The 5th Shin no Nakama ja Nai to Yuusha no Party o Oidasareta node, novel (English subtitle: I Decided to Live a Quite Life in the Countryside) picks up from where the Anime, and presumably 4th novel, left off with a not so great opening. The main problems are the intermittent food focus (at this point I just assume it’s a Japanese thing to always be obsessing over food) and explicitly defining Ruti’s attachment to Red as sexual in nature despite its depiction being perfectly familial.
By the time of the gem beast fight though I had come around enough to actually be interested in following it further… albeit with low expectations since eventually the Ruti thing is going to have to be resolved.
After the lackluster 3rd Ansatsu Kizoku novel I was on the fence about whether to keep reading this series or not. The 4th however, while certainly not groundbreaking, certainly does change things up a bit in both good and bad ways. For the good we get two newly secondary characters with different personalities. For the bad, one of those characters looks like they’re on the fast-track into the harem while an earlier secondary character goes through what should be a fairly massive 24-episode character arc in the span of a few chapters. Just incredibly rushed character development that feels completely random.