So this week it hits the fan. The enemy demon has been identified as a "dragon eater" and it represents an existential threat to the entire continent. All three nations mobilize fully for battle and they all march to the Dragon Forest. It's regular troops only, not militia, so it's a force of about 10,000 -- which ain't puny.

It's the real thing. This isn't like one of the scheduled wars. But it becomes clear in watching how the battle unfolds that Roland was right (at the end of the first series) that the scheduled wars help them stay prepared for cases like this one where they need to fight for real.

Some parts of this were actually scary, but not too bad because a lot of parts of it were slightly tongue in cheek.

The demon's roots appear all over the place and attack the girls. (Well, they attack everyone but you knew they'd show us ersatz tentacle attacks, didn't you?)

Gaul invokes his hero stone. They did a nice job aging him.

There are three True Dragons, and each nation's army goes to protect one of them. The plan, then, is for the heroes and the Dragon Priestess to find the central body of the demon and to destroy it. Sharl rides with Becky, and Nanami rides with Shinku.

And there it is. When provoked, it takes the form of a giant insect. It starts shooting energy bolts at Becky, but her experience dodging Rico's artillery comes into play, and she does fine.

Shinku powers up. (Another nice job on the art.) Yuki delivers stones for Becky and Nanami, so they both power up.

Shinku's stone is a hero stone. Becky's is a demon stone. It turns out that Nanami's is a spirit stone, so they're all different.

The demon is hurt. The purple sphere on the bottom is its core, and Sharl puts her last arrow into it, and it's defeated. It was right that Sharl should put in the killing blow. I'm glad it worked out that way.

All the power it had sucked out of the area shot up into the sky and then rained back down gently, in the form of "dragon tears". Only problem is that it dissolves the clothing of everyone who gets hit by it.

A heck of a fine episode, and it ends this story arc cleanly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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