Interestingly, Roy is well aware that Belkar will be dying soon, and yet he’s still doing what he can to protect him in this battle.
Loving V’s character development here! No running, no hiding, indeed.
That is character development on Roy’s part also. Remember way back when he was going to abandon Elan and was called on it when he died? He isn’t going to abandon a party member again, not even Belkar. Not that he will be particularly upset when Belkar does kick off, but he is going to do his best to avoid it.
The battle ends if Tarquin recognizes that he is the sub-boss, not Xykon. The problem with going through the rift is that Oots is on deadline: it’s by no means clear that they would have any quick way of getting to the other side of the last gate. If they do go through the rift, I’d expect a drawn-out O’Chul interlude. And that doesn’t sound right to me. All that said, Burlew has a number of plausible options.
Given his detailed plotting and sufficient wisdom, Tarquin has probably gamed out the possibility that he is a sub-boss, at least in a general way. Except… Burlew likes building characters with blind-spots. I think he wrote somewhere that world builders should borrow from history, as it’s a great source of data. And history shows that rulers can make fundamental strategic errors, such as dividing their domain between their 3 offspring. It happens even though it’s a pretty obvious route to civil war. So I can’t rely on the insight of a high INT, workable WIS character.
That franchise would show the deaths offscreen. To Berlew’s credit, the fireball in panel 6 of #919 was explicit.
One of many ironies is that V’s initial goal was to probe the deepest secrets of the universe. And yet those aren’t accessible via magic: you need to be a genre-savvy bard. I also see that he/she is becoming more genre-saavy (along with everyone else): “It is never the time! It is never the place. I am telling you now so it is done.” Roy’s response was admirable and credible as well: the behaviors of each character interlock pretty tightly.
Oh yeah. Tarquin probably doesn’t want Oots to go through the rift. Otherwise he wouldn’t have anchored Haley to their world via that parental distraction. After all, the rift is a plausible resource for Team Tarquin, especially if the last gate goes Krakakoom. Imagine the tax revenue from imports and exports alone.
…unless they get there via the rift–like ducking into a building and coming out through another door.
There, that’s my wild-ass speculation.
What, like they duck in this gate and pop out in, say, Lirian’s rift?
I’ve said several times here that I saw them going through the rift. Please pass the salt shaker, I’ll eat my words now.
I don’t see Roy’s end game. 6 vs. an army can’t hold out forever. He says they will make their stand, but I see him as smarter than that. Even when their plans go to hell, he at least had a plan. This doesn’t seem right. Willing to die and take the rest of the stick with him? Then what of the Blood Oath of Vengence?
Actually, it’s entirely plausible for 6 high-level D&D adventurers to wear down an army. They’re not playing by the rules of our world.
Look at it this way: Haley has demonstrated that she can kill up to 4 people a round. Roy can kill 8, if he gets surrounded, but let’s say he’s usually limited to 4, since he doesn’t want to get flanked. Durkon is dominating one per round, which effectively neutralizes 2 soldiers. That’s 10 soldiers taken out of the fight per round. A round is 6 seconds, so among them, they can kill or suborn 100 people per minute. I’ll make a very rough guess, based on panel 4 of this strip, that Tarquin’s force is around 3000 troops. Those three could potentially kill all of soldiers half an hour, even if the rest of the party doesn’t kill any of them–but V took out at least 20 soldiers with one spell, probably many more, and has at least 32 spells per day of that power or greater, though not all of them will as suited for this type of fight.
All they have to do is stay alive–and with Roy tanking on one side, the nigh-unkillable Durkon on the other, and V supporting with defensive buffs, they probably can. Protection from Arrows alone is a big deal–given that the archers have at best a 5% chance to hit (probably less, with the miss chance from partial concealment), and it will take about 22 average hits to wear through the spell, the army will have to fire more than 400 bolts at a protected target before they can even start damaging him. Stoneskin is even more powerful.
If Tarquin and his high-level allies don’t get involved directly, the Order can plausibly take the army.
Well Tarquin isn’t raving mad dog evil, he is calculating businessman evil. Now that V has shown up, and Durk clearly had a buff compared to his earlier performance. The Order is set up to do serious damage to his army. The ROI of this scheme has dramatically changed, and they just have to hold out till Tarquin calls of the dogs.
Something like that, yes.
So, I am the only one that thinks V might consider going through the rift just to see if it destroys a soul? He’s feeling pretty guilty for killing the Draketooths, he knows the Order needs a way out, he can fly through it after saving Haley and Elan, and if the soul DOES get destroyed, then it doesn’t belong to the fiends anymore (well, they would have to write it off as a loss).
Presumably, an act of sacrifice and penance for his misdeeds is in line with his character growth. And also presumably, it will turn out that going through the rift doesn’t destroy a soul, so V sticks around.
Ooh, that could work.
Yellowjacket, that is an elegant solution I don’t see it because V is loyal to Sir Greenhilt and the team. After the last independant escapade he/she/it had, not seeing the stake out on my own vibe.
Who said anything about “stake out on my own”? I mean he goes through the rift to see if it’s safe for the rest of his teammates, as an escape route.
He probably figures that with the fiend’s hold on him, he’s as much a liability as anything else at this point, not to mention his massive guilt, so he may feel that allowing himself to die to test a theory is a worthwhile application of loyalty.
Of course, I suppose another method would be to use bigsby’s grasping hand to toss a few of Tarquin’s soldiers in there and see what they do, but that’s not in line with his character arc.
I’m not buying V sacrificing her/himself to test the gate-destroys-souls theory. At least not from that angle, not from guilt. I keep coming back to V shouting: “I’m telling you now so it is done!” There, it’s done: s/he’s no longer under that crushing weight, no need for need for suicide, s/he’s confessed his/her sins. Obviously redemption couldn’t possibly be that easy, but the urgency has dissipated a little. For now.
That said, I could well see V scoffing at Roy’s theory about the gate and testing it personally, with little doubt everything will be fine on the other side. V is nothing if not comically self-assured at times.
Hmm. What was that about Xykon getting busted up on Dorukan’s gate, then?
It was the Gate that busted up Xykon, not what lies beyond it. If the Snarl had destroyed Xykon, he couldn’t have come back. But he could come back from being zapped by a protective ward that worked against anything non-good.
Maybe. We’re seeing that the characters (and we) haven’t been told the whole story. All we know about the Snarl has been relayed through some unreliable narrators like Redcloak and Shojo - and we have no way of knowing how truthful the people they got their information from were.
But we were told that the Snarl is an all-destroying being and we have seen this can’t be true - there’s a world on the other side of the rift that hasn’t been destroyed. So does the Snarl really exist? If it exists, is it completely different from what we’ve been told? Did the Gods lie to their followers?
The Dark One has every reason to be sincere about what he believes is behind the gates to Redcloak. It’s much more plausible that he and the other gods are mistaken.
Actually, it was Dorukan’s runes. He could touch any other gate without being harmed.