King of Swords 10-170
Intra took the stone, and his terribly damaged sword, and began to set to work by the side of the fire. Using the edge of the sword, he slowly chipped at the rock, flattening its shape. As the rock was of a reasonably large size, this took quite some time.
Once he was satisfied with his tool, he took off his kafeyen and traveling cape, so he was clad only in his underclothes, then found a good spot in the barren and muddy town square and began to dig.
Even the people in the square who had filtered in to see the Sword Saint and had some hope he might yet prove their savior felt their resolve sag at the sight of his starved body, laboring and sweating as he toiled in the muck and filth. The cruel master of the vale laughed and had a tent set up to shade him as he watched Intra’s struggles. “If you are done with your farce, I will happily geld you and make you my jester, lord Intra,” said he. Intra said nothing, but kept digging, only emerging to feed his fire. As the day dragged on and his fire burned to coals, he had quite a sizable amount of clay, which piece by piece he molded into bricks and let dry by the light of the sun and the heat of the fire.”Behold the earth,” said Intra.
As the sun began to creep lower towards the horizon, his craft quickly became apparent. Exhausted, and muscles quivering, he emerged from his hole and began to stack his bricks into a sturdily made bread oven. Then he asked for a vessel, and went down into his pit, emerging with it filled to the brim with muddy water, as he had dug deep enough to coax it from the dry earth.
“Behold the water,” said Intra, and set it to boil clean over the fire. He began to shovel coals into the oven, to prepare it and set it.
At this sight, more people began to gather at the square. They could sense that something was afoot. Yem Yeddo would have beaten them back into their homes, but he too was transfixed by the strange spectacle that was unfolding.
“Clever,” said Yem Yeddo, with the slightest tinge of anxiety in his voice, as all tyrants are wont to have when confronted with an honest man. “Do you mean to bake bread for the people? That will not work despite your powers of transfiguration, as I have all the grain.” His thugs, like the loyal dogs they were, sensed their master’s discomfort, and gripped the hilts of their weapons.
“I tire of this,” said Yem Yeddo, without realizing the gravity of his own situation. “Break his limbs.”
“Next,” said Intra, “I will turn this rock into air.”
reunions! how sweet! how horrid! to reach a goal and know that you are still not done!
Is it, though? Better to have something to work towards. After all this is over and the 7 are gone… what will Alison do? I can’t exactly see her settling down. That isn’t the way of Royalty.
That isn’t the way of Royalty. At least not before Allison stepped in and decided “fuck the rules, I do what I want”. Besides, it’s evident that the current rules are broken and only lead to suffering.
When the seven are gone? Well, I can’t help but notice that there now are 7 companions on team Alison now…
Quite magnificent. Now, which one is Clint?
🙂
I hadn’t considered it before but it must have been years since Alison spoke English to someone, hearing it again must feel like coming home.
Don’t think Cio is too pleased though, can’t say I blame her. Alison has been rather vague as to what her plan was after she finished finding her White Rabbit (or would it be Brown sort of ex-Boyfriend who scruffs up nicely?).
I can’t quite tell if that’s a tail-wag of disgust at the language or possessiveness. Only time (and the next few pages) will tell.
I fancy she is frustrated that she cannot understood their conversation.
Little of both I suspect.
Both. She hates the language so she doesn’t care to learn it and now Allison is having a “private” conversation with her ex boyfriend thanks to this language barrier.
I wonder what they’re chatting about.
Probably just freaking out and telling each other about what happened.
“Alison! Is that a bindi?”
Truly as her wise roommates know, that is always the first and only question that need be asked.
still gotta kill like 5999999999 demons
I think she actually hasn’t killed any yet.
Wait… oooh the gold mask in Yre, true. 5999999999 it is.
Mottom’s Tree-husband. Check the alt text on the pages where that is destroyed.
Kill 6 billion demons and one sentient tree
While no one would classify it as a devil, I think it’s fair to call the thing demonic.
Actually… Do we have an in-universe definition of what a Demon is?
Simple. A demon is a form of asshole.
Agreed! It seems “demon” doesn’t refer to the similiarly-named “devils.” I believe “demons” refers to every single royal screw-up committed by humanity since it breached heaven.
What about daemons?
I think Six Billion Demons is a name, for a single entity
Well if they’ve been killed five times already then they can’t be that hard to take down, can they?
They’re clearly named Demons and are on their 6 billionth reincarnation.
Plot twist, we’re actually looking for “6,000,000,000 Demons” also know as The World’s Worst Angel.
Legend says halfways through forging the angels, Koss accidentally hit his thumb with his hammer, and this accidental being was the result.
6,000,000,000 Demons means well, but he’s so incompetent that his actions are directly responsible for every major calamity across The Wheel.
The heroes need to kill him, then convince him to stop reincarnating before he inevitably dooms us all.
Its actually Alysuns name
AIR ROCK
AIR ROCK
living for this story
this one is about to do something incredible
Okay now… kiss.
No, not you two. I meant Nyave and White Chain.
*Nyave and White Chain
Vigilant Gaze and Princess
…you don’t mean 10 Vigilant Gaze and Princess?
He seems quite taken aback by her.
I think he’s just super freindly, I imagine he’s got the personality of sigmire of catarina, and a similar voice.
a veritable fleet in that last panel, I say
Slowly becoming convinced that the “Demons” in “Kill 6 Billion Demons” refer to personal demons.
“Reach Heaven through helping others self actualize”
I’ve believed this for a long time. This comic isn’t about solving your problems through thoughtless slaughter of your enemies.
Considering the emphasis Meti and Intra place on thoughtlessness, and how “I” is both the ultimate nature of royalty and the greatest enemy. I’ve always interpreted it is reaching enlightenment by breaking down the limitations of the individual with which one has identified themself, so as to embrace the universal.
I read an interesting take that “through” in “Reach Heaven through violence” is using the movement definition like “swim through the water”, so it’s more like “get past the violence and you’ll be enlightened” which definitely follows the themes that have developed so far.
Alternatively, “violence” doesn’t mean “punch a dude real hard” but means “upend the current order” which also tracks.
Upend the current order, both within yourself and without.
I have also heard the interpretation “reach heaven through the exertion of one fighting for their life”.
REACH HEAVEN THROUGH THERAPY
there’s someone i wish would take this advice
Antares, is that you
Well we know it’s not Chris, that’s for sure.
I understood that reference.
Kill not the enemies without, but the demons within.
English really is an awful language if you so much as begin thinking about it
i also completely forgot no one in this comic has been speaking english either
Unless I miss my mark, Devils are blessed with the mastery of tongues.
That Cio, of all people, found the process of learning English too disastrous an endeavor to even attempt, speaks volumes as to just how bad the language is.
It’s easy to forget the horrid little demon she had to eat, but the joke after the drinking contest which gave us dear Princess was a nice callback.
*hoork*
“Ugh, I don’t have to eat these, do I?”
This is bothering me though. Didn’t she eat that demon in the middle of the conversation with White Chain, and thus was speaking English to White Chain for the first few pages of Book 1, Chapter 2?
No, IIRC White Chain said she’d been giving blue devil liquor to her in her sleep initially, and she vommed up the imp and ate it again while back home.
The forward to one of the editions of the Meriam-Webster dictionary declares that the English language borrows words from other languages with the subtle delicacy of an industrial vacuum cleaner.
One time a fellow student asked me a question in Arabic, and I was able to understand it because of my etymological studies, not that I had directly studied Arabic.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
-James Nicoll
He spoke no lies.
English is considered an infectious disease in better parts of the galaxy.
As a wise (debatable) old one once described it, the English language (especially the American variant), is really three languages stacked in a trench-coat that stalks other languages down dark alleyways to rifle through their pockets for loose grammar.
Aye, the danger is what violence it does to your language while rifling through your lexicon in search of choice vocabulary. It’ll steal your sleepwear and leave you with some pithy idioms which it stole from a completely different language.
A memetic retrovirus of a language, in the classical sense.
Once upon a time, there wasn’t an angel who didn’t travel to the homeworld of the Double Successor. This angel didn’t try to understand English, only to not be driven mad and not rampage through Throne until another was unable to put it down.
On this angel’s next reincarnation, it didn’t see the flaw in its method. It hadn’t expected a means of communication to make sense, and thus hadn’t driven itself mad not trying to find the pattern in the nonsense. Instead, the angel didn’t embrace the chaos of the language, and didn’t lose the Law in its heart. For this, it wasn’t expelled by its brothers, and wasn’t only accepted back upon not purging itself of this impurity.
But enough about 36+418i Radiant Shadow.
English IS a mess. Cio is wise not to bother with the thing.
Having studied the language thoroughly, I can say that my feelings toward English are quite similar to Mathangi ten Meti’s regarding the sword.
…und lispeln englisch, wenn sie lügen
-Goethe, Faust
Allison X Cio is old and busted.
Vigilant Gaze x Princess is the OTP and no one can change that fact.
I find it only all too fitting that the Angelic Knight and Princess get along.
My new ship is 10 vigilant gaze and princess
As someone else who has taught English, in China:
English is three languages in a trenchcoat with
It’s true! It’s like a Germanic grammar with a bunch of Latin words stapled on.
I mean it’s the bare skeleton of a proper germanic grammar, but the vocabulary… damn, it’s like there is a brittonic, germanic and latin version for every word AT LEAST xD
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. –James Nicoll
I’m just waiting for the shoe to drop. What will SD do?
Also, what will Alison do? She’s supposed to give her power up now, but will she?
Will Zaid want it?
Will she be able to? I suspect the Old Man won’t have made it so easy to evict his Key.
Awww, Cio wants hugs and handshakes too.
you can really tell by the way she wips her tail xD
Vigilant Princess is the new top tier ship.
I am partial to Princess Gaze myself.
How sweet. It’s been a long time coming, and it seems they’ve changed quite a bit since they last saw one another.
I wonder how they will deal with their situation. I hope their friendship can develop despite the awkward situation.
The gang is back together! Nothing could possibly go wrong now :). Except maybe for Princess learning Fierce Horse Soul. She made it to Ebon Devil, she can certainly master the ten thousand year evil crushing fist.
And yet, even in spite of it’s weird quirks and massive vocabulary…. English has one of the simplest grammars out there and is one of the easiest languages to learn xD
Hahaha, no.
English is a stupidly inconsistent and nonsensical language. It’s really quite awful and I feel bad for anyone who learns it as a second language (especially after adulthood).
However, in return for that level of stupid you get a language that can incorporate ANYTHING into it and still make perfect sense. You can noun a verb and verb a noun and it still make
sense. You can easily add a zufällig word to it from another language, and still divine what it is. If it’s a noun, you don’t even *need* to know what the word means and still easily use it in a sentence after you’ve heard it.
So english is a pidgin, not a language?
It’s a flock of pidgins piloting a box with an eagle’s face drawn on crayons on one face, and vulture feathers sloppily taped to the other five.
English is easy to get the gist across with, but difficult to do “well” (following the rules and conventions of a native speaker) Americans especially are really sensitive to “bad” (yet easily understood) English.
Tell that to British people, who are renowned for their pedantry- particularly when talking with Americans! Given that the U.S. is the source of abominations like “I could care less”… not sure the leg Americans are standing on is all that sturdy.
When you think about it, English is the quintessential Imperial language.
It pretends it’s its own thing when it stole what it is whenever it was practical from, well, everybody.
Case in point, the most quintessentially British of accessories, the gentleman’s umbrella.
Or for that matter, tea.
god forbids we have to deal with auxiliary and composite verbs!! it’s still simpler than most other possible options, scandinavian languages came close to having a simpler grammar (and have a much more limited vocabulary) and then, taking away the part of learning an necessarily complex writing system, japanese grammar is also much more straightforward… but other than that? remains among the lowest tier languages of languages to learn :/.
poor learners of english as a second language? nah, poor learners of hungarian or finnish as a second language. I’d put up with the quirckyness over trying to incorporate the complexities of 14-17 grammatical cases or, dear lord in heaven, fucking ancient greek, any single day xDD (and I had to learn it as a second language)
*unnecessarily cpmplex
Most people who think English is either uniquely difficult to learn or uniquely “mongrel,” full of loanwords (and loan grammar, natch), complete with various degrees of hyperbole about it stealing (borrowing wouldn’t be as vigorous and macho) words, seem to be English speakers, many of them monolingual.
It is especially funny because, it being the language of empire in the current age, everyone else’s language is not only similarly mongrel, but in particular full of English vocabulary (and increasingly some English grammar).
While I love the aesthetic beauty of Spanish, the utilitarian nature of modern English is something spectacular. It’s malleable in ways other languages aren’t, in part because it’s really a confluence of several precursor languages that had to learn to play well together.
I’ve only been following this for a few years, for some reason never commented. The comments are brilliant. Your comic is brilliant. I thought I knew where it was going several times and instead like a zen koan informs me this was truly the best path. The last sequence was all around fantastic, though trying to explain to the “wife” I sounded like the Faux Pious Idiot Of The 424242th Faux Universe that I am and it sounded as strange to her as the English to them. Just because I don’t chime in does not mean I don’t think this is the best comic out there.
As a fellow English teacher, I must agree that it is quite atrocious.
Digging the Princess and Vigilant Gaze interaction here btw.
Thank you for more 😉