By Takehaya and Poco. Released in Japan as “Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?” by HJ Bunko. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Warnis.

Another “short-story” volume of Rokujouma, although honestly it’s more three short stories and a half-novel, as the story written especially for the book is a continuation of the previous book and not really skippable. The three short stories are all essentially character pieces. The first focuses on Nana, who has been slowly drawn into the secondary orbit of the main cast, although she’s not in the Koutarou sweepstakes. It involves making changes to her mostly cyborg body to have her look more of her actual age… as well as various other members of the cast envying how Koutarou interacts with each of them. The slightest of the three stories has Shizuka and her “dragon” uncle going to a hot springs. The third involves an eating contest that all the cast enters, but it’s mostly about Sanae and Theia, along with making Yurika the butt monkey again, because, well, we’re back on Earth. All three stories are the same as we’ve seen in previous volumes – nice character pieces, but slight.

The final story is more significant, and starts with an obvious problem: Koutarou being on Forthorthe is ruining the economy, as anywhere he goes is automatically where everyone else wants to go, and everything he buys, everyone else does… meaning all the competitors are being ruined. This is a tad ridiculous, but serves to give him an excuse to quietly go back home with everyone except the main Forthorthe cast. That said, they’ve been away from Earth a LONG time. Various people on the magical girl side have been pretending to be them in class, but that’s not helping their actual studies, so they have to take a test to prove that they’re up to date… and failure means repeating a year. You can imagine who panics most about this, but Sanae and Koutarou are also not great students.

Now, I will partly hand it to Yurika, despite whining and moaning the entire time, she really did seem to earnestly study. That said, I do like how this book shows that all the studying effort in the world can’t help you when you start from so far behind. I also liked how Maki kept Yurika motivated – yes, Koutarou would still let her stay there if she had to repeat a year, but he’s be so disappointed… as you can imagine, the thought horrifies Yurika. The other main plot here involves the cast being followed around by various guys in suits and sunglasses who look straight out of Urusei Yatsura. This was amusing, but feels more like a setup for next book, where I expect Forthorthe is going to have to go public. In fact, the author said there’s a lot of setup for the next book in this story.

So overall not bad, and sets us up nicely for the next two books, which are the final ones in the “main” storyline, though the series continues after that. Rokujouma fans should be happy.