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.

While there are still bouts of humor in this series, it has not escaped my attention that each volume seems to be darker than the last, and this one was particularly dark. Dead adventurers, dead women and children, bandits everywhere, lots of justified hatred of nobles, and the realization that the city that our heroes live in really does have a lot of issues, and they’re desperately trying to force it to become a place that people might actually want to go. Which, frankly, it isn’t at the moment. The cast is also pretty static – we’ve met potential new characters, and one of them even returns in this book, but for the most part once we get to know them they leave the city. Hell, even Claudia threatens to take Lutz and go somewhere more welcoming. Though I suspect a lot of that is that she’s tired of Lutz throwing himself into deadly situations.

We open on a party of adventurers running from a zombie, and when one of them trips, the others… run away. She’s saved by Lutz, who happened to be in the dungeon and is also the main character, but she can’t rejoin that party. Fortunately, she finds another party… and then the exact same thing happens, only she is the one who runs while her new party are killed by a flame demon. She’s a mess. This flame demon has also massacred a village of carpenters Lutz worked with, and their village leader, Kevin, wants revenge. He’s a mess. And then there’s Djoser, head of the knights, such as they are, who is dealing with a bout of self-hatred, not at all helped by coming across bandits butchering everyone except an old merchant. He’s a mess. As for Lutz? He’s fine.

Well, OK, he’s not ALL fine. His beloved axe gets destroyed, but this allows him to make an even better katana with the remains. His main worry is that he keeps worrying Claudia, who loves Lutz a lot and very much does not want to keep being the good wifey who waits for her man to come home and worries he never will. She gets only one really good scene here, but it’s a pip, as she points out exactly how valuable she and Lutz are to the city and how much they’re starting to rely on him magically solving all their problems. We’re starting to see the Count trying to do something about it – creating a knight unit that not made of of noble rapists will help, though notably, even then they have to create a SECOND knight unit and leave the dissolute first one, as they all have connections. Better roads would help, but the bandit problem is not going away, and since the bandits just seems to be “those damn nobles”, it may take a more complicated fix than any of our leads can do. There’s good worldbuilding here, but the world is hard.

This remains one of my favorite new light novel titles, but it can be very grim. There are no easy solutions.