Kill Six Billion Demons IV: King of Swords (part fifteen)
Holy shit I can't believe it's been this long. Some "main" project this has turned out to be. Well, better late than never.
Where we left off, White Chain was duelling Solomon David in the arena despite knowing that her avatar is just barely holding together with the help of hasty overnight repairs. Could she really not just get a new one for this? Maybe integrating with a new synth takes longer than Solomon is willing to put off the final match for. It's off to a bad start for White Chain, unsurprisingly. It probably would be off to a bad start even if White Chain was at full hp in a brand new custom anti-Solomon body. The rest of Team Killy, including newest member 420 Lamassu Whose Head Is An Ophan, are up in the audience, watching and hoping that White Chain knows what she's doing. As of her latest transtemporal philosophy lesson from Zoss, Killy isn't trying to get in the way of her companions' own ambitions if they don't want her to.
Zaid is...somewhere. Probably somewhere in the VIP tower, but Solomon could be doing something tricksy there again. Gog-Agog is still narrating, and also probably sneaking around in fifteen or twenty different parts of the amphitheatre.
The end of the book is near. Let's see how much nearer I can get today.
The battle continues in much the same spirit, with Solomon expressing double-edged condescending admiration for White Chain as she tries trick after trick, style after style, only to discover that Solomon has already seen it all and mastered it all. When repeatedly told that she should surrender and enjoy a privileged position as one of Solomon David's own champions, White Chain just laughs at him (yes, she actually laughs. Like, with a smiley expression and everything) and tells him that that's exactly the future she's fighting against.
Solomon gets really paternalistic and tries lecturing her about her failure to live up to the angelic ideal, let alone his own ideal. It really has a "white person lecturing a minority member about how they should practice their own culture" vibe to it. All the way down to rubbing White Chain's improper recitation of the Trigram Mantra in her face.
If this was meant to get under White Chain's skin, it doesn't work. But it might still be the herald of a bad turn, for other reasons.
Solomon starts to initiate a Ki-Rata timehax rush like the one he used to pulp all those other guys at the end of the battle royale. Nothing we've seen in the comic so far suggests that White Chain can keep up with that, let alone defend against it. However, as Lamassu points out to Killy and the others, Ki-Rata does have one potential countermeasure; the user needs a split second of total concentration before the bullet time blitz can be initiated. If White Chain can deny Solomon that moment of activation time, she can hopefully prevent Solomon from actually going all out.
It turns out that White Chain does have a trick in mind. Both to interrupt his concentration, and to exploit the opening that his last-minute switch to defence will likely create.
Krayu-Mat flanking maneuver. Coordinating control of both avatar and tethered spirit-form so that both can attack at once.
Lamassu reacts in amazement. "Body and soul at once?!" I'm kind of raising my eyebrow at the notion of this being something new and unheard of, though. We've seen angels coordinate control of multiple synth bodies at once. I'm not sure why this would be so much harder to pull off than that, especially if the angels have an entire martial art based around using their spirit-appendages alongside their synths. I could definitely see full spirit-form projection being a very advanced and difficult move within the Krayu-Mat school, but I don't buy it being beyond the known repertoire. Angels have just been fighting too many types of opponent for too many millions of years for no one to have done this before.
Well, whether it's actually novel to the multiversal record or not, it does allow White Chain to interrupt the Ki-Rata cycle. Just as intended, she forces Solomon off-balance switching from concentration to total defence, and simultaneously comes at him from another direction he wasn't expecting to have to defend. And keeps up the flurry of blows from both sides in case he managed a lucky reflexive block against the first flank-strike but is then left open somewhere else.
It probably was the most optimized possible set of tactics against Solomon David. But Solomon unfortunately just...
...has too good a reaction time.
Nothing wrong with the tactics, or the technique. White Chain just can't move fast enough to pull it off before Solomon adapts. Maybe someone faster than White Chain could have managed it, but White Chain doesn't even know anyone like that. The page's caption-quote is very apropos.
“Heed this well: the princes of the world are no strangers to iron. You may wish it bite them but it will merely kiss their skin. It is an old friend of theirs, and they pull it from the blood of their enemies. Your own sword will leap from your hand and spitefully impale you. You shield will break at the slightest brush of their fingers. Your armor will crumple and fall away as they approach. They are the kings of iron, and it swears fealty to none but them.”
Once again, it's Xykon's maxim. There is a certain amount of brute force against which no tactics can succeed.
Granted, I don't know if it really applies to all the "princes of the world" and not just Solomon, Jagganoth, and maybe one or two others. Mottom's combat performances thus far have not been nearly as awe-inspiring. :p
...
By the way every panel of that sequence is absolutely beautifully drawn. It was hard for me to choose just a couple to screencap. Starts here and continues for a few pages.
...
Solomon is much more legitimately impressed this time, at least. His smile might be kind of creepy, but it's a real smile. White Chain actually made him sweat there. It's the first time in a long time that anyone's managed that. It's the rare moments like this that make the Circle of Power tournaments worth holding.
And, speaking of concentration and the importance thereof, White Chain is forcibly taught that now is not the time to give a shonen speech.
She isn't able to interrupt the next Ki-Rata chargeup cycle. Solomon completes his hamon-ish breathing pattern, cut ahead two seasons to use za warudo, and reduces White Chain's avatar to more or less the same state it was in after the battle royale. I get the impression that he could have ended the battle here, if he wanted to. He could have just hammered the synth's structural lynchpins and shattered it to inoperable dust. But, despite promising that he would fight for real now, Solomon just can't resist another chance to try and make White Chain submit.
Okay, I think this might have been what White Chain was trying to do all along. Taunting Solomon in a way that makes him feel compelled to extract an apology or a surrender (those are literally the same thing, in Solomon's worldview) instead of just winning the match. Then just dragging it out for as long as possible, so that Solomon acts more and more obviously like a schoolyard bully instead of a dignified warrior-poet with his people's best interests at heart. While all his own subjects are watching, either in person or on The Gog-Agog Show. Solomon's image is the most important thing in the world to him, and unlike his body it's nowhere close to invulnerable.
Granted, I don't know that damaging Solomon's mystique is actually going to help anyone. It might weaken his regime a bit and also make him mad and stuff, but that doesn't bring the party any closer to its goals.
...on the other hand, their initial goals don't really matter at this point. Using the tournament as an opportunity to rescue Zaid was never going to work. When she talked the others into coming along, Nyave said that she's in this just to weaken the demiurgic order however she can. And, White Chain IS doing that here. So, sure. If we really are just trying to cause disruption now, then this is a good trick.
After crippling the angel again, Solomon breaks a new hole in the ceiling and flies her up over the city to give one of those big pseudo-heavy-speeches-for-the-audience-of-literally-just-himself that he likes to make.
It's complete nonsense, of course. In fact, I suspect that Solomon considers the words to be less important than the tone of voice he says them in. Tired, longsuffering, almost-but-not-quite regretful, but resolved nonetheless. It's important to say things in that tone of voice to a defeated enemy while overlooking your capital city sometimes, especially if it's raining. He follows it up by piledriving White Chain back down into the arena and leaving her at the bottom of a crater.
But still. He hasn't disembodied her. He must have carefully done exaaactly enough damage to not force her out of her avatar and end the match before she can agree that it's ended.
Solomon makes one last attempt. Telling her that he really, really doesn't want to have to do this. And also that he'd like to have a more protracted conversation with White Chain, and also with her "white-haired companion" in particular. Lol. If that's what he wanted to do, he'd have done it last night before the final match. It's not like he'd have ever needed White Chain's permission to talk to Killy even besides that. White Chain, of course, tells him to go fuck himself. Solomon decides that he's finally demeaned himself enough, and tells her that he hopes 83 White Chain Returns From The Void To Defeat Evil will be a bit wiser than his predecessor. Huh, I guess he's planning to actually chase her spirit self into the void and kill it too? Excessive. Speaking of excessive, he then does a totally unnecessary Ki-Rata speedboost, considering the state of White Chain.
As he charges, even though he's ending the un-masking and seemingly aware that he's doing it, the mask has already slipped too far for him to put it completely back on again just yet. Look at his face as he rushes in to land the final discorporating (and possibly killing?) blow.
The sadistic smile as he bears down on the defiant upstart who's been frustrating him.
Before the demiurgic war, before Solomon learned Ki-Rata or took his first Key of Kings, he was something analogous to a Spartan citizen-soldier. A garden variety state-sponsored thug. That's all he still is. He just had to create a new state to sponsor him, and he has to pretend to be something other than a power-tripping petty tyrant in order to legitimize that state.
The irony is that he doesn't actually need to legitimize it. The other Black Kings don't bother. They're fine with admitting that they just do whatever they want because there's no one left who can stop them, at least for the most part (Mottom may be a kinda-sorta exception, depending on how much if any of the fairy tale she told Killy she actually believed herself). Solomon just could never break out of his old raison d'etre, no matter how far he's come since those days.
...
To the authoritarian mind, the legitimacy of an "authority" is contingent on whether or not it condones the things you wanted to do anyway. There's a reason authoritarians have such a penchant for conspiracy theories. If their guy isn't in command, they need to rationalize why the guy who is in command isn't actually a legitimate authority.
Solomon David has boiled this down to the purest form possible without just biting the bullet and abandoning the institutional middleman entirely. He simultaneously is of the state, and is the state. He has himself to write the laws he wants to be able to enforce. Himself to make any rule he feels like he should be beholden to. A cop running the city for an imaginary mayor.
He'd really be much happier if he just admitted he was a thug, but authoritarians despise that kind of lawlessness.
...
He brings his fist forward. White Chain, somehow, manages to throw her own near-shattered fist into it. Either he didn't actually speedboost like it looked like, or White Chain burned a ton of angel coldfire energy to speed herself up for just a moment along with him, idk. Their fists collide, and White Chain's avatar shatters. Reverberating force vibrates through the synth and shreds it into gravel and scrap metal from head to toe. Her spirit form erupts...but it looks different. There's a white flash of light. Something flows around Solomon David's body in a river of molten luminescence and a hail of half melted avatar-bits.
The hell just happened?
The white comet resolidifies behind Solomon, as the last bits of White Chain's synth rain to the ground all around it. It's White Chain, but, um. Something has happened. Something that neither I nor any of the characters in the comic are able to make sense of.
Not even White Chain herself has any idea what just happened, going by her reaction to seeing her new self.
Angels have abandoned the angelic philosophy and come to self-determine and self-identify before. They didn't turn human. There must be something that makes White Chain's case different from the others. No idea what, but something.
She can't actually be HUMAN human, though, right? You can't reverse the polarity of your soulfire and still retain aliveness. Within the metaphysical framework we've been given it might be theoretically possible for a devil to become human, or for an angel to become something like a servant, but not for a devil to turn servant or an angel to turn human. Right?
Granted, the rules for how angels work have gotten so hard to follow in this volume that maybe I shouldn't be sure of anything anymore.
Behind White Chain's fleshy new self, Solomon David is having an existential crisis of his own. Not because of what happened to White Chain, but because of how her soulform was semi-solid during the transformation, and continued existing for further and longer than Solomon expected anything to after the avatar shattered. A half-flesh-half-soulfire limb collided with his face, with just enough force to overwhelm his passive defences and break the skin.
Or...did it? I don't actually see any blood on his finger, but it's raining pretty hard at this point so it likely would have washed off. His expression suggests that he thinks he lost, so...I think blood was drawn?
Battle lost due to outside context problem. He knew how to deal with everything known to exist in the multiverse, but things have been static for so long that he'd stopped considering the possibility of encountering something new.
I still don't know why the new thing happened here and now, and not with any other rogue angels following their own freshly discovered paths through life. But then, Solomon kept inviting the weirdest outliers from all over the multiverse to throw their whackiest tricks at him, over and over and over again. So, if something like this would happen anywhere, I guess the Circle of Power tournament was a statistically probable place for it to do so.
Killy, Cio, and (surprisingly) Lamassu finally descend from their seats in the stadium and try to get onto the arena floor. Soldiers press in around them; it looks like things might get ugly. Solomon David turns around and starts stomping toward the prone, shivering White Chain, but then stops when he sees the audience. Or rather, hears the audience. He might have been thinking of surreptitiously healing his face and ending the fight before anyone noticed, but if so it's too late. Everyone saw, and everyone is clapping and cheering. Everyone.
Including someone specific, who has wriggled one of her manifestations up onto Solomon's VIP chair to look down at him like a queen at an especially pathetic serf.
Ashmadai takes the throne of Shlomo. The worm that carved the temple stones claims its due.
She breaks character for a moment. The entity that fought well enough in the multiversal war to claim a seventh of creation reminds Solomon that it wasn't always a clown, and could stop being one again any time it feels like it. Unlike Solomon himself, who will never, ever, ever be able to get himself offstage and out of motley.
Also, her wording suggests that he DIDN'T actually lose any blood there, but I'm still not sure. And frankly, even if he didn't bleed, White Chain gave him an obvious bruise. That definitely satisfies the spirit of the challenge, if not the letter. Hell, I'm not sure I'd have taken the "spilled blood" thing literally to begin with as opposed to a turn of phrase for "inflict bodily harm."
The choice of words at the end there, heh. I guess the author really was intentionally going off of Guy Debord in this arc.
...could Gog have had something to do with White Chain's transformation? I don't know how she could have, but then I also don't know what Gog-Agog actually is and what all she can do. She's clearly something fundamentally different from any of the other demiurgi, and the ability to manipulate flesh and bodies is a major cornerstone of her powerset. That doesn't feel right, though. Hmm.
For a long moment, Solomon is silent. Then, he whispers that perhaps, today, he has learned something new. Been a while since that happened. He doesn't look happy about it, though. As the cheering and clapping continues, Solomon - the picture of defeated misery - gives the people what he's forced himself to give them. Holding White Chain's fist up in congratulation while looking like he wants to kill himself.
Three dramatic questions remain for the final chapter of this volume to answer.
1. Does Gog-Agog have a greater and more nefarious scheme in mind, now that Solomon has been humiliated?
2. What happens to Killy and Zaid?
3. Is Solomon going to grant White Chain's wish and then spend some time in introspection before changing his entire approach to life, is he going to pull off the bandaid of his theater state and admit that his power is all just petty tyranny, or is he going to be a little bitch and try to wriggle through some kind of loophole?
Next time, we'll find out. And also finish King of Swords.
