Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Chapter 10: The Price of Fourteen Words

(Original Chapter Title: The Price of Fourteen Words)

And now, at last, we reach the point the OG draft skipped to.

I doubt anyone would be surprised to know this 12k monstrosity of a chapter faced numerous calls from my beta readers to split it into two—or even three—chapters. There were several reasons I didn't, such as my pacing concerns that I mentioned in the last afterword. But there was also a theme set up with this chapter. Ranthia finally gained [Harbinger] which promised her the power to bring about change. And by Xaoc, she brought it about.

Also, I think a long chapter as a splashy finale to this arc worked.

One thing I had fun with while I fleshed out these years was the escalation involved in the dinosaurs Ranthia fought. The T-Rex (not the largest predator dino, no, but culturally it felt like the ideal peak) needed as much hype and pomp as I could give them. And so there was an escalation, until we reached them. The legendary dinosaurs were opponents that Ranthia couldn't directly fight. Even for the big one, the System afforded her little weight in its death—the damage she had inflicted had been all but irrelevant to bringing it down.

Yet, in spite of what I just said about giving the dinosaurs as much hype as I could, they were a speedbump as far as the narrative of this chapter went.

Statia's death wasn't part of my original plans for her character. Heck, I didn't even have plans for her character originally! I'd given her an interesting (albeit, stupid) restriction Skill. That and being 'a friend from the Ranger Academy' kept her in the narrative irregularly. But when Ranthia joined the War Ranger program—my second attempt to find a way to get her to the field of battle—it only made sense for Statia to be there as well. In time, I realized that the War Ranger program made more sense if Statia was it's focus.

What better for an empire than someone who could be a flexible weapon to use as its spear tip?

Ranthia's words were her own though. But when I gamed out what they meant to Statia with her restriction Skill... Statia's death became an inevitability.

She would be forced to see Ranthia again, once she learned the chance that Ranthia was still there. So she drove her forces—too small to pierce so deeply into hostile territory—into battle, then left them behind.

Unfortunately for her, the troll twin proved to be an obstacle she couldn't get around.

And no matter how powerful Ranthia gets, it's important that she isn't omnipotent. She can't do everything.

She can't save everyone.

Ranthia isn't Elaine. She isn't a [Healer] that can make everyone around her basically unkillable. Ranthia's own struggles will always be visceral and risky—especially when she fights alongside friends and allies. She can shrug off blows—sort of—but she can't extend that to anyone else. Not even charged gemstones can let her spread her safety net, not that it's near as wide as Elaine's own.

This chapter actually also unveils something important: the shimagu aren't as universally vulnerable to [Healers] as Elaine assumed. It was a mechanic that Selkie'd recommended, actually. [Healing Resistance] and similar Skills are absolutely possible.

This may have consequences for the shape of the war in the future.

The troll was an interesting challenge from a writer's prospective. There's a lot of fascinating worldbuilding wrapped up in his existence that didn't get to come up. He feared the sun and sought a way to overcome it—not that he succeeded. His parasite was eternally at war with his own regeneration, which helped drive their levels a little. And he had always been a brute hunting beasts and fighting weaker foes—it was his parasite that convinced him to use Ranthia to develop himself into something that could crush equals.

But as fascinating as he was, he was a hell of an obstacle. Ranthia still needed to overcome him.

[One With Chaos], I'll have more to say about the Skill in the future, but there is a real formula behind it. When it rolled an absurd result, in spite of everything... well, I decided to save it. It's been long enough that I don't remember exactly when it gave that result, but it was at least a few strikes earlier than this one.

An epic bit of genuine luck—masquerading as divine intervention—felt like a better note to end the match on than Ranthia managing to slow the troll for a few precious moments. Plus, this let her actually deliver the final blow before the sun finished the job.

Taken as a whole, I feel like the chapter is exhausting—but hopefully in a good way. It's a journey, even beyond its sheer length. Hope and despair intermingle. Competence and desperation exist side-by-side. It's the death of a friend—a great regret that Ranthia will carry for a long time—and the victory over a hated enemy.

And maybe, if I'm lucky, my readers cared about all of these events enough to feel the weight of the journey.