Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi keeps us on our toes.
While the invasion of Zoble threatened to turn into a horribly one-sided affair in episode 7, the demons actually put up some challenging fights for Rin and Hayato in the end and more than enough other twists and turns appeared during episode 8 of Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi to keep this episode interesting.
While Hayato matches up against the emperor and at first gets beaten down, he uses the skills he’s learned over the past few episodes and ends up putting up a fairly solid fight. More than that, for the first time, Hayato is taking on an unknown demon, and quite a strong one, and doesn’t need Prontea or Rin to come to the rescue.
Sure, Hayato takes some horrific injuries during the course of the battle, he wouldn’t be Hayato if he didn’t, but years of being beaten up by Rin and having to heal quickly to get back on his feet came in handy. With rapid regeneration, Hayato was pretty much never going to lose the battle as the Emperor was at a disadvantage from the start. His wounds weren’t healing while Hayato just kept getting back up.
However, it wasn’t just a Hayato show for 20 minutes in Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi. We kept cutting back to Rin’s fight against Brandy. Though Brandy was largely staying out of the direct fight, choosing instead to use puppets.
This is where Rin’s straight forward nature worked against her as she fell for trap after trap and was seemingly getting nowhere.
For a short moment, even Brandy believed that maybe she wasn’t doomed to lose the fight.
However, with the appearance of Oobami, Rin suddenly recognising him as similar to her grandfather, Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi gave us a brief emotional moment for Rin before Brandy took that as her opportunity to attack. And that will be the last poor judgement Brandy will ever make. It was a spectacular light show though.
But if viewer’s thought two epic battles being played out was all Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi had in store for us they’d be wrong. As usual, the pace is pretty frantic (which makes it a nice change from anime that would spend three episodes on a single match up) and we also have Prontea and Ysley working to secure the main targets they’d decided on before the battle.
While this isn’t the most visually interesting storyline, it does at least keep the viewer remembering why the Idaten are actually even attacking the city in the first place (other than to kill demons).
In addition to that though we get the nun, Gill.
After observing the fight between the Emperor and Hayato, she actually wants to help the Emperor. She can’t stand seeing him hurt and tries to give his actions some noble intent even as he dismisses the thought.
Later when she runs into Prontea, she criticises him for killing an enemy so easily and he pointedly asks is defeating an enemy after a struggle would satisfy her moral sense. She has no answer and he ultimately knocks her out realising that regardless of her answer she wasn’t going to accept his actions.
And in the midst of all of this, a new Idaten is born from the prayers of the people fleeing Zoble including our moralising nun. I can’t wait to see what sort of personality and skills she ends up with.
Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi apparently has 11 episodes so there are 3 to go and I’m just not sure what the end game is here and I actually don’t really mind. This anime is definitely more about just enjoying the moment rather than really worrying about where it is headed and so far most of the steps have made enough sense not to really criticise too much.
Even the villains get to act logically some of the time.
So, I’m really looking forward to the next episode and maybe we’ll get a sense of where this is heading.
Images from: Heion Sedai no Idaten-Tachi. Dir. S Kidokoro. MAPPA. 2021
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Karandi James
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