Overlord S01E08 Review: The Cult of the Damned

Overlord, Season 1, Episode 8: Twin Swords of Slashing Death

The episode starts off with a pretty dark bit where Clementine and Khajit arrives and attacks Nferia and the adventurer quartet, and you'd think that there's going to be some sort of last-minute rescue or at least Ainz would use a spell or the resurrection wand to bring back his new friends. But, nope! Clementine and Khajit absconds with Nferia offscreen while Ainz, Nabe, Hamsuke and Nferia's grandmother are just talking in the guild.

They arrive on the scene of the crime to find the adventurers killed and turned into undead zombies, and the youngest one, Ninya, is apparently tortured instead of just turned into an undead monster -- all because she's a girl disguising herself as a boy? While we don't linger on her body for too long, it's pretty gruesome from what we saw. And Ainz... just brushes them off as "nah, these are people I barely know", although whether Ainz really doesn't care or if he's keeping up his appearances of a badass undead overlord (for Nabe) or a cold-hearted mercenary warrior who wants fame (for the grandma) is not exactly clear. Ainz basically asks Nferia's grandmother what she's willing to pay, and Ainz's price is "everything"... something that Nferia's grandmother is grudgingly willing to pay.

It's interesting, for sure -- Ainz is really getting into roleplaying as a badass-but-jackass hero,  which I thought is kinda cool.

We then have a hilarious bit of Ainz telling Nabe to use a Scroll of Locate Object...  and then pulling out from a sack multiple scrolls of counterspells, counter detects, fake covers and the like.  Oh, he clearly have had experience in playing some insanely ridiculously complex RPG with a lot of metagaming. Good job, you munchkin.

They ended up locating where Nferia is being held thanks to  Clementine taking the adventurer's rank badges as trophies (apparently they make up her metal bikini-armour) and Ainz locates where Nferia is held, in a graveyard with the plot device crown attached to his head. Ainz sends the grandmother off to inform the guild as the Day of the Living Dead happens all around the town as a bunch of CGI undead stalks towards the city... and then Ainz just jumps into battle and absolutely curb-stomps all the undead skeletons and even a big skeletal giant-thing. Pretty badass, even if we get the scene of Nabe carrying Hamsuke in the background because the living will cause the undead to go berserk.

Again, we get another bit of Ainz trying to bullshit his way into seeming like a proper undead overlord, when Nabe asks him if it wouldn't be better to let the undead swarm kill some guards and citizens to make their eventual heroic comeback look even more impressive, to which Ainz tells her something along the lines of  the information they had at the time and the current goals of the enemies and stuff. We also get to see Ainz using his lich powers to summon a couple of named undead monsters, "Jack the Ripper" (totally  not the Joker) and the "Corpse Collector".

They make their way towards the base of the Cult, and Nabe engages Khajiit and uses a high-level spell Electrosphere to zap Khajit's minions to death, while Ainz draws Clementine away. Clementine does the evil villain thing and goes "oh, are you mad that I killed your friends", but Ainz just calmly notes that he doesn't really give a shit about the adventurers, but they are a component in his plans, and Clementine killed them and has thusly disturbed his plans, and for that she'll die. Ainz also makes it clear that he's not going to take Clementine seriously, but is going to take the fight against the arrogant serial killer as a way to gauge how combat works. Clementine is super-confident, mocking Ainz for overestimating himself, noting that there's only a bunch of people stronger than her in the region, with a familiar name, Gazef Stronoff, being mentioned, and a bunch of others (Brain, I think?) as obvious foreshadowing.

Overall, though, the episode definitely does a great job at building Clementine up as an asshole villain that needs to be taken down a peg or two, and I think it manages to juggle just how much Ainz/Momonga is invested in the humans. He tells Clementine, Nabe and the grandma no, but at the same time, as Nabe lampshades, Ainz is minimizing human casualties instead of doing the most villainous and expedient thing if building up a reputation was truly Ainz's main goal. Overall, while all of this still smells of a minor sidequest (unless the Cult of Dale ends up summoning some huge spell or whatever that proves to be huge trouble for Ainz) and still gives the vibe of world-building mode. Not a complaint, though!