At first I read it as just some kind of reading material for learning Japanese.

I wanted to find some books that were available to read for anyone, and syosetu.com is obviously the best place for them. It's where some very popular anime stories started, and surely there would be something for me there, right? Especially since I don't mind many of the common anime tropes.

Well, turns out there is such a thing as too many tropes. Isekai, cheat skill, "my skill is useless but I manage to become unbeatable using it", adventure guild, demon lord, hero, and so on. It's all the same. I was browsing popular stories, and it was all the same isekai tropes. I don't have much against them, but I wanted something difference.

What did it for me was just filtering out the word "isekai". The rest was still full of tropes, but at least not to the same extent. Even the Silent Witch, which I ultimately picked, starts as an extra spin on the villainess trope. But it's "what if we don't even have a villainess, but it's basically a villainess story setting?" Which works surprisingly well.

The name was also a good sign for me. It's not a whole sentence, describing the premise, the cheat skill, and so on. It's just "Silent Witch". Intriguing.

It's a story of a shy girl, who is actually a powerful magician tasked with secretly protecting the prince.

As time goes on, I realize how much I like the stories with secret identities and contrasing perceptions. Especially if the "true" identity, at least from the perception of the character, is the shy nerd girl, not the "hero". In a superhero story the hero is usually brave, but while they're in their civilian mode, they pretend to be a normal person.

Here it's a double layered pretense. Monica is actually super shy. But she has to fulfull her duties as the Silent Witch, so she wears the robe, holds the staff and "pretends" to be one of the Seven Sages. Meanwhile her duties make her pretend to be a shy and normal girl again, which returns us back to normal. The key part here being that when a superhero is praised for their deeds, their reaction is "yep, that's actually me, and if you knew it, you would probably think I'm cool". While Monica's reaction is "Yes, that thing the Silent Witch did? It was me, and if you knew it, you would probably think the Silent Witch is not that cool, and just a girl".

But that's just Monica. What this story does well in general is just how connected and how whole everything is. Books, especially web serials, tend to have new ideas as they go. Just "What do I write about today? Let's write about a tea party. Okay, so the chapter is about a tea party". Not here. I won't say every single small thing is purposeful and everything pays off, and the balance is perfect. It's not perfect. But the balance and the payoff is so much larger than I expected. All the hints, all the little steps, it all turns into grand reveals and character moments, and it works so well.

Flaws (a few spoilers):

- Not enough Isabelle. She is set up to be one of the main characters, but then she turns into a background one. The way it works in the end is fine, but whenever the story mentions her, it's as if she's a main character, but she's not.

- The battles. The story is mostly focused on characters, their interactions, their communication. It's not an action story. And that leads to one of the most frustrating moments for me as a reader. During the first few battle scenes Monica basically cheated and instatly won every fight by electrocuting the opponent faster than they could react. Which is amazing and logical - why use a different method if this one works. But then there's a fight where Monica spends to much effort to prepare for it both mentally and physically. She is vigilant. She sets up things in advance. She is on the lookout. And the completely loses the whole thing - her opponent reaches their goals, they injure Monica and get away. One good part about this battle is that it illustrated how Monica is very inexperienced in real fights. She is amazing at magic in theory, in a controlled environment, but she doesn't have a good battle sense. But still, the details here weren't great and I hope the light novel version improves them.

There are a few other flaws, but very minor ones. For example, the setup for several reveals is so good that the reveal itself doesn't live up to the hype. Or there is a Checkov's gun that never shoots. But I guess it's because it's not an action novel, but a conversation novel.

The thing I really liked was Monica's character growth, and it's probably one of the main points of the whole story, so it's no wonder it was done especially well. The only thing that was unclear was Monica's personality before the start of the story. She's described as quite heartless, like she gave up on humanity, and at some point it reads like just a mischaracterization by some other character, but at other points it comes from Monica herself.

From what I've seen about the changes done in the light novel version, they were pretty good. I wasn't sure about the first arc, but the second one had much better character moments and introductions. The web novel version was written fast, so it makes sense that there is a general feeling of "ah, but this exact story could be so much better if only there was some hard to pin down element added". I think that element is basically "general quality", and it's possible to add it, and I hope that's what the light novel is doing. When I get a way to pay for Japanese books, I'll get an ebook of the light novel version and definitely read it.