The next panels show Pandora's grimace accompanied with his 1500 life points, then Yami's face collapsed back into a brooding frown for no reason, because he has his full 4000 points. Cheer the fuck up, you little asshole. He's not inclined toward celebration just yet, however, because though he's managed to evade Pandora's attacks so far, he still has no idea what Pandora's next move will be. Yami thinks that Pandora is a tough magic-user, but he's still got faith in his own (light) Dark Magician. Said magician looks down at Yami and smiles reassuringly, because holograms are not only sentient here, but can also read minds. Dark Magician is the perfect waifu.
Yami wonders which one between he and Pandora will trust his cards and himself more, because that will be the key to victory. If it's not, you know, actually playing the game or something. I don't know.
Meanwhile, Pandora has found his smug grin again while contemplating how the legends about Yami being skilled in magic were all true. Note that "magic" is neither capitalized nor copyrighted, despite the fact that the makers of Magic: The Gathering should maybe be getting SOME royalties here. Anyway, Pandora thinks he's got the upper hand here, but I'm not sure why. He's lost over half his points where Yami has lost none, and there's no indication this game is going to turn around. That is a massive case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect he's got going on there.
But see, he's PREPARED to go up against Yami, because he knew Yami uses the Dark Magician, and that's why he put the ultimate anti-spell-caster card in his deck prior to this duel! So, Pandora thinks that he's sufficiently prepared to go up against a LEGENDARY player of this game by putting ONE card in his deck to counteract the ONE card his opponent has that's a spell-caster. That is a special kind of stupid right there.
Pandora finally decides that he's done reassuring himself that he's totally on top of this, yessiree, and shouts at Yami that the last turn was a fierce exchange to be sure, but it's his turn now. He draws a card and slaps it down on his Duel Disk with flourish, but otherwise ending his turn on an unremarkable note. Yami is eager to use his turn to draw dramatically as well, and end his turn with just face down cards to show for it. Here we go again, folks.
With his evil Dark Magician smirking in the background, Pandora asks Yami if he's ready, before revealing a card called Beckon to the Dark. Well that can't be good.
Still, the Dark Magician seems genuinely horrified at the prospect of going to a place that's DARK as the clawed hand reaches for it. However, because Yami's not a regular mom (he's a cool mom), he refuses to let Pandora imprison his Dark Magician. Yami reveals a trap he laid, Mystical Rift Panel, intending to make that arm turn to the evil Dark Magician instead, which it does briefly. Until, of course, Pandora chuckles and says this is exactly as he planned. Yami gapes and sweats, disbelievingly asking what that means.
Pandora explains that the arm was a decoy to make Yami play a trap card, then laughs maniacally about how Yami fell for it. He yells the reveal of his counter-trap...
An extreme close-up of Yami's sweating face and wide eyes shows how disturbed he is that his magician is chained up to the torture device. As the Dark Magician grits its teeth and sweats, Pandora laughs that it can only watch as Yami is tortured now. Yami growls, knowing that since the Dark Magician is out of the picture, his life points can be attacked directly.
This is exactly the moment that Pandora has been waiting for, asking Yami if he's ready again with gleeful malice. Without waiting for an answer, Pandora directs his "slave" Dark Magician (yes, he really calls evil Dark Magician a slave here) to go forth and blast Yami to bits. It launches at Yami and casts its 2500 point Black Magic on the boy bracing himself. It doesn't appear to help much:
Yami doubles over and pants under the horrified gape of his bound Dark Magician. Pandora shouts that it's showtime now, claiming it's just like a slaughter house Yami's saw travels closer to his legs. I guess this means that Pandora goes to slaughter houses instead of theaters for his entertainment? Yami watches the saw come ever nearer to his legs and stop with the blade just on the edge of the 1000 mark, sweating the whole time.
Pandora is jubilant and raising his arms in triumph when he asks Yami if he's ready to be dismembered. Dude, what is it with you and asking your victims if they're comfortable with how things are progressing? He mockingly inquires if Yami cares for a little body modification. Hardy har. Then he goes on to rant about how when Yami's life points reach zero, his great escape will be complete, and Yami will bring down the curtain with his blood. He tells Yami its his last turn now, failing to cover a bloodthirsty grin with his splayed fingers.
With Yami and his Dark Magician all tied up and threatened with buzz-saws, Yami knows that if he can't block the next attack from the evil Dark Magician, it's all over. He plays a card from his hand in a more subdued manner than he has before in this game, Big Shield Guardna in defense. It appears in front of him kneeling behind a curved kite shield, ready to play its role in saving Yami until his next turn.
Pandora observes aloud that Yami has played a wall monster, characterizing it as cowering behind the shield to avoid evil Dark Magician's next attack. According to Pandora, this is not going to work, insisting that Yami's legs will be coming off at the end of his next turn. He challenges Yami to try dueling THEN, which is kind of hilarious. Hey, Pandora, Yami doesn't duel with his FEET, so I'd like to know how you think this is going to STOP him from dueling.
Yet Yami looks worried as Pandora pulls a card from his hand and informs him that a monster will be played for now.
Pandora pulls another card from his hand, his second to last, and claims it's the spell card that will bring Yami down. It's a card called Ectoplasmer, which affects the entire field. Yami's wide-eyed stare is voicing all the mental begging for this not to be reality right now. Pandora, though he assumes Yami knows what the card does, explains to him anyway that Ectoplasmer extracts soul energy from a monster to use as a weapon. It also has the added bonus of being able to go right around Yami's wall.
But, Yami realizes with some disbelief that Pandora would have to sacrifice his monsters' souls to do that. Pandora appears to read Yami's mind when he laughs and confirms that the monster he uses with Ectoplasmer will die, and his evil Dark Magician shoots him a terrified look from behind. It does not like the sound of that AT ALL. Of course, Pandora just prattles on about how it's a small price to pay in order to win. You can just SEE the evil Dark Magician thinking what a raw deal this d-bag is giving him, and it's just a hologram.
With a devilish smile, Pandora condemns Dark Magician and Doll of Demise to the fate of becoming ectoplasm to fuel his next attack on Yami. Yami growls before Doll of Demise's soul floats up out of its puppet body and points itself at Yami. Pandora orders an ectoplasm blast on his opponent.
Didn't your mama ever tell you not to count your chickens before their hatched, Pandora?
Yami doesn't give any indication of wanting to hear Pandora's thoughts on a defeat that hasn't happened, but that doesn't stop Pandora's typically long-winded monologue about how Yami lacks the ruthlessness for being a true master of magicians. Clearly, Pandora has not read the beginning of this manga. Big mistake. Maybe he should have done THAT instead of putting a single anti-spell-caster card in his deck to prepare for this duel. Just saying.
Pandora goes on and on about how Yami can't win duels with trust or coddling his slaves, and this is the reason with the good Dark Magician is currently tied to a weird torture grid. Apparently it was because Yami tried so hard to protect it. Pandora insists that Yami was a fool harboring that mindset, because monsters are nothing but tools, pawns that must be sacrificed. Okay, KT, you're laying it on a bit thick there. Reign it in, alright? You don't want to get into George RR Martin levels of "look at me, I'm a villain! Do you hate me enough yet?"
Although this lack of subtlety seems to be working quite well on Yami. His nose is wrinkled, eyes are narrowed, and he's growling that Pandora is scum. Pandora laughs, then barks at the evil Dark Magician behind him that its master commands it give him the soul energy required to win. The evil Dark Magician hesitates, a pained, almost tearful look on its face. It has no choice, though, and hunches over listlessly while its soul rises up out of its body. Pandora tells the resulting ectoplasm to fire at Yami, and Yami asks Pandora if he can't hear his servant crying. Pandora just tells Yami to die, directing the soul blast straight at Yami around the Big Shield Guardna, which looks back at Yami with silent scream.
The good Dark Magician's soul energy moves to intercept the evil's, while Yami looks on with wide-eyed alarm. Pandora is even more flabbergasted by the fact that the good Dark Magician seemed to have turned itself to ectoplasm all by itself. It reforms into a smoky-looking ghost in front of Yami and holds out its arms, the other ectoplasm blast coming straight for it. The impact makes an arc around Yami in a thousand different directions, exploding before it can hit him.
Yami sorrowfully acknowledges that his Dark Magician killed itself to save him. Pandora, in shock, realizes that when he designated "Dark Magician" as the target of his Ectoplasmer, it affected ALL the Dark Magicians there, and not just his. Still, the fact that Yami never TOLD his good Dark Magician to protect him has Pandora stunned. Then he's downright horrified by the appearance that the card had its own will in protecting its player. He's got some sort of silent scream going on here.
Yami, surrounded by spectral fire, tells Pandora through gritted teeth that it takes more than ruthlessness to win, and not to worry because he's going to get some ruthlessness right back at him.
This is what Pandora gets for monologuing Yami's best card friend into suicide.
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? Despite a couple of points of wordiness here and there, I think KT is finally starting to grasp the idea that his artwork should speak for itself. I didn't see nearly as many examples of pointless elaborations on the panels as I usually do, and there was a good balance of talking to action. I spent a lot less time slogging through the dialogue, meaning I got to get through the chapter a whole lot quicker this time around than I usually do. I'm really hoping this isn't a fluke and that KT is starting to trust his artwork to speak for itself more, because I think it's a fantastic style. He NEEDS to give it a chance to talk on its own every once in a while. When he does, I get a lot more satisfaction of reading the characters as well as their speech bubbles. If he would just do with the human characters what he does with the monsters and their expressions, I think he could cut down his excessive dialogue by more than half.
And speaking of the monsters and their expressions, let's talk about something I haven't really addressed up until this point: the autonomy of the monsters and their holograms' effects on reality. I've jokingly mentioned in the past the ridiculousness of the physical impact these holograms seem to have on the players, but the introduction of direct attacks coincided with the holograms having a physical effect on duelists. It's obvious to me that this isn't one of KT's little physics flubs, because it's consistently demonstrated with the duels we've seen in the tournament. Something interesting is going on here, something that the characters aren't mentioning explicitly, which is an interesting thing to note in itself.
My guess is that the Duel Disk technology has bridged a gap between the actual monsters and the players. Kaiba's created a summoning system that closer resembles those systems of the past that allowed those in Yami's "ancient pharaoh" time to summon them. Which would mean, of course, that these monsters are ACTUALLY being summoned right now. They're real, which is pretty wacky to think about, but I'm not coming to this conclusion from nothing here.
First of all, the realism of the system was EXACTLY what Kaiba was aiming for here. Remember that when he created the dueling boxes in Death T, his goal had been to recreate the experience he had inside Yami's penalty game for him: being in a world populated by Duel Monsters. Regardless of the fact that it was also a means of instilling madness in the players, it was a way of getting closer to those fantastical creatures in the game Kaiba loves. I imagine he went a bit further in that goal than he first anticipated, or even knows about right now.
Second, Ishizu mentioned that Pegasus got his inspiration for his monsters from tablets depicting their likeness in Egypt. The tablets we saw etched into the carving Kaiba and Yami saw in the museum resembled trading cards quite a bit, which suggests to me that the trading cards nowadays provide a similar conduit for the monsters' powers to channel through. For example, if one were to create an image of an ancient monster and perform the correct ritual, one might be able to channel that monster through to the plane of reality in which one resides.
Which brings me to the simple conclusion that I like the idea that not only are science and magic not mutually exclusive in this story (Kaiba's whining be damned), but also that they can riff off one another to create unique relationships between beings of different realities. It's an interesting thought, and I'm sure KT will continue to have fun with the concept throughout the rest of the story.
You know, for a self-proclaimed master of magicians, Pandora also isn't using very many magician cards...
ReplyDeleteHe's just attached his entire ego to the one, apparently.
DeleteAlso, that's not how Ectoplasmer works, Atem!
ReplyDeleteProtagonist don't give a fuck how anything works! He'll use it the way he wants! lol!
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