Thx! I'm more or less alive and kicking again.
As you could probably guess from the rather small amount of text in this chapter, there wasn't much going on storywise:
Son'o reminds Kenshi (i.e.: Phantom Joe) that he is not following the teaching of his sensei (being peaceful, fighting only for defense, etc.), whereas Kenshi says that he wants to defeat Son'o, Seiko and finally Kiichi. Both exchange blows for a while, then Kenshi states that he intends to destroy Nadashinkageryuu and thus show the world the power of Yuugenshinkageryuu, and points to the fact that he already brought down Kiryuu, who is considered the strongest of Nadashinkageryuu. Both fight for a few more pages, and then Son'o stops Kenshis attack and says:
"Do you really think that you defeated that Kiryuu?" To which Kenshi acts with surprise. (Next and final page shows Kiryuu in hospital opening his eyes)
Judging from the undertones in the speech, it seems that Kenshi bears a certain kind of grudge against Son'o because of some thing occurring in the past, when Son'o started to study under Kenshis sensei... not quite sure about it, but there are some nuances in both Son'os and Kenshis words that indicate that... but judging from the way Tough has been told during the past 72+ Tankobons, we'll surely get a complete backdrop on those events sooner or later too, I would assume.
Also, I am not completely sure what Son'os line about "that Kiryuu" is supposed to mean...
First of all, he could refer to the fact that Kiryuu to most people seems to be someone whom you just cannot kill (the splash lines on the final page also translates as something like: "The immortal devil rises again..."). However this seems to be a bit odd to me. Currently, Son'o is depicted as being superior to both Seiko and Kiryuu (he fought both and had no problem leisurely defending their attacks), and he has a much harder time fighting against Kenshi...
Another possible explanation could be, that Kiryuu currently is no longer the powerful monster he once was... That one sounds a bit less odd to me: After all, at the end of the first series of Tough, Kiryuu stopped his final attack against Seiko (which otherwise probably would have spelled *death* for Seiko) and he even refrained from taking the other half of the "Cursed Technique" scroll destroyed it instead.
He also no longer talked about annihilating Nadashinkageryuu, instead he used his Acupuncture skills to cure Seiko, seemed to be on better terms with his own father (in the first series, he used his incomplete Cursed Technique on the old guy, causing him to see monsters everywhere) and started to train and teach Kiichi.
Also, it seems that the death of his son later in the series actually touched him... Cannot be sure about it, because it was never mentioned in a single word, but I have seldom seen a scene more full of mourning than on the graveyard where Kiryuu was kneeling in front of his sons grave. Also, this event seems to have brought the whole Miyazawa family closer together again - in the beginning of the series, Kiichis goal was to beat the shit out of Kiryuu - currently he was about to protect him against Phantom Joe, and both he and Seiko are obviously worried about him.
ma... just my 2 cents
ja ne~
