Helck – Episode 4

Humanity has awakened to the strength of heroes.

The fourth episode of Helck has aired. Last we left off, Hyura got her arm cut off by the captain of the Winged Soldier and Helck decided to start moving. Will he be able to save her? And what is the mystery of the Winged Soldiers?

Some of the secrets come out here in our recap and review.

Recap

The fourth episode opens with the captain of the Winged Soldiers going to finish off Hyura while Anne watches on until Helck calls out for them by the name of Edil. The Winged Soldier speaks and removes his helmet, revealing him to be a Human. Or at least he used to be one before awakening.

It turns out he had high compatibility with awakening, so he was able to keep his sanity compared to the rest of the silent ones. They’re still weak enough to be manageable for someone of Vermilio’s level. However, the problem is that all of Humanity has awakened as Heroes when the last one prior to Helck and Cless was 255 years ago. Right now they’re weak, but as their compatibility grows and they gain Levels, they’ll eventually reach the same tier as Helck.

So, while Edil rants about how Demons are the root of all evil and they’ll create a world of true peace for Humans, Hyura gets back up and cuts off one of his wings. She can regenerate her body due to her clan, meaning that an average wound can heal in no time. She let herself lose an arm to make him drop his guard so that Vermilio could observe how Helck would react and swiftly clips his other wing.

She gets ready to bump him off while he talks about getting stronger, stating that when she becomes the next Demon Lord she’ll wipe out the Humans. Likewise, Vermilio agrees that peace isn’t an option since they’ve apparently been betrayed by Humans too often and don’t want to risk any of them getting as strong as Helck, so she uses Summoning Magic to create living bombs and thins their numbers. Edil gets a front-row seat to the destruction and is told to beg for mercy since he called her vermin, and maybe she’d spare his life.

He refuses, vowing to defeat her one day with his own hands. Then Hyura gets ready to kill him, so that day never comes, only for Helck to step in. The women peg him as a traitor when he tells them they must not kill a Winged Soldier, but then Edil gets stabbed by another Winged Soldier, much to their confusion.

As he lies dying, Edil states to Helck that he knows everything and it’s a shame since they would have completed the path in a little more time. That’s when Helck warns the others to run as the floor beneath them collapses and reveals a magic gateway at the bottom being fueled by a crystal. The Winged Soldiers used magic to create it, which is something they shouldn’t be able to do since it’s advanced magic.

However, because they interrupted the ritual instead of creating a path to the Human Realm, no one knows where it’ll lead. That’s a problem because even with the buff dude creating a barrier, it’s trying to suck in the entire castle. So Vermilio effectively decides to nuke it but has to get close enough to destroy the barrier crystal it’s using as a battery.

She manages to crack the crystal with one attack. But as she readies the next attack she gets clipped by a statue of Azudra. And while she does manage to destroy the crystal, she gets sucked inside with Helck as he reaches out for her. Vermilio then wakes up to find that she’s sleeping on Helck’s cape beneath a forested beach beneath a blue sky.

The after-credits scene is just a comedy scene of Azudra begging Vermilio not to cut her hair before she traveled with the others as Anne. He gets nuked and her hair gets cut, as things should be.

Review

Okay, so this episode basically gives away one of the mysteries of the Winged Soldiers that should come as no surprise: they’re Humans.

Or rather, they were Humans. Based on what Edil states, the awakening caused them an immense amount of pain and not all of them kept their ability to speak and reason. Edil being one of the few who had a high enough compatability was probably why he was leading that group.

However, what they lost in their capacity to speak, they gained in strength. They awakened as Heroes, who have the ability to get insanely strong if given enough time. Helck is easily the strongest person we’ve seen at Level 99, and his brother isn’t a slouch either to have defeated a previous Demon Lord. So that’s a problem.

Knowing that, its easy to see why both Hyura and Vermilio have both opted for the genocide route. Humans are clearly a nuisance at best unless a Hero is present. Then you have to actually pay attention to them, so letting all of them run free to grow stronger is just asking for issues later on.

At the same time, there’s clearly a knowledge gap between both sides. For one, Edil seems to think Demons are the root of all evil and speculate there may be others strong as the Demon Lord. He clearly knows nothing about the hierarchy of the Demon Realm or even the situation.

Helck, meanwhile, stopped them from trying to execute him. It was obviously something Edil wanted, given that when she wouldn’t another Winged Soldier did it for him. So while Vermilio and Hyura are sure that they can manage the Winged Soldiers at present, Helck knows something they still don’t.

So there are more mysteries that are abound, including how they know advanced magic like creating a Gate.

Despite the seriousness of everything that went down in the episode, it didn’t forget its comedy roots. Hyura, for all her surliness, got pissed off more about being called a vermin and referred to Edil as a hunk. That ties into her wanting to see the picture of Cless when she heard he looked handsome, so I guess she’s got a thing for eye candy.

Meanwhile, the other two seemed more content to let Vermilio and Hyura deal with the threats. Makes sense given that they aren’t really offensively inclined. One is just really fast, and the other is a defensive powerhouse. And then there was the fact that Vermilio got beaned by a figurine of Azudra as what sends her through the gateway.

Anyway, considering we know that the Demon Realm is always under a bleak sky and filled with poison, they’re clearly not there anymore. But, if they were in the Human Realm, that would mean the gateway was complete. So where did they end up?

That is a topic for next week.

Changes

Yet another faithful adaptation, it covered Chapters 10-12 of the Manga.

• There’s an Omake chapter covering Asta and Isuta, including the fact that they knew Hyura before the tournament.