Chapter 3

**Chapter 3** is the third chapter of the *Astra Lost in Space* manga. It was released in Japan in *Shonen Jump+* on August 30, 2016, and in North America on December 5, 2017, with the rest of Volume 1.

## Synopsis

After three days of faster-than-light travel, the *Astra* arrives at Vilavurs and enters its atmosphere, quickly descending to the surface. While the crew excitedly anticipates reaching the ground, Zack asks Kanata where he should land the ship. Realizing he has no idea where to land, several of the others list ideal details for landing sites, namely somewhere a short distance from water and a forest where they can look for food. Pressured, Kanata tells Zack to land behind a mountain, but as the ship emerges around the side of the mountain, they find the sky filled with large, flying featherless creatures.

The crew frantically tries to get the ship turned around, but not before an enamored Aries remarks that their noses resemble those of soft-shell turtles, dubbing them "Tur-gons," and Charce expresses an emphatic desire to dissect one for research. The ship lands some distance away from the potentially hazardous Tur-gons. As they disembark, Aries' diary notes that they will have to find enough food and water to last them twenty days, the time the trip to the next planet will take.

While all nine of the children stand on the ramp leading down to the planet's surface, watching the Tur-gons flying in the distance, Aries yells loudly into her suit's microphone to scare Yun-Hua Lu, doing the same to all the others in the process. She happily remarks that Yun-Hua's startled response to the scare is the first time the shy, withdrawn girl has spoken. Her actions serve to lighten the terse mood hanging over the group.

Kanata, silently thankful for her actions, decides to split everybody into three groups: he sends Zack and Funicia back to the ship, wanting the former to work on repairs, assigns Ulgar and Yun-Hua to water collection, and takes the rest of the group to find food in the forest. Quitterie initially refuses to follow them into the forest, eventually relenting when Kanata shows he has a decent knowledge of scavenging for food. Once inside the forest, however, she quickly becomes disillusioned, wary of the Tur-gons flying high overhead and annoyed by the speed with which all the others are adjusting to the environment: Charce's fascination with the wildlife leads him to let them crawl on him, while Kanata and Luca start pulling branches shaped like spears and swords from the trees. Aries joins in, climbing onto a plant with a short, wide base and a flat, grassy, and springy upper surface and jumping on it like a trampoline; Kanata and Luca have an impromptu sumo fight on its top. Quiterrie's frustrated attempt at dissociating herself from them backfires, to the amusement of the others, when the plant she is examining opens a parachute-like appendage and pulls her sharply upward into the air. Afterward, as the five lie on the grassy surface of the tree-poline, Kanata pulls a star-shaped flower from the grass, indulging in a moment of wonder at the world around him, drawing playful sarcasm from the others.

They return to the task at hand; sometime later, they dump the potential food they have harvested onto a blanket. Every item on the blanket is definitively alien in nature, their appearances ranging from mildly unappetizing to blatantly disgusting. Kanata is unable to convince everyone to test the "food" for edibility and is on the verge of returning to the ship with it when Yun-Hua joins them. She and Ulgar have finished testing the water, having determined that it needs to be filtered before consumption, but the awkward silence between them prompted her to leave him and join the others while Ulgar pipes the water into the ship's tanks. She helps them pack up the food, and they all begin the walk back to the *Astra*, resolving to go hunting for meat the next day (even though Luca no longer has his spear, having left it behind on the grassy trampoline-plant).

No sooner have they started to walk back than a bright light flashes to life on their right. Glancing at it, Kanata and the others are horrified to find that the orb has reappeared, just a few short meters away from them.