Every so often a manga adaptation of a light novel comes along that makes you say, “I wonder if the original books did this better?” Fiancée of the Wizard is one of them. It doesn't have a terrible plot or horrible pacing, but there's just something lacking in the story that keeps it from living up to its full potential. Since, as of this writing, the light novels aren't available in English, the possibility of them rectifying the issues in the manga remains a tantalizing unknown. But more importantly for these middle two volumes of the manga version, things start to improve in book three, which either points to the novels actually being better or indicates that the story just takes a while to get its feet on the ground.

After the childhood covered in volume one, the second book picks back up with the twistily named Egiederyus (thankfully nicknamed Edy) working at the palace as Chief Enchanter to the Court. He's still resisting to name a date to marry Filimena, and while she's sort of okay with that because she does understand him, she is also beginning to get a little worried that he's never going to be ready. This is compounded when he appears in her bedroom in the middle of the night to tell her that he's been chosen to accompany the hero's party to find and kill the Lord of Darkness, an evil being who has begun to ravish the kingdom. Filimena is upset, but not surprised – after all, she's been reborn into this world from our own, and once she got over her giggle fits about the name “Lord of Darkness” she realized that if a hero was being chosen, his party was going to have to include the most powerful mage in the kingdom, and that's Edy. But with those RPG thoughts also came the realization that the princess is also part of the group, meaning that if this world follows those conventions (as it appears to in her eyes), Edy will either end up with the princess or end up dead.

This marks the first time in the series that Filimena's past as an ordinary woman in modern Japan really comes into play. Previously, it was just used as a crutch to explain why she was mature for her age (by her reckoning, she's a fifty-year-old soul in a twenty-year-old body). But now she's allowing her preconceptions of fantasy worlds to dictate how she reacts to events in what is an actual real world, just one with magic and bad guys with cringey names. Her overreactions therefore make her feel truly human for the first time, because they're one of the first real and authentic emotional reactions we're getting from her. It's a marked improvement for Filimena as a character, and that's something that carries over into the third volume as well, making book two the start of her coming into her own, at least to a degree.

Of these two volumes, the latter is definitely the better. Mostly this is because of two specific things: 1) the whole marriage plot is settled and 2) Filimena continues to face difficulties in her personal life that are possibly related to her past. One of those is brought on by Edy himself, who wants to keep their marriage a secret. Not, it should be said, because of any nefarious reasons – he's mostly terrified that, because of his exalted position as the Chief Enchanter to the Court, high ranking nobles will try to force him to set Filimena aside (or just flat-out kill her) so that he can marry one of their daughters. It's not an outrageous fear, because Filimena's relatively low rank does stand out as unusual in the political system the author has established – her father may be noble, but he's a librarian, which is miles away from being a duke or a marquess. While Filimena intellectually understands why Edy's asked for this, emotionally it's much harder for her to stomach, especially when she finds out that the younger (than her) daughter of a duke, Lady Luna-Marie, has been visiting Edy every day at work. These emotional insecurities make her feel like she has to keep secrets of her own from her husband, one of which may turn out to have disastrous results.

Although it can be irritating to read about characters acting foolishly out of a misplaced sense of not wanting to bother someone, in the case of Fiancée of the Wizard it turns out to be very beneficial. Edy and Filimena are technically now in a place where they should feel more comfortable than ever with each other, but the fact that they can only act like a married couple at home takes its toll on both of them. Edy hides his incredible fear of losing Filimena under his gruff exterior, and even though Filimena knows he loves her and that he has trouble emoting, that, combined with rumors she hears around town and the sleep deprivation caused by nightmares she's begun to be plagued with, begins to wear on her patience and confidence. She thinks more and more about her past life, which was depressing and difficult, and we begin to see that maybe her own beaten-down outlook on life made it that way – an outlook she's getting dangerously close to falling into again. Filimena seems to never have dealt with her past life issues, and that may be coming back to bite her in the next volume of the series.

Fiancée of the Wizard is still a series not living up to its potential, but volume three really does help to move things in the right direction. The art remains very nice, with a blend of Victorian and Medieval sensibilities that works better than it sounds, and with only one volume of the manga version left, it suddenly feels possible that it will end a better story than it began.