By Namekojirushi and Nao Watanuki. Released in Japan as “Ore ga Heroine o Tasukesugite Sekai ga Little Mokushiroku!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Mana Z.

There is a plot twist about 2/3 of the way through this volume that pretty much manages to make me drop my main complaint about the book, which is that it’s simply too short. Even by the standards of Little Apocalypse, not one for large page counts, this is ridiculously short. It’s also got a cliffhanger, making me wonder if it might originally have been combined with the volume after it. The first third is relatively sedate… for Rekka, not the reader. We know there’s a problem because the huge cast list of heroines we see at the start of each book has almost all of them scribbled out – including R. Only seven heroines make the cut for this book, leading us to wonder what it is about them that makes them important… or rather, unimportant, as it seems they’re what’s left over after most of Rekka’s memories of the last six months have been wiped.

Technically not a new heroine on the cover, nor is she played by Jodie Whitaker, but The Doctor is the creator of both L and R, and is interested in their welfare – as well as that of Rekka. Sadly, events in the future are reaching a turning point, with the extremists deciding now is the time to kill Rekka in the past, even if they have to use giant robots to destroy the town. And that’s what we get, as a baffled Rekka and his remaining heroines try to evacuate and figure out what’s going on. Fortunately, Rekka eventually gets his memory back, and we find out what happened to R, but the other missing heroines remain missing for the entire book, nor do we know where they are. (My guess is the future, where Rekka ends up heading at the end of the book.) Even his parents, who show up in this book for the first time since the start of Chapter 1 or Book 1, aren’t able to do much but slow the enemy down.

As I noted earlier, I really liked the twist we get here, which is that Rekka should NOT be having to deal with all these heroines at once. The gimmick of the series – that he uses one heroine’s problems to solve another’s problem – was never meant to happen. The seven heroines who aren’t mindwiped/kidnapped are there because they’re the heroines he was SUPPOSED to originally save. They’re the “easy mode” heroines. (Notably, this does NOT include his childhood friend, removed even from her parents’ memories.) They’re heroines that Rekka could save using only his own human abilities and those of the heroine herself – I mean, we do still have a shrine priestess and nun with very lethal weapons around. If nothing else this helps us to be impressed with what Rekka’s achieved. The question is, though, what changed everything? Does it have to do with Rekka’s “helper” being R, not L?

Again, readers need to prepare for being able to finish off this book in only an hour. But if you don’t mind the length, this is a suitably fun and interesting volume as we head towards the series’ climax.