- "He was supposed to be a good strategist and knight but his inflated ego and lack of vision make him a pompous blunder" — Pina depicts Helm's egomania and short-sighted attitude.
Herm Fule Maio(ヘルム・フレ・マイオ Herumu Fure Maio) is the friend of Zorzal as well as a viscount of the Empire. Sentai on their English Dub spelled his name Helm. He is the secondary antagonist of the Gate thus the JSDF fought there.
A witless, inflexible and close-minded military adviser with an ego that can make him to deny reality, rationality even his own grave and foolish mistakes, he responsible of making strategy for Zorzal and the Imperial army in their fight against the JSDF and the Loyalist, but only to failed miserably in the end because of his stick-in-the-mud mindset.
Of all Zorzal's generals, he is the most fanatic toward the suicidal cause of the Empire in a futile war against the JSDF, even surpassing Zorzal due to his extreme egomania. During the Imperial Civil War, he is well-known for making a lot of tactical blunders against the JSDF. He is stripped of his Viscount title after the Civil War.
He also a former member and co-founder of the Rose Order of Knight.
Personality
In the past, Herm was much humble where he had often advised the young Norma Co Igloo to refrain from ignorantly performing any reckless actions during their time as part of the Rose-Order of Knights. This later changed after leaving the Rose-Order of Knights and becoming a viscount. He becomes more arrogant and haughty, along with showing no remorse as he took part in either slaughtering or enslaving innocent lives during the Battle of Ginza, though this may be more a display of different ideals between those from the Special Region and Japan. Herm seems to respect Zorzal and even holds him in high regard. He also seems to have no sense of compunction when making Piña his enemy.
While he was given humane conditions by Japan government, as compared to the standards of how the Special Area would usually treat prisoners of war, Herm is clearly ungrateful for the treatment. He even considers the treatment to be a disgrace to someone of his office since he was treated with the same respect as the demi-humans who were also part of the prisoners of war showing his racism, royalty haute nature and lack of common sense since he never being putted in the position of POW.
Despite how he is the relative of one of the families that are helping in the peace negotiations with Japan, Herm has no intentions of supporting his family’s goal in building peace as he sees the peace terms to be, from his point of view, unfavorable for the Empire. Instead, he and the rest of the returned prisoners choose to secretly collaborate with Zorzal in getting vengeance with the Japanese.
Like Zorzal, Herm is willing to use whatever unconscionable methods in order to gain victory over Japan like how he suggested to Zorzal in having the Empire's goblins in attacking the villages around Alnus, making it look like it was the work of criminals and bandits, along with having the Empire's soldiers attack local villages while having them disguised as JSDF soldiers in order to frame the JSDF and cause a casus belli that would be favorable for the Empire's pro-war faction. Furthermore, despite witnessing tremendous military power of the JSDF, he still greatly underestimates the military power and technology of the JSDF as well as being extremely ethnocentric in which he and the rest of the pro-war generals and senators never try to learn and adapt advanced technology and firearms. Instead, they practice outdated scorch earth tactics or letting monster loosed around Alnus to make chaos around the JSDF ranks only to failed miserably and even backfired since all monsters they let loose around Alnus are destroyed effortlessly by tank and the majority of Empire's citizens turns against Zorzal's force, showing his absolute incapability in learning from his mistakes and experiences. At the same time, it is also shown that he underestimates Demigod like Rory and Giselle; others powerful magical races that support the JSDF, all the mages of Rondel as well as the Rose Order of Knight, which proves disastrous to him in war effort since these factions put Zorzal's force into more and more disadvantages. In the twist of irony, he has become an ignorant buffoon that he tried to prevent Norma from becoming in the past.
| “Not yet. As long as our army is fine, we can rise from the ashes! If I accept a defeat like this, how can I face Pina-denka?” |
| Herm expresses one of his biggest reason to continue his futile fighting against the JSDF and the Loyalist |
The biggest weakness of Herm are his massive ego and extreme sexism as he always see Pina and other female knights as inferior to him in every way just because they are women. This fact leads him to underestimate Pina and her army during the Second Battle of Italica, which getting him a lot of difficulty to break her defense. However, the most important part of his ego is that it doesn't allow him to lose to Pina or the JSDF as shown when the JSDF decimated the entire remaining of Zorzal's army during the final stage of the Second Battle of Italica in which he delusionally called out his generals to retreat and rebuild the army to fight again with Pina and the JSDF, although the result would be disastrous for him and the Imperial army as always and his tactics are nothing more than wastefully throwing Imperial soldiers into the meat grinders. Even when Zorzal loses his will to fight and abandons him for his life to the point of making he breaks down in tears, Herm still madly tries to defense his injuries ego to the point of screaming Pina to come to challenge him when he is surrounded by Duran's demi-human troops since he unable to allow a Viscount like himself to fight with the demi-humans only to be pinned down and knocked out by a Dwarf warrior.
Pina Co Lada: “And then you will continue fighting Nihon? And then even more soldiers will be made to die?”
Helm Fule Maio: “About that…”
Pina Co Lada: “And then countless innocents will be drawn into the fray. All for the sake of a battle you cannot win.”
Helm Fule Maio“Your Highness. No, it is for the sake of winning the battle. This sacrifice must be made for the Empire to triumph.”
Pina mocks Herm and Zorzal for their foolishness whilst Herm tries desperately to hide the fact that he makes the fool out of himself.
His egocentric tendency also makes him to completely deny the fact that he made tons of strategical and tactical blunders as well as completely incapable learning from his past experience toward the war against the JSDF. When Pina mocks him and Zorzal for building an army just to be eliminated pointlessly in the hopeless fight against the JSDF, he vehemently but pathetically defends his incompetent by justifying that victories require great sacrifice, totally rejecting the reality that what he can do best is wasting manpower against JSDF advanced weapons. Like the rest of warmongering senators, he is undoubtedly superficial to the negative long term effect of the suicidal war against the JSDF as he seems to never realize how much it will cause the Empire to go into ruin when the Empire cannot afford any men to even defend themselves from invasion inside the Special Region.
After being captured and imprisoned as well as hearing Zorzal's demise, his arrogant and egotism completely break to the point that he becomes too shameful to look at Pina and even his uncle in the face. However, in the end, he is spared by Pina due to her past with him during their day as knight-in-training and his uncle's pledge to spare him based on the fact he was still young and stupid. Although Herm loses his privilege as Viscount after being spared, he accepts without objection showing that he regrets starting the suicide war against the JSDF in the first place. Finally, he also thanks her dearly for her effort to release him from Japan as well as sparring his life and sadly states that he should have listened to her in the first place. After becoming civilian, his personality reverts back to the day before he was a Viscount and he also states that the Viscount title actually corrupted him to join Zorzal to bring down the Empire out of stupidity and blind price rather than making him great..
Appearance
Herm is a young man with long blonde hair which is slicked back and thin eyebrows. He wears clothes befitting of a noble.
History
In the past, the 16 years old Herm had enrolled in Piña Co Lada's Rose-Order of Knights where he was being mentored by the 34 year old Grey Co Aldo. His main goal for doing so was to make connections with the royal family. He was shown to hold rankings and titles to high regard, to the point where he would purposely lose matches against higher ranking nobles in order to not humiliate them. Herm was the oldest known student of Pina's Knight school, and unlike the others, Herm often remained calm and was always thinking, however due to his lower rank, he believed that his thoughts and opinions didnt matter, to which Bozes claim he was "just useless". During a tournament, Herm advised the lower ranking students, (all the boys and Beefeater) to lose their matches to higher ranked students, everyone agreed, except Beefeater, who claimed that rank has nothing to do with battle. During the final tournament match Herm suggested to Norma that the boys' team should just defend so that they will eventually lose while still putting up a good fight. When Bozes' group deserted her post as the front line combattants to take the boys' flag, Herm and his group found themselves paired up against a lone Hamiltion, who was the only one who remained true to Pina's orders, Herm immediatly began wondering how he could lose in this situation, Hamiltion then bravely challenged the larger and stronger Herm, who decided that he would knock Hamiltion down, then his group will attack Beefeater's group and lose (since Beefeater's group was larger, and were defending the flag), however before Herm could attack Hamiltion, Pina arrived and took Hamiltion's place, Herm began to get angry with how the high ranking nobles could be so serious while he, as a low ranking noble could only throw matches, he then decided to go all out on Pina so that she could understand his situation. Unexpectedly Pina turned out to be much tougher than Herm anticipated, he thought that Pina was only giving orders to the school and did not know that she was practicing after class was dismissed, Herm's eyes open for the first time as he can finally fight properly, in the end Bozes got the the boys' flag, and Herm's team lost. During a campout, Herm attempted to hunt with the rest of the school, while Bozes noted how cute the deer were when drinking, Herm and Norma took aim with their bows, Bozes shoved Norma down not wanting to see the cute deer die, while Herm fired his arrow, which seemingly hit the deer. after the students killed more deer, Herm wondered how he managed to hit the deer by firing an arrow out of desperation, and how did the other students also brought down so many deer, however Grey(who was secretly shooting the deer to save the students from eating rations) quickly congratulated Herm for being the first one to bring down a deer. While the other boys rated which girl was the most pretty, Herm did not participate, believing that it was rude to do so, however Norma then pissed him off when he began bragging about how he could go and take Pina for himself easily. When a storm threatened a nearby dam, Herm and the rest of the boys followed Norma to assist the girls, however instructor Grey was soon washed away, and Pina took Suissesse, Hamiltion, and Beefeater to rescue him, leaving Bozes in charge of repairing the dam. Bozes then left Norma in charge and left to find Pina, Herm and the others finished fixing the dam, and rode their horses to Pina's rescue, where Herm's eyes open again upon entering battle. At some point, he left the Rose-Order of Knights.
Plot
Herm was one of the 6,000 prisoners who were imprisoned by the JSDF during the Battle of Ginza. Later he, and 14 other people, were allowed to return to the Empire in order to please the families that are helping with the peace negotiations. However, after being greeted by Zorzal in a meeting, he later plots with Zorzal in getting vengeance on Japan.
Skills & Abilities
- Limited military strategist: despite conducting and inventing ways to fight the JSDF firearms, his strategies are highly shallow, idiotic and lack of adaptability due to his lack of knowledge about modern weapon, technology and anti-guerrilla tactics of the JSDF along with his ethnocentric approach toward warfare. As the result, most of his tactics are only short-lived and failed miserly later on. It is also shown that he has zero experience as well as having a very weak gasp in the concept of guerrilla warfare.
- Experience in commanding Demi-human soldiers: he has great experience in utilizing and commanding demi-human troops as shown when he correctly deducts the uncontrollable bloodlust of Pina's own demi-human troops to lure them into the trap in order to decimate them. However, his experience is absolutely obsolete against the JSDF since he only wasting his beasts and monsters toward to gun barrels of the JSDF.
- Swordsmanship: Herm is trained in swordsmanship with Pina, however, he is no match against her since his main goal of creating and joining the Rose Order of Knight with Pina is merely for making connection with the royal family. As the result, he doesn't take his swordsmanship training seriously.
Gallery
Trivia
- He is against Goblins getting equal treatment as shown at right.
Herm Fule Maio upset being seated with Goblins.
- Because of his egomania, he can be considered to be far more idiotic and insane than Zorzal.
- Despite co-founding Rose Order of Knight, he greatly underestimates them due to the fact that he doesn't stay in the order for long period of time to know their superior strength over regular Imperial troop. It is also contributes to the fact that he is quite a sexist, which is common in the ancient time.
- A herm is a column with an erect phallus with or with out a head usually Jupiter or Hermes hence the name herm.
- He is the only Imperial general to refuse to give up the suicidal war against the JSDF whilst all other Imperial generals and even Zorzal lose their will and hope to fight after the destruction of pro-war faction army in Second Battle of Italica.
