‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 518

Colors by Audrey with edits and everything else by me.

Ambushing ambush plans?

Also, I haven't had time to respond to any comments recently, but I will soon! Hopefully, this week!

56 Comments

Ooh… That’s gonna sting…

Oh snap. This is the moment we learn if they’re as blind as npc enemies in many games with stealth elements.

So Herve is called Garyo then? Are those his Game and Life names or did I misunderstand page 479? But I don’t see whom else Vize could’ve addressed back then, because he saw that everyone else was tied up on the ground.
Herve: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-479/

Mabye his full name is Hervelini Garyomongus. 😀

So, looks like Azamalactica is again the first one to go down. Ladies first, right? 🙂 But I do wonder what kind of tricks Jane has up her sleeves, because mere melee attacks aren’t going to get you a win against three others, even if they’re low on health (which she shouldn’t know). And her dolls take quite an amount of time until there are enough of them to be dangerous, but if these three had full health the dolls probably wouldn’t even be enough.

Maybe her dolls have a bunch of other abilities as well and we saw only one of them in the tournament. Maybe each of the four programs Jane used represents one ability.

Or maybe she’s just that much of a bad*ss. This is a player who’s famous for killing people after all.

Her old team no less, so unless she butchered them all pretty early then left very soon after (soon enough for everyone to THINK that’s why she vanished), they’d have a bit of an idea HOW she fights, meaning they’d have SOME info on how to counter it…

…And yet they STILL went down…

To borrow from Emerson, if you strike at a mani [at close range], you must kill him.
This should be fun!

It’s Jane now.

Well Kat has the perfect excuse why everything is going to h*** and it’s not her fault. “I WAS DEAD AT THE TIME!” I really want to see an argument with that in it now.

Oh man, this is NOT their lucky day.

Bloody Mary isn’t along with you, you are alone with her.

Oh the irony of the last panel…

Underestimating an enemy because he is “not as smart” is not very smart yourself.
A Tiger can kill a human without needing to out-math him. Because the human keeps overthinking it.

In rural India, they had the opposite problem. Tigers were killing solitary humans in the forest (food gatherers, wood cutters, etc.). Since tigers would only attack people from behind, it was proposed that people wear masks on the back of their heads when in the forest, and masks were supplied to the villages for this purpose. The villagers insisted this wouldn’t work, however, on the grounds that tigers (like humans) were too smart to be fooled by such a simple trick. (As it turned out, the tigers were indeed fooled.)

The great thing is that humans aren’t too smart to be fooled by this trick, which makes for some awesome choreography opportunities.

It’s not that tigers are stupid enough to fall for such a trick, but that they are smart enough to know that something funny is going on and refuse to jump in until they know they won’t be killed as a result. Attacking humans in the first place is already pretty stupid, very few other species are as determined about taking revenge (occasionally quite disproportionate) on anything that kills even a single member.

Not that Jane’s group is acting totally human, since this is after all just a game (especially for the TENka players), but right now I don’t see anyone “playing it smart.”

Operating the sickle-blade
What’s so hard about swish swish stab?

The link doesn’t work for me. It just says
AccessDeniedAccess DeniedA7AAAFEA47AB5E25d+idTN+ObZe443H4+IICpytdIhbCyEg4XU/+p8JJbzxpXfTMN2ffmm+MmNz2A8uoLYDr2Zb7aHg=

Awww, can’t find the pic anymore, it was supposed to be a Red Vs Blue meme pic of a blue guy with an energy sword with the caption “Opperating the energy-sword. What’s so hard about swish swish stab?”, but it’s gone… 🙁

The link had an extra symbol to it that was messing it up. I deleted it; it works fine now!

Not playing as smart as you’d like to, I see!

That moment when you get ambushed by the person you want to try ambushing.

And for extra embarrassment on all sides….it’s probably going to be hard for anyone to die, thanks to Kat being there.

Well… I do believe Kat is currently dead, so I don’t think her Erbana rule applies right now.

She will block the light at the end of the tunnel.
“YOU SHALL NOT PASS ON!!!”

Jane seems to be the solo hunter type anyway. I’m guessing we’re going to be seeing more player deaths…

Is it possible that this is what happened to that party ? Remember that Kat found they were damaged… Just saying 😉

It seems this is after the encounter we just saw, since their friend is now a tree. Unless that has happened more than once now.

Yeah, looks like they got beat-up/damaged while on the island BEFORE the main characters arrived, tried ambushing the main team, just ran for their lives & now their taking a moment to regroup. Problem is, the person they’re planning to attack next via ambush is just about to show them how it’s done…

Whooo…. Dramatic irony is strong with this one.

I’m torn between cheering for Jane or for this group…

I wonder why this group has it out for Jane? They probably aren’t players from Bloody Mary’s last group, unless people can have multiple characters in the game.

My guess is that they think it will be cheap XP’s. They are a group, she is alone, afair they are a few levels higher, and she’s a well known player that has played the villain role for a long time.

So cheap XP and a lot of exposure for taking out Bloody Mary.

I 2nd this opinion…

There seems to be some sort of exp system, or maybe they’re after esone? Not sure. Besides, I’d rather attack Jane before she inevitably attacks me.

It was already explained. If they kill Jane, they can collect the bounty on her (which was posted because everyone knows she was Bloody Mary, and anyone can post a bounty on a Morto). They can then use the money to get some healing, which they desperately need.

Um, why on earth does Aza’s right eye’s iris and stuff look completely shriveled, messed up, etc? It’s giving me the chills. It’s as if she’s already dead.

Of course, Bloody Mary/Jane’s right behind her, she just doesn’t know it yet… }:D

…speak of the devil and she will appear…

I would love to see the in-universe commentary on all these fights. It’s probably going to be hilarious.

I thought becoming a tree was permanent. Also, that it doesn’t kill you, just transforms you, in which case you are useless because trees are useless and also reason why the player still shows as valid in their list. As I understand it, the forest was made mostly from npcs and pcs, which is why Jane has to kill all the trees with faces, right? And the forest continues to grow, so the only way to be free of tree-dom is to be killed, hopefully restoring them unless they were on their last life.

SO….being a tree is as temporary as your life? You’re still in the game as a tree, but you have to be a tree until you lose a life?

Vize’s comments make me question this now…or are they all wrong in assuming there’s a timer on the tree status?

Their might be some sort of downgrade on the capabilities of the npc who took Kat’s dad’s place. Or it might have been some lesser version of the same spell, intended to quickly incapacitate rather then permanently change them, which may take longer. It’s to hard to tell at this point, with our limited knowledge of the rules of the game.

To ambush someone, you have to first find someplace you know they will be…

I find it hilarious that the group that just got obliterated by a lone erbana is still thinking they can take Bloody Mary. I mean sure Kat is amazing, but from the point of view of these guys, and anyone watching them, they just got stomped by the weakest class in the game.

And we gotta assume Bloody Mary has roughly an equivalent mastery of morto to Kats. Recall she actually BEAT Kat in the preliminaries. Someone that good at doing nothing but killing? These guys are screwed lol

I estimate that Kat’s hesitation because of having eliminated Danni was a significant factor there, Kat’s alert system should have given her an edge in direct combat with Jane, especially as Kat seems to prioritize stats that allow her to evade attacks.

Still, no real argument against Bloody Mary/Jane being a pretty impressive in melee combat, her custom special seems to be more effective (and designed) for harassment, keeping enemies off-balance and distracted. She also has already demonstrated that she knows how to back down from a losing fight no matter how tempting it might be to wipe an irritating smirk of a certain annoyance’s face.

If she’s charging in, she thinks she can win, and given her chosen alignment, “win” means kill them all dead.

Plus, if Jane has a bounty on her, she’s apparently getting a bonus.

How wrong is it that I’m rooting for Jane here?

It would be very wrong NOT to root for Jane here.

There is a huge karmic issue with a Mani-led group trying to turn a new group against one of their own (while plotting to betray and kill them afterwards, no less) to collect a bounty. It’s basically the worst behavior possible.

Of course, the real karmic issue can only be resolved by Jane becoming convinced that eliminating Danni would alienate Kat past any hope of ever cooperating with Sandra (which would be simple enough if Sandra realized this rather obvious point and simply told Jane they needed to come up with a plan to eliminate Bandit instead).

Btw: I have a feature request: It would be nice if one could get an E-Mail alert if someone replied to one’s comments.

To add my two cents, I’d like straight-up Disqus support. It’s used in the majority of webcomics I frequent, so if I read one, I get notifications for all. I don’t know what’s required to set it up, only that it’s convenient for the readers.

I’ve seen comics that have switched over to Disqus and they lose all their previous comments. That’s not optimal 😉 But other than that I do like that comment framework.

Working on this…

Yo Dawg, I heard you like ambush plans. So I ambushed your ambush plans.

YOU can ambush HER? Adorable. Well, at least Kat won’t have to deal with any penalties if it’s like this.

Some may say the last panel is ironic. I say the second to last is more so. At this point, Aza really has no right to talk about anyone being stupid.

Aza was stupid? I’d say her biggest error was underestimating Kat, so she probably didn’t watch the tournament, but while it wasn’t smart to not gather intel on the newcomers, it doesn’t make her stupid. They probably had other issues to deal with. So, what did you refer to?

I think the bigger problem is that apparently those two hitherto unnamed close-combat Kestis don’t have any means of countering even the most basic control spell an Erbana has. Seems like Vize doesn’t have a Disenchant card (http://magiccards.info/query?q=disenchant&v=card&s=cname) either. And if Herve has means of helping out, then he was even more stupid for launching the treeifying attack.

Or Aza can do it as long as she isn’t tied up. Then it would indeed have been stupid to go to the front lines like she did.

Actually, Aza had no excuse for underestimating the group based on the fact that Bandit was their Demoli (the primary class for countering Mani). She had no excuse for underestimating Kat specifically based on the fact that Kat took Bandit down like he was nothing.

But I don’t believe the issue is her ability to estimate outcomes, but her dislike of Bandit. She probably wanted to show him up and then failed to adapt to the evidence that Bandit was far from the most dangerous member of the group. Then failed to admit to her group that her decision to go after the bounty on Jane was really just a ploy to get Bandit, which clearly isn’t something they can handle.

Oh my gosh, that’s awesome. Let’s wait around, let our guard down, and make plans to ambush the very person who’s seconds away from slitting our throats.

I’ll take my Bloody Mary with a slice of Irony please

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 518