Annotated 30-5
I appreciate the way this scene cuts to the chase, as our heroes figure out a new combo attack before the fight even gets started. As they did with Harky, they recognize the opponent they’re facing is not normal and they have to raise their game even to have a chance against him.
It pretty much had to go this way if we wanted Byron to confront this different flavor of berserker, not ruin later developments (see below), and also not just back off and let Frigg do it. This also gives Syr’Nj a solid role in the fight, which (spoiler) somewhat balances out how early she’s going to be taken out of it.
I don’t remember for sure if “Byron suppresses his suppressant to face this other kinda-sorta berserker” was ever in our outline, and it’s in character for him for reasons Syr’Nj gets into. But one way or another, I’m glad we didn’t go for it. The prospect of Byron berserking needed to be unblemished in its horror if Chapter 36 was going to work (and we already knew by now how that one was going to shape up, more or less).
“Hey, that’s great, Syr’Nj! You can take the potion of swiftness and that will allow you to go to your lab and make the berzerker potion in plenty of time!”
:-D
Not sure Scipio *needs* a potion of swiftness, considering how quickly he moves between panels 5 and 6.
I have to say, on the first read through I was baffled at why they consider HAMMERHEAD to be a berserker. There’s nothing to hint at that other than the dialogue. Even here, he’s very calmly receiving his weapons frim another land shark.
In subsequent readthroughs it’s even more perplexing. Consider the scene where he’s presented and the stark contrast drawn between him and other land sharks. He’s not presented as a particularly berzerkish kind of land shark, quite the opposite – he’s presented as the only thing standing between the normal land sharks and a constant state of berzerking.
Sharks are pretty much berzerkers by nature, and the protagonists don’t know anything about this particular one which would tell them it’s different in that way. And while Hammerhead does have more intellect than most of his brethren, I read his lines in panel 1 of 28-20 to mean that he, too, is affected by “the frenzy”. He just controls it better.
http://guildedage.net/comic/annotated-28-20/
I don’t blame you; I also feel we could’ve done more to spell this out. There’s two major kinds of berserker in Arkerra: the “Savage Hulk but worse” kind that Byron embodies, and a type who can access “combat madness” in a more directed way, like Hammerhead. The first kind is generally scarier and a lot more important to the series overall, but Hammerhead’s size and power almost makes up the difference. I’ll have to get further into that in about ten more annotations.
I do wonder why there are soldiers on the wall in the background, and the protective stone bridge is gone, but Hammerhead does not seem to be showered with arrows, spears, tar and all that. Looks as if they stopped defending the gate.
I can make up some halfway plausible explanation (like some avian push which drove them from the wall or them all being drawn towards the hammertank for some reason, or maybe the leadership sent them to the yard because they expect the gate to give way any minute and have not enough forces to meet the intruders) but I don’t really see an indication in the story.
I saw it as: Hammerhead is big, but they’re preoccupied with the even bigger tank