Reki Kawahara is a one-trick pony. That sounds harsher than it ought because there are plenty of authors in all media forms who have one particular narrative that pops up frequently in their work; it’s just more noticeable with Kawahara because of the fame surrounding his best-known work, Sword Art Online. He’s grown as an author since the start of SAO, so it’s clear that he’s spent the intervening years refining his trick—that of the joys and dangers of a hypothetical VR or AR world in the near future, where games become something more than just things to play. Does that take the sting out of the almost trite similarities between all of his works? That depends on your mindset, but there will definitely be readers who turn away from Demons’ Crest simply based on its tagline, “This is more than a game – this is real life,” which is awfully similar to SAO‘s “This may be a game, but it’s not something you play.”

The story this time skews a bit younger, however. Its protagonists are sixth graders, so everyone is either eleven or twelve years old. In the story’s version of 2031, augmented reality (AR) has become an everyday thing with people using a special film-based wearable computer known as QREST. QREST (pronounced “crest”) is worn on the hand like a thin, clear band-aid with companion “eye lenses” and earpieces. All three components allow people to overlay their real-life experiences with basic computing functions, a step up from the technology Kawahara created in Accel World, although the story takes place between it and SAO. Virtual reality is only just becoming viable, and the poster child for it is a new MMORPG called Actual Magic. The game is played using specialized padded capsules (like a full-body NervGear), only available in Althea, the game center constructed by Actual Magic‘s developers. As a special graduation treat, the sixth grade of a soon-to-be-closed elementary school is offered the chance to playtest Actual Magic at Althea, which is where the story begins.

By this point, most readers will know where this is heading: something goes horribly wrong, the log out button vanishes, and deadly chaos ensues. But unlike most of its genre brethren, most of the characters in Demons’ Crest aren’t stuck inside the game’s virtual world, their bodies ensconced in gaming pods that are described to sound like coffins. Instead, the virtual world begins merging with the real world, which on balance is much more alarming. When Yuuma wakes up in his Caliculus pod, the power to Althea has been cut off. He has to manually open the lid, and he immediately knows that something is off – not just the power, but also the strange metallic smell in the air, which we can guess is blood. He realizes that the room around him has largely been destroyed before running into classmate Sumika…who is no longer the prettiest girl in school, but a horrible monster, and one who has already clearly murdered another classmate.

Most of what works in the first book are the horror elements. Although Yuuma is reunited with his twin sister Sawa and best friend Kenk (the nicknames are not good in this series), that doesn’t really reduce the danger. Adults are all either dead or missing, about half the class is gone, and the kids are all desperately trying to figure out what’s going on and how they can possibly survive it. The realization that classmates are dying—some killed by the horrific Sumika—makes it feel a little like a sci-fi Lord of the Flies, particularly once the core group of three meets up with other classmates and people begin jockeying for power. Yuuma and Kenk are both consistently trying to do the right thing, but they keep running up against the roadblock of how “right” may not mean the same thing it did before reality began to erode. They have to rewrite their own perceptions as they attempt to stay alive and keep other people alive as well.

Sawa is a different story, mostly because she seems to have more information than anyone else. When she and Yuuma are reunited, he notices that she’s no longer wearing her school uniform and appears to have wings and horns growing out of her body. She sounds like the same person for the most part, but Yuuma’s uneasiness about his sister is obvious. Although he doesn’t want to think it, the idea that maybe not just the world has changed but also the people is a worry underlying both volumes, which ultimately leads us to the cliffhanger endings of both. The question of why Sawa doesn’t want to tell Yuuma everything she knows even as she’s acting with more practicality than either of the boys is concerning, and again, this horror aspect is the strongest element of the novel.

We have some of those answers by the second volume, although they’re still relatively thin on the ground. The plot of the sophomore book takes place primarily in the game world, which Sawa’s newfound knowledge lets them know they can reenter. Their goal is to find Nagi, their missing friend, but what they actually learn is that Actual Magic has undergone some major changes, too. Rather than feeling like a game world, it instead is suddenly much more real, reinforcing the idea that the two worlds are now essentially one. While in AM, the group meets another classmate from the group that fled upstairs in Althea rather than down, an encounter that leads directly into the volume’s cliffhanger ending while also expanding the books’ premise. At this point, Yuuma and his group are still struggling with the concept of a game made real, and they’re still acting like everything follows real-world logic. Even though Sawa is now host to Valac, one of the demons of the title, they don’t fully understand what that means for them in the larger scheme of things. Nagi and Niki provide proof that is much harder to ignore. While all of this still very much replicates story beats from both SAO and Accel World, it also feels more urgent, which is either a sign of how Kawahara’s craft has improved or due to the youth of the characters involved; possibly both.

Although Kawahara has improved as an author in the larger details of his work, issues from his earlier days still plague this book. The most glaring is that he still isn’t very good at writing female characters; girls are either broad stereotypes (there’s a bog standard mean girl who’s so much of a cliché that it’s nearly impossible not to roll your eyes) or exoticized and/or perfect, with Sawa falling into the latter camp. Sumika goes from being perfect to exoticized, because it’s clear that despite her now monstrous face and behavior, her body is still exquisite, and Yuuma’s ability to use his Tamer class to capture monsters treads some uncomfortable ground. The writing can also be very repetitive, with the same few phrases or bits of information rehashed far too often, although this isn’t as big an issue as it was in previous works.

Demons’ Crest was, Kawahara tells us in the afterword, originally conceived as a webtoon, and he was surprised to be asked to write a novel version as well. Certainly, his fears of having too many series going at once feel valid, but despite the time crunch, these are still enjoyable books. It isn’t a perfect story, but it’s also better than his earlier work. Fans of both author and genre should be pleased, and even those who are neither will probably find something to keep them reading.

Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.