Kill Six Billion Demons III: “Seeker of Thrones” (part three)

Alright. It's been a long time, and a lot of posts, but it's finally time for me to get back to the current main project. I'm relaxing my spoiler policy regarding background knowledge, setting lore, etc for this comic, but I'd still appreciate it if you guys kept that stuff to a minimum.

Spoilers about the actual plot, however, are still completely unwelcome.


Where we left off, Killy had made major advances in gaining the power to rescue Zaid or whatever she thinks she's trying to do at this point. She now has an airship, a small party of angel, human, and devil companions with useful skills and knowledge, and the ability to use her Masterkey consciously when she puts her willpower into it.

Unfortunately, the aftermath of her confrontation with Mottom has also left her in a very vulnerable physical and emotional state. This led to her making an extremely ill-advised pact with another malevolent sorcerer-king, David Bowie. She's instantly grown in magical ability from doing this, gaining self-healing powers among other things, but also given Bowie a yet-unspecified degree of mental influence over her. At the very least, we've been shown that Bowie can get people literally addicted to the power he lends them, and I wouldn't be all that surprised if he can use the link for more overt mind control stuff too.

Last that we knew, they were just hovering their ship around in Throne airspace, blending in with the chaotic interdimensional traffic and hoping that's enough to thwart Mottom's agents as well as the swarm of bounty hunters that are still after the Masterkey. True, a lot of that swarm's members killed each other over the prize the last time we saw them, but I suspect that there are still plenty left to deal with.


The next chapter opens with their vessel descending on a much more familiar-looking neighborhood of Throne, where the petrified gods have been overbuilt with structures that look like they could otherwise exist on modern Earth. Perhaps they've chosen a place that they think would be less alienating and more comfortable to Killy to rest and recover in.

Also, your periodic reminder that creator Tom Parkinson-Morgan's greatest skill as an artist lies in his scenery:

The almost mundane nineteenth century-ish skyscrapers built around the titanic corpses somehow makes this seem more fantastical rather than less. I dig it!

So, the gang disembarks to do some...um...idk, resupplying? Shopping? Do they even have any money? Well, anyway, they park the ship and get off of it. As Killy climbs off, she and the reader both learn that the effects of blue devil liquor aren't permanent after all.

She's gonna need to drink some more of it and do some more devil fetus cannibalism. Or else learn to speak Thronese. Thronish? Multiversal Common? Demiurgic? Actually, is there even a dominant lingua franca for Throne at all, or is each neighbourhood its own country in terms of which languages you need to get by?

It turns out that some of the party have already been off the boat for some time, as Cio, Princess, and...what was the Mykosian girl's name again? Right, Nyave!...Cio, Princess, and Nyave are just then returning from a little shopping trip. Killy can still understand Nyave, so I guess Cio or White Chain must have given her some of that liquor. Nyave is too enchanted by the scale and cosmopolitanism of Throne to care about anything else at the moment, but the devils are surprised and suspicious to see Killy walking around again already. Nyave gets freaked out too when they remind her that Killy is supposed to be languishing in bed full of puncture wounds; she's the one who bandaged her up after all lol.

Killy is not very self aware about this.

Hmm. She was acting pretty brash and bullish from the beginning of this chapter as a kind of defense mechanism, but not understanding their surprise at her recovery is odd. As is immediately jumping to the worst conclusion about their actions. Is Incubus starting to poison her mind already, or is this just her overcompensating some more?

White Chain looks up from where she was standing guard on their berth and tells Killy to get back in bed and keep being injured this very instant. Killy tells her to STFU, and White Chain is both shocked and not-so-secretly elated at being addressed as a her. Did she ever do anything to suggest female presentation to Killy? If not, does Killy just have really good transdar, or is Incubus letting her borrow that old +5 transdar array he spent ninety years working on as a pet project a few millennia ago? Either way, Killy correctly genders White Chain, which stuns the angel enough to stop pressing the issue.

Killy tells everyone that she just figured out how to heal herself using the Masterkey. Which...maybe she really does believe that? I'm not sure. She might be trying to convince herself that the Bowie music video about her making an infernal bargain was just a coincidental dream.

Then, she strikes up a JoJo pose and does this:

The eye color changing, and even the face and expression starting to look a little Ziggy Stardust there. Is he actually possessing her already? This feels like he might actually be full-on assuming direct control, at least at key moments.

Hmm. The fact that she was trying to play-act this kind of thuggish pirate captain archetype back in the beginning of this chapter out of stress and fear might work against Killy now. Everyone might assume she's just continuing that shtick, rather than being possessed by someone who actually IS like that. Seriously, I think it would be obvious to them that something's wrong if it hadn't been for Killy's weird "explain yourselves or get off 'my' ship" performance back there.

...of course, the less unpleasant (but more insidious) possibility is that Incubus is just pumping her full of fake confidence that lets her wear that mask more convincingly. That would be a closer fit to his drug dealer coding. In that case, he's probably not planning to possess her or the like, but rather just getting her addicted to that self-perception of confidence and dominance so he can make her beg for more of it and become the man behind the (wo)man. Possibly more dangerous in the long term, but definitely less so in the short term, if this is the case.

So, the gang as a whole heads out to do some shopping, resupplying, and unwinding as they decide if and how they're going to do this insane rescue mission. Nyave explores, and tries to buy presents for the others that they mostly refuse. The devils peruse. White Chain keeps watch. Killy bounces around the malls and marketplaces touching everything that gets her attention like a crackhead.

This drug dealer subtext with Incubus is getting less and less subtextual, to the point where I'm wondering if he literally just teleports a drug into his clients' bloodstreams.

It's also made clear in this sequence that they do have money, from somewhere or other. Either that spelljammer they stole had some valuables aboard, or one or more of them did some surreptitious looting during the escape from Mottom's palace-ship. Eventually, Killy gets over her magical meth high enough to sit down and have a normal conversation, so they sit down at a noodle place together. Killy is still tweaked out enough that she finishes her meal before anyone else does though, and when she tries to hurry everyone else up to go break into yet another sorcerer-king's palace Cio has to tell her to calm the fuck down.

Killy isn't tweaked up enough to flip out and threaten her over this, but she still isn't exactly receptive to criticism.

There's something else going on during this conversation, though! Toward the beginning, Cio (who seems to have picked the restaurant) hands one of her magic paper slips to the waiter and tells him to deliver it quickly. A page or two later, the tall red devil who made a brief appearance in volume 2's drinking contest scene appears.

I think Cio said he was an ex of hers? She has a lot of exes. This guy, Jabba the Sphinx, who even knows how many other devil bois have had their hearts broken by the notorious Yabalchoath.

...oh, right. Yabalchoath. Okay, this makes sense! This crimson devil was probably one of her underlings during the time of her previous self's theft of Mammon's keys (she may have been dating him and Jabba at the same time lol). If he was part of her crew for that heist, then Cio probably came here to find him again so they can recruit someone with experience. Of course, during his last appearance he seemed to be kind of smug at seeing Cio reduced from a mighty ebon devil to a humble blue, so I doubt he'll come cheap at this point.

White Chain has an immediate hostile reaction to this devil's entrance. Specifically, she seems to be trying to grab one of the necklaces she's wearing. Old cop reflexes probably reacting to a stolen item she recognized. Eh, she'll get better eventually. I hope. It's a pretty big gaffe, especially when it turns out that big boy crimson didn't come alone.

I love how his henchmen just wear "evil" hoodies as their uniforms.

Unfortunately, this introduction is punctuated by...well, I guess it serves me right for not having bought the ebook version of volume III. But, there's an interactive webcomic audience participation thingy here that kind of takes me out of the story, reading it years after the fact.

Readers get to submit their devil OC's to make up an archetypal heist movie team. With the invitation being put out by way of a painfully unfunny little bird-goddess character who I hope I'll never have to see again after this.

If I'd been reading this as it came out and had a chance to participate, I'd probably enjoy this. Reading it as part of the comic's backlog though? Eh. Maybe if bird-goddess chibi was funnier I'd get some enjoyment out of the interruption, but I guess they can't all be winners.

...also, knowing that the rest of the devil heist-team are audience submitted characters means that I ALSO know they're not going to be important after the heist itself. Their stories aren't worked into the main plot. They weren't made with arcs in mind. It's possible that the author will have been inspired by some of them and managed to turn them into persistent parts of the story going forward, but it's unlikely. So, this sort of disincentivizes me from being too interested in or curious about them.

Again. I should have purchased this volume and helped support the author, so this kinda serves me right. I doubt this artefact of the webcomic publication made it past the editors.

...

That said, there is one interesting and useful thing in this blurb. The devil OC making guide includes some new information about the devil colors and what they indicate besides how many names and what general position in the diabolical pecking order someone has.

As I recall, those two mook devils with human tissue based avatars in volume I had white masks. They weren't insectoid, and they could talk, but that might have been down to their unusual avatar substrate (this would also explain WHY Jabba would be harvesting human body parts, if using that allows white devils to take on smarter and more versatile manifestations). They were notably extremely stupid despite their speaking ability, and Jabba used them for pretty menial tasks, so that more or less fits.

Red boi is an elite soldier-caste, from the looks of it. The way that this describes devils as having different personality traits depending on color makes me wonder how much continuity there is in their identities when they move through the spectrum. Do cunning, mischevious blue devils suddenly just start feeling more aggressive and bloodthirsty when they shed a name and become reds? Do reds just calm down but otherwise remain the same people when they become greens? Is it sort of like how human personalities change when they hit puberty, perhaps? The only color shifts we've learned about in any detail (Vladok's and Yabalchoath's) were both ebon > blue, and also both the result of highly unusual circumstances.

We haven't met any green devils besides background extras yet, but it's starting to look like we've met a gold. I'd been assuming that Jabba the Sphinx is an ebon devil, since he's mostly black-colored, is very powerful, and seemed to be co-ruler of Yabalchoath's organization, but this chart reminded me that it's the color of the mask that matters. His mask was gold, and uncanny valley humanlike as per the description, so yeah, he's just a gold devil.

Granted, "just" might be a misleading word here. Individual devils can learn individual skills, including magic and so forth. I doubt most blues could pull off the spells we've seen Cio use, for instance. So, it's likely that Jabba is an exceptionally powerful gold devil, able to contend with some ebons on more or less equal terms. A more typical gold devil would probably be that secretary of Mottom's who seemed to be keeping stock of the tribute as it was brought forth in book 2.

So, if nothing else, this devil information amounts to quite a loredump when used to contextualize things we've already learned.

...

Cio manages to talk the red devil - named as Oscar - down. It helps that White Chain quickly manages to get her ACAB reflexes under control.

Unfortunately, before Cio can properly explain what kind of work she wants to hire Oscar for, Killy goes back into manic crackhead mode and ruins things all over again by sauntering up to him and telling him that he's going to work for her now OR ELSE like she's babby's first DnD character trying to roleplay an intimidate check.

...

Okay, I think the author is seriously overwriting the Incubus mindfuckery here. Killy is acting so weird that it's hard to even empathize with her as a human being at this point, and the party's understated reactions to this make them harder to identify with as well.

This would work much better for me if it was about 30% more subtle. At least at this early juncture.

...

This time, it isn't Cio but Princess who talks Oscar down. Which he's able to do because of Oscar's talent for recognizing devils even after polychromatic demotion.

Oscar's schadenfreude isn't limited to just Yabalchoath, it seems. He knew Vladok, and seeing him laid low and reduced to an itty bitty blue imp tickled Oscar's funnybone just as hard. That memory wins Killy back enough points for him to forgive that impertinence of hers at least for now.

Oscar seems like the type of guy who everyone is friends with, but who no one is quite sure why they bother to be friends with.

Anyway, things calm down enough for Cio to start explaining the long and short of their mission, and it's a doozy. Mammon is the most defence-focused of the seven Black Kings, and his fortress of Yre - which he never leaves - is quite possibly the most secure facility in the contacted multiverse. It's located here in Throne, but that doesn't mean its more exposed or vulnerable than it would be on one of Mammon's own planets; the structure is basically a giant Tardis, with a fractal folded space interior. There's nearly infinite space inside the building, and the layout is a constantly-shifting labyrinth of cunning death traps and superpowered guardians. The actually important parts of it are patrolled by the armies of the Holy Count, Mammon's fanatical warrior-priests. Finally, anything really, truly important will be kept in the central vault, where Mammon himself resides. With how important the Black Kings think Zaid is, it's very likely that they'll have to confront Mammon in person and then escape through the death-megadungeon again.

It IS possible. Yabalchoath did it once, so they can theoretically do it again. Though on the other hand, she seems to have been lucky at least during the central vault part of the heist, since she found Mammon asleep in his treasure bath. There's no guarantee he won't be awake next time someone tries sneaking up on him, and if he's keeping Zaid near himself, well. I guess they'd better just hope that he's as emotionally fragile and easy to shut down as Nadia "Stunlock" Om.

Oscar isn't deterred by this mission prospect, which is more evidence that he might have been involved in the previous one. However, he's going to need to assemble some very high profile devils to make a suitably capable reader OC crack team, and involving multiple notorious devils in something this politically risky means they'll need to get approval beforehand from the Heretics' Court. That "great king of all devils" and his council who were mentioned a few chapters ago.

In volume I, it was established that a "hell" is what you call any shady devil-run neighbourhood. The Guilded Cage's base was "hell 71" as I recall. So, if the Heretics' Court is the primary devil seat of power then it would be "hell 1" I guess. So, people referring to it as just "hell" or perhaps capital H "Hell" would make sense.

I'm still curious about how devilkind maintains any sort of government, though. They seem to be a race of self-interested, independent actors spread out across the entire multiverse doing mercenary stuff. What kind of authority could any one leader have over all of them, or even just most of them?

Well, it seems like I'm about to find out!

The next page is probably the largest and most detailed isometric map/cutout that K6BD has featured thus far. There's no way in hell that I can post it on here and preserve any of the details, so instead I'll just link it. This shows a section of what is known as Ashton, the outer and lowermost ward of Throne's wedding cake like construction. Spokelike walls connecting Throne's outer wall to the inner wards divide Ashton into 27 equally sized districts, each of which has ended up with its own dominant languages, species, and ethnic groups. It still hasn't been said if there's a Latin-equivalent used by elites and scribes throughout Throne and beyond, but even if there is I get the impression that most Ashtonites don't speak it. Of course, depending on how common devil-liquor and other universal translator magics are they might not ever need to, heh. Our heroes our currently in one of the literally "shady" districts of Ashton. Throne has an orbiting pseudo-sun to provide a balanced day and night, but it stopped working a few millennia back and no one's bothered to fix it, so since then half of Throne has been in perpetual day and half in perpetual night.

I really love that last detail. It's not just some visually spectacular fantasy worldbuilding, but also such a strong thematic statement. Back in my readthrough of volume one, I noted that this is a theistic setting in which humans have actually replaced the gods and assumed their office. Here, we see just how unworthy of the position humanity is. What do gods do, in polytheistic cosmologies? Make the wind blow, the rain fall, the sun rise and set. Well, here are some humans (and one giant lizard thing, but regardless) in the role of the gods, and they're too lazy and stingy to fix the fucking sun when it stops rising no matter how much you pray to them. Something something civil infrastructure, something something corporate interests over voter needs, something something failure of late capitalist national projects.

The most important thing this picture shows, though, is that Cio and Killy are taking some kind of schizotech train line along the Ashton outer wall and getting off a few districts over on the outside-facing side of the wall. Out here are "the Shades," a bunch of shanties built off of the sides of Throne and over the astral ash wastes that underly it. This region - at least on the night side of the wheel - is not fit for human habitation, but some sturdier entities have come to call it home. The Heretics' Court is based out of here, presumably because neither the angelic orders nor the Black Seven will permit it to come any closer before deciding that they can no longer tolerate its existence.

The building Cio brings Killy to is an unassuming one. I wonder what it used to be, and if the Heretics' Court resided elsewhere before choosing it? There are a couple of guards sitting on bizarrely cheap-looking wooden patio chairs at the entrance. A dog-shaped ebon devil who is wearing a collar and leash for either ironic or kinky reasons, and what appears to be a fallen angel.

I guess maybe all devils can recognize each other after pro/demotion, assuming they knew each other to begin with. Every one of them who knew Yabalchoath seems to recognize Cio on sight.

Mogrin the devil doge warns Cio that her old self isn't remembered fondly by most of the Heretics' Court, and that appearing before them might actually be more dangerous for herself than it is for the squishy edible human. Cio blows her warnings off, and leads Killy through the door and into a spooky elevator that begins lowering them into a physically impossible abyss. Killy asks Cio if this is where she originally came from. Cio answers that yes, it is.

Huh. So devils are born here?

...are all devils born here?

If so, they must be fewer in number than I'd been thinking. They seem to be all over the place, but that might only be the case in Throne, which isn't really all that big relatively speaking.

Also. If this was ALWAYS the heart of devilkind, rather than just their most recently adopted one, then...was this a laboratory, once? Assuming that the stories about how the first devils were created by the early demiurgi are true (which admittedly is a big assumption), then this might have been where those experiments with the hot black flame of Yis were performed. And it makes sense that they would build it outside of Throne itself, given how dangerous the stuff they were playing with was, but also near enough to monitor and access at their leisure. So, yeah, this is entirely possible.

Fascinating.

As the elevator descends through the void, they pass by a huge ebon devil perched on a balcony, feasting on human corpses. At least, I think they're corpses. If they were alive prior to the chomping, they weren't struggling much.

That sight seems to snap Killy awake from whatever PCP daydream Incubus had her in at the moment, and she looks as horrified as she was by Mottom's husband reveal. She asks Cio what the fuck they just passed by, and the question comes across as panicked rather than imperious and demanding. God, it feels good to have the old Killy back, for as long as it lasts.

Cio reminds Killy devils sustain themselves and grow in power by absorbing the energy of other soul-fires. That's why they make pacts with humans, after all; the pact mark that appears on the human signatory is a parasitic feeding orifice of the devil's. We've had this explained to us in brief back in early book 2, but we're getting much more into the implications of it now. Anyway, Cio explains that while devils were designed to be dependent on humans for sustenance, the oldest and most powerful ebons have figured out a way of bypassing those measures and absorbing human soulfires directly through a ritualistic eating of their bodies. Enabling them to continue maintaining or even increasing their power without making themselves beholden to any master. Thus, the ancient ebons who dwell here in the Court are the only truly free members of devilkind, and it is they who oversee the nexus of their species.

Killy asks Cio if Yabalchoath was ever a courtier. Cio just looks frustrated, and tells her that she already told Killy what her old self used to be like; why does she need her to repeat it now? When Killy has trouble believing this, Cio says something that I think calls for a lot of unpacking:

Okay, so. Maybe I'm just being suckered in by how charming and entertaining some of the devil characters in the comic have been to this point, and that bias is causing me to make excuses for them. But.

How are the devils any different from humans in this setting?

The leaders are ancient, ruthless oligarchs who eat people by the thousands to keep their status: am I talking about the Heretics Court, or the Black Kings? Their societies are built on opportunistic plundering, exploitation, and betrayal: am I talking about the devil camps around the unopened Gates outside Throne, or Throne itself?

You can essentialize their behavior and say it's in the nature of the hot black flame to destroy and consume with wild abandon. But you can also look at their creators and conclude that they were just never taught anything else.

Cio's perspective on devilkind, in light of the human and angel attitudes toward devils that contextualize it, is hard not to read as internalized racism. Devils might be useful soldiers or sorcerers or administrators and so forth, but they seem to have far less political power in Throne than the angelic orders, let alone the human (and lizard?) demiurgic empires. They might have more status than the human peasants who get enslaved and sacrificed en masse, but no devil has nearly as much power and privilege as the human elites who sit atop it all. And yet, they're the ones who are criminalized and reviled for doing the exact same things that the real powerbrokers do, and now we hear the devils themselves blaming this on their own sinful nature.

This all just sounds way too familiar for me to take at face value.


Gonna stop here for now. So far, I'm tempted to say that this volume contains both the best and the worst of K6BD thus far.