Afterword - Book 4 - Chapter 25 (Patreon)

Chapter 25: The Foul Winds of Change

(Original Chapter Title: Blind Retribution I)

A lot of this chapter was new. This was a place where I had a weird time skip that acknowledged interesting things were happening—without actually showing them. Obviously, that couldn't be tolerated.

For completely unimportant reasons, I wanted to show more of just how much reason Ranthia (and everyone else) had to hate the winged ogre twin. This was followed by a reminder that there's a broader war out there, beyond Ranthia's sight.

The bit with the potion gone off was the only scene from this chapter that was actually in the OG draft, which I somehow don't think I'd quite realized until I was writing this afterword. That's a bit more extreme than I was expecting.

I never really did anything with the 'forbidden four' classers in the OG draft, which was strange in retrospect. It wasn't like there were any rules governing mortal warfare in this era, and even if there were, the shimagu wouldn't have cared to obey them. I wanted to rectify that absence, but I also didn't want to belabor the point.

The result was a single (explicitly presented) engagement where a potent Miasma-user appeared. Realistically, Miasma is somewhat terrible for engagements between two large forces, but the shimagu have proven themselves quite willing to risk casualties amongst their own to inflict harm upon the Coalition. The original plan called for Ranthia to deal with the dangerous classer, but she ended up more tied up by the Dark-using ogre than I was expecting. Fortunately for her, she's not the only competent combatant in Remera.

The [Battlemaster] was able to use her soundwaves to find the invisible gas the Miasma-user created (reminder, she lived deep underground for her entire life until she came to Remera—of course she has ways to find deadly gas pockets), then she just had to run through it to tear him apart! ...By passing directly through concentrated Miasma, with nothing more than a bit of cloth covering her face.

And, as Covid-19 taught us, cloth is an imperfect barrier.