Afterword - Book 5 - Chapter 18 (Patreon)

Chapter 18: Those Who Hunt...

Chapter titles are something of a mixed bag for me. Sometimes I have an idea from the outset, sometimes I'm staring at the initial draft of the chapter and trying desperately to come up with something appropriate.

This one is a (slightly) regrettable reference. I've never actually seen it, but there was an anime series ADV licensed called Those Who Hunt Elves. To my understanding it's a bit of an indefensible series—the 'good guys' were the people trying to strip total strangers (exclusively elven women) against their will for some noble purpose or another to mask the creator's barely disguised fetish.

Never seen it and I hate the premise (at least as I understand it), but I heard the name so often from the ADV anime DVDs I owned that the name stuck in my head. I didn't want to use the title outright, but I not-so-gently alluded to it.

A minor admission: elementally imbued voices is one of the things I kinda constantly forget exists in BtDEM/Pallos. It almost never comes up, it doesn't really do anything, and for a lot of elements it's hard to imagine how they could affect a voice? Still, it was worth bringing up here, because the barkeep would absolutely be as rude and insistent as possible.

She doesn't really like "authority figures," you see.

The flipside to Ranthia paying more attention to names is I do get to namedrop Sir/Ma'am Unlikely to be Mentioned Much After This. Used to, the rare names that stuck with Ranthia proved that a character was important and worth remembering—now who knows who's important?! ...Okay, yes, it's obvious once they start showing up again and again, like Anthelleon. I'm legitimately not sure what point I was hoping to make when I started writing this?

-cough- Moving on!

I'll share a weird thing I struggle with when writing: any time I have to list what Ranthia packs. Every single time I feel like I'm forgetting something incredibly obvious and essential! No matter how many revision passes or mulling I do, I can never, ever, shake the feeling. But being nonspecific feels like too much of a copout and lacks interest? Like, legitimately, seeing a list of what someone packs while I'm reading feels far more immersive than seeing bland, broad statements like "she packed the essentials for a multi-day journey." Though admittedly, I have a small amount of handwaving—namely, the contents of Ranthia's always-available belt pouches.

Very early into my plans for this book, I originally was going to have Clover accompany Ranthia for this mission. Ran had her own opinions about that, of course, but the timeline also just didn't work out. At all. So bunny stays in Ar-Suelle while Ranthia quests outward.

I think my favorite bit of this chapter was describing the Hunters getting competitive with their tracking. It just feels delightfully silly, yet at the same time, it feels like absolutely exactly what had to occur. Your guess is as good as mine if the ground-licker was bullshitting or if he actually had a Skill for that.

The Elf Hunters themselves were long planned as a reveal. With the Wardens focused on external threats/national security and Adventurers not existing (lowercase, elves that go on adventures, yes; but not comparable to the organization near and dear to Ranthia's heart) there was an open need for something akin to bounty hunters. ...And elves that think they're the baddest thing around were the obvious candidate. They were always going to be edgelords, but I feel like I outdid myself with their names and designs.

Blood Chain was the first of the two that I came up with, specifically because of the scene at the end of this book. A Spatial user that specializes in breaching other Spatial Skills is somewhat essential for anyone going after other elvenoids. After all, why run when you could hide in another dimension?

As for the rest, well. In the immortal words of Elaine: RAFO!