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.

By 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.

This is another book that I enjoyed, but was not wowed by. It’s always hard to review those titles. “This was pretty good, all things considered” is not exactly a blurb you can put on a back cover. This is a good coming of age royal fantasy series. If isekai are about the hero gaining cool powers and a harem of hot babes, then the small but notable genre of “military/royal fantasy” usually involves the hero being either royalty or the close advisor to royalty, and instead of a harem there’s a relationship between the royal and their advisor. Also, redheads feature heavily. I’m not sure why. In any case, this is squarely in that genre. Slain, the new king, is a decent guy, proves a quick study, has some military ideas that no one there has considered, and gets the girl. It’s a feel good sort of book. That said, nothing here is surprising, except maybe one thing that I’ll get to later. It’s “pretty good”, but not in a bad way. If that helps.

Slaine is a young man whose mother has just passed away. He never knew his father, so is rather surprised when suddenly a royal escort appears in his small village. It turns out that his mother had once been a servant in the royal palace, and left after a dalliance with the King. What’s more, the entire royal family has just been killed in a fire, leaving Slaine as the heir apparent. Needless to say, he feels he is not remotely ready. But his mother was a scribe, meaning he can read and write due to her teachings, and he has read history books. He also has nobles who are willing to be patient with him, and a talented aide, Monica, at his side. He’s actually getting the hang of things faster than expected. So provided another neighboring country doesn’t declare war and invade them, they should be fine. Oh dear.

The thing that interested me most in this was the way magic was used. At the start of the book I wondered if it wouldn’t have any magic at all, and just be an alternate-world royal book, but that was unlikely to sell to a light novel publisher. So yes, there is magic, but it’s not a constant in this world. Only about one in 30 people have magic at all, and even then it’s not super powerful. Neither Slaine nor Monica have any magic. We see water magicians around the castle, and they use their magic powers to do things like fill barrels, or clean. This of course also leads to Slaine’s idea on how to win the battle against the foreign country invading them, which works well enough, though everyone’s praise of his idea reminds me of those isekai books where people are stunned at the idea of crop rotation. I also wish we’d gotten a bit more with Monica, Slaine’s aide, who has a chapter or two at the back that quickly shows why she went from “uncaring and emotionless baron’s daughter” to “please take me”, but you get the sense it was written after the fact when someone pointed out we knew next to nothing about her.

So, this wasn’t great, it wasn’t terrible. It was pretty good. It passed the time. If there’s another volume (it’s a Drecom book, so this is it for the moment) I’ll read more.