Chapter 11 Insight

The lahmu are supposed to be as powerful as sphinxes, but I decided to pull a slight nerf on them. Yes, they’re powerful, but as stated in canon, they’re still learning. As such, they have basic instincts still, but also unrefined combat skills. Throwing themselves at the enemy hive-mind style becomes a viable tactic earlier, but their combat effectiveness is worse as well. It’s why chewing through them is fairly easy with so many powerful servants present.

It’s about time for the humor to evaporate. Babylonia was a mix of both, but we’ve hit the drama and tragedy of the latter half. What better way to mark that than two deaths at once, plus a lot of fairly gory scenes. I felt I toned them down well enough, because the original draft had them pretty gruesome by comparison. Again, if it feels a touch to descriptive, I can bump the rating to M.

Samila’s death was guaranteed already based on the singularity, but I wished to make it impactful to two people at once. It serves as a stark contrast of reaction based on another death in Their Guiding Light. Gilgamesh’s way of handling death of someone he understands and accepts is well composed and stark compared to most. Medusa, who has been dragged through mud, helped serve as the direct visual to this.

Siduri’s goodbye scene was fairly tragic as it is, but I decided to bump it a touch. I wanted a way to show how far Gilgamesh has come, and it made for a fairly good spot to do it. It also made it more meaningful since there’s now a servant with confirmation it was actually her instead of just the white-flag-waving reference.

Also, there’s some slight alterations done to the canonical timeline here. Ushiwakamaru was directly responsible for letting the grail slip away, but she only stopped Gabrielle’s team here. That means there’s nothing stopping Gudao’s from intercepting the grail, but I have a workaround for that next chapter. It’s a minor adaptation, but its results will be fairly obvious.S

The first one is pretty recognizable. It can play during the beginning battle sequences too for extra emotion, but it’s mainly for Samila’s scene (V).

The second one is for Siduri’s scene. (VIII)