOOOOOM, and there's yer volume. From here on out, it's entirely foreign territory for the next few volumes: did Maelstrom survive (oh yeah, and the way he comes back.. he finds some uses for Shunsuke's face.), what happened to Hikaru on that island (nothing great), was there a point to that backstory blather? (Oh, yes.), and are there more things to hurt (Oh, yes.)

Also, there's actually a reasonable naked spaceman cosmic arbiter. And, hell, the whole thing's well written- look up one or two volumes if you have the time, and go from there.