Recap / The Rising of the Shield Hero S2E2 "Footprints of the Spirit Tortoise"

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Tropes for this episode include:

• Escaped Animal Rampage: If Ost Horai is to be believed, someone broke the seal on the Spirit Tortoise before its time, rendering the god-like monster a mindless beast.
• God in Human Form: Ost Horai reveals herself to be a familiar of the Spirit Tortoise, specifically a manifestation of its soul.
• Godzilla Threshold: The only people who could release the seal on the Spirit Tortoise are the Four Cardinal Heroes (with a familiar's help, of course), and that is only when all other options in stopping the Waves are exhausted. The fact that it suddenly woke up and started rampaging is serious cause for alarm.
• Off with His Head!: All it takes to kill the Spirit Tortoise and its army of familiars is to cut off its head.
• Resurrective Immortality: Ost Horai claims that as long as the Spirit Tortoise lives, no method of killing her would be permanent (though this is never tested).
• The Reveal: The Four Cardinal Heroes are not the only "heroes" walking around. There are also Seven Star Heroes that wield the Vassal Weapons.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Ost Horai reveals that the Spirit Tortoise's purpose is to end the waves, though to accomplish this requires a dizzyingly large amount of human souls to do so. She admits that her purpose was to trick nations into waring with each other and harvesting souls from the mass deaths, monstrous familiars hunting humans being the second option and the Spirit Tortoise rampaging as the Nuclear Option.

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