y Surume Enoki and ttl. Released in Japan as “Rutile Quartz no Taikan: Ō no Tanjō” by DRE Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Alice Camp.

Siiiiiiigh. Great, another attempt to review a book which is “okay, I guess”. Again, it would be so easy to paste the review of the first volume here. It’s a decent read, it held my attention, the battles are well-done, and I like Slaine as a character. But it’s again using a fantasy world as an excuse to get people to read a generic military history book, and Monica, Slaine’s lover and later in this book wife, is painfully undercharacterized. The book is happy to have her there to cheer Slaine up and pat his head, as well as glare at anyone who does anything vaguely insulting to him. And that’s really about it. She reads like a prize, which, honestly, I thought authors knew better than that now. On the bright side, the court mage is shown to have another woman as her partner, and even if gay marriage isn’t legal in their country, they call each other wife and wife. Maybe Slaine should do something about that in between fighting to save the kingdom.

Slaine and Monica are now lovers, which you’d think would be an issue given her low noble status, but as it turns out the kingdom’s nobles are balanced so precariously following Slaine taking the throne that everyone’s actually okay with Monica being the Queen provided her family doesn’t get extra perks – well, at least publicly acknowledged extra perks. Meanwhile, Slaine’s reign is still regarded as “laughable” by far too many people, and so he suffers an assassination attempt, then an invasion by a noble who regards him as beneath contempt because he was a commoner… and finally by the Third Prince of the Empire, Florenz, who was behind the noble’s attack in the first place and who seems to think that invading will be easy from their impregnable fortress. Can Slaine perhaps make that fortress less impregnable?

The men in this book fare a bit better than the women, though honestly only three characters really stand out, and one of them is Slaine himself. We get two varieties of “evil ruler” here. Julius is the sort who’s actually good to his men, and goes out to fight with them, etc. The ‘noble bigot’ sort. The bigot coming because he is deeply,. deeply classist to the point where he’ll gladly go to war over it. This goes badly, mostly as Slaine has very well trained troops who know how to perform obvious sucker moves without making them LOOK like obvious sucker moves. Then we get the third prince of the Empire, who is the ‘entitled dickhead’ sort of villain, who assumes that anything he does can be taken care of after the fact provided he wins… and then when he loses literally goes mad. I did like Slaine’s idea for how to take the impregnable fortress, which felt very much like him, as opposed to “tactics that we’re supposed to handwave the enemy couldn’t think of”. More cleverness, less pushing soldiers around on a map, please.

This comes out slowly, so I’m not sure when the next volume will be. And it’s a DRECOM title, so who knows if the third is the last. The webnovel suggests 7 books in total. I’ll read the next one, though. Even though I’ll go “that was all right, I guess” at the end.