Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 7 (Patreon)

Chapter 7: Changes Were Made I

(Original Chapter Title: The Price of Fourteen Words)

Ranthia isn't a born leader. Her leadership is a mix of hopeless optimism, leading by example, and following her whims while hoping they don't lead her astray. She makes mistakes, but here we see her leadership succeed.

Her people embrace chaos and it turns the tide of a single battle.

Moments like these were glossed over or summarized in the OG draft, and for several different reasons I wanted to explore more. There were great victories and dire struggles there, and they deserved to be shown. This chapter was one of the brighter points: they obtain a supply of metal (and a new mystery metal!), the legionaries evolve to meet Ranthia's every hope, and Ranthia clears her first concern about her curse!

Ranthia is, of course, aware that she isn't exactly a tactician or a leader. She has a bit of fun with that in her narration here—even though the chapter overall is one of competency. Admittedly, she lucked out more than once this chapter, but it reads as competency on the part of her and her people.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows though. Ranthia's knife problem looms over her head and they're trapped next to a larger force of shimagu than ever.

And then, of course, there's her second encounter with the troll twin. Ranthia is forced to engage him while conserving mana—ironically, this isn't something she's had to do in a major battle for a long time by this point—and finds herself unable to even do much. Fighting alongside her images gets mana expensive and she faces a strange question: how can she best something she can't bleed out? She lacks the reach and power to delete massive swaths of the troll in one go, while he has no such limitations.

At this point Ranthia has spent years rarely outside of her armor (gross, yes), which means that she hasn't truly been able to test out her growth in terms of her flexibility. In a moment of desperation, she finally does and she succeeds in bending over backwards.

Too bad the laminar didn't like that. But neither did the troll and (presumably) anyone else that happened to witness the uncanny feat.

Though to be fair, Ranthia did make a solid go at blinding the troll to make up for it! (Hey, if he didn't want to see her defying how skeletons should work...)