Kill Six Billion Demons III: "Seeker of Thrones" (part twelve)

The group is tiptoeing its way across the raging Battle of Yre, being battered periodically by soldiers from either army whose attention they stumble into. We see Charon take a nasty chainsawglaive wound. I hope he doesn't die, he has an actual personality and stuff. As they near the breach that Mottom's ship created, they get a lucky break as a small ship detaches itself from the fleet and descends to ground level.

I was about to question how they could have sailed right through the thick of Mottom's navy without being shot down, but then I remembered that they stole this skiff from her forces in the first place. Given how chaotic the battle is, I doubt any of those air-sailors would have given a second look to one of their smaller boats moving at a strange vector.

So, White Chain ran after Nyave when she saw Mottom charging Yre with her armada in tow, they got over their stupid fight, and fired up the engine to slip in after them and pretend to be part of the fleet. More courageous than I'd have expected from Nyave, and more devious than I'd have expected from White Chain. Well done, both of you.

White Chain drops the anchor, then leaps off the deck and takes out a pair of Priests of the Count with one of her called-out animu attacks before they can sneak up and gank a devil or three. She then instructs Cio to get Killy up on deck so they can get out of here, and also informs her that she and Killy are grounded for eternity.

Sorry, mom.​

They apologize for having been jerks to each other, reassure each other that they were right to have been upset with their behavior, and then start with the good natured ribbing. This gets cut short, unfortunately, when Killy regains just enough consciousness to point out a troubling development.

A devilepment, really. 🥁

Looks like they're still doing their shortsighted shenanigans. Well, Oscar is still alive and somehow not beaten to a quivering pulp by the others, so this was probably his idea.

Ah well. Time to see Prince Kassardis' wives all fall on each other's swords, I guess. Let's see how it plays out.

Princess, either out of genuine loyalty or just because he happened to get left on the ground as well, leaps up and grabs the anchor before the other devils can finish pulling it up. His bulky new red devil physique is strong and heavy enough to slow the takeoff a bit, enabling White Chain and Cio with Killy over her shoulder to grab on as well. Further ahead of them, Charon and Cat Master are also still climbing the rope, in a way that suggests that they were also victims rather than perpetrators of this betrayal. Cat Master reaches the deck, only for Blueberry to hold him at gunpoint and demand he give up the treasure he has on him in exchange for his life. Unfortunately for Blueberry, she didn't seem to realize that Charon was right behind Cat Master on the rope, and the green devil leaps over him, tackles Blueberry and Ricardio to the deck, and declares that their own shares are now forfeit to him.

Cat Master's cat in the bottom left corner about to pounce on Blueberry to get her off his buddy.~​

The brawl continues, with even Charon and Cat Master seeming to turn against each other as well. The only ones who haven't betrayed each other yet now are Blueberry and Ricardio, and they're both just one fan submission so it doesn't count. Suddenly, gunfire tears across the deck, and everyone besides the cat falls limp and full of holes.

Oscar, naturally. He was just a little too conspicuously absent until now.

He monologues to himself about how these are ultra-rare +4 bullets of devil-murdering he loaded the clip with. One of the rare times he got his hands on a large sum of money and didn't immediately spend it all on hookers and blow. Damn, is Charon actually dead now? That sucks.

Also, Oscar somehow had a skipper hat with his gang logo on it. Was he carrying this the entire heist just in case he'd have an opportunity to steal a ship at some point? Or did he hide it on Killy's skiff ahead of time planning to steal it sometime later on? Maybe he has two of those hats and he did both, just in case.

Looks like he also locked Nyave inside the cabin. Surprised he didn't kill her. Maybe he needs her engineering skills to fly them away? Yeah, that's probably it. Granted, she can also threaten to sabotage the engine and bring the ship down, but I think Oscar would probably call that bluff even if it turned out to not actually be a bluff.

Well, thanks to Princess' quick action, Cio is able to climb the rope onto the deck and confront him mid-monologue. He tells her that he expects her of all people to understand, of course. She rebukes him, and there's some really heavy-handed dialogue where the two of them literally say the themes of the arc to each other. This volume does that a lot. I wish that it didn't. I'll just skip to the end of this part, because it's literally just the stuff I've already talked about in previous posts and that the story had already communicated perfectly well before this insult to the reader's intelligence.

Anyway, when Cio doesn't ease up on the hostility Oscar tries a really desperate story to wriggle out of this.

There are so many things wrong with what Oscar is trying to sell here that I don't even know where to start.

How was breaking into a vault and not stealing anything supposed to remind her what "real power" was like?

How WAS he planning to avoid retaliation from Mammon's forces for breaking into the inner vault and killing a bunch of their dudes, even if he didn't steal anything? History has shown that Yabalchoath is no more able than anybody else to survive their retaliation.

Most importantly, if he was hoping to get Yabalchoath back as an ally from this venture, why would he have tried to sail away without her?

So yeah, if he's babbling out bullshit THIS transparent, then he's desperate. He's really desperate.

Well, it doesn't work. Obviously. Forcing him to try and kill Cio before she can do any whacky paper magic. However, trying to hit an agile, experienced combatant across a battlefield full of cover is very different from cheap shotting a bunch of brawlers while they're distracted with each other. While he tries to make one of his last few anti-devil bullets connect, Nyave climbs out a cabin side window, literally clings to the outer hull of the ship, and side-climbs onto the deck behind Oscar.

That dive-kick she just did is almost exactly the same as the move White Chain used against those Count warriors. It's obviously a lot more effective when one is dropping from a great height and has feet made of metal and stone, but still, she's obviously been paying attention to how White Chain fights. It's enough to knock Oscar off balance and let Cio close the distance and tackle him. Dang, I guess she's out of paper or something if she's resorting to her little blue devil claws against a hulking red.

Well, predictably, a physical contest between paper-less Cio and Nyave against a hardened red devil warrior favors the latter pretty dramatically. Oscar seizes both of them and prepares to toss them overboard, wondering aloud how many more of these dummies he's going to have to kill today. A new interloper cuts in here to provide an answer. While also picking up the gun full of anti-devil bullets he dropped.

O...kay. I'm not sure how that's supposed to have happened. Not just how she survived the door without anyone seeing her escape, but also how she managed to get up onto the ship just now. I was expecting there to be a flashback panel or two explaining at least one of those two things, but no. I get that she's "Lucky" Felicia, but still, I think for a case like this we need to know what form her luck actually took.

...also, the door actually opened. I *assumed* that the victim needed to actually die in order for the door to be appeased. If that's not actually the case, then does that mean they could have just tossed some meat into its mouth and gotten the same benefit? Was the need for human sacrifice really just them coming to the worst possible conclusion and defaulting to it? Were those doors designed in order to prey on that bias in the type of people the Priests of the Count expected to be coming after them?

Yeah. This needed a little 1-3 panel digression to explain.

Well, however this happened, Felicia has Oscar's gun now. She's missing an arm (and has somehow managed to bind the stump. She managed to do that and ALSO follow them the rest of the way into the inner vault on her own? I'm starting to think Felicia might have been playing stupid on purpose to make people underestimate her), but she's evidently a practiced enough markswoman to heft the barrel with just her stump. With Cio and Nyave holding Oscar in place, there's just no way Felicia can miss. He just barely has time to shake his head and sigh at his own bad luck before she blasts a huge chunk out of his midsection, sending him tumbling overboard and down, down, down into the raging battlefield of Yre.

Well, he might have been stupid, reckless, and extremely malicious, but Oscar was no hypocrite. In his final moments, he didn't express any outrage or curses or condemnations. Just annoyance that he didn't manage to make it out on top, and grudging resignation to having been outmanoeuvred. He always knew it would probably end this way, and that he'd probably never see it coming. Just the way life is for his kind.

Heh. It would have been kind of cool if he actually had been flipped by Mottom and deliberately sabotaging them this whole time, but no. He really just was that stupid and that erratically violent.

White Chain finishes climbing aboard with Killy under her arm, just as Oscar's body falls off the other side. Nyave gets the boat moving, flying them back out the breach as Princess finishes his own slow, ponderous climb at the end of their rope-clinging procession. It's kind of surprising that Princess was the only devil to not do any betraying today, considering that oathbreaking was literally how he ended up joining the party. I guess he learned his lesson!

Several other ships are fleeing the battle while Mottom's back is turned, so it's easy for them to escape notice. As they leave, Yre appears to be starting to collapse. Either structural damage from the impact is starting to catch up with it, or Oscar had a deadman's switch nuke on him. Or I guess somebody inside could have just used a big weapon or spell a little too recklessly at just that moment, making it more of a coincidence. At any rate, debris clouds and secondary explosions rack the facility. In the main vault, Mottom (who had just finished reducing the Reverend Mother into a desiccated carcass overgrown with flowering vines) looks up in alarm and casts some kind of shield spell on herself. Mammon crouches possessively over the biggest pile of gold, his mind not able to keep up even as his instincts tell him what's about to happen. Mammon's power word of "Tower" is finally living up to its Tarot card namesake.

An ocean of gold spills out of the collapsing, four-dimensional structure, flooding the nearest neighborhoods of Throne. Toppling buildings and crushing or suffocating hundreds of victims with the sheer weight of Mammon's hoard. The dragon himself is left exposed, looking out at Throne for the first time in centuries from the center of where his fortress used to be.

A change has begun coming over him.

I don't think you can just recover from senility, but the scale of the violent shake-up that just happened has reignited (literally) a part of him that's long lain dormant. He can drown in regret for the things he's done and even express kindness and compassion, as long as his walls are up and his gold is all accounted for. Take those things away though, and the instincts that caused him to go down in multiversal myth and legend as the embodiment of greed surge forth. His scales are fire and diamond now, and flames erupt from his mouth. His demiurgic halo flares into new life as everything he'd been stewing in is seared away in a maniacal burst of "THAT WAS MIIIIIINE!"

Best case scenario is that Mammon goes on a wild rampage across Throne until the other six put him down. Worst case...I'm not even sure.

Everything goes dark. Like, there's actually just a black rectangle for that day's comic. I imagine contemporary readers were not amused. On the next page, Killy awakens with fresh bandages over wounds old and new, in a familiar shipboard bed. There's a lot more decorations and articles laying around, probably courtesy of Nyave and White Chain's shopping excursions. Also in the room is Cio, preparing a stir-fry in the kitchenette. She has a new haircut to make sure Killy can tell she's gay; it was obviously a little too subtle for her up until now, so Cio took measures to make it clearer. Also, she has grave news.

Yeah. With how precarious the balance of power already was, the fall of Yre pretty much has to kick off the big war everyone's been waiting for. I guess Mottom was right. And, while Incubus didn't get everything he wanted out of his little mind game with Killy, he did end up getting the other Black Kings to start fighting, which he and Jagganath were hoping would happen soon. So, he probably is calling this a partial success.

Killy, of course, got nothing except for even more lacerations and punctures than she had at the volume's start.


That's a post. There will be just one more to complete this volume before I do a final analysis and move on to book four.