A suddenly flood of pages after a pause, what a great Being Xmas present! Thanks so much for the hard work on this great series.
It's played somewhat for humor, but the "coincidences" of 203 vs Albion and the conniptions it gives their intel services is another amusing angle on how real the fog of war is for those on the ground with omniscient reader knowledge or the 20/20 hindsight of history. It can be real hard to genuinely get a picture of what is happening in a theatre, how the enemy is moving/what they're planning, and conversely the view the enemy has of you. Intel and counterintel games can get real convoluted. In fact if the Empire really
did have the kind of mole Albion suspects, then normally they very specifically
wouldn't have authorized those kinds of operations and coincidences precisely because it'd make a super valuable intelligence source obvious. IRL this was an issue with cracking Enigma, if all of sudden the Allies obviously knew and reacted to everything the Nazis would instantly realize their codes were all cracked. But of course keeping the source 100% secret and unused renders it pointless to have cracked in the first place. When and how to use that sort of thing, very valuable yet very fragile, must cause a lot of gray hairs amongst leadership!
@Karakuri1812
Definitely a red flag and foreshadowing. It's drawing a real contrast with "righteousness" versus professionalism, and maybe also the importance of mentors to shape developing newbies. Even if most of them feel the same emotions, that doesn't mean it's a good idea to give them free reign.