My Quiet Blacksmith Life in Another World, Vol. 3

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By Tamamaru and Kinta. Released in Japan as “Kajiya de Hajimeru Isekai Slow Life” by Kadokawa Books. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Linda Liu.

Still enjoying this series, don’t get me wrong, but it’s time I face up to the face that I am skimming a large chunk of it every time simply because I really don’t care one jot about the Blacksmith Life part of this book. There is just so much detail about how to make swords correctly, knives correctly, and katanas correctly, including hilts and scabbards and the like. And of course we also get to hear Eizo talk a lot about how he’s using his cheats too, so these are essentially IKEA blueprints that contain the S. Harris punchline “then a miracle occurs” halfway through the process. It is a BIG chunk of every book, and I think the series would benefit from less of it, even if it means sacrificing a bit of the slow life pacing. Which gets a bit of a kick in the pants in this volume anyway, as halfway through Eizo is called out to help with a monster subjugation that turns nasty.

In the first half of this volume, we essentially get the same thing as the second half of Book 2, only with the elf replaced with a demon. Nilda recently suffered a crushing defeat battling against a mere human, and the mere human had a very familiar sword. Now Nilda wants a sword of her own to challenge her, so basically stakes out Eizo’s hometown till she runs into him. What follows is a lot of slow life sword building and all the girls admiring Eizo’s muscular blacksmith body. After this, Marius asks that Eizo go monster exterminating with them, so that he can repair the swords and armor when they’re broken in battle. This battle ends up being more personal than he expected, as he runs into the elf Lidy, who just left his shop with her own magic sword. She’s here to help them take out the main monster boss… and avenge her brother.

I gloss over it a bit in these reviews, but this is still very much that genre of “a harem series without any actual sex or even kissing” that is so popular in Japan. Nilda clearly likes Eizo. By the end of the book, Livy has gone back to his shop and moved in with everyone. We meet a young woman, Frederica, who is in charge of logistics and can best be summed up as “small insecure accountant” but also clearly is in love with Eizo by the end of the book. Hell, it’s implied that the Queen of the Demons has taken a liking to him as well, and the flashforwards we occasionally see very pointedly say he has a wife but never say who it is. This book is written for folks who love seeing a man surrounded by a dozen women but who will be making precisely zero moves. I know this upsets some light novel fans.

Still, it is what it is. It’s slow life, adding girls one by one, and smithing. So much smithing.

When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace, Vol. 3

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By Kota Nozomi and 029. Released in Japan as “Inou Battle wa Nichijoukei no Nakade” by GA Bunko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Tristan K. Hill.

Imagine that you are an Olympic sprinter. It’s the final race. All eyes of the world are on you. You’re feeling great. Your fiancee is cheering from the stands. The starter pistol goes off, and you take off, quickly putting all the other runners in the shade. It’s smooth sailing till the end of the race. You smile, confident and proud. Then you trip on absolutely nothing and fall flat on your face. All the other runners trample over you as they fly towards victory. You have humiliated yourself and your country. The medics don’t even want to treat you. Your fiancee leaves you, sobbing. The team bus leaves without you, as does the team plane. And so there you are, broke and starving, wondering where it all went wrong. If it wasn’t for that one horrid misstep right at the finish! If you can imagine that, then you can pretty much imagine how I felt on getting to the climax of the third volume of When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace.

As has become the norm with this series, the first half is basically a bunch of fooling around, goofy gags, and Andou being incredibly irritating. The club plays tennis, and has a cosplay roulette tournament, which gets everyone into embarrassing outfits. That said, as you may have guessed by the cover art, Chifuyu is the featured girl of this volume. She seems to be having difficulty at school, which Andou drops her off at one morning, and trouble dealing with her best friend Madoka Kuki, aka “Cookie”. Well, best friend is probably the wrong word. Partly because Chifuyu is so helpless at doing anything that Kuki ends up acting more like a mom than anything else. And partly as, well, Chifuyu has the club, and talks about the club all the time. Which, naturally, makes Kuki mad.

For the most part, this was a lot of fun. Andou has become tolerable for the most part, especially when we contrast him with his loathsome “friend” Sagami. He and Tomoyo go on what is, to all intents and purposes, a date midway through this book, and it’s cute as hell. There’s some ominous foreshadowing of a character from Andou’s past (who might be trans?), but that’s for a future book. And Chifuyu’s problem thankfully has nothing whatsoever to do with the superpowers or the other evil organization – it’s just typical elementary school stuff, and reminds you that she really is ten years old. Which makes Andou’s “solution” to the problem really head-slappingly terrible. Even Hachiman would not quite be this self-sacrificing. It’s creepy. And it also reminds you that Chifuyu probably *is* a love interest for Andou despite being ten, because the whole club is – that’s the point of the book, ti’s a harem series. Which, whatever. But there’s no need to underline it with all this lolicon stuff.

So, 85% of a good book. Just stop before the final chapter and assume there was a sensible solution. …right, this is When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace, there is nothing sensible here. Never mind. Carry on.

Reincarnated As the Last of My Kind, Vol. 4

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By Kiri Komori and Yamigo. Released in Japan as “Tensei Shitara Zetsumetsu Sunzen no Kishou Shuzokudeshita” on the Shōsetsuka ni Narō website. Released in North America by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Roman Lempert.

It’s two years after the previous book, and there’s a lot of bad, heavy things going on. Tina is now living at the captured fort, being flown around to various dangerous places to purify monsters. She’s referred to as “the holy woman” by basically everyone, and has almost come to accept it. She’s also coming to accept the fact that she’s in love with Renge, and debates confessing to him, though world events kind of put a kibosh on that. But the Sugula keeps coming closer and closer to them, and it needs to be destroyed soon. We’re getting into “this is the passing of an era” style fantasy, where one mentor close dying and another mentor actually dying off screen (how rude!). And, of course, there’s still the occasional enemy attack, and those are getting more and more dangerous. What on earth can Tina do to help things? If your answer was “have a fashion show”, then congratulations, you too may be able to write web novels.

To be fair, the fashion show *is* a side story, where Tina tries to solve the problem of newly freed slaves who still have tons of issues working them out by bullying each other. There’s also two side stories, which focus on the non-Tina romances in this book, and show off that just because a character SEEMS dense and oblivious it doesn’t necessarily mean they actually are. Unfortunately, the two side stories and the extra story run to just over half the book, leaving only the first half left for the actual plot to bubble up. This is also a problem with web novels, which are rarely written with the author thinking “now, I’m at about Page 220 if this were a Kadokawa book, time to have a cliffhanger”. But it can be very frustrating if you’re invested in how the world is going to be saved.

Tina doesn’t really have a fun book. We don’t even SEE the inn that she and her father used to tend here, and she’s pretty much resigned herself to being the savior of many (though her sister and others also yearn for a day when she can just lie around and make incredible healing potions, something she doesn’t have time to do anymore). She gets more information on her parents’ background, but this comes at the cost of losing a new found family member just when she realized she was a family member. And of course there’s the revelation that falling in love with Renge may actually produce a stone that could lead to a war that lasts centuries – again. As plot macguffins to stop a confession go, it’s certainly a strong one. That said, I think that the 5th book is the last? So we may not have more to go before an actual confession.

This is the second book in a row that felt like it was just marking time, and as always YMMV on the romance between a 15-year-old with the mind of a 30-year-old inside her and an immortal who rescued her as a baby. Still, I’ll soldier on. This was OK.