Reign of the Seven Spellblades released episode 6 on Friday, and the anime suddenly went from a generic Harry Potter-style magic school show to an intriguing MC with a hidden revenge plan. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been enjoying the show from the start for its enjoyable art style and animation for the action parts. The fact that I’ve found it generic didn’t take away from that, but I also didn’t expect to see anything groundbreaking. I expected the MC Oliver Horn to continue to show some ‘unexpected’ ways to beat more powerful enemies and eventually get to the point of being OP himself while simultaneously improving both his friends and former enemies. Things seemed to be going that way, right until this week’s episode.
The first part of the episode was itself quite intriguing. The senpai-gone-bad was expected, with Vera Miligan turning out to be the person who experimented on the troll and abducting the naively kind Aalto. We already saw this in the last episode, with Nanao mentioning that the troll had been trying to escape and tipping off Oliver just a few moments too late. They face the 4th year student in her laboratory, who has the cursed eye of the basilisk with the ability to petrify her opponents. After a few back and forth moments, Oliver (as expected) comes up with a plan. Nanao ends up behind Vera, which is when she reveals a second cursed eye.
I expected this to be the major part of the episode. As she was about to get petrified, Nanao realized she had to be faster than light and cut through both time and space in order to win. She manages to do exactly that, accidentally creating the seventh titular spellblade. With the title of the anime being Reign of the Seven Spellblades, it was kind of obvious that the six spellblades that had been mentioned earlier wouldn’t be all of them. That was also one of the most interesting things the show introduced so far, so I was happy actually seeing one used. Oliver explains this to us, with Nanao herself unaware of what she’d done.
She asks Oliver for a victory kiss, but Godfrey and Withrow arrive, saying they received an anonymous tip. With the incident over, they carry Aalto back and the next scene we see her learning of what had happened. The troll will be safe and Vera Miligan genuinely cares about her but was led astray with how she awakened the troll’s ability to speak. This is what she’s told before deciding she won’t let it get her down. After exclaiming that she’d make the school a kinder place by the time she graduates, Oliver breaks down in tears, happy that he also managed to protect something.
This again showed that his character’s also genuinely nice to the point of being cliche, which is what we’ve been seeing since the start. However, the second part of the episode revealed another side to him, which made the show a lot more interesting.
Darius Grenville, the professor who briefly reminded me of Snape, intercepts the gang and asks Oliver to go with him alone ‘to show him something.’ Previously, Richard warned Oliver that he was the kind of professor who took credit for bright students’ works, so this seemed like the lead-up to that. We see the professor demonstrate his strength by making quick work of some monsters that Oliver states to be stronger than the garuda they barely beat, and explains that they are down there to collect a talented student’s research since they’d been consumed by the spell.
I was surprised that Oliver had no questions about the research or the portal that had opened. After Darius closes it, Oliver instead calls him out for his involvement with the demi-human research and the troll incident cover-up attempt. Darius then reveals his own plan of eliminating stupidity from humanity by experimenting and eventually artificially improving their intelligence. He wants Oliver to assist him due to not having any specific talents and being able to do any job. And this is where the plot thickens when Oliver drops his second question: where was Darius on a specific night 7 years ago.
This had me legitimately surprised. I was not expecting that Oliver had actually picked out Darius and wanted to get alone with him, much less so after Oliver himself mentioned how strong the professor was only moments before. The serious expression already implied something serious was in question, with Darius realizing there was a connection to a certain woman. After Oliver thanks him for not changing and remaining the person he hated for seven years, I kept thinking what he could possibly do to get an upper hand in this match-up.
The initial results sees Oliver with his throat cut. Then the scene zooms out to reveal Oliver seeing it as one possible future, and he has the ability to see thousands of them and attract the one that brings him the wanted result. He comments that he would die in almost every instance even if they fought 10000 times, but that a future where he wins must exist. Of course, he finds it, and ends up cutting Darius down after revealing that he can use the fourth spellblade called Angustavia, the thread that crosses the abyss.
This wasn’t yet the real surprising part. The MC is expected to get power-ups in desperate situations, and this would’ve been a rather cool one. However, the real twist only came after he won the fight, and it was Oliver’s sadistic side.
This was the biggest surprise by far, and one that made me A LOT more interested in the anime than I’d been before the episode. Oliver’s mother being betrayed and tortured in 128 different ways, Oliver actually experiencing them in order to be able to reproduce the pain for revenge and then doing it to Darius… The way he made him look for ‘magic words’ in order to ‘forgive him’ was also text-book sadism. Darius broke down after around 57, after he cried and got the successful answer which was basically to ask to be killed. The MC being brutal and actually a cold-blooded murderer was also not on my generic anime checklist, and I look forward to seeing his character develop moving forward.
To top it all off, we finally meet Gwyn and see Teresa Carste’s face. She is the person who’s been meeting with Oliver since episode 1, and is now revealed to also be the person who notified Godfrey of the Vera incident through the anonymous tip. Gwyn and Sis are Oliver’s cousins, and they are clearly helping him get his revenge on the people who killed his mother, the original wielder of the fourth spellblade. In the end, Oliver is crowned the leader of their group, and has a large number of followers (or vassals, as they were called in the episode).
With his goal being to kill half the professors at Kimberly, as well as headmistress Esmeralda who seemed to have been the closest to Oliver’s mom, it really makes me wonder just how that can happen. What was their motivation in the first place, and are they all outright evil like Darius? Especially since some of them might also have spellblades. I’m also curious as to how he got his mom’s spellblade. Is it some inherited version or did they do something after her death to make him be able to use it? All in all, all these questions all came after Reign of the Seven Spellblades episode 6, and I look forward to seeing the future episodes.
If you enjoyed episode 6, don’t forget to vote for it this week! It ranked 10th after the previous episode.
Images via Crunchyroll
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