I watched four episodes, the last of which -- it was about a bloody arena fight with a "divine" magical creature that came about very suddenly -- only in fast forward.
Episode 1: six students meet on the way to the new magic school and are practically close friends from then on. At least according to the series. The friendship between the six magic students is not made credible. One of the magic students has a left-liberal attitude -- she campaigns for the rights of half-humans and animals. And she does so so extremely doggedly and ideologically. It seems to me as if the author only brought this character into play to create conflict between students and between students and teachers. Ultimately, these kinds of conflicts are also the main theme of the series in the first episodes -- what makes the magic school so dangerous from the start (20% of the students are to be killed by the end of the academy's lessons, which the headmistress announces right at the start with the motto "I don't care" ).
It quickly becomes clear that two characters play the main role: a student named Oliver Horn, who comes from an old family of magicians and apparently has hidden fighting knowledge and other secret talents. Occasionally, scenes are interspersed where he conspiratorially meets with a kind of female bodyguard and talks to her about a big task for which she is supposed to protect him at the dangerous school. The other main character is a supernaturally good samurai swords-woman who has already murdered many people and was simply plucked from a battlefield in the Far East at a critical moment to become a student at the magic school. She has a death wish and her hair turns white when she fights -- which ironically is supposed to indicate special magical purity... kind of strange for someone who has already killed a lot of people. In general, the show is less about magic than about sword fights. The magical environment in the fights only seems like decoration, what it really seems to be about is sword fights with fantasy elements, as you know from the Far Eastern samurai series.
This anime is well-equipped with violent scenes: blood flows, heads fly... but you don't really feel any empathy for the characters. This may also be because the anime -- which only has 15 episodes in season 1 -- seems to fast-forward through the plot of the basic light novel series too quickly and superficially.
Visually, the characters don't look very impressive. They all look like "normal" (no fat ones, they all have athletic builds) students. Only the hair color and hairstyle are played with a little, otherwise everything is boring and average. It takes a while before you can tell them apart.
I couldn't recommend the light novel series to anyone either, because the plot as a whole seems to me to be just an unoriginal, dark imitation of the Harry Potter plot.
