The Eminence in Shadow Volume 6 Honestly not much to say here, if you liked the story up to this point you'll love this as it's just more of the good stuff. We also get more glimpses into the Cult vs Shadow Garden allegiances forming in the Midgard kingdom and hints at an upcoming country scale conflict in which Cid will surely be yet again an unassuming background character.

Also we get to see more of Akane who might just be the first non Shadow Garden member to figure out the link between Cid and Shadow. She's pretty close to getting there since she's almost linked shadow to his Japanese identity.

I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, Vol. 3 - It's so bad, why am I reading this? This time our wish fulfillment MC gets fought over for the school's ball tournament. You know, like someone who gets picked by teams only after threats from the teacher would dream up while silently crying on the sidelines. And which team gets him? Table tennis. And MC is so great at it that he hits the table tennis ball and it flies straight through the table and burrows into the floor. You know those 3 gram plastic balls... got hit so hard by MC that it pierced the metal(!!) table and burrowed themselves into a gymnasium floor. This is "I AM ATOMIC" levels of stupidity, but just as a reminder, this is not a parody. I annoyed the new o3 model of chatGPT with this question and it turns out that a ping-pong ball would need to go at Mach 1-2 to pierce through a table tennis table and somehow magically not disintegrate itself. The verbiage and tone it gave as an answer felt very condescending and I get the feeling that the AI overlord now thinks less of me. I swear if I land on the chopping block after the robot uprising because of this I'm going to take this fucking author down with me. Next, MC obviously, is going to sub in for some other conveniently injured players (plural) and destroy some more courts on the way with his incredible athletic prowess. Oh, and there's a girl that is constantly grabbing another girl's boobs because that trope-y archetype is always a fan favorite. In the isekai world, he enters a merchant guild and obviously, it becomes a huge commotion to which the clerk says she has to get the Guild Master. For the next part I'll quote verbatim just because no one would believe me otherwise:

"What’s a guild master? I wonder."

Yeah, you fucking idiot, I also wonder what on earth and isekai-earth a "guild master" might possibly be. Probably something too complicated for mere humans to understand...

I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, Vol. 4 -

"So, this is the Adventurer’s Guild? I have no idea what kind of place it is, though. It was simple enough to understand that the Merchant’s Guild is for merchants, but I’m way less informed on adventurers."

Okay, okay, don't panic. You're almost there. Let's think about it slowly. The merchant's guild is for merchants. You got that right. Good boy, very good! Now, for what profession could the Adventurer's guild be? Take your time, no need to hurry. /sigh Anyway, one of his earth love interests finds out about his isekai door and meets his isekai harem-wanna-bes and the first thing they do is some bathtub bonding. The totally normal thing to do. Also totally normal is using this as an illustration-op to boost some volume sales, I guess.

I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, Vol. 5 - So he picks up a little girl who seems to be stunted in her mental development and needs to be hand fed and disrobed for bathing. And guess what gets illustrated? Right, a little naked girl coming out of the bath. Like. Fucking. Clockwork. they should harvest that perv energy somehow. They should hire otaku as train conductors and flash at specific times loli doujin in places that can only be seen from the train conductor's POV and they will never ever have a train even a second late. As for MC, it's so grating and mind-numbing boring how stupid he is. Utterly incapable of understanding even the most obvious concepts. Like, when in the last volume he didn't grasp the concept of a Merchant's guild, in this volume he is incapable of understanding that his new loli companion can see into the future even though she literally spelled it out to him and he has seen it happen at least 4 times already. Seriously his idiocy is next level. Let me give another direct excerpt. So, what happened is that they encounter a demon and in order to seal it it needs to possess someone first because it's immune in its natural demon form. So MC offers himself up to the demon to become possessed by it. Right after the demon jumps into his body MC hears a voice inside his head and the following excerpt happens:

“Huh?!”

I’m hearing the voice of the Demon, but looking around, I can’t see it? Then, suddenly, I feel something like a blow INSIDE my body.

“Wh-what was that?”

Me, you fool! I’m in HERE!

“What, inside me?!”

This fucking imbecile really invites a demon into his body and is then confused that the demon is inside his body. And you can grab idiotic lines from MC on almost every page. Not every chapter. Every. Page. It's that bad. The final straw for the volume is when they encounter a dragon that has been asleep for thousands of years and when talking to it it uses anachronisms like "cringe".

I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too, Vol. 6 - Inconsistencies right off the bat. In volumes 3 or 4 they explain where the side characters called "deities" (not actual gods but people who got special skills) get their demon-fighting powers directly from the planet as a form of self-cleansing (ie. the planet is self-cleansing itself from demons by giving some humans special powers). In this volume it suddenly switches from "planet" to "stars". I am not sure how much of this is due to mistranslation since the whole concept of "self-cleasing" kinda implies it's from the planet rather than stars. Usually, I would put that error on the translator but in one of the previous volumes MC is doing his usual self-deprecation spiel in the form of "I was so bad at physical training and regardless of how much energy I put into it I always stayed fat and the only thing I only ever was good at was to study since there I got returned what I put in...". Now in this volume, he does a 180 and goes:

"Before leveling up, no amount of studying ever seemed to make a difference".

I guess even the author can't be arsed to read his own shit to double-check what was established in previous volumes. And I guess no one was ever as masochistic as me to read them back to back to spot those inconsistencies. The author also seems to have forgotten that MC has a level-up mechanic. In the first volumes that's how he gets stronger. He fights monsters and then gets level-up points he can spend on stats. In the last 2 volumes, this isn't mentioned anymore but I just filed this away under the "maybe he didn't level up" category. In this volume, he defeats one of the strongest beings in this story so far and that surely should have netted him a level up or two but no mention of this at all. The author just conveniently forgot the main plot mechanic to add some more anime-friendly training montage instead. Another instance that might be on the translator is the way some character's speech is written. As in the way they use typesetting to differentiate the speaker. For example, the demon in MC's head is speaking in italics without quotation marks. And the rabbit master of MC is speaking in italics with quotation marks. When reading a scene with both of them it's easy to understand who of them is talking at the moment. Except when they just forgo this whole typesetting thing and even switch it around within the same discussion. At times it took me a while to realize that they just fucked up the typesetting and that this isn't a different character entering the discussion. The idiocy spells from the previous volumes continue as well. An early chapter is basically the beach episode and the group of friends go to the beach-side vacation home of one of the rich girls. Then the group heads to the beach and MC is flustered to see the girls in swimsuits. Here we get this gem of a quote:

"But now that I think about it… It makes sense that girls would have cute swimsuits for the beach."

Yes you daft bint, people wear swimsuits to the beach. Who would have thunk? On a sidenote, I lost count of how many girls are now in love with MC (who remains completely oblivious to the fact even when they are telling him repeatedly that they want to marry him or planting kisses on his cheeks, etc.) Anyway, this was the last volume for now and my self-imposed hell is over. I wish I could say I've come up stronger for it, but I just feel a bit more stupid and hollow.

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Vol. 20 - Another little girl swimsuit illustration, but it's only cute and not sexualized so that makes all the difference in the world. Still, Clockwork. The volume itself was the same as always. Cute, inoffensive entertainment. Like a soothing balm for the soul after the "Unrivaled" ordeal.