Chainsaw Man #53-61 (part two)
The comic loses no time in starting the assassin encounters, while simultaneously getting back to the goofiness that defined the earlier volumes and that "Chainsaw Man" has sort of been getting away from in the last few arcs.
...you know, it only occurred to me right now as I typed the above words, but those tonal shifts are completely simultaneous with Power's departure from and return to the comic. Which in turn is making me realize how important to "Chainsaw Man's" tonal balance Power really is. We didn't need her in the first volume, when the absurdity of Denji's life and circumstances were enough to keep things silly and surreal, but since then she (and her interactions with Denji) has served as a magnetic pole constantly yanking the story back in that direction.
I feel like without Power to be even more childish than him, Denji would either be forced to be serious more often, or else get annoying to read about. She really is an essential ingredient.
Anyway, the "secure Denji from the assassins" plan actually turns out to not be what Makima made it sound like. True to her typical MO, it's actually "use Denji as bait to ambush the assassins until their patrons decide this is getting too expensive and stop sending them." So, she's having Denji and Power do highly regular patrols, shadowed by an extensive support team including Aki, Angel, and a whole bunch of newly-introduced mooks. Some of them will be visible, others hidden.
Not sure if this is the best plan for its stated purpose, but she probably has some secret agenda of her own that it serves.
...
God I love it when the story realizes what an asshole Sensei is and frames them accordingly.
...
It also doesn't help that the squad of agents Makima has directly handling Denji and Power are exactly the wrong type of personality for this job. Like, Denji and Power are just minding their own business, daring each other to hunt the ducks swimming around in the city park's pond, when they start freaking out on Denji for - of all things - picking up a dropped sushi piece. Because apparently bacteria are one of the threats they're charged with defending him from.
Aki and Angel even back the squares up, like the bunch of suck-ups they are. It's almost too bad Aki and Angel have learned to respect each other, they were much more pleasant to be around and also much more entertaining when they hated each other.
Meanwhile, the backup squad of irregulars that Makima is bringing in to support this operation from hiding have personalities much more suitable for wrangling Denji and Power.
To the point where it almost seemed suspicious to me that their positions weren't reversed.
These suspicions outgrew the "almost" qualifier when it was revealed that these are supposedly some of the toughest mundane combatants in Public Security's employ, and that they also have mixed (at best) feelings about Makima. To the point where two of them feel the need to warn the third, less-experienced-on-the-subject, member of their group about something to do with her.
By the by, isn't it a bit odd that these important personnel are being made to drive across Honshu in a civilian car with no escorts when enemy action is expected?
The car is waylaid and all its occupants buried in shallow graves before we can ever hear the details of their reservations about Makima.
It's possible that she didn't arrange for (or at least stack the deck in favor of and hope for) this outcome, but I would be surprised.
The ambushers are those three American brothers, and they chose their target well. We now learn that the brothers have limited shapeshifting powers, which they use to impersonate the murdered agents. That said, despite the competent execution of this attack, the ensuing scene reminds us that these three are kinda stupid assholes.
More than kinda tbh.
They move on toward Tokyo, planning to rendezvous with Denji and his existing security detail and conduct their hit. The way they do it is a bit more complicated than just that, though. One of them goes ahead of the others and finds the first government devil-hunters that he can in Tokyo. Which turns out to be Kobeni and Violence on patrol together.
We don't get to learn much about Kobeni during this stroll of theirs that gets interrupted. Just a few more details about the nature of her anxiety, her deprivation, and the abusive family that gave her that anxiety and deprivation. We do learn a lot more about the Violence Fiend, though. And about fiends in general, assuming his experiences really are representative.
Fiends aren't just brain-addled devils puppetting human bodies. The human body itself also plays a role in defining the fiend's identity, depending on how much neural decay occurred by the time the devil moved in. Which naturally leads one to wonder how much of Power is really the Blood Devil and how much of her is the girl whose body the former reanimated. I'm guessing that fiendish cognitive ability also correlates with how intact the brain is, in which case the smartest fiends are also the ones with the most human in their gestalt beings.
...
How do fiends even happen anyway?
Is there something that can prevent a slain devil from returning to hell and reincarnating there forcing it to latch onto a human carcass instead?
Or maybe it's the opposite? After being killed in hell, some devils find themselves grasping at human bodies on earth instead of just manifesting a form of their own?
I feel like this will be explained soon, but it's not being explained yet.
...
Anyway, Violence is either way more human and self-controlled than most fiends (or even devils for that matter), or is doing a good job of pretending to be. The drugs they have him on via that mask may also be playing a role in this, of course. Good for Kobeni, she needs someone normal-ish to go get ice cream with.
Unfortunately, the ice cream date is soon interrupted by the arrival of the disguised American assassin, who claims to be a lone survivor of the ambush on the agents' car. I guess they weren't confident they could prevent the waylaying of the car from being noticed (or perhaps it was just a matter of not knowing the precise destination within Tokyo), so they instead opted for the stratagem of just looking for someone Public Safety affiliated and doing this.
His ploy honestly shouldn't have worked as well as it did. Even he muses to himself about Kobeni and Violence's sloppiness as they bring him in phone contact with their superiors without so much as verifying his stolen identity. And then bring him to rendezvous with Denji and Power's escort group without realizing how off it is for him to want to get straight to work without a proper debriefing about the attack first.
This stage of the American brothers' plan goes better than they could have hoped. The disguised one is introduced to Denji, whose name and face they hadn't known until now (they'd only seen video of him in chainsawman form prior to being sent).
Goddamn he's laying it on thick, lol.
Well, fortunately for Denji, while this conversation is going on, Power is twisting Kobeni's arm into letting her drive her car. Kobeni has her most spineless moment to date and believes Power when the latter tells her she has a driver's license.
Power, of course, insists that this is all Kobeni's fault. That is, until the moment when everyone realizes that the "agent" has changed his form upon death, and is actually a shapeshifting imposter, at which point she takes credit for the kill. Denji, of course, regenerates in short order...
-___-
...
Doofy shapeshifting assassin brothers who the protagonists defeat by accident.
God fucking damnit, Fujimoto.
...
This extended JoJo reference is intercut with another subplot, this one treated with significantly more gravitas. Those tribal (Soviet-aligned?) assassins who we saw hunting foxes and musing on the ease of taking human life earlier have also made it to Japan. They seem to already know who Denji is, so yeah, probably Soviet since the USSR are also the ones who sent Reze. It turns out to not just be the unblinking knife-wielder Tolka who went to Japan, but also his sickly, lifespan-reduced mentor who I don't think has been named yet. The two of them manage to arrange to get lunch at the same restaurant that Denji and Power are annoying their handlers at. In a series of accidental-looking brushes and close passes, Sickly is able to surreptitiously poke Denji three times with a certain metal nail that she owns.
So she's literally got the same deal as Aki, then. She's been using one of the Curse Devil's faustian weapons, only a sneaky assassin version rather than a big sword. In addition to reduced lifespan (which she seems alarmingly willing to trade away even more of, perhaps having written herself off and caring only about leaving a big pile of many for Tolka and/or improved status for whatever peripheral society they hail from), Sickly seems to have lost sensation in several of her fingers, and to have made other sensory compromises as well.
Earlier, she mentioned that she'd introduce Tolka to her contracted devils - plural - before she dies. So, that's confirmation that you can have more than one diabolical pact running at a time. And also implies that her health problems may be the cumulative effects of multiple devils all taking something different from her.
The arrival and subsequent vehicular homicide of the third Oingo Boingo brother ends up foiling this duo's plans before either of them can poke Denji a fourth time. Do they need to start over from the beginning now, and poke him another four times, or do they still have three down? I don't think the comic has ever specified if all four hits need to happen within a certain amount of time or not. Depending on how it works, they might have an easy shot at Denji in their next encounter.
This assassin arc is a lot more screwball than I was expecting going in. Power's return and Makima's absence account for some of this, but not all of it.
Anyway, that's it for now.
