Halfway. Yay. You’re still around? Inserts Chacmool comment.

Scheduling Disruptions

Back in December, I figured I’d be too busy with stuff over Christmas to keep up with posting. So I paused the schedule for a week. For some reason, I decided that I could somehow juggernaut my way through Chinese New Year – which is far busier – and I was definitively proven wrong. Oops.

After flying back and forth across three continents and attending functions pretty much every single day that I wasn’t in the air, posting for Valkyrie’s Shadow slowed down just a bit. Over a month later, I’m still travelling around tying up various things that happened along the way.

So…yeah, I’m not burning out or out of material or whatever, I’m just an extremely busy person who is insane enough to write a regularly scheduled web novel in my spare time. Sorry about that.

Anyway…

Catching Up With Some Old Friends

Due to being a kingdom builder that runs concurrent with the Overlord Light Novels, Valkyrie’s Shadow faces the challenge of needing to work within the crazy timeframes of the canon material. In the LNs, Nazarick appears in the New World roughly one year before the creation of the Sorcerous Kingdom. Volume Thirteen ends one year after the founding of the Sorcerous Kingdom. The events of Volume Fifteen and Sixteen occur roughly a year after that, covering a span of time that is at most a few months.

While this may seem fine for the LNs, which only stop to visit select plot points that directly involve Ainz, it means millions of words for Valkyrie’s Shadow, which sets out to fill in all of the handwaves that happen in the time skips between each novel in a way that is coherent to the rules of the setting. When it comes to the preindustrial realities of the region, a few years is a proverbial blink of an eye. Characters that we haven’t seen for two million or so words ago haven’t actually been away for very long, as is the case with the crew from the Baharuth Empire.

Before the Storm begins less than half a year after the end of Chains of the Empire, but it was very difficult to convey how frantic life has been for the imperials since then. Not only have the Noble delegations only had a few months to marshal their factions and prepare for their visit to the Sorcerous Kingdom, but the Empire as a whole is undertaking a colossal pivot in its foreign policy and military outlook. Most of these things are only mentioned in passing, but the results will be the focus of the story in a few volumes.

We have a sort of high school reunion for the imperial cast, though since the Promotional Examination happens at the end of the Imperial Magic Academy’s junior year, everyone but Frianne is actually still a senior in noble high school. The Empire has very robust internship programs.

Frianne von Gushmond

Frianne – now the Countess von Waldenstein and expecting her first child – has replaced Fluder as the Empire’s Head Court Mage. She has some big shoes to fill…or does she? As much an aristocrat as a mage, Frianne’s platform is akin to that of an old-school Victorian conservative compared to her dive-face-first-into-the-abyss-of-magic predecessor. Rather than envy and admire the imperial system as outsiders like Raeven do, she sees all of the problems that the single-minded pursuit of magical knowledge has created for the mages of the Empire.

Her appointment as one of the most powerful individuals on the Imperial Court Council might have come as a surprise to many readers, but I think it was the obvious choice. Fluder Paradyne’s betrayal has made plain the fact that the Empire is no longer in a position where it can command the service of individuals driven purely by selfish ambition because the Sorcerous Kingdom can easily steal them away. Thus, Jircniv turns to the imperial dynasty: the steadfast allies of the imperial throne and a pillar of the Emperor’s political power.

As an imperial princess, Frianne has a vested interest in the continuation of the Empire as a preeminent power in the region. In a time of unprecedented change, her drive to create a solid foundation that the Empire can build upon would seem like a very attractive thing indeed. Most of her moves haven’t come to light yet and her visit to the Sorcerous Kingdom is in part to get a feel for what might be acceptable to the Empire’s suzerain, but we do know that she has pulled a certain Rangobart Roberbad into her schemes.

Rangobart Roberbad

Last seen in a restaurant in Norford, Rangobart has become even more of a Rangobart. But the road of the Rangobart is fraught with perils. This time, not only is his house trying to leverage his connection with Ludmila, but he’s been tangled up in the schemes of his high school nemesis, the political machinations of Emperor Jircniv, and the expansionary ambitions of General Ray. Rangobart isn’t one to let an ever more complicated life keep him down however: the son of a concubine with no prospects of inheritance is now a Noble in his own right and he fully intends to take every one of his new duties head on.

Much like in Empire in Chains, the core of Rangobart’s personality isn’t conveyed in ways that action-oriented stories tend to portray their characters. His stoic demeanour means that he just lets unimportant things bounce off of him while he focuses on achieving his goals. Stuff that doesn’t matter doesn’t get his precious time or attention, whether it’s attempts by his family members to influence him, the harassment of his academy peers, or even hot singles in his area. Of course, that just has the effect of increasing his market value, but, well, what can you do?

We get a glimpse of his personal life – or maybe more than a glimpse – with his family thrown into the story along with him as he makes his first trip to the Sorcerous Kingdom. Almost immediately, the dynamics of his characteristically imperial family become apparent. His success has resulted in him overshadowing his stepmother’s son, which can’t ever be a good thing when said stepmother is his father’s official wife. To add to his family problems, Rangobart discovers that his mother has been falling out of his father’s favour while Rangobart has been away.

The solutions to all of his problems line up so conveniently that no one – including himself – can rationally believe he isn’t at the centre of some grand conspiracy orchestrated by an individual of unfathomable intellect. Thus, he can only resign himself to being a pawn in such a supreme being’s machinations. Not that it’s a bad deal for him.

Dimoiya Erex

Frianne’s sidekick during Empire in Chains once again comes along for the ride in Before the Storm, still pursuing her dream of climbing the ranks of the Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This time, she’s out to learn more about the Sorcerous Kingdom with all of her aggressive optimism. As a scion of the Empire, however, she sees things through a lens crafted by the Imperial Magic Academy. Everything that she doesn’t recognise as productive is an opportunity for development and exploitation, which probably doesn’t sit well with most of the Sorcerous Kingdom’s citizens…especially those who have been driven out of their homes over the generations by the expanding imperial frontier.

That aside, she takes in most of the Sorcerous Kingdom rather well. This should probably be expected since she's committed to landing a post in the Empire’s as-yet-nonexistent diplomatic mission to their suzerain. Dimoiya’s proactiveness ends up turning her into the diplomatic mission when Ainz Ooal Gown cuts through all of the Empire’s hesitation and red tape through a feat of unfathomable ignorance. Sasuga.

Nemel Gran

The legend of everyone’s favourite minion continues to grow. Unfortunately, growing potatoes has turned out to be more difficult than she predicted. Nemel starts the volume in Arwintar, where Rangobart comes across her caravan of migrants preparing to leave for the Sorcerous Kingdom. She’s changed quite a lot – at least in Rangobart’s opinion – earning some small renown after subjugating the Goblin tribes across the river from her in the Upper Reaches.

In doing so, she’s put together a small Goblin Army which is becoming larger and more autonomous by the day. For the time being, they seem satisfied with suppressing the neighbours and tackling the elemental threats manifesting above them. They’ll start eyeing bigger things eventually, however, and Nemel tends to go with the flow. I wonder who she’ll accidentally conquer next.

Nemel’s wands have raised some questions due to their use in the duel between Narberal and Lupusregina. To that, I can only say that magic defences don’t work the way you probably think they work. A successful save against most evocation spells still results in the target taking half damage unless they have a special way to completely avoid it.

Unlike Ainz, Lupusregina doesn’t have anything that makes her immune to spells under a certain tier. Lupusregina’s main defence against lightning damage only absorbs a certain amount before expiring. Narberal just spammed her way through her sister’s defences using the supreme one’s special techniques.

A Magical Journey Through the Not-so-Magical Sorcerous Kingdom

In this volume, we see more results of the Merchant trio’s preparations, which started way back in Birthright. A perfect stage has been set for the arrival of their imperial guests, though some trickery was necessary to keep them from fleeing at the border. No expense or effort has been spared to keep them comfortable, confident, and suitably impressed at everything that they were shown.

Clara’s preference for fruitful collaboration is on full display here. Not only is she sharing her ‘spoils’ with the other Nobles of the Sorcerous Kingdom, but any group affiliated with the Sorcerous Kingdom that is ready to deal with the Empire. She even harnesses the pride and ambition of her imperial guests to upgrade the Empire’s transportation network, building a bridgehead to Karnassus for the Sorcerous Kingdom’s future interests. With Florine’s unexpected absence, Clara and Liane have to split the work between them, but their efforts will surely pay off.

Fortunately, the recent annexation of E-Rantel allows them to lean on the excuse that the lack of Sorcery in the Sorcerous Kingdom is merely the legacy of Re-Estize, which the Imperial aristocrats are all too ready to accept. Frianne and her party, however, unexpectedly find the frontiers of progress being pushed in an unexpected place.

A New Frontier

While the rest of the Sorcerous Kingdom has been bogged down in trying to have hundreds of thousands of former Re-Estize citizens adopt new ways and reform old systems, Ludmila has been advancing at a steady clip on all fronts in Warden’s Vale. To their great surprise, her imperial guests find all sorts of advanced institutions being spearheaded not a dozen kilometres from where Demihuman tribes are beating one another up with sticks and stones.

Science – at least what the New World would consider science – is the name of the game in Warden’s Vale. With the knowledge and resources Nazarick has shared with her, Ludmila is cheat-moding her way to success. Of course, Frianne’s group knows none of this and what they are shown ranges from looking anywhere from impossible to insane.

As usual, Ludmila conveys everything from a holistic standpoint that makes little sense to a group of imperials trained to interpret the world through reductionist methods. Frianne, especially, shows the most frustration, challenging what she considers unfounded assertions and illogical ideas on several occasions. That the few testable things seem to work only serves to make what she sees even more confounding. All she can do is try to puzzle out what she sees.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A Far-Flung Intermission

The story checks in on another set of characters we haven’t seen in a while, bringing us to Rol’en’gorek where Xoc and her people are facing an unprecedented crisis. Water levels continue to rise well past the monsoon season and through lack of guidance from the ruling clans is having everyone take matters into their own hands.

Seasonal feeding grounds are being overgrazed and the pastoral tribes are culling their herds in an effort to keep starvation from wiping out the entire Nug population. The resulting feast is treated as an unexpected windfall by most, but the reality will inevitably come crashing down on them. In the cities, the flooding and lack of general order have spurred the city’s gangs to take control of supply lines and thus most of the population.

The Pa’chan Clan’s agricultural revolution puts them in an enviable position, but it is as much a bane as a boon. Xoc finds herself in a race to build up her clan and save the people of the city with highly aggressive gangs and hundreds of thousands of hungry people on her borders. Fortunately, the tactical deployment of a certain murdersheep trivialises any direct confrontations. Unfortunately, their biggest problems continue to grow in severity.

Capitalism? What Capitalism?

It seems to be inevitable that many readers conflate anything to do with economic activity with modern-day capitalism or communism/socialism. It doesn’t help that the Overlord LNs relate things according to modern concepts due to isekai conventions and Suzuki Satoru’s perspective as a salaryman from a hypercapitalist dystopian Earth. I’ll come right out and say it, though: capitalism and communism/socialism do not exist in this region of the New World.

Of course, capitalistic practices have existed long before the formal recognition of capitalism as an economic system. As a whole, however, I would recommend that readers not confuse the existence of these things as the presence of the system itself. At best, it’s an interesting way to compare things. At worst, it will utterly warp the interpretations of the characters and narrative.

Re-Estize, Baharuth, Roble, and the Draconic Kingdom are all agrarian societies. Nobles in such a society are not even remotely like modern-day politicians or ultrawealthy capitalists. Commercial agriculture barely exists. In an agrarian society, everything revolves around land. Policies – economic, military, or political – are made with land at the centre of consideration. Society is ruled by the rural elite, and every vassal, retainer, and tenant is a part of the same establishment.

The traditional rivals of that establishment are the crown and the guilds. Royalty was similarly agrarian, and, while the Merchant Guild is seen as a capitalistic institution by readers, they’re not. They’re more like a collection of brutal protectionist cartels and trade in itself is not capitalism. We’ll see more of that side of them when the story gets to places where the guilds are in control.

Then what about the Sorcerous Kingdom? Surely, a country ruled by a salaryman from a hypercapitalist dystopian Earth is a capitalist country? Well, no.

The overarching economic policy of the Sorcerous Kingdom is to maximise resources for export and maintain an account surplus to build up monetary reserves. This is called Mercantilism – Colbertism, specifically. Ainz wants the wealth of the economy to serve the state(Nazarick, in this case).

As a side note, Xoc’s clanhold also runs a specific type of economic system. Economics geeks have probably long noticed that it’s a bronze-age palace economy. Raw resources go into the clanhold; goods and services come out. Amusingly, this one wasn’t intentional: I just wrote what would make the most practical sense in Xoc’s situation, then later realised what she had created.

Will we see capitalism at some point? Oh, yes. There will be several different places practising different forms of capitalism, and I suspect that these parts of the story will resonate with readers the most.

Ludmila in Wonderland

Ludmila’s visit to Nazarick has been highly anticipated for a while now, so I hope that this first part of it was entertaining enough. Though I say ‘first part’, the act was as long as a conventional light novel and this has caused me to ponder certain things.

The Problem With Writing Nazarick

And by Nazarick, I mean the location. This probably sounds strange since Valkyrie’s Shadow is an Overlord fanfiction. What do I mean by this? Well…

The most obvious purpose for a Nazarick arc is fanservice. Surely, that can’t be bad, right? It’s a fanfiction and many readers read fanfiction for exactly that reason. They want to see the guild base and its denizens and what they get up to. Slice of life in Nazarick is limited to a bare handful of locations, so being able to see more is good!

In part, I agree. If it was a self-contained story within Nazarick, it’d be perfectly fine. The thing is that Valkyrie’s Shadow is about the New World. Writing about Ludmila’s visit to Nazarick sort of made me feel the insidious thing that it represented: a place where nothing changes, ruled by a man who so adamantly refuses to change that this refusal is reflected in his very soul.

When Ludmila is in Nazarick, nothing changes in the New World. Two days take twenty chapters, and those chapters are like a half-revisitation of things that fans of Overlord already know. Twenty chapters in the New World would have done much more to advance the story while building up the setting and its themes. Of course, I did my best to avoid getting trapped in a limbo where it’s just Ludmila reacting to all of the stuff that she sees on her visit.

Why a Tournament?

In Volume 15 of Overlord, Ainz refers to some ‘combat drills’ where Albedo was the only NPC who was willing to change her gear. This is that.

A Thousand Questions

Being surrounded by all of the Yggdrasil stuff just begs for Ludmila to ask about, well, everything. And, as a Noble keen to learn everything that she can for the sake of improving her land, she does. The answers that she receives, however, are a mess at best. Nazarick’s denizens are pretty careful to keep the whole truth obscured while trying to help out their new ‘kouhai’.

As a result, Ludmila is left to puzzle out what we recognise are resource node spawn times, various consumable items, and the wonders of player housing. To make things even more confusing, media from Suzuki Satoru’s Earth is thrown into the mix. Even the appearance of another New World native, Fluder Paradyne, doesn’t help out very much.

The last canon mention of Fluder is that he was appointed as the Sorcerous Kingdom’s ‘head of magic item development’, but it never mentioned where they put him so I threw him into the library. Unfortunately, his efforts at translating the mysterious language used in the Great Library of Ashurbanipal haven’t met with much success. I guess that’s what happens when you try to translate a language that borrows from an international selection of other languages and evolves as quickly as language in the information age does.

Fluder’s still as crazy as ever, though. Maybe even more so. Whatever the case, his desperate desire to dive into the depths of magic has him break his promise to Ainz about not sharing the contents of the book that he lent him. Fortunately for him, Ludmila isn’t aware of that promise. She may have also inadvertently sent him chasing after the Spiral of Death phenomena. As for the book that Ainz gave to him, I’ve heard people claim that it’s the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but the Book of the Dead doesn’t have any lines like what Fluder paraphrased in Volume 10.

Speaking of which, there is a bit of Earth ‘lore’ that makes it into the New World, and that’s karma.

What if Karma was Karma?

This was brought up in The Tiger and the Dragon, but it didn’t seem like many people gave much thought to it. At best, there was some discussion about how it didn’t make sense as a concept or that the Beastmen were conveniently trying to sell something that favoured them(even though it was a Human doing the teaching). Overlord, however, is steeped in the language of eastern religion and culture…it’s just that most western readers don’t pick up on it. They tend to pick up on the D&D references and various bits of western mythology – especially Norse since the name of the game is Yggdrasil – but miss most of the eastern mythology and gaming/media references.

The karma system was once a pretty common thing in eastern MMOs, and the west’s first big taste of it was probably with Lineage II. How did it work? If you PK’d someone, you got bad karma. With enough bad karma, your name went from white to pink to red, at which point anyone could kill you without consequences. Red means dead, or something like that. The normal way to work off bad karma was to kill monsters. Sound familiar?

In Yggdrasil, players were encouraged to kill Heteromorphs(monsters) by the karma system. Demons, Angels, Undead, whatever. I can only assume that the game had some weird, half-assed two-faction system that had Humanoids as the good guys and Heteromorphs as the bad guys.

This system, in turn, is very loosely based on the concept of karma in dharmic religious and philosophical systems. For those who don’t know what they are, it’s Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and a bunch of others. A lot of South and East Asian culture is built on these, so even if someone in one of those cultures is an atheist, they probably still hold the same bucket of values. It’s much like how western culture is still heavily influenced by Christian morality, even if there aren’t as many practising Christians as, say, the 1300s.

Because of how Overlord phrases things and makes certain inclusions in the narrative, I think that there’s a strong chance that karma in the New World is some version of ‘real’ karma. It’s a bit amusing how the story and character sheets broadcast this, but western readers seem to try to frame good and evil according to the d20 alignment matrix or try to explain it as a subjective alignment system when that doesn’t work.

I think the d20 alignment matrix got jammed in part because of all of the d20 references, and also because some character sheets have neutral-evil/neutral/neutral-good on them. What’s strange is the fact that the rest of the slider uses ‘extreme evil’ or ‘great good’, indicating that all of those ‘neutral’ labels just signify that those characters are not as good or evil as the others. There is no ‘lawful’ or ‘chaotic’ in the karma system – at least not in the way that the d20 alignment matrix categorises it.

The existence of a functional karma system also concisely explains how characters like Buser can have a decent karma score despite being belligerent jerks to other races. His race exists in one of the non-evil realms of existence, thus acting as he should makes him at least neutral. For those who are unfamiliar with the six realms(states) of existence, it goes Deva -> Asura -> Human -> Beast -> Undead -> Hell in order of the highest to lowest.

Ludmila, of course, has no idea about this background and Ainz framing karma with his understanding of it doesn’t improve things any. Now, she has it in her head to reform the Faith of the Six using her divinely-sourced knowledge. I wonder what will happen…

The Adventures of the Seventh Floor Gang

The goodest of bois has been working hard to pave the way for Nazarick in the New World and he uses the tournament festival to collect feedback from his comrades in Nazarick through a pair of plays. Keeping with how Maruyama has carried out Demiurge’s schemes, Valkyrie’s Shadow sticks to using aspects of Demiurge as the basis for each operation.

In Gnostic tradition, the Demiurge has three names: Jaldabaoth, Samael, and Saklas. Jaldabaoth was defeated in the Holy Kingdom, leaving us with Samael and Saklas to play around with. Samael is the blind god, played by the Evil Lord of Greed, who conveniently wears a blindfold. Dance of the Blind tells the tale of the forces he has gathered under him to fight the Undead, blind to his deception. Saklas, the fool, is the supporting force for the fools she has recruited in Fool’s Conquest.

Valkyrie’s Shadow will eventually intersect with these ‘plays’, so they serve as a convenient way to offer previews for some of the post-canon arcs of the story.

Moving Forward…

Ludmila is still in Nazarick and she’ll be there for a while yet. After that, well, the Before the Storm descends into some miserable times for the people of the New World. I’m sure some people will like it, though. Probably more than some.

I have to fly around for a few more meetings before I get back to a more normal – and, more importantly, stationary – life again. In light of this, I’ve decided to pause payments on the Patreon for a month. I’ll still be posting when I can, though. Royal Road will see some delays, as well, but you now at least know I’m not dead or dropping off the face of the planet. It’s just a result of how ridiculously busy my life can be.

Once again, thank you for reading Valkyrie’s Shadow!

P.S. I just saw the new PV for the Holy Kingdom movie. They’re trying super hard to make Remedios look bad. I thought Neia was supposed to be the one with the evil death glare.