Helck – Episode 22

And so my secondary ship launches and gets sunken in the span of twenty minutes.

The twenty-second episode of Helck has aired. The siege of the castle takes another twist, resulting in a shift in the balance. Now we must say goodbye to a character who regained his free will right at the very end.

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

Recap

The episode (which covers Chapter 62 to Chapter 64 of the Manga) opens with Hyura going against Edil and chiding him for going easy on her because she’s injured. She tells him to fight seriously or go against the others, but he can’t because they’re so happy-go-lucky that they remind him of his old comrades who used to work with Helck. But if it’s her it’s a different story, as he lashes back that he’s gotten stronger fighting her.

She tells him she’ll just get stronger than him again to widen the gap, and he states he’ll just catch up to her again. Then he states he wants to fight her forever because she’s the only one for him, at which point she calls a timeout and asks for clarification. He goes tsundere, but the fact that he can means he’s starting to shake off the King’s spell and that’s making him slightly unstable.

At the same time, Asta asks Shalamy about the King and claims she came to visit him, at which point she pranks her by claiming she is the king. That being said, after the joke she agrees to show her there in exchange for taking her to see Helck and Cless by helping her escape. Asta figures that taking her might be the right call since she’s attached to Helck and pretty much the only normal Human left alive, plus she’s gotten attached to her.

So they go through the castle with Shalamy pulling some parkour moves and revealing she has a special ability to create snow, which actually can spread other forces of energy over a large area. Asta, immediately figures out that if it was poisonous and no way to stop it, then she’d be a major asset. But then Shalamy gets scatterbrained and doesn’t even remember why she wanted to go that way in the first place.

That’s when Asta hears footsteps and they start running. She ends up being led to the King’s chamber, whereupon Shalamy nearly knifes her in the back while under his control. At that point, Rafaed shows up and calls out the Human King for using the Divine Word on his daughter when the plan didn’t call for it. Shalamy falls unconscious and Rafaed recognizes Asta as the presence he sensed earlier, offering her a compliment for managing to get to his daughter without being detected.

Sensing she won’t be able to escape, Asta goes to assassinate the Human King but Rafaed basically flash-steps in front of the attack while two of the Awakened Warriors pin her down. He then tells her that if she’d killed the Human King the awakened would stop being so docile and become monsters on par with New-World Lifeforms. There’s nothing the Demons can do either, as even if they stopped their advance by killing the Human King, it would cause nothing but destruction and death, meaning they’ve been checkmated.

We then cut back to Ista, who feels something is wrong with her sister before going back to Azudra facing off against Mikaros. The latter claims that trying to capture the Winged Soldiers alive was a mistake and breaks the King’s spell on the two he had in the room, transforming them into powerful monsters like Rafaed claimed. Azudra could handle two of them, but he broke the spell on every one of them who came to attack the castle, meaning they numbered more than 20,000 in total.

Mikaros can’t beat him personally, but they can’t beat his army, so as far as he was concerned it was a win for him since his goal was to be able to create such an army with ease. Azudra calls for Hon and orders the castle evacuated in light of this. Then he borrows the last strength of the great tree to ensnare all of them.

Hyura nearly gets blasted by one of the monstrous Awakened Soldiers, but Edil manages to grab her and fly her to safety. He hasn’t transformed, which Mikaros notices means he’s built up enough willpower to resist the effects of the King’s spell. So he decides to use him as a final pawn against Azudra.

At the same time, Hyura talks about the situation with Edil, and they theorize that his affinity for awakening prevented him from transforming as they did. But she’s concerned about making sure Azudra stays alive, so she asks Edil to give her a ride. He agrees while telling her she looks pretty and feeling Helck might have been right about making peace with the Demons.

Then Mikaros interfered, claiming that awakened warriors who kept their personalities grew faster and he was hoping that meant they would become more valuable assets. But he decides that removing their sense of personality was the right call and reveals he built a method in to destroy their minds as needed, using something called Mind Break. That robs him of his mental stability and renders him unable to resist the power of the New World.

Hyura gets pissed and tries to kill Mikaros, who decides he’s going to strangle her to death while she can’t heal. But with the last of his free will, Edil splits him away from her and she slices him to pieces. Not that it kills him, as he states now that the change has begun Edil will become nothing more than a fighting machine until the day he dies.

Sure enough, Edil starts to transform and tells her to run away while hoping that Helck will end the war soon. She just needed to stay strong until then. But she tells him to worry about himself and to get a hold of himself, only for him to apologize for everything he said before he finishes his transformation. She tells him to come back as he flies off to confront Azudra.

Review

So anyway, this episode pretty much spells the end of Edil as an independent character and shifts the stakes of the battle as Azudra gets taken down. One of the Four Heavenly Lords was bested in battle and the castle was lost. And my secondary ship was sunken right when it was set to sail.

Damn you, Mikaros!

So to start, we learned that what Helck said was true. Those who were awakened only kept their human forms because they were under the King’s spell. If that spell gets broken, then they can’t resist the power of the New World and warp into the monstrous forms we saw when they first awakened.

The only exception to this are those who had a higher affinity for the awakening and kept their memories. Their personalities were warped by the King’s spell, but with enough time and willpower, they can fight that off. That’s what happened to Edil due to his fight-boner with Hyura, which is a ship that I honestly didn’t mind surprisingly enough.

However, Mikaros being a bastard, kept a failsafe that allowed him to shatter the minds of those he transformed. And without their willpower to keep the power of the New World in check, they can’t stop the transformation. Thus, Edil could only use his final moments to bid Hyura farewell and place his hopes on Helck.

Unfortunately, Mikaros already anticipated Helck being a factor and has the Helmeted Soldier, who is Alicia, as a pawn to be used against him. And we’ve seen that his failsafe will work on anyone he’s personally awakened. So with a snap of his fingers, he can do to her what he did to Edil, who has already broken free of the King’s spell.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, now we know who was responsible for the Mass Awakening as well: Shalamy.

She was likely born with the special ability to create that snow that can spread across other forms of energy or spells and then was brainwashed by the King to spread the spell to awaken the rest of humanity. Cless was the source, but she was the catalyst. And she’s been kept in the dark about it due to how it seems to screw with her memories.

What’s interesting is that Rafaed called the Human King fallen, basically chewing him out for stepping over his authority by using the Divine Word on his daughter when not part of the plan. The Human King is likely a puppet himself under Mikaros’ control. Considering that he and Rafaed are the only two who have complete freedom from the Human King, it’s likely that one of them acts as his minder in the same way Mikaros can for the others.

Boy, she’s not going to be happy once she figures out what happened to Cless. If she ever does considering that now that Asta has been caught she’s likely going to be imprisoned under even stricter guards. Here’s hoping that when Helck gets to the castle he’ll be able to rescue her.