Being Rudeus is suffering. The volume starts off with him beginning his solo journey with Eris having run off on her journey of self-improvement. While I do emphasize with Eris, having lost her entire family and almost losing Rudeus, wanting to improve herself was a good idea, especially given that shes a kid with a lot of potential. But leaving the unaware Rudeus with nothing but a note is pain. Rudeus is really strong to have made a move forwards after being left alone in the world, all the more so because of his previous memories. To the people who only know Rudeus, even those closest to him like his family, Slyphy and Eris, all believe him to be of indomitable will and power. But he himself knows how easy it is to give up. Yet he decided to pick himself up and smile through the pain to achieve his goal of recusing Zenith.

Anyway that brings us back to the start of the chapter. Rudeus is working with a broken heart and spirit, ready to take on suicidal jobs reasoning to himself that it would be the fastest way to achieve his goals and that it wouldn’t matter if he died anyway. Fortunately he is comforted by counter-arrow who along with the other other adventurers and the guild, have misunderstood his situation, believing him to be the sole survivor from his previous party. Nonetheless, his heart begins to heal although he still ends up thinking of Eris from time to time.

Sara is also introduced in this arc as another character who’s age is close to Rudeus physical age as a new love interest. Though his actions, he saves the party on multiple occasions and even rescues her from death. However, she decides to confess to him in the worse way possible but Rudeus decides to go along with the flow. Things head south as he’s unable to get it up and embarrassed, Sara absolutely destroys the fragile Rudeus’s heart with words. Rudeus decides to drown himself in alcohol where he is met with Soldat who turns out to be a nice guy and join’s Rudeus attempting to comfort him. They end up going to the entertainment district where Rudeus has fun with a nice lady but this does little to help him, though it does reveal that he has grown mistrustful of women and is afraid of being betrayed. Later things with Sara go further south as he is caught with the nice lady saying terrible things about Sara.

The volume ends with neither of them getting to apologize as Rudeus decides to run after nearly being pushed to suicide once again.

I think the portrayal of Rudeus coping with Eris running away was pretty good, he was naturally deeply hurt and couldn’t stop himself thinking of her. Such is first loves. That and it was a long one which ended very abruptly. On top of that I feel like Rudeus going along with Sara’s invitations and getting burned was a predictable result. Rudeus wasn’t quite ready to love again yet and Sara was going way too fast and was much too immature. The “misunderstanding” outside the entertainment district was very forced though but either way I think their relationship would have been a rocky one. They should definitely have apologized to each other but I think it was fair for Rudeus to have run given his mental state. In terms of his goal, it also made sense for him to not settle down, just like how Eris decided to get independence from Rudeus.

Anyway I decided to write this post because this arc destroyed me. Rudeus struggling with the incident with Eris, doing his best to move on by body building and working towards his goal, exploring new love while cautious of being shot down again, yet getting brutally destroyed got to me.

On a side note, I also decided to try listening to this book as a japanese audio book and that worked out pretty well. I am excited to continue exploring more light novels in japanese in this manner.