Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Side of Fire

Reign of the Seven Spellblades Light Novel

by Bokuto Uno, Ruria Miyuki (artist), Andrew Cunningham (translator)

Alvin Godfrey, a failure of a mage, entered Kimberly Magic Academy unsure of himself. Unable to cast a single spell, he was mocked by his peers. Yet he faced the darkness of Kimberly, made friends—and in time, became the student body president. Set five years prior to Reign of the Seven Spellblades, this is a scorching account of how Godfrey earned his famous nickname Purgatory.

Genres: Dark Fantasy

232 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2023

Reviews

[Pieter · Rating 4 out of 5]

On its own it is a fairly typical wizard academy light novel if a bit more brutal, but with many of the shounen action tropes there. Protagonist struggling with his powers in a dark world, collecting friends to fight against its injustices and deal with them head on. The characters are interesting, the world a lot darker then usual and accepting treatment on non-binary gender roles (especially for LNs were the effeminate muscle man crossdresser is all too often the joke character). Some great evocative environments in the final part. Bit predictable at the start.

As part of the Spellblades series it adds a bit of background to important side characters and forms an interesting mirror to Oliver with Godfrey being a talented heroic character and Oliver being a mediocre tragic (anti)hero.

Still, that also means the story lacks some of the elements that makes the main story so interesting to me. So while an entertaining read, it doesn't really add much to the series. A good read for fans of the series, but not a must read.

[Aaron Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Side of Fire feels a lot like a redux of the first three books (what the manga and anime adapted) but with the Campus Watch in the Sword Roses' role. Which made it a little predictable, but wasn't bad, and I strongly suspect it was a deliberate artistic choice: Bokuto-sensei tends to use the two groups as thematic foils.


So we start with an extended prologue showing Alvin Godfrey as a first-year in 1528, entering Kimberly, struggling because can't cast for shit, and making friends with Carlos Whitrow. Then we jump to 1529 to bring Tim Linton and Ophelia Salvadori into the story, and can I say, first-year Ophelia tugs at the heartstrings, she's so freakin' cute.

TW: school violence. Remember the bit from volume 10 about Tim going postal and gassing the Fellowship? Well, it's shown this time: Tim is already fucked in the head, Godfrey is trying to get through to him, and then a pot weasel that Tim had been feeding gets randomly killed by another student and Tim cracks and wades into the Fellowship flinging gas bombs. I swear Bokuto Uno must have read accounts of American school shootings, because this feels like glimpsing what it must have felt like to be at Sandy Hook or Columbine. That was hard to read. Fortunately, nobody dies, and Godfrey gets Tim out of being summarily executed by Esmeralda by betting her that Tim can save two lives for each one he endangered.

Then we get the beginnings of the rivalry with the old council: Leoncio Echevalria tries to recruit Godfrey into his clique, Godfrey gives him the basic "thanks but no thanks", and Khiirgi Albschuch and Gino Beltrami promptly target Tim and Ophelia... and then the shit hits the fan a la the end of volume 2/episode 11 because a monster-summoning seventh-year has chosen that exact moment to get consumed by the spell.

So more delving into the self-destructive obsessiveness of mages, this time in the person of a new character named Severo Escobar, who makes living paintings and has a huge guilt complex over all the bodies mages tend to step over to perfect their craft, leading him to become obsessed with the concept of Hell punishing sinners and paint a hellscape a la Hieronymus Bosch (though it's patterned more after the Sino-Japanese vision of it), which has now come to life. Godfrey, Lesedi, and Carlos all dive into a painting to go after him, with Eche accidentally dragged along for the ride. There's a lot of really interesting thematic stuff in here about the nature of sin and salvation, and the role of religion and faith in a world whose power structure is normally militantly anti-theist.

Verdict for the volume is that book 10 set the bar much too high for Side of Fire to measure up, but on its own merits it's still enjoyable, and it's nice to get so much of Tim and Ophelia playing off each other.