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This covers the second half of the initial anime season. (Or, much more properly, the anime covers this.)

It retains the format of being smaller stories stitched together. The book gives them as chapters, but they are separate stories, connected by a fairly short amount of time passing.

We start with the main pair, Kazuma and Aqua, still sleeping in a stable and winter is coming on. This is a powerful motivator. And then Kazuma ends up temping with a different party. You know, with regular adventurers who aren’t useless. And Kazuma ends up showing how tactics and smarts can overcome a lack of overall power.

The next story is good, but less overall relevant. The third story deals with getting a real place to stay. This one is decidedly better in the anime, thanks to some superb comedic timing. The fourth story also is a bit better in the anime for much the same reasons. Like with anything in this genre, it has a sexy side, and this one leans on that more than usual for the jokes. That said, this is comedy, not ero, so everything falls apart in the face of mistaken identity and bad timing.

And then the fifth story suddenly turns back to adventuring and another climatic encounter. This doesn’t really flow out of the previous stories, so it feels abrupt, even though things did get name-dropped ahead of time. Kazuma gets to be competent again, echoing the first story, but there’s a big cast of other people being competent as well. It works, but does feel a bit light for what’s going on.

Overall, the second half of the first book is better than this is overall, though it’s a lot of fun. The anime definitely took was was here, didn’t really change anything, and still punched up the humor a bunch. Very impressive.