“Marge, I have no idea what you were just thinking about. Why would you think I did?”

“We do not make war on terror, Deserthammer! What kind of ridiculous superpower would waste its energies by warring on a complete abstraction?”

Remember what Syr’Nj said about “a certain number of hours of useful consciousness?” I don’t know how clear it was, but the reason she doesn’t get any lines on this page and looks all squinty in panel 2 is that she’s running out of steam. Ardaic is still concerned about her, but he’s also not above using her limits to support his argument.

Even so, I find myself leaning a little more toward Ardaic here, and… I’m not sure if that’s a story flaw? The rest of the sequence will have many of our heroes agreeing, “Yeah, Ardy’s just an asshole,” but Gravedust hasn’t really made his case as convincingly as he could, even when he’s not pushing Ardaic’s buttons by nation-shaming. Ardaic has a broken arm, Syr’Nj has a singed back, they are both discussing enormous casualties, and he just stumbles in and tells them they’ve been wasting time with second-stringers. You weren’t there, man! They had a berserker shark who was tall as a house! Conversely, it’s kind of like he expects the others to see the pictures in his head when he talks about the Cultist threat. He’s totally convinced it eclipses the Rebels, but nobody’s even seen this monster yet, so a lot of that is based on his intuition. Such intuition will prove correct, but no, I can’t really blame Ardaic for not buying it.