Kill Six Billion Demons V: Breaker of Infinities (part two)

No sooner has Incubus finished telling Killy that no, really, she should just run away until she's out of sight and then teleport even further, than he is struck by some whacky sword-on-a-laser-tether of Jagganoth's and thrown back across the island, where Jagganoth appears to vaporize him.

Maybe he got away somehow, maybe he didn't. I'm leaning toward yes, but if not, heh, that was a fittingly anticlimactic death for the obnoxious little parasite. Karmic, too, that the Black King who thought he could work with Jaggonath would be the first of the six to be killed by him.

Then again, Incubus' final act being to save Killy feels wrong on so many levels that even as irony I don't think it works. Hence, I'm leaning toward him having survived. Like, maybe his spirit can just keep reincarnating itself out of his blood pool or possess one of the bodies of his garden of crackheads or something. Yeah, that seems right for Incubus. Very much a "got to destroy his castle in order to kill him for good" type of dark lord.

In any case, at least he's gone for now. Hopefully from Killy's dreams as well, at least until he's done regenerating. Being away from him in mind and spirit for the first time since book 3 might do her a world of good.

As the party learns from Incubus' helpful example of what happens to people who fuck around in Jagganoth's line of sight, we cut back to...uh...the other people who are fucking around in Jagganoth's line of sight. Mottom is bitching out Mammon for doing the thing she suggested but much more stupidly than she meant, and Mammon is telling her to shut the hell up and prove that she can do better in that case.

Heh, I remember the implications in both books 2 and 3 that Mammon and Nadia used to be pretty close, at least by demiurge standards. Now that the stupid war Mottom started has been made irrelevant, and we see them fighting in this much pettier way, they almost remind me of a cantankerous old married couple.

Heh. For all I know, maybe they literally were that, at some point, for some length of time, during or after the very end of the war. It's not like Hastet was in any condition to whine about bigamy.

The two of them are interrupted in their bickering by Solomon David whooshing passed as he makes yet another fruitless attempt at hurting Jagganoth. Shamed by the reminder that some people are still actually trying, Mottom pulls her shit together and scolds Mammon into doing the same.

Next thing we know, Jagganoth is blindsided by what I suspect may be a long-unseen reminder of what those two might have been like back in the final battles of the Multiversal War.

Mammon is blind nowadays, but Nadia's vision is flawless and her aim with deadly energy blasts likewise. With a length of demiurgic vine, she channels her power into his flaming gullet to combine it with his own, and lines the great dragon up for perfect strikes with his molten breath. An ocean of superheated metal is vented onto Jagganoth, clinging to his form and slowing him down enough for Solomon to get an extra-long Ki-Rata timewarp off. Actually, the captions make it seem like it might be a timestop within a timestop, for exponentially more time to land hits. Either way, Solomon takes very good advantage of the opportunity they gave him.

It's long overdue, but the demiurgi are finally cooperating. Those one or two drills that Solomon managed to browbeat the others into participating in a thousand years back weren't much, but at least they still remember something from them.

Jagganoth isn't hurt, of course. Nothing can actually damage him. But all his armor and weapons are blasted to bits, and he seems to have been stunned for a bit. And, once again, Nadia is the one who sees the chance and coordinates the others for the next follow-up.

Heh, maybe I've been giving Solomon too much credit. He might be the one who's all about pacts and obligations, but Nadia seems to be the one who's put the most thought into how to actually use that cooperation. Maybe he's the one who dragged the other five to the gym, but she was the team captain while they were there. It also does a bit to explain her less-than-impressive (compared to the other demiurgi) combat performances in previous volumes when she's supposed to have been one of the multiversal war's victors: she's one of the setting's rare examples of a lead-from-the-back commander, using her demiurge powers to supplement her tactician-ing rather than the other way around.

So, Mottom tells Jadis that she needs a "six hells trigram." Jadis squirts this weird blue ribbon-thing out of her iceblock that shapes itself into a glyph surrounding Jagganoth, which Mottom eagerly turns into a mass of thorny vines and tosses one end of to Solomon. Together, Nadia (riding a flying Mammon) and Solomon turn the glowing, viny threads into a net that ties the disarmed Jagganoth up tight, like an enormous fly in a spider's storage-coccoon.

Man, this feels weird. We've spent the entire comic up until now learning in gory detail what irredeemable monsters these guys all are, but right now, watching them work together against a greater evil like this is almost heartwarming. It makes one wonder if perhaps, at some point, there was a possibility that things didn't have to go like this. That maybe the victors of the multiversal war could have made something better of themselves and their territories.

They didn't. And they are who they are now, even if they once had the potential to have a different future. But still. This makes it easy to see them as heroes who failed to be, rather than just as villains.

On the topic of possibly-failed possibly-heroes, we finally get back to Team Killy. Everyone except the leading trio has gotten into the water and are preparing to swim or fly or whatever off of the island. I'm not sure what has Killy, Cio, and White Chain still held up, tbh. Especially considering the commentary that White Chain gives regarding the battle.

Much like myself, White Chain had been wondering why Jagganoth bothered dodging non-restraining attacks or wearing armor into battle if his body is truly indestructible. Now that she has a good look at him in place now, without the helmet in the way, she thinks she's figured it out. Jagganoth can't be injured, but he can be hurt. As in, he still feels pain. The dodging and the armor aren't to keep him from losing the fight, they're to reduce the amount of pain he feels while winning it.

After his helmet got destroyed, White Chain saw him flinch and grimace and heard him cry out when he got hit. Right now though, even as the super-imprisonment spell draws its net tight around him and cuts into his skin without ever actually cutting, he isn't wincing. He's concentrating. Whatever they're doing, he had a countermeasure to it figured out well ahead of time, and no amount of pain is enough to distract him from executing it.

Additionally, White Chain has been thinking about the time and place of Jagganoth's attack. Solomon David is the most formidable combatant of the other six, but here on his own homeworld he's both at his most emotionally vulnerable and least willing to go all out and risk collateral damage. The Circle of Power ensures maximum imperilled civilians in the city across the bay, while the nuking of the arena itself took care of any assorted weirdos with potentially surprising and game-changing tricks up their sleeves who could help against Jagganoth off the bat before they could raise their own defenses. Killy with the Masterkey - which we know Jagganoth very much wants to take from her - is also right here. The other demiurgi had their dumb war going on, and thus were at the nadir of their likelihood to work together (they probably already exceeded Jagganoth's expectations, with that rare moment of clearheadedness from Mottom).

What this means is that Jagganoth is very patient, and quite good at luring his enemies into a false sense of security until he sees just the right moment.

He's got this. Everyone not named Yaun Ten Jantriss is fucked.

Then, Cio suggests that they try to help, and Killy is like "okay sure" and tells the others to go ahead. Without any argument from White Chain.

-____-

How is that a takeaway from what White Chain just said? Or from what Incubus just said? Or from...anything?

The leading three, including the one who just said that Jagganoth is going to wipe the floor with everyone, stay. The others retreat, with Vigilant Gaze carrying the wounded Nyave over his shoulder and Princess ignoring Zaid's protests at having to leave the only other Terran again so soon.

I really don't know what they're thinking.

Killy and Cio fuse back into Coca-Killy. White Chain seems to have made the same inferences about her new composition and its similarity to devilkind that I did at the end of the last book, and suggests they try an experiment. An experiment that proves successful in unleashing Vanilla Killa Coke on the multiverse.

The comic supplies a caption labeling this new compound entity as "Aspected Chaos: the Fool." It's not even remotely clear who would have given them that name though, so mine is of equal legitimacy.

After stretching their limbs and inspecting their new form, Incarnated Sapphism: Vanilla Killa Coke turns around and starts marching back toward the battling demigods. Mottom is amused to see Killy reappear now at all times when she's given up hunting for her. Hah, I'm surprised she can even recognize her within the composite; some kind of aura-perception lets her recognize her spiritual signature, maybe. Gog-Agog is enchanted to see yet another new evolution from the group already. Jagganoth starts thrashing and struggling within his bindings in a way that suggests he's not happy about this turn, though it's very possible he's just baiting them onward.

I'm not totally sure what happens next, but it looks like Vanilla grabs the magic ropes binding Jagganoth and adds some rainbow gay power to it. The gayified parts of the web then latch onto Jagganoth's chest, and then Incubus reappears out of a nearby mud puddle, leaps at Jagganoth, and stabs him right in the heart where all the gay is concentrated. That, in turn, causes whatever the hell this is to happen:

The island wrenches itself out of the bedrock and seawater and floats up into the sky above Celestial City Bay. Jagganoth turns into stone. The sword is still pinning the glowing mass of rainbow sparkles to the statue's heart.

Okay, I *think* what happened here is that Vanilla gave the net a final extra boost of strength, and then Incubus used his sword to "lock" the trap. Jagganoth has been rendered inert inside of the locked mega-six-hell-trigram-flower-gay spacetime envelope, the sword is sticking out like a key, and now the demiurges are floating the island off into space to find somewhere safe for entombing as a final level of security.

Again, I THINK that's what's happening, but it's really just a best guess. At the start of the fight, Solomon said that if they couldn't kill him then they'd just have to imprison him, and that appears to be what is now happening.

I doubt it'll stick, though. Not after all that buildup.

And yeah, sure enough, Jagganoth manages to speak from between his frozen stone lips. This spell of binding is indeed stronger than anything he expected them to use, which is why it might even take him over one entire minute to break free. Well, fair's fair, they've got him totally disabled for around a minute. If they've got something else that they think they can finish him off with now, well, he supposes they've earned their victory.

They don't have anything to finish him off with. So, in the absence of such, Vanilla tries to make another charisma check. They start by asking, for realsies this time, why Jagganoth wants the Masterkey so much. It seems he was telling the truth the first time he answered that question (or, if not, then he's at least being consistent with his lies). However, he does go into a bit more detail now.

He knows about the timeline resets. And so, it seems, does 1 Metatron. The thing is, Jagganoth doesn't think that Zoss is the one who's been creating all these alternate timelines. Rather, Metatron is the one behind it. Moreso even than that, he doesn't believe that Zoss actually forced the true names of the gods out of Metatron when he made the Masterkey. Rather, Metatron gave them willingly, and may have even been jobbing in the fight that preceded it (if that fight even actually happened at all).

In every timeline - or perhaps at a point before the timelines diverge in the first place - Jagganoth is given the +50 acupuncture feathers of indestructibility and set on his task of destroying the multiverse. Jagganoth has only managed to get his hands on a fragment of his own extratemporal memories, but he's pretty sure that he always succeeds in that mission.

He thinks that if he gets the Masterkey this time, though, and combines its power with the invincibility that Metatron already gave him, he might have a shot at defeating Metatron himself. Succeeding at the task Zoss never actually succeeded at. Then, the timeline won't be reset again, and the loop will stop repeating. Jagganoth will finally get the prize that the angel has been dangling in front of him for eternities on end, and destroy the multiverse once and for all.

All life will end. Yisun will be reborn. Hopefully wiser than they were before. If they do decide to split themselves and create life again, hopefully they will have learned how to do it better, and the new creation will be one without such inescapable suffering and horror. It's the only way to change things, and Yaun Ten Jantriss desperately wants things to change.

...

Oooooof. Man. Jag. Yaya. Bro. Think about this for a second.

If you're right about all this, then that means that Metatron chose to give the Masterkey to Zoss, and also chose to give the feathers to you. If he was really in control the entire time, then it's very unlikely he would have parted with items that could actually kill him. Again, if your story is true, then Metatron probably has the power to just take all the toys back at will the instant you try to threaten him with them, assuming they even CAN threaten him at all.

A mastermind of this scope would not have made such an elementary mistake. This is not going to work. Zero chance. You're even less likely to beat Metatron in this scenario than the other demiurgi are to beat you. Hell, for all you know, you already DID get the Masterkey thirty different times, and it never helped.

Nah. If you really want to defeat Metatron, the winning move is to do nothing at all. He wants you to clean up the failed timelines for him? Well fuck him, he can do it his damned self. In the meantime, you're the strongest thing in the multiverse besides Metatron, and unlike Yisun - who you're just blindly hoping will do things better than they did the only other time they're known to have acted - you are fully in control of your own actions. Can you eliminate struggle and suffering from the fundamental nature of the universe? No, but you can probably make things a hell of a lot better than they ever were before.

You know that you want the world to be better. You don't know that Yisun cares about that at all. Why are you making this Yisun's job?

In fact, it really seems like Jagganoth is the one who's actually being tested in all these time loops, not Zoss or whichever rando Zoss decides to rape in the forehead this time. It's almost a Trials of Job type thing. Take a human who has suffered beyond belief, has very good reason to want the world to end, and who has had all his memories of life aside from pain and all his talents besides destruction beaten out of him. Give that human the power to end creation. If he doesn't choose to end creation, well, that's passing a test alright.

It also ties back into a lot of the earlier themes, about trusting yourself to take care of your own desires, acting rather than depending on others to act for you, etc. Jagganoth is playing the role of the Red-Eyed King in that story, but to get what he really wants perhaps he needs to learn the same lesson that Aesma did in the story.

Really, this is ultimately laziness on Jagganoth's part. He's doing the thing he's used to doing. Undoing the damage that Jantriss and his merry band of psychos did to him and relearning how to do anything besides killing would be hard, and painful. He could do it, though. With all the weird types of magic that exist in this setting, I'm sure there's a way to conjure up the faces of the long dead. He can remind himself what his mother and father looked like. He can reopen his mind and expose himself to the kinds of feelings he knows he's lost by mixing it with others, using dream-magic or by fusing with devils.

He rules a seventh of the multiverse. If there's something we've seen in the comic, he probably has access to it. If there's something we've seen in the comic that he doesn't already have access to, he can just beat up the Black King whose seventh it exists in and take it from them.

But defeating the grand enemy called I would be hard, and destroying the multiverse is - at least by comparison - easy.

With Zoss' last lesson to Killy being to throw down the sword and instead help others find self-actualization, maybe that's her real job. Teach a lesson of her own to the world's most difficult student.

...

One encouraging sign, at least, is that Jagganoth is fairly sure there wasn't a three-part what the fuck human-angel-devil hybrid in any previous endgames. So, he's as willing as anyone to believe that this time will be different. In his view though, there's only one way to find that out.

He breaks free of the binding, and takes on a new form.

Yeah. "The world's most difficult student" is right.


That's a post.