You say deliberately, but those are all stretches, leaps in logic. Did he animate the town, or did he command the undead to animate the town? His army of undead has also been growing ever since his mother's death, he even took over the ghouls in that devil's nest in Mirg (which are considered undead, until he took a few to Morksi). Someone even pointed out that Talosheim is full of undead, and he might become unstoppable if he manages to control those too. Edit: I mean if you see a child running with a bunch of wolves, you assume the wolves have adopted the child, not that the child is mind-controlling them, and Van had been considered dead for a while before the town wandered off.
well, more or less in fact the story goes, a world where all the competent people were out of the game and only those who should not command the world remained, of basically all the commanders, and the troops on the ground do not know that their leaders they are complete incompetent that only reached their rank by discard or because they knew.
You would think that, but remember that Bormack Gordon was still alive to see the aftereffects of these feats. He took the reports seriously, when everyone else thought it was a hilarious exaggeration. He was the first to conclude that Van was somehow responsible for Evbejia self-dismantling. When he heard that a Ghoul tribe had managed to wipe out an army of Orcs, led by a Dhampir toddler, he knew it was Vandalieu. He was prepared for their final confrontation, in ways that no other villain has been since. In fact, the only reason Gordon lost was because Vandalieu had the ability to create lethal toxins and contagions, which he had no way to predict or prepare for. My primary point is that every noteworthy villain to come after Gordon somehow managed to not take Vandalieu seriously enough, despite the fact that most of them had access to the information about what happened during the Second Siege of Talosheim, and about the failures of every villain preceding them. Kanata Kaidou? Made the brilliant choice of fighting someone he knows has Death Magic in a freaking crypt! The Evil-Breaking Sword douchebags? Refused to take the information the Amid Empire spies dug-up about him seriously, leading them into an even more lopsided fight than they would've gotten anyway; to be fair, they had no way to know that Vandalieu treats dismemberment as an inconvenience rather than an actual threat, but they were still considerably more cavalier about the whole affair than they should've been anyways. Hihiryushukaka's necrophile fan-club? They had access to most of the information about the above through their spy-networks, and they still didn't plan accordingly to deal with Vandalieu, even after getting instructions from Hihiryushukaka itself! Team Murakami? Fitun? Heinz? Not a one of them manages to make smart decisions about how to deal with Vandalieu, even with a decisive advantage in intel gathering! They had enough data from his previous feats that with even a hint of common sense and imagination, they could've concluded that he was constantly growing in power and ability, and predicted perhaps how his skill-set might've evolved! Vandalieu even gave Team Condiment a major handicap, and he still owned them! They. Are. INCOMPETENT! Pattern-recognition, the ability to correlate specific occurrences with their specific causes, is an essential survival skill! How could they fail at this, in the world of Lambda no less, where this is actually vital?
I meant like how the gods see the people of Taloshime building Van a giant statue. They see it as Van forcing them to build it but if they actually looked properly they would see the people were happy and enjoying the building of the statue. Even if they didn't see Van protesting.
I don't think the combat-capable villains should get a pass on this one. Especially the Lambda natives, who should have a firm grasp of cause-and-effect and pattern-recognition; without DBZ levels of plot-armor, you wouldn't live long enough to achieve anything in a dangerous world like Lambda without those skills. It's not merely that they are incompetent, but that they are incompetent at their own occupations!
We have the information, but they only see the results. An army of ghouls battled a Noble Orc led army of monsters, and somehow got out alive (most likely because of Van), and the army of humans that followed them over the mountain was wiped out somehow, they don't know anymore than that those troops came back as undead that want to ruin their reputations by yelling out their sins. They can't even get spiritualists to tell them what the dead know, since Van claims all the souls. Even Rod and Kanata were blind to anything having to do with Van, only knowing where he was, and speculating that he can maybe do what he was shown to be able to do on Origin, which Gungnir should have been able to get past, but he was so focused on getting this job done and moving on from Lambda before Metamorph can find him again.
You all forget one major thing: Author is a True God. How author decide is how it will be. Alda did not impaled old DK with his power, can he do it to new one? It shows that Alda power is not omnipotent. So, it may not work on Van at all. Van grows stronger very fast, who knows how long it will take for Alda to attack Van directly. May be at the time Van will be able to kill Alda with just two fingers? It is easy to know how powerful Van is after you read novel where author chewed and put on a plate all information for you. It will not be as easy to do if you are inside the story. If it where easy wars would not start on Earth. Everyone knows about businesses who have succeeded, but how many knows about failed businesses? How many have failed they businesses? Are all of them incompetent? How many times one failed in his businesses before he succeeded? Or how many times one failed in his businesses after he started new businesses after success? Microsoft have bought many other businesses and many of them go bankrupt. Are Microsoft incompetent? Alda is not incompetent, he are just self centered, self righteous fool who are brainwashed by Bellwood.
Don't forget, Luciliano was able to get a fair amount of information about the Ghouls through Pauvina's former self; he shared that information with the Mirg Shield-Nation before he made the wise decision to get the Hell out of Dodge. The resulting invasion force was wiped out, under mysterious circumstances, yes, but also converted into undead and sent back; that's pretty unambiguous, even for an in-universe observer. Kanata already knew about at least some of Vandalieu's abilities through Rodecorte before he volunteered to be a hit-man; and considering what Van could do in Origin, which Kanata obviously knew about, picking a fight with him in the middle of a crypt is just plain suicidal--it's like challenging a gunman to a battle in the middle of an armory, except you can't use or touch any of the firearms in there. My point still stands. All of the villains who came after Bormack Gordon are incompetent. He actually mounted the closest thing to a reasonable response to Vandalieu based on the information available about our little Death God at the time; literally everyone else worth talking about had better intel, and somehow managed to make worse decisions with it! That shouldn't be possible--you're supposed to make better decisions as you get more and more data!
Alda’s power only works on gods of Lambda, aka gods acknowledged and worshipped by the inhabitants of Lambda. No one was worshipping the demon king Guduranis so of course Alda couldn’t stake him. Van on the other hand is now a demigod and is being worshipped by the people of Lambda, therefore it can be concluded that Van is very likely to be susceptible.
I mean, to be fair if the villains in the series like alda had a bit of competency they'd follow in the shoes of the others with said competency and awareness. Heck the problems they're causing would probably not even exist in that case. It would kind of make the story a moot point... The only way to have a proper antagonist here is for them to be dumb enough to not realize the scope and breadth of the threat they actually face and the consequences of their own actions. After all, if they did... well. As you stated- run or join. It's less that all the villains in this story are incompetent, it's just that only the incompetents are left.
Or maybe the villains all have raw power on their side so competence has never been something they needed.
More like the antagonists have to catch the idiot-ball because the author wrote himself into a nice little corner.
Curatos was horribly biased just like Alda though so it’s no surprise. Also ridiculously hypocritical. Saying Van is pure evil while at the same time using an image of his mother knowing that it will make him hesitate and stop.
They didn't know that Van could create undead, back on Origin, it was speculated by scholars/scientists, but the majority of the Bravers weren't included in that. The only Undead Van was known to have created was himself, and that could still be rationalized as him being full of grudges when he died. They also didn't know on Origin that he could talk to or charm the dead, so fighting him in a crypt was not something they knew they should be avoiding. If Kanata had done what he was told, get used to the world a bit, take advantage of the Job System, and keep a low profile, then he might have succeeded. As it is he got close, and was only beat by a Skill, after he had already pierced all the defenses they knew about on Origin. The thing with Luciliano is more damning to the human nations, they overlooked the info he gave them, and ignored what was convenient completely.
Meaning he was absolutely delusional and refused to see that, which was before his very eyes. I know its a theme running with religion in general but holy fuck is that stupid. The author has to make Van's enemies completely insane and stupid in order to make the story work because he brutally overtuned Van to a point where nothing short of the dragon and the big bads can stop him. And he is outgrowing those remaining enemies with enough speed to invalidate them within an arc or two. Exponential growth tends to suck. Hard. Which would be pretty shitty in this case because it has a lot to offer besides that.
My impression of Curatos is that he was an emotionless being. He was never a human, but rather a being who was created by Alda. Something like an AI. He simply had a set of rules that had to be followed (laws), and those who followed those laws were good and those who didn't were evil. I doubt that he broke any laws when he created an image of Darcia. It was an emotionally evil act, but again, he was a being without emotions to judge.
About the troops on the ground, I agree on that, there are several very imcompetent, mainly the reincarnates, who for some reason, always, but always, underestimate someone who lived two lives in difficult difficulty, but it is mainly, because their attempt not to attract attention, it makes them interact little, surprisingly, the only ones smart enough to realize that they are in a difficult situation, are the group of asagi and that of Kanako and that says a lot. About the natives, I think the main problem is that they have fought very little with them, until now they have been slave traders, city thugs and knights going to stop an uprising of villagers, who could not know, that a BS rank adventurer, he was going against them. About the 4 swords that break evil, 3 did them well, we had a swordsman with a perfect light attribute for hordes or against strong individuals, an entomancer who could collect information to warn them of ambushes or hidden enemies and an assassin whose specialty was to kill the Leader in the first round, from their perspective, they faced a necromancer with a childish mind, an army of the undead and some ghouls, perhaps some zombie hero, who could use various fragments of the demon king and with a talent for create poisons, but if they neutralized the leader quickly, everything would fall by inertia, and if not, they had been acting professionally for the negotiation, the problems were 3, they knew that he was attached to his troops but not so much, they did not expect Vandeliu to be An all-terrain vehicle and that was also strong individually, in addition to the fact that until that moment, they had never seen a real Van combat and finally, the main problem, Ervine, the one who damaged the entire negotiation before it started and the one who was definitely arrogant and ignored all the alarms. fitun there is nothing to say, he himself admitted his idiots by forgetting that life was at stake in this game. and vampires, is what happens when you try to impregnate a system of sith lords or sects, but with people who were just any in their original faction and who having thousands of years to reach a power worthy of the era of the gods, it They wasted betraying each other or in self-defeating hobbies. In general, any backstabbing system has this problem that you cannot trust anyone and there will always be someone who is willing to destroy everything for an immediate benefit that will not do you any good when it is all over. In short, the problem is that there are very few antagonists in truth, and the most imcompetent take the competent with them.
To be fair, Birkyne recognized the threat Van posed and did everything in his power to just negotiate a truce. I'm not sure Alda has the ability to punish Vandalieu with the stakes of law. Van is not and never has been a being under his authority or even on his side, meaning Alda's authority may not apply. It also seemingly can't be used on someone that is in peak condition otherwise Alda would have just oneshot Vida. Van is an outsider.
That's not how Alda's stakes work. It has nothing to do with someone being under his authority or else he wouldn't have been able to punish his fellow siblings, none of them were under his command. The requirement to use the stakes is just for the being in question to be recognized as a god of Lambda, aka worshipped / known by the people of Lambda. Van fits that requirement as does all the evil gods currently in Vida's faction. So even though they are all originally outsiders, they'd all be susceptible to being staked too.