Ok, just finished up reading until the latest chapter, which I think is 39. I must say, and I apologize to the previous reviewers, but those are two of the most skewed and almost embarrassing reviews I've run across and bring down the quality of the site in my opinion. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but those sorts of negative things are just a shame to see whenever.

Having gotten that out of the way - I will say that I found this to be a very enjoyable... more>> first novel from this author. I did not read the story in the original language, so I cannot comment on that - but I thought the writing was very good, and if the flow was all the work of the translator, then I would say the duo is excellent. There were perhaps 3-4 rushed spots in the plot, mostly at the beginning, but aside from some board of experts grading thesis-level papers, this is absolutely an enjoyable read. Why exactly is everyone so uptight with free work being shared? I'll never understand. As the story unfolded, I definitely got more and more into things and am enjoying the character and world developments very much. The ML and the FL are slowly starting to get in sync and I personally would like to hear more about their adventure. This is pretty early in the story to break things down too much so I'll leave it pretty vague, but I would definitely recommend giving this a try and see what you feel. <<less

Fun story.

No harem at all. I don't see what the other reviewer is complaining about. Sure, there are other female characters in the story, but that doesn't make it a harem. They are side characters at best and there is no romance at all between them and the MC. Hell, the MC was about to emotionlessly mu*der them at first.

Some amount of worldbuulding has happened but not all that much.

Reading the interactions of the witch and the merc is a lot of fun.

Looking forward to more of this.

I went in with severe pessimism since I hate mercenary/bodyguard/butler/assassin/soldier protagonists with passion (narrows it down for me quite a bit hey? :)) but at the beginning I was pleasantly surprised it was a decent read thought out author wasn't just spouting nonsense characters weren't completely one-dimensional the female character wasn't extremely annoying the male character wasn't completely spineless and there were some darker themes as well. Then there was a bit too much focus on racism bad which I find a bit tiring at this point but whatever... the... more>> breaking point was the last chapter I read

Spoiler

where the protagonist completely folded like a bit*h in a situation where he wasn't at fault in the slightest in front of the witch just for "comedic" purpose.

[collapse]

I read way too many japanese novels to bother reading any further. It has harem elements and that doesn't help either.

The translation is good. <<less

(First of all, I’m only rating the original Japanese WN here. I didn’t read the translation; therefore I have no mean to rate it.)

Honestly, this was probably one of the worst written WN I’ve read in a while. The utter lack of punctuation was confusing, to say the least. I frankly doubt the author even knew about the existence of punctuation or its proper usage to begin with in the early chapters.
Further, the structure and pacing is all over the place. The number of time skips in places where the author could have introduced characters, and developed their personalities and relationships in just the first 10 chapters had me staggering.

The “theme” of this story also appears to become redundant all too fast. Starting out as a story where a witch means to escape her life in constant hiding, seeking a place to live in peace and asking our MC, the mercenary, for guidance and support on the journey to reach said place.
At this point I would have thought we’d get a Spice and Wolf style journey centered story. But what it turned out to be was a superficial collection of time skips until they reached supposed safe haven, only for the story to likely (stopped caring at this point) turn into your average “adventurer quest”.

Taking a quick glance at the translation, the translator at least alleviated some of the problems of the raw script (doubling as the author’s editor for anyone only reading the English translation, I dare say).

But as I’d prefer to keep with the original, I can only judge this as a bland, badly written WN, not worth the hassle to spend any more time on.