BREAKER OF INFINITIES 3-94 to 3-95
Chapter: 3
Feet of Clay
Kill Six Billion Demons
BREAKER OF INFINITIES
WARNING: The next few KSBD updates are super spoilery. If you're cool with that, scroll down. If not, click here for the first page of the comic
oh, shit. is this where we meet his deceased wife and daughters?
Honestly, he tanked that pretty well.
solomoncucks please reconsider
Diamond or clay, both are still just stones. And unlike gods, stones can be easily broken.
his face is priceless.
The pro-salami faction in the comments is scaring me.
Calm down. It’s just the author’s premise coming back to bite them.
Kind of like Warhammer 40K, which was originally a parody. But as it took a straight tone, it kept premises like the fact that a single unchecked psyker could destroy a planet, literal Chaos gods are constantly devouring worlds and destroying civilizations, and the only thing holding them back is a brutal theocratic cult and its barely-human god emperor. Everything about the latter is terrible, until you realize that every other option in that fiction is closed. If the author gives a dichotomy of “Hell swallows reality” and “brutal dictatorship”, you don’t have to believe in fascism to see why characters in that universe support the latter.
Abaddon (the ksbd author, not the 40k character) hasn’t shown another option from the perspective of the characters in his world, and I’m worried that it’s going to feel rushed if he does it it the time he’s allotted. Regardless, the ride was fun.
There is always the Real Politick Tau that will at least leave you most of your self rule as a client species.
The Tau that operate a rigid class system with mind control, forced sterilization, and are wholly vulnerable to aforementioned Chaos gods? They’re only alive thus far because their souls are too weak to attract much demonic attention.
False on pretty much all accounts. The Tau have studied the Empyrean, the Nicassar are a client race that flies their ships around accelerating them with their psyker minds instead of engines, and the planets full of humans haven’t just been consumed by daemon hordes. They *did* birth a Warp god based on their understanding of the Greater Good though…
‘Mind control’ is conjecture from the Admech, who eschew empiricism and Deathwatch autopsies of Ethereals didn’t find anything, and the sterilization was a lowering of fertility rates for humans in one planet so they would neither go extinct not outbreed everyone because during the latest war the humans fell to lynching the neighbors they had lived with for decades because an old man in a funny hat started ranting. Even then, that was just a bit of fluff in a video game.
Being ruled by people who don’t believe in chainswords? Some fates are even worse than death.
“Best possible” can still be “unconscionably bad”. “There is no possible better alternative” does not transform something awful into something good.
The anti pro-Salami faction in the comments is scaring me. So many of them seem so very self-righteous and zealous, so willing to write of the members of the ‘Pro-Salami’ faction as if they were some kind of uber-fascists.
Listen, Solomon’s reign? Less than ideal, but within the context of the comic’s world-… It’s the best that we have seen. Nobody, or at least very few, in the ‘Pro-Salami faction’ wants to actually live in something like Solomon’s Celestial Empire.
The members of the ‘Pro-Salami’ faction, as you put it, are perfectly capable of writing themselves as some kind of uber-fascists. There are a few people arguing that he was simply the best of the demi-urges, or that life under his rule would be preferable to that under any of the others, but there are also people flat-out arguing that he has done nothing wrong, and that authoritarianism is a perfectly good idea. Some people really do believe that might makes right.
The Beast has seven heads, not two.
what a grand and intoxicating innocence
his face is priceless.
his face is priceless waw.
So I’m noticing a trend of “Solomon David’s society is justified because there are actual threats that only he can protect against and therefore, because he has created a safe space that is better than the alternatives, his people have no right to criticize him.”
Now there’s two separate points to make on this.
The first is the obvious – SD’s society, his laws, his rules, even his armies, none of that has anything to do whatsoever with his ability to protect his people against another demiurge, as has been made absolutely and abundantly clear just now in fact. He could have ruled his people as an ineffable, never-seen presence meditating on a mountain for thousands of years without ever interfering with them and it would have made absolutely no difference whatsoever to his ability (or in this case, inability) to fight off another demiurge. So everything he did, all his laws, all his rules, all his order, none of it can be said to have been justified by the fact that he protected them against a rival god because ultimately it DIDN’T. And frankly, that doesn’t seem to be why he structured society the way he did, anyways.
The REASON he organized society the way he did seems to have been personal – he wanted to recreate his people, to protect them, to guide them, and to ensure that they fit his vision of what he thought society should be. He could do that – he’s a demiurge, and all of them do much the same with their own domains for different reasons and different purposes. And yes, in so doing he created a bright, shining, safe world that appears, on the outside, to have been a much more pleasant place to live than those of the other demiurges.
That brings us to the second point, though – WAS it a better place to live? We have the evidence of this very page to argue it wasn’t. Consider: This lady was jailed for twenty-five years. For drinking. Think about that, fully, for a moment – if she was fifteen when she was caught drinking by the law, she would have been forty by the time she left prison. Her entire adult life was reduced to a prison sentence, stripped away from friends, family, and society, and most of her working years taken from her because Solomon David thought she was drinking more than she should. Or rather, not Solomon David, but the impersonal laws he wrote decreeing how everyone’s life should be ordered.
Think about the implications of that. This is a world where social control is exercised to an incredible extent, all of it fitting the personal vision of what one man thinks society should be, and any transgression is punished by, functionally, ending their life. Drinking can hardly be the only sin so punished, nor is it likely that drinking is just the one thing Solomon David hates most in life. What other sentences await the unwary, the inattentive, those who just had a bad day? How many years will you be locked up for if you lost your family in an accident and screamed on the street in rage, grief, and frustration, thus “causing a public disturbance”? How heavily will you be fined for “swearing in public”? How much of a child’s life might be taken from them for playfighting with a friend? What punishment might an absent-minded or busy man face for jaywalking? Let’s not forget, either, those various misfits and outcasts who don’t slot neatly into society for whatever reason – what does Solomon David have in store for them? It’s a small scene, but we are seeing here the human effects of the society that Solomon David has only previously been hinted to have created – a world where every citizen is forced to walk the straight and narrow (as defined by Solomon David) lest they fall forever in the abyss, where the certainty of falling is ever-present. Perhaps as a whole his society is safer, but for the individual, it has every bit as much risk as any other, and with just as much chance of, functionally, losing your life, if not indeed a greater chance.
But this is merely the laws of Solomon at play, because all these laws suggest an even more unpleasant aspect to his society. After all, if one breaks a law and nobody reports it, has it actually happened? Yet in a world bounded on all sides by strict and rigid social control, suddenly each and every one of your neighbors holds great power over you. All it takes is one mistake in the eyes of someone who dislikes you, and your life is ended. But not only that, but it may well be that your fellow citizens will report you even without disliking you because there are laws punishing those who fail to make a report as well – and so every neighbor, every colleague, every friend, every family member, everyone you pass on the street, all of them hold a knife to your throat at any point, waiting for you to make a single wrong move, whether because they dislike you or because they fear the law, or even because they are deeply, intensely patriotic and care nothing for your personal circumstances.
Is this a good life? Would you feel safe in such a world? Can you enjoy your prosperity, if you have it? Even if you did, would everyone? Would most, even? Certainly, you may not fear raiders, nor thieves, nor robbers, nor cheats – but instead, each and every day, you walk about with the fear of the state hanging over your head. Is this really a society that lives in any less fear than those of Mottom, for instance? Or is this simply another manifestation of the same problem that plagues every demiurge – that raw power is limited in the benefits it can provide for society and for others?
So no, I can’t say that I’d agree that Solomon David provided a “necessary evil,” nor that the society he worked for was fundamentally so much better – its exterior is fancier, but the internal rot is not much less deeper, if at all.
I love the whole Salami cant fight off one demiurge, so he has given his people nothing. Jagganoth, he cant fight off Jagganoth, who was apparently as strong as the other six combined at their peak, and several of the other demiurges are no longer at their peak.
I’ll grant that Jagganoth is a bit of an outlier, but the crux of my argument as far as that goes isn’t Solomon David’s inability to fight off Jagganoth – it’s the fact that the entire empire and state apparatus he built up is IRRELEVANT in the face of a final clash of demiurges. The only thing that really matters in such a case is Solomon David himself, and Solomon David remains Solomon David whether or not he sits on a throne. He could fight off a demiurge equally well as a recluse living in a cave somewhere as he does as the high emperor of a vast realm, or indeed as an elected president. There’s no essential reason why he couldn’t have taken on the role of Superman instead of Paternum. As such, arguments over the necessity of his rule fall short – his rule wasn’t necessary to the defense of the realm, it was something he did because he wanted to, for reasons he thought were important. As such, it’s perfectly valid to judge his empire based on whether it is a good society, as opposed to saying “OK it’s terrible but it HAS to be terrible to survive.” The realm he built was a reflection of his desires and his vision – did such things stand up to scrutiny? I would argue not.
I disagree with the armies are completely useless argument but I think I’ve been won over in that we haven’t really seen Solomen try to run his government in preparation for warfare.
All his strategists seem have been chosen on their genetic relation to him rather than merit. He goes and holds his annual death tournament instead of preparing for a war he knows is coming. As for teaching ki rata to anyone we haven’t really seen any evidence for it in Rayuba, although that might be for much the same reason the US doesn’t test nukes next to New York City, but if that were the case I doubt Solomen would be so hung up about looking for a heir.
His only justification for his empire is like a slippery slope argument. I can’t imagine his seventh of the universe was in a great shape after the universal war and he was probably the person who could do the most good with his powers. (Creating suns, making food for famines, healing the sick), to not do that would be in his eyes to repeat the mistakes of his masters. Next thing you know it’s a thousand years later you’ve the head of an authoritarian regime which you don’t really want to run, which you kept going for reasons thought of after the fact.
I’ll admit I may have overstated the case of the uselessness of the military – after all, one presumably wants options short of total thermonuclear warfare. Raids from other empires can happen, bandits may arise, and in general there’ll be a need for the military short of total, absolute war. But two points are of note here: Firstly, while the military may have its purpose in lower-intensity conflicts, when push comes to shove it’s still Solomon David and his key that really protects against depredations from other demiurges, and I find that hard to deny – and as such, the military is no justification for the nature of his rule.
The second point, though, is this: Even if we accept the necessity of a military for the defense of the realm, why is a monarchy or a dictatorship required to make the military function? Why is authoritarian control over society required to run a military? After all, the most powerful military in the real world at present – by far! – is run by a democracy. Rome was a republic in the time of its early major conquests that laid down the foundations of its power, and the most famous navy in history was operated by a constitutional monarchy. Even IF we took it as a given that we need a military, absolutely nothing about the need for military forces presupposes the need for an Orwellian level of social control. In what way does jailing a woman for twenty five years because she had been drinking make a military stronger and more able to defend its people (who are, apparently, in jail for drinking)?
Nothing about Solomon’s empire is NECESSARY – it’s built the way it is because Solomon decided to build it that way. As such, necessity is no defense – instead, we may ask “What was Solomon trying to accomplish with his rule, and did he succeed?” And that is honestly a complex and potentially fascinating question with a wide range of answers depending on your perspective, but personally my take is that Solomon tried to reshape society literally in his image as he felt he was the only person capable of both shaping and protecting society, and that ultimately his society was flawed because, well, not everyone is him or happy to be him, or to live in the society he thought perfect and beyond question. He may have thought to make his people happy, but I think in the final equation he was trying to make HIMSELF happy by creating a world that reflected his desires. Yes, some of those desires were positive and beneficial, but others were strict and unbending and in the final judgement we must take the bad with the good, as well as the good with the bad. I am not sure, on the whole, it was worth it.
I think part of the problem with “Solomon did nothing wrong” argument is that he kind of…*did* do some things wrong. He definitely made mistakes! And those mistakes boil down to his core flaw, which is his pride.
Here’s one big mistake. Solomon is supposed to be protecting his people from a war he knew was coming, against a foe more powerful than he and the other Demiurges put together. He has been preparing for this for a long, long time. He is also the last surviving practitioner of the most deadly martial art in the multiverse.
*why hasn’t he taught anyone else ki rata?*
Let’s imagine a different Solomon; one who held his tournament three hundred times over ten thousand years, and instead of just killing whoever made it to the final round, instead takes them as a student and teaches them his wackadoodle crazy one-punch-man superpower. By the end of the ten thousand years, he would have up to three hundred warriors who do not age, move at 9,000 miles per hour, and can break cities in half by exhaling in the right way. That is the kind of thing that *may* be useful if you are going to be fighting a god of war! At the very least, they could evacuate everybody at mach 12 so that Solomon didn’t have to worry about collateral damage.
It’s as if Truman, having seen the awesome power of the nuclear bomb, decided that there would be only ever be one bomb, and he would keep it with him at all times, and anyone who wanted the bomb had to win a tournament and then fight him for it, at which point he would kill them with the bomb. And then he never makes any more bombs, even though he’s the only guy who knows how to make bombs. Instead, his defence policy is that if anyone should invade the US, he will personally kill them with his bomb, and if that doesn’t do it, everyone’s screwed.
The biggest criticism of Solomon David isn’t that he’s a fascist; it’s that he’s a fascist who was only superficially effective. Yes, his armies were huge; yes, he was Superman in a toga. He knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He *didn’t* do everything he could do to protect his people, because in order to do it, he would have to admit that he couldn’t do it all by himself. His whole tournament bullshit did nothing but regularly weed out any incredibly talented martial artists who crop up within his domain by having him disintegrate them with his fists. He makes a big deal about how it’s to find his successor, but he doesn’t want to *help* anyone succeed him. It’s not like he never had help getting where he is! He got taught superman karate by three recluse monks who took pity on him. Why won’t he return the favour?
I broadly agree with your points, but I will note that to the would-be empire builder having a pack of superpowered individuals running around would be considered destabilizing by most if you couldn’t ensure complete control over them, which you couldn’t because they’re superpowered, that’s the point of the whole deal. Besides, yes, Solomon David learned ki rata with the help of recluse monks. He also killed them once he learned their powers, completely ignoring the philosophy they tried to teach him. Not, I think, the role model he would want any would-be apprentices to have in mind, and quite possibly the reason why he might look with suspicion upon any would-be apprentice.
Not that any of this is to his credit, mind you, just noting that there is the old and traditional logic there of “an empire refuses to do things that are objectively effective because they might pose a threat to their real control over society.” See also the Austrian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, the Polish Sejm near the end, etc. etc. Turns out “selfless devotion to the welfare of the state and nation” doesn’t actually mesh well with the goal of “Reign as undisputed ruler forever,” who knew?
We only know about the killing of the Ki Rata monks because Incubus knows, and told Allison. But how did _he_ find out? Solomon was the only survivor of the scene. Has Solomon been bragging about it? Or is Incubus making things up?
In a map of throne one of the locations listed is the domain of one of the last ki rata monks who presumably has gone unnoticed by Solomon for a long long time.
You might think so, but Abbadon said on Tumblr that Solomon and the last Ki Rata monk are mortal enemies. I think Solomon can’t just go over and waste him because of the thing about Throne being neutral ground.
As an aside, something that just occurred to me – Solomon David HAS to be aware of alternative methods of rule if he was paying any kind of attention at all, because, well, out of the many worlds available to look at, Earth was one of them. That’s not to say that governance on Earth is perfect, but the thing is that even a brief study of Earth history demonstrates an enormous variety of governmental types along with what actually happened to them over time. And Earth, it has been noted, is one of an enormous amount of worlds and planets in this multiverse, each with their own no doubt rich and varied histories, their own wild forms and methods of governance.
Either Solomon David has decided to ignore all of them in favor of simply absorbing them into his imperial banner (and I wonder how peaceful that process was as he abolished ancient traditions in favor of his own), or he has actively studied them and concluded that what he came up with was the best possible form of governance. He’s not working with the mental and social limitations of a medieval ruler, he doesn’t have the excuse of ignorance, he had literally the entire universe for his palette and this was what he decided to draw with it.
That presumes firstly that he has agents on Earth, and secondly that he was paying attention to reports. Allison’s Earth is in Mottom’s territory, and is sealed.
Not at all – if you read what I noted more carefully, you’ll see that I’m using Earth merely as one example of the many, many worlds of the multiverse. I make no claim that Earth is particularly exceptional or excellent in its governance, but rather that the rich history of Earth suggests that any one of Solomon’s 111,111 universes, even if it has but a single inhabited planet, likely has just as rich and complex a history with just as many examples of governance of one kind or another. No doubt some had republics, others had democracies, and yet others had government systems unimagined by ourselves. Alternatives CAN be known, if Solomon chose to examine them, is my point.
If the worlds of the wheel had a spectrum of independent governments, they had it only before the Universal War started. After that, they had tears, ashes and pain.
Solomon’s big achievements is not opposing Jagganoth personally, it’s dealing with the other thousands of over-powered nutters who were destroying creation. Creating the empire was a wartime measure; things were different then. I suspect that the harsh laws were made originally to keep worlds in the empire.
Solomon great failure is that in the 100 generations of peace he hasn’t liberalised his empire. Nobody needs to be bullied into remaining. His laws are obsolete.
So, I think we agree about the basic verdict, if not about the context.
(This was intended as a reply to Tomn’s post at 08:10 18th October. As usual, it’s ended up in the wrong part of the comment stream.)
I caught up on this comic in about five days and it’s honestly the best story I’ve ever read
Same I’m just waiting for the next page to hit
Did you read all the alt text?
The Demiurges have always been the problem, marketing itself as a solution.
They tried to take the place of gods who saw that the Wheel was better off without them.
Never forget that.
Jagganoth, Solomon, Zoss; all heads of the same beast.
I think that’s not completely fair in Solomon’s case, as him becoming a Ki Rata monk and then a demiurge was actually a result of the other key-wielders’ war. He wasn’t originally interested in “murdering the gods and toppling their thrones”, but eventually joined the conflict because he thought it was necessary to avoid that others suffered the same fate as his finally.
Granted, he turned into the very evil he vowed to contain by doing so. But that’s what makes his character interesting and kinda sympathetic. He’s a tragic and somewhat relatable villain, even more so than other demiurges.
Honestly, I feel like the story of half the Demiurges are tragedies (or tragedies in the making).
Solomon became the very evil he thought he would fight (because he believed an iron fist is necessary to rule).
Mottom obtained power to be safe, free from her husband, and became trapped in her court, even more reliant on her husband in death than in life.
Mammon was greedy, and for that he killed his entire family, but never recovered psychologically from his betrayal.
Jadis wanted to attain true knowledge. She is all-knowing now, and so everything is meaningless.
But I’ll admit, Incubus, Gog-Agog and Jagganoth?
They either don’t care or are living the life.
Oh I definitely agree with the demiurges all being tragic figure.
To the ones you mentioned, we might add:
– Gog-Agog wanting to be loved and needed, but eventually being unable to be without literally mind-controlling her subjects, thus making it all meaningless.
– Jagganoth constantly searching for power but being trapped in an eternal and being aware of it, which pretty much makes its existence futile.
– Incubus… well, he appears to be the least tragic one, but he was looking to escape his terrible condition as a kid and ends up the king of slimy, rotten hell of mud and blood, so maybe that counts too?
I would still say Solomon is the most tragic of the lot though, cause he’s the only one who believed that what he was doing was for the sake of others.
Where’s your crown, King Nothing?
Alas, how the mighty are fallen!
Even the mmightiest tomes will have their author killed, if not by the hands of mortality, by the screams of ten thousand stones
Pride is not the opposite of shame, but the root cause of it.
I’m going to miss the comments section
There will be blood
You may not like it, but this is what Royalty looks like. Royalty belongs to man, not gods. One must realize that Death is part of one’s nature, and live according to that purpose. O vain student, now at last you truly learn. At last, you realize your purpose. Now that your vanity has dropped, you will notice the limitations of your charade. Only one conclusion remains. You may not like it, but this is only path to Royalty.
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The art style in this chapter is phenomenal.