Nightmare Fuel / Slightly Damned

Snakes... Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?

• Moonshade. Currently he's the strip's best candidate for the Big Bad, and for good reason. He's wiped out a village along with Iratu and co., killed Moku, a freaking Guardian, and worse still, taken his powers as well. And he intends to kill all the rest of them, too. And his smile is terrifying.
  • Later, we learn that not only is he related to Rhea as was earlier implied, but that he is none other than her own father and her murderer and that he has zero qualms about killing her again. Even Azurai seems revolted.
• While berserk Demons as a whole look pretty menacing, Sakido's berserk form is downright ghastly, with a skull-like face and visible vertebre in her neck and tail making her look like a living skeleton. She's also one of the deadliest creatures around given that she was an elite soldier before she went berserk.
• After Darius finds Sakido, he goes to look for her mother and finds a battlefield strewn with mutilated demon and angel corpses including a demon child with an arrow in their back. Even worse it's implied that this group of demons wasn't part of hell's army and the angels slaughtered them just for being demons, showing that the angels could be every bit as monstrous as the demons they fight.
• The whole invasion of St. Curtis arc. Not only does St. Curtis, a previously peaceful town, get destroyed while the demons are hunting angels but you can see the destruction it's causing. Oh, yeah, and the whole place is burning to the ground during that portion. The fact that Kieri leaves the group, Kinako is split up from Tirol, and that angels are revealed to have been working with demons during the invasion doesn't help it any less. Oh, and it's shown that it's not just angels that are getting attacked. The fact that the same thing happened at Weyville just a few arcs ago doesn't help, nor does the fact that it takes place during the Flower Festival.
• While traveling to St. Curtis, Lazuli murders an innocent person for his water, leaving a bloody mess behind. She then laughs about how she's going to get more water from "another stupid Median." This is when it's made perfectly clear that she has completely started losing it.
• Azurai's murder of Sanjulo is easily the most graphic death in the series thus far. He slashes his throat with his claws, splattering a gratuitous amount of blood and leaving some of it dripping from his hand. And it happened right in front of his boyfriend, Kazai. Holy SHIT.
  • What's worse is that there's NO Gory Discretion Shot for that lovely little scene. Enjoy seeing a teenage boy getting brutally murdered in full detail!
• Lazuli's return in St. Curtis. Killed off one of the series' Ensemble Darkhorses? Within sixty seconds of her intro! Nearly kills the protagonists? Three times, in fact! If it hadn't been for Azurai, of all people, she probably would have killed them too. And that's not bringing up what else she could have done before finding Rhea and Buwaro, or what would have happened if Kieri hadn't shown up when she did.
  • Contrast this with the time they first met Lazuli -she was dead-set on capturing Kieri, but her interactions with Rhea and Buwaro were quite comical, and she even considered sparing their lives at first, so long as they handed Kieri over. Here? There are no laughs to be had; Lazuli is murderously pissed off and has learned from her mistake of holding back against the group the first time around. From the word "DIE!", she keeps her mouth shut and simply focuses on ending the trio's lives as quickly as she can, attacking them relentlessly and never giving any of them a second to breathe. They're beaten, bloodied and exhausted within barely over a minute, while Lazuli's hardly scratched. The battle's cut short when Azurai steps in and demands Lazuli to stop, as they need Kieri alive, but it shows that she could have easily killed all three of the heroes back at the lake herself if she really wanted to.
  • At one point, she bites into Kieri's arm, causing her to scream in bloodcurdling agony. It's so bad, she can't use that arm for the rest of the arc.
• Buwaro could turn into a killing machine if anyone one removed his star pendant, in this state he could kill his friends before they could even react and without the restorative powers of hell would have already done this to Rhea.
• Semi-berserk Buwaro brutally mauling Lazuli by sinking his teeth into her shoulder, thrashing her like a toy and throwing her off hard enough for there to be a crunch is pretty disconcerting and even Rhea is frightened by it.
• When we see Lazuli after her ordeal with Buwaro, the experience has caused her to go berserk.
  • And then there's when her berserk status comes back...
• Larkitz' description of the war between Heaven and Hell is this. He mentions that "Any atrocity you could name was committed" by both sides. Looking at the atrocities that happened in Earth's own history, especially World War II, one can't help but shudder at the things that must have happened in that war...
• Darius reveals that Reincarnation is integral for new medians to be born but Death didn't give him the ability to do so, meaning that if something isn't done eventually no new medians will be born.
• Kazai goes Nazi Angel when he realizes how alone he is; his father died, his mother is missing, his boyfriend was killed in action in front of him, and now his sister refuses to break up with a demon over him. Even the other angels think warriors like him are mindless brutes. But all of this is a direct consequence of the Council of Angels' unrestricted totalitarianism, which his indoctrination makes him incapable of realizing. He's still enthralled under the belief that Gaia wants all demons to die and all mortals to kneel before the warrior caste, and he's willing to beat his own family to prove it.

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