By Satori Tanabata and Tea. Released in Japan as “Akuyaku Reijō Level 99: Watashi wa Ura Boss Desu ga Maō dewa Arimasen” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by sachi salehi.

This may be my favorite volume of Villainess Level 99 since the first one. Which makes sense, given that it ties back to the plot of the first quite a bit, but that’s not why I love it. I love it because the basic idea that kicks off this volume is completely, totally bananas in every way. I have no idea how the author came up with it. I do know exactly why Yumiella came up with it, it’s because she’s Yumiella, and everything is about being the strongest. But I mean, if I told you “Yumiella imagines her left side and right side fighting each other, and wonders who would win, and the idea causes her to think *so* hard that her left side *dies* and goes to purgatory, where she is literally shown as only her left half in the illustration”, you might think that this is either a dream sequence or a minor subplot. Nope. this is what kicks off the majority of the book.

While listening to Eleanora tell her about a legendary perfume maker, Yumiella, as I noted above, thinks about her separate halves fighting. Her left side wakes up the next “morning” in the “Kingdom of Twilight”, a place for souls of the dead who still have unfinished business. Meanwhile, Yumiella *also* wakes up back in her own bed, but her left side has no feeling whatsoever… in fact, as a particularly obnoxious Lemn points out, her left side is literally dead. Now Yumiella, Patrick and Eleanora have to research the Kingdom of Twilight and that means going back to the very origins of the kingdom… which is appropriate, as the left side of Yumiella discovers that among those with regrets in the Kingdom of Twilight are the Hero, aka the first king of Valschein, and the Demon Lord… who definitely remembers Yumiella.

This book, like the last, continues the trend of “Yumiella is slightly more sensible except when the author needs her to be over the top”, and unlike the last, it succeeds. Leaving aside the actual premise, the way that they resolve the Kingdom of Twilight thing is so funny I laughed for a good 30 seconds, and also definitely falls into the category of “Only Yumiella could do this”. As for Yumiella’s relationship with Patrick, well, they’re still not quite married, but this is the strongest I’ve felt about the two of them as a loving couple. Well, OK, a loving couple and Eleanora. The three of them have fallen into being a throuple without really realizing it, and while the attraction is more friendly/familial on Yumiella and Patrick’s part, I think they both realize that they can’t really be together without her there. Eleanora, by the way, also shows off her more mature side we saw in the 5th book. (Patrick has always been mature.)

We’re caught up with Japan, so that wedding may be a while off. Till then, I was pleased to see this book give me exactly the sort of Yumiella, Patrick and Eleanora that I want.

By Satori Tanabata and Tea. Released in Japan as “Akuyaku Reijō Level 99: Watashi wa Ura Boss Desu ga Maō dewa Arimasen” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by sachi salehi.

The anime has now finished, and it ended up being a fantastic advertisement… for the manga. Great news for that, but as for the light novel, I think anyone who enjoyed the anime and reads it is not going to be anything other than pissed off. That said, I think the author, now that they are aware that this won’t be a short series, is trying to do something beyond “Yumiella is wacky and dumb” over and over again. For the first, oh, 4/5 of this book, we get a deeper Yumiella, who actually thinks and makes realizations that are actually correct. Admittedly a lot of this is because she spends a great deal of the book depressed, but it’s still a positive development. She’s dragged into politics that have been simmering since the first book, and does OK… well, till the last fifth of the book, where Yumiella reminds us who she is. Sigh. It was nice while it lasted.

Yumiella is supervising (well, not really) the building of several new structures in her territory in preparation for her upcoming wedding when she is lured to the capitol, supposedly to build cool sentai armor, but in reality to be fitted for her wedding dress. The one-two punch of having to endure the fitting and discovering that anime giant robot physics don’t apply in this world sends her into a funk, which is not helped by Eleanora – spotted in the capitol – being dragged into a dispute between the radicals and the moderates… which she only just now realizes was framed to her by those who support the moderate side. Now both sides are grappling for power, and are trying to use Yumiella’s position to get it, reasoning she is sensible enough not to punch people to death. Which is true. That is the end of the sensibility.

Let’s get the terrible out of the way first. Everything about the final bit with Yumiella and her parents is pathetic and awful and unfunny, and it does not help that everyone in the story agrees with me. Ugh. Leaving that aside, I did enjoy this. Yumiella is more sensible until the denouement, something she even notices herself. She also is starting to examine her own habits and thought processes and find them wanting, especially when it comes to observing others. That said, Eleanora is easily the reason to read this. The running gag in the book is that Eleanora, the duke’s daughter, is not the same person as Eleanora, the girl everyone knows is living with Yumiella. But that’s also very true – Eleanora has grown up. She is using her own special talents to help businesses. She’s mature enough to criticize Prince Edwin and even say that his own morose moping makes her hate him now (though she later melts down after realizing what she did). She’s terrific. Yumiella… ends up backsliding, alas.

It was nice to see the book wade back into the politics of the first two again, and it’s still fun to read, provided you completely separate it from its adaptations.

By Satori Tanabata and Tea. Released in Japan as “Akuyaku Reijō Level 99: Watashi wa Ura Boss Desu ga Maō dewa Arimasen” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by sachi salehi.

The anime is currently airing as I type this up, and it’s quite enjoyable, if very low budget. It’s also doing something very sensible, which a lot of series are doing lately: it’s adapting the manga, not the light novel. This is obvious if you watch any scene with Alicia, who is simply far more sympathetic and nice in the manga than she ever was in the LN. I’m not sure how the manga resolves the Alicia plotline, if it’s even gotten to that point yet, But I remember how the light novel did, with Alicia essentially under house arrest, and still traumatized by the finale of the first book. And, as it turns out, the author was rather jealous of how Alicia was handled in the manga. And so, after taking a couple of books off, Alicia returns for this new book. Unfortunately, this is still the light novel version of Alicia, which means that the reunion is more pathetic than anything else.

After resolving issues with her alternate universe self, there’s not really much standing between Yumiella and Patrick’s wedding… except for Yumiella, who suddenly realizes that a large wedding is exactly the sort of thing she doesn’t want. Given this, she naturally decides to fly to the moon. This doesn’t work out, so instead she plummets into the neighboring country of Lemlaesta… which you may recall is the country that Patrick’s mother despises. There she meets a man named Gilbert, who looks a lot like Patrick. And he has the same name as Patrick’s brother, something which Patrick just told Yumiella before all of this insanity happened. Naturally, she doesn’t recognize him. Incredibly, she also manages to fool (?) him into thinking she’s not Yumiella. Can the two densest people alive possibly manage to stop a war?

How much you enjoy this book may depend on how much you can tolerate Yumiella being even more of an airhead than usual. The anime reminds me just how far off the rails she’s gotten since the first volume, and she now rarely if ever manages to descend to anything resembling reality. There are a few times when I just wanted to throttle her, particularly when she tried to jump to the moon to run away from her problems. On the bright side, sometimes Yumiella being this dense really is very funny, and once you get behind the idea that she and Gilbert don’t know who the other one is, despite the 87 billion clues each one has, you just roll with it and laugh. And yes, Alicia comes back. More interesting than her actions in this book (which are predictable as hell) is the fact that she’s being trained to be a weapon that will be deployed in case the country’s bomb (Yumiella) goes off. I’d feel bad for her if it weren’t for, well… (waves hand at everything Alicia does in this book).

I didn’t even mention Yumiella measuring her new level, which leads to some of the best jokes but also sets up the final confrontation. Oh yes, and Yumiella sprouting wings like an Evangelion shout out. In any case, despite Yumiella starting to get a bit *too* dense, this is still a series I enjoy.