The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent

Episode 10

It is the moment some of you have been waiting for: the day when Sei meets another professional woman. Despite the novels being pretty clear about there being working women in both the medical and magical fields, the anime has largely eschewed that in favor of making Sei the lone lady among all the men in her workplace, but now the story has reached a point (namely adapting volume three of the novel series) where they can't play that game anymore, because the best alchemist in all of the Klausner Domain is a woman named Corinna.

It's worth mentioning that the show doesn't make a big deal out of this – in fact, I'm making much more of it than the episode does. Corinna also doesn't fall into any particular little old lady tropes – yes, she's hunched over, because apparently there's no cure for osteoporosis in fantasy worlds either, but she's not evil, sassy, sex-crazed, or any of the other various stereotypes for a woman who's old and performs what's essentially a feat of magic. I suppose she might eat children on the weekends in her gingerbread house, but for all intents and purposes, she's a very professional person who just so happens to be an elderly lady. And she has clearly been waiting for Sei to arrive.

At first, as you can tell from the screencap, it looks as if Lord Klausner and Corinna might have some sort of shady interest in Sei, and to a degree that could be true – there's apparently something amiss in the herb fields of the domain, and since most of Salutania's herbs are from there, that's a major problem. Why should anyone assume that the Saint can fix that? Because, unbeknownst to anyone outside of the domain, a previous Saint did precisely that, using the Blessing magic that Sei has unwittingly unleashed several times now. Corinna and Lord Klausner are hoping that they can get Sei to do that for their fields, thus staving off a major crisis in the herb and health industries.

As for why no one but those higher up in the Klausner Domain are aware of this ability of the Saint, that's something that the anime has largely brushed over. It may have been mentioned in early episodes, but records about and by past Saints are kept under lock and key, if not outright destroyed in order to prevent their powers from being abused by people with bad intentions. The Klausner Domain has kept their past Saint's diary in a safe, and the implication is that only Lord Klausner and Corinna have read it. In this book, the past Saint discusses a terrible drought and plague that visited the lands and how she, fearing for her younger brother's life, managed to Bless the land and put a stop to everything. She doesn't appear to have made the connection between her love for her brother and her power, but it's enough to get Sei thinking when she hears that the knights have been injured. Her fears for Albert trigger the Blessing, and later when she thinks about it, and remembers the Saint's diary, she finally manages to put it all together.

I suppose that makes this a pretty major episode of revelations: we learn about a past Saint (who was born in Salutania, not summoned), meet a professional woman, and Sei gets a clue about her powers and her feelings. Whew! Of course, she's in no way ready to tell Albert this last part, although he's very definitely upping his game a bit with each encounter. Since this coincides with another strapping young man's entry onto the scene, it's probably a sign that we're going to get a bit more romance plot development in the remaining episodes – Leonhardt doesn't know that Sei's the Saint, but he's definitely keen on her, even if only for her awesome healing powers. I can't think Albert's going to react well to that at all.

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The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent is currently streaming on Funimation.