My favorite thing about Raul as a character is his insane commitment to the bit.

Letting someone else use his body to enact their revenge to circumvent his own rule about seeking revenge? All for the bit.
Pretending to be a princess getting assaulted all night just to make a fountain of torture for the perpetrators? All for the bit.
Twenty years of illusion of this man achieving everything he ever dreamed of? Oh man, it's gonna be so good when he realizes, and that's all worth it. For the bit.

I imagine that it's the sharing of her blood that's drawing the descendants/reincarnations of her past encounters to her, and something about the endgame will need their various blood samples to work.

Welp, he's dead.

I just noticed in the earlier panels of him singing he's drooling, because he can't feel the feedback, his own lips moving up and down, his breath coming in and out, the saliva pooling in his mouth.
All that to say it's probably a truly terrible rendition until he breaks her concentration.

I despise him but that was an excellent turnaround.

I don't need it to be Iruma who wins I just NEED THIS FUCKER TO LOOOOOOOOSE

I'm very excited about this, a stylish phantom thief character is neat.

The entire point of the conversation is that the other side can also, in some way, see the future so they are also actively avoiding the outcome in turn. If she thinks, I'll go ahead of time to stop that one, they go somewhere else. As she said, there's too many to protect all of them, and they're too important for all of them to just hide and wait. All of this is the text of the chapter above you. Yes, the author could just have her have a spell that would immediately solve the problem but that would be an infuriating story development, if everything just gets solved every time because the elf has a spell lmao. Magic has been a part of the story of the entire time but a significant portion of it has also been the limitations of magic, the reasons why you can't just solve all of your problems with a spell, and why having magic isn't the end all be all. Here, you're seeing her find a solution to her problem that isn't magic, which is to trust the emperor and have a dialogue with him, don't you think that kind of means something? The communication and Trust are doing something that magic cannot?

Yes, Frieren has literal magic that probably also helps committing a literal magical crime.

Yes, that's why no murder has ever been unsolved.

If she doesn't go, the assassin kills however many of her followers they can find.
If she avoids the plot entirely, she never encounters the assassin so where would she gain clues from?

Huh? That makes perfect sense as the rules of the system were laid out. The vision of the future only goes until her death, and she even says she found a way for herself to live but whoever is targeting her took it out on the mages who work for her instead. What are you talking about?

Turth be told when you mentioned somoene being quite brave I assumed the rest of the post was going to be about the girl saying she wanted to be impregnated.

I picked a very good time to reread the story in a binge the other day!

It feels as if we're approaching but not quite to the endgame, which at this rate has to be Sue and America entering the war and being both an equal to Tanya on the field and impossibly resource rich (and fresh to the fight) to ever attrition or outmanuever into defeat.
My guess is that Tanya and the Empire's problem ultimately will be they can't 'complete' the war. The previous chapters put a lot of emphasis on the distance between the public, politicans, and military's expectations of the future. One sees victories and goes "We're winning!" But with the more complete picture the military can only see it as "We won, but we can't keep winning at this rate."
Because of these things, and the situation on the Allies side, nobody involved currently will accept a losing peace. From there, as much as Tanya has done to influence Imperial thinking 'to win', I think she'll have to convince them that the best thing to do is to lose. Somehow having to avoid the bad outcomes of our World Wars for the Empire, where the peace isn't so harsh it sets the stage for the next war, or so devastating that it leaves the Empire ruined and divided between East and West.

I know that final line already has and will lead to more comments about commies but I hope people realize the dramatic irony where the same is true of every nation in the story. They all unforgivably threw human lives away into a meatgrinder that feeds straight into the garbage. For the sake of empire, freedom, security, economics, politics. Tanya herself having no choice is the main thrust of the plot, and the same is true for all of the soldiers she's killed or had die alongside her. Those fighting and dying rarely had the choice to do so. Even volunteers are rarely saying "give me a place to die".

VICTORY FOR MIA

Thanks much to Hasagawa, both for the view and for playing wingwoman.

I can't help but think the real power at work here might have been some kind of axe...

Given what all else goes on in this world it's hard to blame him, he might even just have developed a defense mechanism from trauma.

I think she's just indifferent to her, and more that the first and possibly most decisive hurdle to getting Pinkie on the throne is to push her into for one reason or another wanting to be on the throne. The right favor could be a big first step to that.