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2.19 Patreon Release

I was caught off guard by how sudden and intense my desire was to leap out of bed and go to Hina. I was possessed of the urge, for just a moment, to flood my muscles with Flame enough to stand under my own power in spite of the egregious harm I’d already inflicted on them, to rip the intravenous needle from my arm heedless of the pain it would bring. She was hurting, and she needed me. I wanted to feel her touch, press my forehead against hers until she felt better, tangle our limbs togethe...

Upcoming Rewards Changes (More Stuff For Everyone!)

Hi! This is for both current and prospective supporters of Sunspot. I'll be changing the Patreon rewards starting with Arc 3; everybody will be getting more stuff per dollar!

TLDR:

• Side stories are becoming available for members of all tiers, including free memberships.

• Advance chapter backlog is increasing from 1 to 3.

• Radiance tier: After 2025-03-21 09:50:03 +0000 UTC View Post

2.18 Patreon Release

“She hasn’t come out of her room since we got back.”

My stomach twisted. Last time that had happened, Hina had been stewing in remorse. This time, it served her right, but even so…

“Oh. That’s…bad, yeah.”

Alice sighed. “Very, very bad. Normally she just runs away when she gets like this, so the fact that she’s not…I’ve said what I can to try to cheer her up, but she’s a mess. She thinks you’re mad at her.”

“…I am.” I couldn’t entir...

2.17 Patreon Release

If I dreamt after passing out in the grass, I don’t remember it. Perhaps I would have spoken with Holton again, or drawn the parallels between how I’d broken out of our shared dream and how I’d escaped back into reality from the abyss, or connected the gargantuan hunk of driftwood to the towering forest beyond the beach.

But instead, I just slept. I slept through finally being extracted from the inferno and taken back to Lighthouse Tower, through the remainder of the evacuation, t...

2.16 Patreon Release

Sorry this is late! I really wanted to make sure I got it right. You'll hopefully understand why by the end.

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If only getting back to reality were as easy as letting gravity drag me there. Even though we were supposedly ‘above’ the three-dimensional slice of the universe humanity calls home, the physics of the space beyond was a complex balance of countless other forces that overrode Earth’s familiar homeward pull. I was instead sent plummeting through the kaleidoscopic a...

2.15 Patreon Release

Of all the Radiances, Yuuka seemed the most universally useful. She was nearly impossible to catch by surprise. Even though she hadn’t foreseen Takagiri escaping the first trap, she’d still been able to avert the magical backlash and gotten it right the second time. I didn’t know much about strategy, but it was clear as day that foresight—precognition, divination, whatever you wanted to call it—was a game changer, the furthest thing from a liability.

At least, when it worked.<...

2.14 Patreon Release - 2000 Reader Milestone Edition!

Hi everybody! Thank you so much for 2000 readers across shub+rr+the main site. To celebrate, this chapter is available to free members in addition to the usual patron tiers. Enjoy!

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Rather than dive into the crowd to go after Takagiri directly, Yuuka simply summoned her Flame once more, weaving quickly and carefully, never taking her eyes off the spot in the crowd where she had “seen” my stalker. I wasn’t having any luck seeing her myself, but that wasn’t a surprise. 2025-02-07 14:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post

2.13 Patreon REVISION

This is a REVISION of 2.13 with one major change that cascaded down across the chapter. The change is informational, not plot-related. The original chapter is still available here on Patreon.

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Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds lat...

2.13 Patreon Release

Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the...

No Side Story 1/31 + Rewards Discussion

No side story on this break week! Sorry, Vaetna-tier patrons; I'll be trying to get arc 2 done during that week!

Also, during the longer break after arc 2 finishes, I'm thinking about shuffling around the Patreon rewards. I'll probably make side stories available to all patron levels, but give Vaetna-tier patrons a longer backlog of advance chapters to compensate (3 weeks?). The goal is to give patrons of all levels more rewards than currently. This is still mostly in the brainstorming ...

2.12 Patreon Release

I cannot talk about Dad’s death without discussing infernos, and it is difficult to discuss infernos, especially those of the firestorms, without first explaining free ripple, or ambient ripple. That’s the stuff that brings uncontrolled magical effects, be it from natural sources or as the runoff of flamebearer magic. Though the exact effects are myriad, on the whole, there is an obvious analogy to radiation.

In nature, both can be found in relatively trace quantities, and indeed, t...

2.11 Patreon Release

There were a lot of things that sucked about the morning of Hikanome’s event.

First and foremost was the pain. I could feel what I had done to my body last night as a low-level burning, scratchy sensation, not unlike a rash. Every place where a hair follicle had been removed and backfilled by new flesh was its own pixel of discomfort which together formed a high-resolution screen of itching and irritation, lighting up wherever my clothes pressed against my body.

That brought me ...

Side Story: Christmas Shopping

It’s Christmas. Alice and Hina go shopping.

CANONICITY: Canon until contradicted by main story.

DATE: 2021 December 25 (two months before the Thunder Horse Inferno)

The last six years had brought some rather seismic changes to how Alice Takehara experienced Christmas.

The Christmas of 2015 had been somber at best for everyone everywhere. The Firestorms, as they were then starting to be called, had ended hardly four months earlier, an...

2.10 Patreon Release

Also available on Sunspot's new website!

Mild content warnings for dysphoria and blood magic.

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Who hosts an outdoor event in February?

The Saturday of Hikanome’s festival had seen the rain finally wise up and realize it was unseasonable for this time of year in Tokyo, so it had retreated and left streaky greys across a clear, blue sky which you could tell was chilly just from its hue. The b...

2.09 Patreon Release

You can also read this chapter as a Patreon release on Sunspot's new website by logging in with Patreon there!

https://sunspot.gay/

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“I’m—mutating? Like Hina?” Yes, Ezzen, that’s what she just said, don’t ask stupid questions. I tried for something more cogent. “Related to what I did with the punch, I assume?”

Ai nodded, prodding the hologram of my arm. She had highlighted ...

2.08 Patreon Release

Hi guys! Sorry for delay; see the Discord or 2.07 public authors notes on Shub/RR for info about my absence. I'm back!

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“Hit me!”

Hina was in a mood. A giant, gleeful grin of pointed teeth covered her face, and the blue of her eyes held a fervor, a mania.

“Uh.”

“Punch me!”

“Um, we were doing spear exercises earlier—”

“No. Shut up and hit me, cutie. With your fist! Make it fucking hurt,” she panted.

My res...

2.07 Patreon Release

Pretty happy with this chapter overall. Let me know what you think!

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VNT: Vaetna-type. An obnoxiously inaccurate term; for one, none were equal to the Vaetna, and for two, the term was haphazardly applied to essentially any group where a flamebearer held a major role, not just ones that shared the Vaetna’s philosophy of violence. The PCTF and Todai were definitely tier 2 VNT groups; Hikanome was more like tier 3, from what I understood, a...

2.06 Patreon Release

It’s cold.

That’s weird, because temperature isn’t the kind of thing one normally notices in a dream. Nonetheless, it is undeniably cold here. I can feel it on my skin, in my teeth, and especially from the ache in my hand.

Where is here, anyway? It is not the waters below the ice, nor is it the flat expanse above, nor the beach or great and incomprehensible forest beyond. Instead, I sit upon an outcropping, some vast block of hard and rough material tha...