天下制覇

I'd dress them all in the devil costume, but it's HP penalty is painful.

Impressions:

A fairly uneventful 33% or so of a chapter here too. I probably should've tried to get a little further through the sidequests stuff, but I got a late start. I can almost certainly tell you what happened with the start of this chapter too, using the power of glancing ahead, which I pretty much always do to make sure I don't accidentally take a break 20 minutes from a better stopping point, I know that the main battle of this chapter is an obnoxiously massive dungeon with not just a mini-boss at the halfway point, but also not one, not two, not three, but goddamned four boss fights. Pretty much all of the effort went into that, or maybe a rare bout of good sense to not stick some dungeon at the start too. There's even only I think one random battle sidequest in the interim. I guess you could probably call this the end of the Evolution arc if this was an anime adaptation, which I guess goes to show how abruptly their Brotherhood of Evil Mutants plan gets dealt with. And I bet you'll never guess their true identities!

Our Story Thus Far:

We pick things back up with an assembly where sketchy student pres is thanking everyone for the last mission. Everyone's bored and squabbling. Tsubomi's trying to stir up crap with Erika by spreading rumors of us and Kanae doing IMPROPER THINGS under the guise of studying, so we end up with the entire harem saying they're going to come over for study time, except for Mashiro, who's asleep. We inform Sidekick we're kicking him out. He says he'll just stay in his girl's room, so she hits him. Ena pops up and invites herself with obvious ulterior motives. We eventually relent. Conversation turns to how peaceful it's been since defeating the phoenix thing. No NPs or Evol acting up. That Evol person we saved and then imprisoned has been recovering at the hospital since the mission and apparently has some kind of information, so we decide to go see her.

Right before sidequest day 1, Sidekick tells us more stuff's around. Not entirely sure what that means. Not much to say about day 1. Some girl wants us to find her a bug, so we buy it off a guy for some Enigmatite. Ena's 'hiding' in the city this time, so she's easy to find. She's holding her breath for some inane reason. We hang out with Erika to bring her halfway to her next level. I would've done Mashiro, but she didn't want to hang out. Afterward, we go to the hospital and run into Not-Chaos and Not-Law. They tell us they've already talked to the Evol people recovering in the hospital. Yeah, I bet you have. She says we can go in anyway, but to keep it a secret.

She wanders off, leaving us to talk with the little angry lesbian, who's CURIOUSLY subdued because we helped that Evol person out of the goodness of our hearts. She says she knew the girl from before. She berates us for being a freshman but acting all high and mighty or something. She's just an angry bitch mostly. She wants to know what we'd do if we discovered a traitor on our team. We can't give her an immediate answer. She says she's selfish and that she'd never trust a traitor ever again, then thanks us for saving the girl before yelling not to misunderstand her and storming away, yelling back to become strong and someone to believe in. This twanging music is starting to hurt my brain. Big Lesbian says that Little Lesbian is a good girl.

Back at our room, the entire harem has found our porn and is reading it. Hikaru is confused by the girl on girl action and demands an explanation. Ena offers to do anything in the book. Eventually things settle down. Instead of studying, Ena insists everyone eats a post dinner meal because she's hungry. She starts stirring up trouble telling them they'll get taller or bigger boobs by eating. This is insipid. Hikaru declares herself satisfactory and rubs her chest on us some more. Finally, we start studying, and by studying, I mean they recite dumb platitudes about leadership while everyone takes notes. We notice Kanae's been running herself thin, so we offer to try out being leader ourself to give her a break. Everyone agrees and she's reluctantly deposed, just as a trial.

We get up in the middle of the night with everyone sleeping in the room and go take a walk. Ena follows us out and invites herself along to our night stroll. We tell her we didn't get to talk to the Evol person. Their condition suddenly took a turn for the worse. How shocking. We have a little flashback to being yelled at to become someone trustworthy when asked why we suddenly wanted to step up to be leader. Ena's still grumpy we don't think we're childhood friends. FINALLY, it's the next day. Kanae's the first up, and has made sure nobody snuck into our bed… so she can do it. Erika tackles her and declares that she'll protect our virtue. Lady, that ship has sailed. They start calling each other names and making fun of each other's drills/height/chest size, etc. Tsubomi tries to sneak into bed in the fracas but gets caught. Hikaru and Mashiro both snuck into bed in the interim.
 

Sidekick accosts us after we wake up and gives us a random as hell info dump about how the island is neutral territory owned by no country. Thanks, Sidekick. Yada yada, GOTTA WORK HARD! Back in our room, we make our plans for the day. Guard duty. We get to do the logistics because we're 'leader.' Yawn. Mashiro pats us. Ena sees us off. Kanae says she should really be on our team since she's always hanging around, but Ena reminds us that she's useless in combat. She eventually declines, saying she's busy with tons of other stuff, mostly student council crap, but thanks Kanae for the invite. Cut to guard duty and not much is going on. Kanae is mothering us the entire time apparently. We're worried about some location so we go off to check things out. Cut to later, apparently some stuff was detected, but always gone before we could get there. We want to check things out deeper, but don't have permission so we fetch the teacher.

She eventually relents and lets us go in to check things out. Battle setup time, except no dungeon. Okay, whatever. Note that Ayumu and Kanae now have new weapons to choose from with marginally better stats. Charlie and his Angels head in to check things out and basically immediately run into Evol. We beat them up easily. Afterwards, Wolfram comes out. He gives the usual ranting about the Kingdom Operation or whatever and destroying the corrupt world order, etc etc.

This was a sad, sad little battle. Wolfram is a very sad man. You can check out Ayumu's new sword though. Also, I had forgotten to fill in the Engage Board for a while, so there's a number of random new things there, the most notable of which is that Ayumu now has his super move. Which I can't use this battle. Oh well.

Wolfram goes down very easily. As he collapses, he wonders if this is the POWER OF THE KEY. An explosion in the distance distracts us, letting him make his escape with the usual "I'll kill you next time" BS. Come night, we get a recap. The upperclassmen found some machine at the explosion site and are trying to figure things out. Tsubomi offers to break some rules and check it out herself, but we don't want to drag the whole team into our worries, so Kanae hits us and calls us an idiot. We get another goddamned speech about team power. Back to sidequest time, but I'm calling it a night because I got started late and there are literally no more plot events for the remaining 10 days of sidequesting.