>>64260088This could use another pass or two at proofreading. While you might have done edits already, you might need to change up your method a little. I'd suggest reading one section from start to finish and making any fixes you see that need to happen, take a break, move on to the next. Once the entire chapter is done this way, go through it again one more time from the top. It's a tedious method, but it works. This would have been an easy catch from it:
Mio got a child down her spine and nodded, - While I constantly think about giving Mio a child, this is nor the time nor the place.On the topic of Mio, the manner of speech you give her seems a bit too rigid. Mio the Spear is of course different from regular miosha, but without any background to her personality or many interactions to go off of, she comes off as a little flat in her scene. This is her maiden mission as a spear graduated from initiate, but she feels almost detached from the whole situation. “Do you have her dismembered arms?” Mio asked - for example, if the arms are not on the body, she wouldn't need to preface that they're dismembered, both people at the scene can clearly see they're not where arms normally are. As Mio thinks and observes, you can do little thinks like mention an ear twitch, or the way she really gets deep into thought and lightly hums to herself. You got neat girls with animal features you can use to your full advantage. It adds a lot of color to a scene.
For the Reine side of the story, I think the pacing is good, and it looks like more will be interconnected than I first thought, which is a nice thing to let slowly unravel itself. The pacing for Botan's part however, it getting close to jarring. The situation escalated quickly and it was a little hard to follow the action since
one second Towa has her throat sliced open, basically dead on the ground and spurting blood, and the next she's able to talk. I know living through these injuries is getting normal for Spears, but there wasn't a mention of anything Towa did to heal the damage. I think letting yourself build this side of the story up more will help the bigger scenes you have planned for it come out better. The confrontations also don't have to begin and end as a massive bloodbath either, this was the target's own turf, let them use it to their advantage and possibly escape their situation in other ways.
Sorry if this review comes off as harder than others, but those are my takeaways.
