Tags: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Comedy, Romance, Harem, School Life, Isekai

(This review will contain spoilers)

Slowe’s Growing Stress and Shuya’s Anime Awakening.

The fifth volume is the culmination of events in recent volumes finally coming to fruition. Slowe, arriving in Zenelaus, is faced with one of the most important events from the anime and in Shuya’s development as the main hero of the story. Zenelaus is under attack and has thus become a hotbed of activity with adventurers being kept busy by an undead monster horde spurred on by a lich, however, Slowe knows that there is a lot more to this crisis than meets the eye. One of the Dustour Empire’s three musketeers has arrived hell bent on starting a war and the true terrible tragedy that’ll befall Zenelaus will come in the form of the anime’s protagonist himself, Shuya, as his powers go berserk causing death and destruction.

Slowe’s planning and scheming abilities are on overdrive throughout this volume and rightly so given the fact that he has three different potential tragedies to deal with. His stress levels are through the roof as he struggles to keep control of all the different aspects that could possibly go wrong with such a fraught situation. As a result, The Piggy Duke has undergone quite the transformation. Money troubles as well as not being able to eat or sleep properly has seen Slowe radically slim down and become a shadow of his former Piggy self leading to many of the novel regulars being unable to recognise him. Foresight of future events can be really problematic for peace of mind it seems. Alongside the potential tragedies, neither Charlotte nor Alicia exactly help the situation with non-combative royalty being caught up in a potential warzone and Charlotte more focused on Slowe’s promise of getting her a new wand rather than fully realising the true danger of the situation that she’s in.

This all strikes up a really big flaw in Denning’s character, his inability to trust others. One of the biggest problems that he faces throughout this volume in particular is the fact that he’s unable to tell anybody about what going to happen. This makes the job of sorting out each of these cataclysmic event even harder to deal with. You would have though that since he was able to admit his love and knowledge of Charlotte’s secret that Slowe would be able to at least trust Charlotte with this information. Whilst she may not be able to do anything when it comes to the battle she could be a good ear for him to sound out some of his major problems to. Perhaps this is a topic that’ll be brought up in some of the upcoming volumes as I can hardly see Slowe and Charlotte together until he’s coughed up the fact that he’s reincarnated and already knows the events that are to come.

In order to minimise the potential damage that could occur due to the arrive of the lich and the musketeer, Slowe enlists the help of town’s guild leader, Eye of the Crimson Lotus. Whilst there’s apprehension at first, Slowe is able to gain his trust through his good work helping the guild activities and noting the going’s on around the lich and the labyrinth. This leads to a lot of notoriety for Slowe amongst the adventurer community, which allows him to control the battle formations in the final fight against the zombie monster horde towards the end of the volume. The problem of Shuya, however, proves to be a lot more difficult to solve. Choosing the more diplomatic approach at first, Slowe tries over and over again to try and convince Shuya to leave the area because it’s a dangerous active warzone and he should think of his family as he could end up getting seriously hurt. This falls on deaf ears however, as Shuya has convinced himself that this is the way that he can help others and get better at fighting and adventuring. Consequently and perhaps due to his piling stress, Slowe resorts to a more aggressive measure of persuasion to get his point across, for better or worse. Tensions between the two ultimately result in a very one sided duel with Slowe dealing quite the beatdown, which once again fail to reach the determined Shuya.

For a while now, this series has been heading in the direction of a confrontation between Shuya and Slowe. Shuya has been constantly causing problems for Slowe especially in the most recent volume where Shuya’s recklessness results in Slowe having to save him from Rooney, a man touted to become strong enough for the position of fourth musketeer – the musketeers being renowned as some of the strongest fighters on the continent. This volume really does deal with some of the problems that comes with the hero’s mindset. Shuya is extremely reckless throughout this entire volume disregarding anyone and anything that doesn’t help him become a stronger adventurer. This especially angers Denning as his activities come at the expense of Alicia, Shuya’s closest friend and Slowe’s former fiancée. Shuya has placed her in the direct path of danger, someone who is supposed to be his best friend and ally, and yet all he cares about here is helping defeat the horde and become a better adventurer, which often comes at the expense of others. His reckless streak and pigheadedness certainly isn’t helped by being in the exact atmosphere he’s been searching for, a place filled with the adventurer spirit. Furthermore, he’s caught the eye of a strong adventuring party who all have similar aspirations to his own. They serve to rile him up, feeding his ego with what he wants to hear, the fact that he’s slowly getting stronger and as a result getting closer towards his dream. It’ll be because of this camaraderie with the adventuring group that he’ll finally go berserk, he’ll be too weak and get his friends killed. Just one more thing that Slowe’ll have to factor in as he saves the city from disaster.

He’s an outrageously good-natured person who wouldn’t even take his own life into consideration.

Slowe Denning

Regardless of Shuya’s recklessness, he’s still granted admiration amongst the rest of the characters, Slowe and Alicia in particular. They view him as someone who’ll always do the right thing for the sake of helping the people. Although for me personally, I would have liked to have seen Shuya face some type of repercussion for his actions. This is a complaint that I couldn’t just lob at this series but at many others in the genre as well. As long as the hero is doing what’s right and is on the side of justice, they can basically do whatever they want without consequence. In this series, Shuya’s actions are extremely reckless and done without any sort of proper planning, as a result he puts a lot of his friends in danger even leading to some of his adventuring friends getting severely injured in the process. By the end of the volume, Shuya faces no problems as a result of his actions and its difficult for me to see how Shuya will grow as a character without the consequences of losing someone he really cares about requiring the necessary questioning of his own actions. Perhaps in the next volume this might be played out more as the end of this volume skips over what happened after the final battle.

The Great Spirits are Scheming.

Shuya isn’t solely to blame for his actions as part way through the volume the real reason for his powers having gone berserk are revealed. It would seem as though Shuya has come partly under the influence of one of the great spirits, Eldrad, the great spirit of fire. Eldrad is also known as the Devil of Temptation and is known to offer those with potential the rights to control his power, often leading them to ruin. Within the story, Eldrad plans to use Shuya as a vessel to kill the creatures he hates the most, spirit riders (dullahans), and will stop at nothing to do so even if it leads to a great number of lives lost or even the death of his host. This brings into question the wider motives of the great spirits as a whole. The great spirit of darkness is revealed to be the mastermind behind the ordeal as Zenelaus. She is definitely final boss material for the series and it’ll be interesting to discover what her motives are for war. Beyond this, I wonder what of the great spirit of Wind, Light and Water and their involvement or their aspirations. The great spirit of wind may seem lazy but could there perhaps be something bigger with him at play?

The finale of the volume goes to show just how powerful Slowe’s abilities really are. In order to keep the lich, musketeer and Eldrad under control he has to use magical tools once thought impossible for anyone to use. He also makes a deal with Eldrad, giving him access to his body in exchange for power to defeat the lich. This could certainly be seen as a dangerous move that could have seen Denning killed, however his mastery of magic has enabled his ability to control the spirit’s immense power, in turn killing the lich and freeing the musketeer from his undead curse.

Conclusions

As we have reached the halve way point of the series, it now seems appropriate to speculate on what things need to arise within the next couple of volumes. Ever since the confession in volume 3, the potential romance within the series has seemingly stalled. I would really love to see in the next volume something that’ll end up pushing Charlotte and Slowe’s romance forward as well as deal with Alicia’s ever growing feelings for Slowe after the events of the second volume. More from Princess Carina and the royal guard. With the Queen revealing Slowe as a candidate for Princess Carina’s royal guard at the end of this volume, I’d love to see how this’ll shake up things for Slowe and the potential problems it could cause between him and Charlotte. Finally, I’d love to see a confrontation between Slowe and his father, given how much he’s changed it’ll be interesting to see how this will affect his father and whether he’d be forced back into the family fold.

Volume 5 serves as a wonderful mid-point for the series with Shuya’s powers fully revealed leading him on his original anime journey, tensions between Slowe and Shuya finally boiling over and we’re finally introduced to a character who could serve as the final boss of the series. After everything that’s happen over the course of the volume, I wonder what will become of Shuya, will he finally team up with Slowe or will he continue in his rival capacity?