NOVPUB
I think that’s a nice note to leave that on.
HELLO!
Funatic here, bringing you his usual complaints of “this arc turned out so much longer than I thought it would!”
At 267’064 words, this one is more reasonable though. We’ve managed to dodge enormities like the Flow Riding Arc for now… although I fear that the next arc will change that again, since I have a bunch of side stuff to clean up again…
Before I get lost talking about the future, let’s talk about this arc itself.
And before I do that, I want to thank all of my paying supporters! My finances continue to be on a good trajectory thanks to all of you and I can continue investing my time and thoughts into this and other projects.
That being said, I wouldn’t say I have reached a truly comfortable wage yet, so if any of y’all have some money to spare, I’d much appreciate it. (/Funatic or https://subscribestar.adult/funatic)
This arc was primarily born out of the popular request to spend some more time on the Kingdom Adventures mechanic. I wouldn’t say the chapters that previously were dedicated to them were wildly popular, their like numbers were sometimes even below average, but they usually drummed up more verbal support than was usual. I would consider myself more of a stubborn bastard than a people pleaser. No harm in giving people what they want every now and again.
So, I got to planning.
The realm was always going to be quite straightforward. Villains in my work are typically not that simple. By that I do not mean that I haven’t written my fair share of malevolent bastards in my day, just that I like to give dispatching them a lot of weight and that things aren’t typically easy even if they’re right.
With the Iron Domain, I threw all of that out of the window. This was going to be a very clear, unambiguous, “There is no way fighting the Ironborn will not be the right call” situation. There was a very clear rank order of enemies, with a big bad evil guy on top that could only be dealt with using fisticuffs. Basically, I wanted to reconstruct the simplicity of a Shounen Manga story.
Which I obviously failed at in almost every aspect. Because I like “realistic” chains of events, the conquest was a meandering path of dodging enemy engagements and gradually diminishing fighting power. This was, like always, not helped by the fact that John is a smart boy who does not want to ever face an enemy without stacking the deck first.
In the roughest possible terms, this arc ended up in four segments: 1. Entering the Iron Domain, 2. The Prep Grinding, 3. Widespread Conquests, 4. The Final Confrontation. Let’s talk about them in order.
Entering the Iron Domain was simultaneously the easiest and hardest part of it all and also where I immediately realized that this could not play out like a Shounen story. They land, they find a city of misery, they get familiar with the situation, then they start throwing their weight around. All around simple stuff, laying out the groundwork for the world and the relative power of our heroes in it.
The problem I had was made manifest when they first ran into Reetha: our group is very powerful. Shounen stories typically get around the problem of having several strong members on the good side by giving them some code of honour (or sheer stupidity) that makes them unwilling to intervene in one-on-one combat. The only way I could have gone about the group not utterly dominating basically everything they ran into was by filling the Iron Domain with people of absolutely absurd power. Basically, I would have needed to break the power scale of the universe and that’s something I am VERY much against.
Deciding to stay with the levels I had mapped out worked fine though.
Arkeidos was always supposed to be a lich with multiple bodies, so that counteracted that problem well enough in the final fight. More on that later.
For now, let’s focus on Arkeidos’ first introduction. Writing Arkeidos was one of the most fun experiences I’ve had when it came to a villain in a while. He was, and remained to his last moments, an utterly evil son of a bitch. Just because he was an absolutely horrid person did not mean I wanted him to be uncharismatic or a bad leader. No, I wanted him to be exactly that kind of force of personality, personal might, and sheer determination that could carve out an empire on his own and dominate it for a millennium.
To those of you even remotely familiar with League of Legends, the parallels between Arkeidos and Mordekaiser were most likely obvious. Visually, he’s supposed to be a mixture between that character and Sauron, with some Necron bits and personal flair added. In terms of character, I wanted to take the base of Mordekaiser and flesh it out into an actual person. League of Legends lore has a large amount of very interesting ideas, almost none of which are particularly deeply explored.
Arkeidos is probably my favourite villain I have created so far. He has gravitas and a deeply malevolent worldview that also makes perfect sense for his character. Partway through the creation, I also decided that I wanted to explore this angle of someone of extreme power whose sin was less pride and more greed. Although Arkeidos is just as prideful as John is greedy, the extremes are switched here. John wants very select things a lot. Arkeidos wants everything a lot, to the point where he deems it his right to have.
The throughline of his character in these conflicts is supposed to be that a proper challenge has become the rarest thing to obtain at all, which is why he engages with less caution than he should initially and does not mind his ultimate defeat that much. That’s basically outright stated at the end of him. Perhaps I should try to do some more subtle character writing.
Moving on story wise, we keep going with the Prep Grinding. That one went on for much longer than I bargained for. The problem was that I wanted to give bosses, which I had already designed, at least some screentime despite how easy they were due to the level gap. Whether that was a good or bad decision varies depending on your outlook. Obviously, it delayed the return to the meat of the arc for a while, but there’s also quite a few of you that enjoy the game aspects of this story a lot.
There were also a lot of Perks and the Golemcrafter Class got introduced. This is a power that was actually supposed to be one of John’s fundamentals back when I first designed this branch. I’ve tried to get it into the story a few times over the years, but never found quite the right opportunity or iteration of it. Now it felt like I finally got to do it in a way that made sense. Feels nice to occasionally boost the Possession aspect of this story again.
After the Prep Grind, we went back into the Iron Domain. The first fight against Arkeidos was… okay, I guess. The excuse I could employ here for basically making it a 1vs1 was that the speed at which things were happening was too high for anyone else to weigh in. The action itself was rather poor, which is my standard opinion of my action scenes, but I did get to show the continued problems with Eliana’s “unity” – or lack thereof.
From there we went to the map painting aspect of the arc. What I can primarily say about this stretch is that I invested an unnecessarily great amount of worldbuilding into it. I just can’t help myself. I love mechanics and infrastructure. Getting the Fusion army involved as a volunteer force was also a nice chance to do some interesting side stuff.
Claire got introduced towards the end of this stretch. Unlike Lee, the vampiric maid was someone I had planned for a while. As a matter of fact, she has been planned for so long, I cancelled her at least once and then put her back on the menu. Now that she’s hit the pages, you can expect more of her in the future.
On a short note: I haven’t really talked about Lorelei yet. For the most part, her introduction was done in previous arcs and her informal introduction into the harem was… well, exactly that, mostly informal. She hasn’t had a lot of integration time yet due to the events unfolding afterwards. We’ll address that next arc.
Anyway, John develops an interest in Claire, Arkeidos notices, and then strikes as he sees an opportunity to either win the war in one decisive engagement or at least get a hostage to force a second decisive engagement later. I did want this stretch to last longer. Jevaine’s power was just too overwhelming.
In the original plan, they were actually supposed to run out the clock on Jevaine and take care of her there, still losing Claire in the process. I could have still run with that course of events, ultimately I decide how long that effect should have lasted, but I came to realize that John being forced to use Escape Rope made more sense and was more satisfying.
Arkeidos would not have been as interesting to write if he hadn’t possessed the necessary competency to evaluate the power of his minions.
Little bit of desperation and hope later and we enter the final stretch of the arc. This is all very recent, so I won’t rehash too much of it. Basically, they gather their allies, go in, and fight Arkeidos.
This was a nice opportunity to bind this arc back into the larger universe. Because the story unfolded on a different plane of existence, the plotline was disconnected from the rest of what was going on. John gathering support not only sets up some future stuff, as he now has a lot of new and strengthened ties, it also gives a tangible example of the world’s interest in him growing over the course of the season thus far.
The fight(s) against Arkeidos are structurally sound. That’s the best I can say about them from my perspective. I have a hard time ever considering my action scenes more than mediocre. In part this is because I know they could be even better, even if they are objectively above average, so it’s just useful for me to categorize them that way. Moreso it is that I think action in writing rarely ever leaves the realm of mediocre in general. Words just lack the necessary bandwidth to have the multi-layered or swift engagements I like from my combat.
At 20 chapters, 17 PoVs, spanning over 55’000 words, the final fight against Arkeidos and his subordinates is the most ambitious action sequence I have written so far. While the action bits themselves were not to my liking, the overarching strategies employed by the different combatants were interesting to spell out. It also gave ample opportunity for a lot of bombastic scenes.
In order, we had: The Entropy Arena, Nathalia’s dragon form in action, Maximillian Quarter Fusing, the Sin Elemental, Rave and Moira pushing against a laser beam, and the combo of everyone helping John survive until Arkeidos gets blasted to oblivion.
There were also a great many “lesser” moments, like the Horned Rat tearing off parts of himself and, later, fighting Arkeidos.
My favourite fight was certainly Metra’s. There’s something so honest about her and it was nice writing the difference between her going full berserker and her engaging in a more skill-focused fight when the Entropy Arena disables the power boost from anger. 𝔫𝖔𝔳𝔭𝔲𝔟.𝖈𝔬𝔪
My favourite moment was almost certainly the final combination of all allies coming together.
At this point I’d like to give a special shout-out to Omnius, one of my proofreaders, who gave a lot of feedback on me brainstorming this whole engagement. Second, but definitely no less, thanks go out to DraMr who continues to make all of this readable with his dedication to grammar.
And then the arc wraps up fairly quickly. You would know, you just read it.
So, this arc is a showcase of what happens when I actually focus on a single story thread… it bloats out of proportion until it is just as long as every other arc. Fantastic. Complaints aside, I had a lot of fun with this one. I was incredibly happy when I was finally done with the action sequence and will probably stay away from those for a little bit. With the Overclock cooldown, John won’t fight anyway.
If you have the time to give me some feedback, please leave it /forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfEjKkcVuWWD617g5cPJPLCiYbOJlavl4GsRU0pfJGxiP_Bxw/viewform
Next arc will focus more on the slice of life aspects of this story. Primarily because we have 3-4 waifus to properly handle. Lorelei deserves more attention, Claire needs to be shown a world that isn’t worse than hell, Delicia needs to be cured, and Nightingale is owed some courtship.
All of this will combine with some other issues. What happened with Fusion while John was gone? What lessons did the volunteer forces draw? How will John repay the favours he now owes? How quickly can Maximillian organize a wedding? Will Rave poke her man relentlessly that Max and Irielz got hitched faster than they did?
The answer to the last one is definitely yes.
For the other answers, you’ll have to return for the next arc. I’ll now take my two week vacation, then the Gamer will return with Season 3 Arc 9 “Maid in Heaven”.
Until then.
