Title: Solo Leveling Vol. 2
Author: Dubu (Redice Studio), Chugong (Original Story)
Publisher: Yen Press
Language: English
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Genre: Fantasy, Action
Publication Date: July 20, 2021
The Story
Volume two of Solo Leveling picks up with Jinwoo fighting his way through the dungeon that he entered after his reawakening. Here, he has to face some steel-fanged wolves with a sword he acquired from the D-Rank dungeon in the previous volume. While Jinwoo struggles at first, he begins to beat the wolves back one by one until he levels up. Once he notices his stats going up, he continues to level up until he feels confident in taking on what he thought was the dungeon’s boss.
Once he clears the dungeon, he re-enters the real world and realizes that the real dungeon boss escaped. A bunch of low-rank hunters is trying to fight the stone golem, but they’re simply not doing enough damage to it. With his sword already broken, Jinwoo figures he’ll just throw it at the boss which shatters its defense. The hunters then take it down.
Next, Jinwoo needs to pay his rent so he joins a strike team as an extra. His only job is to carry the bags and equipment while the team goes in and just overpowers everything. Everything seems to be going well until they discover mana crystals in the boss’ lair. They claim that they’re going to go get their tools when they suddenly cause a cave-in to trap Jinwoo and a D-Rank hunter named Jinho inside. Luckily for Jinho, Jinwoo has leveled up to LVL 18 and takes down the boss by himself, netting him enough experience to get to LVL 21.
When the strike team returns, their nefarious plan is as clear as day and Jinwoo receives a quest from the system to slay the betrayer hunters. At this point, a personality shift occurs and Jinwoo becomes filled with bloodlust.
After the incident, word reaches the U.S. to an S-Ranked hunter named Dongsoo Hwang. The leader of the strike team was his older brother and now he has a personal vendetta against Jinwoo and Jinho. Speaking of Jinho, he makes a pretty lucrative offer to Jinwoo to form a strike team with him. Apparently, if he can clear 19 more dungeons, he can form a corporate guild for his father’s company. Jinwoo has conditions but he accepts the deal. Since he knows that he’s going to have to carry this strike team by himself, he opens a gate via the system to another solo dungeon looking to gain even more strength.
Characters
Jinwoo underwent a pretty big transformation in this volume. At first, he was meek and timid which is the cookie-cutter recipe for most fantasy main characters these days; however, Jinwoo decided that he’s not going to take anyone’s crap anymore a lot sooner than most main characters do. His shift in attitude makes him question some of his morals but, in the end, he decides that if the system is going to use him, then he’s going to use the system… even if the system’s desires for him are rather questionable.
This causes a bit of an attitude change in Jinwoo where he’s not scared of anything anymore. He went from really meek to really nonchalant about even the toughest of scenarios. One could say that his confidence got the biggest stat boost of them all. It makes you wonder if he’s only like this because he’s able to tackle low-rank enemies with ease now. One has to think what might his reaction be should he come face to face with something way more powerful than him. Then again, with some of the special skills he has acquired in this volume, it’s easy to see why he’s more confident in himself.
Jinho is a new character that seems like a nice kid. He has some really expensive armor gifted to him by his father to commemorate his first dungeon raid. Once he sees how powerful Jinwoo had become, he thinks that he’s a false ranker and begins to idolize him just a bit. Even though he knows his father’s ambitions are born out of greed, he’s still excited over the prospect of forming a corporate guild. All his father wants to do is use the guild to raid dungeons for essence and mana stones and sell them to make a ton of profit.
Jinho doesn’t hide any of this from Jinwoo and even makes him a very nice offer. Jinwoo had no intention but once he saw the price tag, he took the bait and agreed to form the strike team so Jinho can get his guild license. It’s kind of odd to see someone act so pure and innocent while knowing full well that he’s only doing the bidding of a greedy corporate overlord that happens to be his father. It adds a nice duality to the character. I just wonder if that sincerity is going to come back and bite him in the end?
Joohee didn’t get a lot of screen time but it was interesting to note that when the dungeon boss escaped, everyone began to wonder how its armor suddenly broke and they were able to defeat it? Joohee was the only one who wondered if it was Jinwoo that stopped by and did something. It’s kind of an odd thing to wonder but I guess if it furthers their developing relationship, then why not?
Dongsuk Hwang, the older brother of S-Rank Hunter, Dongsoo Hwang, was the leader of the strike squad that recruited Jinwoo and Jinho as extras. At first, he just seemed like a friendly and confident tank that had a lot of experience clearing C-Rank dungeons without a healer. Then, he showed his true colors as he and his group were just there for the loot and would do anything to get it… even if it meant killing a couple of extras because, after all, much like Vegas… what happens in a dungeon stays in a dungeon.
This, of course, grants him a bit of karma. Once Jinwoo obeys the system, news of Dongsuk’s death reaches Dongsoo in America. And thus, we have the birth of, possibly, the series’ main antagonist!
Final Thoughts
After embarrassingly starting on the last page and trying to read right to left, I flipped the book over and had to retrain myself to read a comic book as the rest of us here in America typically do. That’s just a sign that I read too much manga… or not enough.
With that minor slip-up out of the way, I have to say that I really enjoyed the second volume of Solo Leveling. I loved the character shift for Jinwoo and I’m really happy that he’s not just some kind of weakling who gets stomped every single volume like a lot of these other fantasy/isekai stories tend to do. He grew a backbone and grew it pretty quickly. I know that Joohee kind of fell for the weak Jinwoo, though so I wonder what she’s going to think when the two of them eventually cross paths again.
Oh, and if you can’t tell where I’m going with that, there’s no way this story continues without Joohee joining Jinwoo and Jinho’s strike team. The mere fact that she was shown for a page of two was done so with a purpose. It was to remind us that she’s still part of this story. I can already predict that she seeks out Jinwoo to see if her intuition back at the boss fight was correct and when she does, she’ll get roped into joining the team.
I can already imagine Jinwoo sighing because now he has to get even stronger to protect two people instead of one. (Technically, he’ll be protecting the whole team but since members come and go, he might think of extras as cannon fodder). Either way, I think it’s a bit predictable but they need a way to work her back into the spotlight and this is the perfect way to do it.
The next volume looks to start the same way this one did… with Jinwoo in a dungeon so we’ll see how that goes! Looking forward to it!
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This item was provided for review by Yen Press
