By Cathfach and Kurodeko. Released in North America by J-Novel Club.
This was one of the winners of the J-Novel Club original light novel contest, where they had judges (including Carlo Zen, author of The Saga of Tanya the Evil) picking out who created the best work. The winners got a cash prize, publication, and illustrations by a Japanese light novel artist (in this case, the Lady Bumpkin and Her Lord Villain artist). The premise of this story interested me, as it looked like it might be a deconstruction of the standard isekai. Which it is, but not as much as you’d expect. Honestly, this has its roots in those old fanfics where the author wrote the story asking “what if everything were the same except the main character was sensible and asked questions?” Thomas, the main character of this story, is sensible and definitely does ask questions, but that only gets him so far, because this is a world that has been at war for a while, and has summoned heroes before, and they are not happy they have to do it again. So they try to rig the game in their favor. This goes badly for almost everyone.
Thomas Smith is walking drunkenly back to his apartment with his friend Simon when he spots a purple “whirlwind” in front of him. On touching it, he ends up in another world. There, he is told that the world is under threat from demons who are on the verge of destroying humanity, and he has the power to help them fight back. He’s also assigned four pretty women – Stephanie, the King’s daughter; Christine, a knight; Wendy, a mage; and Mary, a slave. As he learns about magic and swordplay, and discovers that, much to his surprise, he really does seem to have heroic abilities, he also starts to connect the dots that they’re lying to him. In fact, the reader knows this from the start. Previous heroic summonings haven’t always gone well (and, in a nice meta joke, tend to be Japanese teenagers), so they gave him a “harem” and are trying to get him to be their good little puppet. The more he learns, however, the more everything completely goes off the rails.
This is a solid book, which wants to play around in the isekai sandbox but also try to examine some of its cliches. Slavery is examined closely here, and it’s horrifying in many ways. About 40% of the way into the book, we get a HOLY CRAP moment, and you wonder if that’s going to help solve the slavery thing, but that ends up not really being the case. Because this is a world where no one really understands how magic works. A lot of it is just “because it’s magic”. And Thomas finds that the success and failure of his spells lean a lot on his feelings towards others – even if they’re unconscious. Which means if he is unconsciously blaming others for their past horrible actions, even if he wants to save him the magic can simply not work. The world is also just starting to show off its complexity – it’s clearly meant to be multiple volumes, though I’m not sure how ongoing series work when it’s a contest winner. Possibly depends on sales.
I will admit, the character I most want to see more of in future books is the one who only appeared on the last page. So I would like to see more of this. For fans of isekai who want dark!gray!independent heroes.