I will do my best as "the enemy of mankind" for you, Lady Cecilia
When a young Farm Boy named Karna turns thirteen, he's officially recognized as an adult and undergoes the Revelation ceremony to receive a title from Heaven's Gods to determine his lot in life. To his surprise, he's given the title of "Wise Man" along with the "Necromancy" skill, granting him incredible magical power. Elated by this discovery, Karna immediately decides to put his new talents to work by becoming an adventurer to earn money for his ailing grandparents. Things couldn't get better when he's scouted to join the party of the Hero himself, which comes with a lucrative salary.
But after his first month on the job, his gross yet powerful abilities get him kicked out of the party with no money to show for it. Forced to become a solo adventurer, Karna then stumbles upon the lair of the Demon Lord of Lust, Cecilia Israfilia. After watching him easily defeat one of her strongest generals, she offers him a job rather than retribution. And so the boy who should have been a hero to humanity turns against it for the sake of earning money for his family. The rising of the formerly unemployed Wise Man begins!
The Rise of the Unemployed Wise Man is a manga written by Mikawa Ghost and drawn by Oomine. Beginning its serialization in Weekly Young Jump in 2020, it follows Karna the Necromancer as he helps the demons against humanity for the sake of his salary. Not to be confused with The Rising of the Shield Hero.
The Rise of the Unemployed Tropes:
- Accidental Discovery: Two of them. Karna finds the secret tomb of the outer gods when he's trying to make the land of his grandparents' farm arable by cleansing the inherent curse. After he's scouted and abandoned by the Hero party, he stumbles upon the Demon Lord's headquarters by sheer chance as he's looking for food.
- Always Chaotic Evil: To date, the ogres as a race are completely irredeemable, attacking and looting all their neighbors, human and demon alike, and are even shown stripping and trying to eat human adventurers on their introduction for a laugh.
- Always a Bigger Fish: For all his power, Karna believes this is the case, and so makes his dungeon as Crazy-Prepared as possible in hopes of stalling for time should a hero come kicking down his door. Fortunately for him, this is very much not the case, as the heroes of the current era are nowhere near the invincible one-man armies of old.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The demons' society runs on a strength-based meritocracy where the strongest rule. The Demon Lords dwarf all others in power, making them the permanent leaders until they pass on their powers to someone else. However, power alone sometimes isn't enough to earn acceptance, as Mammon refuses to allow a human into Cecilia's inner circle after discovering Karna's identity, betraying her to the Demon Lord of Greed as a result.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Karna and Cecilia register as adventurers two guys who look like stereotypical thugs look on and admire how pretty Cecilia is, leading one to think they're going to try something immoral (and highly ill-advised). Turns out, they're genuinely concerned that Karna and Cecilia are too naïve and inexperienced to handle actual malcontents and just want to help them.
- Black-and-White Morality: Despite the Gray-and-Grey Morality below, it's very, very easy to tell who's good and who's evil in this setting. The definition is that "Good" cares about the fate of others above oneself while "evil" cares about one's own fate at the expense of others.
- Back from the Dead: Karna possesses the Resurrection spell, which allows him to bring things back from the dead. The Hero also learns to cast this spell, which is why he thinks nothing of Friendly Fire when fighting Karna.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Parodied. Not only does Karna happily shout how he's "an enemy of humanity" as he's actually rescuing people, but several truly evil demon lords are really hammy about how evil they are and how they'll pound Karna to paste only to find themselves on the wrong end of a One-Hit Kill with No Body Left Behind.
- Cool and Unusual Punishment: After capturing Aisha, Karna plans to interrogate her by... filling her cell with fluffy, adorable demonic cats for her to dote and coo on. Despite her cold, uncaring exterior, she quickly melts from Cuteness Proximity.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Due to Karna's overwhelming magical power and possessing the powers of several Physical Gods, every fight he gets into ends thoroughly in his favor. He's actually surprised when the Ogre Lord who's supposed to be as strong as the Hero goes down in one hit and initially thinks he's hiding until Vol informs him that, no, Karna had simply blasted him to pieces with one attack. He's also surprised that the Hero's party doesn't put up much of a fight against him, knocking out the Battle Master with one attack even while holding back.Karna: Huh... he disappeared. Did he use some kind of concealment spell?
Vol: [shocked] No, he didn't... He just got torn to pieces. That's overkill... - Cute Is Evil: Downplayed. While the demons didn't originally care for the concept of "cuteness," Karna gets creative to protect the cat-demons by using them to lure human adventurers to their defeat, draining away their mana, memories and confiscating all the loot they had earned by that point.
- Fanservice: Attractive women are given just about every possible excuse to find themselves in various states of undress or being under-clothed. This also hits physically attractive men on occasion.
- Fantasy Pantheon: Just among Karna's pet gods alone, there's Nodence and Volvados. There's quite a few other gods as well, mentioned by their followers who have a Power Tattoo to prove it.
- Fantastic Racism: Humans view demons as an Always Chaotic Evil race and want to wipe them from the earth by killing the demon lords. Similarly, demons hold humans in contempt, and Mammon's realization that Cecilia invited a human to become one of her generals is enough for him to plot a coup against her to pave the way for the Demon Lord of Greed to take over.
- Fictional Age of Majority: In this story, people are recognized as adults when they 13, undergoing the Revelation ritual to obtain their title, which determines their lot in life. Especially powerful titles like "Hero", "Battle Master", and "Wise Man" come with a Mark that represents the incredible power given to them.
- Gray-and-Grey Morality: Every faction has good and evil among them. Rich and powerful humans in the upper strata of society are decadent, foolhardy, self-serving, and petty. Some adventurers will even kill their own party members to hoard more loot. Meanwhile, the demons are out to destroy humanity and are constantly engaged in internal power struggles for territory and influence. But the demons under Cecilia's employ are far from the Always Chaotic Evil creatures humanity sees them as, and many of them have families to protect or legacies to uphold.
- Horned Humanoid: Numerous high-ranking demons, such as Belphegor and Mammon, possess horns and wings. Ogres also possess horns.
- Horror Hunger: Stronger demons need to lure humans into dungeons and suck out their mana in order to live. Weaker demons like orcs can survive on just regular food like meat and vegetables.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: Nodence and Volvados remember the heroes as unstoppable juggernauts who shrugged off all of the amazing magic thrown at them to strike the killing blow on the Outer Gods. The heroes of the present are nothing like that, being weak, incompetent, and foolhardy to extremes. Aisha works to pull wool over Karna's and the demons' eyes to prevent them from realizing this, as humanity is doomed if the demons start an all-out invasion with Karna at the helm.
- Humans Are Bastards: The majority of adventurers are depicted as greedy, self-serving, petty, and backstabbing opportunists. Despite how much help Karna was providing to the Hero's party, he got dumped simply because his powers are too gross for the other members of the party to withstand, and the Hero didn't defend Karna simply because he wanted to remain popular with the girls. Aisha, a renowned adventurer and mercenary herself, holds humanity and demons as a whole in contempt, only trusting cats and the handful of friends she's made whose straits are as dire as hers.
- Idle Rich: Aisha says that the upper classes are all living decadent lives doing nothing but gorging themselves on food and going through court rituals, leaving the bulk of the fight against the Demon Lords to adventurers.
- Legacy Character: The Demon Lords received their powers from the last seven Outer Gods before they were hunted down by the heroes of old. Each Demon Lord passes their powers to a successor, who gains their mark and magical power. But over time, this power has grown so unstable that Cecilia fears that she can't produce an heir the normal way because their vessel wouldn't be able to handle it. Because of this, she wants to conceive an heir the way a human would to hopefully pass on her power to a vessel unmarred by the Mark of Ruin.
- Might Makes Right: Among the humans, your merits are pretty much determined by "survival of the fittest."
- Mirroring Factions: Humans and demons are eerily similar in this universe. The cultural and biological differences are so minute that it almost doesn't matter.
- Mundane Made Awesome: How powerful could a dungeon made with the gift of Hot Spring Creation be against an army of demons? How does the phrase endless supply of holy water sound?
- Nipple and Dimed: If the plot calls for a woman to find herself under-clothed for some reason, she's not going to be showing off her nipples, aside from one scene where the Hero party's holy knight tries to tank a corrosive curse at point blank range, at which point, she shows off her inverted nipples just before she faints.
- In the late chapters, it gets zigzagged a bit. In panels featuring women in states of undress, it mostly depends if the camera is far away, the scene is crowded, or there's plenty of action. Close-ups of singular and important females might show nipples, while far-away or crowded shots of minor background characters tend to be closer to Barbie Doll Anatomy.
- One-Gender Race: Deconstructed. When the outer gods created the orcs from pigs, they made orcs exclusively male, only able to breed with female humans (and later female half-orcs). Naturally, not all their mates were willing at the time...
- Overshadowed by Awesome: Belphegor and the rest of Cecilia's generals would be formidable opponents for the heroes of the current era, but Karna makes a fool of the former by completely dwarfing Belphegor with the power of Nodence, who is more than 5,000 times stronger. Belphegor later mutters to himself in relief after obliterating part of an army that he's not weak, Karna is simply absurd.
- Power Levels: Numerical ratings are briefly used to compare the power of Cecilia's underlings and Karna's. While Bephegor prides himself for his strength and is formidable at a power level of 1,000, Vol and Nodence completely blow him out of the water with power levels of 500,000,000 and 550,000,000 respectively due to being the revenants of dead Physical Gods.
- Power Tattoo: Everyone in this new world is given one at birth to determine their talents and powers. Those who betray their patron deity or code of conduct without damn good reason can lose said tattoo, and will be universally reviled at best, executed at worst.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: Discussed when Karna tries to build his own dungeon. His first idea is to place a zombie dragon king at the entrance in hopes of stalling for time against the hero. Aisha complains that that's way too huge of a difficulty spike and any adventurer will simply run in the opposite direction when they see a dragon at the entrance. He then introduces Aisha to his mobius loop hallway immediately afterward, which is designed to trap someone for at least a hundred years and can only be escaped by possessing dimensional transfer magic. Aisha gawks when Karna and Nodence refer to this is a "small" trap, as these two things alone make it impenetrable even before taking into account that Karna is utterly invincible.
- Seven Deadly Sins: The seven Demon Lords are all themed after a particular cardinal sin. Cecilia is the Demon Lord of Lust, while Dargaz Zalaza is the Demon Lord of Greed. The original seven Demon Lords were born when the last of the Outer Gods, Bastet, broke her soul into seven pieces, and each of the Demon Lords inherited a different aspect of her personality that has been twisted by her regrets after humanity turned on the Outer Gods.
- Shout-Out Theme Naming: All of the "Outer Gods" in this story are quite fittingly named after gods from the Cthulhu Mythos, such as Cool Old Guy Nodence referencing Cool Old Guy Nodens, Playing with Fire Volvados referencing Playing with Fire Vorvadoss, and demonic Istasha referencing... Cat Folk Istasha.
- Strength Equals Worthiness: Demon hierarchy is almost exclusively based on terms of magical and martial power, but competency is still a deciding factor. The truly incompetent demons don't tend to live long, regardless of how strong they are.
- Super-Empowering: When a human turns 13, they're able to undergo the Revelation ritual as part of their coming of age, granting them a title and potentially skills that grant them great powers.
- Underestimating Badassery: Because of his politeness and diminutive size, it's easy for others to brush off Karna as a mere child before he pulls out all the stops. Karna is also prone to underestimating his own abilities, considering what he does to be just the basics of necromancy even when he's accomplishing feats like turning back time and having Physical Gods at his beck and call. He also has a tendency to overestimate the abilities of the heroes, assuming that they'll be the nigh-unstoppable juggernauts of yore when they're all pretty weak and incompetent in the present. Aisha is working behind the scenes to keep things that way out of fear that the demons will launch an all-out assault if they ever learn how far humanity has fallen.
- Unnaturally Looping Location: Karna bends space and time at the entrance of his dungeon so that anyone walking into it will be forced to walk endlessly through the same hallway for at least a century. Even when he, the master of the dungeon, guides Aisha through, it still takes them several hours of walking to reach the end. He reasons that against a true hero, it would buy him five minutes at most, as they could escape via dimensional transfer magic once they notice they're stuck in a trap. Aisha is horrified at the thought of such a room, as dimensional transfer magic is lost and none of the current heroes are competent enough to do anything but starve to death in such a room.
- Uplifted Animal: The orc race came into being by virtue of the outer god Nodence taking pigs and magically evolving them to the humanoid race shown in the series.
