Literature / The Queen of Darkness Does Not Want to Be the Villain

Luna was a just regular girl, working as a librarian at the capital of the kingdom, until one day, a prophecy called her the 'queen of darkness' and said that she was going to take over the world with power and fear.Even though she's a gentle girl who always has the best of intentions, everyone is deathly afraid of her, and fate seems to be determined to place her in the role of the villain.Will she be able to clear this misunderstanding? Or will the world fall into her reign of unintentional terror?

It can be read here.

Associated Tropes:

• Achievement System: Part of the RPG Mechanicsverse. Certain personality traits and accomplishments can cause your Mana to be imprinted with a "title". Many titles are just for show, but some also offer new abilities and increased power.
• A God I Am Not: The Elemental Gods were Physical Gods, and had titles like God of Fire from the Achievement System in ancient times, but they don't fit the modern definition of a god, which resulted in the System changing their titles into stuff like the King of Fire. Vilde, the one who was once known as the God of Fire was influenced into believing himself a god by the praise of his followers, but now, he is embarrassed that he ever did and refers to himself as a "god", only in the sense of an old Embarrassing Nickname.
• All the Other Reindeer: A lot of darkness spells are useful enough to prevent darkness element from being banned completely, but between simple fear of the dark, and the fact that the darkness element revolves around chaos, people tend to shun it. Also not helping matters is the fact that myth claims that the Elemental Gods forbade their followers from using Darkness magic, which is technically true, though most people have forgotten that it was due to a truce rather than due to the gods actually disliking it. Overall, most people agree that it is only good for destroying things.
  • The southern elves are particularly bad about this, exiling elves with darkness affinity to human settlements as babies. With the nature of the story being as it is, rumors inevitably spread of Luna supposedly destroying elven villages and enslaving the survivors in revenge.
• Ambiguously Gay:
  • Princess Nera is weirdly reluctant to bathe with other girls when neither Luna nor Aranna had any problem with it, and she is heavily implied to have a crush on Luna. Rumors abound that she is already in a relationship with her.
  • Aranna seems to enjoy dressing up Luna an awful lot.
• Ancient Artifact: The witches guard many powerful relics they consider too dangerous for the world at large. The most powerful and important of them are the World Artifacts, which were created by a magic ritual involving most of the world.
  • The Artifact of Darkness is the oldest, and was created as a superweapon to Kill the Gods. It is a Living Weapon and an Evolving Weapon that develops new powers every time it's current master is defeated.
  • The Artifact of Light is also a superweapon, a magic sword intended to be wielded by heroes, such as the Silver Knight.
  • The Artifact of Water allows the user to hear the voice of the world and the prophecies of which it speaks.
  • The Artifact of Wind allows its user to disguise themselves almost perfectly. Its only known weakness is Stat-O-Vision.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Two thousand years ago, after the Demon King was defeated, 6 heroic women, each a master of a different element, banded together to repair the damage he had done. Seeing that they worked well together, they formed a benevolent conspiracy intended to protect the world from behind the scenes. Thanks to the Void Titans' interference corrupting them, they have in recent times lost their way and become one of the threats the world is up against.
• Animate Dead: Corpse puppet is a spell for animating dead bodies. Word of God says that it isn't "real" necromancy, and more similar to golems, but enough people mistake it for necromancy (or at least, consider it disrespectful enough to the dead) to make it illegal in most countries.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: If the concentration of Mana in a region is high enough to result in the Superpower Lottery, and the Manaborn tribes don't have the natural races among them to even themselves out, the power discrepancy tends to result in warlords calling themselves demon lords taking charge. Might Makes Right is pretty much the biggest law in such regions.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Agua Kingdom in a nutshell. Their Golems are made out of sea salt and dead fish. The royal assassins specialize in needlessly flashy moves, which, as said by Luna, makes them more suited to the circus than actual fighting. Worst of all, all of the national Magitek of the capital is wired up to a single control device, meaning that if a single enemy mage managed to break into it, they could effectively paralyze or even destroy the city.
• Balance of Power: The country of Mekria has developed their Magitek dangerously far ahead of the other nations of the world, becoming even stronger than the dragon nation, disrupting the balance of power. Their High Technomancer brags that even a level 500 Physical God like Luna would face a Curbstomp Battle at the hands of their tech. A formerly benevolent Ancient Conspiracy was going to pull some strings to ensure that they wouldn't abuse the imbalance to go on a war of conquest, but after their leader was convinced that it was her destiny to rule the world, she seized control of Mekria in order to Takeover The World herself.
• Big Bad Wannabe:
  • The Demon Lord Kalroth thinks he's destined to become the next Demon King and forge a mighty empire through conquest. He ends up pushing Luna too far, resulting in his death and Luna claiming his life's work conquering a territory.
  • The Witch of Darkness, Felias, believes that she is the Queen of Darkness of the prophecy, and that she is meant to rule the world. She interprets Luna as a fake being sponsored by Aranna, Witch of Light, to try and trick the prophecy into letting Luna steal her place. Aranna however believes that the prophecy was always referring to Luna.
• Biomanipulation: Fleshshaping is a branch of darkness magic that allows one to manipulate the body. Since dark mages have historically abused it to do things like bind people with their own skin or even turn them into abominations, this branch of magic is illegal. However, Luna has discovered that certain applications of it can be used for healing.
• Boob-Based Gag: Luna's very large chest size is remarked on more than once. Nera and Xania speculate that the reason Luna hasn't gotten fat from eating too much heavy food is due to it going to her breasts.
• Boomerang Bigot: Luna hates her own species, thinks of the elves as idiots, and takes being told she is not much like an elf as one of the greatest complements. This is largely because the Southern Elves are primitives who shun elves born with darkness affinity.
• Born-Again Immortality: Everyone reincarnates, but the witches use a highly controlled method, becoming born to a previously chosen human woman with a similar body to their previous, also inheriting some of their previous incarnation's power and fragments of memory.
• Born as an Adult: Most Born of Magic races are born as children and adopted by older members of their kind, but some races are born as full fledged adults.
• Born of Magic:
  • When enough ambient Mana is concentrated down to a point, it forms into monsters. The more Mana the monster was created from, the higher it's starting Character Level will be. Sapient monsters are called demons or Manaborn.
  • Elemental spirits are similar, but are Pure Magic Beings intended to fulfill specific purposes on behalf of their element.
• Brainy Baby: Luna was changing her own diapers and casting her first spells when she was one year old. Liliam, the orphanage director, kept trying to rationalize the weirdness by telling herself that elves with darkness affinity grow up fast.
• Bullying a Dragon: Prince Sette of the Remno Kingdom insults Luna repeatedly, despite her reputation. It should be noted that he's doing this on purpose because he's suicidal enough for him to want her to kill him.
• Butt-Monkey: Erwin is strong, even for a dragon, but he keeps ending up against opponents that are even stronger, or have some talent that allows them to bypass his raw power, resulting in frequent beatings.
• Came Back Wrong: Previous Reincarnations of Cureva, Witch of Wind, were among the world's greatest heroes. The current one is a Straw Nihilist Manipulative Bastard who wants the world to descend into ruin. It is implied that the Void Titans managed to infect her current incarnation with void Mana when young in order to use her to corrupt the witches' formerly benevolent Ancient Conspiracy.
• Cap: Elemental ranks define how much control you have over a given element. Rank 10 is thought to be the natural limit, with only the Elemental Gods, who were born with their power, having anything higher at a rank of 20. However, Luna proves this wrong, having managed to earn rank 20 by her own efforts without even noticing, which is also how she won the Queen of Darkness title via the Achievement System. Felias was able to force her way to rank 14 before she had to resort to cheating by stealing the power that would have belonged to the God of Darkness.
• Casting a Shadow: The darkness element is associated with chaos and ambition. It is very possibly the strongest element, at the expense of being the most difficult to control.
• Character Level: A measurement of how concentrated your Mana is and how much it's reinforcing your body. Earning levels gets harder as you progress, but the difficulty is divided on a per category basis. For example, becoming high level just by learning spells won't make it harder to gain levels by direct combat training. With rare exceptions, Min-Maxing isn't a thing in this setting, so the only thing preventing you from becoming a Master of All is talent and time. A typical humanoid civilian has a level in the 20s, the average soldier is around 50, elite soldiers are around 100, famous heroes are around 200, people that reach 300 are written in the history books, and the highest ever recorded was 430. Luna is in the 500s, as were the Elemental Gods. A person's power raises cubically per level. For example, a level 500 mage will have 5 times as much Mana, can cast spells for a 1/5th the cost, and will release spells 5 times as powerful as a level 100 mage, making them 125 times as powerful overall.
• Cheap Gold Coins: Justified Trope. Gold and silver used to be worth plenty, up until some alchemist and his royal sponsor found the secret of turning other materials into them. They thought it would result in unlimited money. Instead, the two metals became worthless, especially when other alchemists figured out the technique. Nowadays, gold coins are part of a fiat currency that get their value by imbuing them with the mana signatures of the world's current rulers.
• Child Prodigy: As a young orphan child, Luna was able to figure out how to make rat corpses dance, just from a brief description of the spell in a storybook, when she was only eight years old. Most children that age are only just starting to learn how to control their mana flow.
• The Chosen One:
  • To the world at large, it's the Silver Knight who's destined to oppose the Queen of Darkness.
  • Technically, Luna herself counts as well, but has been chosen by the prophecy for a different purpose as the Starter Villain of the world to force the creation of new heroes. As the first person to reach the power of the Elemental Gods by earning it, and as the first being equivalent to the God of Darkness that never existed, most of the void demons see her as their biggest threat, while one wants to corrupt and claim her as its champion.
• Combat Clairvoyance:
  • When a warrior builds up enough experience, they develop "battle instincts" that help them reflexively pick the correct reaction to an enemy's attack.
  • Luna's Battle Analyst skill allows her to calculate the possible future moves of an opponent and pick the optimal path of attack.
  • Vilde's Battle Master skill allows him to always know the optimal action in combat, and can read an opponent's moves to the point of limited mind reading.
• Combination Attack: A group of mages can cast a combined spell, exceeding the normal limits of magic. For example, in the Demon Wastes, the gray demons once tried to use such a spell as an attack during a battle, and accidentally created a rank 12 curse when none of the individual casters exceeded rank 10.
• Comically Missing the Point: Luna has No Social Skills and very little common sense, resulting in frequent misunderstandings.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Some types of monsters are called "Boss" monsters, giving them high resistance to status effects, like paralysis.
• The Corrupter: In all of her lives, Cureva has had a strong understanding of the human mind. Previous incarnations excelled at bringing out the best in everyone. Her current incarnation however, is a mad and nihilistic sociopath, and now she uses her talents to exploit everyone's weaknesses to bring out the worst in them.
• Creepy Child: Even when Luna was a child, everyone found her creepy, with her fellow orphans running and hiding from her on sight. Luna didn't mean any harm, she just thought that dancing rats were cool and didn't understand why everyone was so creeped out by her animating dead rats. When she was threatened by a group of murderous thugs, she tried to make them leave her alone by convincing them that she was just a regular girl playing with her friends, a collection of dolls... Except that her "dolls" were just more animated dead rats. When she invited them to become her friends too, they interpreted that to mean she would turn them into zombies and ran in terror.
• Curse: A form of dark magic that can be used to weaken people or inflict them with specific forms of bad luck, like frequent toe stubbing. The traditional way to remove a curse is to seek out a light mage as powerful as the dark mage that cursed you. It can also be removed by the original caster or a person with double the dark magic ranks. Luna has access to a dark magic spell she calls curse reversal.
• Damsel in Distress: This trope is part of very deliberate propaganda intended to make people feel a duty to protect the various royal families. Princess Nera even took part in various staged incidents to promote it. Continuously ending up as one for real makes Nera wonder if she is suffering from Laser-Guided Karma.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Darkness is the element of chaos, meaning that using it carelessly and without understanding will lead to ruin and destruction, but the darkness element is not intrinsically evil.
• Death of the Old Gods: The Elemental Gods really did exist. They were created as a natural defense mechanism by the Mana of the world to protect itself from being devoured by void demons. There was one for every element except darkness. Unable to defeat the demons due to missing an element, the Five Gods accepted a truce with the void demons and signed a Magically-Binding Contract that would keep them out of the world until the Five Gods died. Without the void demons to keep the gods in check, the gods were influenced into hubris by the praise of their followers and fell into evil. Most of their followers then turned on them. Desperate to rid themselves of Jerkass Gods, the people enacted a worldwide ritual to create a superweapon capable of killing them, the World Artifact of Darkness. The Artifact of Darkness was an Evolving Weapon. The gods defeated its user countless times, but it would always escape to someone else's hands with a new power. In the end, four of the gods were slain, and the last survivor, Vilde, God of Fire, was imprisoned beneath the earth to maintain the treaty. According to the prophecy of the Queen of Darkness, he will soon die too, allowing the void demons to return to a now weakened world.
• Defector from Decadence: Aranna, Witch of Light, was originally a member of an Ancient Conspiracy that protected the world from the shadows. To avoid abusing their powerful positions, they had rules against things like seizing direct control over a country. When Cureva convinced her fellow witches to start breaking the rules, Aranna, being aligned with order as a Light user, protested, but largely played along. When she figured out that Cureva was the real mastermind behind her mother's murder on the other hand, she fled the conspiracy and went into hiding. Concluding that Felias wasn't the real Queen of Darkness, the only plan she could come up with to stop her was to align herself with the real one and beg for her help.
• Demoted to Extra: The way Aranna feels when more characters arrive to fill the roles she used to fill, with Nera providing common sense, Xania providing necessary cruelty, and Vilde providing Luna with a mentor figure.
• Ditzy Genius: Word of God has described Luna as being of high intelligence and low wisdom. She appears to have some form of high-functioning autism. Luna is constantly memorizing the smallest details of what she looks at, leading some people to think she's crazy. She has a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, fussing over minor imperfections, which give her headaches. She's an unsurpassed genius, but has No Social Skills and a complete lack of common sense.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: A seemingly minor background character, Paula, one of the Silver Knight's True Companions, is revealed to be a false identity of Cureva, one of the Void Titans' most dangerous agents and the one responsible for misguiding the witches into evil.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Cureva is supposedly Felias's dragon, responsible for coming up with her plan to Takeover The World. She is actually the Void Titans' dragon, her ultimate goal to drive the entire world, Felias included, into despair.
• Elemental Embodiment: Elemental spirits are Pure Magic Beings meant to perform some purpose on behalf of their element. For example, rain spirits encourage everyone to become aware that it's raining. They are lead by Great Spirits, who can imitate the sapience of living things. However, all spirits are instinctive beings with Creative Sterility.
• Elemental Hair Colors: Automatic with some races, very common with all. Elves and fairies are automatic, always having specific hair colors for their element. With humans, it isn't automatic, but still very common to have hair colors matching their element.
• Elemental Powers: Mana can have one of six known primary elements, namely Light, Darkness, Fire, Earth, Wind, and Water (though it is later revealed that it is possible for Mana to lack an element, resulting in what is known as the Void element). The "elements" define the theme and personality of a given sample of Mana. While every element can theoretically do a lot of what the other elements can do in the hands of a sufficiently talented mage, each element has its own strengths and weaknesses.
• Element No. 5: Luna disagrees, but a lot of people think that the Light and Dark elements are special in some way.
• Emotion Suppression: One of the powers of the Power of the Void. Just being in its presence is enough to make a person of low Character Level become like a doll.
• Engineered Heroics: Something Cureva often does. She arranged for several men to murder Aranna's mother and then rescued her from them in order to use her. She is currently doing the same on behalf of Sylvia in order to turn her into a Fake Ultimate Hero, though Sylvia's noticed that something seems off.
• Evil Counterpart: Word of God has described Felias as basically being Luna without humility.
• Evil Redeemed in a Can: Pretty much what happened to Vilde, God of Fire. He and his siblings, the Elemental Gods, were originally heroes who protected the world from void demons, but when they signed a truce, they lost their purpose. Mislead by idiots who blindly told them they were perfect and others trying to use them, they let their arrogance get the better of them and fell into evil. The entire world united against them and forged a superweapon powerful enough to kill the so-called gods. Out of the five, only Vilde was allowed to surrender, and in his prison, he has had thousands of years to reflect on what happened. When Luna finds him, he becomes a mentor figure for the nearest equivalent to the God of Darkness they never had.
• Fake Ultimate Hero: One of Cureva's goals is to turn Sylvia, The Chosen One and Silver Knight into one. She plans to use Sylvia as an Unwitting Pawn, manipulated into thinking that she's doing good, while actually causing the innocent to suffer.
• Familiar:
  • Aranna specializes in Summon Magic involving spiders, and keeps a spider named Longlegs by her side. He wears a hat matching Aranna's and excels in commanding other spiders, tracking people, and finding things. He is also very good at chess.
  • Ranna specializes in Summon Magic involving frogs and keeps one frog by her side. Said frog wears a miniature copy of Ranna's hat.
  • Cureva's familiar has yet to be seen, but she is known to have the power to control birds.
• Fantastic Drug: There is a mysterious type of flower called a Ghost Rose. Being pricked by it's thorns will weaken the emotions of it's user and has been used to "treat" social anxiety. The flower is quite addictive, leading to most countries banning it. The flowers somehow produce void Mana, something previously believed to be impossible since void Mana is normally intrinsically toxic to any living being infused with it.
• Final Solution:
  • Due to dragons being the strongest natural race, the Demon King attempted to hunt them to extinction. Their arrogance nearly allowed him to succeed. Modern dragons now put a cultural emphasis on not letting pride cause them to make unwise decisions.
  • The Mekrians enacted one upon the Northern Elves in vengeance for all the massacres the Northern Elves previously carried out in the name of Gaia's Vengeance. Only a handful escaped. Fortunately for elves worldwide, the descendants of Mekria have calmed down and now interpret the elves as enslaved victims of nature themselves.
• Foil:
  • Cureva and Luna are opposites in most ways. Luna has No Social Skills while Cureva is a Manipulative Bitch. Luna has a very strong sense of sympathy, while Cureva is The Sociopath. Luna produces an aura of otherworldly terror, making people feel as if they are in the presence of a Humanoid Abomination, Cureva produces an aura of otherworldly kindness, making people feel as if they are in the presence of a benevolent goddess.
  • Luna and Karin are both similar and different. Both of them are fools, but Luna can sort of compensate with her extremely high intelligence, making her a Ditzy Genius, while Karin is just The Ditz.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Luna has gone from an orphan abandoned by her people, to a librarian, to the most terrifying Hero with Bad Publicity of all time, considered a greater threat than even the Hell Dragon and Demon King before her.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Part of Mekria's backstory, and noted to have backfired. Mekria is a harsh territory that bordered the largest Enchanted Forest in the world. The forest helped them somewhat, but whenever they took too much, the Northern Elves would massacre them using elemental spirits without so much as a warning. The Mekrians obsessively developed their Magitek and used it to take revenge, enacting a Final Solution on the Northern Elves and burning their forest to the ground. Their grudge against the elves has faded, but they still hate the forests. It is implied that some of them are fanatics who plan to take advantage of Felias's plans to Takeover The World in order to destroy nature while they're at it.
• Genre Savvy: Ranna interprets the world as a story and uses that to predict what is going to happen next.
• Glamour: Cureva's aura is exactly the opposite of Luna's, projecting a seemingly divine, otherworldly sensation of kindness, making it a lot easier for her to manipulate people.
• God Guise: Cureva occasionally takes advantage of her Master of Illusion and Glamour powers to pretend to be the Goddess of Wind. The real Goddess of Wind died long ago, and not very many people remember that, so she isn't around to complain. Furthermore, Cureva can imitate the Goddess of Wind's ability to take control of all wind magic using her own power over both the wind and void elements to cheat any attempted God Test.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: Nera's mother, the Queen of the Agua Kingdom, is more than a little crazy. She was seen as an Inadequate Inheritor due to failing to inherit the royal family's talent for communicating with elemental spirits, resulting in a complex. She resents the kingdom's Manaborn for worshipping the spirits and scorning her over her lack of talent. She believes that her daughter has been conspiring against her since birth, and has been making attempts at Offing the Offspring.
• God Test: A mage with double the elemental rank of another mage of the same element can override and take control of their spells. The normal limit to elemental ranks is 10, but the Elemental Gods are said to have had a rank of 20, meaning they can take control of all conventional magic of their element.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Prayer isn't known to create gods per say, but Mana is empowered by thoughts and emotions. Certain actions by a person's surroundings can imprint a title on their Mana, empowering them. For example, acquiring the obedience of a thousand Manaborn by terrorizing them can earn you the power of the Demon Lord title. The Element Gods were gradually becoming stronger due to the combined support of their followers. This is also one of Vilde's theories as to why there was never a God of Darkness. Because the people of the world feared the dark and didn't properly develop it, the darkness Mana of the world wasn't strong enough to hatch the Seed of Darkness intended to create one.
• Guns Are Worthless: This world is currently at early industrial revolution levels. Muskets work well enough to equip common soldiers with them, but high level warriors can literally Dodge the Bullet or even just let them bounce off their skin.
• Have You Seen My God?: The world's dominant religion is the church of the Five Elemental Gods. The Five Gods, if they ever existed, haven't been seen in thousands of years. Since there is no God of Darkness, Luna interprets this to mean that they are probably fictitious, everyone not wanting to worship the element of the bad guys. The reason for no God of Darkness can only be speculated on, but the Elemental Gods really did exist. They were Manaborn and Physical Gods created as a one time defense mechanism against void Mana, a parasitic element that seeks to destroy all living things. When the elemental void spirits signed a truce, the gods lost their purpose, and deluded by the praise of their followers, they fell into evil. The entire world turned on and destroyed four of the five, the last being imprisoned deep beneath the earth. Legend Fades to Myth, and now almost no one remembers what really happened to them or what they were like, simply imagining that they have been looking over the world from afar.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Healing magic is easiest for the light element, since it by nature restores order. Even just channeling light Mana without a spell is enough to treat minor injuries. The darkness element on the other hand is widely thought to lack healing abilities at all. Most dark mages used fleshshaping to hurt people, and even the few that tried to use it for healing failed, with mages agreeing that Black Magic is only good for destruction. Luna's experimentation figures out that it can heal, and that it can even be a lot more powerful than the light magic equivalent. However, it isn't as "automated" as light magic, requiring an actual understanding of the body in order to heal correctly as opposed to causing more harm.
• The Heartless: Void demons are the elemental spirits of Void, and like all elemental spirits, they have limited minds, largely operating on instinct. Since they need leadership to destroy worlds with life, they create great spirits on par with a world's elemental gods, giving them minds that are a reflection of the weaknesses in the hearts of the targeted world.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: The premise. Not only does Luna's mana have a Supernatural Fear Inducer that she cannot turn off, but the Powers That Be are manipulating events to portray her as a villain for their own purposes. It is implied that the Sentient Cosmic Force that is Mana intends to use Luna as a Starter Villain, to force the world to become strong enough to defeat the Void Titans, the leaders of all void demons in this world. The Void Titans also want Luna to be seen as a villain, to either push her into becoming evil for real, or failing that, unite the world against who they see as the biggest threat to themselves personally.
• Hidden Buxom: Luna prefers clothes that hide her bust size. When an incident burns her clothes off, Xania notes that they are bigger than she thought.
• Horrifying the Horror: The overwhelming Killing Intent produced by Luna's aura is strong enough to make the mightiest demon lords hallucinate and pass out.
• Humanoid Abomination: Anyone that gets exposed to too much of Luna's Supernatural Fear Inducer starts to hallucinate her as a Living Shadow with violet orbs for eyes. Witnesses in this state consistently describe her as something that "does not belong in this world". Even Luna feels that way when exposed to the effect with a Magic Mirror.
• Hyper-Awareness: Luna has some form of high functioning autism that causes her to constantly memorize every detail of her environment. She can tell when anything is even a millimeter out of place, and it drives her nuts.
• Inadequate Inheritor: The second prince of the Remno Kingdom has none of the talents needed to become a king, and is seen only as a useless backup to his elder brother, the crown prince. He's pretty much in a Morton's Fork, since his Abusive Parents are currently attempting to kill him indirectly with Uriah Gambits, but would directly kill him for Rejecting the Inheritance and pursuing his actual talents as a bard since they consider him an embarrassment.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: Aranna wants Revenge against Cureva for murdering her current incarnation's mother.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One:
  • Sylvia, the Silver Knight, feels pressure to save the world when she feels completely inadequate for the job.
  • Luna has basically been chosen as the villain of the world to force the Silver Knight and the rest of the world to become strong enough to fight an ancient evil before it returns. Since Luna is kindhearted and lonely, even finding ways to take advantage of this forced role is at best a mixed blessing.
• Killing Intent: The intimidate skill allows people to use their killing intent to make others fear them.
  • Luna's Killing Intent is so powerful that it can make people pass out or hallucinate. Notably, for some mysterious reason, she passively produces Killing Intent even when she has no desire to hurt people at all, despite that being the requirement to use it.
• Lame Pun Reaction: There is a type of monster that looks like a skeleton on fire called a "bone fire". Luna's reaction is "Who names these things?".
• Legend Fades to Myth: Very few people remember what the Elemental Gods were really like. Assuming they ever existed, they last interacted with the world more than two thousand years ago. The gods are assumed to watch over the world from some distant place. They were Physical Gods rather than "real" gods and wouldn't be considered gods anymore if anyone remembered what they were really like. The Five were created by the seeds all the Mana in the world came from as a one time defense against the parasites known as void demons. They have plenty of worshippers in the modern era, only a few people remember that at one time, they were so hated that the entire world worked together to kill four of the five and imprison the last survivor. Artistic depictions of them are inaccurate, and in the case of Vilde, no one, not even the witches, remembers his true name.
• Level Drain: One of the powers of the Void element is to reduce Character Level. The effect is temporary, but could be dangerous if the spell was cast on a mass scale.
• Like a God to Me: Even if Luna is "merely" a mage that just happened to get very very good at it, as far as Xania is concerned, she may as well be a god, having performed feats beyond her understanding in mere minutes.
• Light 'em Up: The light element is associated with order. It can do things like mending damage to living things or objects and increase the probability of success for a given action.
• Louis Cypher: Played for Laughs with Vilde, who's name is basically "Devil" with the syllables switched and has a lot of Fire and Brimstone Hell related character traits, but is not actually a God of Evil of any sort.
• Magitek: The world at large has reached early industrial levels. The nation of Mekria has reached late stage and effectively specializes in the subject, using things like magic powered robots and engines.
• Mana Burn:
  • A darkness spell called Mana Corrosion can be used to get rid of Mana.
  • Vilde's fire magic can very literally set an enemy mage's Mana on fire.
• Master of Illusion:
  • Light magic is good at creating visual illusions by manipulating light.
  • Darkness magic is good for creating mental illusions.
  • Wind magic is considered best for illusions, since it can manipulate not only light, but sound and smell.
• Mistaken for Gay: A lot of people think that Luna and Nera are lovers. Luna for her part has no idea where the rumors come from.
• Monster Lord: When sapient monsters, also known as demons or Manaborn, live apart from the natural races, they usually form into tribes. The more militant tribes are usually led by warlords known as Demon Lords. Forcing one thousand Manaborn to bow to you with power and fear is unlock condition for an actual Demon Lord title from the Achievement System, granting new abilities. Forcing one thousand people with the Demon Lord title to bow to you unlocks the Demon King title, though only one person in all history has succeeded so far. Nevertheless, the sheer power that is granted by the title makes it worth the effort.
  • As Luna learns to her dismay, one need not be a Manaborn themselves to unlock the Demon Lord title, they only need Manaborn to submit. She unlocks it accidentally when forcibly stopping two Manaborn tribes from warring with one another.
  • The Demon Lord Kalroth is one of the strongest active demon lords. He is also a Big Bad Wannabe who hopes to be the second person to unlock the power of the Demon King title to show that he has "won" at life.
• Morality Pet: Xania was more than willing to massacre an innocent town to impress her boss, Demon Lord Kalroth. Her little brother is more idealistic, and she fears his disapproval enough to make excuses.
• More than Mind Control:
  • Darkness magic can nudge people into doing things they would already be willing to do and guide their thoughts into a particular direction. No known spells can make anyone do something against their nature though.
  • Void magic can plant thoughts into a victim's head, though if it isn't close enough to how they already think, they might notice that the thoughts are not their own. It can also suppress emotions, induce despair, and make victims stop caring about things.
• Morton's Fork: The demon, Solitude, informs Luna that it has taken control of an entire nation, knowing that she has a choice between letting it claim countless innocents or destroying it's hold over the country by force via invasion. While Luna is at this time, widely seen as a tyrannical supervillain, the countries of the world have yet to take her seriously. If she does invade, Solitude can use its influence to manipulate the other countries into believing that she has committed an unprovoked attack and really is every bit the threat the prophecy claims.
• Mugging the Monster: When encountering some bandits, Luna fully expects this trope to be in play, with the bandits performing their duty to show how powerful the protagonist is no matter the expense to themselves. Despite being two woman traveling alone however, her expectations are subverted. While they do in fact have no problem with picking fights with adventurers that outmatch them, the bandits can instinctively tell that she is overwhelmingly more dangerous with only a glance, even without knowing her infamy. When Luna approaches them, they attempt to flee in panic.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: It's not that they are truly meaningless, but the amount by which your Mana is increasing your strength is probably going to be greater than your physical muscles. Exercising will cause your strength stat to rise more than practicing magic, and practicing magic will increase your magic stat more than exercising, but other stats will still increase. A high level mage will be a Squishy Wizard in comparison to a warrior of the same level, but will still have more physical strength than a low level one. Before Luna learns just how high level she is, she sends a musclebound warrior through a wall by complete accident and ends up wondering if his muscles are just for show.
• The Napoleon: When Luna sees the surprisingly short size of the Demon King's throne, she starts wondering if he did the things that he did due to a complex about his height.
• Narcissist: Felias is legitimately intelligent, powerful, and skilled, but she sees herself as perfection personified and her delusions border on A God Am I. Aranna once pointed out that the progress the world has made was slow and contributed to by many people. Every single person who thought they could turn the world into a perfect paradise if they only had more power has always resulted in disaster. Felias acknowledged the point, but insisted that it would be different for her when she manages to Takeover The World, because unlike her, they weren't perfect.
• Neck Lift: When an infuriated Luna witnesses several bodyguards betray and murder their fellow bodyguards, she intimidates their leader by lifting him from the neck.
• Necromancer: A largely illegal branch of magic. Some forms of it are rumored to be able to trap the soul, preventing them from moving on to the cycle of Reincarnation. It is also said to have all sorts of nasty side effects.
  • Certain tribes, such as the gray demons, specialize in using magic to animate corpses, for all intents and purposes using dead bodies as Golems.
  • While the details haven't been covered, Luna has mentioned that advanced necromancy can be used for healing.
• No Biological Sex: Creatures that are Born of Magic usually have masculine and feminine appearances and gender identities, but lack an actual ability to create more of their kind. Instead, they tend to assemble tribes where the mana has the right mixture to have an increased chance of producing more of their particular Born of Magic race and form nuclear families via adoption.
• Ninja Maid: Nera's personal maid, Mari, has a Character Level of 122, giving her combat power equivalent to an elite knight. Mari believes she got that level, despite having no combat training, due to her sheer loyalty. Nera doesn't consider that an explanation.
• Obsessively Organized: Luna is constantly memorizing the countless details of her surroundings and cannot resist obsessing over the tiniest traces of disorder.
• Obviously Evil: Demon Lord Kalroth looks like a big thug, and unlike Luna, his appearance completely matches what he is.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: One would-be hero, Flameban, confronts Luna with her Biomanipulation and Necromancy research, which has previously been used to create horrors out of tortured victims. Luna explains that she has discovered that specific applications of it can be used as the Dark healing magic no one realized existed. Flameban proceeds to interpret her as an Evilutionary Biologist and tells her no one would be willing to pay that kind of price. Luna, thinking he is talking about literal affordability, reassures him that with some work, it will be quite affordable. Flameban, who was talking about one's fundamental humanity, proceeds to lose it and tells her You're Insane!. Luna thinks he's talking about her general eccentricity.
• Only Sane Man: Nera's role, as the most normal person in the Luna's group. Aranna is the only other member of the group to even understand common sense, but considers it more "fun" to mess around or let things follow their course.
• Our Demons Are Different:
  • Mana has an instinct to spontaneously form into monsters. In ancient times, sapient monsters were called Manaborn, but after a Warlord that came to be known as the Demon King conquered them all and used them in a crusade against the natural races, the natural races started referring to them as "demons" for Demonization after the demons of myth. While relations between the races have largely mended, the new name stuck. But with the original void demons returning, Luna has decided to encourage a return to their original name.
  • The demons of myth actually did exist. They are a race of parasites from another dimension and the Elemental Embodiment of the Power of the Void.
• Our Dragons Are Different:
  • The natural race with the largest amount of innate power, they on average have a level of around 200. Before the Demon King, they were a prideful race, but after the Demon King nearly drove them to extinction, their culture now heavily emphasizes not letting their pride get the better of them. They usually have a diet of rocks, but they especially like to eat gold. They usually shift to human shapes when traveling among other races.
  • There are several types of monsters that resemble dragons and are even referred to as such, but being Born of Magic, are technically a different species entirely.
• Our Elves Are Different: All elves depicted so far are of the Wood Elf variety. Elves are naturally in tune with the forest and will hear the trees whisper when something bad is happening. There is a specific type of tree, magic trees, that elves have a symbiotic relationship with. Magic trees protect elves from danger, provide them with cures for illness, and even tell them how they should live. Elves tend to live in Hidden Elf Villages in the middle of Enchanted Forests. Word of God notes that the elves of other continents may be different, but the Southern Elves are obsessed with being Long-Lived, a blessing given by the magic trees. A person's Mana is influenced by everything they do and experience. To keep their Mana compatible with the forest, they obey everything the magic forests tell them to do, leaving them as primitives. If they allowed their forests to have trees attuned to darkness, the element of chaos, the dark trees would provide them with freedom and development, but it would come at the expense of their long lives. As such, the southern elves strictly keep the darkness element out of their lives. Elves with darkness affinity are practically treated as an entirely separate subspecies, despite being forest attuned like the rest of them.
• Our Orcs Are Different: There are two corresponding Manaborn races, Orcs and Orks. Orcs are the large and green depiction, Orks are the Pig Man depiction common in Japan. Both races hate each other for having similar names.
• Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: Luna and Nera have a conversation about how they are going to deal with the trouble they have gotten into. Everyone else hears Luna threaten the Capital of the Agua Kingdom with annihilation unless they surrender.
• Outranking Your Job: Invoked when Luna assumes that the "mudlord" monsters she is watching are technically called that because they are a stronger subtype of monster, but finds it weird that all of them are "lords".
• Personality Powers: While any mage can theoretically learn spells in any element, they will have an advantage in the element they have an affinity for. A person's affinity depends on which element's theme their basic personality was closest to when they were born. For example, a person who cares strongly about rules will most likely have Light affinity, while a free spirited or ambitious person will be more likely to have Darkness. A person's affinity can theoretically be changed when still a child by educating them in a certain way.
• Physical God:
  • With a Character Level in the five hundreds, and an unsurpassed mastery of darkness magic at rank 20, Luna is strong enough to destroy entire mountains with a single spell. Had she existed in the ancient past, she would have been recognized as a God of Darkness.
  • The Elemental Gods were also in the five hundreds, were quasi immortal, and likewise had rank 20 in their primary element. Over time, the definition of the word "god" changed, and the God of Fire saw his God of Fire title change to King, much like Luna's own Queen of Darkness title.
• Place of Power: This world has one for each element. Each of these locations has a high concentration of Ley Lines for a single element. The high concentration of Mana makes these the most dangerous places in the world, spawning high level monsters.
• Power of the Void: Mana without an element is known as void Mana. Its theme is Straw Nihilism. Mana instinctively seeks to be colored by life, but can be reduced to this state by a strong will to not live. Natural void Mana originates from another dimension without life, and the elemental spirits formed from it seek to parasitically destroy all living things so that they can forcibly convert Mana of other elements into void. Void Mana has the power to traverse dimensions, drive people to suicide, and reduce everything into nothingness.
• Railroading: Prophecies are popularly thought to work by looking through time. However, while magic can theoretically manipulate the speed of time, one of the fundamental rules of magic dictates that it cannot make cause and effect go out of order; In other words, Time Travel is impossible. Instead, the World predicts a series of events with a decent chance of happening that it would like to happen, and then casts an extremely powerful spell to ensure it happens, resulting in things like freak apparent coincidences where a prophecy is involved.
• RPG Mechanicsverse: The Mana of the world has organized itself into a System, allowing it's hosts to develop themselves a bit like video games characters.
• Scary Librarian: Luna's first job. Her boss took full advantage of her "natural talent" for ensuring that the rented books were always returned on time.
• Sentient Cosmic Force: Mana itself is a living thing, implied to originate from another dimension. It planted itself into this once magicless world via six objects known as the Elemental Seeds and symbiotically bonded itself to living things as hosts. Mana is an Emotion Eater that gives it's hosts power in return for empowering and producing more of it. The ambient Mana its hosts release forms a Background Magic Field that flows in Ley Lines. The collective Mana of the world organizes itself into a System, providing its hosts with an RPG Mechanicsverse. It is also implied to be the intelligence responsible for creating and enforcing prophecies.
• Shapeshifter Baggage: In theory, fleshshaping can be used for Voluntary Shapeshifting. The biggest problem Luna runs into while figuring out how is what to do with her mass. While magic can create more flesh if she wants to be bigger, it costs a lot of mana. Likewise, compressing herself is painful.
• Silly Reason for War: Orcs and Orks hate one another because people keep mixing up their names, so both species want to force the other to change theirs. Sometimes, this escalates to the point of actual battles.
• Single Specimen Species:
  • Mana instinctively causes creatures to be Born of Magic. It usually uses preexisting templates, producing more of the species it has made before, but every once in a while, it spawns a unique creation. Of course, the potential always exists for Mana to create more of it's kind of it sees a need to.
  • There are always exactly six members of the witch species, because their race is technically an artificial one used to reincarnate the original six witches with similar bodies and retain some of the power they earned in previous lives.
• The Sociopath: Cureva's current incarnation is a Manipulative Bitch without any sense of guilt. It takes a few years worth of exposure to their influence, but void demons have the power to destroy a person's sense of sympathy.
• Squishy Wizard: Zigzagged. Studying magic increases magic stats more than it does physical ones, so a mage will be squishy compared to a warrior of the same level, but a high level mage will still be able to out-strength low level warriors. Furthermore, magic and muscle are not mutually exclusive, so there's nothing stopping a person with enough talent and time on their hands from mastering both.
• Stat-O-Vision: The appraisal skill allows users to view a person or object's race, primary combat style, elemental affinity, and Character Level.
• Super Power Lottery: Monsters are born with a Character Level determined by the amount of Mana that created them. In regions with especially dense amounts of Mana, their levels can vary dramatically. It's always possible for a low level person to earn their way to those same high levels, but those born with high levels have a headstart. This often leads to sapient monsters being lead by warlords known as Demon Lords.
• Telepathy: Witches seem to have some sort of limited ability to read hearts and spontaneously know things in detail from just a hint.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Aggressive monster types tend to be mindlessly so, apparently lacking the ability to feel fear, even from Luna's Supernatural Fear Inducer.
  • Luna's Summon Magic produces imps. The only thing they're good at is dying.
• Training from Hell: Luna would spend weeks without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and even minimizing her breathing, in order to study magic. With her complete lack of common sense, she doesn't even realize that there is anything abnormal about her training regimen. When she trains the dark fairies in dark healing magic, they are so traumatized by the end of it, that the very way they see the world changes and they all become cultists.
• The Unsmile: Luna's smile looks filled with unspeakable malice, to the point that even her friends freak out when they look at it.
• Uriah Gambit: The king of the Remno Kingdom deliberately sends his disappointing second son as an ambassador to Luna in the hopes that the reputed supervillain will kill him.
• Villainous Legacy: The Demon King was defeated 2000 years ago, but his mark on this world remains.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Witches are tricky, talented in magic, and know many of the world's secrets. Their ultimate weakness? Losing their hats. Their hats are actually a disguise for the world artifacts. Due to a contract they signed with The World, they are instinctively duty-bound to guard their artifact. If they lose it, it is like losing a part of themselves. Aranna can't even stand without her hat, Ranna goes from very polite to Lady Swears-a-Lot, and Cureva loses the ability to lie.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Luna has a deathly fear of clowns due to some childhood incident. Aranna assumes Luna was reading a horror story about an evil clown and had nightmares, Luna insists it was real. One of her fellow orphans dressed up as a Monster Clown for fun, and young Luna couldn't process what was happening, resulting in garbled memories when she grew up. When the demon, Solitude, forces her to relive her childhood memories directly, she finally realizes what really happened.
• World's Strongest Man:
  • The highest level ever recorded in history was the Hell Dragon's 430.
  • The second highest level ever recorded, and the strongest level belonging to a person, was the Demon King's 422.
  • Luna surpasses them, with a level of 507 at the start of the story.
  • While not recorded, the Elemental Gods were born with extremely high levels, and after fighting in countless life and death battles, managed to reach the late 500s. Vilde, last survivor of the Elemental Gods, is the strongest living being at a level of 578.
  • The Witch of Darkness, Felias, was already one of the world's strongest heroes. After stealing the power meant for the as yet unborn God of Darkness, she has become level 560.