See the image below?
This is from page 2. While the two men on the top half are introduced early, you only have to read 80% of the novel to get to bottom half of the picture.
And it can be a long, dull 80%.
There’s been a sudden rise over the past few years of females being reincarnated as the villainess of an otome game and trying to avoid a bad ending, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! perhaps being the most popular. I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! is totally different you see — Kiara, formerly from Japan, is in a strategy RPG game! Totally different…despite being surrounded by hot guys and trying to avoid certain death.
So yeah, not very different after all.
After being summoned for her surprise wedding at age 14, adopted-out Cinderella Kiara realizes the dreams she’s had over the years were of her life in Japan, and she’s been reincarnated as an antagonist of a Final Fantasy Tactics-style game. Game-Kiara shows up as a recurring Boss before eventually dying at the hands of Alan, the protagonist. Heroine-Kiara believes that if she doesn’t get married, she’ll avoid lining up with Game-Kiara’s backstory. So she sneaks into the baggage compartment of a nearby carriage and falls asleep inside.
When she awakens, guess who she sees: Alan, along with his guard Wentworth and the eccentric, charming Reggie, whom Kiara doesn’t recognize from the game. Kiara manages to avoid being turned over and even gets hired as Alan’s mother’s attendant. Both out of self-preservation and a fondness for her benefactors (particularly Reggie), Kiara tries to prevent the tragedies of the game, which is set about two years in the future.
The best way I can describe I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! volume 1 is a cheap jigsaw puzzle where, even though all the pieces connect, there are gaps, pieces that require a lot of force to snap together, and peeling cardboard. Parts of this story don’t seem to jive together. At age 11, Kiara was forced to carry around a bottle of poison (which she still has at the start of the novel) and learn how to fight with a knife. Not only do we never see Kiara use her self-defense skills, she never hones them either. Alan’s mother is a tough sword-wielding noblewoman whose other female attendants also have skills. Since Kiara is so determined to make sure Reggie and company stay alive, why not ask her friendly mistress for training in swordsmanship?
Instead, Kiara is secretly determined to be a spellcaster like Game-Kiara, but magic is very rare in this monster-filled world. The one mage she does meet refuses to directly assist her, so Kiara ends up pouring through books to learn anything. Even what little she does discover we only find out after she’s assembled the ingredients and forced to test out her theory. This is the kind of development that should be explored when comes up with the idea, not after. How she officially ends up a spellcaster is also rather ridiculous (let’s ask a captured enemy to help!), but maybe you can chalk it up to game plots often being rather contrived.
That, as I mentioned before, happens late in the novel. After she arrives at Alan’s place, it’s a lot of “I did this, then I did that, then that happened”. Reggie gets closer to her physically and emotionally, Alan is on guard, and Wentworth admires her dedication, but these feel often too few and far-between. Maybe it’s also because of the way the I Refuse to Be Your Enemy! volume 1 is structured. There’s a quick prologue and side story, but otherwise, it’s only four chapters long. Length-wise, it’s not any shorter than most light novels, but for much of the novel, when something happens, it doesn’t last as long as I would have wanted. The side story, for instance, was the type of content I wanted directly in the story: an actual incident we get to experience right along with Kiara, not a glossed-over narration.
But maybe volume 2 will be an improvement now that the game is starting and Kiara can’t just hang out in the library looking for answers. Plus, best boy Reggie is likely to be around full-time, and I give credit for Kiara finally being a heroine who isn’t obtuse about his feelings for her — and vice versa. But while Kiara may not be Bakarina in denseness, the novel also doesn’t nearly reach Bakarina levels of fun.