Between troubles with her magic and her apparent weakness to Albert’s existence, Sei can’t catch a break. But she’s doing loads better than Aira, the younger girl summoned along with her, who turns out to be as bad at adjusting as Sei is good at it…
This series needs to figure out what it wants to do with Sei - when it first started out she was taking no crap, but it feels like they’ve really worn down the edges on her lately. Partly she’s come to like the world more and made friends, I get that, but it may have lessened her slightly in terms of her own agency. Or maybe the story simply doesn’t go anywhere this volume.
And woe betide the manga that starts down the path of research in a magical realm because it often, well, is boring. And we get that a fair bit in this episode when Sei tries to make her healing power more potent. It at least leads to something a bit more related to the plot, but it’s a looooong path there.
Honestly, the best stuff comes from Aira’s trials at the magic school. Much like Sei, she did not want to come to a different world, but her adjustment isn’t going half as well. The prince who took a liking to her has basically coddled her into a state of learned helplessness.
There’s also a mounting number of people who recognize that there’s no way she’s the saint compared to Sei, including the aforementioned prince’s fiancé (we’ll ignore the incredibly yikes age of majority in this realm, because… yikes…).
It all adds up to Aira being especially put out and I like that she’s not yet especially villainous, just unfairly judged and crushed under expectation and assumption while acting out against it. She asked for none of this and is unwittingly being saddled with responsibilities that were never supposed to be hers to begin with.
That stuff works about as much as some of the Sei digressions don’t, although the fluffy tea party and etiquette stuff gives them lots of excuses for many costume changes. It still feels rather like they’re softening her up to an extent that isn’t strictly necessary, but again, it’s also not helped by nothing really happening.
3.5 stars and I’m not giving it the rounding up this time. It’s easily the weakest volume of the series to date, with all the interesting things being given over to somebody who isn’t even the main character.