Majo no Tabitabi Vol 25 - Shishina and Uruka. As usual quite sad...

Volume 25 of Majo no Tabitabi (The Journey of Elaina) goes back to its origins and delivers a depressing main plot with tragedy, drama, and a melodramatic ending. I know, I know; stories in this series are all over the place, and there are some that are cheerful and some that are downright depressing, this just happens to be on the latter side.

Of course, not everything in the volume was like that because, as usual, there are minor short stories added to make the volume reach the required size, and some of them were quite fun. The first story of the volume starts great with Elaina arriving in a country popular for its bread, something that Elaina adores.

The issue is that the owner of this shop, Rerinka, wants to quit and go back to cooking meat at her original restaurant. She only started baking bread to add a side dish, not to change her entire business, and she asked Elaina for help on how to quit. Apparently, she tried to refuse to sell bread outright, but even the city officials arrived, forcing her to continue to keep the city quiet as people were getting rowdy.

Elaina is still as stunning as she was back in the first volume. How can someone be as beautiful as her?!

Rerinka was definitely the funniest side character of this volume. Her tsukkomi at Elaina were right on point!

Elaina starts to devise various plans, but only makes the shop even more popular until she realizes that while Rerinka's skills are definitely high, something is afoot. The main hint was that she started seeing hallucinations of her teacher, Fran, every time she ate some of that bread. Yes, it turns out it contained drugs; the girl providing Rerinka the materials was mixing drugs to make it more "delicious."

The thing that particularly struck me from this episode was the point of view of Rerinka. Elaina obviously asked why she would want to quit, because the business was booming and money was coming in without limits. Rerinka points out that there's no meaning if she can't do what she wants to, and she wanted to cook meat. It may sound like "first world problems," but at the same time, I see her point; money is less important once you go over a certain amount.

Shishina is one of the two 'creators' and the tragedy baits this time around. She looks good admittedly.

Uruka is the other side of the 'creators' duo, the source of the tragedy, or maybe should I say the target?

The main story of the volume revolved around the 'creators' country' where everything, including houses, is created by mages/witches, and follows two witches: Uruka and Shishina. Both were friends since they were young, but they had much different ways of approaching work. Shishina was diligent and precise to the orders of the client; Uruka instead defined herself as a 'slave to fun' and always tries to find something eccentric to respond to the requests with. Be aware that Uruka can do the job perfectly fine; she just refuses to do so.

Elaina is tasked by a government official to retrieve something from the trap-filled hut of Uruka. She sneaks in and finds Uruka in a ghostly state; apparently, she died long ago. Various tribulations happen, but it turns out she was killed by the government for refusing to build the magical warships this official wanted for invading other countries (Elaina was tasked to recover the blueprints). Shishina was unaware of the whole story behind it and was duped by the official into helping.

Elaina's 3D mind thinking always surprise me, she's always three steps ahead of everyone else.

It's sort of a bad end, but yet not as bad as other I've read about in this franchise. At least they manage to stay a bit longer together.

Of course, Uruka and Elaina defeat the evil official using the houses built by Uruka as some sort of mecha, but there's no fixing what happened. The only solace is that Shishina gets exiled to live in the same house as Uruka. I guess they can be together now, even though Shishina can only rarely see Uruka's ghost? It's bittersweet, and they don't even give us info about what happened to the official afterward. I hope she joined Uruka as a "ghost."

Honestly, it's hard to give a proper evaluation to Majo no Tabitabi because it's all over the place when it comes to volumes. There are some that are absolutely gorgeous, like the one with Fran's backstory and time-traveling shenanigans, and some that are more mid, like this one. I guess we'll see what the next one has to offer!