I did some editing on this one, and I’m glad I was able to get Phil’s idea across in the last couple of panels but give it the sort of tense terseness that it feels like Byron would use to address the Cultists in his thoughts. As you can tell from these annotations, terseness doesn’t always come naturally to me.

The coloring and body language on this page are like brownie batter on my fingers, mwah.

I don’t perceive any contradiction between Cultist nihilism and the leader’s attempt at flight in the last two frames. Even among death-worshippers, only a very few like Brother Tom are fully prepared to greet a violent death in the moment.