By Takehaya and Poco. Released in Japan as “Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Warnis.

Now that’s more like it. After being a bit disappointed with the minor villains in Kiriha’s resolution arc, we get a much higher standard of villain here. Darkness Rainbow are back, and they’re getting backstory. Not a hell of a lot, admittedly – that may be next volume, as this is sort of a stealth two-parter – but it’s clear that more care is being taken with these teenage, evil magical girls. (I’ll go with evil for now, given that they kidnapped ten small children, and if the ritual had finished they may have all ended up the way Sanae did.) This is also a continuation of Maki’s redemption arc. She may not win the big fight here, but the greater picture has her succeeding, as she’s forcing Crimson Rainbow to consider her relationship with both Maki and the rest of the Darkness Rainbow team. If there’s a way in to redeem this group, it’s likely to go via Crimson.

Given that we’re dealing with Darkness Rainbow here, it seems only natural that we finally get to see Nana, Yurika’s predecessor as a magical girl until her painful sacrifice. We find out how painful here, as we see her shakily trying to stand on crappy artificial legs, and her spirit energy is nearly nil. Fortunately, we have Koutarou’s harem, who between all of them are specialists in nearly everything, and they resolve to better Nana’s situation. In the meantime, though, kids are getting kidnapped as Darkness Rainbow makes its move – and they’re desperate, clearly, as kidnapping is not something easily papered over with memory erasure. Once it’s clear who’s behind it, Yurika asks everyone to help her save the kids and defeat the bad guys. Unfortunately, only one of these is accomplished by the end of the book, so it looks like we’re going on a field trip to the next dimension over next time.

Readers of these reviews know that I’m a huge Yurika fan, so I was pretty delighted with this book, where she spends most of her time in serious, competent mode. The joke is that everyone is really uncomfortable with Yurika being mature and competent, and wishes for the old whining Yurika to return. (This is admittedly a better joke than Shizuka’s running gag about her weight, though I liked how it became more about Koutarou being unable to princess carry her.) Yurika does an excellent job here, leading the team that discovers the bad guys, relying on others for support, and not breaking down once. The afterword hints of even better things in the next book. The rest of the cast are also good, and we’re starting to see the girls attempt to flirt harder with Koutarou, but he’s still not emotionally ready yet.

The book isn’t perfect – the battle in the hotel almost feels like there’s a chunk of the book that was randomly cut out, and the climax is similarly rushed – but overall this was a very strong entry in the series, and I really can’t wait to see what happens next.

By Takehaya and Poco. Released in Japan as “Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Warnis.

This is essentially a series of short stories taking place right after the events of the last two volumes, and is therefore as light and fluffy as you can imagine. Everyone goes to the beach, then everyone goes to a festival, then everyone goes to an amusement park. When the group aren’t going places, we see Yurika struggle to do all the homework she completely forgot about in two days, and we also see Koutarou’s father, who hasn’t shown up since the first volume, drop by to check on his son and meet his nine new daughters. I’m kidding only slightly, as the series is starting to make the not-too-shocking chess moves to allow this to be a full-fledged harem in the future. It’s always had this somewhat implicitly, but here two of the girls agree that if one of them marries Koutarou, the other is allowed to cheat with no worries. Honestly, at this point I think fans would be angry if he DID choose only one girl.

We do seem to have capped the number of girls at nine, however. Elfaria was certainly in love with Koutarou back when he was in the past, and it’s fairly obvious that she still harbors feelings for him, but she also knows that she can provide a role for him that the other girls can’t, which is to be a mother figure. Rokujouma is never really all that subtle with its character development, and has had the other girls talk about everything being on hold till Koutarou emotionally matures enough to be able to accept and move past his mother’s death. That said, given the rest of the girls are putting ‘Koutarou’s family’ first, it makes sense that Elfaria is thinking about being a mom for him, something the others aren’t able to do (Kiriha could pull it off, I think, but likely wants Koutarou romantically too much for that to happen).

Koutarou has developed since the series began – something the series is unashamedly fond of spelling out, as his dad tells him straight up in the last story how the old him would never have allowed himself to get this close to all those other girls. That said, my favorite chapter was probably (try not to be surprised) the Yurika one, which also shows off how much she has grown and changed despite still being the author’s go-to when he needs someone to whine and be pathetic (as we can see in the beach chapter, where she proves to be a hammer). Sure, she needs some motivation, mostly from Koutarou (he does a stick, then a carrot, which works very well), but I really did admire her refusal to get “magical help” to finish the homework, or to give up. I also liked that Shizuka noted there were errors in the work, but didn’t correct them – Yurika has to improve enough to get into college with Koutarou and Harumi, and that means fixing her own mistakes.

Of course, it also means dealing with the other evil magical girls, and the ending implies that the next book will feature their return. Rokujouma continues to truck along nicely, and even this slight volume provides smiles and chuckles.

By Takehaya and Poco. Released in Japan as “Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Warnis.

We’re now in the 2nd half of this long series of light novels, and the author is taking the time to wrap up the plots. Sanae was first, mostly as her plot tied into others and was fairly easily resolved. Yurika and Maki’s has honestly barely been touched beyond introducing various strata of evil magical girls, and there’s a sense there’s much more to it. Theia’s is, most like, the main plotline, and thus is not wrapping up anytime soon. And that leaves Kiriha’s, and unfortunately, it’s really not as good a climax as I’d like. I mentioned last time that Kiriha’s antagonist was a classic laughing villain type, and thus he’s pretty dull. He’s so dull that the more interesting villains assisting him just wander off when it becomes clear he’s going down. We’re also introduced to “surprise villain”, but he barely ties into the cast and no one really cares. The battle scenes are cool, though.

The plot is divided into two parts, as Kiriha and Koutarou head underground to deal with the villains trying to use a giant earthquake machine to destroy the world (the fact that I had to type that sentence out in a review that is not about MST3K says a lot about this arc), while Theia and her group head to the machine itself to try to destroy it. Everyone gets to use their powers to do something cool, and we get to see that the reason our heroes are always able to succeed so easily is their empathy and compassion. There’s a lost of discussion of justice in this book (actually, there’s a lot of lecturing about justice in this book), and the idea that justice means you are doing the right thing only works if you’re not, say, a cackling madman convinced that the right thing is to RULE THE WORLD!

Honestly, when all is said and done this feels like the ending to a sentai series or something like that. Even Kiriha is not immune to the tropes, giving Koutarou her trading card back in a blatant “I am going to sacrifice myself and die so that you can all be happy” ploy, which the reader will be unsurprised to hear gets her yelled at by EVERYONE afterwards. The addition of the sentai rangers also helps to sell this as being along the lines of a pastiche, which is fine in and of itself, but if we’re genuinely resolving the issues that make up Kiriha’s arc in the series (as we seem to here), it feels rather undercooked. There is a very nice scene at the end, despite some Yurika abuse for comedic affect again (could be a concussion… eeeeh, she’ll be fine) where Kiriha essentially proposes while admitting the status quo has to stay the way it does. The romance in this series is still well handled.

The next volume appears to be a “let’s do a lighter book” type, as it’s summer and we’re all going on a vacation. I look forward to that, but I also look forw3ard to getting back to the alien and magical girl plots, both of which seems to have more dramatic heft than the underground dwellers did.