Celestria teased apart the clue again that it's Leon who assumed the Dark Lord is the grave threat, the goddess didn't.
As it's being highlighted by the Smart character in the cast, I'm now more sure Leon is wrong. Behind the Dark Lord is something worse. This Dark Lord is a force of nature in the human myths at least. Yet monsters we've seen so far that feed into it are not evil, only wildlife and people. Monster grudge accumulation doesn't make sense so far, when monsters are mostly a megafauna-based ecology; not evil. Maybe a bit cursed if they're extra aggressive to humans, but not
evil. There's probably some magic angle to it, but if such magic exists it still doesn't need to be stuck on a genocidal warlord acting on animal logic. No way does his happy series treat monsters as forever doomed to cyclical rampages.
And it's a lot funnier to stick with sympathy for the monsters all the way. They deserve better than blitz brainwashing. Near-sapient ones are still food, but they're not evil meat.
that was such an obvious foreshadow of Lumir = Dark Lord... gotta be a misdirection, right?
In a series with Jelly Aspic, slime? I'd been expecting Lumir was connected to some sacred force, maybe not the goddess, but
dammit, inverting that for a not-actually-evil Dark Lord works. Or competition for Dark Lord's power.