KonoSuba Volume 6 Review

SPOILERS FOLLOW!

In this volume, the Princess of the country, Iris, calls for a meeting with Kazuma and his party for him to divulge the stories of his adventures to her. She then promptly decides to whisk him away to the royal castle to play with him. What proceeds is a light emotional rollercoaster dealing with Kazuma's internal conflict about his worth to his team and his appreciation towards his supposedly insufferable party.

Megumin is waifu but damn, I can't help but think that Aqua is indeed the prettiest of the three. She very much displays an air of a Goddess. Too bad her personality is so toxic! 

Iris serves as the much awaited imouto-chan to Kazuma, fulfilling the needed archetype for the inevitable harem. She's been sheltered her whole life due to her royalty and craves a friend more than anything else. The initial meeting with her highness showed more of her cold, controlled side, the side that's been bred and brought up as royalty. This shows mostly because of her two bodyguards, Claire and Rain, who suspect that Kazuma is not the man they think he is.

As the initial meeting continues, it is evident to them that Kazuma himself did not participate directly in the amazing battles rather, it is his team that is famous. Claire and Iris starts calling Kazuma out and his ego gets stomped on endlessly, which brings forth the loyalty of his party. Megumin and Darkness defend Kazuma to the point of near-treason (Aqua is about dead drunk by now).

Somehow, this whole episode gets written away when Iris brings Kazuma to the royal castle via Rain's teleportation spell. This is unfortunate because this scene adds to the relationship between Kazuma and his party.

Kazuma spends a good portion of the volume playing with Iris, building his sister-brother relationship with her, all the while thinking of how retirement would suit him better than adventuring because he doesn't have to spend his days wondering how not to die. This later leads into a battle in which Kazuma and his party participates in that leads to yet another death-resurrection scenario. This situation forces Kazuma to realise his skill and strength difference with that of his party which leads into some indulgent self-pity.

The plot of the story then starts to shift towards what they call the divine relics. Divine relics are the items granted to all the Japanese 'foreigners' that have chosen to be reborn into that world. Basically, they're the cheat items of the world and are so overpowered that upon the death of their original owners, should be retrieved to prevent them from being used for evil. The Goddess Eris asks Kazuma for his help with this, to which he obviously rejects until he finds out Chris herself is out on a mission to retrieve them (as according to her, she realises the danger they invite if left unchecked).

Lord Alderp plays a small part in this volume (though by the end we realise he's making use of a demon to conjure up problematic situations to further benefit his mission: to marry Darkness). Other than that, we'll only see him in the next volume. So I'll ignore him for now.

Kazuma discovers that Iris possesses a powerful divine relic (which she thinks is just a simple necklace) and after getting ignored and insulted for the entirety of the dinner party thrown for the heroes, he leaves, dejected and humiliated. Thoughts go through his mind where he thinks it'll be better for his party to join Mitsurugi (yes, he was one of the heroes present during the battle) and it progresses so far that he thinks they would actually team up with Mitsurugi but that's alright, because he can just retire a millionaire. As I said, indulgent self-pity.

Chris asks for his help in retrieving Iris' necklace after hours within the royal castle and Kazuma accepts out of a sense of loneliness and worthlessness. They break in, with Chris donning a simple thief bandana around her nose and mouth, and Kazuma wearing one of Vanir's mask. They get discovered by the guards not longer after and while Chris suggests they run away, Kazuma gains an epiphany that he should act for what he believes in. Not wanting to let Iris be a casualty due to the divine relic, Kazuma convinces Chris to continue their theft and his badassery begins.

He takes out and evade all the guards until he reaches the hallway before Iris' room. There, Claire, Rain and Mitsurugi take him on, in which he singlehandedly beats the trio before continuing. Read that again. He beats them, alone, by himself. It's not even through any underhanded means as he can't talk while under the mask so as to completely hide his identity. He beats them through the combination of great combat skills and the art of surprise. And I say that in the sense that Rain and Claire were so shocked at his skills that any action Kazuma performs invites fear into them.

Kazuma then faces his own party within Iris' room but Darkness immediately recognises him and Chris, to which she understands that they mean Iris no harm and only feigns an attack on them. Megumin gets starstruck by Kazuma's apparent coolness (not knowing it's him) and defects to their cause (and by defect, I mean she just stands there doing nothing). Only Aqua actually does something (again, doesn't know it's Kazuma) but Kazuma and Chris manage to cast their Steal spells and escape before anything could happen to them.

The resolution to this commotion comes pretty quickly, with Kazuma no longer having self-pity about himself and Darkness lecturing the two of them. Chris runs off into the wind, claiming that if she needs his help again, she'll call on him as the two of them make for a very infamous team. And they do, as a bounty is set-up to capture the two of them.

The ending features Claire seemingly turned on by the thief Kazuma, Megumin star struck by the thief Kazuma and that Iris actually knew that the thief was Kazuma. Also, it revealed that while Chris stole the divine relic, Kazuma's Steal spell actually stole a ring from Iris, and according to her royal culture, those who possess that ring are to be wed to royalty, She, thankfully enough, decides to keep this information a secret from the group and thus ends Volume 6!

Kazuma's alterego is now known as the Masked Chivalrous Thief and he is a wanted man. Thankfully though, much like comic books, people seem quite incompetent in discovering the truth. Also, one incredible thing to note is that at one point, Kazuma and Chris played Rock, Paper, Scissors and to his surprise, he lost. Yes, Kazuma, who's defining stat is his luck lost to Chris. Whether or not the Goddess of Luck, Eris, had anything to do with that will remain a mystery until Volume 8! Or the ending of 7, if you want to count that.