Team-Building via Goblin-Killin'

Don't look at me like that, it's a good title.

The second volume of Apparently Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World picks up where the first volume ended. The new party, having made it through their first labyrinth with little trouble, decide to hit a second one that same day. This time it's the Goblin Forest, full of, you guessed it, dragons.

Sorry, forgot goblins aren't clever enough to pull that kind of trick. Initially, this is used to show how powerful this group of characters are. In the first battle, the spell Tiana casts simply to thin the goblins' numbers, instead kills all 10 of them. In the next battle, Karan cuts two goblins in half with one swing.

(Nick also briefly explains that "labyrinths" are just places rich in a miasma, a sort of goo that transforms plants and animals into monsters, and you have to kill the monsters to disperse the miasma and keep the monsters from growing strong enough they attack nearby villages. I don't get how killing monsters gets rid of the stuff that created them in the first place, but I think this is meant to explain why adventurers keep coming back to these places.

Also possibly to assuage any concerns the reader might have about goblins having their own culture and this really just being genocide-for-sport. Nope, nothing like that here! Those goblins are just poisoned, uh, horses, that's it. Yeah, horses, bent on killing everyone and everything you hold dear! No need to worry about sentience or have any qualms about killing them!)

Aside from that, the remainder of the Goblin Forest excursion is devoted to Nick's attempts to get Karan to relax in battle a little, instead of always checking that the others aren't getting ready to backstab her, and showing that Nick's not just "The Plan Guy," but a skilled fighter himself.

The manga remains focused on Nick and Karan after the goblin fighting, as it only briefly touches on what Tiana and Zem get up to with their portion of the rewards. Instead, we see Nick trying to pick out an accessory for Karan to replace a pendant of hers he accidentally broke. He crosses paths with Karan and we get a bit more of Karan's backstory and a little more trust building between the two characters. (And we see the trust building is working later, as Karan doesn't hesitate to take a beating from an enemy immune to physical attacks until Tiana can ready a spell to defeat it.)

The chapter ends with the group on another mission, this time to explore an old training labyrinth in the hopes of finding a mysterious magic sword. Many parties have searched, and none have succeeded, but a secret panel opens at the final dead end, so maybe this group's luck is looking up. On the other hand, it's a magic sword said to be powered by the bonds of trust between a party, so maybe this is a cursed chalice, like me getting an offer for a high-paying job that involves interacting with strangers constantly.