While visiting Luria’s land of Aensland in Kaleneon, a young Ilumgard Hopleys makes a promise to fight with her someday. Here, in the present, he’s using real weaponry, heavy plate armor, magical medicine, and some kind of mysterious amulet. The fix is in, so the ref allows all this as Jin, Yuno, and Izumo are the three of Makoto’s students to win rock-paper-scissors and fight in the team final.
Ilum also trained with and befriended Hibiki, which makes sense as he’s part of the nobility of Limia and as Limia’s Hero, she is the personification of his ideals. But when fate brings Ilum and Luria back together in Rotsgard, his attempt to reconnect is ruined when his toadies castigate her for abandoning her lands to invasion, and then Kuzunoha intervenes.
It’s interesting watching this scene unfold from Ilum’s perspective, because it fills in a lot of blanks about his character, who had kinda been floating on the periphery. If it wasn’t for the OP and ED, I’d probably think he was just some background character.
I also had no doubt that even with everything stacked against them, Jin, Yuno, and Izumo would have no problem dispatching Ilum and his team of nobodies with ease and style. This may be deadly serious business for Ilum, but they’re just having a fun time showing their teacher how much they’ve progressed under his tutelage.
Ilum hates Kuzunoha, and blames him both for his inability to reconcile properly with Luria and prevent him from fulfilling his promise to Hibiki. While I can’t speak to the perceptive qualities of demons in this show, I can say with relaive confidence that Rona had been watching this guy closely as a candidate for treachery. She supplied him with ability enhancing drugs, and gave him an amulet she claimed boosts magical resistance.
I’ll refer to Frieren’s rules about demons, which is that every single word they say is meant to deceive humans. Rona may not be a Frieren demon, but she’s just as crafty and duplicitous. Just like Zara did in the merchant’s arena, Rona would seem to have exploited Makoto’s naïveté.
He thought he could form an alliance with the demons, but there’s every indication that alliance would only last as long as Rona needed it to to achieve her goals, which have something to do with the amulet mutating Ilum into, well, I dunno … some kind of hyuman-demon hybrid boss that threatens all of Rotsgard?
Makoto had it all planned out: After congratulating his victorious students, he’d shove off to Kaleneon to help Eva and Luria win back their lands. He, in turn, would be able to run his trading company outside the guild’s jurisdiction. That’s all on hold now that there’s the more immediate threat of Demon Ilum.
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