Ah… yeah, that’s fair enough.
As Xykon says, they’re Team Evil. They play rough.
Ballsy move by the grumpy pirate.
Looks like I was right about the “take credit for everything to get in Xykon’s good books” plan. I wasn’t expecting him to just come out and say he’d murdered Tsukiko, though.
Anyone want to guess what his explanation is going to be? I’m guessing it will be “It was her job to deal with the Resistance, but when they stole the phylactery, her problem became my problem.”
I like the theory that it will be something like:
“I caught her rooting through my study so I killed her. What would you have done? And besides, using the wights was so…appropriate.”
I’m deeply curious about why Redcloak even said anything about it, given that there were exactly zero witnesses. I suppose it was to take away any possibility of it coming up at the worst possible moment for him, which would make it a risky but bold decision.
He said it because her absence was already noticed and would have to be explained, so he might as well get in front of it. Plus he’s got the brownie points from crushing the resistance and recovering the phylactery to bolster his explanation about how Tsukiko screwed up her job of finding the resistance and how she was messing with his stuff for no good reason and that she died in a funny way, all of which are good reasons to brutally murder her by Team Evil rules. Xykon may be suspicious but he’s already suspicious by Redcloak’s sudden apparent competence so it’ll all get rolled into that as long as Xykon didn’t seriously need her (and given she was a battlefield appointment and that Xykon previously expressed indifference to her near-death I doubt she was indispensable).
Xykon may keep a closer eye (heh - eye) on RC from now on but he has his fallback position in the event of doublecross. Anyway RC is moving into the endgame phase of his plan so now is the time to be bold.
Tsukiko getting eaten by her own beloved wights is funny enough that Xykon wouldn’t need any other reason for Redcloak to have done it.
I’m curious, though, whether they’ll be going against Girard’s Gate with the full military deployment they went against Azure City with.
The one complication is that now Xykon won’t be getting that analysis of the arcane half of the spell unless he figures it out himself (which is too much like work, and may be beyond him in any case). Just how much he cares about this depends on why he wanted Tsukiko to look into it – maybe he just wants to double-check that there won’t be some last-minute snag with the casting, or maybe he’s actively suspicious that Redcloak isn’t telling him everything.
Telling Redcloak about her special job was Tsukiko’s last significant deed.
Red had obviously been planning this for months. Not just getting the fake phylactery made - he’d also planted a spy in the resistance by putting a shapechanger in prison just in case there was a jailbreak. That agent had been in place for months, so Red has had plenty of time to plan strategies for destroying the Resistance in a way that would cover his tracks and win Xykon’s approval. It’s no great leap to imagine that he’d long since planned how he’d ever kill Tsukiko if he needed to - he didn’t hesitate to cast the requisite spells when he saw her ransacking his study. And that he’d planned (or at least considered) the most acceptable way of presenting her death to Xykon.
But now he’s aware that he’s not the only member of this partnership who’s been maneouvering for advantage. He’s got to be alarmed that Xykon’s no longer content to trust him, and that he came this close to having his cover story blown. So as well as executing his well-laid plans to deceive X about the phylactery, he’s going to have to find out just how much trust he has left with Xykon, and start a programme of either distracting him from or reassuring him over his concerns about the ritual.
That’s going to require some pretty fast footwork. But now that he knows about Xykon’s suspicions, he’s a step ahead of where he was. All in all, it does look like the balance of power has shifted towards Redcloak in the last few strips. But not conclusively.
From this strip, RC doesn’t think they will:
Kinda. I mean, Redcloak’s plan might succeed or fail, but Xykon’s plan can’t succeed. Redcloak’s secret isn’t, say, “if a priest and wizard cast this spell, the Snarl gets controlled by whoever holds the special ruby,” such that Xykon could get wise in time to snag the jewel from Redcloak’s pocket or whatever; it’s that “casting the spell grants control to Redcloak’s deity,” which means Xykon simply ain’t getting the power he’s spent decades working to acquire.
Step one: become a god.
Step two: mind rape Redcloak into worshipping him.
Step three: cast the ritual.
Step four: profit!
Surely Redcloak is admitting the deed at least in part to distract Xykon from the fake phylactery?
Well, he could, in a roundabout way. Get to the gate, set up the ritual, but just before it is cast seize Redcloak by the throat and loudly proclaim “Yo, Dark One ! If you want this ritual of yours done you’d better give me Ultimate Ninja Power in the next 30 seconds or I’ll kill your boy here ; disintegrate his corpse ; then add a second helping for that rag of his. Your move. Clock’s ticking.”. The Dark One couldn’t just smite him, because he’d need him unalive for the ritual. Blackmailing a god is the very definition of risky business, but it could work.
Anyhow, once again, I’m puzzled. Why take such pains to covertly raid the rebels using independent contractors (and kill his informant) if he’s going to own up to it immediately afterwards ? Why erase all traces of Tsukiko’s last supper if he’s going to give himself up 10 minutes later ?
To hide any potential evidence that he’s switching the real phylactery with a fake, I think.
Now that Xykon has been given the fake phylactery, could RC conceivably destroy the *real[/]i] one?
Xykon will still feel safe, but now he’s [permanently] killable.
He doesn’t need to hide the fact that he killed Tsukiko, only why he killed her. Destroying her body, and those of her wights, makes it significantly more difficult for anyone to investigate what actually happened in his study.
For the rebellion, I think the only thing he’s hiding there is that he had a man inside for so long. It would seem he could have crushed the rebellion months ago, but was waiting for some reason. I’m not sure why he’d wait, since the rebellion is more of a concern to him than to anyone else on Team Evil, but if word got out that Redcloak waited until they had the phylactery before he moved on them, Xykon would probably get suspicious.
I don’t think that Redcloak is hiding his inside man in the Resistance. Jirix already told Xykon and Tsukiko that they’d learned the Resistance had gotten the phylactery.
What Redcloak is trying to hide is exactly what he told Tsukiko: the puppet-strings he’s making Xykon dance to. He couldn’t risk Xykon finding out how long he’d had an inside man in the Resistance, because that reveals that Redcloak is more on the game than Xykon suspects he is.
Learning that Redcloak wiped out the Resistance because he got a man inside is one thing. Realizing that Redcloak had a man inside for months, and could have wiped out the Resistance at any point is something else.
That’s exactly what I’m saying.