The students, along with the school doctor and a teacher, manage to escape on a minibus and travel into the city. We are warned by Rei, one of our main characters and a badass member of the spear team, that they’d regret letting the teacher on the bus. We learn really quickly that she is probably right. Koichi Shidou, the teacher, thinks he should be in charge, though by that logic it should be the doctor in charge if we are judging only age and education. The members of our core group who led the evacuation of the school know that their fellow student Takashi should be the one in charge. The debate devolves into violence on the bus as it’s driving down the road. It’s certainly a distraction to the driver, the somewhat airheaded Doctor Shizuka Marikawa. The kind doctor is our ecchi example this time. She sits in the driver seat in a skirt torn to the hip and a white blouse with a seatbelt creating a great amount of cleavage. Marikawa slams on the brakes, the seatbelt breaks in two and she turns around to yell at the people in the back like an angry parent. The shot, in which the camera positon would have to be at her navel, reveals her large breasts hanging in her white blouse like she’s some kind of bra-burning hippie. You see every curve of each breast, leaving nothing but the color of her flesh up to the imagination, making this brief scene a truly ecchi one.

Rei and Takashi have been forced to break off from the main group due to a collapsing traffic tunnel. They’re moving around the city on a motorcycle. Before their separation from the group they made a plan to meet up at the east police station at 7 p.m. and if they didn’t make it they should try to meet up at 7 p.m. the following day. Rei and Takashi would just have to find a detour and a way to stay alive until they could reach their destination. The ecchi scene that stands out in this episode is an example of how the world’s moral fabric is beginning to unravel. The couple finds a service station to fill up the tank of the bike, and while Takashi runs inside to steal money from the cash register for the pump, Rei is jumped by a thug. The oversized tough guy holds a knife to Rei’s neck as he recounts the tale of killing his own family who’d been turned into zombies. He explains that he wants the bike and Rei. The thug plans on carrying on the species with her. In an attempt to restrain Rei from running he clamps down on her breast with his hand. The viewer is led to believe due to a censorship shadow we get a nip slip. We then see shots of her bra, the motion of his hand, as well as her reactions and understand the severity of the assault. The saying goes don’t bring a knife to a gun fight and that was his mistake. Takashi pulls the revolver from his pocket and shoots the man straight through the shoulder. With Rei and a full tank of gas, Takashi turns to the once-powerful thug on the ground and reminds him that the noise probably attracted “them,” before driving off and leaving him surrounded by the flesh-eating zombies.

We’ve all had thoughts about what we’d do if we were some of the survivors in an end-of-the-world scenario. What would we want to do? And who would we want to do it with? We know from the beginning of the show that Takashi and Rei have known each other since childhood, a childhood that led to promises to be married one day. Rei broke that promise when she fell in love with someone else. We also can tell from his actions that Takashi still cares a great deal for Rei and her safety is one of his key priorities. The relative safety of the fortified apartment leaves the girls willing to let their guard down and do a little drinking. Yes, they’re in high school, but it’s the end of the world so who cares? Rei, wearing only a camisole and her underwear, corners Takashi. She explains she decided to date another guy because she felt unappreciated by Takashi. Takashi takes offense to that and reminds her, bluntly, that her boyfriend is dead and it came down to him to crush the man’s skull. The silence between them hangs in the air in sharp contrast to the chaos outside. Rei steps closer as if to kiss him and they lean against the railing, getting even closer as they slide down to the steps. Her camisole begins to slip off her shoulders as the picture fades to black. The post-credit scene shows him beginning to push her away, saying “this is not good” and “if we keep going it will be … up.” We don’t know why he wanted to stop there, it being the end of the world and all, but we can respect the self-control and the honesty as we put this scene on the list.

We love anime physics. We love watching the laws of motion as they are applied to boobs. The group is on the run from the hoards when they have to slam on the brakes to avoid a wire trap set across the road. The team is heavily armed and backed into a corner and Rei is injured after being thrown from the turret. Saeko, the sword-wielding badass, and Takashi take the lead and are fighting valiantly yet quickly getting overwhelmed. The scene that makes this ecchi is when, after firing his last bullet, Takashi realizes that Rei’s high caliber gun is still hanging from her harness. He lays the gun across her chest and fires. We see the recoil ripple through Rei’s breasts before a bullet tracking shot. We follow that bullet in one case under a high kicking Saeko and get a good look at her thong before we follow the bullet to its impact in a zombie’s head. The second amazing tracking shot follows the bullet down the street and between the breasts of a back-bending Saeko. The anime physics in this scene are a bit over the top, leaving us to wonder if Newton had ever thought of his laws being applied like this – but it’s also why this scene ranks so highly in this countdown.

The number one scene on our list is a classic. The team has recently been reunited and have told Koichi Shidou Sensei and his Manson-esque followers to get lost. The six lead characters take refuge in the fortified apartment of Shizuka Marikawa’s friend, special forces sniper Rika Minami, who was busy defending the airport. What do you do if you’ve been running and fighting a blood-soaked campaign for the last two days? If you’re an anime character you can you take a shower and a bath. Yes, a bath scene. The whole harem is in the bathroom together, leaving you to wonder at the average size of a Japanese bathroom. Rei and Mirakawa are in the tub together where they have the obligatory anime talk about breast size and the eventual copping of a feel. The trope isn’t lost on the characters either with Saya Takagi, our resident tsundere stating “this is just like a mediocre romance sim game,” and asking “why are we bathing together?” All while she sits next to Saeko Busujima washing her hair. We even get to hear delightful squeals and squeaks as Saya and Saeko pour cold water on each other in a competitive and teasing way. We know a bath scene is a low-hanging fruit in the ecchi world, but in High School of the Dead it’s the one of the few oases of pure perverted fun we get.