By You Fuguruma and Nama. Released in Japan as “Kasei Madoushi no Isekai Seikatsu: Boukenchuu no Kasei Fugyou Uketamawarimasu!” by Ichijinsha Bunko Iris NEO. Released in North America by J-Novel Heart. Translated by Hengtee Lim.
It’s always interesting seeing how light novels based around a typical “fantasy RPG’ setting handle monsters. Some of them tend to go in the direction of “monsters are people too”, particularly when it comes to demon lords, to the point the recent manga Frieren was written in part to push back against that. A lot more of them tend to see monsters as simply things that our heroes hit with their weapons for drop loot. Housekeeping Mage tries to sit somewhere in the middle. We already know about the slime familiars, and we get another familiar added to the extended family here as well. But we also get a dragon that is the subject of cruel experiments, and while they can sympathize with its plight and give it the best death possible, they still have to kill it, because the alternative is the loss of human settlements. On the bright side, that does lead to some really cool fight sequences.
Alec and Shiori are called back to Brovito, home of the foot baths, in order to investigate a rumor that there’s a fenrir in the woods. What they do find turns out to be not QUITE a fenrir, but certainly an intelligent wolf variant, one who immediately bonds with Alec as a soulmate, and is made into a familiar so rapidly it’s almost comical. The bulk of the book, though, it taken up with a crisis: an ice dragon, buried in a frozen lake for two hundred years, has woken up, and the knights are unable to handle it, so have called in the adventurers. This will take everyone’s skills, and there’s a big chance there will be some deaths. And to make things worse, this is the fault of the Empire, whose dying embers are still glowing, and who even know have grudges to settle.
The series has gradually been getting more optimistic and less bleak with each book, so I was not too surprised that after the great battle, the casualty count was low. Honestly, it’s more interested in romance, now that Alec and Shiori are lovers and ready to get married as soon as he can sort out his family issues. (His brother always seems to be on the verge of visiting but never quite makes it by the end of each book.) We also get another inevitable proposal here, as Clemens and Nadia finally make things official after he takes an arrow for Alec and almost dies. Speaking of which, the reason he doesn’t die, doctor Ellen says, is because she’s been studying harder and learning more thanks to Shiori’s example. For all that Japan loves to write about folks dying from heart attacks from working too hard, most of these books agree that if it’s a job they love which is rewarding, they want to work ALL the overtime and do ALL the things.
We’ve caught up with Japan, so I’m not sure when we’ll get the next book, but the author says it should wrap up in 2-3 more arcs. I’m still enjoying it.
