A small cast and no villain at all

Twenty-nine in his head, fifteen on his status screen

Real name Suzuki. Satou is what he calls his test characters, “because people often call me that by mistake.” He is a game programmer, and the world he lands in runs on the interface of a game he was building.

What he is like: he measures rooms in square feet, pays ten days of rent in advance to derive an exchange rate, counts the population of a labyrinth, and switches his map to 3-D because height variation matters in war games. The dominant trait is not courage or kindness. It is the habit of documentation.

The age gap matters. His status screen says fifteen and his ID papers agree, so he introduces himself as a fifteen-year-old peddler. He is not fifteen. This is load-bearing for the bathing scene at 34 percent and the review deals with it.

His best moment is administrative and sincere at once. Three hundred lizardmen are itemized as loot, so he makes a Graveyard folder in his Storage, files all the corpses in it, pauses, and clasps his hands in prayer. That is the character in one gesture: he cannot stop organizing things, and he is not cold.

What he is not: ambitious, threatened, or in any danger after page twenty. He is powerful enough by 7 percent that the rest of the book has to find him something else to do.

The eldest, and the only one with manners

Waist-length red hair, a tail, and orange scales running from her neck to her shoulders and her elbows to her fingertips. Carries a spear and is attached to it; when the authorities try to confiscate it, Satou negotiates to get it back for her.

She is the one who remembers to thank people. Her formal bow to Zena is the most composed speech any of them makes: “We’re immensely grateful that you protected us from those stones on the surface. Without your sorcery, I doubt these children and I would have survived for long.”

And she is the one the pastry moment lands hardest on. Handed a few honeyed pastries, she gets as far as “Baked pastries made with honey… I…” and stops, unable to finish the sentence. Satou’s private response is the driest line in the book and also the saddest, because he does not yet understand what he is looking at: “That seems like a bit of an overreaction for a handful of pastries.”

Bobbed brown hair, and visibly hungry

The one described as “visibly drooling” at the sight of food she has not been given permission to eat. When told to go ahead, she starts choking on it and has to be handed a water bag and told there is no rush.

Short, white, choppy hair

The smallest presence in the volume. Speaks in single words. “Tamaaa.” Spends most of her page time being carried by Liza “like stuffed animals” with both hands pressed over her mouth because she has been ordered to stay quiet, a pose the narration calls “pretty adorable” and which is, read a second time, not.

Soldier, sorcerer, and the reason the reader learns anything

A military magic user, well known enough that she can walk a civilian up onto the city walls without being stopped. She is the book’s exposition engine and it never feels like it, because Satou asks the questions a curious engineer would ask and she answers them like someone who lives there.

She explains the flour mill that converts into a wyvern gun battery, has a spell called Path Finder that reads information from the flow of air, and gets thanked by three children who then immediately use her as a shield.

Her casual line about the war with the beastfolk ending ten years ago is the closest thing this volume has to a bomb, and neither character defuses it.

The Gatefront Inn

Martha is a young waitress who drags Satou in off the street, is delighted by him, and is visibly startled to learn he is older than she is. Her mother runs the place, is good at arithmetic, and throws in a free side dish for long-stay customers.

They are in the book for one reason and it is a good one: somebody has to charge him rent so the reader can learn what money is worth.

The viscount’s butler

Appears at 91 percent to hand over a guesthouse and a small pouch of what are probably precious stones. Satou, characteristically: “Although if it was candy, that’d be pretty funny.”

There is no antagonist

Not a reduced one, not an offstage one. The lizardmen are deleted in the first twenty pages and are never explained. The wyvern is somebody else’s problem and is handled by professionals. The labyrinth riot happens largely offscreen. Nothing in this volume ever threatens Satou, and after 7 percent nothing could.

Whether that reads as restful or as inert is the whole question about this book, and the review takes a position on it.