The Great Evil has both won and had absolute victory snatched from their jaws. Our world has ended, yet what has been made after is free from its machinations and was allowed to develop as its own thing.

The initial concept came literally after watching net narrator do a reading of a HFY story on reddit about a guy that got isekai'd into being a dungeon followed shortly by me binging the eighty or hundred some odd chapters ahead of what NN did. the first few chapters were fairly easy; introduce the dungeon, ome supporting cast regulars, a few odds and ends sorts of finding its feet.

This arc has turned from me just me-to'ing a genre (Dungeon Core) into me memorializing a friend I lost right at about the start of covid, as well as excorcising the demons from perhaps the most toxic game group with literally the worst DM I'd ever had the displeasure of dealing with.

And yet, there was still positive there. Even at its worst there were still moments of genuine fun to be had and value that made me hang on, and even after I left the group I kept touch with Ishida, which is where we remained friends for the next decade.

I'm not a fan of spite writing 'raaah i hate this thing so I will burn it in effigy by portraying it as weak and stupid.' No. that's a toxic as hell attitude to have, and instead I wanted to find the good that was there and tell a story based around the group, how it fell apart, and how out of them I was basically the last man standing in spite of it all.

So.

No shit, there I was...