Kill Six Billion Demons IV: King of Swords (part six)

Alright, I let my main project get away from me for a little too long. Last time, we took a little break from Team Killy to see the demiurgi being insane at each other in the ruins of their old capital building for a while. The gist of it is that Solomon David is determined to smooth over this recent spat between Mammon and Mottom for fear of losing their unified-ish front against Jagganath, but they're only very grudgingly considering de-escalation, and Incubus (and possibly Gog-Agog as well) is playing saboteur. Narnia lady is the only one behaving herself, and that's at least mostly because she can barely talk.

Meanwhile, Killy and White Chain had a minor falling out over the latter's continued participation in Throne's hideously decayed criminal justice system. Also, a long-dormant Concordant Knight avatar was quietly reanimated, and is creeping after them; I suspect it may have been taken over by a Thorn Knight spy, but that's just a guess.

So, let's see what's up next.


Well, we're not getting back to Killy and Friends just yet. First, we have a scene with Mathangi. Well, young!Mathangi. It's another flashback to her training from ascetic hobo-swordsage and possible former demiurge Meti. This looks to be a few years after the first of these flashbacks we saw, as Mathangi looks like she's in her mid teens or so now. Meti, still living in that same empty barrel in an alley, hasn't changed at all.

And, it looks like Mathangi was a much more difficult student than I expected, at least to start.

Damn, it's been FOURTEEN years. Mathangi is in her twenties now, not her teens. Talk about a late bloomer, seriously.

Like I said, "shave your head with this rusty old sword" is actually a pretty good entrance exam if you think about it. You need to show that you have the patience to clean and sharpen that sword before you learn to do anything cool or impressive with it. You need to show your willingness to sacrifice something and thus prove that you're serious about this. Mathangi's failure to wrap her mind around this after more than a decade - even accounting for her being a child for part of that time - is kind of embarrassing. She probably looks back on this as one of her most shameful mistakes.

We get a narration now, from the perspective of Future Mathangi. As I inferred, she's not exactly proud of how her younger self behaved back then, or of how she used to see the world in general for that matter. She felt like after she and her family fed this ill-tempered hobo for over a decade, said hobo owed Mathangi sword lessons. How dare she deny her, at that point?

Mathangi was just about ready to give up and go enlist in the army of Au Vam, the demiurge who ruled her world (or at least, her region of that world) at the time. Au Vam is a name we've heard before a few times, in the supplemental texts. Usually providing some words of wisdom about leadership, including a few tidbits that I pointed out in earlier reviews as being slightly reworded points from the Evil Overlord List. Here, he's referred to as "the King of Kings," and the leader of the multiverse's most impressive army.

Mathangi's narration also points out that this was right at the beginning of the Multiversal War. Notably, Au Vam is not one of the Black Seven, and there doesn't even seem to be anything named after him left standing in modern times. I love how this little Ozymandian tale tells itself just through inference. Au Vam was probably one of the ascendant demiurgi at the war's start, and thought he had this in the bag when the conflict started. Really makes you rethink how valuable any of his advice actually is.

Also, Mathangi is way older than I suspected. If she was born slightly before the outbreak of the war, then she's...well, the timeline still isn't clear, as is the question of whether time flows at the same rate in each of the satellite universes, but she's still got to be two to three thousand years old at the very, very least. How old was Meti herself, at this point, I wonder?

As Future Mathangi admonishes her younger self's foolishness and entitlement, the camera centers on a starving, filth-covered street urchin watching her and Meti's conversation from behind a nearby pillar. A platinum-haired, magenta-eyed street urchin.

Huh.

Is that who it looks like it is?

If so, then I guess I was firing in the exact wrong direction when I mused if he was born into a priveleged position that colored his view of the world, earlier. Granted, that was only one of several hypotheses I threw out, but still, I'm amused at how perfectly wrong this particular one was.

Young!Mathangi looks up and sees the urchin boy who may or may not be Babby Incubus. Meti tells her to ignore "it," its just a little pest who's been poking around here every day for the last little while. It probably thinks Meti will feed it some of the hard-earned food she gets by sitting in a barrel all day and not doing anything for anyone. There wouldn't be any point in trying to help it anyway, without parents it'll be dead in a month no matter what, so why waste food on it.

Okay, Meti is baiting her. That's totally bait.

Mathangi falls for it. She grabs the bowl of pasta she just placed down in front of Meti, and gives it to the urchin without looking back at Meti for so much as a moment. Hmm. Not sure if she passed the test here, or failed it. Like, Meti might be about to point out that Mathangi could have helped this child at any point prior, but only started doing it now to spite Meti (who she in turn was only ever feeding in the hope of getting something for it). In any case though, the child surprises everyone by waiting for Meti to bend down with her hands occupied by the bowl to grab her sword off her belt and run away with it.

Not very FAR away, though. Just over to Meti. The kid kneels down before her and promptly starts chopping off his (I'm pretty sure it's a he, now) overgrown, filthy hair. He cuts his hands on the blade. Cuts his scalp, too, with his vigorous, clumsy movements with the sword too long and too heavy for him to properly maneuver. He doesn't care. In his mind, there's something he needs that Mathangi has, and that she's not even using. She has the privilege to be squeamish and prissy about Meti's demands. He doesn't.

The fact that he doesn't bother to take any care not to hurt himself is sort of alarming, and probably defeats at least part of the purpose of the task. But still, he's at least shown himself to be far more dedicated to this prospect than Mathangi. And, while he may not be a better person than Mathangi, he at least hasn't shown himself to be a virtue-signaling hypocrite about it. Meti seems like the type who might care more about honesty than empathy, and in that sense he's Mathangi's superior by far.

There are two under-the-page texts in this sequence. The first is a summary of the fall of Au Vam's capital city, the metropolis spoken of in admiring terms in many previous quotes. Chaos, starvation, cannibalism. Perhaps this actually IS Au Vam's capital city that Mathangi was born and grew up in. War caused starvation and poverty, which led to more and more people ending up in Babby Incubus' situation.

The way Incubus sees it, then, is that everyone was eating each other, but he managed to make it out alive and on top. He even outcompeted Mathangi and outlived Meti. That's why HIS rage is uncommon. That's why HE deserves to rule. He could do it, and all the others couldn't. This is also why, the way he sees it, the war is never over until there's absolutely no one left who could even concievably challenge the victor; assuming otherwise was the mistake of Au Vam, and (I suspect) of Meti and Mathangi as well.

...holy fuck, he literally is Dio Brando. I jokingly compared them once in an earlier review, but it's no joke. Identical ethos. Near-identical backstory. Virtually identical fashion sense. Just a different method of blood-drinking and a different musical inspiration. Heh, damn.

Also, the other under the page text, this one for the page where we see Incubus actually shave and accidentally partially scalp himself:

“There is only one way to be a pure master of sword law. This is to allow your body to become absolutely soaked with death.

Death is always in the body at all times, but happier people are able to let it live only in their skin, or on the surface of their eyelids. They may easily wash it off from time to time and carry on with their lives.

When I tell my students to shave their heads, partly it is so they cannot rid themselves of death so easily. Those who do not bathe in death regularly will forget it is there, and that is a very stupid thing to do when swords are involved.”

The reference to "my students," making it sound like she takes them on as a matter of course, makes me think this is from a younger Meti, before she became a hobo. Or perhaps, an older Meti, after she becomes more sociable again. I'm thiiiiinking probably the first option, since she's calling herself "ten-someone" at the time, calling attention to her own student status. She was still practicing and teaching someone else's sword arts at the time, rather than her own inventions. She just kept some old traditions like the hair-cutting test.

Hmm. Way back in volume one, when we had our first excerpt from Meti's book, she said that her one student was a dumb girl who spends more time eating than training. That had to be Mathangi. There's no mention of Incubus. Maybe he already completed (or abandoned?) his training, by then? Hmm. Wonder what the timeline is, then.

...also, whatever the case is with Meti and Incubus' relationship at the time of Meti writing her sword manual, I seem to have been wrong about who Incubus' ex-wife that he usurped his throne from was. It wasn't Meti, it was Mathangi. Mathangi is the former demiurge, not Meti. Well, maybe Meti also is, but if so then that's irrelevant because she'd given up her Key long before she started training these two.

So, Incubus took Mathangi's Key(s). And she survived the process. Interesting. Wonder how that happened.

Anyway, Mathangi just became a much, much more important character.

We now move on to the present, where Future Mathangi (or...Present Mathangi, technically. You know what I mean) is telling the story to a young woman as the two of them pray at a shrine to...I think that's Aesma, but I'm not sure, could be a different surly-looking goddess. Said younger woman seems to want Mathangi to train her, and Mathangi is turning her down much as Meti initially did to herself, albeit much more articulately. Mathangi says that that was how the great Swordsage Meti took her first apprentice, just before Mathangi herself become her second.

When pressed further on the subject, Mathangi says that her hatred of her fellow student and former lover is boundless, beyond words. She can only pray for God's forgiveness for nurturing such poisonous hate, however, because actually taking revenge upon Incubus is impossible. He is one of the Black Seven, after all. So no, to answer the young woman's question, Mathangi isn't chasing Killy so she can recover that Key and use it to get revenge. She doesn't share her actual motives here.

She also sheds a bit more light on why herself and Incubus are no longer on speaking terms:

If Meti did teach other students, as that one quote from her insinuates, then it was indeed when she was much younger and teaching more rudimentary sword arts. She did not have any others after Mathangi and Incubus.

Earlier on, Meti made a cynical little mention of how she'd want dogs to eat her body after she died, whenever that might be, because that way it would be of use to someone. I guess Incubus was at least considerate enough to do that much for her, after the whole murder thing.

Hmm. That red gem Mathangi has set in her forehead is there to fill the empty socket left by her old Key, I'm guessing. Or else she secretly still has one and painted it red so no one would suspect.

Mathangi completes her prayer, and then continues her story as she leads the young woman away from the shrine again. The war, she explains, was just starting to heat up when she and Incubus began training under Meti. Meti would take them to see battlefields, in their first couple of years under her. Presumably using some whacky sword magic to cut their way between dimensions to get to said battles-in-progress. This was the first time that Mathangi and Incubus had ever seen demiurgi in person. They'd heard about these gods of mankind, uniters of the multiverse, conquerors of angel and devil. They'd been told all the stories, grown up in a culture totally suffused with tales and assumptions, about their wisdom, their virtue, their dignity and otherworldliness. Now, seeing them take to the battlefield, slaying each other's normie human troops by the thousand with nary a thought and going apeshit on each other in prolonged, bloody duels surrounded in even more collateral damage, Mathangi realized it was all propaganda.

Her entire civilization was built on a lie. A lie that she'd been about to go enlist, fight, and die for.

Meti explains that this is the power that her students seek. This is the practice of violence, using a sword or any other tool. Really, when it's being used for this purpose, the tool barely matters when it comes to the philosophy and ethics of the situation. That's why Meti wanted them to see demiurgi, specifically, fighting a magic duel.

When you use something as a weapon, it is reduced to weaponhood.

Looking at the panel above, you can really glean a lot from their expressions. Meti is grim, fatalistic, as she explains the evil she has mastered and that they wish her to share with them. Mathangi is disturbed, anxious, looking like she might be starting to have second thoughts. Incubus, meanwhile, is bored. Now that he's seen the spectacle, he doesn't get why they still need to be watching this. Everything Meti is saying here is just obvious, common sense, after all. What, are there actually people who didn't already know this? Why is she treating her students like they're stupid?

After they watched the fighting for a while, Meti took them to a quieter place and placed a rat on the ground between the three of them. "Here," she said, holding the rodent by the tail to keep it from escaping, "is the essence of sword law. Kill this rat." It was a cute rat. Small, white, and with an inquisitive, intelligent look to its tiny face as it looked up at them.

Mathangi was hesitant to kill the rat for no reason. If violence is such an ugly thing, after all, then surely it must be saved for situations in which it is strictly necessary. That's the whole point of what Meti just showed them, isn't it? It's why she was so reluctant to share the knowledge of how to kill in the first place, no? Mathangi hesitated, trying to decide if she could bring herself to kill the innocent, helpless animal, and if she should. During that moment of hesitation, Incubus chopped it in half.

Meti then asked her students who the victor and who the loser were in this battle. Mathangi, feeling very proud of herself, declares that Incubus is the loser, because he killed wastefully and without thinking, reducing his sword and his self to vulgar weapon status. Meti replies that yeah, sure, Incubus suffered a moral defeat or whatever she guesses, whatever. What's much more important, though, is the fact that Incubus wanted to kill the rat, and Mathangi wanted the rat to not be killed. The rat is now dead. So, who is the victor, and who is the loser?

Mathangi was almost right in what lesson she was supposed to take away from watching the demiurgi. Yes, violence is ugly. Yes, its practice demeans its practitioner as well as damaging the environment and destroying other lives. Despite all that, there's a very, very good reason to learn how to do it.

...

Would it have been worth it, killing her classmate to save the life of a rat? Well, probably not. And obviously, protecting the rat probably wouldn't require his death. However, stopping Incubus would have required blocking him, parrying his sword, knocking him aside, or something similar. If she had done that, there would have been a nonzero chance of him striking back, escalating the violence to deadly levels after she opened the hostilities. If she wanted to save the rat, she needed to be ready for that possibility as well; she might have to kill him even if she doesn't want to, as a consequence of having saved the rat.

Should she have done that? Again, probably not. The problem is that what she did here wasn't a calculated decision to minimize the risk of her having to fight Incubus for realsies. It was hesitation. Squeamishness. Inaction, rather than an intentional decision to not act.

Incubus had the will to power. Mathangi did not. When people LIKE Incubus are the only ones with that will to power, well, Meti already showed them the battlefield. That is the nature, and the importance, of the willingness to enact violence.

...

Mathangi didn't realize until long after the fact that, in truth, Meti had only ever intended to take on one student; her. She knew, from whatever interactions that they'd had in the slum, what kind of person Incubus was. She took him on to be a warning for Mathangi; an object lesson in what evil is and how and why it must be fought. Mathangi just didn't realize this until way, way too late.

Hmm. Well. Meti might have been the greatest swordfighter to ever live and an exalted philosopher of Yisun and all, but she was also kind of an idiot. More than kind of, honestly.

And also sort of a really bad person, come to think of it. Like, what, was Incubus just inherently evil for some inexplicable reason and fated to be a murderous monster no matter his circumstances? I have trouble believing that. Even if he was a born psychopath, most psychopaths go their whole lives without committing a single murder. She put a sword in this starving, desperate kid's hand and told him to kill a rat. What the hell did she think he was going to do? Hell, Incubus wouldn't need to have any sort of character deficiency at all to act as he did in the scenes we've seen of him and Meti so far; just the fact that Mathangi has a home and family to go back to while Incubus has only loneliness and starvation virtually dictates that she can risk defying Meti's orders and he cannot. She turned him into the thing she took him for.

Well, it sounds like she eventually reaped what she sewed. It's just too bad so many other people had to get caught in the blast radius.

Returning to the present, Mathangi's audience considers her words, and asks her some stupid questions. Meanwhile, the two of them walk back to where Time Baby, Encyclopedia Kickassicka, and all the other surviving murderhobos are camped out. I guess they're not chasing Killy anymore, then? It's not like she's made herself hard to find or anything, you know. Anyway, since there's a bunch of reasonably powerful adventurer types camped out here, a crier from the Celestial Empire has come to advertise the upcoming tournament.

Holy shit, is Killy going to have to duel every single one of these chucklefucks in the arena? I honestly can't tell if I would love or hate to read through a solid arc of that.

Time, Mathangi meanwhile explains, doesn't pass any faster for a near-immortal like herself than it does for a normal human. To hold onto a grudge for multiple thousands of years could make sense, potentially, if revenge were actually theoretically attainable. If your enemy can't be revenged against, though, the only sensible things to do would be to either get over it and forget about revenge, or challenge them to a duel ASAP so they can kill you and let you go out with some honor if nothing else.

People don't make sense, though. That's one principle that Meti did successfully teach Mathangi, even if it wasn't one she intended to teach.

In the end, Meti herself was no different from Au Vam and the other demiurgi of his era. So confident in her ways. So self-assured in how and why she did things. Mathangi went from believing in them to believing in her, and watched them all choke on their arrogance and die.

Is she making the same mistake a third time, keeping herself alive for millennia out of faith in the prophecy of the Rising King? She doesn't know. But whether or not it makes sense for her to do it, or to be doing it out of sheer spite for Incubus, it is what she's doing. Maybe she's just as arrogant and stubborn as Meti after all, herself. Maybe she's doing as much damage. Maybe, in the end, it really is better to just never pick up the sword at all, no matter how cute the rodents in peril are. But she's still doing it.


Meaty chapter. Finally gives us some real insight into Mathangi's character, as well as dropping the bombshell that she, rather than Meti, is the ex-demiurge who lost her empire to Incubus. I wonder how she's been extending her life. Unlike Incubus, she doesn't have a silo full of fresh blood to recharge herself with. Well, as far as we know at least. Maybe she has a secret one.

It also gives us our first real insight into who Incubus really is, and the picture being painted is a bit more sympathetic than I would have expected. The demiurgic party line he gave Killy in the previous book about some people being inherently more important than others wasn't privilege talking, it was survivorship bias. Everyone and everything around him died, crumbled, or fractured, but he (at least in his own mind) didn't. That means he was special. It means he was the best. It couldn't have just been random chance and luck, could it have? No one ever treated him as anything more than an object to be used, and thus it never so much as occurred to him that he should treat anyone else any differently. He might have been fucked in the head to begin with, but it was the world around him that turned him from whatever he was to start with into what he is now.

That, in turn, puts Mathangi's own obsession into perspective. Incubus needs to die, obviously. Like the other Black Kings, he's too destructive to tolerate, and too far-gone and set in his ways to be changed at this point. But, to a greater degree than most of the others, I don't think he's someone you can really hold a grudge against. There's just not enough of a person left in there to merit those kinds of feelings.

Very sombre, pessimistic, and misanthropic interlude. It's one of the best sequences of the comic thus far, but I hope it's not foreshadowing how the main story will end.