Kill Six Billion Demons II: “Wielder of Names” (part six)

The sixth and final chapter of "Wielder of Names." The previous chapter ended with everything starting to fall apart for Mottom. Thanks to her dismissal of Killy as a mere patsy rather than an active user of the Masterkey, the twisted tree form of Hastet-Om has been destroyed, and with it Mottom's source of immortality. While she was distracted by that, two separate groups of infiltrators snuck into her flying palace and hid among the guests of her current ball. One of these groups consists of White Chain and Juggernaut Star, who are currently racing each other to meet up with Killy; White Chain to join her party on Michael's orders, Juggernaut Star to...I don't know, maybe he's just trying to motivate White Chain or something. The other group consists of a large number of mercenary misfits from Throne who are here to tear the key out of Killy's head.

On top of all that, Killy - while fleeing Mottom's soldiers - found herself face to face with another familiar character. The noodle-eating swordswoman from Jabba's Palace, who has now identified herself as Mathangi, an acolyte of the legendary swordmistress Meti. Fortunately, she seems to be on Killy's side, and has just saved her from those guards only to now be surrounded by the mercs.

And, this chapter kicks off with a demonstration that the bounty hunters, fortunately, still haven't gotten their heads around that whole "two dogs fighting over a bone and not noticing the vulture" thing.

I love how nonchalantly resigned the gray skinned swordswoman in the center left looks. "Yeah, sure, behead another of the guys I was traveling with, whatever, such is life." Mathangi, right in the middle, at least looks like she cares about this fight. Fortunate for Killy, that.

Although, it seems that Killy doesn't need *quite* as much protecting as one might think. She might not have totally gotten the hang of the Masterkey yet, but when caught in fight-or-flight moments of thoughtless action she can use it a little. When one particularly strange looking Bloodborne refugee comes at her (either picking up the target from amid the crowd, or just attacking whoever's closest and happening to guess right), she hits him with...something.

Yeah, that does not look like a portal-slice sort of attack. The Masterkey clearly has more features than just opening dimensional rifts. It remains to be seen if that's true of all the keys, or just the one key to rule them all.

Unfortunately, being impressed with herself for what she just did has left Killy open for a Prometheus Maneuver coming in from behind.

Mottom's giantbone tea sets are the real victims of all this.

She just barely dodges the hurled 404 Polley, leaving him to return dejectedly to the hand of his master. Juggernaut Star has arrived on the scene, and is throwing his oversized vehicular projectiles from one of the bannisters overhead. White Chain runs into the room right behind him, which hopefully will be enough to dissuade him from going and killing the VIP in defiance of orders like That Guy in a D&D game.

Or else he missed on purpose, and he's still just messing with White Chain. Which is still puerile and irresponsible as all hell, but slightly less WTF than the alternative. That's two data points now in favor of angels not being anywhere near as innately lawful and stoic as the creation myths claim.

Juggernaut Star at least seems to pull back now that White Chain has arrived at the target. Either that, or he got distracted by a particularly sinful looking mercenary or janitor or something. White Chain leaps into the fray, trying to make her way toward Killy, but isn't even able to finish her pre-battle mantra before she gets buried under mercs who presumably mistake her for another competitor. They're...sort of right, I guess? Anyway, White Chain takes a nasty hit to the helmet, but not a disabling one, and soon she's beating and bashing her way to the Key-blasting objective.

The fight gets even more chaotic when the room lists dramatically to the side, throwing everyone against the wall. It looks like the Palace of Radiance is going down.

Some Mykosians are going to get very, very rich picking through the wreckage of that shit. Assuming it doesn't go up in a nuclear self destruct or something when it hits the ground.

Does this mean that Mottom is dead? Or in a coma, perhaps? Some sort of delayed sympathetic reaction to Hastet's final death? Or has she just portal'd off the ship and left it and everyone and everything aboard to die while she makes a frenzied search for another life-extension thingy? Could be any of the above, or something else entirely, but in any case the Palace of Radiance is about to become the Crater of Phat Lewt.

The answer comes just a page later.

Either she's in a dissociative fugue, or she's crashing the ship deliberately. That wide eyed, glowing-keyed stare could mean either. Assuming that she really does control the ship telepathically, which I've been given no reason to doubt.

As the ship rocks one way and then the other in its death spiral toward the Mykosian surface, White Chain frees herself from the mess of confused combatants and manages to find Killy's hand. She's confused to see her, as you might expect, and less than trusting considering the note they left off on. But right now, Killy really can't afford to be picky.

Behind them, Juggernaut Star has apparently not turned back after all now that White Chain is in place. Instead, he...is in the middle of the fight. Just slaughtering mercs. Seemingly just out of boredom. It doesn't even look like he's trying to cover their escape or anything.

How did this guy get trusted to carry out anything even approaching a sensitive mission?

Were Mike and Meta really just that desperate to get rid of him for a few precious hours?

As Killy and White Chain flee out onto the upper deck, Juggernaut Star ends up coming face to face with Mathangi, the weapons of other mercs breaking against his avatar's armored frame as he cleaves his way through them. She draws her sword, which...turns out to just be a broken hilt (either that, or she picked a broken sword up from one of his recent kills). However, she also pulls out a little tuning fork looking charm-thing and brandishes it with the same motion.

What's this? Another missing Key? No, doesn't look like it. Something *like* a Key, though. A demiurgic device of some kind.

Mathangi affixes the Cutting charm thing to the hilt of her broken sword, does *something* to activate it, and then surprises Juggernaut Star with an attack similar to the one Killy occasionally manages to use.

The portal beam cuts him right in half. Along with several pieces of furniture and much of the wall behind him.

The most surprising thing about this, for me, is that Juggernaut Star didn't seem to realize what she was doing until after she'd done it. JS doesn't seem like the type to not learn about weapons, especially ones that can one-shot a Thorn Knight synth. That means that whatever that weapon is, it's very rare and obscure. I suspect it's either an ancient artifact that Mathangi dug up somewhere and that Juggernaut Star thought no longer existed, or a new secret weapon invented by Meti's disciples using their cutting magic. In the latter case, the tuning fork shape would be a form-fits function convergence with the older demiurgic creations that work on the same principles.

Unfortunately, Mathangi realizes a second later that she wasn't the only one who brought a gun to a knife fight.

He rigged his synth with explosives.

Or...well, "he" did. According to the alt text of his introductory page, Juggernaut Star is actually in one of the wheels. So, either the humanoid thing with the built in self-destruct was remote controlled, or that was actually 69 Rolley who just took one for the team. What a champ you are, Rolley.

Anyway, I'm kind of ashamed I didn't expect this. If angels can hop into new avatars with little trouble, why wouldn't a long ranged raider faction like the Thorn Knights give them a self destruct? Prevents their equipment from being stolen, and has a good chance of taking the enemy with it. And possibly lets any given thorn knight act as a "suicide" bomber if the circumstances call for it. It makes enough sense that it should have been obvious to me, heh.

I doubt Mathangi is dead (the story hasn't done enough with her to justify all the buildup yet), but I wouldn't be surprised if that blast has her out of the action for a while. Well, she played her part in helping Killy get away from the initial pursuit and ambush, so mission accomplished even if it's a victory that may take months to heal. Meanwhile, White Chain and Killy flee onto the deck toward...um...somewhere? I'm not sure what their escape plan is, short of Killy diving off the edge and hoping she can plane shift back to earth again like last time. They're running to *somewhere* anyway, when suddenly the Palace rights itself and stops descending.

Uh oh. Looks like she was just stunned after all, but she's gotten over it now.

...wait, what happens when she's asleep? Does she not need to sleep?

Maybe she wasn't stunned so much as having suicidal ideation after the loss of her immortality tree, and just now decided to not give up after all?

Whatever was going on with Mottom and the Palace up until now, she's gotten it under control. And, a moment later, something starts tearing its way through the deck under Killy and White Chain's feet.

Shit. That looks like it could just as easily be Hastet as Nadia. Maybe Killy didn't nuke him quite hard enough after all?

On an irrelevant note, I wonder how many of the decorative plants in the background used to be people.

The good news is that it turns out to not be Hastet's root system tearing itself free of his burning hulk and seeking madly after one last drink of virgin blood. The bad news is that it is Nadia, and now that she's gotten over the shock she's piiiiiiiiiissed.

She doesn't have any words for Killy this time. The time, as well as the purpose, for those is past. However much she might have believed her own sob story casting herself as the helpless victim in the first place, she's not presenting that facade to herself or anyone else right now. Like the self-pity and affected helplessness was a cocoon gestating a whole different kind of monster.

White Chain throws herself at Mottom in a flurry of stone fists, but she must have known it was hopeless before she even tried it. Mottom splinters White Chain's avatar and sends its remains shooting out over the wasteland in a spray of debris with a single flick of her fork-wand. Ouch. Hopefully Michael is willing to give you another of those, White Chain. Mottom's next move is, owing to the squishier target, rather more gruesome.

I can't wait to see what stupid questions the sorority girls are going to ask about those marks. If Killy is wise, she'll just tell them she got them from Batman.

And, it turns out that Mottom's sob story was calculated and knowingly deceptive from beginning to end. As Killy writhes in agony, impaled by the vines through the bones of all four limbs, Mottom tells her that Killy WILL be her slave one way or another. She WILL become the new Mother Om while Nadia slips away and holds her reigns from the shadows. She WILL face the prophesied reckoning in Nadia's stead. Nadia WILL find another immortality method to replace Hastet's fruit. But before that, she's going to torture Killy like no one has ever been tortured, and leave her too broken to do anything but Nadia's bidding.

She tears the vines out of Killy's body, letting the blood escape her body in rivers from each puncture. And then...Cio appears!

That's awfully brave of you, Cio. A mere blue devil trying to stall a Black Queen? How strangely overconfident for a blue devil. Because Cio is definitely a blue and not a much more powerful color laying low.

Regardless of how powerful Cio actually is, and which tier of devil she really occupies at the moment, her first move against Mottom is very, very characteristic.

The paper is only going to restrain Nadia for a moment, but Cio only needed a moment to get Killy off the deck. It turns out that while Killy was in stasis waiting for Mottom to set up her pointless feast room and White Chain was infiltrating the palace with Juggernaut Star, Cio was hijacking a fucking spelljammer.

White Chain is in one piece? Huh? It really looked like Mottom smashed her avatar to rubble there. Maybe it just knocked a few pieces off the extremities, and I mistook the visual for the entire thing falling apart.

In addition to snatching White Chain out of the air, it looks like Cio went and got some of her devil friends to help crew the ship. And...holy shit, it's Nyave! How the heck did Cio manage to find and recruit her? Regardless, great to see you again, Nyave! I figured you'd be back at some point, but I didn't think it would be this soon.

They pull the critically wounded Killy onto their ship. However, there was really no way they could keep Mottom restrained long enough for a getaway. She levitates up over their ship, cackling about how surprisingly refreshing this is. Real combat, it's almost like back in the war! She's also aging before everyone's eyes, and quickly coming to resemble her rotting mummy self more than her young self. She conjures a storm around the ship, boxing it in.

But she doesn't strike. And Killy knows exactly why.

Mottom isn't confident that she can recover Killy from among her companions without killing her. Or, at least, she can't manage that kind of finesse in her current emotional state.

As Mottom hesitates, Cio urges Killy to plane shift away again, and bring the whole ship with her. That's something a Key should be able to do.

Action. Voluntary act of will.

It's kind of a wonder Mottom is as good at demiurgic magic as she is, given her personality. Well, on the other hand, it seems like at least 80% of that learned helplessness was bullshit, so I guess it's not such a wonder after all. Regardless, even if Mottom is only 20% passive and drifting, Killy is the kind of person who dives back into hell after just a few hours' rest to rescue a rando she doesn't care about. Her natural aptitude for this is immense, by virtue of who she is.

The better traits of Ys-Aesma, few and far between though they might be in the goddess herself, are concentrated and distilled in Killy. Zoss knew what he was doing when he chose his heir.

The ship vanishes. Blackness. When Killy awakens, she's in a sort of makeshift eldritch hospital room.

As she weakly sits up in bed, hissing in pain from her many punctures, the door opens and her rescuers come in. White Chain, Cio, that other devil she called over, and Nyave. They're still on the spelljammer, now in Throne airspace. Good thing Killy didn't accidentally warp the whole ship to Earth. That would have been awkward.

Killy seems to be in surprisingly good shape, given the extent and nature of her injuries. Thronite medicine is presumably much better than ours, thanks to healing magic and the like. That said, Killy isn't going to be walking for a while, and she isn't going to be fighting for significantly longer. Mottom REALLY fucked her up back there.

Of course, given the challenges yet ahead of her, attitude is as important a question as physical health. And, when Cio tells Killy not to take stupid personal risks like this again, Killy's answer speaks for itself.

End of book two.

So, that was the second volume of Kill Six Billion Demons. Analysis post will come sometime in the next couple of weeks.