I know it can feel disjointed because we wait (on average) a week between pages instead of reading like a chapter at once, but this is not filler.
This is most likely intentional for the reading tempo as a whole, as I don’t think Abadon think up a page one at a time once a week, but rather has an outline set out before he get to make the pages proper.
Otherwise, even on its own, I don’t think that there is nothing going on in this page either, the way I see it, Maya is clearly regaining her footing here, which will either end up in a reversal in her favor or is a fakeout so that if she loses it comes unexpectedly and hits harder.
Also, there is experimentation in the composition of the page, that a dialogue heavy page would not allow. Their two figures on the vertical axis on the right are a choice that I find dubious for readability, but the detrimental effects are lessened by the fact that it’s “just” a fight scene that is there to transition to the next stage. And overall, I’m more happy to see Abadon taking risks in the composition rather than to stay in his comfort zone and becoming predictable.
I agree. Great meaning is not only derived from the sculpted word, but also from deliberate action.
The unique composition also seems to exemplify the chaotic and adaptive nature of battle.
Yes. It would also be absurd for a self-employed artist to bother with “filler”. They are not being paid by the page or by the minute. You realise the drawing is by far the more time-consuming part of the process compared to the writing? No-one is out here spinning out plot with excess weeks spent on painstaking artwork so they don’t have to write, fuckwit.
Yeah we have to get the vision , when i reread the whole comics befor ethe start of the final war it was way different to read then when i just followed every week. We need to have the vision , now we are witnessing history being written, and later we will be looking at it back and it will be glorious and we will be proud to say “i was there”
This is a climactic 1:1 sword duel between arch-rivals with a vendetta. Samurai movie stuff. If your goal isn’t a specific anticlimax, even if you have a neat philosophical resolution (“I cut you thirty five comics ago”) you have to show them actually doing sword-fu at each other for a little bit.
It’s like walking into John Wick and being mad that they waste so much screen time on him beating dudes up.
Agreed, also i think we’re exploring the theme of death by many cuts vs oneshot cut to exemplify that even after a thousand paceful years, she’s still an undisputed master of the sword, contrast with Incubus that has to resort to cheap tricks like cheating death by blood alchemy and has no true royal resolve behind his blows.
Have the Bards and Storytellers of this age have truly become so focused on setting up “big lore drops” that audiences would consider a final clash between old rivals, the culmination of grudges fostered over millennia, to be mere padding?
Would they truly be satisfied if one of these combatants simply struck the other down without struggle, moving the story onwards? I would hope not. What would the point of telling a tale if you skipped over such an important bout?
I just now realised she was fighting with essentially a dagger against a longsword. She should consider carrying a shortsword in her offhand for defense to free up her main hand for strikes past the guard.
Maya wields the Maybe Sword. The only guard against it is Will, and Incubus lacks the will to withstand it. I’m excited to see what happens when she decides to make her cut.
He does indeed do many non-sword things. Curious that being a poor swordsman is treated as an insult when… arguably he went and set up a very nice noodle shop for himself. He didn’t let a sliver of metal define him and, even now, he is merely mocking its shape from time to time with a smear of crimson.
He is a ruin for a thousand other reasons but his being a poor swordsman is not one of them. All swordsmen should aspire to be worse.
Exactly. And then he set up a very large noodle shop, covering a measurable percentage of the universe, and focused on non-sword things. He was always going to be wretched but now he is wretched with a noodle shop that he can use rather than a piece of metal he would have never been able to. Its just a shame that he wasn’t even worse with a blade and never picked it up to begin with.
Except we know that she already cut off his head with it, and it didn’t do shit to him. Cutting isn’t enough. If it were, she’d have killed him centuries ago.
Incubus is plausibly resistant to the Maybe Sword, albeit for the wrong reasons. “Are you alive, or are you dead?” “Of course I’m alive. What sort of question for loser morons is that”
I’m gonna say no to this, because the Maybe Sword definitively cuts everything around a person. The question is not simply whether you are alive or dead, but whether you have the will to name yourself alive when everything around you foretells your death.
Incubus, man who has indulged in all the same craven arts as Jantris to safeguard his life, does not have that will.
His technique is atrocious too. He uses a broadsword like a rapier, has a wide-stanced double-handed downward swing, a full-on Homerun swing. Wide and slow swings without properly knowing the method of his blade.
I do wonder what she expects to be different this time around. Clearly she believes she can kill him, but whatever she’s doing hasn’t worked the past few times. For all the power of the Maybe Sword, Incubus’ arts are beyond it. Is she really just accepting her doom, or does she have something up her sleeve? Might that acceptance itself provide her an opportunity?
They fought after the Jagganoth battle, right? Maya helped Allison get away and beheaded him…and then he thrashed her. The ten cuts that failed to behead her were from when he found her family, right? I feel like this time she’s only moderately drunk this time. Also, as Vigilant Gaze noted, RESOLVE.
My dear Pree, I believe that the Pit Lord has revealed His greatest weakness. See how prominently now He bears his brow? How proudly He shows the nails, tell-tale marks of Head of John? Unless this old beggar misses his mark…our dear Preem Maya need only remove His head once more, and pull the nails out before it can be re-attached! This one swears he’s seen it done, twice in fact. An old man enjoys strange company, and the seediest bars in Throne.
Gundhram the Reader, Belligerent Knight and Amateur Historian
E’en if that doesn’t work, there are many other ways of separating a man from his vital fluids. Head of John is an impressive art that grants a spectacular vitality to the skull and neck, but I’ve never seen it stop someone dying of disembowelment or a blade piercing the heart.
I can see that actually. Maya does one big cut, Incubus looks shocked for a moment but then it turns out he’s fine, she didn’t even hit him. “You had your one chance, and you wasted it.” Then it’s revealed she was actually swinging at something else. Not sure what yet, maybe Metatron or Jagganoth?
I do wonder what form Maya’s strike will take, if she was to dispatch inky with the maybe sword it might have already happened by now. I think we’re almost done waiting for that 1000 year causeway.
Incubus cannot defend against the Maybe Sword, but Incubus will heal from any cut.
For a swordswoman to win…don’t cut to kill. Cut to ensure the killing blow lands.
She will naturally succeed in defeating him but I can’t help but feel she was wrong in her assessment of calling him a poor swordsman. she’s just like her master who views all other arms as peasant weapons, being stubborn in her own specific views and beliefs. You can call Incubus a terrible swordsman but he was and still is a sword saint in his own right.
Yeah. For as much as everyone looks down on him — including all the demiurges except maybe Mammon (and Gog-Agog isn’t singling him out — she looks down on ALL the other demiurges) — it’s not like they’re all much better.
He’s referred to as “a coward by nature”, but even after Mottom and Mammon were killed in front of him, he was still prepared to stand against Jagganoth on his own, without his fear (he IS visibly intimidated by Jagganoth far earlier on) holding him back at all like happened for Mottom earlier in that battle. He also argued against Zoss, another person he was visibly afraid of.
He’s criticised for being unable to kill Maya when failing to behead her — but she said herself that she “decapitated him quite cleanly” on Rayuba, only for him to still be alive.
It’s said that he can use the world as his “plaything” because “ none could reach him, so far down was his domain”, yet here he’s fighting in-person in a battle where his enemies include two of the other demiurges, someone he’s been decapitated by before, and the person he recognised as Zoss’ true heir before almost anyone else did. And probably Metatron and his angels, too. And probably also Jagganoth, never seemed like either of them intended to remain allies.
Maybe a poor swordsman isn’t someone bad at using a sword in the first place. Meti clearly looked down on violence and brutality, so with that quote being based in her philosophy, maybe it’s more that Incubus is a poor swordsman from a moral perspective, that talented swordsmen in general are. (Including Maya. How many bodies did she have to climb to reach him? Meti would probably disagree with her saying “Not too many”)
Just like how a terrible illness isn’t one that fails to infect a body, but one that thoroughly and completely succeeds at that. Not terrible at being an illness, but terrible because it’s an illness.
(Though if so, failing to behead Maya should be irrelevant to Incubus being a “poor swordsman”. Did she misunderstand Meti’s philosophy, or did both of them misjudge Incubus?)
Though, like most of the other demiurges (Mottom, Mammon, Solomon David, and Jagganoth all previously acknowledge the harm they’ve caused, or are causing, in their ambitions), he’s still aware of the weight of his actions. He might not directly mention it about his own actions, but if he acknowledges others’ lives as a significant cost to reaching towards a goal (again, asking Maya about how many died for their fight to happen here)…and with him telling Zoss “your Heaven is rotten”, it’s not like he’s treating it as a good thing to reach Heaven through violence. Doesn’t change the harm he is causing, but I don’t think he entirely rejected Meti’s philosophy.
Incubus is a master of Sword Law, the principles of killing—he is most skilled at turning men into ghosts. But he is a terrible swordsman, because he believes he needs a sword to do so effectively. As a killer, he is proficient. As an individual, he is hollow and weak. Incubus holds the world in his palm, but clings to the holding of it. He is ruled by fear, hunger, and petty malice. It connects back to the principles of Royalty, which each of the demiurges fail to grasp in their own way.
Pree Pondering has the truth of it. Like all deviants and blood drinkers, Incubus clings too firmly to what little mastery He has. The other Demiurges, for what little it matters now that the Concordance has fallen, looked down on Him for many reasons. His key wasn’t just stolen, it was taken from a much diminished (at the time) opponent. Much like a foolish little boy with a sword, He neither knows the full wielding of His mastery, nor more importantly does He have the wisdom to not wield it at all. Time and time again, we see Him squandering his power. Giving it out to thousands upon thousands of puling, bent backed little weaklings like Himself. I have no doubt that any who bear his pink flame will perish before even a middling combatant. Hence why I also have very little fear for Pree AL-YISUN. I’ve saved my best wine, to enjoy while observing these future conflicts!
Which feels like a cycle of its own.
Using Incubus as an example, of course he’s ruled by fear — he grew up as an orphan in a famine. Of course he follows petty malice — most people around him seem to be either just as petty, or callously indifferent (Meti encouraged Maya to let him starve, for example), so why should he be any better?
(I don’t agree about him being ruled by fear, though. The fact that he has fear isn’t a weakness itself, just as it wasn’t for Het — and even when faced with people we know he’s afraid of, he’s still wilfull and defiant.
On the contrary, when speaking to Jagganoth earlier on, he seemed to try to hide his fear — if that includes hiding it from himself, then rather than being ruled by it, he’s trying to control it, which again was established as an equally bad idea in Het And The Three Companions)
At least with his viewpoint that “your Heaven is rotten” — that the way of the world is wrong (though borrowing from Tokyo Ghoul, I’d say “this world isn’t wrong, it simply is”) — might make him aware of the issues that made him the way he is.
But even then, he still seems to perpetuate the same problems. Still seems to be making others face the same fear and hunger, and the same disillusionment, that, with how he handles them, make him fall short of Royalty. (“Fall short of” feels like an inaccurate turn of phrase in regards to Royalty itself, oh well, it still gets across what I mean)
And if the world at-large remains “rotten” from that, it’ll keep reinforcing those same motives of fear, hunger, and spite.
—
Still, makes me wonder what it’s all for, in his mind. For all his talk, back at Rayuba, about how it’s scavengers that “win” in a famine, he still went to this battlefield in-person, even getting involved before Jagganoth or Metatron, rather than waiting for his adversaries to weaken each-other. And he still personally fought against Jagganoth. That sounds like it’s against the philosophy he spoke of there, against his survival instincts, and I honestly don’t think it’s malice driving him when he’s trying to push Maya back into being what he saw as “magnificent”.
So, what is he actually fighting for? Whatever the answer is, feels like something he’s kept to himself too much for it to be clear at this point.
Oh yes because the final battle between a former Demiurge and her traitorous adopted brother, the last students of the greatest sword saint to ever live, whose love has turned into a thousand-year-old immortal hatred representing the clashing ideologies of their own mentor’s flaws, isn’t something interesting
I mean, in direct context of an ongoing battle involving an arch-angel that wants to destroy the universe to reset it, a god eater who wants to destroy the universe to stop it from resetting, a god-worm who wants to do literally anything to the universe to have something interesting happen, and a god-king who impersonates the will of humanity itself to assert itself in the midst of all these insanely powerful immortality adjacent actors and their agencies?
Yeah sorry but Maya’s struggle with, honestly, mostly just war criminal guilt and some awkward found family relations is pretty fuckin’ boring.
Scope isn’t the only thing that makes things interesting. Maya and Incubus’ conflict is deeply personal on a level beyond any other than White Chain and Michael, and a pretty important part of the story’s philosophical themes about swordsmanship.
In his foolishness, he doesn’t recognize that she’s also dueling her nemesis on the face of a giant godship, but she’s doing so with the handicap of not having a blood sword.
Longsword fencer here, and I must agree with Maya from a couple chapters back. This man truly is an awful swordsman. He needs to bend his knees more. And stop standing broad in front of his opponent. We don’t know that the Maybe Sword can thrust, but if it can he needs to square off to present a smaller target.
You’d think Jagganoth would have beaten these lessons into him, but then, such a coward wouldn’t directly challenge another Demiurge, even under the pretense of a “friendly” spar.
Truly, the Dream Eater is a poor swordsman indeed. Such superfluous movements, and see how He takes pride in his utter lack of discipline… Demiurges were bound by decorum in my day. Now? I need more wine…
Each strike fully intended to be the one needed to finish the job, each one fails. And yet in spite of the continuous stream of failures, that smug look remains glued to his face, for he believes in full certainty that the NEXT one will do it.
I think Maya’s strategy here is to get killed gorily and then point out that she didn’t even have a sword, which makes Inqubis cringe for killing her and taking that long to do so.
Five Stars for coolest fight location ever on page 6-201.
Truly Dope.
Those Gods better stay dead, or at least one’s gonna wake up totally pissed at being turned into someone’s battleship and carelessly defaced in an End-of-the-World Duel.
METAL.
BLOOD.
CLANK
Filler
I know it can feel disjointed because we wait (on average) a week between pages instead of reading like a chapter at once, but this is not filler.
This is most likely intentional for the reading tempo as a whole, as I don’t think Abadon think up a page one at a time once a week, but rather has an outline set out before he get to make the pages proper.
Otherwise, even on its own, I don’t think that there is nothing going on in this page either, the way I see it, Maya is clearly regaining her footing here, which will either end up in a reversal in her favor or is a fakeout so that if she loses it comes unexpectedly and hits harder.
Also, there is experimentation in the composition of the page, that a dialogue heavy page would not allow. Their two figures on the vertical axis on the right are a choice that I find dubious for readability, but the detrimental effects are lessened by the fact that it’s “just” a fight scene that is there to transition to the next stage. And overall, I’m more happy to see Abadon taking risks in the composition rather than to stay in his comfort zone and becoming predictable.
Filler
I agree. Great meaning is not only derived from the sculpted word, but also from deliberate action.
The unique composition also seems to exemplify the chaotic and adaptive nature of battle.
Yes. It would also be absurd for a self-employed artist to bother with “filler”. They are not being paid by the page or by the minute. You realise the drawing is by far the more time-consuming part of the process compared to the writing? No-one is out here spinning out plot with excess weeks spent on painstaking artwork so they don’t have to write, fuckwit.
Yeah we have to get the vision , when i reread the whole comics befor ethe start of the final war it was way different to read then when i just followed every week. We need to have the vision , now we are witnessing history being written, and later we will be looking at it back and it will be glorious and we will be proud to say “i was there”
Ignorant
This is a climactic 1:1 sword duel between arch-rivals with a vendetta. Samurai movie stuff. If your goal isn’t a specific anticlimax, even if you have a neat philosophical resolution (“I cut you thirty five comics ago”) you have to show them actually doing sword-fu at each other for a little bit.
It’s like walking into John Wick and being mad that they waste so much screen time on him beating dudes up.
Agreed, also i think we’re exploring the theme of death by many cuts vs oneshot cut to exemplify that even after a thousand paceful years, she’s still an undisputed master of the sword, contrast with Incubus that has to resort to cheap tricks like cheating death by blood alchemy and has no true royal resolve behind his blows.
What’s it like being media illiterate? Genuinely curious.
Have the Bards and Storytellers of this age have truly become so focused on setting up “big lore drops” that audiences would consider a final clash between old rivals, the culmination of grudges fostered over millennia, to be mere padding?
Would they truly be satisfied if one of these combatants simply struck the other down without struggle, moving the story onwards? I would hope not. What would the point of telling a tale if you skipped over such an important bout?
I just now realised she was fighting with essentially a dagger against a longsword. She should consider carrying a shortsword in her offhand for defense to free up her main hand for strikes past the guard.
Maya wields the Maybe Sword. The only guard against it is Will, and Incubus lacks the will to withstand it. I’m excited to see what happens when she decides to make her cut.
Whatever the outcome he is and always will be an exceptionally poor swordsman.
Yes, in other words, undefeated. :]
He does indeed do many non-sword things. Curious that being a poor swordsman is treated as an insult when… arguably he went and set up a very nice noodle shop for himself. He didn’t let a sliver of metal define him and, even now, he is merely mocking its shape from time to time with a smear of crimson.
He is a ruin for a thousand other reasons but his being a poor swordsman is not one of them. All swordsmen should aspire to be worse.
He tried to decapitate her ten times and failed.
Exactly. And then he set up a very large noodle shop, covering a measurable percentage of the universe, and focused on non-sword things. He was always going to be wretched but now he is wretched with a noodle shop that he can use rather than a piece of metal he would have never been able to. Its just a shame that he wasn’t even worse with a blade and never picked it up to begin with.
I believe her strategy is to erode Incubus’ will by outlasting him.
Only when he starts to seriously question the certainty of victory will the Maybe Sword strike true.
Except we know that she already cut off his head with it, and it didn’t do shit to him. Cutting isn’t enough. If it were, she’d have killed him centuries ago.
I do believe she already has. Perhaps a very long time ago, by now.
Incubus is plausibly resistant to the Maybe Sword, albeit for the wrong reasons. “Are you alive, or are you dead?” “Of course I’m alive. What sort of question for loser morons is that”
I’m gonna say no to this, because the Maybe Sword definitively cuts everything around a person. The question is not simply whether you are alive or dead, but whether you have the will to name yourself alive when everything around you foretells your death.
Incubus, man who has indulged in all the same craven arts as Jantris to safeguard his life, does not have that will.
Did you skip Maya’s entire storyline? This is the end of her arc, and you’re missing basically all of her context.
It is a poor swordsman who looks at a broken blade and thinks it cannot cut beyond its reach.
It’s more of an Asp Coil at this point than a longsword
Wow, Incubus truly is a terrible swordsman. Look at all those cuts and still no victory.
There are also stabs. A very underappreciated thing you can do with a sword.
His technique is atrocious too. He uses a broadsword like a rapier, has a wide-stanced double-handed downward swing, a full-on Homerun swing. Wide and slow swings without properly knowing the method of his blade.
Gotta twiddle that thing.
I do wonder what she expects to be different this time around. Clearly she believes she can kill him, but whatever she’s doing hasn’t worked the past few times. For all the power of the Maybe Sword, Incubus’ arts are beyond it. Is she really just accepting her doom, or does she have something up her sleeve? Might that acceptance itself provide her an opportunity?
I’m guessing this is the first fight where she’s willing to sacrifice herself to land a killing blow.
They fought after the Jagganoth battle, right? Maya helped Allison get away and beheaded him…and then he thrashed her. The ten cuts that failed to behead her were from when he found her family, right? I feel like this time she’s only moderately drunk this time. Also, as Vigilant Gaze noted, RESOLVE.
My dear Pree, I believe that the Pit Lord has revealed His greatest weakness. See how prominently now He bears his brow? How proudly He shows the nails, tell-tale marks of Head of John? Unless this old beggar misses his mark…our dear Preem Maya need only remove His head once more, and pull the nails out before it can be re-attached! This one swears he’s seen it done, twice in fact. An old man enjoys strange company, and the seediest bars in Throne.
E’en if that doesn’t work, there are many other ways of separating a man from his vital fluids. Head of John is an impressive art that grants a spectacular vitality to the skull and neck, but I’ve never seen it stop someone dying of disembowelment or a blade piercing the heart.
It appears he bears the Nipples of John as well. A truly formidable opponent!
She fights like Richard Shapre, though he did that against superior swordsmen, not his inferiors.
She’s flagging… better make that cut soon, while you still can
If you don’t have locally sourced thousand year old grudges to settle on the face of a dead god, store bought is fine
Autie still got it
Auntie did tell us she was going to die… I hope that before she goes, she can at least give Incubus a taste of the Maybe Sword
I get the feeling there will be one cut, and it will not be aimed to bisect Incubus.
I can see that actually. Maya does one big cut, Incubus looks shocked for a moment but then it turns out he’s fine, she didn’t even hit him. “You had your one chance, and you wasted it.” Then it’s revealed she was actually swinging at something else. Not sure what yet, maybe Metatron or Jagganoth?
I do wonder what form Maya’s strike will take, if she was to dispatch inky with the maybe sword it might have already happened by now. I think we’re almost done waiting for that 1000 year causeway.
The stone in his forehead. She will cut the stone.
Incubus cannot defend against the Maybe Sword, but Incubus will heal from any cut.
For a swordswoman to win…don’t cut to kill. Cut to ensure the killing blow lands.
“Measure twice, cut once.”
– The Carpenter’s Mantra
She will naturally succeed in defeating him but I can’t help but feel she was wrong in her assessment of calling him a poor swordsman. she’s just like her master who views all other arms as peasant weapons, being stubborn in her own specific views and beliefs. You can call Incubus a terrible swordsman but he was and still is a sword saint in his own right.
Yeah. For as much as everyone looks down on him — including all the demiurges except maybe Mammon (and Gog-Agog isn’t singling him out — she looks down on ALL the other demiurges) — it’s not like they’re all much better.
He’s referred to as “a coward by nature”, but even after Mottom and Mammon were killed in front of him, he was still prepared to stand against Jagganoth on his own, without his fear (he IS visibly intimidated by Jagganoth far earlier on) holding him back at all like happened for Mottom earlier in that battle. He also argued against Zoss, another person he was visibly afraid of.
He’s criticised for being unable to kill Maya when failing to behead her — but she said herself that she “decapitated him quite cleanly” on Rayuba, only for him to still be alive.
It’s said that he can use the world as his “plaything” because “ none could reach him, so far down was his domain”, yet here he’s fighting in-person in a battle where his enemies include two of the other demiurges, someone he’s been decapitated by before, and the person he recognised as Zoss’ true heir before almost anyone else did. And probably Metatron and his angels, too. And probably also Jagganoth, never seemed like either of them intended to remain allies.
Maybe a poor swordsman isn’t someone bad at using a sword in the first place. Meti clearly looked down on violence and brutality, so with that quote being based in her philosophy, maybe it’s more that Incubus is a poor swordsman from a moral perspective, that talented swordsmen in general are. (Including Maya. How many bodies did she have to climb to reach him? Meti would probably disagree with her saying “Not too many”)
Just like how a terrible illness isn’t one that fails to infect a body, but one that thoroughly and completely succeeds at that. Not terrible at being an illness, but terrible because it’s an illness.
(Though if so, failing to behead Maya should be irrelevant to Incubus being a “poor swordsman”. Did she misunderstand Meti’s philosophy, or did both of them misjudge Incubus?)
Though, like most of the other demiurges (Mottom, Mammon, Solomon David, and Jagganoth all previously acknowledge the harm they’ve caused, or are causing, in their ambitions), he’s still aware of the weight of his actions. He might not directly mention it about his own actions, but if he acknowledges others’ lives as a significant cost to reaching towards a goal (again, asking Maya about how many died for their fight to happen here)…and with him telling Zoss “your Heaven is rotten”, it’s not like he’s treating it as a good thing to reach Heaven through violence. Doesn’t change the harm he is causing, but I don’t think he entirely rejected Meti’s philosophy.
Incubus is a master of Sword Law, the principles of killing—he is most skilled at turning men into ghosts. But he is a terrible swordsman, because he believes he needs a sword to do so effectively. As a killer, he is proficient. As an individual, he is hollow and weak. Incubus holds the world in his palm, but clings to the holding of it. He is ruled by fear, hunger, and petty malice. It connects back to the principles of Royalty, which each of the demiurges fail to grasp in their own way.
Pree Pondering has the truth of it. Like all deviants and blood drinkers, Incubus clings too firmly to what little mastery He has. The other Demiurges, for what little it matters now that the Concordance has fallen, looked down on Him for many reasons. His key wasn’t just stolen, it was taken from a much diminished (at the time) opponent. Much like a foolish little boy with a sword, He neither knows the full wielding of His mastery, nor more importantly does He have the wisdom to not wield it at all. Time and time again, we see Him squandering his power. Giving it out to thousands upon thousands of puling, bent backed little weaklings like Himself. I have no doubt that any who bear his pink flame will perish before even a middling combatant. Hence why I also have very little fear for Pree AL-YISUN. I’ve saved my best wine, to enjoy while observing these future conflicts!
Which feels like a cycle of its own.
Using Incubus as an example, of course he’s ruled by fear — he grew up as an orphan in a famine. Of course he follows petty malice — most people around him seem to be either just as petty, or callously indifferent (Meti encouraged Maya to let him starve, for example), so why should he be any better?
(I don’t agree about him being ruled by fear, though. The fact that he has fear isn’t a weakness itself, just as it wasn’t for Het — and even when faced with people we know he’s afraid of, he’s still wilfull and defiant.
On the contrary, when speaking to Jagganoth earlier on, he seemed to try to hide his fear — if that includes hiding it from himself, then rather than being ruled by it, he’s trying to control it, which again was established as an equally bad idea in Het And The Three Companions)
At least with his viewpoint that “your Heaven is rotten” — that the way of the world is wrong (though borrowing from Tokyo Ghoul, I’d say “this world isn’t wrong, it simply is”) — might make him aware of the issues that made him the way he is.
But even then, he still seems to perpetuate the same problems. Still seems to be making others face the same fear and hunger, and the same disillusionment, that, with how he handles them, make him fall short of Royalty. (“Fall short of” feels like an inaccurate turn of phrase in regards to Royalty itself, oh well, it still gets across what I mean)
And if the world at-large remains “rotten” from that, it’ll keep reinforcing those same motives of fear, hunger, and spite.
—
Still, makes me wonder what it’s all for, in his mind. For all his talk, back at Rayuba, about how it’s scavengers that “win” in a famine, he still went to this battlefield in-person, even getting involved before Jagganoth or Metatron, rather than waiting for his adversaries to weaken each-other. And he still personally fought against Jagganoth. That sounds like it’s against the philosophy he spoke of there, against his survival instincts, and I honestly don’t think it’s malice driving him when he’s trying to push Maya back into being what he saw as “magnificent”.
So, what is he actually fighting for? Whatever the answer is, feels like something he’s kept to himself too much for it to be clear at this point.
A sword saint he may be, but dishonorable it is to lose to one with that flat an ass.
Lets go Auntie M! Kick his ass!
Why isn’t she dead yet? Or at least too injured to do anything.
When he took the key from her, he struck ten blows to cut her head off, but still failed. She’s a tough old bird.
I just wish Incubus finished this already so we can back to something interesting, like White Chain and Michael or Allison and the army of freaks.
Oh yes because the final battle between a former Demiurge and her traitorous adopted brother, the last students of the greatest sword saint to ever live, whose love has turned into a thousand-year-old immortal hatred representing the clashing ideologies of their own mentor’s flaws, isn’t something interesting
I mean, in direct context of an ongoing battle involving an arch-angel that wants to destroy the universe to reset it, a god eater who wants to destroy the universe to stop it from resetting, a god-worm who wants to do literally anything to the universe to have something interesting happen, and a god-king who impersonates the will of humanity itself to assert itself in the midst of all these insanely powerful immortality adjacent actors and their agencies?
Yeah sorry but Maya’s struggle with, honestly, mostly just war criminal guilt and some awkward found family relations is pretty fuckin’ boring.
The world will end soon enough, what’s your hurry?
Scope isn’t the only thing that makes things interesting. Maya and Incubus’ conflict is deeply personal on a level beyond any other than White Chain and Michael, and a pretty important part of the story’s philosophical themes about swordsmanship.
“dueling my nemesis on the face of a giant god ship with my blood sword to prove that im the coolest”
And that, little prince, is why you never will be.
In his foolishness, he doesn’t recognize that she’s also dueling her nemesis on the face of a giant godship, but she’s doing so with the handicap of not having a blood sword.
So she’s still out-cooling him.
This cut from Maya is gonna feel so amazing or so terrible
Longsword fencer here, and I must agree with Maya from a couple chapters back. This man truly is an awful swordsman. He needs to bend his knees more. And stop standing broad in front of his opponent. We don’t know that the Maybe Sword can thrust, but if it can he needs to square off to present a smaller target.
You’d think Jagganoth would have beaten these lessons into him, but then, such a coward wouldn’t directly challenge another Demiurge, even under the pretense of a “friendly” spar.
blackpool and scarborough
your winters’ spirits harbour
the danse macarbe
Everything I’ve ever done is an accident
This is axiomatic
“It was a momentary madness!”
“First blood isn’t as important as last blood.”
—Gerrard of the Weatherlight
Incubus waves that sword around an awful lot, leaves himself too open for a counterstrike.
Perhaps that hubris will be his undoing, in the end.
Truly, the Dream Eater is a poor swordsman indeed. Such superfluous movements, and see how He takes pride in his utter lack of discipline… Demiurges were bound by decorum in my day. Now? I need more wine…
Each strike fully intended to be the one needed to finish the job, each one fails. And yet in spite of the continuous stream of failures, that smug look remains glued to his face, for he believes in full certainty that the NEXT one will do it.
She’s doing her Aragorn thing, but she’s never had her Narsil repaired. That takes chutzpah.
Thank God he’s an extremely poor swordsman; otherwise, I’d be really worried for Maya.
Top tier duel.
Describing it sounds silly: fabulous shirtless guy uses blood sword to fight old lady using a sword with two inches of a broken blade.
Undoubtedly one of the flimsiest swords ever made.
Can it kill a god? Maybe. Maybe not.
I think Maya’s strategy here is to get killed gorily and then point out that she didn’t even have a sword, which makes Inqubis cringe for killing her and taking that long to do so.
“Fight me on the Face of a Dead God.”
Five Stars for coolest fight location ever on page 6-201.
Truly Dope.
Those Gods better stay dead, or at least one’s gonna wake up totally pissed at being turned into someone’s battleship and carelessly defaced in an End-of-the-World Duel.
“MY FACE !”