Helck – Episode 16

The smugest bastard in the entire series.

The sixteenth episode of Helck has aired. Zelgeon has approached Helck asking for his help. What secrets will he bring to light, and how will this lead to the end of humanity?

Let’s go over it in my Recap and Review.

Recap

The episode (which covers Chapter 45 to Chapter 47 of the Manga) opens with Zelgeon showing up to reveal the truth behind the Awakened Soldiers. They were all felons who were locked away for so long that they were little more than husks, only to become super buff via a spell that destroyed their mind in the process. They are effectively puppets, and the nobles intend to cast it on the entirety of the populace aside from the nobility, making them mindless slaves.

The Great Sage Mikaros is the one behind the plan with the other higher members of nobility backing it aside from Zelgeon, but they need a spell caster and a person who can act as the key for the spell. The King is the caster of the spell, but his location is kept secret so they don’t have much of a shot of stopping him. However, Cless is the key, so if they take Cless and run then the plan will fail.

Cless is unaware of any of this since he’s still unconscious, being little more than a tool. Zelgeon came to Helck because he heard the rumors and Cless, who is his best friend, spoke highly of him. So hearing that leaves Helck more than willing to help rescue his brother, and both Edil and Alicia are willing to help too despite it being treason.

They made their move by instigating a riot with the townspeople while the group infiltrated until they ran into a bunch of Awakened Soldiers that they managed to take out really easily. Along the way, Helck reveals the truth he discovered about the Demons, but they suspect that he was lied to because he was too nice. That being said, Alicia does state it would be wonderful if it was true, and once they were done here they would go to find out together.

Continuing on, they reach the room where Cless is supposed to be only to end up walking into a trap set up by Mikaros. The Great Sage stated that he expected Zelgeon to act as a traitor and disgrace, with the other high nobles chiming in that the lower class is little more than livestock. They get ready to gank the nobles when the King pops up and orders them to kneel, forcing Edil, Alicia, and Zelgeon to do so since they can’t disobey him. Then he orders them to commit suicide, and they get ready to do so until Helck refuses, which snaps them out of it.

Helck being able to break the control reveals that they regard Helck as a being higher than the king. Mikaros notes that Helck is too strong for Awakened Soldiers to beat as well, so they awaken his brother and order him to fight instead. Cless has a dark aura around him that has stripped him of all agency, so all of Helck’s pleas fall on deaf ears.

Mikaros then goes on a tangent, revealing he had been planning this since the day he found Cless had the ability to draw upon power from another world. This is a power only a Hero has, and even then it’s one that only appears rarely to the point that he could have searched for a thousand years to find someone compatible. However, Cless was too weak back then so it was necessary for him to level up his body to handle it. The outbreak of monsters made it possible to reach this point, but he notes that Helck could always kill Cless to end things (but he won’t because he’s a good brother).

That’s when Alicia pops in and slashes at Cless. It was little more than a scratch and the attack shouldn’t have been able to do anything to him considering how strong he is. But that scratch leaves him screaming out in pain due to her sword being special. It turns out that sword is one Mikaros recognizes as the “Hero Killer” sword, and because of that, they have a chance to get Cless out of there.

The others decide to buy time for Helck to take Cless and run. But Mikaros, being the dick that he is, steals the sword from her and goes after Helck. Since Helck had already awakened as a Hero, a single stab of that sword was enough to leave him screaming in agony as the episode ended.

Review

So, this episode basically highlights how the awakening process came to fruition. It was a plan that was spearheaded by the nobility of the Kingdom, which would strip the lower class of their minds while warping their bodies. With the King as the caster and Cless as the key, they would effectively turn everyone who wasn’t a noble into an Awakened Soldier to be tools for their use.

You could see the obvious moral issues with such a plan, so Helck, Edil, Zelgeon, and Alicia decide to put an end to that. They knew such a thing would be tantamount to treason, but the alternative was worse. And the fact that Cless was being used as the key to it was just more incentive for Helck to get involved.

However, the raid doesn’t go as planned since Mikaros proved to be as shady as he looked. He’d been planning on grooming Cless to become the key since the day he found him, and now that he was strong enough they were putting the plan into action. And while Helck is strong enough to actually fight Cless as a fellow Hero, he’s not going to kill his younger brother intentionally to end it.

That’s where Alicia steps in, as it’s revealed her sword is something only known to her immediate family and Mikaros as the Hero Killer. A single scratch of that thing was enough to basically strip the fight out of Cless due to him being a Hero. Unfortunately, because Helck is also a Hero, the moment the blade got stolen from her and used against him, it messed him royally.

How Alicia’s family got something specifically designed to kill Heroes is unknown, but that does explain why the sword was so effective to this point. Anything designed to kill a Hero would easily be able to kill monsters with little issue, let alone Awakened Soldiers. It’s just unfortunate that Alicia hadn’t been aware that Helck himself was a Hero, so if it got used against him it would be just as devastating.

It should also be noted that the Awakened Soldiers here were a lot weaker than I expected. Or rather, is it that Edil, Zelgeon, and Alicia are a lot stronger than I thought. Helck did the bulk of the work, but they were still capable of managing the ones they did face. That might explain why Edil and Zelgeon managed to keep their sanity after becoming Winged Soldiers since they were already strong enough to handle the sudden increase in power.

And its interesting to see that Zelgeon was supposed to assist the plan, but he was against it because he knew it was wrong. He also considered Cless his best friend since they served in the army at the same time. It raises my opinion of him, even if I think he needs to work on how loud his voice is.

Last, I actually liked how they didn’t immediately agree with Helck that the Demons were good. Too often friends would just believe the hero if they presented their opinion without a second thought. They even came up with a very rational response, namely that the Demons didn’t want to pick a fight with Helck so they told him what he wanted to hear. We know Azudra was speaking the truth, but their perspective makes sense.

Alicia being one who believes that, but was still willing to go investigate the truth with Helck, serves to further raise my opinion of her. She isn’t outright dismissing the possibility. She’d be more than happy if it was true, and she does trust Helck. So she wants to see it with her own eyes.

And by the logic of the fact that two out of the three people we’ve seen here are Winged Soldiers who kept their sanity, her sword was stolen now and we know that Helck has the broken half of it in the future, and she used a bow, I think we know what happened to her as well. She’s probably the Helmeted Winged Soldier we’ve seen working with the others in the past. But we still have to get to that point to see how it all unfolds.