Shibuki was struck down by the demon lord just as he was defeated, but you can’t keep a good hero down. Shibuki springs back to “life”, except he’s now one of the undead. Which kind of matters when his newly betrothed, Surfi, is a holy priestess whose very touch sets him on fire. Literally.
The addition of the whole undead thing adds a little bit of pop to what would otherwise be generic fantasy manga #408, but otherwise this book’s as by the numbers as you can imagine it being.
Still, the reversal of Shibuki already having established his bonafides in respect to his feelings for Surfi and now being unable to act on it while both of them are quite up for hanky and/or panky is a pretty nice change of pace.
It allows for them to be a lot cuter than if we were enduring the courtship phase (and there’s a great deflation of an obvious rival practically immediately) for the nth time.
While large swaths of its jokes are very ‘shrug’, there are definitely some fun ones with respect to Surfi, who is idolized by the populace to the extent that she has special edition statues in various towns and tons of limited edition merchandise.
The undead wrinkle is also used to goose the story a little too - how do you cope when healing magic will now hurt you? What do you do when the magic sword bequeathed to you is now deadlier to you than the enemy? When the quest proper is straightforward, asking the little questions like this is a smart call.
Of course, while it looks like this book is prepping to be pretty tame, minus the couple hi-jinx, it turns out that it’s saving all its horniness for the latter parts. You can see the warning bells when the all the men, save Shibuki, are conveniently excised from the party, leaving us with our leads and a tsundere sorceress.
Vanilla the Succubus (cough) enters the picture next and while you wouldn’t have thought so, this book is the end point for skimpy costumes without the character being flat-out nude. I mean, succubi gonna succubi, but I blinked twice at that one - she’s practically a cosplay dare.
Besides her desire to land Shibuki, Vanilla does provide some interesting friction - she turns out to have a fairly sad backstory that gins up some sympathy and there’s a clever wrinkle with her being able to heal Shibuki while Surfi cannot. That goes over as well as you’re expecting.
If anything, the characters are the biggest letdown - the camaraderie between our main trio is quite evident, but even the undead thing doesn’t really change that Shibuki is the archetypical teenager hero with all the snuck porn that entails.
Surfi’s whole holier-than-thou thing can occasionally come across as Bible-equivalent-thumping, even if she does sometimes quote scripture to suit her own needs and definitely has a less pure side. She’s mostly okay, but you may easily find her grating.
The tsundere sorceress is a tsundere sorceress.
3 stars - average book is average. I don’t think this distinguished itself enough for me to really bother keeping up with it, but if you haven’t had your fill of these sorts of stories yet, you could do worse (and better).