Episode 6 – My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s

This episode does a great job of enhancing the mystery of the show. As I mentioned last week, from the beginning of this series, we’re inclined to believe that there’s more to demons than they seem. After all, if the King of Men is evil, then the devil must be evil, if not kind, then at least misunderstood, right? Meeting Night only reinforces this idea, with the Demon King inviting Akira to his territory and taking no active action against our heroes despite being able to see what he’s done.

However, all this seems to have changed. Now the Demon King wants to kill Akira and capture Amelia. Of course, this contradicts what Yoru was told, which means one of two things: 1) Aurum got the wrong orders from higher up the chain of command, or 2) the Demon King changed his mind.

In this episode, it’s strongly hinted that the latter is correct – once the Demon Lord discovered Amelia’s resurrection powers, his original plans to befriend Akira were thrown out the window. All signs point to him wanting to resurrect his lover. However, given the rules of resurrection – that it must be used immediately after death – this seems impossible. However, if he found a way to do it, but at the cost of Amelia’s life, for example, his sudden change in attitude toward Akira would make sense. Akira would never tolerate this, nor would Amelia be willing to do it – hence the need to kill Akira and capture Amelia.

Speculations aside, Demon King’s 180-degree completeness makes us wonder if demons and humans are equally evil. Night does his best to make Akira understand that there are a lot of good demons in the world, but that certainly goes against what we’ve seen with Orum (and the Demon King’s agent), as he was willing to sacrifice the entire population of a major human city to capture Amelia. Then, the Human King captured and sacrificed a large number of his own people to summon a group of Japanese students to the world.

This in turn brings us Leah, a new character. While she explained how the victims were captured through her tragic backstory—coincidentally, how Amelia ended up trapped in black goo and Akira discovered her—she didn’t quite fit the character for me. The double cliché of her being both an orc (a secondary love interest after the main elf love interest, of course) and another princess was a bit too much for me. And, she’s almost a note now. Hopefully my opinion will change as she develops further.

Finally, I noticed a drastic drop in animation quality in this episode. Most of the time, Night suddenly lacks lip quivers, and any time it’s possible to use static shots instead of actual movement, they do. That said, the longest series of these works is quite good, as they are used as visual complements to Night’s illustrative dialogue, and have a creative color palette that makes them more visually interesting. Hopefully this week’s animation woes are just a temporary blip and things will be back to normal soon.

grade:

My status as an assassin is obviously higher than that of a hero Currently live broadcast
Crunchy roll.