u/Rinamara

Honestly, this is some kind of madness. I've tried different apps and stories, but this is the first time this has happened to me personally. I just can't make up my mind about who I want to go with for even my first slot, so I've been chaotically picking choices with different love interests, and I've ended up with some insane route:

1. At first, I was interested in Fox (in the early episodes). My Kira flirted with him, I even thought about choosing him on one of the slots. But after Fox started doing more and more obviously evil things, I dropped that idea.
2. Then I got intrigued by Kaiden. He seemed pretty cute, charismatic, etc. But in the recent updates, Kaiden got kind of boring. Plus, his whole rejection of Kira threw me off. I get that he was threatened, but if Kaiden can't stand up for himself and his girl in the world of Morwein, then the guy's kind of pitiful, he'll get eaten alive here. And if Kira chooses him, he'll get eaten even more, that's basically setting him up.
3. Isaac seemed too creepy at first, then mysterious, then creepy again. And now I'm starting to suspect that he is Fox, and I don't want any romance with Fox.
4. Phantom acts like a total psych0, so I imagine the "romance" with him to be about like what Tessa had with the Devil. So not much of a romance, I don't think Kira would be even remotely happy on that path. Although I'm really tempted to pick Phantom just to see how he and Fox would fight over whose Kira is. For some reason, I'm sure Phantom isn't Fox.
5. The last guy is too mysterious and showed up late, so that's just a complete unknown.

So basically, I'm in a total storm. I defend Isaac against Kaiden, Kaiden against Isaac, take paid choices with everyone, and I don't understand anything anymore. To cut down on the madness at least a little, I closed Kaiden's route, but as for the rest...

I think I'll decide on the second slot when the story ends, because I'm already getting tossed in all directions on this one slot I'm playing right now.

Even though the narrative has lost some of its edge in Season 2 of Chains of the Pact, Legion’s storyline continues to impress me. If anything, he keeps revealing a new side of himself. He’s kind of like an onion: layer after layer, enough to make you cry, but somehow impossible to remain indifferent to.

To be honest, at first he mostly annoyed me. Legion was too dramatic, too much of a show-off, too much of a “I’m charming, sexy, irresistible, and I know it” kind of guy. Sometimes, there was just way too much of him.

But then, watching him more closely, I realized that Legion often makes fun of himself. And honestly, that feels very much like him: putting on this ridiculous, over-the-top act, only to suddenly turn around and actually do the things that, at first glance, seemed like nothing more than empty posturing.

https://preview.redd.it/layexzh3m6nh1.jpg?width=576&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a389a9206788cc8ce0f823634abfd04654cc8147

That’s Legion in a nutshell: you can never quite tell whether he’s joking or being serious. Is he messing with you? And if he is, who exactly is he messing with? Legion is clearly a trickster-type character, and you’re never bored with those.

Seriously, at this point I feel like I can already predict the Devil’s route. It’s pretty straightforward: the Devil is, well, devilish. He doesn’t experience love, attachment, and all that the way humans do, but if Tessa stays loyal to him, then on the “good” path she’ll probably end up becoming his Supreme Reaper.

Thomas feels pretty predictable to me too, with his puppy-dog eyes and his constant running after Tessa. Surprisingly, Elian’s route has turned out to be more boring than I expected. Now he’s torn between the classic “I love this woman” and “but my duty, my country!” dilemma.

Caleb’s route is pretty easy to understand: an old love coming back, the feelings never really went away (or came back, or woke up again), and all that. Cassandra is a little more complicated, but even there, you can generally see where things are heading.

With Legion, though, I just have no idea.

Is he actually loyal to the Devil and serving him, with all of this being part of some larger plan? I wouldn’t rule it out. Is he working against the Devil? Has he decided to switch sides? Is he only looking out for himself? Or is he doing it for his own sake, and maybe dragging someone else into it along the way?

I wouldn’t even rule out Legion betraying Tessa at some point — and doing it precisely when she finally lets her guard down (and lets him finish what he started in bed).

But I also wouldn’t rule out him never betraying her at all. Or maybe he will betray her, but it’ll only look like a betrayal. Maybe it’ll actually be part of some elaborate scheme or a much bigger conspiracy...

My theories about Legion

I had a theory that Legion deliberately chose Tessa for this mission so that, in the end, he could set her up to save his own skin. And I think he may have come up with the whole plan quite a while ago, possibly when he learned about Elian.

Let’s put it this way: if the Devil gets rid of Elian, he’ll gain the ability to personally control souls on Earth, absorb them, and feed on them. In other words, he’ll no longer need Legion as an intermediary. Legion would ultimately lose his value, his importance, his power, and most likely his soul — meaning his life.

So defeating Elian would actually go against Legion’s own interests and, more importantly, his survival.

And that brings up the first interesting question: did Legion know all of this when the Devil sent him to kill baby Elian, and Legion failed to do it? It’s possible that he did know and deliberately chose not to kill him. In other words, Legion may have been playing this long game from the very beginning.

But I’m not entirely convinced by this theory, although I’m not ruling it out completely either. The reason I doubt it is that Legion has been to Hell many times, where the Devil’s powers are essentially unrestricted, and he could have simply read everything in Legion’s soul.

And according to the Devil himself, the reason Elian survived was that Legion’s conscience and his inclination toward good hadn’t completely died out — not because Legion was secretly plotting some elaborate scheme.

Which, by the way, is a pretty unexpected twist for the Devil and also an interesting detail when it comes to Legion’s characterization. If, after 2,000 years of serving the Devil, they still haven’t managed to completely eradicate whatever light remained in Legion, then his sheer resilience is honestly pretty remarkable.

Then Tessa enters the picture. And that raises the question: what made her so unusual to Legion in the first place? I think it was a combination of her ambition, which made it perfectly logical for Legion to specifically recommend her to the Devil, and her youth and inexperience, which increased the chances of her failing the mission — exactly what Legion needed.

In other words, Legion needed someone convincing enough to make his recommendation believable, but inexperienced enough to give him a reasonable guarantee that she wouldn’t actually succeed. For a long time, I thought Legion deliberately wanted to set Tessa up and ultimately make her pay the price for him. But after Tessa survived anyway, apparently thanks in part to Elian’s prayers, I started questioning Legion’s motives.

Could he have anticipated that meeting Elian and having him pray for her would give Tessa that kind of protection? I have absolutely no idea what Legion could or couldn’t have known, but I have a feeling that after 2,000 years, he’s accumulated quite a lot of interesting information.

Legion is playing an incredibly difficult game with the stakes as high as they can possibly be. He’s working against the Devil, but he has to do it in such a way that everyone around him — first and foremost the Devil himself — believes he’s actually working for the Devil.

Legion’s defense mechanism is his cynicism. He puts on this whole “I don’t give a damn about anyone but myself” act, because that’s exactly the version of Legion the Devil is comfortable with, and it gives Legion the best possible chance of survival. And the more chances Legion has to survive, paradoxically, the more he can actually do to help other people.

The tragedy of Legion is that he can’t show who he really is, even if he wants to.

And I keep thinking that he must be absolutely sick to death of wearing all those masks himself. I’d really love to see him outplay the Devil and finally become free. It would be fascinating to see what Legion would do first if he finally had the freedom to make his own choices.

Caution, spoilers!

In the MC's life, there were good and bad guys.

The good guys: Caleb, Elian. Caleb left the MC for the church, fully knowing that she had no one else and how much she loved him.

Elian — slept with the MC, confessed his feelings, and then... I am getting married! Duty, country, my dear. You have to understand.

The bad guys: Legion. Cynical, but honest in his own way, and I have a suspicion that he dragged the MC into this whole situation so that she would catch Elian's attention, so that Elian's prayers would shield the MC from the Devil (which worked and became her protection).

Thomas — sold his soul to the Devil for profit, which can hardly be called a marker of a good guy. Crazy about the MC, despite the fact that she helped sell his soul to the Devil. He knows who she is. It does not bother him.

Am I the only one who finds the concept of good and bad guys ironic in the context of the MC in this story?

Just so you know, I do understand both Caleb and Elian, and overall everything is ambiguous. It is just an interesting irony.

I really like Season 2 of HS3 in terms of plot progression, but especially in the context of how certain routes are developing. And I'm genuinely impressed — in a good way — by how Elena has fleshed out Mikael and his route. At the same time, she manages both to develop the character himself even without a romantic line with him, and to develop the romantic line itself.

There are so many big scenes and small moments with him in every update. I don't remember exactly which episode had the intimacy, but on this route, I get a sense of emotional closeness, support, and constant connection even without the intimacy:

1. Audrey by the river of glyph, teasing a worried Mikael about drinking from it. Then Audrey gets a little tipsy and launches into a tribute to Mikael's beauty and his hair. Mikael smiles and carries her off in his arms.
2. Lyla asks to touch Mikael's feathers, but he refuses out of respect for Audrey's feelings and says he is responsible for them. I love responsible men!
3. Dagon gets on Audrey's nerves, and Audrey hopes Mikael will handle it. Mikael handles it without giving it any special attention.
4. Mikael carries Audrey in his arms every time she feels unwell — and just because. Looks like he picked that up from David.
5. Mikael reveals some of his weaknesses to Audrey, showing her the cost of his healing.
6. Mikael is constantly at her bedside every time she comes to after being overloaded because of Malum. Mikael says he is always here, right there, with her.
7. Mikael invites her for a walk in Snow Valley, and Audrey thinks she doesn't care what's around — Earth, Hell, Heaven — as long as he's by her side.

I love the way they talk. Mikael stops saying things that might hurt Audrey the moment her heart skips a single beat. That means he's constantly listening to the rhythm of her heart. Audrey already knows in advance what he'll say to her about certain things, even though they haven't actually spent that much time together.

In Astrea, I had that soulmates feeling with Audrey and Rafael. But now, watching the speed at which Mikael and Audrey are growing closer, I'm getting the same feeling.

I got curious about what everyone thinks about this. I'd appreciate some reasoning.

During the amethyst event, I finally played through all the released episodes of Child of the Abyss. And I have a question: did Dante beat up his brother in the past (a flashback) or in the present? I got a bit confused on that part.

I finally got through the last update thanks to the event. And it seems to me that Fox has somehow crossed the line for a love interest. Though after Almarzar, nothing would surprise me anymore.

What worries me most is the theory that the author might decide that Fox will be exactly the love interest you choose (meaning you can't avoid him unless you go down the solo path).

I don’t mean what everyone’s hoping for—zombies, I remember—but what do you think we’ll actually get? Any thoughts on that?

I have a hunch that for once they won’t be sequels but genuinely new stories. And I’m thinking maybe something historical or alternate history.

My main hope is just that they’re not too AI-driven.