By KONO Tsuranori and ttl. Released in Japan as “D Genesis: Dungeon ga Dekite 3-nen” by Enterbrain. Released in North America by J-Novel Club. Translated by Ian Sacks.

Because I didn’t get into this series until 9 volumes down the road, and I still have to keep up with everything else coming out, I’ve been reading volumes piecemeal, about 25 pages a day or so. This works well to get me caught up, but can make reviews tricky, as I try to recall what I was reading three weeks earlier. Fortunately, the bulk of the interesting things happening in this book are in the back half, so I should hopefully be OK. It also helps that the biggest nerd series J-Novel Club is putting out still includes things to appeal specifically to me. Miyoshi doing her press conference dressed as Yomiko Readman from Read or Die – no, really, she even namechecks her – just gave me a big smile. She and Keigo may not be able to escape being famous for much longer, but at least their attempts to avoid it are hilarious. They may want to lay off the huge discoveries, though.

Keigo and Miyoshi continue to try to set things up so they can do what they want without several nations attempting to kill them – again. They’re forming a company to be their business front, they’re starting a course in how to increase your stats for dungeon exploration (including a drill sergeant who finds herself in way over her head when she has to increase her agility via rhythm games), and they’re trying to see if they can grow crops in the dungeon (so far, limited success). The press conference itself goes very well, though the religious cult that was mentioned in the 2nd volume seems to recognize D-Powers as a threat to their livelihood. They also make another trip to the “haunted mansion” part of the dungeon, but end up being joined by their actress and model friends, leading to a very dangerous escape – one that gets filmed.

The mansion reveals a big secret, and I suspect that secret will continue to be relevant. We probably could have guessed that this is not a series where “and then suddenly, dungeons appeared one day” would be allowed to stand, and sure enough, the scientists who all “died” that day may have been trying to create something – and may not actually be dead. This leads to the other wonderful nerd reference in here, which is that part of the dungeon language appears to be written in pIqAd, which is to say Klingon. (The fact that they figure this out because Saito happened to be a “minor trekkie” and picked up a big of the language is perhaps one coincidence too many for me, but it’s not as if I expect anything else in this series to be realistic.) This actually makes things MORE difficult – it’s a lot easier to give out “dungeon translation” orbs than to say that the secret dungeon info is written in Star Trek. You’d lose credibility.

Next time I expect we’ll get the “dungeon training courses” going full blast, which will be nice. This remains ridiculous fun.