Chainsaw Man V6 (part sharknado)
I can basically explain issue #50 of Chainsaw Man in two images:
A highly mobile, rooftop-leaping battle with hurricane-force winds tearing over everything isn't one that Aki, Angel, or Violence can participate in. In fact, Angel's lightweight, winged body makes him more vulnerable to these winds than a human would be. Violence, meanwhile, might be stronger and faster than a human, but that still doesn't allow him to cling to the ground and participate in combat at the same time.
So, Violence hunkers down somewhere sheltered and watches the spectacle (amusingly, he even says out loud that he likes kaiju movies and that this might play out similarly to one. Violence is...something, alright). Aki would probably retreat as well, but Angel is having trouble pulling himself out of the wind, and Aki - in the conclusion of an arc he's been undergoing for the last two dozen issues - ends up doing much more than just risking his life to keep Angel from being blown away. He actually, at one point, grabs onto Angel's bare skin rather than just his clothes when he can't get a good enough grip with the latter. Angel's touch isn't necessarily instant death. He can turn the intensity of his death-touch up or down. However, he does not have the ability to turn it entirely off.
That leaves Aki with just a few months to live, if I'm recalling correctly? Probably less at this point.
Angel has been claiming he wishes he were dead ever since Aki met him. He's also been doing everything he can to convince Aki that he should be killed, insincerely running his mouth about how humans should all suffer before they die and other edgy nonsense like that. Aki barely has any time left, he doesn't want to die, and he has something important he wants to do while he still can. He has every reason to let Angel die here.
But...despite all his insistences to the contrary, Angel is struggling against the wind. He visibly doesn't want to die either, no matter what he says. And Aki can't let him.
As a reminder, Angel isn't a human symbiont like Chainsaw Man. He isn't even a fiend puppetting an empty human body. He's a full-on devil, head to toe, no human mind or matter in there at all. When we first met him, Aki was barely willing to tolerate the existence of Denji in his department, let alone free-willed fiends like Power. And now, he's doing this for a devil while the devil itself tells him not to.
It's pretty intense. Like, for real. Chainsaw Man is weirdly good at making you feel things despite not taking itself remotely seriously, but this bit hits hard even by the comic's standards.
Another important detail of this sequence is that, right before Aki grabs Angel's hand, when Angel is sure he's going to be swept up in the wind and bashed to death against a building or eaten by Typhoon or whatever, he has a...hallucination? Flashback? I'm not quite sure. But he closes his eyes for a moment and pictures this:
I remember Makima saying that she wrangled Angel from a small town that he'd just manifested in and subsequently depopulated (though that last detail is seeming increasingly out of character, unless Angel has been pulling a fast one on us the entire time and actually is a genocidal monster). I don't recall if they mentioned this town being coastal. So, maybe this is a memory from whatever happened at that village, maybe it's something else. In either case, the woman with the chain-mark on her head...who is she, and is that chain a coincidence, or does it directly relate to chainsaws?
Unknown. Mystery being teased. Not nearly enough hints yet for me to figure it out. Or, well, maybe there have been enough hints, but I've been reading the manga over too long a period of time for me to remember all of them. That's also a possibility.
Anyway, amid all this mystery and drama and pathos, we're still periodically panning up to Denji riding Beam into battle and saying things like this:
It's even funnier because, last issue, Reze was chiding him for just "waving his chainsaws around like an idiot" and not using his powers more tactically or creatively. Well, against Typhoon that apparently IS all that he needs to do,
provided his mount can keep him close.
Typhoon's winds make it hard for Reze to maneuver just like it does the good guys, and her ranged attacks aren't super-accurate in these conditions either. Additionally, Typhoon keeps spitting blood at her whenever Denji manages to land a hit, so it's clear Typhoon is both a bigger threat for the moment and also needs to go down before Bomb Girl does.
A lesson that Denji learns while also being Denji, which is...basically as lol as everything else about this fight sequence.
Denji's mixed feelings about Reze's perfectly good-looking leg healing back a panel later are, likewise, adorably cringe in the way that only Denji can be.
Typhoon ends up being pretty much a sitting duck against anything that manages to penetrate his wind current defence. He's just a big blob of cloud-shaped flesh that can't do much outside of weather control. So, it doesn't take long for Denji and Beam to reduce him to a building-sized mass of gore piled up in one of the ruined streets.
Maybe we'll be meeting the Typhoon Fiend soon. Maybe not. In any case, it's just Reze left now.
She manages to get the drop on them from above and send them blasting back into the pavement in that truly agonizing-looking fashion that we've seen her do before. But, Denji oh-so-graciously makes Beam tank it for him, leaving himself mostly unharmed.
l...think?...Beam is still alive. Undead. Whatever you'd describe fiends as. Not sure though. Kind of a dick move on Denji's part, but also probably a dick move that Beam was okay with. Still a darkly funny contrast to what Aki just did for Angel, though.
So. Issue #51 starts with Denji facing down against Reze, alone. Both of them have been wounded and healed a bunch of times. Hard to say which of them is worse off at this point.
Heh. With the storm gone now, it would be extremely possible for any or all of Aki, Angel, Violence, and Kobeni to quietly scale the building they're on and gank Reze while she's distracted. I'm sure she's aware of that possibility, but that doesn't mean she necessarily has a way of preventing it. Collapsing the building under them would help in some ways, but the dust cloud that creates would hurt in others.
The fight initially goes against Denji, with Reze blowing off more limbs and throwing him around the rooftop. But he remains confident. And also starts asking some armor-piercing questions. One of them being a question I asked myself a post or two ago.
Why did she string him along for so much time?
If she really just wanted Pochita, why did she even bother asking Denji to run away with her? His participation wasn't needed. She could have killed him as soon as his back was turned in that empty school. Just like she ended up doing a bit later, after he turned down her offer (and also happened to be in a more public place, after enough time had passed for Beam to catch up).
Would bringing him back to Russia (or wherever she's actually from) alive be any easier than bringing a restrained Pochita?
Maybe it would. But still. The way she went about this really is very strange for someone with her powerset, and Denji thinks her reasons might not have been as rational as she might have convinced herself they were. Maybe he's right. Maybe he isn't. But either way, the strangeness of Reze's whole approach is something the story itself is aware of and wants the reader to be thinking about.
He also has a comeback for when Reze points out that he has nowhere to run and she's already overpowering him again. Specifically, he points out that she taught him how to swim. One lesson wouldn't be enough for a normal person to be able to get anywhere in the water, but his physiology isn't a normal person's.
Denji also noticed something that...well...maybe the comic illustrated this for the reader, but if so it slipped by me. Reze's explosives seem to be a lot more specific than the generality implied by "bomb." She specifically only creates blackpowder explosions. Denji noticed that she doesn't seem able to detonate parts of her body that get wet.
And, he just learned how to use his chains as grappling tools for latching onto other creatures.
Yeah, you see where this is going.
I'm honestly not sure what prevented her from blasting the chains off of herself. Or detonating the two of them off of each other while they were on the way down to the ocean's surface. Did he make sure to soak her with blood or something right before he struck? Well, somehow or other, Denji manages to tie her to himself and keep her from exploding long enough for them to both be underwater.
Or...maybe what happened was that the building they were standing on was built over the water, part of a shipyard or somesuch, and so when she tried to blast herself free she just sent both of them tumbling down into the waves?
Another case where Fujimoto's clumsiness at visual storytelling during action sequences gets in the way of my understanding. He really is a great artist in general, but these fight scenes keep being hard for me to follow, and I'm pretty sure that this isn't just a me problem.
Anyway, I assume that reinforcements (either the rest of Denji's squad, or additional backup from Public Security and/or the military) just weren't able to get there in time to obviate Denji's ploy. And, it turns out, they aren't able to get there in time to fish the bodies out of the water, though granted that might not be possible at all depending on how deep they fell and how much active swimming one or both of them was doing.
Also, I'm not sure if this was made explicit until now, but while in Chainsaw Man form Denji doesn't need air. Presumably to allow him to keep living while his head is a chainsaw monster with no nostrils or trachea. Reze is similar. So, drowning isn't an issue, and by morning the two find themselves washed up on the beach somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo. And, uh, Beam is also there.
I'll take that to mean that either Denji hooked him with the chains as well and pulled his shark-form down with them to serve as extra weight/ballast, or that Reze did in fact blow the building up and cause Beam to fall with them. In either case, there was presumably enough blood in the water after recent events to revive him, and he helped guide them back to shore before passing out in his humanoid form. I think? I guess? Something like that.
Well, the three of them come to more or less at the same time. My next post will cover what happens next, up through the end of the volume.
The entire volume, up until this final chapter, is one big fight scene. Reze stronk.
