‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 499

Colors by Audrey. Everything else is by me.

Maybe he doesn't know her so well after all...

EDIT: I forgot to post this up last night, but I'm moving to Vermont for a few months and will be driving across the country in two weeks. I'd love to meet fans as I go. I'm still trying to finalize my plans (tentative dates are in parenthesis), but I intend to stop at these cities:

Denver, CO (Fri or Sat, July 1/2)

Rapid City, SD (Mon, July 4th)

Sioux Falls, SD (Mon or Tues, July 4/5)

Minneapolis, MN (Tues or Wed, July 5/6)

Chicago, IL (Tues or Wed, July 5/6)

Detroit, MI (Wed or Thurs, July 6/7)

Toronto, Canada (Fri, July 8th)

Rochester, NY (Sat, July 9th)

Once I've moved in, I intend to make some weekend day trips to meet fans in Montreal, Canada, Manchester, NH, and Boston, MA, too!

I'm re-opening an old survey regarding this trip. If you're near these cities (or would like to add one that is enroute) and would like to be put on an email list so I can email you the details of when and where I'll be, please fill this out below. Thanks!
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Oh, and the comic will be updating despite all this driving and moving. I have a buffer of 4 weeks to I should be able to survive all this without having to interrupt this dramatic sequence. Of course, if you'd like to help me monetarily (which would be awesome!), feel free to use my Patreon, the AneekaChannel, my store, or the donate button on the right sidebar for a drive-by donation. Thanks! And continue to enjoy my comic! You guys are awesome; can't wait to meet some of you!

39 Comments

Yep, Bandid miscalculated.

This is a really nice page, both artistically and story-wise. I’m a fan, and I can’t wait to see more

Of course, It’s ENTIRELY unreasonable that a genocidal super hacker might foreseeably regret such actions.

UPDATE SOON OMG

I sense a Splash Page coming up, because this was page 499…so the next one will be 500, and the high drama just begs for a Splash Page!

…No pressure, though! (Okay, a little pressure.)

I call that the next page will be a literal splash page with Kat (or a grass-shield of hers) getting splashed by that attack.

Also the mouse-over of that page will be “Everything goes BOOM!” or something related to that.

Alternatively I call a splash page of Jane killing Vize.

Also, that is a FANTASTICALLY drawn foot! Seriously, truthfully, a magnificent foot, ankle, and lower calf. However much work you put into it, I think it was worth the undoubted sweat and tears. Well done.

Looks like someone called it on the last page.

She’s tanking one fireball with her body and the other with the chimera.

So… Bandit deliberately attacked his own party (and wingman) for no apparent reason… to try to prove that Kat ISN’T the legendary hacker… and is then surprised that her response to his “Hero’s choice” dilemma ISN’T hacking… which would have proved that she IS the legendary hacker.

Bandit epically sucks at planning.

His plan was to make her lose, because the legendary hacker never accepts defeat.

But she always used to hack to do it. What he didn’t expect is her choosing to actually get good and do it the hard way.

This kinda works for him as well. He’s said in the past that she used to be untouchable, that she refused to ever take a hit. Putting herself in harms way like this is out of character enough that he can still pitch her as not cyborg girl to his superiors.

This might tank his game ratings though; attacking his own team for no reason other than being mean to his herbana, and not even succeeding.

I agree I believe he thought that his attack would prove Kat could handle some kind of defeat, where she saved the good guys but couldn’t save the bad ones and it would end the battle and prove that while Kat does have a lot of skill in a class most other people wouldn’t touch she’s not the super hacker as she couldn’t save everyone and not get hit in this impossible scenario. He figured she’s learned/changed enough now to go save the team mates and let the bad guys get killed to prove that. Then he got all worried when he saw Kat wasn’t gong to follow his plan that he decided to do with out telling anyone, that she was going to do some sort of hack instead to pull off saving everyone and not get hurt and keep her pet. But got surprised when instead he See’s Kat taking a totally different means to solve this problem then the two possible outcomes he figured there could be.

From a viewer’s perspective, he’s trying prevent Kat from interupting his attack by forcing her to defend their teammates.

Bandit sucks at planning? Well, maybe – but Dr. Grace is worse, right? If he was any good at all, he would wait for trivial things like “proof” that Kat is who he suspects. He would simply attack first and ask questions later; after all, this is the species destroying super terrorist we’re talking about – right? Proof and evidence are a big waste of time when the threat is so huge.

So Bandit might be bad at planning… but he doesn’t need to be good. Only better than Dr. Grace.

So they’re splitting up after all. Kudos to all the dozens of people who called it. 🙂 Now let’s see if Kat is going to “facetank” the blow (I love that expression which I saw in a comment a few pages back XD) or if she has some grass with her to block or deflect the attack.

I think Bellatrice is going to be really grateful. Maybe she will make Bandit her mind slave and Kat will put him on a leash, so he will have to walk around on all fours like a bad bad doggy for the next few days. Maybe the Dude will paint Bandit’s face. I can already picture the Feminazi-comments, both in LiFe and in the comment section. 🙂

I wonder how high Bandit’s alignment ranking is by now.

Aw yis. So she IS doing it! Chimera can handle the other guys, and she can do a heroic sacrifice and take the blow for her teammates. Especially Danni. AND….that should provide a boost to both Kat AND Danni’s popularity scores. The girl pacisfistic Kat risked her life for…she’s gotta be something special, right?

Still don’t understand how Bandit, being as smart a guy as he’s supposed to be, would think the only way out of this was hacking. If she’s really dedicated to being a good person, a heroic sacrifice should have always been on the board. And attacking people like that would ensure she’d have to pull one off, right? He didn’t really think this through, did he?

I don’t think the thought that she would do that crossed his mind, up until now he’s known her to do things a certain way. So he obviously thought she would have done something different that only some other class could do, forcing her out of the ultimate pacifist route. It’s been stated that you can mix and match different classes and abilities multiple times. Why can’t she be forced into a situation where all that can happen is modifying her route, forcing an imperfection. Thus keeping others off her trail. At least that’s what I think was going through his mind at the time. just not in so many words.

Except his own narration said he specifically wants her to lose. I understand that losing a fight completely would throw people of her trail, but he’s paying her more attention than he really should. He’s playing up the Demoli-Erbana competition to almost comedic proportions, which makes it REALLY obvious something’s going on there.

If he wanted his boss’s attention off of Kat, he’d be better off paying her a little less specific attention. Like deliberately sabotaging her over any and everyone else. He’s choosing sabotaging her over being a Demoli. I can’t imagine that’ll help his popularity.

FACETANK! She’s actually doing it. Orrrr… she sees an opportunity that Bandit missed. Like growing a tree in .3 seconds flat.

If an Erbana sacrifices her/himself for the sake of others… do their bonus points suddenly increase exponentially? “Strike me down and I will become more powerful…” etc etc.

She’s full HP at this point, so she should be able to facetank it.

“Strike me down and I will become more powerful than ever before.”
More like:
“Strike me down and I will come back incredibly pissed off.”

You know, she may have programmed a tanking special.

I am not surprised she didn’t hack. A hacker requires intimate knowledge of both getting to the system (security), and the system itself. No point in being able to change stuff if you have no idea what you are changing.

Ultimately I would be surprised if she didn’t have a few plans through the game that were mathematically proven.

She has intimate knowledge… this is HER game…

Plus she already has a backdoor to the dev console through D. She basically already has full read/write access to the game. Technically, this means that she’s already hacking; she just isn’t using the write access she already has.

I suppose this could be chalked up to what she called leaky programs?

Though in reality I have very little idea of what she means, if I make a program it tends not to have any conceal what I’m doing internally code but I know many games etc that obfuscate their internal variables to make it less easy to observe, cheat and manipulate those values, that is on one machine though.

This must be a network game and how you would go about accidentally writing a game/program that leaks it’s intent via the network beats me.

If you send more information over the network than you need, you can leave hints about how other features work. This happens frequently when request and response objects are reused. It’s not necessarily bad; it can be very efficient and easy to maintain.

I think that you must assume that she is accessing the server directly, rather than the client. This isn’t much of a stretch given her unlimited access through D.

The rest would have to be suspension of disbelief, because networked games would only share information that is required to for the client to operate, and is often inaccurate because of latency or lost packets. This information shared however can still provide advantages depending on what exactly is sent because of preloading assets, etc. I don’t see how a leak from the server would be visible here, but I do see the potential for vulnerabilities.

Let us also not forget this is super-future apocalypse technology in someone else’s continuity. It may work like nothing any of us currently understand, as well.

Heh, well you could assert something like there is no client and your mind is directly linked to the server. But that has its own problems. Such as hiding ones identity would be impossible assuming that medium. Think Batman Forever on that one, where thoughts were literally injected into Bruce Wayne’s mind, and similarly extracted.

In any case I covered this in suspension of disbelief. That is the notion that the audience is expected to willfully ignore the truth to enjoy the story. A story doesn’t need to add up in reality to be a good yarn.