This volume is a collection of short stories set during, after, and even before the WorldEnd main series. Quite a bit before in fact, one of the stories is the backstory of Lillia Asplay, the “Princess Brave” from Willem’s original time and someone he was well acquainted with. Her presence has loomed large over Willem for a lot of the story: through tragedy she was able to accomplish feats far greater than he ever could and, while the circumstances are hardly unenviable (she’s the lone survivor from an attack on her kingdom), you always gets the sense that in some ways, Willem does wish that was him instead who had been blessed with world-ending abilities.
These stories do continue to futz around with how “strong” Willem is, depending on what’s needed in the story; from Lillia’s point of view we see that he’s inhumanely strong, someone who could go from quasi-brave to brave status if say his entire family was wiped out (somehow these abilities are proportional to the amount of personal tragedy a person has experienced but the exact specifics of how that works are still a bit of a mystery). But from the point of view of everyone else, Willem included, even before his centuries long nap he’s simply fragile and limited. I do wish that Akira Kareno had written that aspect more gracefully, especially since it’s hard to take anyone’s word that Willem is “weak” whenever we do see him in a fight.
Other stories in this volume focus on Chtholly, Nygglatho, and others at the Faerie Warehouse and frankly all of the stories, even Lillia’s, are extraneous. There’s nothing new added to the overall story by any of them, we don’t come to a deeper understanding of any of the characters through them, so there’s just no point. You could argue that of course you wouldn’t find anything plot-relevant in a short story outside of the main books, especially one that was created after the main series had finished, but, as I said in my review of volume 5, I think the series already ended well and that Kareno is just dragging it out by this point. If anything, I think the ultra-short story in this collection focused on Lakhesh, the new wielder of the sword Seniorious – was meant to off-set the more up-beat parts of volume 5’s ending just so that a more grim present could be established in volume 1 of the current series SukaMoka.
So, as I said before, this series has already ended in a good place and I do not feel like I need, or want, more of it. I also still feel that this series had good bones and that it could’ve been even better with more editing but it’s fine as-is and I’m more interested in what other, unrelated works Kareno might produce than continuing along farther with this.