I caught up in one sitting (2.3-end of chapter 2; currently on 3.1) and it definitely felt slower to me as well… 
It’s more them interacting and less zombies dead people. Plus, we get told many times about stuff just before they stopped being meaningful (e.g. not leaving the area and then immediately going somewhere else, taking care of the generator and where to get gas for it, before making it completely irrelevant…)
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I’m still loving it
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Well, that one was more impactful.
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Thoughts on magic and balance (after reading 3.1)
コツンと杖の先を門扉に当て、意識を集中。
私の熱が杖を通して門扉へと流れ込む感覚。これで私はこの大きな門を支配した。
あとはイメージ。
「──開いて」
ガチャンと音が響き、固く閉じていた門扉がギィィィィと音を立てて開いて行く。
@暁のルナ, you were not kidding when you wrote “The magic is […] very simple” in your review 
I was fine with this when it was still just simple telekinesis and making things hotter, but operating a complicated mechanism simply by thinking “Open!” is stretching my suspension of disbelief a little bit more and seems a bit too convenient.
Also, thinking about it… while Honoka and Yuki balance well from a personality standpoint, power/utility-wise they seem to be getting further and further apart the more we see magic being used. At this point, Honoka almost feels a bit useless for anything except driving and a bit of zombie knowledge she gathered while travelling.
- Yuki has a silent, deadly and versatile weapon and an absolutely incredible amount of utility. Her magic exhausts her, but that’s temporary and it seems as long as she’s getting food and rest she’ll be fine indefinitely.
- Honoka can fire at things, but that will attract zombies and she will run out of bullets sooner or later. Being better with machines doesn’t seem to be that useful in a world without readily available electricity.
Hopefully they are actually (or will be) better balanced and I’m just misjudging things.
Timestamp: 0:23:32
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Reading the discussion above made me think about it more and I’m throwing the towel on this one 
I just can’t bring myself to pick it up over other books I am reading.
This especially is what’s bothering me. I read half the book but the amount of actually important feeling information, doesn’t feel much more than one could glean from the cover.
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There is a huge hurdle of ‘yuri’-ness for character development in the mid section but then if you can power through that part, it’s all action after that.
I read a lot of ‘yuri’, that isn’t something I need to ‘power through’.
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response to legato - 魔法
Honestly I think that’s fine tho. Like we don’t have the mechanics of how a gun fires explained, everytime someone shoots a gun; nor of different types of guns, how to handle them, or various related details, and Honoka seems inexplicably proficient (at least it hasn’t been mentioned that she had any kind of training/practice beyond “recently living in an apocalypse”. So why should magic be any different?
I do agree with this… Like there should be some limits and progression or struggles, etc. It seemed a bit too power creep, and is one of my few critiques
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Response - guns and magic
It was though? She mentioned that she trained at a shooting range in the past.
Plus, it is basically just lock picking, which is really hard without proper training (that’s the point of a lock) and relies on touch feedbacks (to feel if you got the pins in, for instance). I would find it more believable if had used magic to see through the mechanism, for instance. Being able to see what you are doing would make it much easier.
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Ah, I missed/forgot that. Thx for the correction
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Sry it didn’t work out, but it was nice to have you, and glad you’ll get to spend more time with books you’re into.
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re: magic and guns
With guns we all roughly know how they work (you pull the trigger, some mechanical stuff that is well-understood and that I could learn more about if I cared happens inside it, and a bullet flies out really fast) and what their use (shoot things), drawbacks (attracts zombies) and limitations (needs bullets; harder to hit when far away) are.
I am not super happy with not understanding how magic works, but I am fine as long as the stuff magicians do seems believable and actually has drawbacks and/or limitations. E.g. so far I all the really complicated magic (making a zombie barrier, a magical familiar and a staff that can make you telekinetic even though you don’t have proper training) was done by her father, who we believe to be a seasoned magician; we can imagine it to be complex and hard to do without knowing exactly how it works.
But now we got “open a complicated mechanism just by thinking about the result, not the way there”, which just doesn’t bode particularly well. It’s either “magic will just fulfill your wishes if you think hard enough about it” which is really uninspiring both as a magical system and as a plot device, or a completely unnecessary (they could’ve just struggled a bit climbing over that fence!), unexplained and unforeshadowed “also my father enchanted this to open locks” deus ex machina.
Yes please! Or her being able to “touch” and move parts of it magically instead of having to rely on the small interface that lock picking tools provide. Either would still be a bit of a stretch, but at least we’d know how she’s doing it and there’s effort involved now.
It’s also inching close to that for me, but… since there’s “only” a third left and I’m rather averse to dropping books I’ll keep it up for a bit longer at least.
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on magic limitations
I was kinda under the impression that the wand was what was doing a lot of the magic, so even what she does is due to her father having set her up. Like she’s able to use the wand because she’s a 魔女, but she doesn’t have any training in it so she’s mostly trying to figure things out based on a letter from her dad and what ends up working. (Like with the lock, she very specifically didn’t know if it was going to work or not before she tried.) For me, that doesn’t feel OP because she can’t just decide to do anything without taking the chance on whether or not it will work.
That said, there’s absolutely a chance that we’ll just blow through that limitation and then it will be less compelling.
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re: on magic limitations
I mean, we are already at “OP” with telekinesis, heat generation and lock picking, at least compared to Honoka.
I touch on her father having enchanted the wand to be able to do lock picking later:
Having a black box device that might or might not fulfill her wishes doesn’t feel that much better to me since the author can just go “her father enchanted it to be able to do that” at any point again. While it means that the magic system itself isn’t bad, we now we have a plot device filling that role instead.
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Now on Week 10 ch 3.2, end pg 175, end percent 72%
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I caught up!
I’m in 2 minds about the story so far - it’s maybe not as engaging as I’d like, but I’m equally happy enough reading along. I think it helps that I’m fairly prepared to suspend disbelief for fantasy as I sometimes can’t be bothered to engage my brain too much in my leisure time.
In terms of the things where something has been mentioned then seems to become instantly irrelevant, I do wonder if we’ll come back to that in the future. For example, I do wonder if they’ll return to the house again.
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Week 10 thoughts
「ふふ、見てのお楽しみです。お父さんの手紙に書いてあったペラの〝使い方〟の一つなんですけど、これまでは試す機会がなかったんですよ」
[…]
「う、うん……たださ、その子──前に非常用のシェルターって言ってたよね？ 由貴が危なくなった時、丸呑みにして家まで連れ帰るって……」
I was fearing the worst when she went “I wanna try something”, but luckily, the parts above make it already better than the lock picking thing. She’s not trying a random thing in the hopes that it works; her father told her about this “functionality” in the letter and it was foreshadowed.
「行きましょう──って」
That’s… a very soft way for a kidnapper to command their hostage.
Timestamp: 0:46:50
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Week 10
As I understand it it’s the other way around. Those are the words the sister said to the monster
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Ah, I wasn’t sure about that. That’s even more suspicious.
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Now on Week 11. ch 3.3-end of chapters, end pg 189, end percent 78%
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