Chained Soldier – 11 – A Common Enemy

While it looked like the humans were poorly matched against their opponents last week, the tables are gradually turned here in one battle after the other. While Kyouka takes on the Unihorn, Tenka finds that Yuuki’s sister (her sister-in-law) moves so fast, all she can do is flee by teleporting; there’s no time for an attack of her own.

So Tenka, who can teleport 666 times in a row, just keeps playing defense, counting on Kyouka to eventually defeat Unihorn and help her out. As she teleports away again and again, she’s also learning Aoba’s movements. That’s the DDF Commander Difference: extra attention to detail and above all, patience.

When Coco reveals that she’s super slimy and her trusty dog is nigh invincible, Shushu and Sahara switch it up. Instead of being huge, Shushu shrinks to the size of a baseball, and Sahara launches her into the dog’s mouth. Then she grows to huge size again, and the dog explodes in a grisly cloud of gore, bone, and fur.

This, of course, it’s the largest plot hole in Avengers: Infinity War: Ant-Man could have easily gone up Thanos’ **** and blown him up from the inside. Anywho, Sahara grabs one of the dog’s teeth and uses her highest-level Sheep power to launch herself at Coco, slashing her across the abdomen. Great creativity and teamwork from the muscle-heads here.

How does Yachiho deal with Hinami suddenly being choked out from behind? By simply rewinding time. Every time Naon and her spider show her a move, she’s able to go back in time and counter it. When she needs a rest, Hinami protects her in kind, by among other things sprouting a hundred guns from her hair and firing them in all directions.

When some of the bullets hit Naon hiding in the wall, Yachiho rewinds time and targets her directly. While they’ll alway be a little hostile or competitive with each other, it’s more than clear that Yachiho and Hinami love each other dearly and will always have each others’ backs—literally in this case.

That brings us back to Tenka vs. Aoba. She’s gotten into such a repetitive rhythm of dodging attacks and teleporting that Aoba is totally caught off guard when Kyouka breaks that rhythm with her katana. She makes it possible for Tenka to finally use her attack for offense. But when she has Aoba right in her sights, she hesitates.

Aoba strikes her down with a direct hit, and asks her why she hesitated. Tenka’s answer proves her love for Yuuki: she didn’t want to make him upset by killing her. Aoba assures Tenka she didn’t need to go easy on her, but she also beams as brightly as we’ve ever seen her as she thanks Tenka for thinking of her brother’s feelings. She’s decided she likes Tenka now.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean she wants Tenka to marry Yuuki, but in her battered, possibly concussed, yet mostly lovesick/horny state, Tenka can’t help but hear Aoba’s words and start visualizing a life with Yuuki  as her husband and Aoba as her sister-in-law.

It’s quite simply sweet as hell, and if it brings the battle to a screeching halt and serves as a momentary truce of sorts, so what? Battles are fun, but character stuff like this is fun too, and really deepens my connection with the characters. This isn’t good vs. evil. These battles only even started because hotter heads prevailed.

Turns out it’s a good thing everyone stops whaling on each other at this point. As soon as Naon and Coco appear before Aoba with Shushu, Sahara, and the Azuma sisters in tow, the two “godlike” humanoid Shuuki Shikoku and Jouryuu blast a hole in the cave ceiling and descend.

To the humans’ surprise, these two are not on Aoba’s side; in fact, they consider Aoba and her friends to be “mutts.” Shikoku introduces them as the “Eight Thunder Gods”, leaders of the Shuuki. One stomp from Jouryuu sends everyone flying, and when one of Shikoku’s snakes bites Unihorn, it turns on Aoba.

Clearly, these two are extremely powerful, possibly more powerful than Aoba, Kyouka, and Tenka, especially when they’re already extremely beaten up and fatigued. But that mighty wind Jouryuu kicks up? Aoba shields Yuuki and Kyouka from it, and when she’s down on the ground and Unihorn is about to deliver a critical blow, Kyouka comes between them—while riding a freed Yuuki.

If Coco can get herself and everyone healed and they find their second wind, I’ll take all of them plus Yuuki working together against anyone, any day. It’ll be an uphill fight for sure, but it looked that way for the humans last week. A lot can happen in twenty minutes, and Shikoku’s naked arrogance might be something that can be exploited.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – 25 – The Age of Humanity

The assembled mages are pondering how to proceed with so little information, but as others arrive, they gain more intel on the replicas, and with it the confidence to take on the Fake Frieren, who is terrifying in its stillness and patience. Dunste confirms it has no mind, while Lawine learned from her brother’s adventuring that the creature making the replicas is called a Spiegel, and is extremely weak once the replicas are defeated.

The third and most crucial piece of information is not only revealed, but demonstrated by Fern: whenever Frieren casts a spell, she ever so briefly stops detecting mana. I love how sheepish she is about it, as after all it’s a common mistake made by baby mages. But all her other strengths mean only a select few can exploit this weakness.

With sufficient intel to proceed, the group forms a strategy. Fern can tell from her smiles that Frieren is enjoying this, and she confirms that, as it reminds her of when she, Himmel, Eisen, and Heiter (if he wasn’t hung over) coming up with a plan to defeat a dungeon boss. Denken and the others are concerned that Frieren and Fern will be facing off against the replica by themselves, but Frieren has the confidence of someone from the party that conquered the most dungeons in history.

It’s rare for a show to come along that wields such mastery of restraint and elegance in the execution of its battle scenes. Frieren’s battles never last long, but they’re never too short. Instead, they are as long as they need to be. In the battles, Evan Call’s score rings out and time is compressed. So much action and invention and mayhem is conveyed in just a few brief seconds. It can jump from Slow Life to Turbo Chaos in the literal blink of an eye.

It can also make expert use of delayed gratification to lend its battles even more weight. Just as Repli-Frieren is about to zap Real-Frieren in the face with a spell, we cut to however many centuries ago when Flamme passed away and Frieren paid a visit to Serie to present her with her apprentice’s will. Now that the emperor has approved it, any human can now study magic, and Flamme wanted Serie to take over the training of imperial mages once she died.

Serie has no intention of doing so, and is angered by Flamme’s “greed”, but Frieren notes that Flamme predicted her master’s reaction with perfect accuracy. Before Frieren leaves, Serie asks her to take a walk with her. While she does, we have a glimpse of Serie’s headspace. She speaks rather coldly about Flamme, having trained her “on a mere whim”, but her attitude makes sense when you consider that the way Serie perceives time, Flamme’s entire life was equivalent to only a few days, or even hours.

I love how when they walk through a very elvish-looking forest, the spirit of a young Flamme follows Serie along, smiling, holding her master’s hand, showing her her favorite spell: creating a field of flowers. Considering how relatively briefly Flamme was alive, Serie was amazed she was able to bring magic to humanity. She warns Frieren not to neglect her training, as the “era of humans” will be upon them before they know it, and if Frieren is going to be killed, it will either be by the Demon King … or a human.

Knowing all of this entering the battle, Frieren keeps her replica focused on her as they fight to a draw. Fern conceals her mana and stays hidden until Frieren creates an opening. Replica Frieren, who has the same vulnerability as her real counterpart, cannot detect Fern’s mana until it’s too late. All Real Frieren has to do is move out of the way of Fern’s Zoltraak, which she can do because she knows it’s coming. Replica Frieren doesn’t, so it’s game over in a flash.

Elves like her predate Zoltraak, they’re unable to react to it as instinctively as a human like Fern, for whom Zoltraak is just a basic attack spell that existed long before she was born. But at the end of the day the replica lost because Real Frieren is a relic from an ancient time living in the middle of the Age of Humanity, and Fern is her adorable human apprentice who was able to best her.