By Kazuma Ogiwara and CARIMARICA. Released in Japan as “Isekai Toushou no Maken Seisaku Gurashi” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ryan Burris.

This remains a series written almost entirely for teenage boys, but it’s worth noting that this isn’t just one aspect of things teenage boys like. Obviously there’s the stuff about the swords, because teen boys love swords, and fantasy authors love treating the swords like they’re women, which this book absolutely does. It’s also written for teen boys in terms of the sexuality – Lutz and Claudia remain very sexually active, and a princess of another country’s city/tribe is mostly described by her large breasts. But there’s something else teenage boys like, and that’s grimdark, and this series has that as well. It never quite spills over into actual tragedy, but there’s a lot of bleak, depressing stuff in this series, ranging from the start with Claudia being saved from a fate worse than death (more on that later), to a clan leader who has let the love of a sword turn him evil, to a vengeful knight seeking to atone for past sins by killing his fellow sinners. It’s not fluffy.

This story essentially consists of two parts. In the first, Lutz, Claudia, and Ricardo head to the federation to see what’s going on there after the death of their king. Turns out things aren’t great. They meet up with Gwynn, the guy who asked Lutz to create a katana he could give painless death with, and together they head to a wretchedly poor city where the chief seems to really, really hate them. He has a daughter who’s far more sensible, but he also has a bewitching katana that has killed three of her brothers when they challenged dear old dad. Maybe an unbewitching katana from Lutz can help. When they return home, they find that there’s a masked avenger going around killing the lazy knights, and while Lutz and especially Claudia have no love lost for those guys, Lutz decides to investigate just in case this turns out to be the fault of one of his katanas, like almost everything else in this series.

There is some humor in this, of course. The darkness of the village chief and his bewitching sword is offset by the adorableness of the first love between Gwynn and Melty. There’s another subplot about Ricardo asking for a second katana to be used with Tsubaki as a dual wield, and it’s up to Lutz to show Ricardo that dual wielding is something mostly done by fictional heroes for good reason. But we see slavery here, and a village whose people are starving to death just because its chief wants a second priceless katana to go with his first. There’s also the entire plot with Donaldo, who worships Lutz for all the wrong reasons. Lutz has to secretly meet with Donaldo to resolve this, because much as Claudia likes to pretend that she’s over the terror of what the knights did to her in the first book, she’s really not, and he knows that he needs to handle this away from her. The darkness of this world leaks in whether you want it to or not, and it’s impossible to get rid of.

It will be interesting to see where this series goes next – especially given we’re now seeing Enchanted Weapons by people other than Lutz. I’m still really loving it.