“AAAAARGHH!” Number Sixty-three, the hairy hobo, screamed in desperation as he fired arrow after arrow at Number Forty.
The hobo barely aimed. The harrowing, ear-piercing screeches that came from the running, rolling three-foot ball of fire fueled Number Sixty-three’s terror of suffering a similar fate and kept him from thinking of anything else but keeping the murdering, naked, blood-covered demon away.
He held his crossbow minigun at the hip as the weight of the weapon proved too much for the ill-prepared man to handle and relied on the sheer volume and the speed of his arrows rather than skill and aim. He hoped, begged that at least one arrow would strike true and put the human demon down. But, instead of coming closer to hitting his naked zig-zagging target, the hobo’s arrows seemed to be further and further off-mark with each passing second.
The only thing Number Sixty-three’s barrage accomplished was keeping the naked girl at bay. By this point, it became obvious that the hobo would only be able to hit his mark if she came so close that even a child could score a hit.
Instead, Number Forty closed the distance between her and the gazellekin who threw her boomerang at the quickly approaching naked. Even as she unleashed her boomerang, the gazellekin came to terms with the fact that she would not score a hit.
If a river of flames failed… If even a barrage of arrows could not stop her, how could I? The gazellekin kept asking herself, crushing her own spirit, ensuring that her disheartened attacks could not possibly be successful. After so many failures? There’s no way!
And with that attitude the bladed boomerang missed a target that was closer than ever before: less than thirty feet and closing in fast
Useless! Why didn’t I pick the other one!? The gazellekin despaired. Fuck!
“BRING IT ON!!” the gazellekin screamed with tears in her eyes and raised her fists, resorting to close combat to fight for her survival. She lunged at the girl bringing the resolve she so clearly missed before.
Whether from surprise or some other distraction, Number Forty was too late to properly deflect a simple punch that grazed her chin.
This is my chance! The hobo cheered when he saw his target finally slow down, entangled in hand-to-hand combat.
*Click*
“NOT AGAIN!!” the hobo cursed when the pull of a trigger did not yield even a single arrow. I have to reload, I have to—
The unkept hairy man’s head flew clean off his shoulders, severed by a flying flaming katana, that came from the direction of the diminishing ball of fire that was the dead old catgirl as her charred remains burned away and turned to ash.
I… I can do this! The gazellekin suddenly found herself hopeful. The naked girl was a piss-poor fighter as it turned out. And even if the gazellekin was no expert herself, her average abilities, an advantage in physical buil,d and a decisive leg sweep were more than enough to land Number Forty right on her black thong-wearing butt.
Number Forty looked up at the triumphant gazellekin who had regained her lost confidence and stood over her knocked-down opponent. At that very moment, a familiar flaming katana flew through the air with diminished flames that were partially put out by the high flying speed and the blood of the decapitated Number Thirty-seven.
However, the gazellekin did not lose her head. She ducked and easily countered Number Forty’s feeble leg kick, retaliating with a simple, straightforward punch in the gut while the katana zapped over them.
“You’re not the only one that knows how to dodge!” the gazellekin declared triumphantly, smiling ear to ear as she pinned her naked opponent to the ground and punched her in the face.
“Hahaha! Not so tough without your little ka—KHRAAHK!?” the gazellekin’s triumph ended abruptly when she suddenly choked on something that flew into her wide-open mouth along with Number Forty’s spit.
The gazellekin’s eyes widened in horror as she recalled the fate of the goatkin. She shooked her head, trying to plead with tears in her bulging eyes as she gagged on something lodged in her windpipe, clawing at her own throat, desperate to get the foreign object out.
But there was no mercy in the Number Forty’s crimson eyes. Even as the side of her face reddened and swelled from the punch, Lilith looked at the choking young gazellekin that clawed the skin off her own throat, and calmly said just two words: “Bubble pop.”
The gazellekin’s throat burst apart, unleashing a fresh coat of blood and meat across Number Forty’s face.
With all the attention on Number Forty, the white-masked miss Ruby stood behind the shirtless staff of the arena and couldn’t help but not-so-subtly touch herself as she watched with envy the amounts of blood that her wannabe future opponent showered in.
Since a few days ago the author joined in to some of the conversation about people's discontent, I thought I'd share my thoughts about the story, both what isn't working for me so far and what hooked me enough that I got this far and am still here. I'm a wordy bastard when I get going so, apologies for that. I know some authors like this kind of feedback and some don't, I try to make it as potentially useful as I can and that means detail.
So, first up I'm here for the gender bender, the futa, and the f*cking, of course. Having a futaPOV that is the receiver at times is a lot of fun, and Beatrice losing control when the lust peaks can be really hot. The litRPG character progression stuff is also pretty compelling, the RPG nerd in me apparently quite enjoys reading about other people character-building and you do a pretty good job writing interesting options for her to have to mull over.
A 200k+ story can't really survive on smut alone though, so we get to the plot, setting, and characters. In that regard, what I find most compelling are the moments of humanity and glimmers of actual friendship and goodness. More than once it's looked like Beatrice's bitterness about living a moral life and her eagerness for hedonism are masking the fact that she's actually a good person still, and more than just fixing the world out of disgust she has compassion for those around her and, consciously or not, is trying not just get them to f*ck more but is trying to help them be happier and better people. And sometimes it even looks like it might be working! Olivia, Ember, that smith, the guard, there are moments with all of them where this looks like it's on the table.
But, then I have to get more mixed. Those moments are few and far between, and often followed by seeming character regression. Early on it seemed like Ember had some actual genuine affection for Beatrice, and then she spends long stretches mostly just being a unnecessarily aloof jerk. A usually helpful and quite f*ckable jerk, but a jerk even so. I'm sure there's probably character reasons why so, but that doesn't make it fun.
The world of this story is drowning in misery, suffering, and just plain nastiness, and the story spends so much time wallowing in it. Having a dark, miserable world is one thing, a valid choice and possibly the right choice for this story, but so many people we meet are utterly despicable, just unpleasant people who exist only for f*cking and killing. The villains are absurdly foul and crass in a way that isn't even funny or fun to hate, it's just tiresome, and lots of words are spent on watching them being shrill and vile. It goes far beyond establishing someone to hate and I just don't want to read it anymore. There's nothing compelling about the princess or whatever gutting a bunch of equally horrible lackeys and the announcer getting mad about the mess, maybe some important things are established in these scenes but they very hard for me to pay any attention to.
And sort of the other side of the coin from the misery is the f*cking. As I said smut alone isn't going to sustain a 200k word story, and if I'm honest only like half the smut here does a lot for me. Since the post-battle healing f*cks, I've enjoyed the armorer sex, a decent amount of the Bob sequence, and maybe 10% of the s*x at the inn. As a powergamer it totally makes sense for Beatrice to keep and f*ck Rafaelia, but as an addition to the story she's just so broken and nasty that if Beatrice's path is just to enjoy sticking it in crazy I have a hard time caring enough to read that sex.
That same principal also often applies to Tabitha. Sometimes there's something a bit more there, some glimmer of hope that she won't just be a walking fleshlight begging to be used, but it's rare. s*x with her is also nearly always a subject of another problem that rears up often in this story; the s*x scenes, much like the gore and misery, "go to 11" very quickly and then try to keep going, and become pretty flat. The 'try to f*ck Ember' stuff in the Inn did that in a hurry, and it usually makes the scene become monotonous. Tabitha in general, her s*x scenes have from the start been trying to get more and more extreme from the start, but without actually killing her there's really not a lot left there. I keep hoping Beatrice will try to bring her to a more well adjusted place rather than just indulging in her depravity, but I'm not holding my breath.
So I guess the core point is that I like to see humanity peaking out of the grime, and the growth of both characters and relationships, and I like kinky bisexual futa f*cking, and I love some good tailf*cks. To bring it back to the tournament arc, time spent meeting nameless randos who I know mostly exist in the story to die miserable deaths, and watching them try to murder and rape each other in endless horrible ways, while an utterly vile arena watches, interspersed with occasional hollow f*cking by same nameless randos, just doesn't do anything for me.
I know the story isn't for me alone, and since the story is 60 days ahead on patreon even if it was there's still a lot already written. But it hasn't been doing much for me in a while. If the story was consistently as enjoyable to me as it has been at it's peaks, I'd be happy to spend that money. The first few times Ember and Beatrice had sex, the times Beatrice started to get through to Olivia and change her for the better, the general kinky character-building litrpg stuff, all great. But the current direction is frustrating enough that shelling out even for a month to peak ahead is hard to bring myself to. At the moment I'm mostly skimming extensively to keep an eye out for a return of any characters or topics I care about, and hoping it comes before I lose interest entirely.
Honestly, a very well thought out reply, which matches my sentiments exactly.
A post that I will be coming back to reread.
Over the course of some discussion with different readers and comparing overall thoughts, there is some high probability that this part of the "tournament arc" is *the* most boring one to out of everything (including all the ahead chapters), so yeah
If some of my overindulgence produced awesome parts, it is clearly also responsible for some good ol' fashioned shit.
And that's not to say that I have any intention of scrambling to change things left and right. If anything, I feel like the hardest part is careful fine tuning to change just the right things for just the right amount. Perhaps this cake needs only seven cups of sugar instead of nine, maybe a smidge more of citrus.
If I was to compare this to a stock value chart with the trajectory meandering up and down from good parts to bad parts, I hope that I will eventually be able to hone in on the right indulgences and the right amount of them for the overall trajectory to go up. Certainly no one wants to join the ranks of millions of webnovels where the reviews are "started out good, but..."
@YuujiEveryleaf If you say you've got some handle on what's got people grumbling and believe story turns back in a more popular direction in future chapters, I'm happy to trust in that and stick around.
I hope the grumbles don't make you think too poorly of your writing. I understand that even novelists who write 'by the seat of their pants' will generally still have the chance to go back and change things that do or don't work before publishing, but unless you're supremely disciplined about having a massive buffer a writer publishing like you are doesn't really have that luxury without going for the dangerous full restart route some authors around here try. What you've created may be imperfect, but it's still quite impressive and I hope you're enjoying making it.
Thanks for all the chapters of kinky fun, and for being receptive to the feedback.
@YuujiEveryleaf I like that the tournament arc is showing us how far gone the city is. But it indulges heavily in unenjoyable gore po*n. It wouldn't be an issue if the chapters were longer, like each bout being 1 chapter, because then it wouldn't feel like the story is just wallowing in filth. It would feel like the story is actually going somewhere instead of drowning in descriptions of violence and depravity that don't move the story along. And we all know where this portion of the story is headed. There are only two believable paths here: Beatrice wins the tournament by killing everyone, or Beatrice stages a revolt against the tournament. And the second one is extremely unlikely, even entirely unbelievable. There are maybe 3 redeemable characters among the participants: the niece, the summoner, and Olivia, and Olivia is debatable because she's barely got 2 brain cells to spark. Everyone else are only really interested in murder, prizes, and maybe rape. And for Beatrice to win, all three of them have to die (unless the tournament organizers suddenly change the rules in a very plot armor-y way).
@YuujiEveryleaf I'll be honest I haven't read through all the comments including yours here I skimmed to get an idea but skipped most. In my opinion this story started out good, but it continues to be good. I want to see where you take it. When I see the comments saying that it is taking too long to progress or otherwise I thumbs down them and move on. If they want it faster ill give a sumary of what will come as i have only read up to here so far. "The main character is powerful and grew to that by doing stuff and things and sex" hope you liked my 18+ summary. Your adventure that you are creating is more then that yes this is a s*x fantasy but it is also an adventure with world building. Any who that's my 2 cents I could ramble but I'd rather not if I don't have to. Your work really is great and I look forward to reading more.