Afterword - Book 1 - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Chapter 11: Covenant

(original chapter title: N/A)

The penultimate chapter spawned out of Passings!

Ranthia faces her first titled opponent, and she faces it alone! I've always kind of loved that velociraptors have two VERY different levels of threat, depending on if you've studied dinosaurs or if you've just watched the various Jurassic Park movies. It's always been hilarious to me to go from the Jurassic Park menace to... well, turkeys more-or-less. Aaaand now that I've typed that I'm second guessing saying their meat was bad, but meh. Predators (and scavengers) tend to be less tasty than prey species in general.

Ranthia's interaction with the Deva guard was so much fun to write, but I guess I don't have much to say about it. He was absolutely messing with her though, that or he was biding time while he tried to decide if he wanted to let a blood-splattered little girl into town. I mean it's kiiiinda sus.

Hm, what else do I want to go over? Oh, I know! Ranthia's backstory with her knives: Originally that came up MUCH later on in a kind of weird mental aside while she was dealing with the guard of a certain other city she hasn't reached yet. I always loved the stupidity of her idea. For a TRUE behind the scenes bit, here was the full idea she had: Her grandfather saved a general from a formorian assassin and was allowed to keep the blades when he retired with honors. Then when he passed on he granted them to her, to keep her safe.

Sadly it worked better to simplify it here, but it was nice to keep the spirit of it (pfft, giant assassin mindless bugs).

And I suppose that's all I have to say. ...What's that now? Oh, the class up?

Ha, fine I'll talk about it. So Ranthia failed the first time and I kind of glossed over the why. She hits on PART of the answer here - She wasn't using her classes together before. But she also was using them in different ways. She'd largely stopped using [Homunculus of Light] and was using Light as a defensive skill or to blind things instead. And she was using [Steel Doll] as an obstacle more than she was using it as a decoy, along with playing artillery mage entirely too often.

Her INTENT for the class didn't match her uses. That coupled with her never using the classes together meant the System refused to reward her. Ranthia inadvertently solved both problems after she reset, so she succeeded!

As for the [Covenant]... well, RAFO. There will be many, many impacts from here on.

As a (HOPEFULLY) minor aside, I've discovered something that's going to require (another) rewrite of several chapters. I'm MOSTLY certain that I can press forward without interruption, but some Adventurer-tier Patreon chapters will be changing (mechanically, outcomes will be largely the same). The main goal will be to get these rewrites done before I run out of buffer again.