All of the Archangels getting sealed away at the same time sounded a bit excessive so I'm glad it was actually just Ludociel. The fact that Nakaba is name-dropping him like this gives me the impression we'll be seeing more of him later on. As hostile as Schwarz and the other demons initially were towards Tristan I've always expected the goddesses to be even worse due to their seething hatred of the demons. Ludociel is the perfect fit to serve as the face of that sentiment during the eventual Goddess Realm arc.
Behemoth is clearly not an ordinary beast given its absurd size and strength easily surpassing that of Zeldris, that's why I speculated it could be a primordial Chaos monster akin to its namesake. It wouldn't have been created to benefit the demons but rather for some other purpose that the DK decided to take advantage of, much like how he used the Lady of the Lake, another unusual Chaos creation with an unclear purpose, to recover his magic reserves ahead of his final battle with the Sins.
In the pages I posted Bouncyval establishes that life spirits exist within Behemoth and in your pic he says they are behind it, which both refer to the beast being powered by said spirits just like all other life forms. At no point is it suggested that the monster itself is a spirit. That wouldn't even make sense given how we know that life spirits are invisible to non-spirits except for when Percival uses his magic to manifest them as green blobs, whereas Behemoth has a well-defined physical form. It's not that surprising for such a massive quantity of life spirits to have an effect on its surroundings, especially when the (still unexplained, I might add) presence of the portal was agitating them further. Think of it like how an intense fire produced by flame spirits radiates heat that can be felt from a distance. The wiki is entirely maintained by fans and is not an official source.
They are allies, hence why I said it would be unintentional. The idea is inspired by the legends where Mordred takes advantage of Lancelot's affair with Guinevere to start a civil war in Camelot, which essentially means that Lancelot's actions caused that war even though he didn't intend for it to happen. I'm skeptical about the Guinevere love triangle making an appearance in the manga at this point, but it wouldn't be too difficult for Lancelot make some other stupid mistake for her sake that then triggers a similar conflict. Same thing with something like Gawain overusing her powers during a difficult fight and scorching crops all over Britannia in the process, thus triggering a famine. I'm pretty much 100% certain that the KotA's disasters will end up mirroring the Sins' crimes in the sense that they'll mostly be misunderstandings, like how Meliodas was blamed for destroying Danafor even though the city had already fallen to demons by the time he wiped it off the map. He's technically guilty but not really.
As for Bartra, I feel like Nakaba would want to keep the twist a secret until later, but it would be possible for Bartra to for example have a prophetic dream that is so terrifying that he dies from shock before he can warn anyone about it. Well, I guess for narrative purposes there would have to be someone who overhears the warning but then neglects to tell anyone about it until things have already gone wrong.
I don't think that's obvious, in fact I don't believe it's going to happen at all. This Demon Realm segment is meant to establish how much of a threat Lancelot is by showing him attacking innocent civilians and defeating a strong combatant like Zeldris. There's nothing to be gained from doing the same thing again with the goddesses. Also don't forget that Nakaba has explicitly stated he wants this manga to work as a standalone series for readers who have not read NnT. The only reason this whole Demon Realm segment was possible is because we already had an arc set in this location before that established Zeldris as a beloved new king and introduced Schwarz's group on the side. That's why Nakaba could create this scene where Zeldris heroically buys time for his people while Schwarz looks on with tears in his eyes. The readers know these characters and understand what's going on. The Archangels have not had their sequel debut yet and the Goddess Realm is foreign even to fans of the prequel so the same kind of scenario simply wouldn't work with them.
Once Lancelot is done with the demons there will be two options for the next development. He can either go to Britannia so that the plot can move forward or Nakaba can give him an even stronger opponent to showcase his full strength against. The most obvious candidate for the latter scenario is Behemoth given that it's close by and would reasonably be woken up by all this chaos. The Sacred Tree could work too given that it should be on par with the DK, but we don't know if it can fight and Lancelot destroying two realms back to back would be redundant anyway so this seems less likely. Hawk is technically on the table as well, though I don't really see that happening due to the problems with Purgatory. Cath didn't bring it up as an option earlier so he doesn't care about the realm and Lancelot had no reason to go there even back when he was still trying to stall because the time dilation means he'd have to stay there for thousands of years just to buy his friends a couple of days of preparation. That said, such an experience could serve to help Lancelot better understand what his father went through and maybe also age him up a little to compensate for the opposite time dilation he experienced at the lake, so I wouldn't say it's completely out of the question.
The difference between life spirits and souls is that life spirits animate the flesh while the soul is where the mind comes from. We know this based on what happened when the demons ate some humans' souls.
These people are stated to still be alive, but they're like empty husks that do nothing but stare blankly into the void. Melascula explanation about souls and bodies echoes this as well.
A soulless body is a living shell and not a dead one, meaning that it's still inhabited by life spirits even in the absence of a soul. I don't recall if it's ever been mentioned whether animals have souls, but given that they don't really have much of a mind and instead act on instinct it's plausible that they are soulless. In this case it makes sense that their life spirits going wild would cause the animal to go crazy, which seems to be what happened to Behemoth. Think of it like how real life animals can be unpredictable and dangerous if they're in pain. When Percival eventually calmed down the spirits the beast simply fell asleep again.
As a side note, if we consider Dreyfus's explanation about how magic power is the product of a person's will, belief and experience, all of which relate to the mind, we can surmise that magic probably originates from the soul as well. This also extends to the Graces, as shown when Escanor's soul was able to burn its way out of Melascula's stomach after being eaten. Another observation we can make based on the same premise is that Diodra's ability to steal other people's magic presumably involves absorbing their souls, which explains why his victims have to be dead in order for it to work. Instead of traveling to the afterlife the souls are drawn into Diodra. We know this absorption was not related to life spirits because Percival sensed Turret and Rothes's life spirits returning to the spirit realm at the time of their deaths. Anyway, Despair is the most overpowered magic in the entire series so I'm really curious what Nakaba has planned for it in the future.
Something to keep in mind about Shining Road is that it's an energy beam, meaning that it pretty much only does damage within a relatively small radius and in a straight line. Even if it has as much or more power behind it than Nemesis it wouldn't result in the same kind of area-of-effect destruction, which is why Nakaba was able to make the technique so strong in the first place. I mean, just think about how many random bystanders would have gotten caught up in the blasts if Shining Road instead worked like a bomb. The destruction being limited in scope is a feature, not a bug. I therefore doubt it's capable of wiping out countries let alone cities in a single hit, hence why Lancelot had to disassemble Camelot piece by piece instead of all at once.
Given Nakaba's track record with fake-out deaths I'm pretty sure both Jericho and Zeldris are going to be fine. The total casualties resulting from Lancelot's rampage by the end of this whole ordeal will likely only amount to a bunch of Chaos Knights, a crowd of demons and possibly Ban. Previous instances of someone committing heinous acts while under the influence of some evil force, such as what happened with Hendrickson and Mael, were forgiven fairly easily so Lancelot's situation isn't anything unusual for the setting. A part me wants Nakaba to follow the Arthurian legends and have Lancelot kill some of his fellow Knights of the Round Table, assuming said order will be established at some point.
I doubt that's the case. Recall how Percival's kids were like "he can't be our dad because the real Percival isn't so goofy". If Tristan were dead in the future then shouldn't Ysaie have used a similar logic of "he can't be my father because the real Tristan died years ago"? That seems like a pretty glaring discrepancy compared to the supposed fake having a slightly different personality, so why was it not mentioned at all? In fact, why didn't the Grail Knights ever bring up that the KotA must be fakers because they were a group of four even though there should have only been three of them left after Tristan's passing?
I don't subscribe to the theories presented in this thread regarding the timeline, but I'm confident that the story isn't simply going to be following a predetermined trajectory. Nakaba has already been toying with this idea in the form of Cath using Guinevere's prophecies to alter the intended course of events. Guinevere's paralyzing fear of defying fate is also clearly building up to her eventually finding the courage to stop blindly following the path set by her visions and instead choosing her own future, perhaps after she realizes that she may have been able to prevent Ban from dying by Lancelot's hand if only she had spoken up when she had the chance. Furthermore, if the story were simply heading towards the same world the Grail Knights come from then there wouldn't be any tension because we'd already know how things are going to go. It's crucial for something to change.
Didn't Zeldris bring up Mael when he went to deliver Percival's helmet to Meliodas? Mael was also shown to be protecting the Fairy Realm in King&Diane's absence alongside Matrona and others.
There is no real evidence one way or the other. My money is on Mael still having the Grace simply because it's such an integral part of his powers and identity. When Mael eventually shows up he's likely going to get a chance to show off a bit just like Zeldris just now, and that's going to difficult to do if he's entirely reliant on his Ark techniques. I could see him and the other Archangels losing their Graces by the end of the story though.
