Nanatsu no Taizai Chapter 108: Gentle Awakening
Pretty good chapter, raising a lot of questions and delivering the twist about Dreyfus pretty well. I thought that Hendricksen's return was a bit too early for my liking, and Dreyfus joins Veronica, Hauser, Hawk and many others in 'people who died but not really'. And it's a shame, because while it's obvious there will be stuff exploring him thanks to the thing that knocked Gowther out of his mind, I thought Dreyfus' death was one of the best and most sudden deaths in manga I've seen, and Team Gilthunder could've easily uncovered the mysteries of Dreyfus via flashbacks and the like. But still, this isn't all that bad.The chapter starts off with Gilthunder, Hauser and Griamor looking at this one book that was shown in the scene when Gilthunder and Hauser reports back to Dreyfus from way back. Gilthunder recognizes the demonic symbol from his fight with Meliodas to be the same in Dreyfus' book. I do like how Hauser kind of panics when Gilthunder talks about how Meliodas has the blood of a demon running through him. And likewise, I also do like Gilthunder's unwavering belief that Meliodas won't go berserk.
Gilthunder points out how odd it is for the great holy knight Dreyfus to have a book about demons lying around, and I do like the scene when Hauser looks all cool as Gilthunder brings up when he first saw that book and Gilthunder is thinking 'you don't remember at all, do you.' Griamor gets pissed and goes all 'my father and Hendricksen have been at each others' throats for years!' and stuff like that, and there's a bit of a fun moment as the three of them argue for a couple of panels. Griamor then recalls how Dreyfus had tripped, otherwise he would've killed Hendricksen, and Hauser sees the point, that the great holy knight Dreyfus wouldn't have made such an amateur mistake. And indeed it was a strange, odd thing to show that development. The trip was indeed a memorable oddity and I am actually pretty impressed that it's part of the plot. Griamor gets rightfully pissed about how he has seen his father die in front of his two eyes.
Gilthunder then brings up Merlin's words, how you can get a different answer that makes sense if you look at things from a different perspective. And I do like the two pages afterwards that juxtapose the upright Dreyfus we know and... something more sinister which looks like, well, Dreyfus crouched over, but with demonic shadow peeling off him. And the background is different too, white in the first and kind of all sorts of screwed up in the second. Gilthunder concludes that Dreyfus and Hendricksen's little feud was merely a collusion, that Dreyfus purposefully targeted Elizabeth and is still alive now... except he's no longer Dreyfus but rather something else. The three of them start to summarize stuff a bit, about how it is not longer Dreyfus...
And then the scene cuts to this... abomination of a bird just flying. And I use the term 'bird' in the loosest sense of the word, because while it's got two bird-like wings, where there should be talons and a tail there is a long human hand just dangling off its posterior, and instead of a bird's body and a head there is a... thing. It's like a multi-segmented mouth of a weird plant monster thing, and the texturing done really makes it look grotesque. And it's kind of a bit of a jarring body horror that makes this strange creature look so demonic compared to the more 'human with extra horns' or 'human with exaggerated features' that some of the demons in this series are. This thing looks like it crawled out of Berserk or something. It's going to be a memorable thing, at least.
Anyway, this thing vomits up the ritual disc containing Meliodas' broken handle thing, and what is left of Hendricksen reaches out for it. Well, we didn't find a body, and this is a manga, so I did assume that Hendricksen wasn't permanently dead, though he's pretty fucked up here. Basically what's left of him is his head, half of his chest and an arm. Apparently the bird-thing is Hendricksen's right arm as it kind of just gets sucked into the arm... And there is something darkly funny about how Hendricksen's torn-apart corpse screams at the arm to 'come baaaack' while it just runs around happily before dropping on the ground. Hendricksen curses Meliodas as his eyes close, saying how close they came to.
We get a little heaven-thing going on as Hendricksen, in his human form, lays down in a field of flowers or something, and Dreyfus approaches. Hendricksen wants to just sleep, but Dreyfus tells him that he hasn't done everything he's supposed to do. Hendricksen starts crying, because he somehow remembers a lot of mistakes he's done but can't remember the specifics, so the demonification thing definitely fucked up Hendricksen's mind. Dreyfus bites his wrist and we get a two-page spread of Dreyfus feeding his blood to Hendricksen. Dreyfus then just walks off, telling Hendricksen to fulfill his last with as he lies there crying with blood streaming down his mouth. It's such a freaking eerie scene, especially since the last arc kind of convinced me just how irredeemably psychotic Hendricksen is, and to see him beaten down and humanized like this...
And the next scene subverts it hard with Demon!Hendricksen going all 'is this a dream?' 'Tears? Remnants of when I was human?' But it is clear the scene with Dreyfus took place, in some manner, since both the tears and the blood are around, and he's apparently regenerated his entire body. So I guess Demon!Hendricksen has some kind of a second, warped personality? Or he's just simply corrupted and doesn't work on a second personality the way Dreyfus seems to be?
Dreyfus has apparently left Elizabeth's bandages around, and Hendricksen notes that with both the blood and the handle, everything required is present. We get a panel of Hendricksen just laughing maniacally in triumph before immediately proceeding to the ritual. Shit's going down! Meanwhile, Dreyfus, with a different demon marking, just smiles as he watches.
What the fuck is going on with Dreyfus? What is going on with Hendricksen? What are their agendas, and to what degree is one using the other? What is going on with the Demon Clan? I want to know so badly. It's great that we're moving onwards with all the more interesting plots, because the last two chapters talking about power levels and shit has been kind of m'eh.This one, though? Pretty awesome.
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