Foreshadowing that the isekai was really just central Australia the whole time?
An
isekai story in central Australia — that looks like a familiar concept: I remember a Russian novel where the final part of the story happens in a parallel world (Earth-alike) in central Australia.
“Рыцарь Ордена”.
And yes, starting from this chapter, “Eiyuu to Majo no Tensei LoveCome” manga diverts from the original story to rewrite at least one female character as a reincarnated non-human. I am relieved that they seem less destined
just to suffer. On the other hand, a reincarnated non-human is a trope that rarely works good because it usually makes its story's author obsessed with playing with that character's non-human traits for a long time without advancing the rest of the plot. For example,
“Boy Meets Girl, Again!”. Let's just hope that the plot of “Eiyuu to Majo no Tensei LoveCome” can be lengthened more meaningfully than that one, especially because this chapter concentrated on the human Japanese part of the character without discarding it in the favour of the reincarnated dragon part. What do we know, we might even eventually get some flashback to a full-fledged tragic interspecies romance (“I love you so much, but it breaks my heart that I won't ever bear your child, and also I am actually a huge dragon and thus we have never been meant to ever be together, and also you need me to be a dragon because the whole world is in danger and might really perish unless we risk both of our lives to do something, so let us just die together a honourable death on the battlefield”) like in DragonLance series, for example.
This comparison is not an arbitrary one. After all, one of the very first pages here seems to offer the hero almost the same¹ sad choice: “Will you choose one of them? Or will you choose the world?”
Now we know that this choice, despite not really existing in the original story (if we do not count the necessity to dispel the curse, but that was not really a matter of a choice), can nevertheless happen in the altered storyline. The most simple opportunity looks like this: if the newly presented dragon lady ever wins a favour from Hero Grey, the witch might feel abandoned and “fuck it all, I have decided to also curse this world right now” — and that is how his choice of a lover might spell doom for the whole world as we know it.
Of course, it'll never be just as simple. What'll complicate things is the matter of the cute
kouhai: will she ever be revealed to be yet another reincarnated love interest? — and if so, then who is she? The most interesting it would be for her to be a female cleric (not unlike Ciel in “Tsukihime”) or a noblewoman (maybe even a princess) that quietly fell in love with Hero Grey and then had to feel some humiliation (of NTR-alike nature: “I have loved him first”)² when by siding himself with the witch he betrayed not just the cause but also that love that remained unknown³ to him. But, honestly speaking, that
kouhai could be literally anyone after we have been already shown a dragoness despite the original story not mentioning any dragons even once iirc. I mean it! At this point as a reader I won't be surprised even if she is revealed to be a gender-swapped sage that says, “I had to execute you, bro, but I have always loved you homosexually and dreamt of becoming a woman for you — and thus here I am”, for example. I can only hope it's not that kind of a story.
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¹ To be fair I have to add a note saying that it is questionable whether Huma Dragonbane in DragonLance has ever been offered a real choice between his love and his noble death (together with his beloved dragoness) on the battlefield for the sake of the world's fate. The legends about them told by Silvara in
“Dragons of Winter Night” say that the choice was very real, while the events of the alternative storyline in
“The Legend of Huma” does not leave much of a conscious choice until it's too late to be real.
² The correct term for that kind of NTR-alike feelings of a female character (if she never confessed but nevertheless becomes painfully jealous when her beloved falls in love with another woman) is “WSS”, which is an abbreviation of 「私が先に好きだったのに」 (pronounced as “watashi ga saki ni suki datta no ni”) meaning “even though I loved him first”.
(Source: Japanese Wikipedia.)
³ To be clear, here I hypothesize that the third female character never confessed her feelings to the hero in the original world and that was the reason behind her not appearing in any of his earlier flashbacks and regrets about the past. But, on the other hand, we have also never seen a dragoness there yet, but here she is. Hence take my reasoning with a grain of salt.