Literature / The World's Finest Assassin

The World's Finest Assassin or The World's Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat^note The latter was too long for the site is a Light Novel written by Rui Tsukiyo and illustrated by Reia. It was first released in 2018 on the user-generated novel publishing website Shōsetsuka ni Narō before Kadokawa Shoten acquired the rights to publish it. A Manga adaptation with art by Hamao Sumeragi began serialization on Kadokawa Shoten's Young Ace Up website in January 2019.

An Animated Adaptation by Studio Palette and Silver Link aired in Japan on October 2021, directed by Masafumi Tamura with scripts written by Katsuhiko Takayama. Crunchyroll has the rights to stream it worldwide except for South/Southeast Asia, where Muse Communications in charge.

An aging and experienced assassin named Allen Smith conducts One Last Job alongside an apprentice named Mila Martinez. He then planned to retire and pass his skills to future assassins. But while on a flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo, the plane he is on is supposedly hijacked. He finds out that the hijacking is a ruse arranged by his bosses as they see him as expendable. While Allen tries to fly the plane to avoid crashing it, a US Air Force F-16 is dispatched to take it out under orders of terrorism threats of the hijacked airliner to crash it onto critical infrastructure. Allen dies in the missile strike with several other people on board, including Mila.

And as he's dying, he experiences his first emotion: frustration.

However, a mysterious Goddess saves him at the last minute to offer him two choices: either be reborn somewhere else with no memories, or be reborn in the peak of human skills and attributes, but in return he must kill the Hero within 18 years after his birth. He accepts the job and gets reborn in the nation of Alvan as Lugh Tuatha Dé.

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The World's Finest Assassin Gets Reincarnated in Another World as an Aristocrat has the following tropes:

• Action Prologue: Episode 1 starts with Lugh and his fellow assassins springing a surprise attack on a slave auction, before transitioning to his past life, also in the middle of combat.
• Actor Allusion: Veronica Taylor also voiced a female Goddess that reincarnates the Hero in I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level.
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • In the light novel and anime, Lugh receives the Tuatha Dé's Special Eyes at seven years-old just before meeting Dia. The manga deviates this by having Lugh's father Cian give his son the Eyes when he's twelve years-old.
  • The anime has a running gag of revealing previous reincarnations who arrived before Lugh, each of them being abysmal failures. In the light novel, it's eventually revealed the Goddess has at least one backup plan in case Lugh becomes a disappointment. The Goddess decides to switch priorities and give more support to the alternative choice. Subverted. Episode 11 apparently had the Goddess did that as well.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Esri half-jokingly offers Lugh to drink her milk when he's already seven, makes Lugh greet Dia in girls' clothing, and is a bit too interested in his Nocturnal Emission, among other things.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: Averted with the Tuatha Dé, which is antiheroic, and played straight with most (if not all) of everyone else, as the montage in the fifth episode shows that most of the Tuatha Dé's targets are aristocrats. Justified in that the only people usually worthy of attention from a family of Royal Assassins are those with the money or political power to put the kingdom or people in danger. Which, in a medieval time setting, is usually the nobility or the wealthy.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: How the story begins, with the main character's life ending and starting anew.
• Asshole Victim: The targets of the Tuatha Dé are all this.
• Auction of Evil: The anime starts off with an auction of young girls who were kidnapped from their villages and sold as Sex Slaves to other nobles.
• Badass Family: The entire Tuatha Dé clan is comprised of doctors and assassins.
• Battle Harem: Dia, Tarte and Maha can all take care of themselves in a fight.
• Beach Episode: Episode 10 features Lugh, Tarte, and Maha having fun on the beach of a remote private island. Lugh also uses the island to experiment with his Kill Sat-inspired spell.
• The Beautiful Elite: Justified. Other than having access to better living conditions than Commoners, there's a correlation between an Aristocrat's mana levels and their physical attractiveness, which is believed to be the result of a subconscious usage of mana to improve one's appearance since a young age.
• The Berserker: Berserk is an A rank skill that people can be born with. Berserk greatly enhances the owner's physical strength and magical prowess at the cost of being unable to distinguish friend from foe. Male users gain horns while female users gain a red aura. The Hero Epona Rhiannon has Berserk as one of her 30 skills. It's the skill that will likely lead to her destroying the world, as she becomes murderous and drunk on power in extended combat with demons. She bestowed the skill to Setanta MacNess using My Loyal Knights. Unlike Epona, Setanta is able to retain his sense of reason, likely due to an existing skill he had before gaining Berserk.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: When Lugh asks the goddess if he could kill the hero the moment he was ready to, she tells him no. The reason is that only the hero could defeat the demon lord, and if he dies before that happens, then the demon lord would become unstoppable and the world would still pretty much be destroyed.
• Contrived Coincidence: What the Goddess uses as an excuse as to why she brought Allen over. She just "happened" to need a soul since she was short and took it from another world, she also just "happened" to do a poor job at cleansing it, then she also just happened to give said soul some great skills and abilities.
• Double Entendre: Dia's helping Lugh with his first magical spell is worded to sound like a rather different "first time." It didn't help that their soul connection has them mentally embracing naked.
• Driving Question: Why was Allen killed by his bosses under the guise of his flight being hijacked? He wondered why as he did his job as intended and was never once disloyal to them.
• Elemental Powers: People can possess Water, Fire, Earth, Wind, Light, or Darkness affinity. A person's affinity determines which kinds of elemental spells they can cast.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: Lugh exploits his knowledge of modern technology and trends to invent new technologies and become ridiculously wealthy.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: A realization Lugh made during his first assassination mission. Count Venkaur trades the kingdom's military secrets to foreign nations for narcotics that he sells to the subjects of allied nobles. The inhuman suffering he inflicted on troops and citizens, such as those in the neighboring city of Pisear, needed to be punished. Yet Venkaur committed these crimes so his wife, who remained ignorant of these evil dealings, could live in high luxury. It also had the benefit of funding community projects that uplifted the standard of living for his own subjects. Lugh knew it did not excuse the Count's actions, but it gave him understanding why it happened.
• Exact Words: When Allen asked if the Goddess brought over anyone else to take care of the Hero, she stated there would be no way for her to cover up having so many skilled people with their memory intact suddenly appearing and that it's only him for now. He catches that last part, realizing he will probably need to watch his guard with her. In the anime, she never said the scale of how many she can cover up. However in the light novel she alludes the upper limit might be two.
• Foregone Conclusion: As the first episode and the now ongoing light novel shows, Dia will not be killed by Lugh.
• Functional Magic: The magic system utilizes Rule Magic, Inherent Gift, Language of Magic, and Runic Magic.
• Godzilla Threshold: A two-fold case. The Goddess bends the rules and recruits Allen to assassinate the hero before they destroy the world. The hero is so powerful in the first place because nothing else could defeat the Demon Lord.
• Hero of Another Story: Sorta. The goddess sent others to do this job before Allen/Lugh. They all either failed or else never bothered to hold up their end of the deal after being reincarnated.
• How Do I Shot Web?: While all people in the world the protagonist is reincarnated into are guaranteed be born with at least a D-Rank Skill, they don't get an explanation of what that Skill is, what exactly it does, or whether they lucked out and got more than one. They're left to either figure it out on their own by their effects, which isn't great for Skills with subtle effects or those with very specific activation conditions, or manage to get their hands on an Appraisal Sheet—single-use divination tools that reveal someone's natural Skills, but they're an extremely rare and restricted item that Lugh thinks aren't made by human hands to begin with after he sees one in action for the first time.
• Human Traffickers: Episode 6 has Maha and friends get kidnapped and imprisoned in an Orphanage of Fear.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: "X of Y" in the anime; examples include things like "Quantum of Trust," "Life of Falsehoods," "First of Dates," etc. The novel goes for "The Assassin [does something]" instead.
• Informed Attribute: Lugh's plan for starting a cosmetics company as a cover is predicated on the fact that the women that use make-up in this world all suffer from dried, damaged skin due to the use of cosmetics. However, it is virtually impossible to tell which female characters actually wear makeup, and the young ones all have similarly beautiful, silky-smooth faces and skin. The sole exception is Lady Balor, who is portrayed as marginally less attractive and caked heavily in make-up specifically to demonstrate how well Lugh's product works.
• Knight in Shining Armor: How Lugh is viewed by Tarte, Dia, and Maha. Maha explicitly envisions Lugh as a shining prince who rescues her.
• Last Stand: Dia and her father are stuck in their stronghold since he sided with the royal family during their kingdom's civil war, who ended up on the losing side. They still have a few hundred loyal troops who managed to hold on long enough for Lugh to arrive to rescue her with a Faking the Dead task of her "dying" in spectacular fashion in front of her remaining troops along with the enemy soldiers they were fighting against.
• Magical Eye: The Eyes of Tuatha Dé grant telescopic vision, increased visual clarity and the ability to see mana.
• More Dakka:
  • The rigged carbines were loaded with drum mags as plan of Allen's plans to make them shoot.
  • The military Humvees chasing Allen and Mila were equipped with Browning M2 machine guns.
    • Lugh summons increasing amounts of guns and cannons to fire off 10-20 shots at once.
• Necessarily Evil: How Cian Tuatha Dé describes the family's job as assassins.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: The goddess allowed Allen to be reincarnated with 5 skills, one each from D to S rank. The goddess explicitly refers to Allen as reaching the upper limit of human power. The odds of someone besides the hero being naturally born with this combination of skills is noted to be 1 in 10 quintillion. The Hero has also won the Superpower Lottery by virtue of having 5 S rank skills and 25 A rank skills.
• "Not So Different" Remark: The reason Lugh considers preventing the Hero from going Drunk with Power rather than just simply assassinating him after he saves the world from the Demon King, as he sees it as no different from the Organization killing him after he outlived his usefulness as well.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Allen was offered to be reincarnated in two conditions: Either as someone with no memories of his assassin life. Or in another world with his talents. He chose the latter.
• Once an Episode: The anime reveals that prior to Lugh, the Goddess has reincarnated professionals from different fields to assassinate the hero. The problem is that each of them has at least one shortcoming that ensures their mission will result in failure.
  • The Goddess summons the World's Best Special Forces Commander, who takes advantage of his newfound life to laze about every day, becoming an obese man in contrast to the muscular one he once was.
  • The World's Strongest Samurai follows the Goddess's orders, but is not that smart. He tries to kill the hero by charging headfirst without any strategy whatsoever. Naturally, he gets killed not long after.
  • The World's Best MC is summoned to drive the hero into suicide, but his rapping antagonizes a whole lot of people who think that he's insulting them.
  • The World's Best Paparazzi is then brought in to discredit the hero but like the samurai, the man Didn't Think This Through, and gets run over by a runaway horse when trying to get a picture of the hero in a hit and run.
  • The World's Best Teacher was also reincarnated by the Goddess, presumably to be The Mentor to the Hero. This implies that Lugh's plan to restrain the Hero rather than kill them has also been tried by the Goddess since the The Mentor would no doubt try to teach the Hero restraint so that they would not be the kind of person who would destroy the world.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • After the van used by Allen and Mira gets blown up, the scene rewinds back when Allen explains that Mira needed to rig the M4A1 carbines with wires to make them shoot.
  • Happens again on the last episode to explain how a Berserk-using Setanta MacNess got unceremoniously nuked from the skies - the scene rewinds all the way back to his tutelage under Dia, explaining that her anti-gravity spell was used to send a tungsten rod into low orbit, then he used Tarte's wind-breaking magic shield to make sure the rod stays intact during atmospheric re-entry. He based the attack on an in-development Kill Sat back on Earth and used his time training on an uninhabited island to test and improve the attack's accuracy.
• One Last Job: Allen was supposed to have his last job of assassinating several mafia personalities and then, train future assassins in Japan. His bosses say otherwise.
• Orbital Bombardment: Gungnir. Lugh uses a levitation spell to propel an enchanted tungsten spear several kilometers into the sky. Then he cancels the spell and allows gravity to take care of the rest. It is the fantasy world version of Rods From God .
• Poor Communication Kills: During the brief period between his death and his meeting with the Goddess, Allen muses that if his organization had simply asked him to, he would have gladly allowed them to kill him without a second thought; instead, they took him out in a needlessly complicated and destructive manner that ended up with a lot of other people dying unnecessarily. (Though it is implied that the truth is more complicated than that.)
• Race Against the Clock: Lugh has 18 years from when he's born to kill the hero after they slay the demon lord. When he asks the Goddess why, she says the hero ends up destroying the world afterwards.
• Reincarnate in Another World: Allen is reborn in Alvarn as Lugh, the only son of the Tuatha Dé family. It's known to be called upon to safeguard the public via assassination for the public good when needed.
• R-Rated Opening: The anime opens with a slave auction for corrupt nobles and the slaves for sale are all young girls who are at most 14, and each one is terrified and crying. It's implied that the girls were taken from raided villages. Soon, Dia (who went undercover to confirm that the nobles are indeed corrupt) goes on a shooting massacre on the audience, with Tarte joining her and Lugh sniping the mistress in charge.
• Rule of Symbolism: In Episode 3 every time the scene focuses on Dia and Lugh in bed, they are shown to move closer together in the bed, showing how close they have grown to each other over time.
• Sdrawkcab Name: All across the in-universe magic system — for instance, "Etaerc reppoc" creates a chunk of copper.
• Secret Test of Character: Lugh states for the last two years he has been testing Tarte from how she answered to her body reactions to his questions to find out if she was actually a spy to steal his family's secrets. Lugh confirms she is genuine and Cian shows relief as he didn't want to have to kill her.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first episode's title, "Quantum of Trust," sounds just like the name of a James Bond movie.
  • "Allen Smith" lampshades that his alias sounds like someone who makes bad movies.
  • In episode 4 of the anime, a previous attempt by the goddess to recruit a hero, the recruit asks if he can reincarnate as a cute girl with maxxed defenses, so he'll feel no pain, a reference to another SILVER LINK. anime
• Sufficiently Advanced Magic: Lugh and Dia figure out the components of earth-aspected Create spells - they can substitute the copper-creating or iron-creating spells with any other raw material by replacing the specific gravity, melting point, and atomic weight in the spell's formula. Lugh quickly uses this plus Spell Weaver to make the rifle-creation and cannon-creation spells.
• Superpower Lottery: The Hero has 5 S rank skills and 25 A rank skills. This makes them superhuman and nigh unstoppable as most humans in Alvan have only 1 skill, with a rare few having 2. Lugh also wins it, as the Goddess allows him to pick any 5 skills, one from each rank from D to S, and it's implied one of his skill choices has incredible unforeseen potential.
• Take a Third Option: Lugh would rather alter the hero's prophecy of turning evil, than assassinate her. The Goddess claims she's fine with a peaceful outcome if he can he pull it off, but expresses considerable doubt on that plan and calculates it reduces his chance of overall success by a significant magnitude.
• Two-Person Pool Party: The date between Lugh and Dia in episode 10 culminates into this, complete with Underwater Kiss.
• Undying Loyalty: Tarte, Dia, and Maha all possess undying loyalty to Lugh due to him rescuing them from dire situations (and in some cases, brainwashing on his part).
• Wham Line: Episode 10 ends with an assassination order against Dia Viekone. Previously Dia said "Goodbye, Lugh." as...
• Wham Shot: The village Lugh and Dia dated in Episode 10 turned out to be a Potemkin Village esque illusion, suggesting that something terrible is about to happen to Dia and her family.
• A Wild Rapper Appears!: When the goddess summons a rapper's soul for reincarnation, they talk by rapping while she is carrying a boombox and playing a turntable.
• "World's Best" Character: The Goddess has summoned hundreds of the world's greatest everything to find anyone capable of killing the Hero. Naturally, none of them have worked out by the time Lugh has his turn.

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