By Satsuki Otonashi and MiRea. Released in Japan as “Moto Ansatsusha, Tenseishite Kizoku no Reijou ni Narimashita” by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Jordan Taylor.

I admit I was surprised and a little put off by the cover of this volume, which, like the cover of the first, is salacious and mostly exists to draw in the hapless reader by promising sex that isn’t actually there. That said, the cover is actually quite clever, as your eyes may be drawn to her chest but we are also meant to notice her gun, and the huge and deadly hairpin she also has. Selena talks about “honey traps” in this series, and the volume in fact opens with the rather hapless and tragic crown princess being driven half mad and out of the palace by her asshole husband bringing home a “honey trap” lover and their two children and saying “this is who will be next in line now”. Thus, Selena on the cover of this volume is meant to draw in a reader hoping for a bit of sex. There’s none of that here. But there sure is lots of death and violence. This series is dark as pitch.

We open with, as I noted above, the tragic downfall of Shahrnaz, a noble girl who marries the crown prince, has a child, and thinks that things are fine. They’re not. Many years later, Selena is told that their school is getting three exchange students: Shaghad, the son of the prince and Shahrnaz, and Ismail and Aisha, the two children of the prince and his lover, a viscount’s daughter. They’re behaving like arrogant fools, but they also have a mission: Aisha is here to seduce Prince Evan, and Ismael is here to get rid of Shaghad, who is first in the actual succession. It doesn’t help that Shaghad, who has a big helping of “my mother abandoned me and I feel depressed”, is letting them do whatever they want. Clearly another noble is not what’s needed here. This needs an assassin’s touch.

For the most part, this book has a plotline that is pretty obvious… at least until the end, which has a terrific twist that I won’t spoil. Selena spends much of the volume rather annoyed that she has to be dealing with this at all, though once she manages to get Shaghad to actually take steps to stand up for himself, and also trains him to fend off assassins, she feels better. The ongoing questions seems to be not “who will she choose, royalty or her devoted bodyguard?”, as honestly I don’t trust her not to kill both of them if she feels a need to. The writer says that they gave Selena a “dumb” friend, partly so she actually had a friend who wasn’t a love interest, but also to point out that Selena can be as grimdark as she likes, and kill as many assassins as she wants, but in the end she does care about people, and there’s no getting around that. The assassin is also a noble girl, and that’s not something Selene can accept right now.

This second volume was not part of the webnovel but requested by the publisher, and there’s no third book out in Japan, so this may end up being it. It’s an odd duck, this, and I’m not sure it could have reasonably given us a happy ending, but I liked it.

By Satsuki Otonashi and MiRea. Released in Japan as “Moto Ansatsusha, Tenseishite Kizoku no Reijou ni Narimashita” by PASH! Books. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Jordan Taylor.

This one is definitely a slow starter. It’s taking a while to make its point, and in order to make it effectively we need to get deep into the mind of its heroine, whose reincarnation has not changed her mindset all that much, and who tends to regard almost everyone in this new world as a terrible person. Unfortunately, she’s not wrong. The main reason this is such a slog to begin with is that the only other characters in the book who are not Selena are either people she’s saved who are now devoted to her, her absent father, and terrible, terrible nobles. If this is meant to be a critique of villainess books, good job, as it felt like it was mashing together quite a few of them, with terrible adopted “heroines”, frivolous princes, arrogant ojous, etc. Even the love interest, the first prince, is in the “everything bores me except you, you’re fascinating” camp. Fortunately, things do eventually pick up once Selena is faced with something where she has to protect.

Our protagonist is 9956, a nameless assassin who dies trying to kill a prince, and ends up reincarnated as the daughter of a duke, Selena Violette. Unfortunately, she was reborn with her old memories, so she acts, as a child, like… well, like a former assassin (she tries to kill a dog with a cake knife). As a result, while her husband is away (something that happens a lot), her mother adopts a commoner girl into the family, Rosemary, who is far nicer ans sweeter and nothing like Selena at all. Unfortunately, Rosemary proves to be a holy terror, being a spoiled brat who uses tears to get her way, and if that doesn’t work she’ll order servants to attack Selena. Selena is fairly blase about this, and in fact keeps trying to hammer home to the adopted daughter that she actually needs to behave like a noble and actually study. This does no good at all. Then the nation’s two princes get involved…

So yes, the first 2/3 of this is a drag, as everyone is SO unpleasant, and also because the narrative is filtered through Selena, who has to force herself not to kill people. This is what fascinates Evan, the first prince, who had her investigated as he found it impossible to imagine someone with her background behaving the way she does. He’s clearly smitten, but also realizes that she, at the moment, is not capable of feeling much of anything, much less love. Unfortunately, before he can slowly show her what love is, one of the terrible nobles who Selena has been destroying over the past hundred pages decides to incite a monster rampage at their hunting party, forcing Selena to fight for her life… and also, much to her surprise, fight to protect the other nobles. Yes, even the nasty ones. I will admit, I wish this had been a single volume. There’s a point near the end where you can hear the author stop and add the number 1 to the cover in their head, and it makes the end a bit less dramatic than I’d like. But oh well.

So yeah, this was eventually a very good read. Just be prepared for some of the world nobles in the world before you get there.