So an expelled adventurer, a defrocked priest, a disgraced noble girl, and an abandoned dragon warrior walk into a tavern.
"Humans can't be trusted."
—All four members of the team
Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save The World (Ningen Fushin no Boukenshatachi ga Sekai o Sukuu Youdesu in the original Japanese) is an online Light Novel series by Fuji Shinta. As the name implies, the story follows a group of four adventurers who are united by a common link: their utter lack of faith in humanity after each experienced a traumatic betrayal by former friends and teammates.
The story begins with Nick, experienced adventure whose party is led by his mentor and father-figure Argus. Following the completion of their latest job, Nick discovers a chunk of the money has gone missing and realizes one of the party members is the culprit. To his surprise, Argus forgives the member and instead expels Nick after being accused of also embezzling funds.
One night after several weeks in a downward spiral, Nick ends up in a local tavern where fate leads him to meeting three fellow adventurers. After a night of drinking, the four bond over their own betrayals and their destroyed ability to trust anyone. This is when Nick hatches on the idea for the four to form a party.
Thus the story begins of a party of adventurers united in their belief that Humans Are Bastards and desire to make some honest coin...
There is a manga adaptation with the artwork by Kawakami Masaki and an anime adaptation has been announced
. Co-Produced by Geek Toys and Animation Studio Seven, it started on January 3, 2023, on Crunchyroll.
This work contains examples of:
- Anti-Magic: A casino has all its cards and machines coated into anti-magic paint to prevent it being used for cheating. It's an expensive solution, but they can afford it.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Sword of Bonds found by Nick and the party. It's a living sword that has incredible power and can not just multiply but square the strength of the user. Made even better by the fact, that it is completely safe. The creators were savvy enough individuals who implemented all kinds of safety features so that there would be no risk of misusing him. It would easily be the ultimate weapon in existence, were it not for one little issue: It requires the user to sync with another person, and they have to be on the same wavelength, which is extremely difficult to do. It takes years of understanding someone entirely to the point that they know everything about them. Throughout its history, only an incredibly small number of people have been able to use him as a result.
- Bait-and-Switch: At the end of one chapter, Nick asks Karan to come to his room. The next one begins with Karan panting, red-faced, and not sure she can hold any longer. Turns out they were just studying arithmetics and her reaction was her brain basically being overloaded from too much thinking.
- Batman Gambit: How the Survivors win the bare-knuckle arithmetic competition—They knew that their opponents would eventually resort to cheating when pressured after Karan pretends to solve a large number of math problems at once.
- Big Eater: Karan loves eating, puts a lot of her spending money on food and fancies herself a gourmet.
- BFS: Karan's sword which is as long and wide as her. As a Dragon Race, she has the strength to carry and wield it effortlessly.
- Bookworm: Bond’s choice of using the money the team makes is to purchase books citing that "knowledge is power" and to learn whats happened in the world while trapped in the dungeon.
- Boomerang Bigot: Downplayed. The three human members of the group have deep trust issues when it comes to other humans due to their past experiences.
- Break His Heart to Save Him: Upon reflection since forming Survivors, Nick realizes that this is what Argus was doing when he kicked him out of the party. The young man's Hero Worship kept Nick from realizing his own potential, being too fixated on helping and supporting Argus compared to what the the former was capable of achieving. He's still pissed about how his leader went about it though and looks forward to making his former comrades regret kicking him out.
- Child Hater: After being Mistaken for Pedophile and subsequently arrested for it, Sem is wary of children, especially little girls.
- Commonality Connection: The basic premise behind the formation of their party is that Nick, Sem, Tianna, and Karan all experienced betrayal, and seem to be comfortable in a party with others who suffered the same pain. After all, who better to trust, then someone who's been stung by betrayal before?
- Dark and Troubled Past: Each of the members of the party, there's a reason why they eventually pick "Survivors" as their group's name.
- Nick was an orphan who was mentored by his father-figure, Argus, only to be kicked out when another member of the party they were in accused Nick of stealing funds to cover up his own crime. The worst is that Argus seems to think he's doing Nick a favor, feeling him to be too smart to be an adventurer (or at least too smart for their group). As if that wasn't bad enough, immediately after this, Nick finds out that his girlfriend Claudine was pretending to like him so that he would buy her expensive equipment to outfit not just her, but her entire party, but now that he's unemployed she doesn't feel like keeping up the charade and instead rubs his face in it.
- Tianna is a trained mage whose fiancée was stolen by a girl from another noble family. Said family used their influence to get Tianna kicked out of the Magic School they were attending and disowned by her family. She's now stuck working as an adventurer while struggling with a gambling addiction.
- Sem was a former priest who was falsely accused of sexual assault by a girl under his care, a Stalker with a Crush whose love turned to hatred. After three months in prison, he's since developed a thing for hostess bars and indulging his "carnal desires", leading to his being defrocked.
- Karan is a member of the "Dragon Race" who ventured into the outside world and joined an adventurer party who didn't mistreat her for being a non-human. Then they betrayed her and left her at the bottom of a particularly dangerous labyrinth while also stealing a treasure from her hometown that she had. Furthermore, it turns out they deliberately sabotaged her education so that she wouldn't know they were taking advantage of her and that if she left she wouldn't have any other prospects.
- Draconic Humanoid: Karan and her people are called the "Dragon Race": they're basically humans with horns, a tail, and scales on their hands with claws. They are well-known to be brave warriors and amongst their abilities is to breathe fire.
- Dumb Muscle: Karan is uneducated: one of the consequences of coming from a culture that only cares about pure combat power. Her betrayal at the hands of her first party rubbed her nose in just how dangerous it is to let others do all the thinking for her while she charges in blindly. Since joining the Survivors she's been struggling to fix this, with her new teammates helping by teaching her tactics, mathematics, and various other useful things she hasn't had the chance to learn before.
- Dungeon Crawling: One of the more common jobs is clearing "Labyrinthes", collecting materials and killing monsters for coin.
- Exact Words: The Sword of Bonds the Survivors turn in to the guild is indeed a Sword of Bonds, but simply one of dozen prototypes created in perfecting the real one.
- Fantastic Racism: Karan faces this as a member of the "Dragon Race" and some of the more despicable individuals have this attitude towards her, specifically their (justified) reputation as "country hick" Dumb Muscle.
- Fighter, Mage, Thief: Karan is the Fighter, Tianna is the Black Mage, Sem is the White Mage, and Nick is the Fragile Speedster Thief.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The key members of Leon's party, especially Claudine and Leon himself, have all suffered horrible abuse and betrayal, leaving them in dire straits, but rather than try to pick up the pieces and start over, or at least limit their rage only towards the ones that hurt them, they focus on the weak, vulnerable, and desperate, and make themselves feel better at the expense of innocents, and have absolutely no loyalty or good faith to each other either. If their scam targets dare to fight back, they get murderously vengeful.
- Fusion Dance: How the Sword of Bonds works; it allows the user to performs this with individuals they synchronize with, temporarily gaining their abilities and some of the physical characteristics.
- The Gambling Addict: Two of them, and very different between each other:
- Tianna loves betting on races and go to the casino, though she's responsible enough to give up when she still has money to not get Trapped by Gambling Debts.
- Donny, Agate's boyfriend, is a much less functional example, gaining debt upon debt and repeatedly borrowing money from her only to lose it immediately (on one occasion, to Tianna).
- Groin Attack: Nick does this to Leon when they get in a brawl, only for Leon to be wearing the fantasy equivalent of a cup to protect himself.
- Humans Are Bastards: It's almost literally one of the first lines of the manga, with Nick and the his future teammates agreeing that humans are completely untrustworthy. Ironically three of members are human and shown to be good people, getting along well with each other.
- Irony: As noted above, all but one of the party formed are humans and yet was formed because of their belief that humans are selfish and couldn't be trusted.
- After some reflection, Tianna admits that she would've been miserable if had gotten married and would've likely ran off to become a traveling mage like her mentor and inspiration. While what happened was horrible, it ultimately gave her the freedom to pursue her dream without the guilt of shaming her family running away would've caused.
- Idol Singer: Nick becomes a huge fan of them, Agate especially, and looks forward to their shows.
- In Vino Veritas: Sem frequents bars for this very reason, taking advantage of his strong alcohol tolerance to socialize and gather information while everyone else is in their cups.
- It's All My Fault: The night the four met, they ended up sharing their stories always ending with this statement only for the other three to immediately dissuade them of this attitude. Each is actually thankful that someone finally said it, and its part of what causes them to bond.
- Magic School: Tianna attended one before being kicked out due to a rival family's influence and it may have been a contributing factor in being disowned by her own family. Its mentioned that it was a school specifically to teach nobles.
- The Mentor: Argus was this along with being a father-figure to Nick before kicking him out. Nick, as the most experienced adventurer, becomes something like this to his new teammates with his advice and guidance on jobs.
- Mr. Vice Guy: Each of the Survivors has pleasures they indulge in when they've got the money to spend. They make a deal to not judge each other's habits.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When Nick realizes that a member of his former party has been embezzling funds, he gives said member the chance to come clean. Which he does... while also accusing Nick of doing the same. Worse is that Argus lets the less honorable team-member stay while kicking Nick out.
- Paying It Forward: When Nick was at his lowest, freshly kicked out of his party and losing his girlfriend, he was cheered up by the Idol Singer Agate. When he meets Karan, Sem, and Tianna, he sees them in the same boat he was, Karan especially, and reaches out the same way Agate did for him.
- Power of Trust: A deconstruction of sorts, as the main characters form a new party, but need a lot of time to fully rely on each other after having suffered betrayal in the past.
- Psycho Prototype: Less prototype and more along the line of rejected model, but the Mad Moon Sword/Sword of Evolution is this. It is designed to forcefully evolve it's user into a more powerful being and gives them an Adaptive Ability, but it comes at the cost of damaging the user's mind, effectively turning them into a berserker.
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: We have an experienced adventurer who was kicked out of his party for being too good at his job; a disgraced noble girl kicked out of school and abandoned by her fiancée and family with a gambling problem; a defrocked priest that now indulges at hostess bars after being falsely accused of sexual misconduct; and Finally, a member of the Dragon Race who was betrayed and had her naivete destroyed by the first human friend she made.
- Sacrificed Basic Skill for Awesome Training: The Dragonians in general are so fixated on training strong warriors to support The Hero, they don't give young fighters like Karan any other form of education. This made it very easy for others to take advantage of her ignorance when she was sent out into the world.
- Sentenced Without Trial: Zem is an ex-priest who turned down a girl who had a crush on him. She then accused him of molesting her. The townsfolk held him in jail overnight and ran him out of town the following morning.
- Stage Names: Agate's real name is Belle Huggins.
- Sue Donym: The Sword of Bonds in his human form calls himself Bond. Nick calls him out on this, especially since he introduces himself while the Survivors are handing over a fake Sword of Bonds to complete their quest. However names are important to such artifacts and using a name too far from his actual title of "Sword of Bonds" might affect his ability to use his power at all.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Donny, Agate's boyfriend since before she became an idol, had become a Gambling Addict and accumulated a lot of debt. He also borrowed lots of money from her, only to quickly lose it to yet more gambling than using it to pay his debt. He even puts her in danger when he talks her into coming to the casino and it's attacked by Leon under the effect of the Sword of Evolution. After the casino, Agate's agency steps in to protect Agate's career by paying his debts on condition he'll stay away from her, going so far as have him sign a contract for said purpose and threatening to have him roughed up if he were to talk to her ever again. By this point Agate herself has already lost all hope in him and decided to break up.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome:
- The reason that Argus kicks Nick out despite being smarter, better, and more honorable than any of their other teammates is because he's those things. Argus apparently felt Nick should have been doing things more befitting his stature only for the younger man to see it for betrayal by his father-figure/mentor.
- Tianna was at the top of her class at the magic school she attended, but she was so focused on studying and improving herself that she failed to notice her own fiancé's growing envy of her abilities. A member of a rival family used her own success against her by making it seem like the only reason she had gotten so far was because she bribed the teachers.
- Tragic Keepsake: The locket that Karan carries was purchased by the leader of her former team and acts as a symbol/reminder of what happened to her. Nick accidentally breaks it during a job but she doesn't care, symbolizing her beginning to move on from the betrayal and trusting her new teammates.
- Trial by Combat: Adventurers get into disputes, and those disputes tend to result in fights. To cut down on rampant brawling, the guild formalized the process into duels. Then after concerns that adventurers were still solving everything with violence, the strong were bullying the weak unfairly, and adventurers in general were not training their minds, an academic angle was enforced resulting in the current format known as "bare-knuckle arithmetic".
- True Companions: Despite the basis of their party's formation being mistrust and betrayal, the Survivors always have each other's backs and go out of their way to help one another. For example, when they learn that Karan has been living in the slums because it's cheap, the rest of the party goes out of their way to convince Karan to find someplace better, especially where robberies are less common.
- Vengeance Feels Empty: Despite all the trouble they caused him (especially Claudine), Nick doesn't feel any satisfaction after the Steel Tiger Crew is arrested, instead pitying how they could've done better for themselves.
