Chainsaw Man #8-9: "Chainsaw vs. Bat" and "Rescue"

We now begin volume two of Chainsaw Man. Granted, the distinction between volumes doesn't really signify that much, in this case; they seem to have been divided the way they are based on length rather than story arc.

So, picking up from the cliffhanger we were last on. Denji just chainsawed up, healed himself, and retaliated against the bat devil, known locally as Batboy. Power has just been eaten, but I suspect she (and possibly the cat) is still alive in there. That's about it, I think. One thing I can't help but point out in the introductory page of the volume, though, is this little illustrated author's note:

Yeah, who would have guessed that an author who takes it for granted that "chainsaw" evokes enough fear from humanity at large to empower a mighty devil is a big Texas Chainsaw Massacre fan? Lol.

We pick up from Denji having leaped onto Batboy as he was taking off from the rooftop and cut off one of his wings mid-flight. Predictably, this causes them to fall. It looks like Batboy managed to get much further through the air before this happened than it initially looked, though. I thought he had just barely leaped off the roof before he lost the limb again, but he apparently made it far enough to get them over the city's leading edge. They fall onto a dilapidated building, smashing through the roof and hitting the ground with enough force to dislodge the grappling combatants from each other. There's a civilian on the ground floor who freezes up in shock when they hit the tiling; Denji roars at her to get the hell out of here before she gets herself eaten, which snaps her out of it and gets her fleeing the building.

Batboy is baffled by what he just saw. Why would this hostile devil be trying to protect a human, rather than trying to drink her blood before Batboy himself can?

...oh, huh. Batboy doesn't realize that the Chainsaw Devil is the same being as that foul-tasting human who had grabbed onto his foot a moment earlier. Damn, he really isn't smart.

So, unable to put two and two together, Batboy asks Denji why he just let that perfectly good human go to waste. What is he even trying to get out of this battle, if not the elimination of a rival hunter? Denji, as is customary by this point, is only too happy to answer his question.

He's probably starting to get tired of explaining himself, at this point.

The fight tumbles out onto the street, where Batboy - seeing that Denji wants to protect humans - grabs a moving car off the street and throws it at him with the driver still inside. Denji has a happy realization that he can withdraw his wrist-saws while staying in devil mode, enabling him to catch the car with his empty hands instead of slicing it apart.

Batboy, furious, asks him why the hell he would waste such impressive strength (especially for his size!) on protecting humans. Denji nonchalantly explains that he isn't going out of his way to save humans; he just does that when it's convenient. A point he illustrates by throwing the car right back into Batboy's face.

Dang. Dick move, Denji. I guess you can't really expect much better from him given his (lack of) socialization, but still, that's disappointing even from him. Especially after having a moment of empathy with Power. I guess there's a difference between people who actively do things to make him relate to them, and just background people in general. There's also the boobs; those may have effected his ability to empathize or do something superficially similar to empathizing. :P

Batboy turns out to be a lot hardier than I'd have expected from someone who just spent multiple days laying around maimed in an attic. Or his face is much easier to regenerate than his arms, for some bizarre reason. Anyway, he gets his face smashed in by the car, but then heals it back in a much uglier and more alien configuration. A configuration that comes with some surprising new abilities.

Frankly, I'm not sure why he didn't use this to begin with, because holy shit is it more effective than anything else he can do in combat.

That's one hell of a sonic blast. I'm guessing that the "bat devil" somehow bullshitted this out of some insane interpretation of a bat's sonar?

I really don't think bats are scary enough to justify this amount of power. Are there really that many people who disagree with me, for Batboy to be so empowered?

With Denji vanished under the rubble, Batboy assumes that his sonic blast did the trick, and starts looking for people to regenerate his new wounds with. There are quite a few bodies in the rubble, living or otherwise, so he has plenty to work with. As Batboy limps toward an injured old man though, we see Denji's hand pulling the chainsaw-string on his chest, charging himself back up again. Right, I forgot he had to physically pull the string to enter chainsaw mode. That explains why he couldn't quickly use it against Power earlier. I'll remember this going forward, as it's a pretty big limiter on Denji's capabilities. Anyway, Denji rises from the rubble, broken limbs snapping back into place before Batboy's eyes, and hurls himself back at the devil with all three chainsaws thrumming. This time, Batboy is groundbound, one-armed, and flat footed. However good his healing factor is, he's really short on blood now, and there's just no outpacing the kind of damage Denji can do against such a soft target.


That chapter ended up being short. Lots of action panels that didn't have much for me to comment on or summarize. I'll do another. Chapter 9 is called "Rescue."


This one starts with another flashback of Power's happiest days, when she lived naked in the woods, alone with her kitty. All the other animals (and possibly people? Not shown, but possibly implied) she killed and drank the blood of, while taking care of Meowy. Telling herself that she was just fattening the cat up for food, when clearly she wasn't.

After Batboy took the cat hostage, and Power ran toward the city to find a human quickly, she asked herself why she was doing this. In her own words, "all lives are equally trivial." The cat shouldn't have mattered more than the bear she killed this morning, or the cow she killed before it, or the bird she killed before that. And yet, she raced, frantically, to save it. She always loved blood as food, as well as the process of acquiring it for such purposes. But she hadn't realized that maybe, just maybe, blood could sometimes be better left inside of the organism that produced it.

Literally "the blood I really thirsted for was friendship."

See what I mean about this being a self-aware adult doing a fascimile of high school writing? This shit is genius. The fact that it's able to actually work AS a character arc instead of just for irony value is honestly pretty impressive.

Cut back to the present, with Power - clutching the cage with a still alive Meowy in it - wriggling out of a pile of bat devil guts to find Denji sitting over her.

She surveys the environment, unable to believe she and the cat are both still alright. She looks up at Denji, her expression conveying something like earnest gratitude for the first time. Denji acknowledges this, but reminds her of the terms of their arrangement.

A stupid reason to go through with what he did. But then, it's not any more stupid than the one she went through what she did for. Pussy, cat, it's the same motivational legitimacy. She apologizes for her deception, and tells Denji to go ahead and touch all he wants.

Denji lets out a victory whoop, raising his fist in the air in triumph. Only for his forearm to be torn off just passed the elbow by a new, unpleasantly Freudian-looking, arrival.

This HR Giger sexual nightmare then pops Denji's severed hand in its mouth, and swallows it whole.

Denji uses his free hand to pull the string on his chest, but only his facial blade emerges, and even that only extends a few inches. Between the injuries he had to regenerate from the Batboy fight and now losing his hand, he's lost too much blood to power Pochita's full transformation. Oof.

The new attacker inches a little closer, and bemoans the loss of her boyfriend "Batty." She'd been looking for him for days, and only found him at the site of his final battle, mere minutes too late. Huh, so yeah, devils DO have affectionate relationships as a matter of course. Or at least, some of them do, and Batboy himself was one of the ones that do, hence him being able to make assumptions about Power and her cat.

Now Power is the one who seems weirdly clueless about her own kind. Heh, you know, come to think of it...alone in the woods, poorly socialized, ignorant about how broader society works, she's basically Denji's diabolical counterpart. Her acquisition of a human body could even be seen as analogous to Denji's fusion with a devil symbiont. Wonder how she ended up in such an analogous situation to his? I doubt devils have gambling debts, let alone inherited ones.

The genitalia devil correctly infers that Denji is the one who killed her boyfriend. However, on closer inspection, Denji has an incredibly cute face that she has trouble bringing herself to harm (notably, this "on closer inspection" assessment was made only after he partially activated his face-chainsaw ). So, she says she'll let him go as long as he lets her kill the others who played a role in Batboy's death; those others being Power and Meowy.

Power is paralyzed, either from injuries or some paralytic agent in Batboy's stomach. She tells Denji to grab Meowy and run, leaving her to pay for their escape with her life. Unspoken, but heavily implied, is her realization that it wouldn't be right to let Denji die for her manipulations and mistakes.

Genitalia Devil comes closer, looking at Denji impatiently. Denji ignores Power's pleas, spits in dick-devil's face, and charges. Even with just one saw partly active, and his regeneration so weak that some of his wounds are still bleeding and costing him even more power, Denji isn't taking this.

And that brings us to another combat cliffhanger, in a significantly more desperate situation than the previous.