Chainsaw Man #53-61 (part four)

The battle named out of universe as "the Mess" initiates with Denji, Power, Aki, Angel, and the body guards being attacked by a horde of Santa Clause's "dolls." They're in a shopping mall when this happens, for that classic Romero flavor. Santa himself is perched at a coffee shop a couple of streets away, where he can inconspicuously control his army while being outside of the probable evacuation zone and surrounded by civilians.

Santa really has a Wildbow-ish feel to him, with his powers, tactics, and limitations, doesn't he?

As Makima rallies a team that includes Beam, Violence, and the Spider Devil to hunt for Santa while his army is busy, the other assassins decide they need to swoop in now and grab the Chainsaw Devil before Santa can. The Soviet duo quietly infiltrate the mall while shoppers flee, preparing the curse needle for its final jab into Denji.

In the same bathroom where they're gearing up, Boingo locks himself in a stall to sit through one last panic attack before trying to collect the bounty himself. He might be mad with grief and having an existential crisis, but his crumbled mind seems to have temporarily compacted itself into the shape of "I owe it to my brothers to get the job done." Not sure how long he'll be able to hold itself that way, but for now he's going in.

Amusingly, the American and Soviet agents pass right by each other completely unaware.

Finally, it turns out that Quanxi has finally gotten up off her collection of asses and do her actual job. She and said butt menagerie are inbound on the mall, and happen to run into a squad of Japanese reinforcements who were just sent in to supplement Denji's group.

The translation is apparently something like “Take them down girls, just like last time.”

I suspect this isn't going to go well for the unnamed Public Security mooks.

...

On a side note, before they finally set out we actually have a full-page drawing of their last fivesome at the hotel before the battle. Like, complete nudity, mouths and fingers on each other, nips and vag just barely hidden by strategically placed limbs and bits of bedsheet, etc. TOS-compliant adaptation below:

It's weird. Not just for this to be in a shonen manga (even by Japanese standards, this has got to be pushing it), but it also seems to be less about telling the story and more just random cheesecake in a comic that's generally not sunk to that. Basically, why here if not in other places earlier?

It's pretty good cheesecake, that said. Makes me curious if Fujimoto does actual porn on the side. It just seems really out of place.

...

Well, anyway! As the other parties all converge on the mall, Denji's group starts fending off the first wave of dolls. It turns out that the one extra-overbearing bodyguard who was freaking out the most over Denji's sushi incident a couple issues ago is actually pretty powerful, on account of his contract with the Stone Devil.

Or the Petrification Devil. Statue Devil. Whatever, he can turn whole groups of people into stone. He just needs to make sure allies and civilians stand back when he uses this power, since it doesn't distinguish between friend and foe within the affected area, but he was very well-chosen for this situation.

It also turns out that fiends and symbionts are immune to the contagious dollification, so while the humans need to stand back and engage at range Denji and Power have little to fear from getting in close and doing their thing.

Santa must have another trick he's holding in reserve, in that case. Swarms of individually fragile mooks are literally the one thing Denji is best at killing, and Santa must have been able to infer that after seeing the news footage. So, he's either planning to use hostage tactics (unlikely to work, but he wouldn't necessarily know that) or he's just using the dolls to eliminate Denji's guards before deploying something else.

Or, alternatively, Germany in particular cares much less about capturing the Chainsaw Devil than about making sure anyone besides Makima has it, and Santa's job is just to wipe out Denji's protectors and make things easy for other countries' assassins.

Everyone gets to be useful in this mob battle, and overall it's a pretty good action scene. Denji and Power hold choke-points to prevent the vulnerable humans from getting flanked. The petrification guy and another guard who has a Fox Devil pact (as a reminder, it was earlier established that Fox is a gregarious, accommodating devil who has relatively cheap contracts with many humans) use their AOE powers to turn the main vectors into killzones. Aki can't do much damage, to his frustration, but that doesn't mean he's useless; his combat precognition lets him warn everyone when and where the next wave of dolls is about to come from. Finally, Angel puts some of his own soul-weapons to good effect. And also implies some more implications about how exactly they work.

Five years of lifespan to kill five dolls with a single swipe.

"I'm sorry, everyone, I need to use you."

So, if I'm understanding this right, Angel has a reservoir of energy that he (involuntarily) extracts from anyone who touches him. He uses that energy to forge his weapons, some of which are created with a one-time investiture, and others (like this sword) actively drain more from his reserves during use. Angel also has some moral hesitation about using the actively energy-consuming weapons.

This last detail could suggest that Angel is still, remotely, draining more life from the people he's touched in the past, or it could just be that Angel knows that the faster he burns through his supply the sooner he'll need to refill it.

Alternatively, it could be that the soul-energy Angel extracts is still conscious, to at least some extent. Literal ghostlets of the people he's touched, suffering as he burns them for weapon power.

Hmm. I think I'm beginning to understand the "angel" thematics of his power. It's an angel who casts the souls of sinners into hell to burn, after all.

...

Also, I feel like this is some direct FMA inspiration, if not a conscious shoutout. It's pretty much the exact same scene as Hohenheim pulling out his constituent Xerxians and apologizing for having to use them like this.

...

Regardless, Angel's hesitance to explain the precise mechanics of this to those bodyguard-warlocks could also mean a lot, or nothing. Shame, guilt, fear of learning that these humans are more callous than he himself in, or just not wanting to get into a long conversation mid-battle.

I feel like Angel is starting to become the story's tritagonist. It's been slow and subtle, but at this point it's hard not to notice. When he first showed up, Angel was just one of several new tame devils and fiends that were introduced together in the Fireteam raid. Since then though, the other newcomers either have barely gotten any screentime, or have proved to be sidekick/comicrelief material like Power rather than people who can carry a story around themselves. Ditto the various new human devil-hunters who have appeared during and since that same incident.

A human, a hybrid, and a devil as the three main POVs. It has a nice symmetry, if it ends up holding true. I can dig it.

While Angel is cleaning up the last wave of dolls and fending off invasive questions from Stone Guy and Fox Guy, we return to Quanxi's group as they encounter another band of Public Safety reinforcements near the mall entrance. And finally get to see what the Chinese diabolycule are capable of in combat.

To be fair to them, it seems like the girls would have been fine leaving these guys alone if they didn't force the issue. Quanxi just uses some speedboost power to bypass them all while her fiends are occupying their attention.

And then the fiends themselves, well...maybe they'd have attacked even if these Public Security devil-hunters weren't assholes to them, but also maybe they wouldn't have.

The group are all dismembered by the Make You Disappear Fiend before they can loose a single attack. She's a powerful one.

The next wave of human dolls that had been on their way into the mall fair little better. Those hunters might be dead, but at least the fiend girls are doing their job for them.

I wonder if the dolls are still aware after Santa turns them, or if they're effectively braindead from the moment of transformation and their bodies are just automatons. Hopefully it's the latter. In any case, Santa is murdering...I don't even know how many hundreds of Tokyo civilians for precious little benefit. If this isn't a declaration of war from Germany, then I don't know what the hell is.

Quanxi, meanwhiles, gains entry to the building and starts sneaking up on Denji's group just as they're having a breather between zombie waves. With her speed, she quickly outpaces the slow approaches of the Soviet and American assassins, and makes contact first.


Next post, I finish up the volume. It turns out that the International Assassins arc is a lot longer than I'd thought.