Man I'm rereading this and I forgot about the dogs.

Honestly I think the two biggest marks against this author has become his unwillingness to have consequences and his unwillingness to commit to someone he wants to be likeable being a bad person or irredeemable in some way . Like shit man people clown on dragon Ball for trivializing death but even up to this day they will have Vegeta acknowledge that he's going to hell for all the sins he's committed- even though he's been a redeemed character. Meanwhile this series waivers between sort of doing that occasionally and doing what Naruto did which is making you feel bad for every single villain every single time regardless of the awful things they've done.( with the only exception being that immortal dude in naruto and the muscle dude in this) and both series had a unquestionably f***** up evil villain that they immediately try to get you to sympathize with by introducing a secret big bad that explains that they didn't actually choose any actual character choices, they aren't actually a character they're two dimensional puppets on strings, they can't make their own choices.

( That and how sometimes it feels like the world building gets sloppy like how we knew how all the different weapons and items in the hero world are manufactured but they never once mentioned that racism was a thing that existed in this world towards people with physical quirks until it conveniently mattered for this last Arc.)
If it's any consolation this is still many times better than that modern times Arc in To you, the immortal if you want to talk about tanking a series you don't get much lower than that.

As someone who read the spin-off, there are multiple times reading the main series where I was confused as to why they brought up stuff from the spin-off without explaining them like the teleporting dudes whole back story was in the spin-off, a chunk of stains backstory was in the spinoff, also the spin-off is better written, better concluded, less dragged out and all around a better story than the main one.

From what I've gathered: because he understood the magic behind that dragon exploding at the very start, the mana from that dragon's body sort of shunted into him and yeeted him into the past, and it's the reason he can use dragon tongue(by converting part of his soul into that of a dragons'?) I'm not 100% sure on anything else though.

Man the phrasing on this confused me, cuz usually for this it would be "God May forgive you, but I won't" this version feels like somebody jumbled up the words and just rolled with it.

I know ghouls as a general rule are souless, but in this specific setting they never mentioned them lacking the soul they simply state they are "creatures who lost their place to return to" and that they keep being made because the world tree isn't working and they established that the world tree helped with recycling souls and passing on the Dead, they also formed a flesh golem that was made from unrested corpses but is made stronger by resentment, to have said resentment you have to have some sort of soul or ego in there. Given these facts the cause of ghouls in this world can be stated as a person dies horribly, their soul can't rest, attempts to go back to their body but their body is dead so they can't properly resurrect thus they become a ghoul. Hell the soulkiller sword makes perfect sense too since he's able to actually properly kill them using said sword when it was shown other people using weapons could damage them but they would just ignore it.(Like in the previous chapter where they reveal how the ritual works and he stabbed it through the heart and the other guys cut off its arms but they just sort of put it back in the box. Or how they dispose of them by just tossing them in the sewers since it seems to be incredibly hard to kill ghouls.

You can't just...say these things...

Yeah usually, but in this setting isn't it due to the lack of a world tree recycling souls.

Wait the skeleton hands or the giant girl? Or one of the men?

Aren't they ghouls because they do have souls? since the world tree can't recycle souls into the Afterlife now.

It was the stress man.

This whole arc just makes me want to reread Blood Lad, which had a remarkably similar final arc scenario to this, but with much cleaner execution.

https://i.postimg.cc/yYm41P3K/i.png

He was curious you know?

Yeah the only way he would be able to leave is if he got strong enough to, which means he would be strong enough to at the very least kill his master, who would 100% personally chase him down if he tried to leave the cult.

Yeah I don't understand they're confusion as far as world building goes for one of these dungeon crawler series taking place in modern times, this one does at least to go out of its way to explain the deviations from the genre norms and make everything make sense while being fairly grounded All things considered.

I think it's the combination of lack of highlights in their eyes which, granted, the series usually doesn't do eye highlights that often, and that for most of the chapter they don't actually actively emote so their pupils and irises remain the same size throughout the chapter it gives the final results of resembling a doll's eyes but without any light. This isn't helped by the fact that their pupils are so small and their irises are so big it makes it look like her eyes are dilated the whole time.

Got to say the biker gang looks like by far the most winnable matchup, since usually in that kind of Apocalypse setting the main advantage they have is numbers and Monopoly over resources along with cruelty. Can't wait to see how they make them cracked as hell.

I mean it makes sense in a way, the aliens are a threat to all of humanity in a group, the kaiju seems to be a threat to all of humanity just by itself so it needs to be that much stronger and more indomitable. Like the difference in threat between something that can beat just Superman or something that can blitz the whole Justice League.