Violetta the cynical and self-doubting is unlikely to believe that she killed Madwa and/or that Madwa will stay dead if she did. (I'd love to know how Violetta fooled Steelgarter.) If she didn't puree Madwa's brain, Lucrezia can revive her. Even if she did, Lucrezia may have backups.
The win here is getting the lantern, without which even Madwa will have trouble taking out the whole crew, especially exhausted & when they have warning.
Evil Overlord List, item #89: «After I capture the hero's superweapon, I will not immediately disband my legions and relax my guard because I believe whoever holds the weapon is unstoppable. After all, the hero held the weapon and I took it from him.» I’d expect Smoke Knights to have something similar.
I'm sure she took all reasonable measures and a fair pile of unreasonable ones, but that may not be enough. We may not find out either way for quite a while -- or Violetta may explain on the next page.
There's obviously a time between the last two panels, during which Violetta takes and closes the lantern. I think it's likely that in that time, Violetta makes very sure that her target really was Madwa and is really, truly, permanently dead. That would be a bit too gory to show.
So Violetta has just gotten enough XP to level up again! :-) She's also accomplished something truly notable in Smoke Knight society. That should be good for a couple of scoops of self-esteem.
One of Lucrezia's areas of expertise is mind transfers. She may be able to rebuild Madwa from backups, even if Violetta did a quite thorough job on the original. I trust Violetta not to be overconfident, here.
That in no way detracts from Violetta having fooled Madwa into monologuing for an audience, taken her down, and recovered the lantern (and possibly a lot of other interesting things Madwa had on her person). Nor from out-sneaking Rakethorn.
There aren't mental duplicates of anyone else that I can think of, but she does have the technology. Possibly there's a technical reason it's limited to just her, possibly she just wouldn't want to share that capability, but it seems like if she cared she could have backups of her critical agents. OTOH, it's easy to argue that she doesn't value anyone else that highly.
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The win here is getting the lantern, without which even Madwa will have trouble taking out the whole crew, especially exhausted & when they have warning.
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I’d expect Smoke Knights to have something similar.
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So Violetta has just gotten enough XP to level up again! :-) She's also accomplished something truly notable in Smoke Knight society. That should be good for a couple of scoops of self-esteem.
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That in no way detracts from Violetta having fooled Madwa into monologuing for an audience, taken her down, and recovered the lantern (and possibly a lot of other interesting things Madwa had on her person). Nor from out-sneaking Rakethorn.
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