By Itsuki Mizuho and Nekobyou Neko. Released in Japan as “Isekai Teni, Jirai Tsuki” by Dragon Novels. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Yen-Po Tseng.
Yeah, I know. So I had a brief gap in my insane reading schedule, and a friend had mentioned this series as one I might be interested in circling back to. I had skipped it in 2022 when it came out as I was trying to cut down on isekai stuff. But I’m a big fan of Management of a Novice Alchemist, by the same author, so I figured why not give it a try. And how is it? Well, that’s an interesting question. I think how you feel about it will depend on your answer to the following: Can something be good and yet very boring? If you say no, by definition boring things are bad, then don’t read this series, please move on to something with lots of cool things happening. If your answer is yes, it can be good, it depends on what the author is trying to do and the nature of what is boring, then I think, like me, you’ll get something out of this.
Another reason that I never read this when it first came out in 2022 is that I thought it was gonna be about someone whose skill is explosive mines, kinda like the godawful Death Beam story. It’s not. The land mines are metaphorical. A bus full of students apparently is in a fatal accident (we only hear about this secondhand) and are now meeting with a self-titled “evil god”, who wants to put them all in another world, no reincarnation necessary, and offers then some cool skills. Nao, our POV character, selects the ‘help’ skill in order to help him choose better… and discovers that some of the cooler sounding skills have lethal consequences! Those aren’t cool skills, they’re land mines! (Hence the title). Now he and his best friends Haruka and Touya are in this new world, and are finding that it’s not quite like the light novels said it was.
So this is sort of a combination of “isekais should be more realistic, let everyone grubbily struggle to survive” books with “if *I* was in an isekai I wouldn’t do all those dumb things that make interesting stories, I’d be smart and rational”. You’d expect that at least one of our main protagonists would be a loose cannon to justify the title, but no, we have smart, sensible Haruka, nebbish generiguy Nao, and hotblooded Touya, and even Touya listens to Haruka and does what she says. They don’t get any weapons, and their magic (Haruka and Nao are elves, Touya is a beastman) is either basic or nonexistent, and needs to be learned. They gather. They experiment. It’s interesting as a thought experiment, and I want to see what happens next, but as a book it struggles. Nao is especially weak right now, and I hope he gains character development.
So if you skipped this when it came out, you can probably keep skipping it. But I enjoyed it enough to want to read another one when my schedule is free again.
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