"Did you even stop to think about what it would be like for me to be surrounded by everyone's dead bodies?"
Spoilers are unmarked.
- Chapter 1:
- The opening itself is quite depressing. Falin sacrifices herself to save the party, and Shuro and Namari quit the team once they're out of the dungeon. Then it's shown that Team Touden is low on supplies, but they have to hurry back through the dungeon to save Falin in time, so they have to go right back inside anyway. Thankfully, it quickly gets better, but still...
- Chapter 11:
- When Laios is possessed by a spirit, he flashes back to the day Falin was eaten by the red dragon. Consumed by guilt, Laios thinks how worthless he is and wishes the beast could have taken him instead. He begs Falin for forgiveness before Senshi drives the spirit away.
- Chapter 12:
- The second time we see the Mad Mage himself, after a brief moment in the first living painting, shows him in deep distress calling out for the king (the one before Delgal) as he collapses in the middle of his son's wedding celebration.
- Chapter 14:
- Anne the kelpie turning on Senshi and trying to kill him even though they've known each other for years and he trusted her and considered her a friend. After he and Laios kill her, he insists on carving up her body alone.
- Chapter 26:
- After everything they went through to kill the Red Dragon, Team Touden find its stomach, cut it open... and see that it's empty. Everyone is appropriately horrified at the possibility that they were too late to save Falin.
- Then, after digging a bit further, then manage to find Falin's staff, and her skull. At least now they have a chance of reviving her, but it's still hard to look at.
- Chapter 29:
- The Lunatic Magician stealing Falin away from Team Touden again. They went through so much to save her, only to lose her almost immediately. Made especially harsh by how happy they all were to have her back. Marcille begins to break down in tears when she realizes what's happened.
- Chapter 30:
- Chilchuck, with tears in his eyes, admitting that he doesn't want to lose his friends. Comes after insisting for almost a whole issue that all he cared about was saving his own skin. In the end, even he can't lie to himself anymore.
- Chapter 37:
- Everyone's looks of absolute horror when they see Falin's chimera form. Even worse for Laios, Marcille, Senshi, and Chilchuk, since they were there when she was revived, and the last time they saw her, she was mostly fine.
- During the fight with chimera!Falin, Laios tells her he would gladly take her place if he could. Then, after she regains enough of her mind to call out to him, he gets to watch Kabru slit her throat.
- Chapter 38:
- Shuro telling Laios he secretly always hated him. Laios admits he didn't pick up on this because he was just so happy to have made his first and only friend on the Island. Poor Laios.
- Chapter 41:
- Team Touden admitting to Izutsumi that they don't know how to heal her of being a beastkin and in all likelihood, she'll be like that forever. She's crushed.
- Chapter 42:
- We get a look into Laios's past and it's not a happy picture... Apparently he dropped out of school and deserted the army because he couldn't adapt to either, the gold peeling group he and Falin were part of betrayed them and took all the credit, and he and his parents haven't spoken in ten years. Oh, and he's still haunted by Shuro telling him that he's hated Laios all along.
- Thanks to the nightmare, we find out Marcille's greatest fear: outliving everyone she loves. She also feels a huge amount of guilt for Falin being turned into her chimeric form since it was Marcille who resurrected her, albeit unknowingly, using a dragon that had a spell on it, causing their souls to become mixed.
- Chapter 49:
- The reveal of Senshi's surprisingly dark backstory as to how he first came to the dungeon in the first place. He was just the dwarf equivalent of a teenager when his entire mining crew— treated as an adoptive family— was picked off one by one by a griffin while their food supplies dwindled. Eventually it was just him and two adults left, pressed to the brink of starvation. Then his two friends stepped outside to have an argument, he heard a struggle... and only one of them came back. Seriously injured, but with desperately needed meat. Senshi's lead his entire life since then not knowing if he ate another dwarf, and it's haunted him to the point where anything that reminds him of the incident (like griffins) sends him into a blind panic.
- Chapter 51:
- While everyone is under the effects of the changeling mushrooms, Chilchuck questions whether having their races swapped around would have changed their lifespans too, and mentions that half-foots have an average life expectancy of just 50 years. Hearing this leaves Marcille in shock, as she'd always assumed they lived for much longer than that. When Laios adds that the average for tallmen is 60 years, she starts imagining the wyrm from her nightmares again — the representation of her fear of outliving everyone she loves — and immediately goes quiet.
- Chapter 59:
- Izutsumi scoffs at the idea of succubi being a problem for her, as she claims not to have an "ideal person". Instead most of them take the form of a woman who she perceives as the mother she never knew. Izutsumi's Dark and Troubled Past consists of being made into a beastkin too young to remember being "normal", then kept caged for display until Shiro's father purchases her to make a retainer, using an Explosive Collar to keep her in line. She feels like she's never been able to rely on anyone, and is bewildered by her happiness when her "mother" approaches saying that she's grown. Izutsumi still kills the monster but is distressed about it, knowing that usually people targeted by succubi freeze up. She looks at her bloody hands, wondering if it's because she has a monster soul mixed with hers and she might not have a heart.
- Chapter 65:
- Marcille suspects that Laios gave her his neck guard purely as part of a gambit to ensure that the team's smartest member would be able to figure out a way to beat the Dungeon Rabbits...while everyone else dies. After all, she can revive them. She does succeed on both counts, but this utterly breaks Marcille once the adrenaline runs off and she's faced with the corpses of the friends she's made over their adventure. It's even the page image, and informs much of her following character arc and her fear of outliving her friends.
- Chapter 67:
- Laios mercy killing Falin. While the party has already been planning for a while on killing her to eat her dragon half in hopes it will revert her to a human, they're none too happy about what they're doing, especially Laios, considering he opts to do the deed himself due to the guilt he feels from having gotten his sister into such danger in the first place.
- Chapter 74:
- Although she has stated that she never envied full-blooded elves, when Mithrun is entreating for Marcille to give up the tomes, he also asks if perhaps she wants to bear children or bring someone back from the dead, unwittingly hitting upon her fears of ending up alone, and Marcille is clearly hit hard by this.
- In contrast to the rest of the Canaries who try to force the book away from Marcille without even allowing her to explain herself, Mithrun tries to reason with her. He tells her that while the Winged Lion may grant Marcille her desires, it will also take them away and leave her an empty husk. Mithrun is speaking from experience: the demon he let grant his own desires had left him completely unable to feel anything. And yet, the look he gives Marcille is an expression that clearly conveys both his sorrow and regret. Mithrun is hunting the demon not just because it's the only desire he has left, but because he genuinely does not want anyone to make the same mistake he did. Makes it all the more heartbreaking that Marcille brushes him off.
- The way the Canaries utterly turn on Marcille after finding out she's a half-elf is heartbreaking. Sure, Chilchuk misled them into thinking her mother was the royal court mage and Marcille felt no choice but to go along with it, but they go from treating her with respect to almost seeming disgusted by her. Cithis hammers in the fact that Marcille would never be accepted or tolerated back in their homeland and makes all sorts of assumptions about how she must want the power of the Winged Lion due to hating the world for not being born pure-blooded, when really all she's ever wanted is to live with her loved ones for as long as possible.
- Chapter 81:
- The Winged Lion had created a doppleganger of Marcille's dead father, which she had been repulsed by, but in Chapter 80, already starting to be corrupted, she uses him to herd the party into a kitchen and keep them from escaping. In this chapter the doppleganger tells the party about Marcille's childhood memories - as a half elf she aged strangely, and while her father lived a long time for a tallman, he hadn't been young when she was born. In most of her memories of him he was old and sick. Marcille vividly remembers her cheerful mother becoming overwhelmed and distraught when he was no longer able to eat his favorite food, and telling her at the funeral that she runs at a different pace than everyone else, and from will have to watch others pass before her.
- Chapter 90:
- Both Marcille and Kabru's Freak Outs over the Winged Lion advancing on the surface world after contracting with Laios. Both are in full It's All My Fault mode, with Marcille regretting her ever trying to resurrect Falin and despairing over the apparent end of the world, and Kabru thinking the whole incident is Laios's fault and regretting not following his instinct to kill him before everything got worse.
- Chapter 91:
- Just as the Winged Lion is casting his Dying Curse on Laios so that his ultimate desire won't come true, Laios starts thinking about Falin, and that now their journey to save her was all in vain.
- Chapter 96:
- Despite all the pain he caused, at the end of the day Thistle was just a young elf trying to help his friend and king, who ended up being manipulated by a demon. Watching him die in Yaad’s arms, too far gone to truly understand the situation but at least able to achieve some level of peace thanks to Yaad’s deception, is absolutely heartwrenching.
- Chapter 97:
- As they finish eating the dragon half of Falin, Laios solemnly recounts how the Winged Lion cursed him and thinks that because of the curse his sister won't come back to life.
- Other:
- In the second World Guide, Lycion explains to Izutsumi that while he is a human with a beast soul inside of him and can take on a hybrid form, she is actually a beast with a human soul inside her and always in her hybrid form. She doesn't understand him and maybe that's for the best - there is some Backstory Horror considering how some mystery mage put a child's soul in a monster. No wonder she can't remember her parents, which also means that she was never loved like a child should be loved and the Touden party really is the best she's ever been treated. And, all along Izutsumi has been wanting to have her curse removed so she could be human, but that just isn't possible.
- Laios' general attitude belies his honestly depressing backstory. When Falin developed her magical abilities, the villagers treated her extremely poorly, which Laios felt even harder than she did. Their parents only stood by and let the abuse happen. It got to the point where he would imagine monsters sacking the village and killing everyone but him and Falin, which is where his reverence for monsters came from. When their father demanded that Falin leave the village, that was the last straw for Laios, who left first for the military in protest. He couldn't make it in the military, though, and he eventually ran away from that to become an underpaid, overworked worker in a caravan. He couldn't even be bothered to clean himself. Meanwhile, Falin was sent to a magical academy (which is what their father meant by saying that Falin would leave the village), where she ended up much better off than Laios, learning how to control her magic and meeting Marcille and a bunch of other friends, meaning his leaving the village for his sister's sake was All for Nothing. When Laios gets the opportunity to see his sister again, Falin is so shocked by his shoddy conditions that she left the academy to join him. Only then did things start looking up for Laios, but even then the siblings spent a while in barely-acceptable living conditions before they became adventurers.
- A bonus manga included with the Blu-Rays of the anime show a What If? from Laios' imagination where he was eaten by the Red Dragon instead of Falin. Despite Falin's urging, the rest of the party give up on saving him due to them believing he's already too far gone, leaving Falin to charge into the dungeon by her lonesome, a thought so terrifying to Laios that he snaps out of his daydream. It says a lot about Laios and his self-worth that he believes that none of his friends would come to his rescue if he died, but it says more that he isn't bothered by that but is horrified by the idea of his little sister putting herself in harm's way to save him.
