Fortunately, it seems I was right that the pacing was fast in the previous episode because it served as an introduction and had to pack a bunch of different things at once. This episode is an improvement on that front – the story flows more naturally. As I said before, I love the art style, but I’m starting to have doubts about whether this kind of narrative can hold up in the long run. IMO, creating ‘smart’ characters by making everyone else around them dumber never works well and becomes tedious after a while. So far, nothing Aoteru has said sounds particularly smart or impressive enough to put the masses in awe.