Somehow, someway, Roland became the world’s greatest assassin despite having the skill Unobtrusive. This skill Roland himself calls a loser skill matched his assassination abilities, making him hard to pick up and even sense once activated. In any case, he’s been involved in many jobs before, but accompanying the Hero’s Party to defeat the demon lord turned out to be his last job. Not because he didn’t succeed mind you — in fact, he ends up killing the demon lord himself — but he no longer wants to live the assassin life anymore. He simply wants a normal life.
So thanks to the King who contracted him to join the Hero’s Party, this wish is granted. He’s able to get enough coin to not fret about funds for a good while, find a quiet area known as Lahti, and then score a sweet job at the local guild. With no responsibilities as an assassin left, he can now start living the sort of mundane life he’s always wanted.
As you can probably guess, he doesn’t live the normal life. For starters, a lot of humans have their own definition of normal, and as life can be unpredictable, who knows what unexpected occurrence can happen that’s simply not normal. But now onto Roland himself — he doesn’t have a clue what normal is. So that means we’ll be watching as his attempts at normalcy with the people jive with his finely-trained assassination abilities. Also, remember the demon lord he killed? Not only is she alive, after faking her death to fool her demon army, she now accompanies and is smitten with Roland. She also can change into a cat.
Yeah, normal life. Good luck Roland.
So we can get this out of the way: the Hazure in Hazure Skill: The Guild Member with a Worthless Skill Is Actually a Legendary Assassin has a few meanings. The one you can closely associate with this one is failure, which Roland emphasizes early on that this is in general a bad skill to have. All it does is temporary make a person realize you’re not there. For anyone else it would’ve been worthless, but for Roland, it lines up with his honed assassination techniques. But he no longer wants to be an assassin, so now it’s like, what’s next?
Well, why not work at the Adventurers’ Guild?
Throughout this first volume we see him shift from his first day on the job to handling giving quests to adventurers. The amusement (or hook) is him being unable to distinguish what’s standard against what’s abnormal. For example, a normal interview would require you to show off your talents, but when the branch manager at the guild, Iris, says they’ll hire anyone with some type of talent, I don’t think him tossing a pebble at the window to distract her, activating his skill and stealing her underwear (the one she’s actually wearing) in her presence, and then later being able to put it back when she’s right there and flustered is indeed normal!
It’s even stuff like what happens when someone screws up at the job. For an assassin, you mess up, it’s all over. When someone makes a mistake at the guild, no Roland, no one actually dies! So the juxtaposition between someone who’s led a dangerous life against him trying to be normal is where this series is at. And for the most part, it succeeds.
This is probably because the scale at this point is too large. Roland’s able to assess who’s actually talented as an adventurer versus what the guild has deemed to be their rank. He’s currently incapable of understanding that defeating a gray bear and a salamandra are high level quests. So it’s essentially his efficiency is at too high a level, which naturally impresses the staff at the guild and the adventurers he meets.
Aside from him though, the characters are pretty typical. Iris, who eventually learns who Roland actually is, is the harsh but mature woman that eventually gets mad when Roland turns down her invitations; Milia is the senior staffer at the guild but is young and after him showing his talents on his first day falls for Roland; and Maurey…poor Maurey. Seemingly inefficient at his job, not only does he get exposed for not catching a poorly done quest by a group of adventurers, he then ends up having to watch the following happen after he thought he set up an ambush and sent the rookie to pound town:
- One dude likely breaking his hand after punching Roland
- Then that guy and another guy get knocked out
- Then the only woman in the group, the one Maurey thought he might’ve had a thing with, end up having the best sexual experience with Roland ever and now intends to keep quiet about the ambush
So on a very related note, the usage of pound town turned out to have two different meanings in this scene. I wonder if the translator and editor had a laugh about this one…
Anyways, this is more or less fantasy slice-of-life, where we follow Roland as he works from being a hero to being mundane. But, as he finds himself caring for Rila and with his general skills, he definitely will struggle for normalcy. After all, not only does he know the people in the Hero’s Party, but it soon turns out Rila has people on the demons’ side that cared for her too. So whether he wants to or not, it’s highly likely he’ll be dealing with abnormal things.
It’s just that on the side he’ll continue to take care of just about any women he meets, make sure a few adventurers actually put their seemingly lame skills to good use, and free a slave, train her, and then end up discovering she was actually royalty. So Hazure Skill will ultimately come down to how good the actual tales are, and for a first volume, they’re pretty good. Aside from the color page and one drawing later of Iris the illustrations aren’t that memorable, but if you’re in need of a fantasy light novel with a callous yet somewhat likable dude, this is worth a try.