Nidome no Yuusha is a hard one to review as it hasn’t made much progress yet and is very much being both released and translated slowly. As a result, I’ll re I’ve based on what I’ve read/seen (manga somewhat influencing the artistic perspective of this review) so far.

His story is about the typical ‘hero summoned from earth’ tale. Our main character lives an entire life “fighting the demon lord” both in order to save the humans (what he naturally assumes are compatriots) of this world and to return home after completing his mission.

This hero is told that, the only way to return home is to ‘defeat the demon lord’, so, utilising his overpowered talents, he goes about his quest like it’s a convoluted game with stakes that are somewhat hard to take seriously. After all: if a decapitated limb simply grows back with healing magic, then how can you treat such a world as anything but an MMO/game? Our protagonist tries to take things seriously as he wishes to return home - and is “promised that he can if he defeats the demon lord” - but that’s difficult when he is naturally stronger than everyone else AND can utilise miracles that’d never be possible like they are in this world.

However... One day, he meets said demon lord on his own and comes to like them quite a bit—in fact, you could say that she was his first true love. Once she heard the only prospect of her, also, only love, she sacrifices herself in order for him (and, “supposedly”, the world) to find happiness; except...

... you guessed it: he was being exploited. Everything he did was in order for the people who summoned him to gain much, much more power. The ones who summoned him were the true bad guys, showing us that our perception of ‘demon lords’ and ‘princesses’, etc, were merely all presumptive attributes we assumed “in-kind” with tropes; our hero was absolutely ‘being played’. In fact, the ones who summoned him always put up an act as they only saw him as equivalent to ‘filthy animal excretion’.

Our hero spent many months, even years, running away from said “good guys” as he tried to survive whilst he realised his personally unforgivable mistakes towards those who truly believed in him - such as, believe it or not, the demon lord - compared to how well he treated all the people who exploited, betrayed, and abused him (whom he trusted, ironically).

...Then, the story starts a-new. Our hero knows well who his real enemies are, and he knows who his real friends are - being given a second chance by the gods as they expected that, going by “their statistics”, that most summoned people need a second chance as they are often screwed over by those summoning them. With this second chance... our hero VOWS to make every person/thing that messed with him, regret that they ever even met him. Along his early journey, he meets another young lady who’s also been betrayed by everyone she’s ever known, and so he makes a contract with her to seek vengeance on all those who ever hurt them.

With this new contract, they both share each other’s feelings towards those they seek vengeance towards, and thus begins our story, Nidome no Yuusha, as these two unlikely anti-heroes go about ruining the lives of anyone and everyone who ever crossed their paths!

On a personal note: if you can’t tell, I happen to love this novel. It’s unique, and it’s creative. As you can see, it’s a very different take on the usual “hero” and ‘isekai’ genre, and it does the psychological part really damn well. Both the two main characters are very deep and dynamic, and the storyline progresses in a moderate enough pace to maintain that dynamic flow to the antagonistic narrative - especially without undermining the real antagonists or without skipping out on the important character development.

8/10, albeit a bit slow in translating as of now. Hopefully it speeds up as it becomes more popular - deservingly so.