And speaking of easy and cliched writing, Malice is suddenly obsessed with Elymas? That makes zero sense to me, at least only watching the anime. If she was really that obsessed, why wouldn’t she have killed him rather than letting him leave home at the very beginning of the anime?

My hypothesis is that Malice was not in a position to just kill Elm when he was exiled, but his feats as an adventurer could undermine her claim to the position of heir to the head of their House. Her killing of the prisoner highlights two things in particular: she is efficiently power leveling up in a rather game player like way and the other is how ruthlessly she is pursuing her goal of staking her claim.