TL;DR:
Clive was trapped in a dimensional space by the duelling power of a messenger. Until one of them was dead, neither was able to leave. The space was an empty void, the only object being a massive flat disc on which Clive was standing. The remains of his precious familiar, Onslow, lay at his feet.
Facing off against Clive was a spear-wielding messenger whose sneer had turned into a glare. He had lunged at Clive, only to discover the adventurer could use his staff for more than blasting fo...
2022-09-28 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostFirstly, my apologies for the late chapter. My assistant scheduled it for 9 in the evening, local time, instead of 9 in the morning.
Normally this is something he watches out for at release time, but it's very busy at Casa del Shirt today. I had a morning meeting in the city, so I got to enjoy delightful commuter traffic, then electricians were showing up right as I got home. This was also the time the chapter should have been going out, and instead of having my assistant doubl...
2022-09-27 23:37:39 +0000 UTC View PostMessengers and adventurers alike were rushing towards Jason. For the highest-ranked people, traversing the city was not a lengthy exercise, and the diamond-ranker adventurers pursuing Mah Go Schaat arrived first.
The diamond rankers were both elves, a man and a woman. Her name was Allayeth and his was Charist. What they found was Schaat’s corpse, dissolving into rainbow smoke. A sharp-featured silver-ranker was extracting and devouring the remnant life-force. As he drained the diamond...
2022-09-27 23:28:15 +0000 UTC View PostSophie and Humphrey returned to the relative safety of Onslow’s hollow flying shell. Jason performing some insane act was an inevitability, and once he had, the monsters went mad. Some continued towards the ground, the control of the summoners managing to hold. Others snapped the leash and fled back up the way they had come, or flew about randomly in a confused frenzy.
“I have a feeling we should get to Jason,” Humphrey announced. “I suspect that he’ll soon be the centre of so...
2022-09-26 23:01:00 +0000 UTC View PostFirstly: tier prices are not changing. This is about schedules only.
I have finally been given the chance to change the billing schedule so that people are billed each month based on the day they sign up rather than being billed at the start of the month, even if they joined at the end of the last one.
This does not affect existing patrons. You will continue to be billed at the start of the month, as you are now. This will only impact new patrons, saving them from signing up at t...
2022-09-26 22:38:27 +0000 UTC View PostThere was a single diamond-ranker amongst the messenger forces, Mah Go Schaat. He had no interest in the astral king’s goals, and longed for the day he would no longer have to take the woman’s directives. He was already powerful enough that she could only ask so much of him, and he gave no more than was strictly required. He was still bound to her service, however, until he finally found the path to astral king for himself. In the meantime, he was stuck servicing her agenda, as delivered ...
2022-09-23 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostTaika looked down the hallway at the messenger floating at the end of it. After being impaled and smashed into walls multiple times, the once-glorious being now looked like a bird that couldn’t stop flying into windows. As for Taika himself, he was in a strange state where he was both exhausted from his recent rank-up and simultaneously tingling with energy from his shape-change ability.
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Ability: [King of the Sky] (Wing)
Taika had both hands against the shower wall as the water sluiced the ichor from his trembling body. Nothing short of crystal wash would get the foul, clinging gunk the body produced during a rank-up off, but that was fine. The cloud palace showers had the water infused with crystal wash. Jason was surprisingly free with the stuff, given how there had been a shortage in Rimaros.
“Oh,” Taika said to himself, suddenly realising why.
He scrubbed away the foul black-green residue ...
2022-09-21 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostFal Vin Garath sneered and headed in the direction of the pyramid. Although no one saw it, the sneer was for his commander, for his astral king’s Voice of the Will and for Asano, who would soon be dead. Fal’s wings spread out as he wove his way through the battlefield, the image of grace and elegance as he glided through the chaos. He seemed untouchable, yet there was no frenetic dodging as he moved through the monsters, attacks from the vehicles below passing him by. He danced through th...
2022-09-20 23:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostFal Vin Garath was not having a good day. He detested being forced to act at the behest of the Voice of the Will, Jes Fin Kaal, and this mission was exactly why. She had sent him to kill Jason Asano, but she clearly expected him to not come back. He would relish the look on her face when he dropped Asano’s head at her feet.
Fal could not openly defy the voice. Like all messengers, he needed to be sworn to an astral king, lest he wither and die. It was one of the strongest drives to be...
2022-09-19 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostTL;DR: The pacing for this sequence is a bit out of whack. I'm going to fix it before it gets published.
To be clear, I mean the plot pacing. Chapters will continue to come out on schedule while I complete book nine, but I may take a week in October to reorganise book nine before sending it to the publishers.
The current extensive war sequence is something new for me as a writer. In addition to being very long, it has a lot of movi...
Jason floated up, his cloak shaped into gently beating wings as they carried him into Gordon’s ritual diagram. His eyes swept over the sophisticated magical orrery, his body tingling as he passed through the glowing lines. He moved to the centre of the large, central sphere. He had the unnerving impression of being inside a complex machine, the operation of which he didn’t completely understand. But he did have a basic grasp of how it worked, enough that he could take his place as the fin...
2022-09-16 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostThe commander of the adventurer forces defending the entertainment district was Eilaf Hayel, a gold-rank elven adventurer and Yaresh native. He was a veteran of fighting the messengers, having assaulted their strongholds more than a dozen times. He was extremely familiar with the aura suppression tactic they employed and how it impacted the morale of adventurers. The fact that they hadn’t used it from the opening moments of the battle was not a relief but a concern.
Eilaf’s gold-ran...
2022-09-15 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostMarek offered a mental salute to the man rampaging through the monster horde. He had managed to overhear one of the man’s companions call him Humphrey, and Marek hoped he would survive to eventually reach gold-rank. He would like to face him in battle, perhaps finding a clue in that confrontation to push his own advancement forward. He lamented that while this battlefield had many exceptional silver-ranked enemies, the golds were only passable. It seemed that the defenders of the city had l...
2022-09-14 23:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostJason sneezed.
Jason was standing on the corpse of a monster as it fell through the sky, using shadow arms to hold himself in place. Shade and Gordon were flying next to him as he rode the monster downward, away from a spear-wielding messenger flying above.
“Mr Asano, did you just sneeze?” Shade asked.
“I did. That’s weird, right?”
“Given that you do not have sinuses, I would say yes.”
“Maybe someone is talking about me.”
“I don’t see ...
2022-09-13 23:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostHumphrey’s second foray into the main force of the summons was markedly different from the first. His Relentless Assault attack has reached such levels of power that his silver-rank sword was breaking apart every dozen or so strikes, the forces passing through it too much for it to endure. It didn’t stop Humphrey as he didn’t miss a beat, conjuring the sword anew each time and continuing his assault. Every swing of his blade left a monster debilitated or dead, the toughest finding half ...
2022-09-12 23:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostFor Humphrey and his team, the fight had reached a new peak of intensity. After Belinda’s wide-scale destruction using her lightning tether, the messengers had sent a storm of summoned monsters to assault Onslow’s tortoiseshell mini-fortress. Rather than being placed on the defensive, however, they were taking the fight to the enemy. Clive’s Mana Tide spell had the team operating above and beyond their normal levels, giving them the mana to throw everything they had at the enemy.
...
2022-09-09 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostClive looked over at the breach in between blasting at monsters with his staff and wand.
“They must have summoners stationed outside, sending more in as we kill these ones.”
“I’d say a lot of summoners,” Belinda agreed. “I know their summoners can call up more than even Humphrey, but these numbers are beyond anything they told us to expect. Which means we could really use someone diving in there to help me use my power effectively.”
“Yes, I’m going...
2022-09-08 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostBelinda was mimicking Clive, blasting at summoned monsters with her own staff and wand, but she was a pale imitation of the real thing. She could also make use of Clive’s rituals, boosting her weapons to deal more damage and chain their attacks from enemy to enemy. The problem was that her weapons were not able to make as much use of the rituals as Clive’s were. Her staff and wand were both quality items, but if she let the rituals overcharge them as much as Clive did his, they would swif...
2022-09-07 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostBreaches to the barrier were happening all across the city, but one was unlike any of the others. Seen and heard from across the city, the messenger’s only diamond ranker came down through the peak of the dome like an anvil through glass. The dome being penetrated released sound that reached the outer walls and force that shattered windows for kilometres. Adventurers were avoiding the central part of the city because of the ongoing garuda battle, but even at a distance many flyers were knoc...
2022-09-06 23:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostFor the new patrons that came along during the very lengthy break, here is the release schedule for chapters:
Release days:
Mon-Fri or Tue-Sat, depending on time zone.
Release time:
9am Australian Eastern (my local time).
Your local time will vary across the year based on daylight savings.
Jason and his team were riding inside Onslow’s expanded shell toward the entertainment district. Buried under the taverns, clubs, theatres and nightclubs was a massive subterranean bunker, one of the least secure in the city. It was large and magically reinforced, but mostly relied on a sturdy roof, with no active defences that could deter attackers from digging in eventually.
That was usually fine if a monster spawned in the city or some managed to break in during a monster surge, bu...
2022-09-05 23:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostThe city of Yaresh was under siege by messengers and their summoned monsters. It was Jason’s first time participating in the full-blown defence of a city, and a high-magic one at that. During the defence of Rimaros he had been working monster cleanup on another island.
If not for the danger to the people of the Yaresh, he would have enjoyed being an unremarkable cog in the machine, one of many silver-rankers recruited to the task. As the messengers and their summons were silver-rank a...
2022-09-02 23:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostThe sky rang with noise despite the battle at the centre of the Yaresh being a dozen kilometres away. Even from the outskirts, barely within the outer walls, the titanic figures could be seen looming over the towers at the heart of the city. The eagle-headed garuda was entangled with snakes wrapping around his body, as if a basket of them had been tipped over him. There was also a cluster of serpents of almost unbelievable enormity, as if sea monsters had risen from the deep and merged into a...
2022-09-01 23:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostWith the next chapter less than fourteen hours away, I hope all you silver-rank patrons are excited for a side-chapter about Anna and Susan's anniversary dinner back on Earth.
All book 7 chapters are now down and we once again enter the awkward period where new readers have the extremely annoying gap in the available story, until book 7 goes live on Amazon.
On an unrelated note, 2022-09-01 09:15:37 +0000 UTC View Post
The book 7 chapters are coming down very soon. How very depends on how late my assistant sleeps in, but definitely today.
If you haven't yet, grab the PDF bundle for book 7 while you can.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/large-pdf-books-60845232
After a much longer hiatus than intended, chapters will (finally - sorry about that) resume on the 1st or 2nd of September, depending on local time zone.
In preparation for the launch of book 7, the associated chapters (461-526) will be leaving all official online platforms. Book 7 comes out September 13th on Audible, Kindle and paperback, with the book 7 chapters coming down August 30.
2022-08-25 22:13:00 +0000 UTC View PostTL;DR: Please post corrections in the report-errors channel in discord rather than the chapter comments.
Here is a discord invite: https://discord.gg/CDV5SqM
Many of my excellent readers are fantastic about digging out errors in the Patreon chapters, for which I am very grateful. I wanted to make a note of the best way to get those errors corrected, rather than have someone go through a bunch of chapters only t...
2022-08-13 19:26:04 +0000 UTC View PostI have release dates for the next two books. Relevant Patreon chapters will come down a couple of weeks beforehand.
Book 7: September 13
Book 8: December 13
If I happened to be floating around Los Angeles the week of December 5th, just before book 8 comes out, would anyone be interested in hanging out? Maybe do some kind of meet-up or small event?