English Dub Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen; “An Unexpected Assassin”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Orphen’s warm homecoming to Tafrem and the Tower of Fangs is unceremoniously punctuated by a recent string of serial killings and the mysterious assassin perpetrating them. 

Our Take

Orphen and his band of tenured stowaways approach Tafrem, with the Tower of Fangs visible in the distance. But where Orphen would usually be walking by trouble already brewing, this time the trouble is lying in wait specifically for him. 

Within the Tower of Fangs, the ruling elder sorcerers are gradually being murdered one by one by an unknown assassin for no apparent reason. The sorcerers receive a description of the assassin, which conveniently matches the rogue Orphen. Given Orphen’s recent involvement with the unexplained absence of Childman, they are quick to suspect him. 

En route to Tafrem, Orphen’s group runs into a bit of a snag. Claiomh is irresponsibly using Leki’s magic to blow up the forest in response to Majic making fun of her cooking. It was undoubtedly expected that Leki’s powerful abilities would come in handy for the party in the future, but not for reasons so silly and asinine as this. Regardless, we see that Leki is being taken full advantage of, as evidenced further later on. 

The commotion Claiomh caused earns them a run-in with a patrolman, who is fortunately willing to let them go, as he notices Orphen is from the Tower of Fangs. This patrolman is able to determine this by Orhpen’s dragon pendant that all sorcerers from the Tower have. Orphen had used his pendant as a conduit for a magic attack in the battle from the previous episode, a process which had evidently destroyed the pedant. The fact that Orphen was able to retrieve it indicates some sort of regenerative property the pendant possesses, which goes unexplained. 

The importance of this pendant is emphasized even further as, shortly thereafter, it is stolen by the assassin and utilized to provoke Orphen, being left alongside a note asking him who the “successor” is. This also marks the reemergence of the phrase, “Successor of the Razor’s Edge,” a title given to Orphen in his youth. What this all adds up to is that there are quite a few more fine details about Orphen’s past and the Tower that we are still not privy too. 

This assassin then wastes very little time after his provocation to reappear and ambush Orphen. He has little trouble doing so, easily overpowering them, and he probably would have killed Orphen immediately if not for two reasons. The first is that the party has Leki, whose sorcery infallibly neutralizes the assassin’s magic attacks. 

The second is that the assassin’s primary objective seems to be to verbally antagonize and prod at Orphen, asking him hard questions about this identity and self-worth. If this guy weren’t an actual threat, he would be some sort of strange, edgy bully that’s obsessed with Orphen. The assassin’s digging into Orphen’s past persists throughout the entire episode, but his motive is never ascertained in any way. He’s clearly the next villain or at least adjunct to them, but his purpose and his goals are kept very intentionally vague. 

As the assassin is just about to exploit a hole in the party’s defense, a conveniently passing by Leticia happens upon the party and saves them. Even when the assassin is unhooded, predictably revealing the exact visage of a younger Orphen, his true identity still goes only lightly questioned and tossed aside by the plot. If the trends of the last two arcs are anything to go by, the true identity of this assassin will be revealed right before or right after it matters the most. 

Leticia takes Orphen’s party back to her house, which shifts the tone and setting of the story to a softer and more domestic one. Up until now, Leticia was just a character mentioned merely in flashbacks, acting as a straight man to Azalie and Orphen’s juvenile antics. Here, we see a more generous and complete picture of her character as a caring soul, more like an overbearing parent than a nosy older sister. 

We also do receive a few new details about Orphen’s past and the Tower. In addition to the fact that Orphen’s cat forgot about him and how innocent he looked when he was a child, we learn a bit more about what training was like in the Tower, which was more akin to torture than education. Students were bound and relentlessly beaten to “test their willpower,” though to unclear ends. It seems more like an inoculation against harsh persecution and information extraction than it does practice to hone one’s magic. Though as cruel as it is, it does seem rather justified, if the sheer amount of skullduggery that all of these parties involved in sorcery take part in is any indication. 

Underpinning all of the buzz surrounding Orphen’s return is the anticipation of seeing how the sorcerers at the Tower will react to Childman and Azalie’s fate as it becomes increasingly relevant. There is the simple emotional catharsis of witnessing how all of Orphen’s former cohorts will react to this news, Leticia chief among them. Orphen even has an honest internal monologue to this end. Pertinently to the plot, recent investigations into Childman’s disappearance throw further suspicion on Orphen, with him now being made the prime suspect.  There’s a lot of tension that’s slowly built up in the last five to ten minutes of the episode regarding this. 

But arriving just in time to throw a wrench in that tension is the fake Orphen, who returns for even more poking and prodding at Orphen’s psyche. After putting him down enough, the lookalike decides that if Orphen doesn’t want the name Krylancelo, nor all of the supposed prestige and great expectations that come along with it, then he would take it for himself and “become” Krylancelo. 

If the first arc of the show was “ghosts of Orphen’s past come back to haunt him as a dragon,” then this arc is “ghosts of Orphen’s past come back to haunt him as a clone.” It makes one wonder what the real narrative purpose of that forest arc was. The ending of the first arc left a lot of unclaimed intrigue on the table, and folding it right into this arc would’ve made the overall story more cogent and compelling. But even then, we do have to wait and see if this arc will even pay dividends.