Terminate the Other World!

Blurb

NSLICE-00P is the Empire’s most advanced combat unit — a cyborg soldier fused with the organic remnants of a human host. When a mission goes sideways, she finds herself transported to a fantasy world with no orders, no chain of command, and no means of return.

Her primary directive remains intact: locate and evaluate a potential commander capable of leading Earth’s forces. Secondary objective: survive.

The world she lands in has its own ideas about what she is. The local system classifies her as a dungeon core inhabiting a humanoid body, granting her access to both personal abilities and dungeon-tier perks. NSLICE-00P files this information under “asset to be exploited” and gets to work.

Terminate the Other World! is a humorous isekai LitRPG featuring a relentlessly logical, mission-focused protagonist navigating a world that keeps trying to file her under “monster.”

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I’ve read the first two books.

I picked this up after seeing it recommended on reddit as an interesting take on dungeons. I was hoping for something in the Dungeon of Knowledge vein, where the dungeon mechanic drives the whole story. What you actually get is almost the opposite: a no-nonsense military AI who treats the dungeon system as one more tool in service of a very specific objective.

That framing has its appeal. If you want a hyper-focused robot protagonist who never second-guesses herself and approaches fantasy tropes with the energy of someone filing incident reports, it couldbe satisfying about watching NSLICE-00P work. She exploits the magic system well, the battles are fun, and the accumulation of an undead-and-monster household is humorous.

The disappointment is that the premise has more ceiling than the story uses (well, at least for the first two books). The dungeon-personal fusion should theoretically be fascinating to min-max as you have a character who can stack personal skills on top of dungeon perks and run two experience trees at once. But NSLICE-00P’s singular focus means she’s always moving toward the next potential commander, never pausing long enough to dig into what she actually has. Compare this to an AI MC like Alexander in Portal to Nova Roma, where human emotional bleed-through is the whole point. Terminate the Other World inverts that: the cybernetics are firmly in charge, the organic host is suppressed, and the result is a protagonist who is exactly what she’s described as being (a terminator). Which, it turns out, can cause some issues with prose and dialogue.

Right, so… prose. It’s a thing. The lack of inner monologue is a structural choice the author has to work around somehow, and the solution is a lot of third-person explanatory narration. This narration has a habit of saying the same thing twice (or more), then saying it again at the start of the next paragraph as if the reader has forgotten. Some of this really should have been picked up in a line edit pass. Last sentence of Chapter 28:

And so, the Exploratores of Utrad received word that an Amicitia Populi Elteni had arrived in their province …

First sentence of chapter 29:

And so, the group turned in for the night, each in their own very high-quality room, leaving NSLICE-00P on her own for a bit.

When NSLICE-00P encountered undead working a farm:

And so … she concluded relations with the organization the necromancers were affiliated with superseded any hostility with the undead themselves. And so … these undead were not, in fact, subject to on-sight re-termination.

And so, I really got tired of the overused exposition construction and wished for an MC who would have idle chatter, inner dialogue, or something a bitttt more human. For another example, in a fight scene, where you want pace and momentum, three pages of restating NSLICE’s retreat conditions killed me.

And above all … retreating from a hostile non-standard was something NSLICE-00P only ever did when ordered to, or when her calculations predicted near-certain defeat.

All of this combined meant NSLICE-00P would only withdraw if victory was practically impossible. In the case of the ursanus, even the strongest weapons in her arsenal proved almost entirely ineffective against it, while her defenses were woefully insufficient. At that point, she had no further means by which to change the probability of success, and withdrew.

Onto dialogue, and I can see people loving it or hating it. Characters have unique ways of speaking, and the author has gone all in on their various affectations, whether its NSLICE-00Ps robot dialogue, the rat’s skaven speech, the spider’s valley-girl tic. They all read as fun worldbuilding initially but wear thin across two books. Your mileage will vary depending on how much patience you have for that kind of sustained voice gimmick.

Example MC dialogue:

“Gratitude: This unit thanks the friendlies for the intelligence report. Hostile intent has been confirmed. Engaging termination protocols.”

Example rat dialogue:

“Fly-flee, you fool-things, yes-yes!”

Example spider dialogue:

Lilussees nodded. “I hate to, like, agree with the snack, but that’s, like, a mana storm or something. Those are, like, pretty dangerous or something.”

If this sounds fun, great. So, if you want a deadpan robot protagonist and a magic system with actual thought behind it, this delivers. If you picked it up hoping the dungeon mechanic or the AI-in-a-fantasy-world premise would go somewhere more exploratory, it might not scratch that itch.