Kill Six Billion Demons IV: “King of Swords” (part nine)

Begun, the tournament has! Gog-Agog makes the announcement, Solomon David lights the purple Olympic Torch equivalent, and the opening matches start. It looks like the Circle of Strength has many small arenas within it for many simultaneous duels, at least for the early rounds. I guess the audience members just have to choose which ones they feel like paying attention to, since I imagine only a small percentage of the audience members have enough sensory organs and mental processing power to track them all at once.

Killy's first opponent is an elderly man by the name of Eris Lo-Kai. I guess I'm supposed to recognize him from somewhere, since Killy does, but unfortunately I'm drawing a blank.

Who the hell is this guy? Was he part of that crowd of randos who spent the first three books chasing Killy around the multiverse? Maybe he was part of Pimpdemon or Jabba the Sphinx's respective lackey swarms? Well, wherever his first appearance was, he and Killy have already clashed once before and neither of them are thrilled to see the other again.

Killy decides to go for a high-aggression opening and hopefully end the match quickly, before Aris can do anything fancy. Unfortunately, it turns out that you really don't need a Key or Kings to think in portals, and he has a gadget that arguably does it better at least for certain close-quarters kinds of thoughts.

That portal-on-a-stick is one nifty magic item. I hope the main characters get one at some point.

While Killy is stunned from punching herself in the face, Eris produces a handful of needle-like darts and throws them at her, a couple of them striking home. These aren't just plain old sharp pokey things, either; they appear to be the same type of crystalline needles that Michael used to deactivate White Chain's armor, and that Himself has sticking out between the bars of his cage. We've already seen at least part of what these things can do, but now we finally get our belated explanation of what they are and how they work.

Considering their alleged sharpness, Killy is lucky that one didn't pierce all the way through her shoulder and come out the other side. More importantly though, vacus needles are made using an alloy of puresilver, the same exotic material that Oscar's anti-devil bullets were tipped with. Puresilver blocks the flow of "atum," which from context seems to be a word for the vital soul-fire of life, and the thing that Earth mystics know as "ki." Puresilver is extra effective against angels and devils, because their bodies run on pure magic with only minimal biological mechanism; hence, sticking an angel avatar full of these needles will disable it and force the angel to exit. Against a human, the effect is akin to local paralysis that persists a short time even after the obstruction is removed. Basically, its a ki-blocking dart.

Okay, I think that explains why some of the devil heist crew were able to survive Oscar's betrayal at the end of book 3. Puresilver bullets will only kill a devil if they get lodged inside the body. If the bullet passes through, the devil is just paralyzed for a little while. Presumably, Oscar would have double-tapped the bodies to make sure they were all dead if he hadn't been interrupted by Cio and Nyave. Makes sense. I just wish it was explained at the time.

Anyway, Killy has a little freakout as she realizes that if Gog-Agog really is rigging the matches in her favor, then that means Aris must be one of the weakest contenders in the entire tournament. If he's giving her this much trouble, then she's pretty much fucked. Even if she manages to beat him, there's no way in hell she'll last many more rounds if the opposition keeps ramping up from here.

...

Or maybe Gog-Agog is just shit at tactical analysis. Have you considered that possibility, Killy?

...

Killy changes tac, trying to keep her distance to facilitate dodging and using ranged energy attacks herself. Aris just jumps over her, closing the distance in a flash and paralyzing her other arm too. Gog-Agog's narration doesn't do Killy's concentration any favors either.

I wonder if Gog is starting to wonder if she made a mistake in backing Killy. There's definitely a hint of bitterness in her commentary here.

Killy berates herself for not listening to White Chain. For being so foolhardy and not remembering her training. Now she has no working arms and is facing an able bodied opponent who is currently drawing his sword and coming in for what looks like a death blow. She'll need to use her feet, but she can't think of even her most basic training right now.

Suddenly, she has a stupid but also kinda smart idea. Remembering White Chain's silly little mid-battle instruction session against Killboss, she jumps onto Aris' sword, forcing it down and breaking his charge. Balancing on one foot, she uses the other to kick him repeatedly in the head, much as White Chain did when correcting Killy's posture. She just barely manages to knock him out of the ring before landing on her face in the middle of the arena herself.

Gog-Agog describes this as "a really quick end to a really weird match." I think that's pretty spot-on, yeah. Elsewhere in the arena, White Chain has defeated her own opponent with efficiency, confidence, and restraint, using no more than the required amount of force and seemingly not taking any damage.

You know, it really seems like we should be seeing more angels in this tournament, doesn't it? They're consistently the best fighters in the wheel, short of demiurges and the like. There are different orders of them that follow different approaches to how to relate to the powers that be, and quite a few rogue fallen ones that just do random violent stuff in general. The risk of death is slim to nonexistent for them (at worst they'd lose their synths), so they'd have a lot to gain and not much to lose. It seems like they'd dominate at least in the early rounds of a tournament like this one, but I don't think we've seen a single one besides White Chain take part in the matches. Wonder what's up with that?

Anyway, as she lays half-paralyzed in the ring, Killy thinks of her last conversation with Cio, and realizes how selfish and insensitive she was being to Cio. This whole thing is starting to seem like a mistake. Then, she realizes that her helmet came off, and Solomon David has a direct line of sight to her from his VIP box; if he happens to notice the Key in her forehead, this might be all over in the worst way possible.

...did she really think that stupid helmet was going to stay on for all these high-powered arena battles? I don't think it even had a proper chinstrap to keep it in place lmao.

Well. Hopefully he didn't notice.

The fights continue. Seemingly with only short rests being allowed in between. It seems like this favors the people with the best endurance rather than the best raw fighting ability, but that might be part of the challenge. Hah, okay, Solomon had better give the winner a good long rest before having to do the final duel against him, or else no one would even be able to PRETEND to buy this as a good-faith offer of successorship. Nobody would even show up...or at least, if they did show up, they'd all be very open about being in it for the exposure rather than for any chance of actually getting a wish.

Killy and White Chain face several more opponents. We see Killy deal with a snakelike green devil that tries to constrict her and a big red devil who fights like Killboss with a greatclub. White Chain, meanwhile, is seen boredly defeating some goblin warrior-monk. By the first day's halftime break, Killy has been thoroughly dispirited, and no one besides Nyave is even willing to admit the possibility that continuing might not be a terrible idea.

I'm starting to wonder what Nyave hopes to accomplish here. Hero worship for Killy can't be the only thing, since we've already seen how tempered that has been by exposure to Killy's less successful exploits. Does she actually think Killy can win? I don't think that was her primary goal, going back to this arc's beginning. She seemed more like she just wanted to cause some disruption. What disruption, though?

Killy listens to Nyave and thinks desperately, but no solution comes to mind. White Chain reminds her that there's no shame in backing out now. They've lost nothing by participating, and Killy has gained the potential for further learning. Soon, the competition will start getting difficult even for a Concordant Knight like White Chain, and Gog-Agog's match-fixing (if she actually even is doing that) can only mitigate that so much. Princess doesn't have any encouraging words at this point; he was eager to see how Killy competed, but now he's seen it, and it's not as impressive a watch as he'd hoped.

Killy, however, isn't listening to any of them anymore. She's just staring at one of those mystery TV screens that started to exist all over the contacted multiverse in this book.

Well played, worm lady. You totally put this footage on the air just now because one of your hosts saw that Killy was considering giving up and also had a screen near her. TV taught me how to feel, now real life has no appeal.

Also, while she's not exactly being her best self in these last couple chapters, I do have to hand it to Killy for even being able to recognize Zaid at this point. He looks like a completely different person without his face dribbling down across the front of his shirt.

After staring at Zaid's miserable, but at least solid, face on the screen for a minute, Killy abruptly runs toward the balcony. Ignoring White Chain's pleas for her to calm down and think before acting for once, she leaps out the window and starts parkouring away across the rooftops of Celecity's waterfront. White Chain despairs at Killy's trajectory, but Nyave - as has become her way - calms White Chain down, with the following justification:

It takes a special kind of person to do what Killy did at the end of book one. That type of person, according to Nyave, has a certain type of baggage, and there's no separating the good from the bad with this type.

However, White Chain does have an answer to this. One that's sort of been hovering in the negative-space surrounding K6BD's themes all along. It's a conundrum that's inherited from the story's philosophical source material, in fact. Whenever Nietzche's ideas about the empowerment of people as individuals run into the overlap between the personal and the political, someone always ends up asking...

The ubermensch as an aspirational ideal sounds all well and good when you're looking at individuals, but zoom out to look at the whole society and you start running into issues.

Well, sort of. There are some strains of anarchism that get along pretty well with at least most of Nietzche's existentialism. To the point where he's been outright categorized as an anarchist philosopher. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that Nietzche's own thoughts about anarchism could be accurately summarized as "lol anarkiddies get rekt."

Frankly, Nietzche hated everyone. Regardless of how much or little they agreed with him. If anyone in the comic is directly representative of him, it would probably be Meti. All the way down to how misapplication of his ideas contributed to the rise of tyrants, and how his own misanthropy made that misapplication by some parties all but inevitable. But I digress.

...

Nietzche wrote extensively about politics and society, but his political views were frankly incoherent (it says something that fascists and anarcho-communists have both tried to appropriate Nietzche even though he wrote lengthy polemics screaming about how much he despised both of them), even before you try to square them with his ideas about personhood. The best answer I've been able to find about how to combine existentialism with living as part of a society is "don't." For all that he engaged in political rambling, Nietzche really wasn't a political thinker, and any practice of his ideas needs to be approached on individual rather than societal levels.

In Kill Six Billion Demons, the concept of "royalty" as characters like Zoss and 2 Michael approach it runs back into the problem of master and slave. A self-determining, self-guided ubermensch is supposed to be neither master nor slave. However, if you have nothing but self-determining, self-guided ubermenschen who refuse to ever bow or compromise, you can't organize effectively and end up with something along the lines of anarcho-primitivism at best. If you have some unfettered high-ability ubermenschen and some people who aren't ubermenschen (what Nietzche calls "the herd"), then you're just going to end up with functionally a leader class and a follower class, which will - not can, but WILL - quickly decay into nepotism, dynasticism, and cynical social control schemes, which are basically the things Nietzche hated the most. The wheel just keeps on turning.

The problem, of course, is in the unspoken synonym for royalty. Monarchy. Unfortunately, no one who's anyone in the setting seems able to get it through their heads that there's no such thing as a good king. Zoss tried. Metatron tried. Solomon David...well, I don't know if he ever actually made a good faith effort, but he at least thinks that he's making one, which in and of itself kind of shows the problem. Heroes are good for some things, but they're very bad for others.

If I'm right about Zoss basically running alternate timelines to test out worthy successors, I don't think he'll ever find one. Because, frankly, he wouldn't have passed the test himself. Neither would any of the gods of the Multiplicity, or the Prime Angels.

Only Yisun would. And that's because Yisun is the only person in the universe, so there's not really anyone for them to rule over, thus rendering the question meaningless.

...

Fortunately, after taking some time off to jump angrily from rooftop to rooftop, Killy cools down and returns to the balcony where White Chain and Nyave are having their philosophically challenging conversation. She wasn't going off to try and stupidly break into Solomon's palace to rescue Zaid, just venting a little. She could have explained that to them lol, but oh well.

She says she's been thinking more critically about their goals and limitations, and she thinks she has a better approach in mind now. One that takes White Chain's criticisms into account. The others might not like what she has planned, but she just wants them to hear her out.

Fastforward to late afternoon, with the resumption of today's phase of the tournament. The contestants all descend into the pit, and suddenly Solomon - rather than Gog-Agog speaks up to announce some changes. In fact, Gog is looking pretty cowed at present.

All spectators are to clear out of the Ring of Power right now. Sorry, people who travelled across the entire multiverse to watch this, you're shit outta luck. With some hand gestures, he splits the pit into a whacky terrain of raised and lowered surfaces, and announces that there will be no matches this evening. Just a battle royale. Everyone against everyone, for as long as Solomon says, ending with however many people are left over when he feels like calling it. There's no mention of how people can lose other than dying, since there are no longer rings to be knocked out of, so I guess he's also ensuring that this is going to be vastly more lethal than previous tournaments; hope nobody minds.

Gog-Agog sheepishly relays the details at Solomon's behest, and then editorializes that it sure would suck for anyone who might have been trying to rig the matches. Good thing nobody was doing that. It would suck for that person, if there was such a person, which there isn't.

I'm 50/50 on whether or not Solomon actually ruined Gog's plan here, or if she deliberately let him find out as part of some bigger scheme of her own. I don't think the two of them planned this together. One of them is outsmarting the other's outsmarting, I just don't know which.

Maybe we'll find out next time.