Bro's just like us. He knows the good entertainment when he sees it.

Yeah. Gotta remember he's seen Alice die a TON from when it was a game and he knows exactly how she feels and reciprocates. We don't know the exact details ourselves yet, but it's pretty likely that either Alice needs some sort of breakthrough herself before he can clear the air or her being told his true feelings this early would get her killed in some way.

Because we should know by now that he'd absolutely refuse to let her die.

MC carrying the squad of level 10s against the level 50 raid boss. lol

Bro is breaking the rules.

You can't keep saying that you're courting death and then NOT immediately eat your words afterwards. That's like some high end forbidden technique.

Guess we'll get to look forward to watching another pretentious fool get humbled!

So even Chronos is slapped by this penalty. Makes you wonder just how absurd Gaia is in the hierarchy considering that Gaia basically IS the tower at this point.

Yep. We don't know exactly how far back compared to the rest, but it's still in the past.

I mean... can't argue with the results!

Makes sense, in a way. For a world with Gods, you gotta punch upwards to be with a God.

Even Kousuke himself had his own hoops to jump through to reach his current position, after all.

Wait, HE said the thing this time?!

Is that allowed?!

She stole a banana once in her youth.

The Monkey Mafia has had a hit on her ever since.

Nope.

Remember, Judith mentioned while explaining cursed weapons to him that she'd dealt with a lot of them in the past. Still good to see her again for a while, though.

Those two are adorable.

Now they just have to work on getting their new cat to accept them. It'll be tough, but a loyal (well for a cat anyway) cat is always a worthwhile investment!

Yeeeeeeeeeeep.

... but unfortunately for his desire to be seen as some sort of horrendous villain, we're just as aware on this side of the screen as the folks in-universe are that he's basically a hero cosplaying as a villain. "I wanna power my favorite hero up, prevent all the worst disasters, and make sure everyone can come to a happy end!" Truly, such heinous and diabolical plans, our MC has!

Yep.

He could've recovered a "bad" rep initially as just being opportunistic or whatever, but the longer that 0 innocents taking major injury goes on? The less plausible him being an actual villain seems as there should've been at least an accident or something by now.

Combine that with him actually being charismatic and entertaining (so people don't feel like they're in actual danger during his attacks and see it more as a thrill ride), and the fact that he keeps actively showing up to deal with situations the heroes can't handle or even setting things up in advance to help them (bridge aftermath into stopping that monster, anyone?), and the end result is that anyone looking at it is gonna think that he's some sort of secret hero that takes care of dirty/heavy jobs and is just failing to maintain plausible deniability by doing a crappy job at pretending to be a villain.

For pure text? Yeah, it's a pretty notable amount.

But the instant you go from pure text to... basically any other type of data, the restrictions on it become more and more apparant.

Guy keeps failing upwards and the fact he doesn't realize it is even better compared to a lot of them who see they're failing upwards and don't know why.

Helps that the Goddess keeps trolling him all day.

They had to make a reminder that at the end of the day dude is still just a dude lol

I know we're focused on Alice here, but we really should take a moment to appreciate Teresa in this panel.

https://i.postimg.cc/xjLdtDXF/i.webp


Girl really has that, "I don't know what's going on but I'm just happy to be here" vibe nailed down!

A part of that was from her staying aloof and not really caring in the slightest, though. She's invested now which changes things to a degree.

Plus, better to have the learning experience early on in a relatively controlled place than near the end where mistakes can't afford to be made and you don't have as much control over everything. I do want to see the payoff for all this, though. Because very few things suck more than a pointless and completely avoidable misunderstanding™ or similar arc.