Lord El-Melloi II Case Files – 05

Our first two part mystery in this series set up high expectations with its first entry. Then, it magnificently followed up with an incredible showing that had a bit of everything a Fate fan could want.

A compelling mystery requires a satisfactory resolution. That is exactly what we got, with a string of Sherlock style deductions. Waver refuses to give up in the face of Adashino’s persistence and successfully absolves Wills of wrongdoing, even managing to figure out the true culprit – the deceased Lord Trevors himself. Lord Trevors might have put together a dastardly scheme, but the fairies did not take his meddling lightly, and end up killing him. Waver underestimates the efficacy his mystery solving ritual would have, and ends up unleashing the latent powers of the Marburry Workshop. Unfortunately, it’s too late to undo the evil architecture of the late Lord’s chaotic plans. A gate to the fairy realm spawns, and our cast have to do battle with hell dogs. Now, we call for some highly charged up action.

Different mages demonstrating their talents, or lack thereof, in fighting off the hoards. Wills goes at it by dual wielding daggers, Kairi fires off his guns and throws out explosives, Gray eviscerates with her scythe, and Waver slowly blasts out piddly shots of magic. The series really likes to remind us that while Waver is a theoretical genius, he absolutely suck at the practical aspect of magic. And it doesn’t help that they could not hold back the monsters and were slowly getting overwhelmed.

Just when it seems like there’s no hope, Waver calls upon their trump card — Gray. Or more specifically, Rhongomyniad, the holy spear of King Arthur that was thought to be long lost from the modern era. Ordinarily, it would be an armament that could only be wielded by the King of Britannia. For whatever reason that has yet to be fully divulged in this series, Gray fulfils this requirement and is able to use Arthur’s powers as King of Spirits and Fairies to wipe out the hell dogs once and for all. And what a moment it proved to be, easily rivalling the moment from Fate/Zero where Saber levelled Caster and his abomination with Excalibur. I live for these pinnacle of hype moments in anime. The fluidity of pulsing energetic waves, the expressiveness in a character’s motions, the sheer passion that you see going into every single frame of animation. Troyca… just wowza. And props to the Fate series for always managing to facilitate extreme excitement through their extensively constructed mythos and epic scale of magic abilities. It definitely provides a pre-built and excellent foundation for the artistic animators to truly flex their skills, without needing to worry about the creative process where story and characters are concerned.

Even with all the monsters destroyed, the gateway to the fairy realm remains intact. Where it seems like no hope is left, love prevails. I’m not sure what to make of Wills waltzing off to spend an eternity with his fairy waifu. But for once, a happy (if not bittersweet) ending is rather welcome, in a series that’s otherwise steeped in treacherous machinations and magical conspiracies. Nevertheless, the rabbit hole runs deeper. Turns out Wills was not born with mystic eyes, and that his father had acquired them from the Rail Zeppelin, an underground organisation shrouded in mystery that runs a black market in the acquisitions and disposals of mystic eyes. Given that their name features in the title of this series, I imagine this is only the beginning of Waver’s run-ins with them. And I’m excited about the implication that we’ll be encountering more mystic eyes the further we go along, since they seem to have become the core theme of the series. Anyway, that’s about everything I wanted to discuss. As always, thank you for reading my post, and look forwards to diving deeper into the mystic eye conspiracy with me in the near future!