Things like Reinhard being able to simply wish for any Divine Protection he wanted.
Just as Gojo and the others had been floored when they learned this, the Comnt section lost its mind.
[He can just pick whatever Divine Protection he wants?]
[This guy's straight-up cheating.]
[Cheater! Total cheater!]
[He's a freak. No wonder he's the kingdom's strongest. Who's supposed to beat that?]
[Who's the protagonist of this show, honestly? He feels more overpowered than Gojo.]
[That's basically an infinite cheat code. Other people would kill for a single Divine Protection and they'd be considered elite. Reinhard orders off a nu.]
[The world itself coddles this guy. Literally the chosen one.]
[What's the point of a selection? The other candidates should just forfeit.]
[At this point I can't even see a path for anyone else to win.]
Reinhard's gift flattened the audience and the cast alike.
But then, almost imdiately, Gojo and the others ran into the Witch Cult.
The mont those people showed up, the audience's focus snapped.
Viewers had so genuine interest in this bunch, given what they'd done to Emilia and the psychological damage they'd hung around Subaru's neck.
Except.
Once the Witch Cult actually appeared on screen, the Comnt section went sowhere else entirely.
[Anti-romance squad!]
[Break them up!]
[No couples allowed!]
[Stay single, kings!]
The second Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti, Sin Archbishop of Sloth, stepped onto the screen, all attention gathered on him.
[Values reset to zero.]
[Cutie looks like a real sothing.]
[Little sothing looks real cutie.]
[Brothers, paste the stupid bit on the public screen!]
[Head tilt move, cute cute.]
[Sloth is so adorable.]
[My brain is trembling!!!]
The chat, which had been dissecting the plot a second ago, snapped into a completely different mode the instant Petelgeuse showed up with his unhinged presentation, warped phrasing, and jerky motions.
By any normal asure the man was deeply unsettling. And yet the Comnt section had settled on "cute."
Gojo read through the stream and wondered, briefly, if he was just out of touch.
Apparently creatures like Petelgeuse qualified as cute now.
"The word 'cute' is being defiled over here."
Chin in hand, Gojo marveled.
Watching the Comnt section for this long had taught him sothing. Whether his old world or wherever this broadcast was being piped in from, put anybody online and a certain percentage would imdiately start behaving like absolute morons. By their own terminology, the word was "deranged."
Explained why the mont Petelgeuse had made his entrance, these people had started bouncing off the walls. The Popularity Points were climbing faster than they ever had for the female cast.
Pure bad taste, basically.
Which, fine. No skin off his nose. The fellow really wasn't right in the head. Completely unhinged vibe going on.
Especially once the man's Authority manifested on screen.
Those disembodied hands drew another deluge.
[Invisible hands?]
[Kind of a weak-looking ability. Nothing to write ho about.]
[I SEE them!]
[Bold prediction. This guy doesn't stand a chance against Gojo.]
[Agreed!]
[Question is whether he even stands a chance against Betty.]
[Reinhard probably doesn't even get to move this fight.]
[This fight's wrapping up in a minute or two.]
The chat speculated. Gojo had already moved.
Initiative sat with him from the start.
Limitless Cursed Technique. Six Eyes. Petelgeuse, on the wrong side of both, was locked out. Couldn't put a hand on him.
[Genuinely one-sided. Not a hint of tension.]
[Sin Archbishop, huh? This is what we get?]
["A match for the Witch" my foot. Letdown.]
[Maybe the guy's only in it for the fun. You're asking too much. He's cute, at least.]
[Whoever called him cute, may your future partner be exactly like him.]
As the chat bickered, Gojo put Petelgeuse down clean and slung the corpse at Subaru's feet, letting him finish the job himself.
[Subaru got shaken to the core. Old him wouldn't have laid a hand on a body.]
[No kidding. With a freak like Petelgeuse on the loose, who knows what he actually went through.]
[They really broke the kid.]
[Brutal.]
And then, with everyone settling into the sense that it was over.
Footsteps.
Sobody stepped into view. Different build, different face, nothing physically like Petelgeuse. Bearing identical, though. Mannerisms identical. That sa sick crackle in every gesture.
Petelgeuse Romanée-Conti.
Back among them, in so way none of them understood.
Resurrected, possessed, transmigrated, whatever it was.
The Comnt section filled with question marks and profanity.
Except.
Gojo gave them no room to sit with any of it.
He erased the copy on the spot.
The original had already been handled. A copy was nothing.
Only for another copy to appear.
Like the kills refused to stick. Like there was no bottom on the supply.
The viewers who'd been laughing at Petelgeuse's trash-tier Authority a minute ago found themselves with nothing to say.
Resurrection. And not on his own body either. On other people's.
What was that supposed to be?
Too much. The guy flat-out couldn't be put down.
Thankfully, as impossible as Petelgeuse was to kill permanently, Gojo still held the higher card.
Took only a handful of exchanges before ili started sealing off the surroundings so they could corral every last copy and finish them all at once.
[My boy Gojo doesn't waste ti. Straight to business!]
[Resurrection's useless here. You co back, you die again.]
[These guys are actually a nightmare though. I take back the "not a match for the Witch" comnt.]
[Honestly, what is there to struggle with at this point? The power gap is absurd.]
[Curious how the resurrection chanism even works...]
The chat settled into analysis mode.
Except.
Not a single one of them saw what was coming.
Return by Death triggered again.
Gojo had just finished erasing the last of Petelgeuse's copies and was turning to tell the others it was over.
And that was when sothing strange started moving in Subaru.
Petelgeuse was dead. All of him. Every cultist in the surrounding area, dead. Why in the world was the thing jumping to Subaru?
A brief pause for thought, no useful answer.
Gojo moved.
Subaru, exit stage left.
[Subaru: I'd like to argue I could still be saved.]
[I have never seen anybody with worse luck than this kid.]
[Didn't they cancel Unlucky Bear? What's this then.]
[Gojo's decisive as hell.]
[What's to hesitate over? Dying doesn't an dying. He cos back.]
[Yeah, leaving him like that is the real torture. rcy kill is the right call.]
Possessed by Petelgeuse, Subaru died clean in Gojo's hands.
Return by Death, triggered again.
The audience rode it back with Gojo to the end of the conference.
Another loop.
This ti he had the route down cold.
No wasted motion. Straight out of the capital with everyone in tow, straight into the forest where the Witch Cult was holed up. Along the way he walked through the soul-transfer problem with the others.
Betty, in the end, was the one who sparked the key insight. A plan ford.
Subaru got parked in the forest out of the way, and Reinhard was handed the cultists.
Reinhard's strength spoke for itself.
Clearing the Witch Cult was easier for him than it had been for Gojo. Breezier.
And with Subaru out of reach, nobody took damage.
For all Petelgeuse's unwillingness, under Reinhard's blade the man had nothing. He died bitter, furious, and powerless.
[This guy really is a pain. Body-hopping like that.]
[Told you Subaru was the unluckiest bastard alive. Gojo would've been a target too, except he'd already signed a Contract with Betty. So it fell entirely on Subaru.]
[Question is, is Emilia dragging him down or is he dragging her down.]
[Good thing he has the rewind. Otherwise they'd all be finished.]
Witch Cult dealt with cleanly. The group shifted back to the great tree and settled in to wait for the White Whale.
With the prior loop as a guide, the whole setup fell into place effortlessly.
While the second run played out, Gojo glanced at the ranking.
Popularity Points had been sitting at a hundred and ten thousand. Now the counter read a hundred and forty.
A hundred and forty thousand was an enormous figure by his standards. Record territory.
At this pace, two hundred thousand by the end of the four-episode block was a lock.
"Barring sothing weird, the last episode should be the one with Regulus."
"Solo showcase, my scene. Should pull in quite a bit more."
"Ten Shadows Technique, hm. Genuinely curious about it."
The Zen'in house had been a rival to the Gojo Family for a long ti. Their hereditary techniques had a certain weight to them.
On screen, the White Whale arrived on schedule, gliding up to the tree.
Gojo stayed back this round. Reinhard took it.
Sa enemy, second helping. The Comnt section didn't get bored of it though. Different hand on the blade, different kind of show.
If anything.
Reinhard versus the White Whale was where the title of kingdom's strongest stopped being rhetoric.
It leveled the chat.
The scale of that power was arguably more brutal than anything Gojo had put on display.
[This guy isn't even a person anymore, is he?]
[I thought Gojo was the ceiling. Whose general is this.]
[Legitimate walking cheat code. Zero negotiation. Swing and kill.]
[One strike, sa as Gojo.]
[Now I want to know if Gojo could actually beat Reinhard.]
[Not just you wondering. Gojo's wondering too, he walked right up to challenge him!]
[Hahaha, these two standing side by side is criminally cool. Ship material.]
[Felt, predictable as ever, still rembered to cash the White Whale in for money. Every loop, without fail. Hahaha.]
Episode three closed on the White Whale falling.
Exactly as Gojo had called it.
Episode four was built around the two Sin Archbishops.
The panel briefly faded to black, then lit up.
Episode four's open pulled another wave of cheers from the chat.
Four episodes back to back, each one running roughly double the length of a typical ani.
Put it together and that was eight standard episodes.
At the normal rate of two episodes a week, that would've been an entire month's worth of content for any other show.
Nobody had expected Re:Zero to be this generous. A single day, and the run just kept coming.
Every episode was packed end to end with payoff. No filler. Effects budget maxed out and then so.
Sothing this well-made, this honest about delivering for its audience. Where did you find that these days?
[Moved to tears!]
[Crying over here!]
[Already shared it with my ungrateful kid.]
[Share 1!]
[Share 1!]
[Posted about it. Everyone get in here and watch!!!]
[This has been a real treat today!]
The stream of comnts had thickened until it was nearly blocking out the picture.
The chat wasn't exaggerating either. Plenty of viewers were spontaneously passing the show along, putting it in front of more people.
Gojo watched it all go by, and sothing clicked.
Could he talk back to the chat?
Real-ti conversation was off the table, sure. But even so one-way ssaging might land well. Stir up more engagent.
The thought hadn't even finished forming before a system prompt cut in.
[Warning! Do not act outside the bounds of the story's in-world characters, including but not limited to communicating with the Comnt section...]
Gojo pursed his lips. The system really did have every crack sealed.
"Fine, fine. Not a big deal."
He turned back to the screen.
Felt and the others had all cleared out. He was the only one left, stretched out on top of the White Whale carcass, sleeping.
Night bled into day.
The next sound was Regulus and Rai talking.
Two figures slid into the audience's view alongside the voices.
One tall, one short. The pairing was striking. Not a duo you forgot.
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