All You Need Is Kill - Vol. 2 Ch. 16 - All You Need Is Kill

[MangaDex]

 

[thegoatrider]

what if they just captured the creature instead of killing it after breaking the antennae so they could both continue on

 

[nyaasar]

Well, that sucks.

 

[AcerFox]

Oh shit

 

[Awan14]

Well fuck......

 

[DracoInduperator]

Wonder what happens if they kill each other at the same moment. Are they both released or do they just start over?

 

[mrboko1234]

Wait, for her to break out of the loop, he has to die right?
But he has died many times and shes stayed alive technically and defeated the servers and backups? Doesnt that mean that when he dies she just breaks out of the loop, or is this a multiverse situation where after he dies, that version of her lives on, and since when he wakes up she doesnt "keep" her memories, meaning that he meets a different Rita every time he wakes up.

 

[mailforporn]

The plot hole is way too big here. He has to die for her to get out? BS! He died 158 times already and it didn't help her. What's the difference now? Dying after they broke that thing's antenna instead of before? Author would need an extreme amount of hand-waving to explain this one.

 

[Carn109]

Damn

 

[Devil_May]

I was not expecting this

 

[etriuswimbleton]

Random plot point came out of nowhere just to answer the migraine

 

[Amplify]

The plot hole is way too big here. He has to die for her to get out? BS! He died 158 times already and it didn't help her. What's the difference now? Dying after they broke that thing's antenna instead of before? Author would need an extreme amount of hand-waving to explain this one.

There's no plot hole, you simply haven't been paying attention very well.

To escape the loop they have to destroy the antenna, then destroy all the backups, then the main server. At no point in the previous 159 loops were all of those conditions satisfied because both of them have become backups as that's effectively the basis for how they're time travelling back 30 hours, and in the loops where Kenji dies he died while the antenna was still up or while one or more of the other backups were still alive.

Because he's the one who originally destroyed the mimic server in this area he's the focal point of this loop, him dying too early in the process triggers the loop. It's only if he dies or Rita dies as the final backup before the mainframe is destroyed that they can escape.

 

[mailforporn]

There's no plot hole, you simply haven't been paying attention very well.

To escape the loop they have to destroy the antenna, then destroy all the backups, then the main server. At no point in the previous 159 loops were all of those conditions satisfied because both of them have become backups as that's effectively the basis for how they're time travelling back 30 hours, and in the loops where Kenji dies he died while the antenna was still up or while one or more of the other backups were still alive.

Because he's the one who originally destroyed the mimic server in this area he's the focal point of this loop, him dying too early in the process triggers the loop. It's only if he dies or Rita dies as the final backup before the mainframe is destroyed that they can escape.

its not him dieing that triggers the loop since that doesnt happen for any of the other backups, why would it suddenly happen for him? like all previous battles, it's rita killing the server that was triggering the loop. also, she was killing it without killing the backups because she always does that the first time in every battle, thinking she'd loop herself once and then kill them in the proper order on the second time. but since this time she was losing her memory she never knew its way past the second time.

other people aready pointed it out, backups clearly need to be in quite close otherwise the aliens wouldn't have them on the battlefield but somewhere safe far off. so she can just get far away before they kill the server.

also there are other plot holes:

who keeps their memories? all the backups? then why did rita stop keeping hers this time but they still say she's a backup? just the server and some weird "focus" that you made up for this specific case but that doesn't fit with the story from other loops? and if that focus theory was true the aliens could've stopped rita in any of the previous battles by simply having the server get killed by one of their guys or a random soldier instead of rita on the very first loop. also, if that focus theory was true, if rita killed him in their duel he'd trigger a loop cos theres a server and another backup alive, making their duel pointless.

simply put they jumped to an unreasonable conclusion about her having to die without enough evidence, based on their failure to stop the loop just once, which could've been due to many other reasons than their and your stupid theory. like there could be another hidden backup nearby.

lastly why did the aliens suddenly adapt enough to even counterattack our base here when they never did in previous battles? they clearly also keep knowledge about the loops so they should've known about rita's ability from all of the past battles

 

[Amplify]

its not him dieing that triggers the loop since that doesnt happen for any of the other backups, why would it suddenly happen for him? like all previous battles, it's rita killing the server that was triggering the loop. also, she was killing it without killing the backups because she always does that the first time in every battle, thinking she'd loop herself once and then kill them in the proper order on the second time. but since this time she was losing her memory she never knew its way past the second time.

other people aready pointed it out, backups clearly need to be in quite close otherwise the aliens wouldn't have them on the battlefield but somewhere safe far off. so she can just get far away before they kill the server.

also there are other plot holes:

who keeps their memories? all the backups? then why did rita stop keeping hers this time but they still say she's a backup? just the server and some weird "focus" that you made up for this specific case but that doesn't fit with the story from other loops? and if that focus theory was true the aliens could've stopped rita in any of the previous battles by simply having the server get killed by one of their guys or a random soldier instead of rita on the very first loop. also, if that focus theory was true, if rita killed him in their duel he'd trigger a loop cos theres a server and another backup alive, making their duel pointless.

simply put they jumped to an unreasonable conclusion about her having to die without enough evidence, based on their failure to stop the loop just once, which could've been due to many other reasons than their and your stupid theory. like there could be another hidden backup nearby.

lastly why did the aliens suddenly adapt enough to even counterattack our base here when they never did in previous battles? they clearly also keep knowledge about the loops so they should've known about rita's ability from all of the past battles

The first person to kill the server becomes the focal point for the loop in that area and is the only human who keeps their memories. You don't become a permanent looper who loops anytime they die forever and ever for the rest of your life, it's who kills the server first that matters. Killing the server in future loops makes you a backup, but it doesn't grant you memories. We never get confirmation one way or the other, but either Rita knew she had to die at that point 100% for the loop to end and did it both as a 'final exam' of sorts for him and because she didn't want to commit suicide, or doing it at that point with all the other backups was sufficient to break the loop at that point - remember, in no loop does Kenji die between the antenna being killed and the mainframe being killed.

The aliens aren't strategic intelligent, they're a semi-mindless bio machines. They have a low level instinctual level awareness of what and who the problem is and over prolonged periods of time of learning they can evolve and adapt, but not a detailed understanding or anything like that. In their early battles they evolved a thick carapace over time because the humans were countering them with guns, but after Rita started getting into loops and destroying their backups they were no longer able to learn and evolve long time to counter what the problem is because she keeps destroying their server and with it their knowledge of all that happened in the region, they just know that this guy is the problem and are trying more and more desperate attempts to kill him, like in loop 3 when they killed him alone outside of the base.

I'm probably not explaining it perfectly, but close enough.

 

[mailforporn]

The first person to kill the server becomes the focal point for the loop in that area and is the only human who keeps their memories. You don't become a permanent looper who loops anytime they die forever and ever for the rest of your life, it's who kills the server first that matters. Killing the server in future loops makes you a backup, but it doesn't grant you memories. We never get confirmation one way or the other, but either Rita knew she had to die at that point 100% for the loop to end and did it both as a 'final exam' of sorts for him and because she didn't want to commit suicide, or doing it at that point with all the other backups was sufficient to break the loop at that point - remember, in no loop does Kenji die between the antenna being killed and the mainframe being killed.

The aliens aren't strategic intelligent, they're a semi-mindless bio machines. They have a low level instinctual level awareness of what and who the problem is and over prolonged periods of time of learning they can evolve and adapt, but not a detailed understanding or anything like that. In their early battles they evolved a thick carapace over time because the humans were countering them with guns, but after Rita started getting into loops and destroying their backups they were no longer able to learn and evolve long time to counter what the problem is because she keeps destroying their server and with it their knowledge of all that happened in the region, they just know that this guy is the problem and are trying more and more desperate attempts to kill him, like in loop 3 when they killed him alone outside of the base.

I'm probably not explaining it perfectly, but close enough.

ok, even if that's true, you being better at explaining it than the author is already a huge negative for his writing quality
but it still doesn't address the backup range issue (or move far away instead of dieing solution), the how did they know issue, since they literally only did 1 loop where they tried rita's approach ("she somehow already knew" isn't an explanation) or why they couldn't just capture the server and keep it alive or even study it, especially if its rewinds only go back 30 hours instead of to a set point before the battle they could've made use of it for many experiments after 30 hours in captivity.
its a badly written plot but i'll admit, mad props to you to be able to bend so far backwards to make some sense out of it. i actually like this attempt and it'll probably help other readers too.

 

[Amplify]

ok, even if that's true, you being better at explaining it than the author is already a huge negative for his writing quality
but it still doesn't address the backup range issue (or move far away instead of dieing solution), the how did they know issue, since they literally only did 1 loop where they tried rita's approach ("she somehow already knew" isn't an explanation) or why they couldn't just capture the server and keep it alive or even study it, especially if its rewinds only go back 30 hours instead of to a set point before the battle they could've made use of it for many experiments after 30 hours in captivity.
its a badly written plot but i'll admit, mad props to you to be able to bend so far backwards to make some sense out of it. i actually like this attempt and it'll probably help other readers too.

The author is not responsible for this manga adaptation, this is simply based on a light novel / book of the same name and cuts out some details, especially ones about the true nature of the mimics, public perception about them, how the final fight went, things like that. It should also be noted that books aimed at people with a higher level of reading will expect you to read between the lines for some things instead of printing out massive walls of text that spell out literally everything in tedious detail, that doesn't mean they're bad or have poor quality writing if you don't understand things; it means you have poor reading comprehension which is what I said at the start.

Your idea is complete nonsense, straight up. It IS going back to a set point before the battle, which in this case happens to be about 30 hours before the big battle. Capture how? As soon as the mimics feel seriously threatened the server restores to the safe backup and starts looking for solutions to prevent whatever problems happened since the backup was made. This is all there right in the manga, not a book exclusive or anything.

Would you like me to explain things in tedious detail for you, since you're incapable of understanding things on your own? If something is my thoughts, speculations or an aside, I'll put it in brackets.

An unknown number of years before the start of the book / manga, an alien race on a nearby star system is facing massive overcrowding. The council is discussing solutions to the problem and the most promising one is the idea of terraforming a nearby planet that their research says has roughly the right composition they're looking for (It's Earth) but isn't quite suitable for their race yet. Their plan is to send a bio terraforming machine ahead to convert the planet into an environment suitable for them, and send a colony ship (about 20 years) later. There's discussion that the planet might already potentially be inhabited with life, but in the end they decide to go ahead with it instead of worrying about the mere 'what if' of that slight possibility.

The mimics are a somewhat mindless machine with the simple task of converting the land and water into stuff that's suitable for the alien race, they just show up and start going about their job with rampant speculation by the humans as to wtf they are. (absolutely no human on earth or otherwise knows their true nature)

At first the humans show some mild success in stopping or slowing down the mimics, but the mimic's weapons are the ability to effectively reload their saved game and adapt and evolve a bit over time, like an AI learning algorithm. Each mimic chapter/army/whatever the fuck you want to call a group of mimics has an antenna on the server that monitors the status of the group within radius of it and keeping full communication with them all like a hivemind, as well as the main back up, multiple redundant backups, plenty of regular grunts, and the ability to call in reinforcements if needed. Once a battle is over the server shares information with the collective at large so they can all learn and adapt from the experiences. After a while they evolve hard carapaces to counter the human's weapons and start winning every battle, things look bad for the human race.

Once day some time later in her first battle, Rita manages to melee kill the server mimic. It sent out the pulse of information to reload the backup but something nobody could have predicted happened: human brains are capable of picking up the signal, not perfectly and it causes damage that manifests as migraines and stuff, but well enough that the information of everything that's happened so far since the backup happened to the user gets loaded into her head (for the first person to kill the given server mimic) and after it hits her point blank she wakes up at the time the backup happened now connected to the server in that she keeps retaining all her memory if she dies, and so do the mimics still.

This is a problem for the mimics, their tried and true strategy of trying one thing and then learning over however many resets to improve on it until they can get a satisfactory victory isn't working against this one lifeform, things keep changing in ways far beyond their understanding and she learns and adapts much faster than they can do, eventually breaking out of the loop and earning the title of "fullmetal bitch".

Two years go by, Rita earns consistent victories on the battlefield and the mimics aren't able to improve against her because the knowledge of what is going on is being lost on the battlefield, their ability to restore backups to get out of even the stickiest situations isn't working for them when every time on each new battlefield Rita gets into the loop by killing the server mimic after assessing things, then wipes them out on the next run before they hit load state.

Enter the MC Kenji. In his first battle on a battlefield with Rita, he luckily (for him) scores the first kill on the server mimic in loop 1 and gets locked into the loop and the events thereafter play out roughly as shown in the manga here. On loops 2 through 158 Rita kills the server mimic expecting to get into the loop as she normally does which happens about 30 hours after the mimic made its backup, but it turns out that this error for granting memories only works for the first person who does it. (Either killing any server mimic in a way that puts you into a loop makes you into a backup permanently, or killing a specific server mimic makes you a backup for that specific mimic. I would guess the latter but it's irrelevant which is the case - the point is Rita is a backup at this time)

On loop 159 he works together with Rita and is told the strategy to defeat an army of mimics; destroy the antenna to prevent them from communicating and telling each other what's going on and that there's a serious threat, destroy the backups, then destroy the server. If they don't destroy the antenna first the then server will get cold feet and reload early, and when the server is killed it reloads any available backup it can that it has made, this isn't reliant on the antenna or range. (For whatever reason it hasn't learned to keep one or more backups in a safe place, again it's a fairly mindless machine so I guess it hasn't learned the phrase "don't put all of your eggs into one basket", so it simply keeps all of them close enough to talk to through the antenna.)

This doesn't work though because there's still a backup in the form of Rita (I speculate but don't know for sure that the main looper is not considered an actual backup, becoming a backup only happens to those who kill the server after the looper has already entered the loop) and we enter loop 160. At this point the server is just smart and threatened enough to understand that something is extremely seriously wrong after coming that close to being destroyed entirely, so instead of doing what it did in the previous loops with small to medium changes it initiates an emergency signal and calls in pretty much every mimic in the Pacific Theatre to come perform an all out attack on these two anomalous lifeforms early.

After having heard what happened in loop 159, Rita is smart enough to instantly realise the problem that they (she?) are backup(s) and that to escape the loop one of them (she?) will have to die before killing the server in order to escape the loop once and for all. After killing all the other backups she attacks Kenji and tells him this and then fight to the death in an extensive battle dancing and dashing around the entire base and killing mimics on the way, before eventually Kenji wins because while Rita knows everything about the mimic's movements in combat, Kenji knows that and her movements in combat. (Could Rita have escaped the loop if she had killed Kenji? Would she have become the new looper if she had done so? No way to know for sure, but it doesn't matter as she lost. Either it would have worked and she'd have escaped, or it would have gone to loop 161, that's all there is to it.)

In his grief at having killed Rita with his own hands, he enters a fugue state and absolutely massacres thousands of grunt mimics that are flooding in as reinforcements solo over a period of six hours. The events after the battle play out roughly as the manga showed them, with Kenji swearing an oath to himself for Rita to never rest until he has slaughtered every last mimic there is, along with anything that threatens humanity.

Is there anything that still confuses you?

 

[mailforporn]

The author is not responsible for this manga adaptation, this is simply based on a light novel / book of the same name and cuts out some details, especially ones about the true nature of the mimics, public perception about them, how the final fight went, things like that. It should also be noted that books aimed at people with a higher level of reading will expect you to read between the lines for some things instead of printing out massive walls of text that spell out literally everything in tedious detail, that doesn't mean they're bad or have poor quality writing if you don't understand things; it means you have poor reading comprehension which is what I said at the start.

Your idea is complete nonsense, straight up. It IS going back to a set point before the battle, which in this case happens to be about 30 hours before the big battle. Capture how? As soon as the mimics feel seriously threatened the server restores to the safe backup and starts looking for solutions to prevent whatever problems happened since the backup was made. This is all there right in the manga, not a book exclusive or anything.

Would you like me to explain things in tedious detail for you, since you're incapable of understanding things on your own? If something is my thoughts, speculations or an aside, I'll put it in brackets.




Is there anything that still confuses you?

no, now you're just coping
the mimics have never once been shown to trigger rewind without being killed. when they feel threatened? having their antenna broken and their backups eliminated one by one doesn't count then?
and what do you mean capture how? they've already cut its antenna and made it completely helpless plenty of times.
even the fixed point rewind wasn't clear since it was during his sleep, and for her it was shown during her bath a couple of times more as a fan service than as a hint about how it worked.
what you're doing is not "understanding". what you're doing is "willful suspension of disbelief" trying to fill up plot holes in ways that weren't there in the material you just read.

 

[Amplify]

no, now you're just coping
the mimics have never once been shown to trigger rewind without being killed. when they feel threatened? having their antenna broken and their backups eliminated one by one doesn't count then?

They do rewind when they know a backup has been killed, destroying the antenna first prevents them from knowing the backups have been killed for the time being. As for why they don't rewind when the antenna itself is destroyed, do you instantly think it's an emergency when you lose your wi-fi connection or just more of an annoyance?

If you like, go ahead and explain the following since you seem to be claiming you know/understand the story better than I do:
Why is it they have to destroy the antenna first? Why not simply kill the mimics that are acting as backups and then kill the server itself and make it a two step process instead of a three step one?

If it cannot rewind on demand, then there's no harm in letting it know the backups are being destroyed and leaving the antenna alone.
If simply killing a backup triggers the loop automatically then escaping the loop is basically impossible, you'd have to have a group of people all kill the backups at the same nanosecond and that's just not happening.
If the purpose of the antenna is to send the command to the backup on death that it needs to rewind time, then destroying the backups is unnecessary as simply destroying the antenna and then the server should suffice.

Yet, it's established as a necessary step.
Why is it a necessary step? To prevent the server from knowing the backups are being killed.
Why is that important? Because the server can choose to initiate the rewind if it deems it needs to. Destroying the antenna alone isn't enough to make it feel threatened, it's not cognitive enough to think that alone is a problem.

The existence of the need to destroy the antenna as one of the three steps needed to escape the loop proves, without room for doubt, that the server can load its savestate on demand if it needs to.

and what do you mean capture how? they've already cut its antenna and made it completely helpless plenty of times.
even the fixed point rewind wasn't clear since it was during his sleep, and for her it was shown during her bath a couple of times more as a fan service than as a hint about how it worked.

It? The server? The server is never helpless, if it knows there's a serious enough problem it loads the savestate if itself or any backup is alive. On death it automatically hits load state but is reliant on there being a backup. Usually this is enough, but there's a window of time between the antenna being destroyed where you can take out the backups without it knowing.

what you're doing is not "understanding". what you're doing is "willful suspension of disbelief" trying to fill up plot holes in ways that weren't there in the material you just read.

What I'm doing is quoting the book and the manga. What you're doing is sitting 5% of the way into the dunning kruger effect line. The manga doesn't mention that Rachel the girl in the cafeteria dies in the final loop when the base was attacked for example, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

 

[mailforporn]

no, it was never shown they can trigger a rewind at will or because they feel in danger no matter how many walls of text you write.
i never claimed to "understand better", i claim that theres nothing to understand as it wasn't written right
and no, quoting the book, while helpful, especially if you are specific about which parts of your wall of text are actually from it, doesn't change the fact that the manga wasn't written right

 

[Amplify]

no, it was never shown they can trigger a rewind at will or because they feel in danger no matter how many walls of text you write.
i never claimed to "understand better", i claim that theres nothing to understand as it wasn't written right
and no, quoting the book, while helpful, especially if you are specific about which parts of your wall of text are actually from it, doesn't change the fact that the manga wasn't written right

I'll keep this as concise as possible so you can't ignore it, I'll hold your head and press your face into it until you are forced to acknowledge it:
What is the purpose of the first of the three steps to escaping the time loop?

I've explained the answer in excruciating detail, you going "I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist" and then claim it's not there because you lack the needed level reading comprehension to understand the answer, does not magically make the answer go away. It's right there, both in the book and the manga, it's just not explicitly spelt out for people who only have a 5th or 6th grade reading level.