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

As Killy pulls herself awake to the sight of flowers and the smell of Cio's cooking, Cio fills her in on what's happened since she bled unconscious. Their ship is currently hidden among some half-abandoned buildings in the narrow twilight band of Throne's frozen light system, near the outskirts. Mottom may or may not still be after them, but her mad attack on Mammon's seat of power has significantly downgraded their importance due to the other political fallout. They might have been the catalyst, but they're no longer the most immediate concern for at least most of the concerned parties.

Lucky Felicia ended up grabbing all the treasure they had aboard; the only one in good enough fighting shape to put up a fight by that point was White Chain, and she obviously doesn't care about gold (also, Felicia was being pretty merciful in not wanting to just kill all of them anyway to be quite honest). Cio isn't resentful, though, because the joke was ultimately on Felicia. With Yre cracked open like an eggshell and treasure spilling out in sufficient quantities to crush and bury the surrounding neighborhoods, gold and jewels have become worthless. Unless some of the objects they picked up turn out to be magical or historically valuable or the like, Felicia might as well be dragging around a load of pig iron.

I guess her luck wore out after all. Granted, she must have burned through a lot of it escaping the door. I feel for her; down an arm and nothing of value to show for it, probably. Eh, hopefully there will be a knick-knack or two in one of those bags that might be valuable even in this economic chaos.

...

Heh, you know, the sheer amount of gold in Yre makes me wonder if the Grand Dragon Bank has had a measurable effect on the elemental composition of the multiverse. Like, if a non-negligible percentage of creation's precious metals ended up concentrated in this one fractal vault in Throne.

Granted, this wouldn't apply to uncontacted worlds like Killy's, but to a lot of the multiverse it would.

...

As their skiff fled amid the collapse, losing itself among many of Mottom's other ships that decided to GTFO, they threw the bodies of the devils Oscar killed overboard. However, of those bodies, two of them apparently went missing from where they hit the ground sometime later whereas the others did not.

I have a feeling that this correlated to the popularity of the devils in question than any in-universe factor, but eh, I liked them too, so I'll take it.

Cat-Master's cat apparently just walked out of the collapsing fortress and then found their devil again proactively. Good kitty.​

I also loved Blueberry and Ricardio, to be fair, but if I had to choose who lived and who died I think I'd probably have leaned this way myself. If only because Charon's green devil physiology is likely to be the hardiest, and because if anyone is likely to wake up mid-descent so they can land on their feet it would be the guy named "Cat-Master."

Granted, this also means that those special anti-devil bullets that Oscar shelled out for aren't nearly as reliable as he thought. Which opens the possibility that Oscar himself might have survived. Granted, he fell right into the middle of the battle, so it's likely he got trampled/exploded in the crossfire even if the bullet and fall didn't do it, but still, it's possible. Cio herself seems to think he survived, just because he has a history of surviving things he shouldn't, but that's just her gut feeling.

Anyway, after Cio completes her summary, Killy rolls miserably around in bed and bemoans the failure of their mission. All that danger, all that pain, the entire dark road Cio ended up being pushed down, only for the princess to be in another castle. Cio gets understandably frustrated that Killy is still fixated on Zaid when, um, they just kicked off what might become an apocalyptic war.

Killy either takes the wrong emotional cues from Cio's reaction there, or she takes the exact right ones. To be fair to Killy, the fact that Cio seems to have adjusted her presentation for Maximum Gay since the last time she saw her does convey a bit of a message.

Killy tells Cio that she wasn't in her right mind at the time, that she's heterosexual, and that the two of them aren't even the same species. Honestly, while the third claim there is easy to just ignore (interspecies relationships are clearly a thing that exists in the culture surrounding them), the second one calls for some unpacking. Looking back at the comic up until now, pretty much everything about Killy has said "closeted lesbian." Her justification for wanting to have sex with Zaid when she clearly wasn't attracted to him never struck me as all that convincing. Nor do I have an easy time believing that a good looking sorority girl couldn't find someone she clicks with better, if it was really just personal compatibility that was the issue. Add the mostly-undefined self loathing that she suffers from, and yeah, no, Killy aint straight.

Killy says this can't work. Cio accuses her of leading her on (I'm really not sure where she's getting that, but given recent events I can get her feelings running wild at present). When the other party members barge in the door, Killy and Cio's spat seems to have sort of taken on an unconscious pull toward...well, you tell me what this means:

Nyave and Princess ask if the two of them would like some privacy, and have to be told repeatedly that they're misunderstanding. Lol no they aren't. Well, since Killy assures them that it's fine, really, they aren't interrupting anything, they come in and deliver some more exposition. It's been just shy of three days since the destruction of Yre. Killy's wounds have been healing unusually fast (either a passive benefit of her becoming gradually better attuned to the Masterkey, or some residual healing magic that she managed to remember even after ditching Incubus), but she'll still need plenty more bedrest before she can be out and about. Just as well; they should lay low for a while anyway.

Also, Nyave has a little heart to heart with Killy. A long overdue one; this volume really hasn't had much Nyave in it. I demand more Nyave. Anyway, first impressions are giving way to more complete, less romantic, understanding.

White Chain coming in the door after the others, meanwhile, just thinks she should have been paying more attention. The word choice indicates that they all know about Incubus now, and...well, earlier in the volume I said that White Chain's insensitivity about human weaknesses caused her to miss the Incubus warning signs when she really shouldn't have. So, White Chain seems to realize her mistake now, and is being self aware about what caused the error.

Granted, she also thinks it was a mistake to let Killy and Cio go running off with a band of particularly backstab-happy devil gangsters, and that she shouldn't let her out of her sight again. Hmm. On one hand, I disagree. On the other, I...don't disagree at all. Really, I think a bit part of the issue here is that they shouldn't have courted Oscar. He might have been a quick and easy method of recruiting a skilled team, but he came with a hell of a lot of baggage. From the moment that it became clear that Oscar and White Chain couldn't share a room without trying to kill each other, it should have been clear that they needed to look elsewhere.

...you know, it only just occured to me while writing the above paragraph that Oscar and Incubus played the same role. Offering quick solutions that look like they can save Cio/Killy the trouble of having to actually improve themselves and broaden their horizons. I'm kind of ashamed it took me so long to see it; probably because Oscar's role in influencing Cio is sort of overshadowed by Succubus' unless you look carefully.

Well, White Chain comes in, is her pompous self for a little while, and also shows off her new look.

Has she modified her avatar to have more feminine features? I know its lips were always sort of thick like that, but I feel like it used to be much more androgenous aside from that. I'm not sure. What I am sure of, though, is that she's walking around without her upper helmet, letting her too-humanoid spirit form show part of itself. Most importantly, she's wearing the outfit that Nyave bought her, plus some matching jewelry.

Looks good on her, really.

The point she's leading up to with her speech, though, is that no matter how they feel about it, the multiversal status quo is crumbling. All-out interdimensional war might not happen just yet, but Mottom's destruction of the Grand Dragon Bank toppled the balance of power and caused widespread economic disruption. People who benefitted are going to flex on people who were weakened. Networks of alliances will be dragged in. The oligarchs are too selfish and too stubborn to step back from this brink. However, for now they have a little bit of time, and they should spend it preparing themselves and building strength. No more quick fixes or easy solutions, we're seeing this prophecy through to the end.

To that end, White Chain has decided to train Killy in the way of the Forty-Nine Empty Palms; the martial art that White Chain herself uses in battle. This martial art was designed by angels and for angels. It works on the assumption that your body is a hollow stone shell full of fire, and flesh and bone bodies just aren't compatible. However, after seeing and hearing about all the bullshit that Killy did with the Masterkey, either with or without Incubus' influence, White Chain thinks that she can do it. So, I guess the next volume will be about Killy learning angel kung-fu, among a presumable great many other things.

Killy acknowledges, remorsefully, that she should have asked for people to teach her the things she needed to learn from the outset. Magic lessons. Fighting lessons. Multiversal history lessons. Whatever, the list goes on. She's been operating up until now on the hollow assumption that she can just rescue Zaid and then put this all behind her, and that's just not how it's going to be.

...

At the end of the first volume, I commented that K6BD isn't doing the usual portal fantasy thing where the modern human just needs to do the quest and then they can go home. It looks like Killy herself didn't quite realize that, though. She'd still been thinking about this all in hero's journey terms, with her Earth as the overworld and everything else as the world of (traumatizing and unpleasant) adventure.

But no, this isn't a dream that can be woken up from. Her world is a Pacific island. Throne is age-of-sail Europe. It's real, and sooner or later it would have come for her universe all on its own.

...

On a semi-related note, Cio asks who Zaid is to Killy anyway. What their relationship actually is. Killy struggles to answer, and defaults to the same reasoning she's been giving all along.

...and also seems to realize she hasn't talked to her friends and family for who even knows how long now. Oof.

Well, okay, maybe it's time for a brief return to LA before she starts at White Chain's angel kung fu dojo.

...or...um...

...why can't Killy go home?

Planar travel between her homeworld and Throne was the first Masterkey trick she ever figured out. She did it at least twice, possibly three times, in the first volume of the comic. If she wants to go assure her family that she's alright, she can probably do that and then be back aboard the ship in the space of half an hour.

I'm not sure what the deal is here. I guess if the Black Kings have a way of tracking her plane shifting, then doing this might put her Earth in more immediate danger, but there hasn't been anything so far to imply they can do that. In fact, Mottom's failure to locate them immediately after Killy brought their ship from Mykos to Throne strongly suggests that they can't.

So yeah. Dunno. It's honestly kind of shitty for Killy to just let everyone think she's dead.

Anyway, the last panel in the screenshot above suggests that Killy is repeating Incubus' pseudo-healing spell, but that isn't actually the case. She's still all scratched up in the subsequent pages. Healing fast in a way that suggests she's speeding things up with magic as per Nyave's assessment, but no immediate fixes.

I think I'm going to like volume four. I've been saying for a while that Killy needs to put in some elbow grease and work for more powers instead of having them handed to her by luck, and it looks like the story itself is agreeing.

Jump ahead a bit to Killy, now able to stand, watching the eternal sunset with Cio. They awkwardly, haltingly start a conversation. Killy, after having rethought a lot of things, asks Cio if she wants to go on a date. Cio says she doesn't work like that, but in essense? Sure. They seal the deal with an erotic cigarette lighting.

White Chain will teach her to smash the enemy, and Cio will teach her to smash pussy. The training montage is going to be interesting.

Speaking of White Chain, turns out she was standing silently a few feet away for at least the last little bit of their conversation. She asks if they are commiserating. They reply that um, yeah, sure, that's what they were doing. White Chain says that this is a good idea, building camaraderie within the team like this, and so she will join them. Let's start with backstories!

I'm not sure if White Chain is actually that oblivious to non-angel social cues, or if she's trolling them.

This is also the first time that anyone has asked Killy about her own homeworld, that I can remember, and she seems pleasantly surprised to have people care.

...honestly, I feel like her world might get a lot more interesting to them the more she tells them about it. There's a lot of things that 21st century technology can do consistently and on large scale that only rare magically gifted individuals in most of the contacted multiverse can match. Granted, I suspect the *reason* that this is the case is because the Black Kings are actively suppressing any source of power that they can't control. So, White Chain and Cio might have seen (or at least heard of) other high tech worlds in the past, and thus might not be terribly impressed.

...that said, now that the subject has been raised I do think spreading that technology around the wheel while the Black Kings are distracted with each other might be a good idea. If they're suppressing technology, then that means they consider it at least potentially threatening to their reign.

Well, that's a possible future consideration. For now, Killy just tells them about LA.

White Chain doesn't read a room very well, but she definitely knows how to read a city. LA is kinda cursed, yeah.​

Looks like Killy will be taking a turn in the kitchenette now that Cio's done hers. If they can get their hands on some coffee beans she'll really be able to wow them.

The mention of her family makes me think she's going to plane shift back home to let them know she's alive shortly. Maybe as soon as she's not held together by bandages and braces.


That's the end of book three. My analysis for this one is going to be longer than the previous volume's (both for good and for ill, I have a lot to say about this one), so I'm not sure when I'll have it posted. In any case, I'm going to have to push the beginning of book four, King of Swords, back a little bit in the queue.

For now, that's "Seeker of Thrones.