Everyone has a role to play and a time to play it.
The eleventh episode of Goblin Slayer Season 2 has aired. The party has received a Quest from the King to retrieve his sister from the Goblins in the Dungeon of the Dead. Will they be able to bring her back before it’s too late?
Let’s find out in a Recap and Review.
Recap
The episode opens with the Heroine’s group arriving to meet the King as they direct her towards the meteor that came crashing down on the Holy Mountain. They want her to deal with it and have prepared a modest reward, which the Heroine is about to refuse until she gets told by her allies to take what’s offered instead of doing it for free. They then get into some small talk while the King is hoping Goblin Slayer’s party can get his sister back.
With the party, Female Merchant briefs the group along with procuring them some horses that, paired with Dwarf Shaman’s spell, will hopefully get them to the Princess fast enough. Lizard Priest relishes the chance to explore the famed dungeon while killing the green devils, but High Elf Archer points out that she was the one who stole Priestess’ treasured chainmail. Priestess states that regardless of that she can’t be all right with letting something bad happen to her.
Sword Maiden thanks them for taking the quest in her place and hands them a map covering what she remembered from the Dungeon of the Dead while Goblin Slayer hands her the research notes he compiled on the markings. The map goes to the Fourth Floor, with it being noted that is where the heart of the Dungeon lies. If they needed to go further than that, none of them were going to make it alive without a blue ribbon she had turned into an amulet.
Once they leave, Female Merchant and Sword Maiden discuss if they would ever want to go back on adventures again. Sword Maiden notes she no longer has the courage to face anything she fears and Female Merchant states it takes everything she has just to look upon them. They would like nothing more than for all the Goblins to disappear.
Meanwhile, Priestess finds her staff at the overturned cart and they conclude she was likely taken as a sacrifice for some kind of ritual. Goblin Slayer notes that if they had been intending to do so from the start then this plan was too sloppy, but they don’t have time to think about that. They hurry along to the entrance to the Dungeon of the Dead, which is a fortress city leading into a mountain. Goblin Slayer figures they’ll place her at the top of it or the bottom, so they decide to sneak in while conserving their resources since they won’t be leaving until they are done.
Inside the Dungeon of the Dead, the party almost immediately gets harassed by the Goblin Riders and starts killing them. But their numbers are so great that High Elf Archer fears running out of arrows so they book it after Goblin Slayer sets a good number of them on fire with gasoline before he uses another Gate Scroll. He notes this time it was connected to a high point in the sky rather than the bottom of the ocean, so it’s going to be raining Goblins somewhere soon.
However, they’ve ended up in an area where they can’t light fires, and their Dark Vision is hampered, meaning they need to take a breather. Priestess apologizes for not being much help, but they assure her she’ll play her part when she needs to. Then they press on until they find an elevator.
Meanwhile, cutting over to the Heroine, we see her party is facing some kind of eldritch abomination made of what looks to be the Goblins that got sent through the Gate scroll. The mage wants to nuke it, but Heroine states that if she does that and the mountain gets shorter she’ll get yelled at. However, they note the creature learns from whatever it absorbs and because it absorbed the Goblins, who are stupid and weak, it’s become much easier to kill and so Heroine one-shots it.
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Then we go back to Goblin Slayer, who notes that there’s a spellcaster among the Goblins they need to deal with. However, they also note that they’d be in a bad position if they get to the bottom of the elevator and get swarmed, so High Elf Archer uses her ears to get a read on their numbers and pick up a strange smell. Lizard Priest reasons it might be them performing a ritual and they probably don’t want to breathe in whatever it is, so Priestess cloaks them with Purify so they can’t be poisoned by it and Dwarf Shaman provides dancing lights for visibility.
Once they have their roles set, they act them out as they arrive at the ritual site where the Princess lies in the center of an altar and is protected by a Goblin Priest who casts Protection around them. They settle for cleaning up the mooks around them but Priestess feels something bad coming and realizes that the blood around them is fueling it. So she casts Purify again and removes the blood, dropping the Protection.
The Goblin Priest then tries to use Princess as a hostage, but he gets taken out with a nutshot by Goblin Slayer who then bashes his skull in as the episode ends.
Review
And with this episode, we return to the goblin-slaying greatness, whereupon a party of high-level adventurers put way more effort into dealing with a threat that most others would dismiss.
So let’s explore everything.
The party set out with a map in one hand and a plan in the other to rescue the Princess, who they could only hope was still alive by the time they reached. Fortunately for them, and her, since she was meant to be a virgin sacrifice they didn’t do unspeakable things to her. So they arrived just in time to see her sitting at the altar where a Goblin Priest was prepared to conduct the ritual.
I have to say, I liked how the party went through all their options and came up with the best solution. They had more than one option for every approach they took, debated which course was best, and then took it. They weighed the choice between their resources and discussed their roles so everyone knew what they had to do. You don’t usually see that sort of planning by most groups during a D&D campaign, which this basically is.
And once more Purify got used creatively twice. First, it acted as a self-contained field so they didn’t breathe in the miasma coming from the blood sacrifices. And then to remove the blood fueling the Protection spell, leaving the Goblin Priest free to get his balls smashed in.
Plus, we got another creative use of the Gate spell. Instead of linking it to the bottom of the sea, he linked it to the upper atmosphere, which sucked the Goblins in and dropped them on the Holy Mountain where the eldritch abomination from Darkest Dungeon absorbed them and ended up getting debuffed. This is the second time that Goblin Slayer’s party has made Heroine’s job so much easier, yet it will go unnoticed.
Anyway, there’s still an episode left and it’d be too clean for things to just end. So expect the finale to wrap up this arc and see our party off.
Differences in Adaptation
This episode starts Volume 8, Interlude, and goes to near the end of Chapter 8:
- Dwarf Shaman used the Tail Wind Spell to get the horses to move faster and make up the time difference between the attack in the morning and when they reached the Dungeon.
- As he explains it, Dwarves aren’t the best at using Wind Spirits but they need to be acquainted with all four of the great spirits (Fire, Wind, Water, and Earth) in order to turn earth into iron.
- The reason the plan was sloppy, in Goblin Slayer’s mind, was because it relied on chance. The Princess they needed just so happened to run away from home, happened to travel north on the main highway, and happened to wander into her captive’s waiting hands. If they were targeting her intentionally that was way too lucky.
- Along their way to the Dungeon, they run across some Goblins who got caught up in the looting and fell behind the rest of the group. Killing them didn’t take long but they did push their horses to the point they had to slow down and didn’t arrive until the next day using a forced march. Both they and the horses were exhausted.
- Goblin Slayer creates a makeshift Telescope by rolling a piece of leather into a cylinder shape, tying it up with rope, and placing two disc-shaped crystals at the ends.
- Dwarves also don’t usually learn offensive spells.
- Goblin Slayer references climbing a tower from the outside without a rope, which was a quest he took with Heavy Warrior and Spearman. The anime skipped that volume.
- The elevator was one that led from the First Floor to the Fourth, allowing them to bypass the Second and Third Floor. The Goblins on that floor were using poisonous weapons, as per usual.
- The Goblins had beaten Princess even though they didn’t violate her, tying her up with the torn remains of her borrowed vestments. However, she didn’t plead for forgiveness or anything because she didn’t want to sink so low and it wouldn’t do any good. She was under no illusion that she was a dead woman if a miracle didn’t occur, and she started seeing her dead parents and brother’s face flash in her mind.
- Priestess’ Purify swept away the miasma as they entered the Fourth Floor, which had been a choking fog. She also received a handout (basically a revelation) from her Goddess that told her that it was a Goblin Priest, not a Shaman, acting as an Apostle to the heinous gods of Chaos.
- Since they knew very well how hard it was to break a Protection spell, they opted to take out the archers and attack hand-to-hand instead of sniping the Goblin Priest.
- Priestess figured out that the Goblin wasn’t offering a portion of his soul in the same way a normal priest would for a miracle, meaning that the price had to come from something else. Then she saw the blood coming from the corpses and realized it was being used as fuel, defiling the Adventurers they’d taken even after they had died.
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