Nightmare Fuel / Alderamin on the Sky

• Yatorishino taking down the traitorous squad of Royal Guards is one hell of a Mook Horror Show.
• Ikta is locked up in a cell for six days without food or water for missing one training exercise, and this is at the hands of one of the more reasonable commanders the main characters encounter. As Ikta discovered, to his horror, in that cell, the commander above that one, Leiutenant Sifa, has a habit of seizing the spirit companions of the Sinak tribe and locking them up, in the dark, indefinitely, which is basically the same thing, as "spirits" live on sunlight, and according to Kha Duran, has a long, long history of confiscating food from the Sinak and making them starve to death, men, women, even children, because he wants to go to war with them. In fact, when they finally reach their breaking point and rebel, Lieutenant Sifa is ectstatic!
• The young, and female, Nanak Dar gets to show us just how horrific the Rape, Pillage, and Burn experience really is, from the receiving end.
• Immediately after that, the General Failure Seifa realizes too late that the Shinnak conflict, that he provoked, was a Secret Test of Character from the holy church of Alderamin, that he failed when an "inspection team" shows up, and sees first hand, how the troops under his command, had been butchering the spirit companions of the Shinnak in a rage, due to Seifa's own arrogance, orders, and neglect, simply letting them "vent their rage," only to try and chase them down, purely to save his own skin... and finding out that an army of 100,000 was waiting, expecting him to fail and fully prepared, to entirely annihilate him and his army, sparing no-one for "heresy against the spirits."
• If You Thought That Was Bad.... Next volume begins with the home province of one of the main characters being run by an aristocrat governor with such a Madonna-Whore Complex that he outright fakes a famine so he can levy taxes on single women so onerous that it drives them out of honest work and into prostitution, and then when the prostitution fails to meet their daily needs, uses loan-sharks to drive them into slavery to sell to a neighboring province with a shortage of women due to disease, while hoarding the profits.... and he honestly believed he was being righteous for it!