The review of episode 2 ran so long that I did not get to how the series is doing so far as an adaptation of the source novels. This is a complicated enough situation that it may even be of interest to anime-only viewers.
The construction of the first few novels is somewhat chaotic, with a
lot of shifting perspective, jumping around between different locales, dialog with unspecified speakers, and events that do not seem at first to be in sync with each other. Because of those factors, novel readers expected this to be a difficult story to adapt. (Even the original author is, if I recall correctly, on record on saying something to this effect.) The first three episodes show how tricky the adaptation process was. The human side of the story skipped most of the first novel and does not currently look like it is planning to flash back; the first human-side scene in episode 1 was, in fact, from early in novel 2, and a couple of scenes so far that were from the first novel (most notably