After spending a summer full of adventures and re-starting school under the torture… I meant care of teachers selected to hone their abilities, it’s time for the Mischief Class to enter the Harvest Festival. For four days, Babyls students will face magic beasts in a forest and try to outwit each other to win the title of Young King or Young Queen.

After gruesome training, Iruma and his partner Lied are ready for the Harvest Festival. In the festival, the students are paired up and are supposed to gather materials and defeat magic beasts and exchange them for points. However, as soon as Iruma sets foot in the forest, he remembers all of the survival instincts that he developed when he lived with his careless parents in the human world. First things first—they need to acclimatize themselves with the forest… even if it means eating everything they are gathering and hunting!

The rest of the Mischief Class is faring much better. Agares and Gaap have also created their base (aka a castle), and it doesn’t take long for scared demons to find the castle and work with them. Keroli and Camui have founded a kingdom instead of a base and a battle against Agares’ and Gaap’s stronghold is inevitable—after all a Queen needs a castle. Clara and Elizabetta are showing off their seductions skills, and not even Iruma is unaffected by them. Jazz and Allocer are pulling off a scam that once it gets found out won’t make the rest of the demons more friendly. Lastly, Asmodeus and Sabnock are showing their brute force to overcome any obstacle. As you can see, the Mischief Class is keeping itself quite busy gathering points, but someone is not happy about that.

Coco Orobas has a deep grudge against the Mischief Class and all of their achievements. He is known as loving the number ‘2’ because he always comes in second place in everything, thus people think he’s doing it on purpose. However, that’s not the case! He’s misunderstood and every time he arrives in second place, he was aiming for first, only for the spot to be taken away by someone from the Mischief Class. But enough is enough! Coco will show them what he’s capable of, and thanks to his family ability that induces hallucinations based on the target’s trauma, he’s targeting all the members of the Mischief Class. When he dares target Clara though, all bets are off as Iruma gets angry (can you imagine a scary Iruma?).

These three volumes only cover a couple of days of the Harvest Festival as the author shows what each team is up to, whether they are fighting against enemies, themselves or are outwitting other demons. It’s a fight to get the most points, but it’s not too violent. In fact, hitting another participant is against the rules so this battle is not as bloody as readers might imagine, but it’s still vicious. After all, only one team can reach the top…which by the way things are going doesn’t seem to be working for Iruma and Lied. After finishing the first day with zero points due to them eating and then being seduced into giving up what little they’ve collected, they decide to go searching for the legendary leaf, which no one in the history of the festival has ever been able to obtain. We’ll just have to wait for future volumes to find out.

Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-chan continues to be full of comedy and light-hearted moments. The series gets a little more serious in tone when showing the demons under Coco’s trauma skill, but the laughs are there right before and after the characters snap out of the illusion. And of course, some of the experiences are funny for the readers but traumatic for the characters. I quite enjoy the dynamics of the Mischief Class, and specially of Iruma, Clara and Asmodeus. For Iruma, they are his first friends, and Iruma introduced them to the concept of friendship which doesn’t exist in the Netherworld. They are attached at  the hip, so being separated during the festival is harder for them, especially when Iruma goes missing… of course something had to happen to him, otherwise it would be too easy! I appreciate how they work hard and keep the promises that they have made to each other but are willing to throw everything away when one of them is in serious (not comedy-style) danger. I can’t wait to see what the fight against Coco brings about in the next volumes.

Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-chan is written by Osamu Nishi and translated by JM Iitomi Crandall for Vertical, a Kodansha imprint. The manga has been adapted for anime with three seasons available on Crunchyroll and a fourth one announced, which will continue the story of Iruma right after the Harvest Festival. Volume 16 of the manga is slated for release in October.

Our review copies from Vertical (Kodansha) were supplied by Turnaround Publisher Services.