‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 496

Colors by Audrey. Everything else is by me.

Hey, Kat, Dude is there, too.

36 Comments

Hey, Bandit, Dude is there, too.

Now that’s a Knight Sacrifice if I’ve ever seen one. Bandit just loves the “Everything goes Boom!” route.

You know Bandit she would stop looking so perfect if you would stop forcing her to be perfect or lose.

well s*** ™

Let’s see what she can do now… and whether she and Bandit are actually capable of teaming up :>

Sure, Dude’s there too, but, if I remember right, Danni is practically depending on being in The Game for survival. She’s clearly more important.

What! Is he aiming for the Dude and Danni?? I don’t get it (from a strategic point of view)

He’s forcing Kleya to make a decision; save Danni, or save herself.
If she defends herself, she stays perfect, undefeated, and keeps “winning”- but Danni gets destroyed, most likely booted from the team, and then taken off life support in the real world.
If she protects Danni (and Dude), Danni stays in- at the cost of Kleya’s “perfect record” that she’s so proud of.
She either has to sacrifice Danni to win against Bandit, or throw the match with him to save her.

I think it’s save Danni and Dude or save the two she tied up. But she has two shields her monster and herself. So that’s an option. It’s more about destroying her 100% than it is about attacking other people. He’s trying to make her be less than perfect.

I do believe you are correct. It’s been stated that she loses percentage if someone dies, and she noted that the enemy group was already pretty damaged. So getting his unless it kills her isn’t likely to be a problem. As she previously stated her chimera has plenty of hp. So she could even jump off at the last second to avoid getting hit if it was only the one target.

“Save Danni or save the enemy player. Can’t save both and either way you’re going to lose some score. Unless you cheat, in which case you prove to me you haven’t changed for the better.”

Good plan, Bandit.

Get the chimera to block a shot and intercept the other personally, her heroic embry(?) Route achieved and makes bandit look bad.

Clever!

But Kat is perfect. She doesn’t get hit. She blocks or avoids every attack. She isn’t just going to let herself get hit. And Bandit’s objective here is to change that. If she does get hit, she stops looking perfect which is what he wants.

You say that but didn’t she let herself lose to Jane in the tournament? Bandit still has this image of her before she changed and while she still has some of her personality we’ve seen repeated attempts to improve herself. I don’t know if the author will take the route but I find it more than believable she’d self intercept one of the shots.

by sabotaging her attempt to prove to herself she CAN “be nice” by hammering her with temptation to break her alignment to resolve the situation?

knowing that the last time something like this happened, an event that hard-crashed the cities systems including primary, secondary and tertiary (if applicable) lifesupport?
look, she’s recovering from, at best, a massive Psychotic breakdown,the guilt of (assumedly) regaining some semblance of sanity with the knowledge she’s responsible for mass-murder, and couple that with Decades of indoctrination/borderline mental abuse from her father she….isn’t the most stable….

if his point is to make her stop being “perfect” didn’t she outright LOOSE/ take a massive hit form something allready several arcs back, that broke character enough to convince an assasination-happy Suit type she was msitaken abotu her identity? >.<

(

Not sure where the claim of decades of mental abuse is coming from.

One event could be seen as mistake or intentional, constant perfection afterwards can still paint a target on her.

Bandit is forcing her to be nice and take a hit. It’s easy to pretend to be good when nobody ever messes with you, it shows strength of will to be nice when someone does get you.

I’m not so sure she DID that much mass destruction. My guess has been that D was a defense AI that Kleya designed to defend her. I’d find it likely that she would program such an AI to counter attack “destroy” everything that threatened her or allied with a threat to her while she was incapacitated. So, she gets hit by an assassin or nuke or some such, D takes over all the military and defense systems of the nation that was responsible for attacking her and started a massacre. Every nation that joined in attacking the forces D had hijacked got marked for extermination as well. So suddenly every smart car in a developed nation started killing every human with a pulse. The defense robots get taken over and start exterminating the citizens they were built to protect. etc.

Kleya wakes up and finds out that her automated system not only wiped out a large portion of the earth’s population but killed her own mother as well.

She’s super pissed that there were so many idiots in power that they all commited suicide by attacking her w/o (in her eyes) provocation. All she did was learn how to fly and control pretty much every computer system remotely. She wasn’t planning to take over the world….

Anyway, that’s my best guess of what happened. Aneeka has given lots of hints but has been quite mysterious as to what exactly happened. I’m not sure ANYONE in her universe knows what happened. And the big end of civilization event (earth’s magnet field, etc), is something that Kleya doesn’t think she caused. Of course, it may have been a super secret MAD weapon built by a super power, and when D started taking over everything, he found and activated it … quite possibly w/o any idea of what it did. And why should a purely agressive defensive / threat assessment AI look into what things do beyond how to turn them on and point them at those who are attacking his creator?

We know that Kleya didn’t create D — D answered that question directly a while back:

http://navcomic.com/qa-sessions/december-break-02/

We also know that Kleya did not stop fighting when her mom told her to, and regrets it:

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-170/

And at least one observer claims to have witnessed her laughing while she destroyed the hospital containing her mother:

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-341/

Kleya (who’s given name apparently starts “Chi”) may not have wanted to take over the world, and may not have intended to kill her mother when she was smashing things, but she wasn’t napping while D was attacking. Pretty clearly she lost her temper and a lot of people died as a result, including her mom.

However, I still don’t think she hacked the earth’s geomagnetic field. 😉

Isn’t whatever Bandit is doing counterproductive? Shouldn’t he know by now that Kat keeps rising to the occasion? Apart from her fight with Jane that is.

So the logical thing to do in order to help her stay under cover is: Step in in a nice way, end the fight and don’t give her a reason to use the Aces she’s got up her sleeve.

I think his current actions are more suspicious than if he acted like a team member for once. I mean: Attacking Danni and Dude? Really? Seriously? o_O I would SO petition him out!
Or I would propose a team-member exchange: Bandit and Jane for Vize and the big blue-haired 71% Kesti (http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-459/). But the others are probably all buddies who want to stay together or something. Unless Bellatrice controls some of her members magically and they have been waiting to be released for months. But the odds that those conflicts for which Aneeka took years to set up are going to conveniently resolve this way are next to zero. Those conflicts arising from having a Morto, a Demoli and a hacking Erbana in a group are going to be thoroughly harvested. 🙂

Is it just me or is Dude shielding Danni with his body? Must be an accident, I suppose. 😉

Well, he’s the Dude, a.k.a. the Genius pretending to be a Goofy. So I’d say yes, he is indeed shielding Danni, as she’s hurt real bad. Now that you mention it, I’m certain that going into Danni’s tree in the first place was on purpose, too.

Note that this time he didn’t bump his head trying to get there. 🙂

I also notice Danni looks annoyed at Dude, and he’s looking terrified, as usual. This is great theater. The viewers will love it.

I don’t know how this will affect Bandit’s popularity, though. Attacking your own team members is fine for a psycho like BlooJane, but it’s really not in keeping with the Bandit persona as we’ve seen it so far. Granted, he did choose a villain alignment… will Mina still be a Bandit fan after this?

The whole knight sacrifice thing
Dude is pretty much going to hold onto Danni so that Danni cannot jump away
All while making him look like a complete goof

Man with allies like that who needs enemies amiright?

Lol, Vize is running away in the background.

I wonder if this attack tracks people. If so, could Danni and Dude hide behind a tree and hope Bandit gets turned into a tree from damaging the trees?

…How does Bandit not realize that it is a VERY bad idea to antagonize her? Seriously right now she’s being happy and generally peaceful unless people go after her and as soon as she loses her 100% Erbana she’s NOT going to be happy with him… She might even be murderously displeased.

That is the point bandit does want to help kat but before he’s willing to help her he needs to know she won’t go on a murderous rampage if someone spills her milk

No, the point is that he keeps telling people that she isn’t the girl who ‘destroyed the world’ and his stated reasoning for that has been that she has lost a couple times. If she continues be perfect people will stop believing that reason, and Kat will be in all sorts of trouble.
So he is trying to protect her by making her not as noticeable to the people searching for her.

But won’t trying to make her lose just keep pushing her until she snaps and goes berserk, which will likely expose her in a way that there’s no possible way for him to convincingly lie about. Going crazy for losing is her thing. If he makes her lose until she goes crazy, he’s just going to expose her faster. There is no logic in this plan.

He is trying to give her a visible loss where she very, very publicly does NOT go crazy after. (Just the normal level of pissed and unhappy)

I guess there is logic to this plan and it fits Bandit’s character to do that. I just wouldn’t go that route at all. I would try to prevent her from having to show her aces by helping her out. But then again I wouldn’t have been a total douchebag right from the beginning either. E.g. look at those two NPC bullies from the comic’s beginning Bandit likes so much. If I had had any say in their behavior, I would’ve had them be straightforward regarding what they are (NPCs), what their purpose is (filtering out the bad players), how they behave (polite and friendly, but strict) and where they appear (i.e. if players wish to train with trucks, just let them be, but in order to qualify you have to go through those NPCs).

I still don’t understand how exactly both Bandit and Jane are trying to gain her trust by making her hate them. It’s really difficult to imagine a more counterproductive strategy than what these two are doing.

What if bandit isn’t trying to gain her trust? What if he’s willing to make her mad at him for the sake of her proving she’s a better person?

Right on the money!

Sorry, introductions are in order. Hello all, Nate avid Reader of Not A Villain for a few years now. Glad to finally make your acquaintances. (KEEP UP THE STELLAR WORK ANEEKA!)

But yeah, Karen here hit the nail right on the head if my understanding of the plot is in any way adequate and/or accurate.

Bandit intends to provoke Kat and have her exhaust all of her options of legitimately overcoming his sabotage of her plans to be a hero (good person). In doing so, he hopes that she will have turned over a new leaf and we’ll accept that she can’t control every aspect of that avenue.

Things will go wrong and she well have to cope with not using D or hacking to get her way. She will have to also accept the fact that she will lose some of her battles, metaphorically and literally and she had to be able to deal with that.

Presumably after she proves to him that she can be pushed to the edge and not resort to flying to get out of it, Bandit will then reveal that he knows her secret, which if I’m not mistaken she doesn’t believe he does. In doing so he will the probably find a way to work her reveal to TenKa, into a more favorable light.

I think Kat genuinely wants to help Danni but she has to do so while keeping a low profile to which having a maxed out erbana will undoubtedly hinder, do to the the level of knowledge needed to use that class. (Only a few people know how to use it properly, and in the right hands, it’s probably nigh unbeatable)

Bandit isn’t going for the tk, she is turned around facing him after his first light attack. She would have seen him attack them. The alert is for something else…

I wonder if Erbanas can do something like this:
http://archives.erfworld.com/Book%202/202 (the explanation is on the next page)

Or this:
http://archives.erfworld.com/Book%202/146 (again, the explanation is on the next page)

It does look like Bandit *could* be aiming for the enemy combatants on the ground (which happen to be in front of Kat) and the one running away (which happens to be in front of The Dude and Danni), so even if he is actually aiming for his team members he can claim that he wasn’t if there’s a fuss afterwards.
Kleya still won’t be pleased, though.

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 496