Shirtaloon

Chapter 837: Not All of Us Are Demigods

“That was hard,” Gary said. “Normally the boss anomalies are huge monstrosities, but this thing…”

He looked down at the odd, seemingly innocuous creature. It was round and purple with stubby arms and legs, like a child in a grape costume. It had a purple top hat and a face that was a couple of dots and a line, in the middle of its body, as if drawn on with a marker.

“What was that thing?” Miriam asked. “It’s like it could remake reality.”

“It came back ...

Chapter 836: Academically Unsound

Thunder and lightning assaulted the ground like an army of angry angels. Rain hammered down, turning black dirt into sludge. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, mud and, for the silver-rankers clearing the rubble, tongue-coating stone dust. The amount of rubble was enormous, having once been a towering mesa. Much of it was scattered far enough away that it didn’t need to be cleared but thousands of tons of stone still needed to be removed.

It would have been impossible without ...

Chapter 835: Paranoid

Lightning struck so fast that the last peal of thunder was still rumbling when the next one set the sky to shuddering. Adventurers took shelter under the forest of iron towers jutting from the blasted landscape. Most were silver-rankers, but a small number of golds worked to shield the others from the lightning as they worked. They were clearing rubble that had been a mesa until Undeath’s avatar destroyed it.

The adventurers hauled away fragments of shattered rock while also extractin...

Chapter 834: When We Worry the Most

“I’m sorry,” Jali Corrik Fen said as she walked alongside Jason in the mountain fortress. The corridors of black stone and red metal were high and wide enough to drive a freight truck through them. It was more than sufficient for the messenger to walk beside Jason without shrinking herself or dismissing her wings.

“What are you sorry for?” Jason asked.

“The messengers you’ve liberated aren’t getting the indoctrination they normally would.”

“I seriously ho...

Chapter 833: Binaries

Boris was human-sized and without his wings, but Jason couldn’t help but notice the messenger was still a lot taller. They were still on the beach, Jason in a floral shirt and tan shorts. Boris was wearing what Jason could only describe as a blouse with only two buttons at the bottom done up. Like his hair, it was being gently tousled by a sea breeze that wasn’t enough to cut through the scorching heat of the day. Jason looked down at Boris’ legs.

“Are you wearing pantaloons?”...

Chapter 832: A Decision Made Poorly and in Haste

Jason and Boris were at the beach in Jason’s replica town, sitting in cheap folding chairs. Boris had put away his wings and shrunk himself down to human size, as he typically did around humans. His long blond hair was teased by the ocean wind, leaving it dancing around his square-jawed features. The sun shone from his tan, muscular chest.

“Could you please do your shirt all the way up?” Jason asked. “You look like the cover of a romance novel from the eighties, and don’t even...

Podcast part 2 and online convention panels.

TL;DR:

• Part 2 of the podcast I appeared on last week is out.
• I will be on some online convention panels this week.

Podcast Part 2
Part two of the podcast I was on last week has gone up. The first part covered a lot of things I've discussed elsewhere in interviews, AMAs, etc, while part two enters fresher territory. It also features a very lingering shot demonstrating how badly I'm baldi...

Chapter 831: Leadership Isn't Easy

Jason walked across the wide grassy meadow where his companions had confronted the avatar. Humphrey followed as they headed for the forest surrounding the area, moving around holes left by giant feet. The sky darkened, day turning to night by the time they reached the trees ringing the space. Jason led them into the woods and they soon came across a much smaller clearing. A few logs were set up as makeshift benches around a campfire.

A glass-fronted refrigerator stood incongruously off ...

Chapter 830: Right Now

The avatar was gone. Pieces of it had been wrenched away, one by one, and consumed by white fire. The final destruction of the avatar marked the final excision of the god of Undeath's power and Jason's soul realm immediately grew more stable. White flames kicked up into an inferno that was harmless to the living but swept across the landscape. Where it passed, damage was repaired and the marks of corruption were wiped away.

From the moment that process had begun, Shade, Farrah and Colin...

A few updates.

TL;DR:

• I just appeared on a litRPG podcast.
• Assistaloon is back.
• Book 10 chapters (699-790) coming down next month.
  
• Break schedule for 2023/24.
• December 2023: break (rest and Christmas).
• March 2024: possible short break (work event).
• April 2024: break (family vacation).
• August/September 2024: TBD-length break (Dragon Con).
2023-10-16 22:05:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 829: Miracles Work on a Different Scale

The avatar of Undeath in Jason’s soul realm wasn’t the melting, beleaguered mess the real thing had been when fighting Gary. It stood as tall as a fifteen-storey building, in the fullness of its might. Skinless, red-purple flesh; wounds that showed not weakness but power, purple light shining from within.

Jason’s companions had been attacking it by means ranging from the ordinary to the absurd, the messengers piling on as well. Through it all, there had been no sign of the avatar ...

Chapter 828: The Hegemon

The contingent making their way through Jason’s soul realm had two groups. One was Jason’s companions, led by Nik and one of Shade’s bodies. The other was Boris and his group of messengers. At the advice of Shade and Nik, both groups moved swiftly but not at a breakneck pace. With the world crumbling around them, even flying through the air they could run into a sudden breakout of corruption. They moved quickly, staying close to the ground but not on it. The messengers could fly, while ...

Chapter 827: No Limit

Jason’s world was breaking. Trees were rotting and falling over. Buildings crumbled as whole sections fell away, leaving them unable to support their own weight. The ground was turning to purple-black sludge. Ghostly white flames resisted the encroachment but it was a losing battle. The fire was driven by Jason’s will and his will was spent.

Jason stood in the middle of a field, exhausted and barely standing. It had been a long time since pain had bothered him, after years of severe...

Chapter 826: Instinctively Protected

Clan Asano had two domains. One was in Saint-Etienne, France, covering most of the city. The other was close to Nitra, Slovakia, on formerly agricultural land. Both contained astral spaces rich in magic, producing far more magical manifestations than on Earth. This meant essences, awakening stones and quintessence, although far more than any of those, it meant monsters.

There were geographical restrictions on the manifestations that cities on Pallimustus would have waged wars to learn t...

Chapter 825: New Power and a Freshly Cooked Batch of Smugness

Jason plunged from his cloud palace head first. His cloak trailed behind him, a black scar against the clear blue sky. His cloak was not a graceful tool of flight, but he had learned from the messengers how to compensate. They flew using the magic of their wings, enhanced by their ability to use physical force with their auras. Jason did the same, descending in a spiral to approach the ground with poise.

Close to Gary, currently four times his height, Jason floated in the air, producing...

Chapter 824: He Isn't Always Evil and He is Not Always Wrong

Jason floated in the scorching desert air, standing on a small cloud platform. In his hand was his cloud flask, spewing out fog that was adding to the half-complete sky fortress forming in the air. It was all thin lines and sharp angles, more decorative than practical. As sections were completed, the white material turned the dark shade of a storm cloud.

He turned his gaze to the ground far below where Gary continued to beat on the avatar. It mounted token resistance but was well past t...

Chapter 823: He Likes to Name-Drop

The battlefield was oddly stalled out. Undeath’s army was a spent force, the priests dead or fleeing while the remnant undead were mopped up by the adventurers and their allies. Few of the enemy messengers with their pallid, corpse-like skin remained. Most had been killed by the butterflies that had blanketed the sky until they were sent to attack the avatar. Those that remained were being captured alive. Miriam had ordered their forces to do so if possible and safe, out of respect for Jaso...

It might go horribly wrong

The next new chapter goes out to silver-rank+ patrons in about five minutes from this post going live. This is just to remind you that I'm running the show without my assistant for the next two weeks, so expect things to be a little sloppy. Rougher proof reading, wobbly links, posts going a bit wrong for various reasons. I'm inevitably going to stuff up somewhere along the line. Note that I will be very asleep when the chapter goes out today, so I'll fix whatever I got wrong when I wake up. 2023-10-02 21:55:00 +0000 UTC View Post

How disturbing, exactly?

Edit: Just to update everyone, I added both tags. I was already leaning in that direction but I wanted some outside perspective before pulling the trigger. The general consensus seems to agree, making it an easy decision. Thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion.

As of several hours ago, I am back in Australia. It took me about a day and half of travel, not counting the fact that I seem to have misplaced Thursday, somewhere around the...

Chapter 822: It Used to be Completely Dark

The two divine combatants were the unquestionable focus of the battlefield. Looming as tall as houses, they flung powers back and forth. Gary wielded hammers and conjured chains, all wreathed in golden fire. He called up his foundry golem summon, far larger than normal and filled with metal melted by divine fire. The avatar plucked undead from the ground and pallid messengers from the air, melding them into grotesque whips of dead flesh. It grabbed fistfuls of undead and flung them like grena...

See you next month

My airport taxi will get here in about three and a half hours. I'm about to freeze payments, shut down my computer and do the last bit of packing. The new silver-rank chapter is scheduled for release and the bronze/iron ones should be available already.

I hope you all have a great month, and that I might meet some of you at Dragon Con.

Chapter 821: Asking For a Lot of Trust

In the dimension-warped M.C. Escher castle Garth had trapped them in, Jason watched Garth move across a bridge that was, from his perspective, upside down. The undead glared at him with the burning light inside the eyes of his skull sockets, but could do nothing more. Although they could look at one another, they could not fling attacks across the dimensional boundaries that invisibly segmented the space. Jason watched as Garth kept hunting him, growing visibly weaker by the minute.

“...

Chapter 820: Bit of an Odd Bloke

As soon as the bony hand landed on Jason’s shoulder, the world around him swirled into incomprehensible nonsense, like a stick of dynamite going off in a drum of paint. Jason was both familiar and inured to dimensional displacement, so was already moving when the world reformed an instant later. He kicked out behind him, hitting something solid enough that he moved rather than it. He span, spotting an undead creature draped in ragged cloth, only his skull face and skeletal feet showing.

Chapter 819: A Dangerous Power

Garth had a dangerous power. It didn't come from his stolen hearts but was inherent to his nature as a zemravore. He could kill his aura, eliminating it entirely. This made him utterly invisible to aura senses, even those of a diamond-ranker. There simply was no aura to sense. This left him exposed, however, in ways that an aura that was only hidden did not.

Auras formed a natural shield against many powers. Sometimes it was something relatively ordinary, such as telekinesis not affecti...

Chapter 818: Risking Everything

In the battle that took place in the underground city of the brighthearts, the priests of Undeath had largely held back. They had what amounted to an infinite supply of the unliving to throw them at the enemy until the enemy crumbled. This was not the case when the two cloud vehicles came barrelling over the rocks and sand of the desert, trails of dust thrown up in their wake.

Undeath priests came in different varieties, from somewhat ordinary essence users to bizarre undead mockeries. ...

Chapter 817: Will he Be Broken

Two cloud vehicles shot through an unclaimed territory, hovering a few metres over the ground. The territory was an icy expanse, but far from a barren waste. In the distance, castles made of ice sparkled in the sun. Plant life was abundant, in shades of white blue and grey over the traditional browns and greens.

Of the two vehicles, one was larger and more colourful. Painted in vibrant sunset hues, it ranged from warm shades of orange, gold and red through to cool purples, blues and tea...

Chapter 816: Messengers Don't Have Hearts

Garth and Jameela were standing atop a hill of red desert rock. Their vast forces spread out on the plateau they were overlooking.

“So, the messengers want this soul forge, whatever that is,” Garth said.

“According to the Magic Society researchers, yes,” Jameela said. “And it seems that Asano is the biggest threat to that objective. He also has the ability to claim it.”

“Do we?”

“I don’t believe so. We could only acquire it with the help of the mess...

Chapter 815: Unorthodoxy

The shimmering dome of aura was impenetrable to magical senses, even those of a gold-rank messenger like Fiola Min Kath. She was sitting in one of the trees, having shaped a throne in the branches with her plant manipulation powers. It was an uncommon power amongst messengers, but that rarity did not translate to respect. Messengers admired powers that worked in the sky.

Fiola had watched Mahk Den Kahla lead the other gold-rankers into the dome one after another, none of whom had return...

Chapter 814: Another Astral King

Mahk Den Kahla was an unhappy messenger. Ever since meeting Boris Ket Lundi, things had been spiralling out of control. Boris was dominant force, his arguments for Mahk handing over his territory compelling. And Mahk was not the last to be swayed, with other messengers they encountered having fallen into line as well. Not every gold-ranker was convinced by words, but those who survived challenging Boris ultimately accepted their subordination. Boris was not just an outstanding combatant but o...

Chapter 813: Small, Easy or Inconsequential

Jason was walking down a wide forest path with the unnamed rabbit by his side. Sunlight passed through the thin canopy, leaving their way well-lit, yet also private and secluded.

“Names are important,” Jason said. “I have a familiar. His name is Colin and people love him.”

“You’re saying that ‘Colin’ is some magic name that makes people like you?” the rabbit asked.

“A little bit. Not by itself, of course. Context is important. I’m a man of two worlds. I...