Tsukina and Il are engaged and they stopped the very awful crazy saviour from destroying Tsukina’s adopted home. All is well and the series ended. Then it didn’t and God shows up to let Tsukina know that another saviour is en route. Surely this nice guy won’t be any problem…? Right?
Series like this one that simply didn’t need to continue can sometimes have a hard time justifying their continued existence. The day was won, true love did its thing, what else is there to say? Turns out, more than a little.
The story takes a two-pronged approach to this. First, it uses the reappearance of God, who is incredibly not-quite-omnipotent in this series, to widen the story’s horizons. Seriously, theology espoused in this series is a lot more fallible than you’d want from anything with the powers this one has.
We quickly learn about life beyond the borders of Othel, including one particularly sketchy location (and one thing I don’t love is the broad Arab stereotyping for that place) that is specifically being denied all-powerful beings from bargain basement God.
It makes sense, ties in with Tsukina’s own work, and doesn’t feel like it’s being pulled out of nowhere. So that’s step one, but step two is this new saviour. While it might be a bit much to be inflicted with yet another useless blob of a human being, Youta at least seems genuinely helpful and trying hard.
Too bad he’s a nice guy. And that makes him interesting, and dangerous, as this guy means well. He means really well. And he’s being very helpful to Tsukina. A lot. And it’s one thing to introduce a rival to a story, yawn, but another to introduce a guy who’s reading way too much into a little kindness.
This is a particular type of assumption and rebuke that many guys have had to deal with and some of them don’t do it entirely well. Now give that over to somebody who can blow a hole in a wall and you’ve got something to work with. Tsukina is being nice, period, and Youta’s interpreting that a whole other way and we clearly see he’s not the type to take rejection well this volume.
Of course, we might not go that way, but it sure seems like we’re heading down that route. It’s got a bit more of a frisson of danger than the usual rival nonsense so it makes a much bigger impact.
The rest is mostly Tsukina and Il being cute together and remarking on how the book cafe basically seems to exist for just the two of them, which isn’t exactly inaccurate, although they do get a very foreshadowing-heavy visitor at one point this time out.
This story is still working for me. Tsukina is a great character - quiet and content, but doing the real saviour work under everyone’s noses just out of the goodness of her heart. Il’s Il, but they’re definitely a cute pairing and that’s enough.
Minus a little unfortunate stereotype usage and a chunk given up to a short story I couldn’t care less about (I never read these, but if you like these prose additions, you’re in luck!), it’s as strong as it ever was. Did it need to exist? No. Does it betray what came before? Also no. Does it add something interesting? Yes, and that’s a pleasant surprise, if I do say so.
4 stars - this isn’t a top-tier series that I reach for the second a new volume arrives, but it is a consistently strong example of how to make a good isekai story and do something interesting with it, rather than the same old same.