WHEEL SMASHING LORD 1-15 to 1-17
Chapter: 1
“Listen well, peasant girl. The time is long past I teach you the ultimate technique, as I have promised.
The only thing you must understand about this technique is it is purely for killing. This is the cut of no cuts, the form of no form. It doesn’t have a name. There is no school it belongs to. There is no master it belongs to, not even you. There is no purpose it belongs to. It is a poisonous technique, the product of a thousand venoms distilled from one master to the next, back to the line of the Gods. All my master used it for is stacking corpses, and his master before him, and his master before that, and that is all you shall use it for as well.”
-Ryo, to his student Meti.
Also, is Maya’s spine enforced with adamantium or something? That’s definitely not normal!
Why is it always farming lmao, can’t they get a boring and safe life being like an accountant or an engineer or selling noodles?
when u just been one of the biggest kings ever and soaked up to yr eyeballs in kingly concerns but suddenly find yrself hating kings and all that other junk, nothing quite does it like getting hands in the dirt with the oldest honest profession. nothing will do but true peasanthood!
And this is why, if you must leave the power and/or title, you must destroy that which knew of you. Otherwise, those who resented your actions, desired your power, or were opposed to your rule will find a way to ruin any peace you have achieved.
I just realized the question was “How do you kill him” that’s what prompted the whole story in the first I’m so dumb
You said this and I went back and looked, and on the page before there’s another question I feel might be even more important: “Should such a man exist?”
“Soon I will take the throne of heaven and then I will have the world itself!”
“Should you have it?”
I think you are on to something much in keeping with the themes so far. The fact that Allison is supposed to spread her fire to others rather than become a hero who stands tall on the wheel would match with her master pointing out that you started this path to upend tyrants, and here you are now boasting about how you will rule the universe.
She of course then tries to protest, saying how much better things will be with her in charge, or that it will just be a kind of stewardship rather than a tyranny, but in the end she sees it is all just a trap and taking the prize is self-defeating.
Ten blows? Ten earth-shattering blows?
I feel as though the question is something more than a simple “and then what?” It is close, closer than the Wheel Smashing Lord has arrived at currently, but my theory is something more along the lines of…
“And how will you stop whoever follows in your path?”
This tale is one of the cycles and wheels that bind us- it is there in the Heir’s name, after all. If Maya were to achieve her goals as declared to Meti, how long would she actually be able to maintain them? How long before she becomes another cruel tyrant hiding behind walls, waiting for the day a couple of young sword saints with too much they feel they have to prove take her head? Not even Solomon David could manage that forever, after all, though he certainly tried to pretend otherwise.
Which, amusingly enough, would make Incubus’ views of winning being “the only thing” and pointing out that Solomon “hasn’t won yet” be one of the closest to understanding this question next to Meti and Maya themselves… though perhaps he is only so close because he chooses to dismiss the answer as foolishness.
For him, knowing such things are fleeting is all the more reason to indulge while you can, though that still carries the assumption you’re standing on top of the corpse pile instead of being scattered throughout it…
“Exceptionally poor” may sound like a diss, but Maya is confirming that Incubus is, in fact, undefeated.
There is literally nothing good in being good swordsman.
Why?
The question that keeps rattling around in my head is “And what will you do with it, then?”
It doesn’t matter what “it” is. The world. Her Ambition. Her power. Her sword.
“And then what?” and you realize that there’s… nothing there. You never bothered to think of what next.
But maybe I’m just stuck on that question because it comes up in my own writing…
The question is a simple one, but powerful nonetheless, “is that enough?” The answer is always the same
Girlboss felled by her biological clock. Eh…
As mentioned by another up above, I think it far more likely to be “Should a man such as you exist?” is probably more in line with her realization, not “Didn’t you really want to have kids at some point?”
this if you think its about the biological clock you might be missing some subtext.
I think in retrospect the part of this that hit me most is Incubus’ face when she ran.
I think that might be the most concerned expression we’ve ever seen from him.
Its easy to write him off as a villain and a psychopath but that face reminded me that he still is an orphan, and being taught sword along side Maya was the closest thing to family he’s ever experienced. She’s the closest thing he’s had to a sister.
I don’t think her surviving those beheading attempts was due to his lack of skill. whatever the situation that put him coming after her, I don’t think he wanted to, and let her live. Either out of what he thought was mercy, or hoping it would re-ignite a fire in her.
Doctor….who? Doc? Tor? WHO?
“What… is your favorite color?”
What kind, a European or African swallow?
Wouldn’t the question that Meti asks Mathangi be the same question that Mathangi asks Allison time and again throughout the earlier chapters?
“What do you think about death?”
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the GIANT FUCKING ANIME SWORD might have had something to do with why Inky is a little “Cephalectomy challenged.”
Also, from the image it looks like his heart isn’t in it.
The context of question is defeat and victory. On the previous page: “-that I had lost.”
But she had lost to who? We saw in this comics, that every Demiurge, while they are the winner of universal war, suffers deeply. They won the war, but as a result, they became slaves of the World they think they conquered. Maybe, Metis’ question pointed on it.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but my read on Incubus’s expression here seems to be very different from most peoples. Most of us are reading his expression as one of concern, and I guess I see a little of that, but more than anything else I see disgust. Specifically the kind of disquieting disgust you feel when you see someone you look up to immensely, suddenly lose every last shred of their dignity in one foul swoop. The kind of sudden loss of respect that rattles you to your core and makes you unable to ever see that person quite the same way again.
He certainly seems saddened as he is wiping his blade, but that very well could be true while still feeling like his sibling died long ago and he is just making sure her corpse stopped moving.
Observant! Auntie Maya hears The Question and immediately renounces the grotesque pillar of violence she had spent a lifetime building herself around. Pale Bolt hears it and thinks to himself, incredulously, “What a stupid fucking thing to ask.” I cannot imagine his expression while wiping his child-blooded blade is anything other than simple satisfaction at the job well done of destroying something weak, proving the point to an idiot that there is no other language in the world.
It is exceptionally rude to not decapitate your opponent in a single blow, let alone ten.
The question is
“I had only one beer, is that enough?”
Callback to page one. I love it.
gaslit, gatekept, girlboss
And what world will you have conquered once you set everything on fire?
The question was, “What can change the nature of a man?”
I wonder what that question was.
Either one blunt blade or one strong neck
Damn thick neck.