Anyways this is the final chapter of this arc. I'm thinking about making a little write up on my thoughts on these past few chapters. Just to put my reasoning for it and the lessons I've learned all in one place. I've put a lot of my thoughts in the comments, but they're spread out over the comments in the arc and some comments are easy to miss.
Karakata's usual smile isn't there. No No No, I was met with a much more grim expression. It's a kind of face I'd imagine a soldier makes when their commander orders them to charge into oncomming fire. She seems to be hesitant about something, but I have no clue what. In the mean time, I check to see if I'm all here and it seems like I am. That makes thing significantly easier.
"You will not cease. You will not cease. You will not cease. You will not cease. You just gotta do it."
I can hear them mumbling under their breath, but I can't quite make it out. Just as I'm about to use a spell to try and pick up what they're saying, Karakata finally speaks up, their face morphing into one that conveys concern.
"Hey, I know that we've had our differences, but in that last round you seemed different."
I form a sword and Lavalivarus slots themselves into it.
"Damn slaying a god already?"
I'm well positioned now. The judges glare, but remain still. Conviction burns in Karakata's eyes as they continue, ignoring my blade.
"It was when you slaughtered Jackel. I thought it was slightly out of character, so I looked you over more closely."
I feel my emotions flare. Rage builds. Just like with Cornelius. Just like with Jackel.
"The results of that little check up were quite intriguing. It was almost like you were a-"
1. I pounce.
2. All seven of my dragon heads bite into Karakata's bitter flesh, restraining them.
3. I rush in with my main body.
4.I raise Lavalivarus.
5. For a brief moment, I see Karakata's usual smile, wide as always.
6. I bring down my blade.
7. Decapitation.
It was as simple as that. Karakata's head fell to the ground. Not even a hint of resistance. I feel my emotions settle down a little.
I'm suddenly hit by a large wave of nausea. Its coming from my dragon body. I look myself over only to find that my heads are starting to corrode. A viscous black liquid leaks from my mouths. I start to stagger. I lose control over the Garn meat puppet. I feel crippled. I can no longer hold myself up, so I collapse. Karakata's smiling face is right in front of me. It's only now that I realize just how much their body had decayed. I had bitten into that.
Karakata's face warps. Their maw opens wide, covering their face in an endless abyss. A hungry, hungry void. It swallows the shadow judges. The shadow snake slithers out of my pocket and into the hole. The rest of Karakata's body is also consumed by the enduring depths.
When all that's left is me and the unholy nothingness, it screams.
I couldn't even begin to comprehend what the hell that sound meant. It just hurt my ears and I so desperately wanted it to stop. I try to feebly cover my ears, but I can't. I feel my end start to wash over me. Its sticky and slowly crawls up my back.
But then it stops. All of it. The screeching, the creeping death, the null. They just vanish. Well the sticky feeling is still there, it just receded. Rather than saying I was given more life, its like my death was reduced. With my strength returned, I get up only to hear an unfamiliar voice to my right.
"I go away to deal with a few trifle and I come back only to find a rat turned to treachery."
I turn my head to see who's talking, but I quickly decide to keep my eyes down at my feet. In the brief glimpse I saw a very large skull. Something in my body is screaming to not get a direct look at whatever they are.
"Ah, my apologies dear, it seems like my servant decided to get uppity and caused you some troubles."
I can sense them start to move clockwise around me, but don't hear any foot steps.
"Hmm, it seems like you and I are anathema. That's fine you don't have to look at me if you can't stand it."
I ticklish sensation makes my spine tingle. It's a feeling similar to the tickle you get when a spider crawls up you leg. I feel it eight, no nine, times as whatever it is circles behind me.
"Even if you instinctually hate me, I still want to reward you for dealing with that bug for me."
A putridly sweet smell is in the air like someone left some juice in the sun for a week by mistake.
"That enemy of yours, the wire leviathan. You cannot kill it by yourself. Your powers are both that of life. However I on the other hand..."
Their words are like like honey. Their proposition seems massively beneficial, but my instincts scream that there must be a lie hidden in it. I can't figure out what the lie is, but it must be there somewhere.
"The wire leviathan has made a massive breach in etiquette and must be dealt with. I would've likely been the one sent to put an end to it anyway."
"..."
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend right? Just call for Lasakata when you're ready to strike and I'll help you."
My reason says this should be a massive boon but my feeling scream that it's a curse.
"Lets send you back now ok? I've got a lot of work to do in the mean time, so think my proposition over well."
---------------------------------
I open my eyes and everything is blurry. I can hear and see a bunch of frantic motion and talking but I'm a bit to groggy to make it out. I feel some large and soft things envelop my arms.
"How are you feeling?"
A voice that I dearly missed brings everything back to focus.
"Exhausted, my dear."
Mi'ara, who is hugging my right arm, giggles.
"Even though you've been asleep for a little over a month?" Vil'anth asks.
Wait . . . Vil'anth?
When the hell did Vil'anth get a physical form and why are they hugging my other arm?!
Ok that second question is rather easy to answer.
Don't think I haven't noticed you. You may view me as evil, but I don't think we are necessarily enemies. If you want to talk again in the future just remember that, DEATH is only the beginning.
here why i think this arc didn't "work" (especially not if it were longer):
- no setup (if it is a stand alone story, sure we don't expect any setup, but otherwise it is expect that there is some connection; even that she got mortally wounded seems very contrived at the current point, as the only time she was kind of in danger was during the fight against Cornelius. You could have her fight a poison user, get poisoned without knowing it (deadly poison + numbing poison), return to her party, someone mentions that she is bleeding, she is surprised and then kicks the bucket. Still not perfect but better than suddenly being "dead" to an enemy the audience has never heard of; also directly contradicts your Cautious Protagonis-Tag)
- wordbuilding (so far gods need to accumulate power to do anything, yet here some spirit/lesser divinity simply usurped a major part of the world and creates whole temporary worlds for entertainment. it didn't look like mc is the first to get there)
- genre and agency (we are here for a slice of life harem action fantasy, not horror; the genre shift can be problematic. Especially so since until then the mc was mostly in control, but then suddenly a no-name character [she he has a name, but neither the audience nor mc knew anything about him] takes control of the plot.)
- reward (as everything happened in a semi-afterlife dimension it neither furthered the plot or had any further story relevance. Sure mc kind of got the help of the god of death, but fighting against the leviathan would be in their interest anyway and since the reward wasn't known before hand we have again the issue of agency [fight to get the reward vs fight to regain agency, which then also came with a reward]. also is Lavalivarus now back? I would assume Karakata death removed him again, but with how this was written i'm not sure...)
- length (the current length was kind of okay, but any longer and you would have started to replace the "real" story. It was a story about defying fate, living in a fantasy world while being op and puring the world of the leviathans influence. not about fighting in death games for a pseudo death god which had never been mentioned before. Now we spend 2/3th of the story in an arc with minor story relevance/story drive, completely different theme and basically none of the normal characters)
- stakes (as the only affected person is our mc there are no real stakes. she can't die as it would end the story. she can't lose stuff as she started with nothing and is a mana construct. and it doesn't influence the grander story as we were in some other realm. sure we aren't here for the stakes, this is fluffy romance slice of life, but your kind of horror seems to want stakes...)
This was some really nice feedback. Like exactly the stuff I was looking for.
This is a bit spoilery but, from my point of view as the author, I consider this arc set up for something bigger and a lot of the contrivances like, Sam getting randomly jumped, were intentionally made to not make much sense so that the reader would question them. It doesn't make much sense right now in the story and in hindsight it probably would've been better to have this arc later, but it does tie in a lot with the big picture. That's all I'm gonna say on that matter for now because that's a reveal I'm not willing to give away.
I'd also like to say that in terms of genre, I never really wanted it to be slice of life or at least for that to be the major genre. I personally think I suck at writing slice of life and romance which is why Mi'ara hasn't gotten that much development. It's also why the N'esk tribe arc was so short, I kinda ran out of ideas because I suck at slice of life.
Going forward I want there to be more horror. I dabbled a bit with the wire leviathan's minions in the cozy cabin chapter, and I want to make more of that as the fight against the leviathan becomes more upfront. Basically I want the leviathan to be something that's feared.
Going back to Sam's Nightmare, I think its very flawed in terms of pacing. This arc has probably been my favorite to write so far and I kinda went wild piling and piling ideas on so it became very bloated. I now see a lot of the rounds as being unnecessary. I still think they're rad and cool ideas, but they don't add much except go "hey look how evil this character is!" So I'm pretty ok with cutting them from the arc.
Finally, yes Lavalivarus is staying. He's probably my favorite character in the story
you might want to look into "nexus awakening" and how the author there wrote horror (the lovecraftian-eldritch kind) while still having a powerful mc; or in short, eldritch creatures doing messed up stuff, but a mc who is less affected by it.
Otherwise i don't think you will keep very many readers if you go full horror with basically no agency of mc, incomprehensible undefeatable beings which loom at every corner and the death of people mc cared for at every second chapter. It just contradicts to much of the build up story.
Also if the arc had taken place later in the story you could have previously introduced leviathan controlled gods (it would then have some additional story implications), mc becomming even weaker compared to her by then probably ridiculous strength (limited mana, a weaker body, maybe some other limits doe to being in another realm; now you have already used the "mc is suddenly in another realm with different rules and weak"-card and a second time would probably go over even worse for the viewers) though we would still have to question how the lesser god managed to create a whole functioning clone world based on her fears... (i would probably have made it more nightmare-esque, in the sense that only choice locations and shadows of people existed, like in a memory, and the rest is blurry with distances shorter, yet the enemies still being a step ahead and in seemingly all locations at once. Furthermore if you really want to include Lavalivarus: it is seemingly alife, so just have the fake death god capture the soul and use it then or something. Since *this* version of Karakata has ties to leviathan it wouldn't be unlikely for him to recycle old tools to deal with a known foe)
I guess you could even now add some of those details in later revelations, but then there would be hints for the reader missing. Some slithering hooks in the shadows, way to many puppetiering references, grotesque amalgamations of beings and/or some other thing we have learned to associate with the leviathan. It isn't necessary to write out EVERYTHING, but having some hints for the attentive reader and so people can't say "oh you added this later so you could fix the plot-hole" is better. And it doesn't leave the reader with a weirdly hanging arc with little connection to the story the learned to like.
.... man this has gotten long again >.<
Will say this the story is great and most of all is yours. Take lessons and criticism to heart but don’t let it define the story, it’s yours and you define it. You are doing great excited to see how it develops.
I haven't really altered the future events of my story because of comments. I will be honest and say that I have made major changes to the stories direction over time, but said changes weren't because of readers, rather me wanting to add something else I like later down the line or dropping a plot point because I realized it was stupid.
Even in my "grand" scheme for this story's plot, this arc is an outlier. That is intentional. Karakata's game is supposed to be alien and hostile and if the arc felt similar to the rest of the story I feel it would detract from that goal. That means something like this arc wouldn't be happening again anyways. (Note, however, that I won't make any more surreal stuff in this story. It will just be in the "real world". I think that will help lessen the confusion felt because I think the readers have a good understanding of Esu)
As a final note I'd just like to say that I think I NAILED this arc for the most part. I got across pretty much all my ideas and emotions I wanted the readers to get. It's just that said things weren't liked by the audience but I think I'll save getting more in-depth on that thought for the write up