Well, this was a no Piwi episode and of course, that can’t be a good thing. But I get it, there would have been no place for Piwi in this narrative, and it was one Helck needed to pursue. The tonal range with this series is extremely wide, sometimes within a single episode – it can go from slapstick to tragedy in the blink of an eye. Piwi is great for what he’s great for, but he doesn’t really fit when Helck goes as dark as it did this week. Not to mention most of the episode took place a long time before he (or Vermilio) ever came into the picture.
As promised, Helck is sharing his backstory with Anne. Ostensibly to convince her to take Hero Killer from him, but also because he surely feels the need to unburden himself. Helck’s story is also clearly a lot more than just his – it has connotations for how things got to the state they have between humans and demons. As you might expect it was a pretty hardscrabble upbringing, but there are some surprises in how thins got to this point.
The key figure in young Helck’s life is his little brother Cless, who we meet when the pair of them are eight and four respectively. Their village has been wiped out (including their parents) by monsters (a big problem at this stage in recent history), and Helck takes Cless to the capital to try and find a safer life. But there are monsters of a different sort in the city – the nobles and their children, who treat the masses like garbage. Even a life of daily beatings and near-starvation is better than living under the threat of monsters, so the boys stay put and suffer. Until one day the malnourished Cless falls ill, and one of the local old-timers tells Helck that he’ll die before the night becomes morning.
There are a few interesting takeaways from this sequence, starting with the fact that Helck had his powers (like super recovery) even as a little kid. And it seems pretty obvious that he was just about to go full Sith when he was unable to find any help for his brother on that fateful night. Fortunately a young noble named Sharuamy comes to his aid, clearly not possessed of the same loathing for the poor every other rich person we meet is. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree – she got it from her father Rafeed-san, who takes the boys home and summons a doctor just in time to save Cless’ life.
Long story short, the lesson young Cless takes away from all this is that he needs to become the warrior that will wipe out the monsters, because the inequality in the capital will never go away as long as it’s under the stress of refugees and random attacks. As for Helck he grows into a muscled laborer even as his brother becomes a legendary soldier at 18, and the brothers form a strong friendship with Sharuamy and her father (and in Cless’ case, something more). I think we’ve already scene enough to explain why Helck would turn a jaundiced eye towards humans, but there’s clearly a few more big shoes to drop here before this trip in the wayback machine is done.
