By Bokuto Uno and Miyuki Ruria. Released in Japan as “Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Andrew Cunningham.

Even when the author is trying to write a light, fluffy heartwarming volume to balance out the trauma and awfulness in Book 10, they can’t quite pull it off. Oh, there’s lots of fun stuff in here, especially at the start. Seeing the main six in the cast, with plus ones Marco and Teresa, going on boat journeys, getting completely hammered in a “fun drunk” way, seeing Katie’s family home, meeting Chela’s mother… this is all great stuff. There’s a scene with Katie forcing everyone into a deeply Nordic sauna experience that’s both heartwarming and hilarious. And yet at the same time there is the undercurrent of “how long until Katie finally turns and has to be put down like a dog”, as well as “I am already not going to live much longer than five years so I might as well continue to help you”. And that’s not even getting into the faculty trying to find their killers. That, said, this is genuinely fluffy compared to last time, I promise.

So we’re now three teachers down, and in the faculty meeting discussing things the voice of reason, new faculty member and Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams points out that there must be something they have in common, and it’s probably related to Chloe Halford. As for the students, well, it’s end of term, and for once everyone is actually going home. This includes Marco, who is coming with Katie to meet her folks and the local trolls, and Teresa, who Oliver has invited along so that she can experience the world outside of Kimberly. They’re beset by pirates (who are defeated ludicrously easily,), and then they meet Katie’s parents, who are very nice but also have some very pointed questions for Oliver Horn. They then meet Chela’s mother, the elf Mishakua, who wants to see how they measure up in terms of a potential match for Chela. (Oliver fails badly.) Sadly, the ongoing Tir incursion ruins our peaceful fluff of a book.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – this series is fantastic at showing a truly wonderful polycule, with six people who are all wonderful in their own way, while also making you understand that there is no way the series ends with them all graduating and moving into a big house to start their own detective agency or something. I especially appreciated Guy, who gets a bit more to do here, and is starting to shape up as the emotional center of the group, along with Chela. I especially liked his relationship with Katie, where he’s there to be her comfort hug for a while because she can’t bear being near Oliver when he and Nanao are, well, CLOSE, but he draws a line and says she has to actually confront him about it. (Which she… doesn’t quite do.) But, I mean, this series started as a grand revenge story, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to go out that way too, and grand revenge stories do not end well for the revenger. That said, he may live longer than Katie, who even has her parents thinking she’s going to need to be killed by her friends to prevent her turning towards the Tir side.

I’m not sure if we’ll continue the grand tour of everyone’s home in Book 12 or just cut back to the next year at school, but it doesn’t matter, because next up is a Side Story. We’re going to get a good look at the past of Alvin Godfrey, who just graduated in the main series. Till then, this is fluffy fun. Ish.

By Bokuto Uno and Miyuki Ruria. Released in Japan as “Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Andrew Cunningham.

Longer than usual content warning here: with this volume, the rating for these novels rises from Teen to Older Teen, and the content bears that out. There’s sexual references, discussion of a horrific sexual assault, discussion of a graphic and horrific torture and murder, a graphic amputation scene, use of a swear word that is far less problematic in the UK than in the US, and, worst of all, I’m going to have to discuss that series about the boy at the wizarding school with the scar again. Reader discretion is highly advised.

When I was about halfway through this volume, I pretty much knew what I was going to be talking about. There would still be a content warning, of course. After all, there’s not only a relatively explicit sex scene between Oliver and Nanao here, but also Leoncio is in this, so there’s a lot of talk of big dicks here. Oh yes, and Miligan is called a cunt. To be fair, she absolutely deserves that one, especially because I’m sure it’s in the British English sense. But yeah, the front half was filled with things to talk about. The “polycule” that our heroes have become, and how much I love it. Katie’s backstory was jaw-dropping, and really deserved me talking about it, as well as the fact that almost everyone has written her off as next to snap. The fights were all awesome, the election results were terrific. Teresa is growing up, and she hates it. That was great. . And I saw that the last half of the book was ALL battle against one of Oliver’s targets. Meh. A lot of fighting. Won’t have much to say.

Kee-rist.

I do appreciate that the series does give a real backstory and sympathy to some of its antagonists. We get Demetrio Aristedes’ backstory here, and like a lot of this series, it involves idealistic attempts to make things better turning into something horrific and tragic. That said, his backstory is dwarfed by what we finally get in this book: Oliver’s life to date. We get some adorable and heartwarming scenes with him and his parents, because gut punches don’t work if everything has been bad from the start. We get the brutal, graphic death of his mother, and see how she was betrayed by one of her closest friends (and oh boy, that’s a can of worms I can’t even get into in this review, it will have to wait.) We get his adoption by the Sherwoods, which unfortunately is because their patriarch sees him as an experiment rather than as a person. We see that, on the cover with Oliver and Demetrio, is Shannon Sherwood, and possibly wonder why she’s give n such an important placing. And then we find out why. Of all the horrific scenes in this volume, the flashback of Oliver being drugged and mind controlled to rape and impregnate Shannon is the worst, and it really throws their relationship into sharp relief. Oh yes, and there is, of course, Yuri. Whose story ends here, but at least the way he goes out is one of the few triumphant moments in this pummeling book.

Sigh. So OK, let’s talk Harry Potter. This series has been compared to those books from the very start, but we’re now ten volumes in, and “oh gee Guy and Katie sort of have a Ron and Hermione vibe” is not only the least of the comparisons, but also mostly wrong. It’s at its most obvious in this book in the flashback to the torture scene, when Darius, Oliver’s first victim from Book One, takes point to be the first to torture Chloe to death, and he revels in it in a way that HAS to remind people of Severus Snape. There’s also a definite James and Lily vibe to Edgar and Chloe, though (because this series glories in subverting Potter as much as it pastiches it) what the two of them do for Oliver is far darker and more interesting. I’m not sure where this series if going to end up, but there is absolutely no way it’s ending up with the next generation of the cast going off to school 15 years later.

As with Eighty-Six I am very concerned, and half convinced, this will end with nearly the entire cast dead. Hell, a lot of them will deserve it. With Eighty-Six I’m hoping that the main couple will make it out OK, but Seven Spellblades has a much higher bar to clear. I’ve joked before about the main six being a polycule, but it’s made explicit here. They’re family. They’re probably all going to be lovers soon (Oliver and Nanao are mostly there, only held back by his past trauma). They have a bond that deserves to live on. I desperately want them all to survive and make the worst a nice place. A swell place. A place where magic kids can play stickball in the street with their athames without fear of being consumed by anything. It’s not going to happen, I am aware. But God, it’s a great dream. Let these kids stop suffering.

By Bokuto Uno and Miyuki Ruria. Released in Japan as “Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru” by Dengeki Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Andrew Cunningham.

Well, the good news is the Spellblades anime was not the complete disaster the way, say, Spy Classroom is. The bad news is that it wasn’t all that great, either, and I doubt a lot of folks who hadn’t read the books will be reading the anime and going “whoah, need to read that”. Which is a shame, as these really are a series of great light novels, but alas, “first rule of anime: drop the internal narration” strikes again. As for this volume, it was mostly excellent, with one major exception which I will get to. It also had a hell of a cliffhanger, as for once the author did NOT write the end of an arc with “and I’ve run out of pages, so bye”, but instead teases us with something that I really don’t want to have happen but will also be really interested in if it does. That said, most of this is the last of the tournament, so fight, fight, fight.

There are three big battles in this book. First, Oliver, Nanao and Yuri have to fight Ursule Valois and her other team members, Generic Person 1 and Generic Person 2. This gets into a long discussion of sword styles but is derailed a bit by a flashback that made me want to drop the series. After that, Stacy, Fay and Chela go up against Richard Andrews and his team of final bosses, and do their best despite Chela basically being told “you can’t win because the teacher is your dad”. Finally, Team Andrews and Team Horn get a knock-down, drag-out battle which allows Yuri to actually become a real live boy but gives Nanao her worst nightmare: an erotically charged swordfight between Oliver and someone who isn’t her.

There are so many ways that this series feels like it was written by an emo 24-year-old boy. Sometimes this is awkward but endearing, such as Horn and Andrews battling to see if they get to call each other by their first names and maybe hang out sometimes. Sometimes this is pretty damn cool, such as Katie sticking to her principles so much that she might eventually turn evil and die, or Chela needing to be Bright Slapped by her dad. And sometimes it’s really awful and stupid. I don’t like “let me show you a flashback to my super evil abusive family to show you why I am super evil and abusive” to begin with, but this one adds a kitten to the trauma to make things extra horrible. There was no need for that, and I say this as someone who wrote very similar things when *I* was 24. That said, I’m never going to be able to stop Spellblades wearing its heart on its sleeve, which means that sometimes you get really awesome stuff, and sometimes you get this. It’s all just out there on the page, everything.

So the arc is over, go in peace. Tune in next time to see if Yuri dies, if Katie turns evil, or if Oliver and Nanao finally bang. The first two are far more likely than the third.