BREAKER OF INFINITIES 2-46
Chapter: 2
“The king that holds the chains of the world must make his peace with them, link by link. They are heavier than any man, and they will not hesitate to break his bones.”
-Au Vam, Pankrator of the Yellow City
Kill Six Billion Demons
BREAKER OF INFINITIES
to call it cyclical would be, i feel, an understatement
God’s mill grinds slowly…
But it grinds, nonetheless.
What is a millstone but a wheel on it’s side?
When all of existence is crushed down to the finest of powder…
… then the stem may be applied…
… producing the most divine cup of espresso.
Try Gods’ Blend! Only the best blend of the best gods. Available at your inter-existential grocer for a limited time! Only once per cycle! Pre-order yours today!
And sieve it through the finest sieve?
Bluecho is perceptive.
A fine book. And a fine film, too.
Except for those millstones that wheels in normal wheel positions.
This isn’t cyclical. You see, jagganoth isn’t a pro gamer, he doesn’t know what’s happening. To jagganoth, it looks like Zoss is resetting time for no reason, watching his heirs fail, but he doesn’t realize that if he keeps picking heirs, then there must be a reason.
Zoss is attempting to find the actual heir, one worthy not just by might but also by morals, or some other criteria.
Zoss is trying every possible outcome in a branching path until he gets to the right one. The only thing cyclical here is the trial being run.
It may be similar to the Simurgh, if it kills a universe every time he tries a new route, but I can’t really argue for or against the morality of a man I know not the goals of. Compared to “freeing the wheel from it’s imperfect masters” an infinite number of tries might be reasonable sacrifices.
Jagganoth thinks he can free the wheel by destroying all, but if Zoss has time warp powers, what’s to stop him from hitting reset and Jagganoth would just never succeed.
If anything, jagganoth may be an intended feature, not even realizing he is playing in to Zoss and Metatron’s hands, if he is involate, why can’t he remember all the runs?
At least captain jack harkness can remember all his experiences.
The story is about Allison, so unless Abbadon plans on writing a million books identical to this but with different main characters, that means Allison is the closest Zoss has ever gotten. Zoss seems confident in her too.
Also, considering that Zoss has the same arm as we see in the foreshadow-page, Allison clearly goes through some shit.
We are close.
“You see, jagganoth isn’t a pro gamer,” is the single best thing I’ve read all week, thank you.
I aim to please.
Next, you’ll see Jagganoth do what’s called a pro-gamer move
Further observation regarding the arm: none of the other Heirs behind Zoss are missing arms or bearing the mechanical arm.
Which Simurgh is that? I don’t see the connection to either the original myth or to the only modern reference I know (Worm)…
I can’t help but focus on how Zoss said even he doesn’t know what Metaton wants.
I have to wonder if Allison is going to do what nobody did in previous cycles and just, y’know… go up to Metaton and have a conversation. She’s good at talking!
allison better ask for an extension on her minute to chat about this. That does explain how this cycle is also infinite.
It’s a DBZ minute, you see.
This minute could end any week now.
I love the idea that Himself is singularly responsible for anime style monologues being longer than they should be
Talking is a free action. Though Allison is cheating by taking other actions while he talks
This is a cutscene. Gameplay mechanics are temporarily suspended for narrative imperative.
Jagganoth. My man. My dude. PLEASE just take a break for once. Smoke some weed. Sit on a beach. Chill.
He should have a piece of bread and maybe he’ll calm down.
He needs a snicker
HE NEEDS SOME MILK
For real. “after I kill everyone, time gets reset, I can’t remember why.”
Bud. Maybe it’s the part where you kill everyone?
Yeah, clearly if he thinks he can free everyone by killing them, but has never once succeeded, then his logic is flawed, because if he has never lost, then he should have succeeded, but yet here we are, doing it again.
He is too dumb to realize he is the universe wiper at the end of the simulation. An intended part of Metatron and Zoss’s runs for universe freedom any%
Funny how he claims to understand the roles that everyone else plays in Metatron’s game, and yet doesn’t seem to consider that he himself might have been manipulated as well.
I think he realizes *exactly* that he is the universe wiper (dust man, in his words) at the end of the cycle. He says as much. He’s looking for ways to short circuit things, just… he’s a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
His plan to short circuit things this time was: intercept the heir before they achieve godhood. Take key. Kill Metatron, take his power, create a new universe outside the bounds of the one in which he is “universe wiper”. Delete self just to be sure.
All this fighting with the 7? Pure violence tourism. He wanted one more spar before taking on Metatron, just for funsies. He was even willing to skip it entirely if Allison handed over the key.
So if Jaggy never loses… and the Heir always wins…what does that tell you about the typical team setup in *this* battle?
Who better to purge the old regime than Jaggy? Up to a point, the Heir and the Omnicide are natural allies. And if you wanted to bring all creation down to a single decision point, would you not bring its mastery down to a ruler/creator/preserver, and a destroyer?
Every previous heir has been stabbed in the back. Perhaps Jaggy was a trusted ally at the side of the throne, having helped the Heir vanquish his other enemies. But, there can be only one… and ultimately, so far, it has always been Jag
That’s an interesting theory that resolves the contradiction some people are seeing. But I still think that with Jagganoth admitting that he has little memory of the previous cycles, he is far too confident in which events are normal, and which are the exception. He expects events to play out differently, while believing that they will play out exactly the same. He claims to have fought and won this battle before… and yet, could it really have been the same battle? Does he believe he has short circuited the cycle every time, or not?
It may explains why Incubus was shocked he had come too early in the cycle. Incubus role seems to be as the ultimate betrayer and conniver. Maybe he too is becoming more in tune to his role in metatrons metaplot. Perhaps Jadis’ mind breaking was what is meant when she can saw the wheel. She became broken my seeing this plot.
I think that cognitive dissonance hints at a few things.
First; jaggy is a deeply flawed character. Even knowing that his deigned role is Destroyer, his only way to rebel against that role is DESTROY HARDER, DESTROY SOONER. Yeah that’ll show ‘em!… likewise, his role as an inviolate constant is so tragically, deeply ingrained now that he can’t see when it might not apply, even as he desperately seeks a way to make it not apply.
We can take him at his word… his memory may be fuzzy, but the one thing *he* is absolutely sure of is his inevitable victory over the 7, and the heir. Not that he doesn’t say he always beats Metatron, or even that he can… but by Aesma’s tits, he wants to try.
You have never lost until now…
Indeed.
Tch. He has lost every time, else why is he still fighting the same battle?
Exactly. Never lost? More like never won.
I know you are just being picky, and that I am naively explaining the joke, but… I think he is referring to winning the battle against his demiurge peers and then, after he wins, Zoss takes his ball home and ends the game.
Everyone loses in the end, but he does win at some point.
Yeah the point is Jagganoth never loses any of his fights, but he never wins in his goal, since time wipe beats ultimate strength/invulnerability.
If he is involate through time, then he should remember all the runs, the fact he doesn’t means he is sucsceptible to the time warp like everyone else.
He maxed out str and ac, but has an int of 8, enough to occasionally sound smart, but never to finish thinking through his plans.
Enough to sound smart when reciting a long practiced self-aggrandizing speech justifying his lust for violence and expressing his rage.
/nitpick
I think it’s more like he has an INT of like, 12 and a CHA of 12 — enough to logically deduce shit and make grand speeches and whatever — but he’s got a WIS of 8, so he keeps missing the bigger picture and never actually figures out why.
Sooo.. Jagganoth’s role is to destroy everything so that it can be remade… and he wants to fight back against that system by destroying everything so that it can be remade?
Our impression is that he wants to destroy everything and make a perfect world, and that he is a bit miffed that Zoss keeps resetting everything right when he’s about to win.
Why Metatron is playing both sides (aiding both Zoss and Jagganoth) seems unclear.
I’m sticking to my theory from last page: he’s iterating the cycle hoping someone will eventually break out of it and kill him.
Whether that’s an heir who saves the world by refusing to take the throne, or Jagganoth waking to the cycle and destroying it all? I don’t think he cares.
It reminds me of something Juggernaut Star said once: “Order must come. Or death. It matters not to me.” In some sense, Metatron feels the same way.
I just re-read from the beginning of the chapter and realized… he does not, at any point, suggest that he wants to destroy everyone and everything.
– He tells Allison that “[she] can save many lives” by giving him her power.
– He tells her that once he destroys Metatron and “once there is no trace of corruption, [he] will reforge the wheel,” but.. we don’t necessarily know that “reforging” the wheel involves mass murder. The only ones he really shows a desire to purge are the “corrupt” ones/the ones perpetuating this system.
– He refers to Allison’s mind being shacked in the prison of “time itself,” but doesn’t exactly suggest that he’s interested in destroying time itself.
– He more or less says that Metatron has made him time’s janitor, destroying everything once the heir takes the throne and thus allowing everything to start over again.
– In this endless cycle, he has never failed to destroy everything and allow it to start over again. It’s become so routine that, even between incarnations, he’s started to become aware of how routine his existence is.
It stands to reason that Zoss is in a similiar state, aware that he’s ultimately a pawn and his “heir”/reincarnation is just going to remake the same reality that has always existed.
Perhaps Zoss’s real power move was foreseeing this moment specifically… And choosing Allison over Zaid knowing that, although it meant that he would not be reincarnated, she would grow into someone who would have the insight to actually listen to Jagganoth instead of seeing him as another big bad guy to be conquered.
The lives of everyone on the wheel could be spared if the heir suddenly, unexpectedly, actually *listens* to Jagganoth and decides to fight Metatron instead of writing Jagganoth off as just another big bad demiurge who needs to be (eventually, after everyone dies and time is reset) defeated.
His desire for omnicide is noted, I believe.
1. The mass-murder he commits on innocents. Both the stadium and the attacks that lit the city on fire.
2. He notes that he will destroy the corpse reality that exists currently, which presumably means destroying and remaking everything, hence omnicide.
You are right, but I still feel it is more complicated. Especially because of the “You can save many lives” comment.
Jagganoth presumably sees all of those deaths as irrelevant, but I’m not sure if it’s because he thinks that they’re a small price to pay or because he thinks they were ‘relieved of a burden’ or something.
“Destroying 7,777,777 universes as they exist right now is worth it if I can make 7,777,777 universes but without all this bullshit, ultimately saving countless lives from *gestures vaguely to the absolute state of things”
– Jagganoth, Probably.
Or the third option. By wielding the Names of God, you can do -anything-… including bring back the dead.
So a twisted ‘I’ll kill you now to spare you from the worst that is to come.” perhaps?
Makes sense. And of course it wouldn’t occur to him to try something else, like “not” fighting. Maybe find out what it is Zoss wants to accomplish by keeping the universe in one piece that he keeps trying to break.
Or he can’t break it.
He created the cage, and now he can’t unmake it.
“The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.”
-Jagganoth, then known as The Architect, speaking to Neo, the 6th heir of Zoss.
Jagg was probably the first failed heir, and Allison was the first girl chosen.
Honestly, I want Allison to fail, but also do something that breaks the cycle in the next go around. That would be more interesting than the standard “Our special snowflake hero wins” scenario. Or have her defeat Jagg but be bound to his role in the next cycle
We do have the oddity of Kill Six Billion Demons… none of those Heirs bear the missing arm of Zoss, as she does.
Yeah but I’m pretty sure that’s doomguy in the back, so we know killing seventeen billion demons (twice) has already been tried.
What if her aim becomes ‘break the cycle, and put the Three to rest’? Metatron, Zoss and Jaggy?
Copying my comment from the previous page:
Imagine you’re playing a video game. Metatron’s reset is like reloading an older save file. Jagganoth, on the other hand, wants to hack into the game and rewrite its code from the ground up.
Undertale + Hack’n’Slash ?
Undertale with nothing but the genocide run
Hey, he’s prescient, not smart
He’s very eloquent for someone who has no sense of strategy.
“Fuck you, I’m swole” is a decent enough strategy when you’re actually swole enough to take whatever the universe can throw at you.
When your existence is the embodiment of the concept of a hammer, I suppose, every problem looks like a nail..
Odin would agree.
Thor is the guy who hits all his problems with hammers.
Odin is a trickster god, as likely to shapeshift into a dragon as he is to seduce your daughter
Not having the speech bubbles around Jagganoth’s words in that first panel didn’t have to go as hard as it did
You know, by extension, that the prismatic oculus-bearing wings which emerge from the fissures in the face of the Scribe of God HAD to do it to ’em
I really want a version of the top panel without any text except Metatron saying “Heyyyy gurrrl!”
Wait if he won every time wouldn’t the cycle have ended? If his goal is to break the wheel wouldn’t he have lost all those times which lead to a new cycle starting ? Or is this because his goal hasn’t always been to stop the wheel or because he hasn’t always been one of the “corrupt lords”? Maybe I am focusing too much on the “never”.
I think the Heir always takes the opportunity to flee this battle when the others have Jagganoth contained. That’s the only way it lines up for the true Heir to sit on the throne while Jagganoth wins this fight.
Notice the order of events in the red god’s tale.
The heir takes the throne, THEN it ends by Jagganoth’s hand.
This time he has taken action before the heir has beaten the other demiurges. Remember the words of Incubus when he emerged: “What is the fool doing? It is too EARLY”.
Perhaps it is so. But if losing to Jagganoth was all there was to it, then Jagganoth would have a simple answer to why time was reversed — the Heir lost. Yet he doesn’t know. Zoss acts when the throne is taken, then Jagganoth cleans up.
The cycle doesn’t repeat because the heir loses, it repeats because the heir WINS. Gathers all the power. Claims the throne of Heaven. Then the wheel is ready to be spun back. Then the tale is OVER and ready to be told anew. Round and round it goes.
Yeah that’s how I’m reading this too, Jagganoth is living through an endless series of Hero’s Journey movies where Luke Skywalker gets the medal or Aragorn ascends to the throne of Gondor and then CUT TO CREDITS, FADE TO BLACK, wake up in the opening scenes of another Hero’s Journey movie where Zoss is about to find the Hero and give them his key, the Call to Adventure. I’m not sure what Jagganoth means by having to “clean up” but it really sounds like the same kind of metafiction as Cio’s fanfic here, like he’s literally describing experiencing a Game Over moment when the Hero ascends, he’s the final boss in a JRPG where you get to choose the features and weapons of the main character, Solas dealing with every variation of Llavellan but always being reset and played again by someone else with a different set of protagonist specs
Zoss steps in and remakes things before Jaggy has a chance, that’s why he wants the key from Allison.
Jag always wins the fight, but usually the fight is just universal clean-up duty for Metatron. This time he has decided to make his own fight.
I think him “winning” is destroying the whole world, which is what lets it start over.
So to stop all of this the heir needs to be an accidentally a female not a boy and also Jag should realise that he should lose to destroy their plans and his own role in al lof this. Simple.
The result is already different — Allison didn’t flee when she had the opportunity
Is Meti an anomaly? Seems odd for a triumphant demiurge to abdicate power and survive, but it would seem she is not if Incubus remembers. Time to go consult Jadis all knowing brick.
Except that may have been part of any of the previous Heirs, per Jaggy.
They had a LOT of courage, but few brains. They’d not have fled.
The question is if Allison takes the Throne. Which, at this point, doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, since it seems like she doesn’t WANT the Throne.
The previous did.
Why does Zoss look like 2 Michael? With those swords sticking out of his back?
Probably for the same reason Zoss does: He too has some memory of the past cycles.
We’ve seen that iconography on Zoss before – on King of Swords 10-141, while Zoss is talking to Allison. Seems likely to be a representation of his repeated failure to fix things. Or he just tends to get repeatedly stabbed during these cycles, could be either one.
Ten of Swords
Zoss and all those heirs have all been stabbed in the back. Is that significant in some way ?
So the question is, is there anything different this time? Is he saying he’s fought Ali multiple times or have the events at the start of the comic changed things? Zaid was supposed to bear the key, he was whisked by the thorn nights, Zoss counter moved by giving Allison the key. She breaks the cycle?
Yep. Suprise! Juggernaut Star fixed everything! I have no idea if it was on purpose.
It was an accident; he didn’t have his head, so he couldn’t see or hear what was going on or just whomst he was cranially impaling.
I have no idea if Juggernaut just wanted to hurt Zoss or Juggernaut wanted Zoss deaf and blind, and Zaid nowhere even close to him, so Zoss would have to choose Alison.
Seeker of Thrones 9-101. Zoss does not want her to seek the throne. It seems that Jagganoth does not understand as much as he believes he does.
Also, Zoss reacts to Allison talking about what power is… did he spend the next two books planning his “Strength Beyond Strength” speech?
Exactly what I was thinking. Also, worthy to note that in that scene Zoss mused about “this cycle”, which he thought might end differently. Oh. how naive we were back than to think he was just talking about three Conquests of Heaven…
Well, the heirs start coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming
Yeah, I have some sympathy now with ol’ Jaggy.
I’d be upset too if I had to clean that up. 😆
This is the power of Requiem.
And they hit the throne running
You’ve also never been thrown into the sun
Hoh, is that Zaid closest to Zoss?
aaah, to fight the chosen one over and over, too bad Allison wasn’t the chosen one.
Yeah, that looks suspiciously like Zaid, maybe he actually was chosen as an heir in the previous cycle
Or perhaps all previous cycles. If Zoss only retains vague memories of previous cycles like Jaggy does perhaps it has taken him this long to figure out he needs to choose someone else.
It seems like Zoss is perfectly cognizant, unlike Jagganoth, but perhaps that is just illusion.
Every other heir has one death, how many does Zoss have? Perhaps that’s how many cycles he has himself witnessed? The heirs are in lines, perhaps he bears a sword for each attempt in the line?
He is clearly branch universe speedrunning every possible outcome til he finds the right one.
Just taking his monologue for a little adventure.
That is the sound of the other shoe dropping, which we’ve been waiting years to hear.
Woah.
Beware the Shoe Goblin!
web.archive.org/web/20130518131418/http://www.beaverandsteve.com/index.php?comic=11
This guy sure loves the sound of his own voice.
Speaking must serve the Red God’s purposes, else he would remain silent. He has demonstrated self-control beyond the ken of even most other gods.
“A curious fact – the Institute of Fractal Archivists insisted to me today they had found a peculiar period of history prior to the Second Conquest that according to their ontoscopes does not exist. Nearly two centuries to which a huge host of historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies have been attributed – I am familiar with the period myself. They theorize that this is because the period only existed for some people; that is to say the flow of time itself, the turning of the great wheel, was tampered with.
It is, of course, a preposterous explanation, though so very convenient I am inclined to believe it.”
-Payapop Pritram, personal notes S.C. 2420
Hmm! That would make sense if we are to believe Metatron and Zoss’ reign over the Wheel has been uninterrupted – they’re not going all the way back to YISUN or the gods, just far enough to rerun the Universal War. And change it just enough to wind up with a new heir to try out, I guess?
“That is on the introduction of HIMSELF. Allison has yet to spare a thought for the poor Devil.
Never forget the great enemy, called I.
It could be that Zoss’ control of the wheel doesn’t allow him to turn it back to the time of Yisun but that his ability to do so only extends back to the point where Zoss became it’s master. Turning the wheel back to a time before you had control of it could be an impossibly: your hand wasn’t there to let you turn it.
Spin something hard enough, and your hand needn’t be present.
No, it takes an infinite amount of energy to go back that far, the longer he goes the more he can turn back, but never before he began.
It’s not even wak-fu, time travel wormholes only work from the time they were created, and then into the future. You can return to the moment of creation at any time, or any time after, but you can’t go before.
Yeah, this was what I was getting at.
As for just spinning it back really, really hard, assuming the wheel carries momentum backwards we can probably assume that there was a hand, at least figuratively, on the wheel before Zoss’ that would start pushing back.
My metaphysics isn’t exactly top tier, but I don’t think that argument holds up, or the metaphor you proposed around it.
Specifically, while Nox’s attempt to turn back time did fail for lack of energy, it also opened up, I am given to understand, portals in time that have allowed other characters to travel to the distant past, well before Nox’s ill fate time-trip (something which always struck me as particularly tragic). And that’s ignoring Yugo’s Dofus-punching Ogrest so hard he created a whole race of temporally displaced Eliatropes that retroactively existed millenia before the event.
As to the physics you brought up, I don’t believe that’s how wormholes are theorized to work. However, I can’t see a way of making that argument that doesn’t boil down to quoting competing theories about something which is currently essentially conjecture, so I’ll simply say I don’t think that’s correct.
First of all, completely fair, since I haven’t watched wak-fu myself, so I don’t know anything other than the time travel was futile,
Second of all, physics is the one area I’m probably equipped to speak about, and yes, wormholes do work like that.
There is a weird quirk with wormholes where you can move one end near the speed of light, or near a black hole, and then the ends exist at different times, therefore going in one side sends you to a different time. They just are essentially one way, and can’t go back further back than their creation.
We’ve actually been able to do the math on that since Einstein first did relativity and black hole and einstein-rosen bridge math. It’s just.. silly to actually attempt.
It’s far easier to make exotic matter and build a warp drive out of super dense elements and warp space til you’re effectively flying faster than light, and that’s saying something, considering when the math for THAT was first done in the 90s, it required the entire mass-energy of Jupiter.
Nowadays the math can make warp drive happen for only the mass-energy of a challenger rocket. You know, at e=mc^2 conversion rates.
So you’re saying that Zoss is Flowey?
Oh, at last. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one to remember that.
Nine swords sticking in Zoss’s back. The Nine of Swords is also known as The Lord of Cruelty.
A tree on Zoss’s girdle. Nine nights Odin spent hanging from the branches of Yggdrasil, a sacrifice to himself.
Interesting overlaps.
Everything always leads back to Odin, always
The Red God speaks truth, repent sinners! Lay down your arms and bare your necks, so that the Red God can finish his holy work and finally free us from this temporal prison.
every world has their tartaria
“The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.”
-Jagganoth, then known as The Architect, speaking to Neo, the 6th heir of Zoss.
Jagg was probably the first failed heir, and Allison was the first girl chosen.
Honestly, I want Allison to fail, but also do something that breaks the cycle in the next go around. That would be more interesting than the standard “Our special snowflake hero wins” scenario. Or have her defeat Jagg but be bound to his role in the next cycle
So this is why Allison will win by talking to both sides and making them understand each other, instead of senseless fighting.
If so, this will be the most glorious finale I’ve seen since the philosophical victory of Planescape:Torment.
YS ATUN VRAMA PRESH. It is said “The conquering king must speak with both his internal tongue of self-love, and his external tongue of violence: he must proclaim himself a king not with a tongue of flesh, but an iron tongue soaked in the blood of his lovers.”
Possesses of 55 Hamsters is observant
Maybe this is what breaks the witch out of the glass – perhaps changing the ending changes the shape of the universe, freeing Jadis from omniscience.
After this, I would like to hear what Jadis has to say.