Chainsaw Man #53-61 (part five)
Quanxi's pact with the Crystal Meth Devil doesn't make her quite fast enough to outrun Aki's precognition. This is probably the only reason that Denji survives the first five seconds of her attack. It's quickly made clear that most of Quanxi's battles aren't so much "fights" as "speedblitz murders that are over before anyone else knows they've begun."
Oh no, not Nakamura!
Furthermore, Aki's new Future Devil powers might let him see a few seconds into the future, but his reflexes are still just his reflexes. Knowing where Quanxi is going to attack from only helps so much when he can't move his body fast enough to compensate. Angel, likewise, isn't any faster than a normally-fast human, and can only act on Aki's precognition as quickly as he can speak. Both of them are lucky that Quanxi opted to go for less-lethal for her follow up attack.
They might actually have Angel's power to thank for that, thinking about it more. If Quanxi knew about Angel's powers beforehand, she might have opted to switch weapons to avoid skin or blood contact. Granted, I'm not entirely sure what she DID hit them with, as the panels are a bit confusing, but either way Nakamura is dead and they're just unconscious. Now it's just Denji and Power versus Quanxi, and neither of them have the speed and/or AOE to stand a chance against her. Also, unlike with the other people she's been fighting up until now, Quanxi is specifically here to kill Denji and extract Pochita. She's contractually unable to be merciful here, regardless of whether or not she'd be inclined that way to begin with.
Fortunately, outside the mall, more reinforcements have arrived, and these ones are named characters with arcs in progress. Beam and Violence were earlier dispatched by Makima to detach from her Santa-hunting mission and supplement the mall fighters, and they arrive alongside Kobeni and Vodka Van Helsing. We haven't seen VVH do any serious fighting up until now; he's either just been having grim conversations with Makima and Aki, or drunkenly abusing Denji and Power in the hope that it'll train them or something. We know he's tough enough to run those two ragged, but this scene is his chance to really establish his threat level as he confidently tells the others to run on ahead and let him handle the entire fiendgirl harem on his own.
Also, this scene definitively answers a question I've had for quite some time.
You can indeed have multiple ongoing diabolical contracts at a time. It's not just edge cases like the Curse Devil's weapons being available for anyone to pick up and make one-time transactions with. The rarity of multi-patroning is simply on account of devils most often taking things like body parts for their pacts, and only an addled fanatical maniac like Vodka would be willing to give up so many of those.
...
Interestingly, there's a parallel to Denji's situation back at the beginning of the manga. Forced to give up multiple body parts to stave off the loansharks.
Whether or not he had as little choice in that decision as Denji did remains to be seen, of course. But for now it did jump out at me.
Actually...hold up, there might be something else important in there too. The Knife Devil and Needle Devil are listed among Vodka's patrons. Needle is an edge case, but Knife definitely seems like it should fall into the "weapon devil" category. Has Vodka Van Helsing secretly been Knifeman all along?
Hmm. I somehow don't think so. He seemed too genuinely unfamiliar with Denji's state of being for it to have been an act (and why would he bother feigning ignorance anyway?). Well, the other possibility is that Knife (and maybe Needle) could physically merge with human contractors, but are also capable of making more conventional pacts. In this case, Chainsaw, Katana, and Bomb are also probably capable of granting power to warlocks the normal way, even if they prefer symbiosis.
If that, in turn, is the case, then I wonder if a weapon devil can be symbiotic and grant powers to other people at the same time. That would be a real trip, if it turned out that Pochita has been granting minor chainsaw powers to warlocks around the world while also being Denji's heart.
...
Anyway, we don't see the battle, but it can be inferred that the Claw, Knife, and Needle devils grant some pretty handy powers, because a minute later Vodka is doing this:
He seems to have beaten them fast enough that he was still able to drag two of them into the mall and confront Quanxi before the people who he'd send ahead of himself could make it to her. While pulling these two humanoids with him and not letting them escape. Either Violence, Beam, and Kobeni had a serious mishap on their way in (a run-in with the Soviet assassins, perhaps), or Vodka has speed powers that almost rival Quanxi's. Probably his boon from the Needle Devil, in that case. You use needles to inject amphetamines.
He arrives just as Quanxi is about to kill the last conscious member of Denji's guard retinue. While forcing her to back down, he reveals the reason why he seemed to know so much about her during the briefing scene a few issues ago.
Huh. Well what's this, now?
Vodka has Denji and Power take over hostage-holding duties while he and Quanxi sit down at a food court table and try to resolve this diplomatically.
From the way they talk, I get the impression that Vodka is originally Chinese (or at least lived a big part of his early life in China), rather than Quanxi having once lived in Japan. In either case, they were once close. Partners in crime, or partners in crime-fighting. Or both, as the case often seems to be in this world. If Quanxi was any less gay, I'd perhaps suspect they were more than just teammates.
Hmm, probably more on the crime than the fighting it side, actually. Going by how surprised she is to see him working for a government agency in formal rather than one-off-contract capacity.
I'm also getting the impression that Quanxi is older than she looks. Either that, or he was the team dad and she was the precocious murder-child team sidekick.
This conversation goes on for quite a while. And, while we learn a lot from it, and some important plot stuff gets teased, it's another case of this arc spending too much time on characters the reader hasn't been made to care about. Quanxi is amusing and sexy and all, but the story hasn't done anything to build investment in her. Van Vodka, ditto, he's funny and quirky, but his main role in the story up until now has just been bullying Denji and sometimes making cryptic remarks to Aki and Makima.
Maybe it's just me, and most readers are actually into him as a character, but for me I really feel like I needed to see more sides to him before this point in order to care much.
Now, WITH THAT SAID, one of the tidbits that gets revealed in this exchange opens the door to make Vodka Van Helsing a lot more interesting going forward depending on how it's developed. As he dryly repeats his insistence for Quanxi to surrender and come peacefully, he shows her some notes he's pre-prepared.
So, yeah. That's kind of a big deal. Like I said, he might end up being promoted to main character alongside Angel in the following chapters.
Not that I expect his "kill Makima" plan to succeed, of course, but I expect it to fail in a way that will persuade or enable Denji to do the job himself. The entire story is building up to a climactic confrontation between Denji and Makima, after all, and while this comic is fond of subverting expectations I don't think it will be able to subvert that one without making more people angry at it than I've noticed from the general fandom public.
Whether Vodka himself dies in the attempt, of course, is a much more open question.
Quanxi tells him that she's not interested in his plan. How she hopes to wriggle free of this situation in that case, I suppose we'll see. For now though, the reasoning she gives him is extremely telling.
She launches into this story about a TV news anchor who she used to have a crush on, until a bunch of scandals about her came to light and she was revealed to be an all-around abusive, hypocritical person. Quanxi tried to ignore the unpleasant things she'd learned about this newswoman and keep on innocently fantasizing about her, but she couldn't do it. The joy and pleasure in it was gone. Once she knew the truth about her, she couldn't enjoy it anymore. So, she tries not to rock the boat, not to learn too much, just enjoy what she can when she can and try to improve her and her fiends' lives in little ways when opportunities present.
In other words, she's a sexed-up version of Denji. Or rather, of the trap that Denji's letting himself be drawn into. The city mouse who enjoys the abundant food and keeps itself willfully ignorant of just how many cats are skulking around. Denji is doing this on someone's leash and Quanxi is doing it more or less on her own power, but at the end of the day both of them are only able to enjoy their status quos at the sufferance of the state. A state that knows it can demand anything of them at any time.
It's notable that the Chinese official responded to Quanxi's own demands with a "we'll see," and that non-promise was good enough for Quanxi. The government said the necessary words for her to pretend she's doing this for a good reason and not just out of fear of losing her peaceful downtime life and creature comforts.
Once again, I just wish it was Denji himself processing this, rather than minor characters being mirrors to him while he just stands in the background holding a fiend at knifepoint.
Anyway, the scene is ended when Boingo finally catches up and tries to get a headshot on Denji before he can transform.
A confusing action blur ensues, as people push each other out of the way, break free from being grabbed, etc.
Still no sign of Beam, Kobeni, and Violence. Yeah, I'm thinking they and the Soviet duo are squaring off elsewhere in the mall. The other two members of Quanxi's harem who Vodka mentioned got away from him before might also be involved. That's my suspicion, at least.
On this frantic, unclear note, the chapter and the volume both end.
Like I said, the assassin arc is ongoing. If all this has just been the lead-in, then there's still time for our established protagonists to take center stage. While I'm fine with Quanxi and Vodka joining the "established protagonist" category, I'd really prefer they not do it at the expense of the people I'm already invested in.
That said? The subtext we've gotten for Denji throughout these nine issues is pretty impressive, and the final dialogue between Vodka and Quanji is what ties it all together.
Weapon-devil hybrids like Denji are a known quantity, albeit rare and sought-after. Other countries do have a couple of them. The existence of the Chainsaw Man isn't an international upset in and of itself. The problem is that diabolical parties are gunning for Pochita specifically for whatever political reasons, and other countries (unless we've been lied to) are specifically trying to prevent Japan specifically from having this hybrid. With Makima at least claiming that she is the reason they don't trust Japan with these things.
She's also the one keeping Denji on his leash. Bribing him into compliance with (extremely meager; he's pathetically easy to please on account of his deprived upbringing) creature comforts and empty promises of sex while also preventing him from developing any kind of life outside of her control.
The not-actually-that-good status quo is, itself, the threat to Denji's relative comfort. Makima is the one keeping him in this situation, and Makima is one of the main reasons (if not THE main reason) that everyone keeps trying to kill him. And she's not going to release him, no matter what. She seems to value him way too highly, for whatever (likely related to Pochita's history with the other devils) reasons.
Vodka putting the words "kill Makima" on the page brings it into focus. If Denji is ever to know happiness, Makima needs to die. Enemies will never stop throwing themselves at him while he belongs to her, and she will never give him up.
Quanxi burying her head in the sand and deciding to accept lies and enjoy crumbs rather than try to solve the real problems, I think, represents the failure state that Denji keeps getting pulled into. I doubt it'll work out well for her.
Finally, there's a cute little omake at the end of the volume, showing us how Power remembers the car incident:
Never change, Power. Never change.
But anyway, Chainsaw Man will continue once I reach the next volume in the queue.
