Blade & Bastard

📖 SYNOPSIS

Dragged back to life in the depths of a dungeon, Iarumas wakes with zero memories of who he was or how he got there, and he falls into a grim line of work: hauling the corpses of fallen adventurers back to the surface to see if they can be brought back to life. Sometimes the gods grant revival. Sometimes they turn the body to ash. Either way, Iarumas gets paid. It's a living, if you can call it that.

His cold, transactional approach to death doesn't win him many friends, and most adventurers treat him somewhere between useful and repulsive. That changes slightly when he crosses paths with Garbage, a feral swordswoman who's the last one standing from a wiped-out party. Together they push deeper into the labyrinth, facing the kind of monsters and traps that make the dungeon feel less like a place to explore and more like a place designed to kill you.

This one comes from Kumo Kagyu, the author behind Goblin Slayer, and features character designs by so-bin, the illustrator for Overlord. The whole thing is rooted in the classic Wizardry RPG universe, so it leans hard into old-school dungeon crawling where death is cheap and resurrection is a coin flip. If you liked the unforgiving tone of Goblin Slayer or the oppressive depth-exploration dread of Made in Abyss, this hits a similar nerve. Dark, gritty, and weirdly philosophical about what it means to come back from the dead.