Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Chapter 11: A Great Honor

(Original Chapter Title: The Grace of Remus I)

I'll begin this one with a slight tangent: I never quite know how to describe the chapters that come between arcs. Are they the conclusion of the last arc? Are they the start of the next? The answer is both, but also neither. They're the moments between.

At least this is a much shorter chapter than the last—a few words shy of 11k. Completely reasonable.

Getting on topic, we open with Ranthia sulking. It's perhaps an understandable and deserved sulk, but it's one of the few places where even she admits that she's probably mischaracterizing how everyone else is feeling. Being rescued doesn't mean she and (most of) her people snap from their own survival-mode focus and paranoias immediately though, many of them are reclusive out of emotional necessity. Which is yet another point her people and the 'regular' Legions don't see eye-to-eye on.

Many comments expected Ranthia's people to become amorphous irregulars that break Legion rules and formations. I feel like they forget one thing: those in power don't want irregulars. They want something orderly and controllable.

If not for Night...

Well, Ranthia will have her own realizations about that with time.

But instead the generals confronted the sole surviving War Ranger, with plans to pin Statia's death on her and to deal with the problem she represented, only to get stopped by the most famous of the BtDEM-sourced cast in my era.

This was the chapter where, when I wrote the OG draft, my understanding of Night started to evolve. I want to stress that I wrote this well over a year ago at this point. There's other chapters that come that cemented it, but I started to realize just how dangerous a being Night was. Elaine's perceptions colored him greatly in the source material.

I delight that the more modern stuff matches my understanding of the man.

I'm keeping it intentionally amorphous about just how much Night understood about the generals' plans, but by escalating her to Sentinel, he removed her from their machinations smoothly.

This was actually one of the points where I hesitated when I got here in the OG draft. I try hard not to retread Elaine's journey—not that its difficult with Ranthia's personality. BtDEM is its own story, I want to focus my own lens on Pallos.

Could I truly let Ranthia become a Sentinel without things feeling same-y?

IMO, the answer was a resounding yes. And, more importantly, Ranthia was ill-inclined to refuse (nor did I like the direction her refusal would have painted).

One change is immediate: [Sentinel's Superiority] is dead. Humanity is no longer on the brink of annihilation—they're expanding and have joined a grand coalition. The weight required for the Skill just isn't there anymore. My goal with [Sentinel's War Supremacy] was to craft a Skill that was plainly a solid step down from [Sentinel's Superiority], yet still 'better' than the modern Exterreri War Sentinel offerings. There haven't been tens of thousands of years of potency erosion as humans expanded to all corners of the southern continent.

More immediately though, Ranthia's still scarred in ways Remus has no true understanding of. She hadn't broken, but her paranoia reigns over her in ways she normally would never allow. She just spent the past six years in a base under near-constant stress as familiar faces slowly disappeared—and now she finds herself surrounded by different allies and struggles to believe it.

The situation with the generals did not help.

One of my favorite things in stories is when people come to the right conclusion through an outright wrong assessment. Ranthia judged Night's speed to be impossible—but only because she actually is currently unaware of restriction Skills that can boost stats. Instead, she assumes Night's operating under a different baseline speed and makes her accusation.

Here also, we see Ranthia promise herself to the war yet again. She hadn't even thought about it, but who would Ranthia be if she didn't let her whims dictate her fate?

Oh, one other fun bit: did anyone catch that Night added a seemingly pointless qualifier to Ranthia's achievement? She was the only member of the Coalition to have two reported twin kills. Admittedly I was sneaky with this, since most people would be focused on "wait, isn't it three?" if they caught anything from the sentence. But the qualifier is there for a reason.

Night's not about to call attention to his own efforts to weaken their enemy, not with a Coalition of temporary allies.

Oh, and yes—the chapter title is absolutely meant to be similar to Book 1, Chapter 59's. A Grand Honor inflicted upon her. And a Great Honor... but was it inflicted, or did she choose it?