There are certainly a lot of puzzle pieces still to put together here. But the picture at the moment says “what a waste” more than anything else. Helck’s flashback is a pretty tragic story, not solely for the bad stuff that happens but for the fact that so much of it seems to have been totally unnecessary. I guess we all strive to have someone to blame when things suck, but my suspicion is there’s something more sinister to all these goings on than that.
As the monster situation gets worse, the kingdom institutes a draft – which puts an end to Helck’s peaceful days as a laborer. To be honest it was pretty silly for him not to be fighting while humanity was basically under siege anyway, but the full extent of just how OP Helck is wasn’t widely known yet (or even known by him). He winds up in a unit serving alongside a young nobleman named Edil (Nanami Hiroki) that confronts one of the “new world monsters” we saw earlier. It wipes out the officers, but in battling it to buy time for his colleagues, Helck comes to realize just how strong he really is.
Eventually Helck and Edil (that name should sound familiar) return to the latter’s town hoping to recruit reinforcements, but the town has been besieged by NWMs and only the presence of a mercenary group has prevented the townsfolk from being massacred. Their leader, Alicia (Kondo Reina) is a whiz with a sword and has a magical blade to boot, but she quickly lamps onto the fact that even bare-handed Helck is stronger than any human has a right to be (to the point where it shakes her confidence). Alicia notes the “ease” with which he fights – so much so that he can worry about his comrades while in the midst of combat to the death.
Meanwhile, there’s Cless, who’s been sent on a mission to take out the demon lord on the grounds that he’s the one who’s been sending all these monsters into the human realm. That’s BS of course, though we have the benefit of hindsight. The question here is whether the human king truly believes it when he sends Cless on his mission, or whether he knows it’s a lie and is pursuing a darker agenda (my money is on the latter). Cless does kill the maou (seemingly) but is himself grievously wounded in the process. His comrades get him back to the capital but when the monster attacks keep on coming, the rabble aren’t exactly sympathetic to his condition.
My assumption is that Helck is going to discover the truth on his self-appointed mission to (re) kill the demon lord. There are a lot of steps between the series’s present and where things stand in Helck’s flashback, but we know that story about the demons sending the monsters is a lie (or at least false), and that Helck saw things which made him turn against humanity with extreme prejudice. Setting aside the fact that demonkin don’t seem evil on the whole, it’s rather sad that Helck should come to feel that way about his own kind, amongst whom are people that he genuinely loved. I’m betting that even the truth Helck things he understands “now” isn’t the full picture.
