Arkady’s wounds are getting worse as drawing detail gets better… 😐
This magic is actually one of the first things we saw Ila use, she used it against it Rovak. It is actually one of the more common offense oriented magics, and it’s own whole category of magic, called Rupture. I will probably either detail it in comic or on the wiki at some point, but we also saw Nick Otte use it, as the IDS frequently programs it into their autocasters for mages good enough to use it.
It is fairly effective against both physical and Eidos reinforcement making it something of a generic trump card, though Tyler was able to defeat it fairly easily and Rovak was able to survive it, so ‘trump card’ might be overstating it. Kally’s ‘dragonfire’ belongs to the same general class of magic though, so… I suppose it’s a little relative.
Ila has tended to favor her acceleration magic, but she can’t effectively target multiple targets with it with Mium offline.
How did Ila know that someone behind her was about to fire? I’ll leave that as a mystery for now… 🙂
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Arkady still thinks she’s a kid. A sociopathic kid, perhaps, but still “just” a kid.
What do you bet he tries to hook her up with some sort of child protective agency when they get back home?
So… Did the guard trying to surrender get spared? It would seem tactically wise to spare him. As an example of what to do to minimize the hassle Ila has to deal with.
Dang, Arkady might just be, like, the smartest person without major direct contact with Peter yet.
(All I can brain for the rest of this: Hee~)
Hear that Peter? You need to start talking to yourself if you want to bring on your A game.
Yes, I know this is the autistic response. Just in case you didn’t notice, I may resemble that remark.
Absolutely love the page and the dialog. Makes the ” not aimed at us part” even better.
“We need to-“…. What? Help her? She is so far ahead of us, it’s not just another league, it’s a completely different game.
And thats realy what it is for her. A game. Sure she needed Miums help for Kardus, but anything else is just a minor inconvenience.
And when you finally have processed, that she is fighting your war (thst you were losing) as if its a Sunday afternoon walk you have to realize: There are things, not many but, there ARE things to tough for her. And then she calls her brother who is for her what she is for you.
Oh, and by the way, he is that guy with the scarf you know from school
Does indicate that a policy of giving free meals can yield unexpected dividends – or in this case, a mega-million lottery win 🙂
Yup, I’m calling it. Arkady’s in love. That boy’s totally smitten with Ila and utterly whipped–he just doesn’t know it yet. 😉
We went into this soiree knowing that the braid tied in Arkady’s hair means that he is engaged to the lady already injured in this war who has a similar braid in her hair. However Arkady has 2 times previous experience with Ila, and because he’s not a dumb guy, has figured out that she doesn’t quite react as normal. Added with the most recent events as given him conclusions that he is voicing to the military agents.
I find it interesting that Martin & Mir both used family mage coloring for the artificial human projects to disguise their nature. Because family Mages are expected to have weird powers.
As forArkady’s wounds looking worse when they are close up, I call it the “50 foot rule” for automobiles. A lot of Dents & body damage can be not visible when you’re standing 50 feet away however when you’re close you see all of the dings and scratches and broken bits. Of course once you’ve seen them you don’t unsee them in the future, you just know what telltale’s to look for.
Regarding the hair color, they actually did not. Ila naturally has white hair, Mium dyed it so she would look like a member of the Families/Designer Child as no one seems to have white hair naturally.
Mium F5 also had white hair, and F8 we know dyed his hair too, so probably originally had white hair. Persumably all the prototypes have white hair, which might be a side effect of how they are made, or just because it is the easiest hair color to dye (if they were intended to be able to infiltrate society as either designer or non designer humans).
Thanks for pointing that out, the color change must have happened prior to shopping for Ila, which coincidentally was the first place that we met Arkady. That’s a third time they have come into contact with each other. It was way back in 2015 by our reckoning. The link below was provided in the author commentary from this chapter though.
As far as we know, F8 has had 3 hair colors, white, blue, and now black.
http://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-wednesday-december-30th
Actually, that was the first time Ila showed up with her dyed hair.
But if she’s going to be presented as a designer child, it really aught to be done before her first public appearance as Mium’s sister… and it was.
Mium Efiate, incidentally, re-dyed his hair after the Kor’s World incident in chapter 4, and Mium Efive dyed his hair between chapter 6, page 46 and chapter 7, page 10, and further before chapter 8, page 16 (his next appearance).
Also, wounds that look like Arkady’s tend to look much worse after a bit, because they tend to not start bleeding right away. I think that could explain the difference between the panel 3 from the prior page and the panel 11 on this one.
It’s raining, which is making the blood run down his face. Least that’s the idea. Also, the level of detail in the art just tends to… vary a little.
I read this scene very differently from you. It felt to me like Arkady was more terrified than in love. Different people are different, and admittedly Arkady is engaged to Camilla?, one of the most terrifying mages around. but for me love is a very different feeling. True, it does leave me feeling scared shitless, but of rejection, not of life and limb.
Single typo. Last panel, critize should be criticize
Either I say that word wrong or the spelling that word is damn weird, lol.
Fixed, thanks!
I habe no idea if you’re saying it right or wrong, but you’re definitely saying it weird based on the typo. Remember, criticize is related to critic and critique.
Wow, a bleeding heart type character who’s smart. I almost never see that in fiction. It’s really nice to see. Arkady is really being a proper friend to Ila there, with that explanation of his.
“Bleeding heart” is the kind of description that really says more about the one making it than the other …
Damn bleeding hearts anyway.
From the wide range of personalities I’ve seen use the term, I think you may be wrong about that. It probably started as a negative descriptor, but I’ve often seen people call themselves bleeding heart types, in addition to heart on sleeve, etc. I think many people just like employing metaphors instead of boring (though accurate) descriptors like “caring” or “compassionate”.
Ila looks genuinely scary in panel 7. Like… still cute, sure. But genuinely scary. I think the shading is subtly different? The eyes are not the flat/cold eyes of Mium when he was in the F10, but they are also not the shiny normal Ila eyes. It is really well done.
Swear Arkady is seeing the same thing, as he seems to have just how dangerous Ila is.
Remember he had experience with her from the hospital as well. First she was trying to buy candy with $100 bill but then she jumped off the edge of a roof and went into Tyler’s room the same way the Assassin had. He also saw her magic in that room since he followed her in. He also saw her confusion of another person coming in that way and the Assumption she made about him being an assassin as well. We didn’t get to see the D-assassination, but Ila was likely responsible for that because the other people there were saying things like “Somebody stop her(assassin)” rather than stopping her themselves.
That was Ash in the hospital, the Princess’ (Camilla’s?) brother, not Arkady. That’s the person Arkady just talked to on the phone a bit. It seems like Arkady and Ash are friends (and likely future brother-in-laws)
Ash was apparently on Ila’s “okay” list until he tried to get her to talk to the cops about the whole thing.
Looks like my other comment ended up in moderation because of the embedded link. I’ll just put the information here and not as a link
We met Arkady earlier than I remembered going all the way back to December 30th 2015. At the beginning of chapter 5 he takes part in shopping with Ila. So that makes him three on the known visits and probably higher than that on the off-screen because of him hanging out with them as a function of NiomeFriend. We only see them when it’s something that drives the story forward but they probably hang out all the time.
I’m loving the dialog in the last panel. Scary stuff to think about.
Yep. Very well done dialog. Suddenly, my respect for and interest in Kady has gone up. He’s very smart and, possibly, has good intuition. There isn’t a magic spell or ability for intuition… is there?
I think Arkady has done a lot of maturing very quickly in these last couple pages. He got very close to dying, and I think he realized he wasn’t much a fan of killing either.
The really interesting thing is we deal so much with characters like Peter, Mium, Kally, Rovak, Miko, and Naomi who simply (while I love many of them) do not operate on normal human emotional spectrum. Arkady may stand out because he is acts a lot more like an actual normal person would. Still a powerful mage on his own right, but actually sort of freaked out by what is going down, and smart enough to still process it.
He already suspected something was wrong with Ila all the way back to his first meeting. I think this has sort of confirmed his suspicious, as well as really illustrated how scary someone that can commit mass murder is in person.
I just hope that Arkady realizes he might need to be a positive influence, as while Naomi may be a “good” moral influence on a D&D alignment chart, she is not a exactly a role model when it comes not solving all your problems with extreme violence (though best I can tell Naomi does not typically kill people).
Now that you mention it: I don’t recall Naomi killing anyone or anything, aside from maybe machines or Atter’s magical constructs.
As I recall, she beat up someone suspicious with an autocaster who was snooping around Mium at the school. (Didn’t she ask him to leave and he attacked her?) And she beat up some IDS agents who came to apprehend Peter. And she wrecked some Kor’s World robots that came attacking on school property… or were those things mecha with Kor’s World pilots?
I’m pretty sure Peter would not have chosen Naomi to be MYM’s moral compass if she was quick to kill or capable of murder.
The thing is it is not even really clarified that Rovak kills all the people he explodes, it is just assumed he usually does as he explodes them. While what Naomi does is much less likely to kill people, we do not really see how many of the goons she batters get back up.
I would guess her body count that we have seen is zero, but she is certainly capable of killing someone by punching. I think this is why she usually holds back. Against the Monster Hunters she mostly said as much, and against the Kor’s World soldier it was clear she was going a lot more berserk than she usually does against normal business suit wearing goons.
Given her whole personality I do not think she kills on purpose, but as we saw with Acalia she is willing to be brutal if you insist on pissing her off. I strongly suspect Acalia lived, but having your arm traumatically ripped off could definitely be fatal from blood loss and shock, but that was because they were actually going to kill Tyler.
I think Naomi morality goes something like “Harmless Goons” -> “Rough Them Up”, “Powerful Adversaries” > “Beat the Stuffing Out of Them”, “Try to kill her allies?” > “Whatever is necessary to make you stop”. Technically Ila seems to follow (roughly) the same spectrum most of the time. We have seen her (probably) not lethally take people down by flicking them with the green hand. She just has a lot faster descent into “time to become an adorable little murder machine”, and clearly once the kill mode is engaged, she sees very little point in being half-assed about it.
An interesting point from her last page makes me wonder if she really even considers the difference between knocking people via punching them, exploding them with lasers all that much. She may not really distinguish between Naomi rampaging through goons knocking them all out and the mass murder. She has a fuzzy concept of dying, and very little concern for people she does not care about dying in the first place. She may view killing people as just a better version of knocking them out.
She knew where everyone was because she got a good view of them when she jumped in (Tactics people are a good plan) and listened for footsteps.
Also Arkady seems to have come to a realization about Ila. And realizes exactly how unstable she could be.
Probably also as a function of needing to detect eidos to use eidos. That “pistol” seems to be an autocaster rather than a ballistic projectile launcher.
Yeah, I recognize that 7th panel pose. The “you think things are bad right now?” pose. The “did you think I was just going to explode you?” pose. The “even if you are a military dropship, you’re still fucked” pose.
Why not just use the rifle though? We know she can do that with the sniper rifle, and it would be likely even more devastating.
Ila ran out of ammo.
Well we know she normally accelerates smaller objects, what would happen if she accelerated the rifle? It may not kill somebody out right however it would definitely take them right out of the fight. Admittedly it’s better if she totally kills everybody because then they would only know what happened not who happened. Rovak had the additional data which let him understand who happened to Kardus.
I think several people happened to Kardus, but Ila, then Mym, then Ila again clearly is not a healthy tag-team combo….
Ahh, but the way Mium took the arm was something Ila could have acquired from Mium in other more conventional ways rather than Mium doing it himself. Rovak didn’t think that it was Mium because of the exploded nature of the corpse. That isn’t Mium’s nature or forte.
I told that bozo to stand down in the last page. he should’ve listened. as for Arkady, he needs medical attention.
Facial wounds can look really bad while still being superficial.
He may need medical attention from internal injuries, and his fiancee would PROBABLY prefer that he get his face tended to, so he doesn’t scar up, but he doesn’t look particularly injured.