Combatants Will Be Dispatched! Review: The Isekai Where the Hero Is Filing Expense Reports for Evil

I came to this manga the way a lot of people probably did: I'd finished KonoSuba, I missed that specific brand of stupid, and I wanted Natsume Akatsuki to do it to me again. What I didn't expect was how much the inversion would land. KonoSuba is about a guy who wants to be a hero and keeps failing. This is about a guy who is contractually obligated to be evil and keeps accidentally doing good — and gets in trouble for it.

The hook that kept me reading was small and dumb and perfect: Six, the protagonist, literally earns "Evil Points" from his evil corporation for committing bad deeds, and he spends them on weapons and upgrades shipped in from Earth. So the entire emotional engine of the manga is a man trying to be a worse person on purpose, for the loot. I'd never seen a power-progression system that ran on being a jerk. It made me laugh on page one and it kept paying off.

Quick Take

• From Natsume Akatsuki, the creator of KonoSuba — same comedic DNA, inverted premise
• An agent of an evil corporation is sent to conquer a fantasy world and has to commit evil deeds to earn the "Evil Points" he spends on gear
• Crude, suggestive humor; sexual harassment is used as a recurring joke — squarely an older-teen read, ageRating: T (Teen)

Story Overview

The Kisaragi Corporation is a secret evil organization on Earth that's so good at conquering things it's basically run out of Earth to conquer. So its leaders point Combat Agent Six — their crude, self-serving top operative — at a newly discovered fantasy world, paired with a newly built android named Alice, to scout and seize it.

The catch is that conquering a world requires the world to still be standing. Six and Alice land in the Kingdom of Grace, which is already getting steamrolled by the Demon Lord's army. To operate freely, the two pose as righteous mercenaries in service to Princess Tillis, which means Six spends his days defending the kingdom he's secretly supposed to take over.

The Evil Points system is the spine of the whole thing. Six can only requisition real firepower from Kisaragi by doing genuinely rotten stuff and reporting it in — harassing his own subordinates, cheating, looting, generally being a menace. So every fight becomes a negotiation between "win the battle" and "be enough of a creep to afford winning the battle." Over twelve volumes the story moves from skirmishes against the Demon Lord's forces toward the bigger truth about this world, the desert and the Sand King in the final stretch, and what Kisaragi actually wants out here — while Six, despite himself, keeps becoming the thing he's trying not to be.

Characters

Combat Agent Six is the engine and the punchline. He's cowardly, lecherous, petty, and openly out for himself — and he's also genuinely competent and, buried under all of it, not actually willing to let people die. His arc isn't a redemption so much as a slow, grumbling, never-admitted slide into caring about the people around him, which is funnier and more honest than a clean hero turn.

Alice is the android Kisaragi sends with him, and she's the straight man to his chaos. She's a hardline science supremacist who can't stand magic, undead, or anything occult, and she delivers tactical analysis with flat exasperation. Her quiet arc is that her "I'm just calculating outcomes" attitude keeps cracking to reveal she's actually invested in Six and the mission.

Snow is the ambitious Knight-Commander of Grace who gets saddled as Six's executive officer. She starts as a glory-hungry opportunist and is, bluntly, Six's most frequent harassment target — the "do an evil deed for Evil Points" gag runs through her constantly — but over time she shifts toward genuinely prioritizing protecting her comrades.

Grimm is an archbishop of the Zenarith faith who can use curse and resurrection magic. She's gone a bit self-destructive over having missed her chance at marriage, and she develops feelings for Six too — the manga loves giving its women one absurd flaw and then leaning on it hard.

Heine — "Heine of the Flame" — is one of the Demon Lord's Elite Four generals. Captured and effectively handed over to Kisaragi, she becomes another target for Six's Evil-Points antics, and her humiliation-fueled determination to get back at him turns her into a recurring foil rather than a real threat.

What I Love About It

The single best running idea in this manga is that virtue is a budget problem. Six wants to win, but winning needs Earth weaponry, and Earth weaponry costs Evil Points, and Evil Points only come from being a bad guy — so the manga turns "should I do the right thing here" into a literal cost-benefit calculation every single time. It's a comedy structure I genuinely hadn't seen before, and it lets Akatsuki's writing have it both ways: Six gets to be a creep for the gag and a reluctant hero for the plot, and the system makes both true at once.

What sells it is Alice as his counterweight. She's an android who insists she just runs the numbers, but the manga keeps undercutting that — she covers for him, she sticks with the mission past any rational reason, and she's the only one who can flatly call him pathetic and have it read as affection. The Six-and-Alice double act is the part I'd actually defend as good rather than just funny. Their dynamic gives a deliberately shallow gag comedy a center of gravity, so when you've laughed at Six being garbage for a whole volume, there's still someone in the frame who, against her own programming, clearly gives a damn.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The bit that crystallized the whole manga for me is the Evil-Points economy in motion: Six needing better gear, realizing the only way to afford it is to rack up evil deeds, and then deliberately tormenting Snow — his own officer — specifically so Kisaragi will sign off on shipping him a weapon. It's awful, it's transactional, and it's framed as completely routine paperwork. Snow's outrage is real; Six's calculation is colder than the harassment.

What makes it stick is how the manga refuses to let him off the hook OR fully condemn him. The exact same loot he extorts out of being a creep is what he then uses to save the kingdom in the next fight. The joke is that the system has made cruelty and heroism the same purchase. Reading it, I kept laughing and then catching myself — because the gag only works if you accept that Six really is that guy, and the manga never pretends otherwise. Fair warning: the harassment-for-points material, especially around Snow and the captured Heine, is constant, and it's exactly the kind of humor that'll either be your speed or send you running.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• The Evil Points premise is a genuinely fresh comedy engine, not just a KonoSuba reskin
• Six and Alice's double act gives the gags a real center
• Complete at 12 volumes in English — no waiting, no dangling threads
• Masaaki Kiasa's art is clean and reads well, with good comedic timing and expressive faces

Cons

• The sexual-harassment-as-comedy is frequent and central, not incidental
• It's broader and less surprising than KonoSuba once the premise settles in
• Character depth is intentionally thin — this is a gag machine first
• Crude, horny comedy is a hard taste line: this one genuinely won't work for everyone, and that's fine

Is Combatants Will Be Dispatched! Worth Reading?

If you liked KonoSuba and you want another dose of Akatsuki's mean, fast, self-aware comedy — and you can roll with the crude humor — yes. The Evil Points hook keeps it from being a pure clone, the Six/Alice pairing carries it, and at twelve complete volumes it knows exactly how long to stay. If raunchy harassment gags are a dealbreaker for you, skip it without guilt.

Art Style

Masaaki Kiasa handles the manga art (Kakao Lanthanum did the original character designs from the light novels). It's clean, expressive, and built for comedy — the reaction faces land, the gag timing is paced well across panels, and the action stays readable instead of turning into noise. The fantasy-world creatures and the Demon Lord's forces get enough visual variety to keep the backdrop interesting even when the plot is mostly an excuse for jokes.

Similar Manga

Title	Its Approach	How Combatants Differs
KonoSuba	Same author; a would-be hero who keeps failing upward	Combatants inverts it — a would-be villain who keeps succeeding at heroism
How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord	Isekai comedy leaning on a powerful but socially awkward lead	Combatants' lead is competent and willingly awful, not awkward
My Next Life as a Villainess	Comedy from being cast as the "bad" role in a fantasy setting	Combatants' hero is actually trying to be evil, not escape it

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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