By Michael “Wavey” Peña

I. The respawn point

Volume 4 opens with a naked man on the floor of an abandoned hospital. Bald. Scarred. Bewildered. He was just falling from the Builder’s tower in the closing pages of Volume 3, and now he is on cold tile in a room that smells like mould, and his body tells him he’s been remade out of magic again. His brain says it’s been seconds. His soul says otherwise.

The hospital is the one he was born in.

Shirtaloon is doing something on the first page of this book that is so plainly stated I almost missed it on the first listen. The opening of Volume 4 is a deliberate mirror of the opening of Volume 1. Naked, hairless, transformed, dropped into an unfamiliar space by a power he doesn’t yet understand. Same shot, reversed vector. In Volume 1, he woke up in a magical world. In Volume 4, he wakes up in the world he already knew.

But it is not the same world. And he is not the same Jason.

The save file carries.

II. What “new game+” means in this volume

I keep coming back to that phrase because Volume 4 plays like one. Jason is back at the starting zone with the full inventory: aura senses, conjured familiar, dimensional cloak, bronze-rank physiology, the spell list, the loot bag, the lessons. The fog of war on Earth lifts almost immediately. The Network, the Cabal, the Engineers of Ascension. Three magical hegemonies that were always there, running the actual main quest while Jason lived a tutorial life he didn’t know was a tutorial. Magic was never absent from his Earth. He just didn’t have the senses for it.

Tyranny of rank, inverted

What “new game+” gives him is a different kind of stakes. On Pallimustus, Jason was constantly outclassed by the tyranny of rank. Auras crushed him. People orders of magnitude stronger than him used their bodies the way he uses words. He survived by being unflinching when squashed, which I wrote about at length in the Volume 1 review. The ant under the boot is the ant under a building, makes no difference to the ant. Volume 4 inverts that pressure. On Earth, Jason is the disproportionate force in the room. He is the person whose aura makes Vermillion, Sydney’s senior Cabal rep, decide to be very polite. He is the person three magical institutions are jockeying to either court or contain.

The new game+ is not easier. It is just harder in a different direction. In Volume 1, he had to learn how to hold his ground when everything around him outranked him. In Volume 4, he has to learn how to hold his ground when he is the thing other people are bracing against. Same problem. Opposite scale. Both forms of the same question. When you are the rare element in a room, what kind of person do you want to be while you are in it?

Vermillion’s POV: a different breed entirely (Ch 9)

Vermillion’s POV passage in chapter 9 is one of the cleanest pieces of writing in the volume on this point. He has never encountered an aura as strong and rigidly controlled as Asano’s. He almost mistakes it for tier-three. He knows that if Asano wanted to hide it from him, he could have. Asano is showing it to him on purpose.

Vermillion was the front man for the Cabal’s dealings with the other groups in Sydney and Asano was wholly unlike the essence magicians he had encountered from the Network. While he was still an essence magician, Vermillion had no doubt that Asano was a different breed entirely.

That phrase, different breed entirely, is what new game+ feels like from the outside. Jason is not stronger than the Cabal. His aura techniques from Pallimustus and the strength of his soul are completely different from the essence magicians the Cabal knows.

This is the volume’s foundational architecture. Earth runs the same systems Pallimustus runs, but it has been hiding them from itself, and the people in charge of the hiding are not built to handle a returning native who has lived inside the systems they were taught to fear.

III. The dad scene (Ch 34: “The Moments That Decide Who You Are”)

Chapter 34 is called “The Moments That Decide Who You Are.” It is, for my money, the emotional spine of the volume.

Jason has just shown his family more than a hundred and fifty hours of recordings he made on Pallimustus. Tour videos from Greenstone. The hotel suite on Emir’s island. Farrah’s voice from across a room. The proof that the brother and son they buried did not in fact die: he had a whole life over there, with people who loved him, in a world that took him seriously. They watch until the early evening. He stops them when the recordings get too dark for his niece. They protest. He holds the line.

Then he sits with his father. And his voice breaks.

“I’m not sure who I am anymore, Dad.”

Ken Asano puts an arm around his son’s shoulders, and what he says next is the thing the whole volume is built around:

“Don’t worry, son. You can tell the others as much or as little as you’d like. But whatever you tell me, I’ll listen, and you will never have to be ashamed.”

I wrote earlier this year, in my OPLA Season 2 essay, about how every Jolly Roger in One Piece is a creed traced back to a parent who chose vulnerability over self-preservation. The flag descends from the moment a parent decides their child’s becoming is more important than their own composure. Ken Asano in this scene is exactly that parent. He doesn’t moralize. He doesn’t ask for the worst of it before he agrees to keep loving his son. He just makes the room safe and trusts the room to do the work.

What Ken offers next is the single most useful frame in the volume for the kind of decision Jason will keep having to make. Next time you’re in a position to kill, every time you’re in a position to kill, you have a choice to make. Don’t think about whether to kill them. Think about whether you want to be the person that killed them or the person who showed mercy. You’re more important than them and what they deserve.

The two wolves. Jason names it himself.

This is the scene the new game+ framing makes possible. In a first playthrough, this conversation never happens. Jason in his original life was a man whose grandmother wouldn’t speak to him, whose sister-in-law had slept with both him and his brother, whose mother defaulted to the favored son. The household coded him as the difficult one and stayed coded that way. He lived on the edge of his own family.

In the new game+, he gets to come back to that house with proof of his own becoming and a father who would still show up for him. The volume earns the dad scene by burying him first. He had to die for this conversation to be available. That’s not a metaphor I’m imposing on the text. The book makes him die, and the book makes him born again on the floor of his birth hospital, and the book sits him at his father’s table on the other side of it, and the man across the table calls him son and means it.

That is what new game+ is for. The first run is not wasted. It is the price of admission to a version of the relationship that the first run could not have held.

IV. The cold eyes of a stranger (Ch 31)

The dad scene only lands because of how brutal the chapter before it is.

Chapter 31 is called “The Cold Eyes of a Stranger,” and it is named for what other people see when they look at the new-game-plus version of Jason. He arrives at the hospital where his grandmother has just been miraculously cured of Alzheimer’s and cancer, having done the curing himself in secret the night before. He greets his estranged mother with “G’day, Mum. That’s a nice pantsuit.” He casually mentions that he’s not dead, then moves past her to handle the doctors.

Erika follows him down the hallway. She is the sister who has been holding the family together. He starts to brush her off and she pushes back, and the book gives us this:

“The look Jason turned on her wasn’t backed up by his aura, but the unflinching authority in his gaze made him seem for a moment like a total stranger. She took an involuntary step back.”

There is the chapter title, written into the prose. She sees a stranger in her brother’s eyes.

“I found out who I am”

He goes to pick up his niece from his sister-in-law Amy’s house, and Amy meets him at the door, and the conversation tilts immediately into the open wound of their shared history. She asks what he did to her aura the night before. He tells her she wouldn’t believe him. She accuses him of weirding her out. He says, with no preamble:

“You threw my heart into a woodchipper, carved my family in half and sent me spiralling into years of depression during which I basically scuttled my whole life.”

Then he lifts his shirt to show the scars.

“You know the saying about not knowing who you are until you’ve walked through the fire? I found out who I am. Someone who doesn’t get to live a quiet life.”

This is the scene that completes what the dad scene starts. The dad scene is the version of the homecoming where the parent rises to it. The Cold Eyes scenes are the version where they don’t, and where Jason doesn’t soften himself for them either. He does not pretend to be the person who left. He is not interested in making it easier for them to recognize him. I found out who I am is a brutal sentence to say to a woman you used to want to marry. The new game+ is the version of yourself the first run paid for, and you don’t get to choose whether the people who knew you before will accept the upgraded build.

Emi vs. Cheryl: who can meet him, who can’t

The volume is honest about which family members can meet him on the new ground and which can’t. His mother Cheryl can’t. She is, as Erika puts it later, the kind of woman whose grief had to settle into a shape, and once it was shaped she couldn’t admit she had been wrong about the shape. His father can. Erika can, eventually. Hiro, the estranged uncle Jason chooses first, can immediately. His niece Emi, who is eleven, doesn’t even need to be told twice. She figures out half the cosmology from context clues and welcomes Farrah back from the dead by hugging her so hard her towel falls off. Emi is the version of family love that doesn’t need to relearn anything because it never needed the old shape to begin with.

The cost of being who he became is not symmetrical across the people he came home to. Some of them rise. Some of them won’t. The new game+ asks him to accept the asymmetry without flinching, and he does, and the household calcifies around the new shape the same way it once calcified around the old one.

V. Synthesis, not grinding

Jason at bronze rank in Volume 4 is no longer an essence-user-by-the-book. He is a synthesis.

The Mirror King aura (Ch 74)

Watch what he does with his aura in the final chapter. He is trying to walk through a Sydney shopping centre unnoticed, a technique normally available only to gold-rankers and high-end silvers. He cannot match what Shade does. He cannot directly mimic what vampires do. He cannot reach what gold-rankers reach. So he builds something bespoke. He takes the vampire technique for manipulating other people’s aura senses, blends it with the Mirror King’s approach to merging into ambient magic, splices in Shade’s instincts, and tunes the whole thing to the absurd properties of his own already-strange aura. This was the theme of all his new aura-control skills, the book tells us, almost in passing. He is a synthesizer now, not a power-user.

The Vol 1 troll voice is still in there. He is still the man who tells the head of Sydney’s Network that she is flavour text. He still names a vampire boss “Craig” on principle. He still lets a confrontation last a beat longer than safety allows because the joke wants to land. But the troll voice has been built around now. Sophie’s combat instincts. Rufus’s discipline. Farrah’s foundational sensory training, the diligent practice of which paid off only at bronze rank, months after her death. Clive’s research method. Humphrey’s care. Shade’s patience. Vermillion’s bespoke aura science. His father’s framing. He grinds, sure. He meditates daily, he runs along Rushcutters Bay every morning, he drills with weights. But he does not grind toward power. He grinds toward integration of every person who has been generous with him.

Braiding the registers

This is the part of Volume 4 I’ve been sitting with longest, because it’s the part I recognize from the inside.

Becoming an adult is growing into the parts you needed to round yourself out. The version of you in your early twenties is real. The version in your thirties is also real. They are not the same person, and they’re not supposed to be. The thirties version is a synthesis of every register you had to learn to belong somewhere: the family register, the work register, the writing register, the friendship register, the city register, the inherited-island register. None of them flatten into the others. None of them get to be the “real” you at the others’ expense. You build a self by braiding them.

I grew up in Washington Heights, in a Dominican family that taught me one set of frequencies; I went to schools and rooms and cities that taught me others; I work an oncology pharmacy job where the precision is sterile and the consequences are measured in patients; I write criticism in a register I built on top of all of it. None of those is the original me. The original me is what they have all been assembling, on purpose, over years. Jason at bronze rank in Volume 4 is the moment in the series where the synthesis becomes legible to him. He is no longer the iron-ranker who survived by stubbornness. He is something nobody on either world has seen before, because he was built from both of them, on purpose, by a man who refused to let any one of his teachers be the only voice in his head.

This is also why the Volume 4 Jason can finally have the dad scene. He has the language now. He had to live in two worlds before he could come back and tell his father what he had become.

VI. The Nirvanic trade

Then there is the cost.

Giving up resurrection (Ch 52)

Halfway through the book, the World-Phoenix offers Jason a racial-gift transfiguration. The system message is the longest and most complex any of his abilities has ever produced, and the trade at the heart of it is brutal:

Your body and soul will be combined into a gestalt entity both physical and spiritual in nature. This state will grant inherent resistance to effects that utilise the soul-body disconnect.

The nature of your new body will render you immune to other resurrection effects, including those of high-rank healing magic.

He gives up resurrection.

Not in the abstract. Jason knows what high-rank healing magic does. He has watched Healer regrow lost limbs in Greenstone’s Old City. He has died twice already and been brought back. The Nirvanic Rebirth lets him die once per rank and come back, but only once, and only at the same rank he died at, with no pity revives in between. In exchange, he gets to walk through sealed astral spaces. He gets to feel proto-spaces around him. He gets to traverse barriers that other essence users would have to pry open with diamond-ranked teams and decades of preparation.

He takes it. He takes it because Farrah is on the other side of a sealed door.

Resolute earned the standing; Nirvanic puts it to use

The trade is the volume’s central exchange and its cleanest moral architecture. The Inviolable Self he won at the end of Volume 3 — Resolute, marked, his — is not a thing that maintains itself for free. The cost of being the person who walked into the Builder’s tower in Volume 3 is that in Volume 4 he has to be the person who walks into a worse place to retrieve someone he loves, with fewer safety nets than he had before. Resolute earned the standing. Nirvanic Rebirth is the standing put to use.

There is a particular register of work where you do what you do knowing what it costs. Oncology is one. The chemo I help compound is hazardous; the workflow exists because if the procedure fails, somebody on the other side of the door pays for it. You count the cost. You go anyway. Volume 4 is Jason learning that this is also what magic feels like at the rank he has reached.

Shirtaloon writes this scene without making Jason heroic about it. He writes it as a trade. The volume is full of trades. The whole genre runs on trades. What’s specific to this one is that Jason understands the trade clearly and takes it anyway, and Shade, who has been with him longer than anyone, names what is being given up out loud, on the page, before Jason confirms.

This is what the dad scene was preparing him for. Ken’s frame: think about whether you want to be the person who killed them or the person who showed mercy. The Nirvanic trade is the same frame on different terrain. Think about whether you want to be the person who could have saved her and didn’t, or the person who paid for the standing and went.

He goes.

VII. The rescue, and “Quite the Year” (Ch 54)

The rescue itself is the kind of sequence Shirtaloon throws when the volume has earned spectacle.

Plane, drone yacht, sealed astral space

Jason is on a plane to France with Asya. The Lyon branch of the Network has gone rogue under their Operations Director, Adrien Barbou. Someone bombs the plane mid-flight. Jason, bronze-ranked and durable enough to take the explosion, comes to in free fall, scans aura signatures across the disintegrating fuselage, and starts methodically diving down through the sky to catch unconscious teammates. He shoves bronze-rank healing potions into their mouths. Shade splits across multiple bodies, becomes a parachute pack on each one, opens chutes on a delay until the potions stabilize their patients. Then Jason drops below the cloud layer and spots a luxury yacht on the water (who takes a luxury yacht to shoot down an aeroplane?) and a swarm of bronze-rank magical attack drones rising up to meet him.

He shadow-jumps onto the yacht and starts working through the crew.

This is the chapter the book casually titles “Quite the Year.”

That is the volume’s voiceover. Catastrophe and shrug, held in the same hand. Jason is doing things in this book that would be the climactic set piece of a different series, and the chapter title shrugs about it. This is also a Volume 1-Jason move, refined: the man who deflected a silver-ranker’s killing aura by acting unimpressed because being impressed was the part that would actually kill him. By Volume 4, the unimpressed register has graduated into a kind of operational dryness. He saves three iron-rankers from terminal velocity, takes a yacht full of drone operators apart, sails to France, breaks into a sealed astral space, and the book frames it as quite the year.

Farrah seeing him

The sealed astral space is where Farrah is.

She is collared, she is starved, she has been tortured for what she knows about the multiverse. She has been kept in a state where her own essence powers are suppressed. Adrien Barbou wants what is in her head. Jason has come to take her out.

When she sees him, she does not recognize him. Not at first. She knows the smirk. She does not know the chin or the height or the scars. She knows the voice, but not its lower register. She knows the man, but not the aura, which she clocks as:

“Solid in a way she had never felt from any other aura, as if it wasn’t a projection of a soul but the soul itself, standing right in front of her.”

The Inviolable Self I wrote about in the Volume 3 review, the soul Jason marked Resolute against the Godless Prophet, won through a war of stolen moments, has by Volume 4 become visible to other people. Farrah, who once knew him better than almost anyone, can feel him from across a bridge before her eyes will agree on his face. The mark is no longer a private claim. It is a public weather pattern. He carries his soul in the world the way other people carry a body.

Then they bicker. She tells him his complexion is too clear. He says it’s hurtful. Shade gets blamed for not warning him about the silver eyes. Hello? she finally says, having been ignored for three exchanges.

This is how the volume handles the highest stakes it has ever held. It refuses to be precious about them. Farrah is alive. The trade was worth it. Now they’re going to take everything Barbou owns.

VIII. A wizard did it (Ch 56)

The volume’s funniest chapter is also one of its most honest and darkest.

After the rescue, Jason brings Farrah back to his cloud houseboat in Sydney. The family has gathered. His mother Cheryl has finally turned up. Asya is there to negotiate his terms with the Network. The houseboat is full of people, all of them asking variations of the same five questions, and Jason cracks.

“Mum, the answer is the same as it has been for your last five questions: because magic. You want to know why? Because a wizard did it, that’s why. And that wizard is me. I’m the wizard. Magic is real and I have it. I’m a magic man.”

What follows is one of the greatest rants in modern progression fantasy. Jason produces his sinister dagger of red crystal and black obsidian and explains it would kill them super dead. He throws it away. It vanishes mid-air. He throws his sunglasses away. They vanish too. He gestures and the cloud-furniture everyone is sitting on dissolves into the floor, dumping the entire family on their backsides, then gestures again and it reforms beneath them as they rise.

He explains his eyes turned silver yesterday, that’s just what my life is now. He explains the houseboat is not a houseboat, it is a magic cloud he keeps in a bottle like it’s a genie. He summons Shade, then Gordon, then Colin, naming each of their cosmic horror specialties in deadpan. Colin has two purposes in life: adorable little dances and devouring every living thing on a planet.

Then he tells them, plainly, that he has killed somewhere between thirty and fifty people in the three weeks since he came back, that some of them really had it coming, and that the only thing he feels bad about is not feeling bad enough about killing them. He sets the rule that no one gets to ask him another question until they have watched all hundred and fifty hours of his recordings, and that anyone who breaks the rule is getting a demonstration instead of an answer. He summons a portal arch, walks through it, and disappears into his soul garden.

I love this chapter for the same reason you love it. It is Vol 1-Jason troll voice deployed at maximum scale, but the content underneath it is real grief and real exhaustion. The comedy is the discharge mechanism for two weeks of catastrophic stress. Shirtaloon’s particular gift is Jason’s exaggeration as a form of emotional honesty. I’m an interdimensional warlock ninja is the lie that lets him say the truth, which is that he has died twice, that one of his familiars is the avatar of the end of the world, that he has lost count of the people he’s killed, and that he is one bad afternoon away from starting to enjoy it. The rant is funny because it has to be. If it weren’t funny, he couldn’t have said it.

This is also the chapter that introduces Emi to Farrah. Farrah, freshly rescued and dazed, is wandering through the cloud house’s lower deck when an eleven-year-old girl walks straight through a wall in a swimsuit, dripping wet, and points at her. “You’re dead. Well, obviously, you’re not dead, but you died. You are Farrah, aren’t you?” She figures out Farrah’s whole situation in three sentences while still naked, returns wrapped in a towel, and clasps Farrah in what Shirtaloon calls a fierce hug. Farrah, taller and silver-eyed and terrified of being broken open by someone too kind, is reduced to awkwardly patting her on the head. The towel falls off. “Oops.” The chapter ends.

What this scene does, structurally, is finish the rescue. Jason can pull Farrah out of a sealed astral space. He cannot, by himself, give her back the feeling of being welcomed home. Emi, who had no relationship to lose and no history to renegotiate, can. The smallest person on the boat is the one who closes the loop.

IX. The Pallimustus political register, casually exported

I want to take a paragraph here on something Shirtaloon does in this series that doesn’t usually get named in reviews.

Pallimustus, the world Jason came back from, is queer-inclusive and sex-positive in a register so casual it took me three volumes to even register it as a register. Farrah has a black-leather sex-magic textbook that she takes as seriously as an artifice manual. It’s not porn, she tells Jason. It’s sex magic. It’s worth learning. Aside from the obvious benefits, it’s quite multi-disciplinary. It touches on recovery magic, buff magic, aura manipulation. That is the entire treatment. No leering, no apology, no scaffolding. Married women in Greenstone are sometimes married to other women. Nonbinary characters get pronouns the narration uses without comment. The Adventure Society’s contract structure is functionally socialist labor protection. Adventurers are guaranteed fees, hazard differentials, retainers, and right of refusal, and Jason’s Vol 1 troll-rant about corporate negotiation is a defense of those protections, not a critique of them.

Volume 4 carries this register into Earth scenes directly. Erika, sitting in the bar lounge while Dawn explains cosmology, observes that some people are “susceptible to outside influence” the way God hates gay people and poly-cotton blends. Dawn, the World-Phoenix’s Earth vessel, agrees with her. The book uses its highest-rank cosmic figure to confirm that homophobia is one of the many small noises a confused human consciousness produces while listening for the actual signal.

This is doing political work with very little political weight on the prose. The Asano family is interracial, intergenerational. Annabeth Tilden, Director of Operations for the Sydney branch of the Network, plays go with her wife in the back lounge of her wife’s art gallery. Ian, Erika’s husband, calls Rufus the sexy one on first sighting and shrugs that he’s secure enough in his sexuality to acknowledge a beautiful man. Jason mutters every damn universe. The book keeps making these choices casually. That is, I think, part of why these volumes have aged so well into the moment we are reading them in. Shirtaloon built a world where the casual register is the progressive one, and didn’t ask for credit for it.

X. I came back to show you wonders (Ch 58)

The line is also the title of chapter 58, which is the volume’s whole argument said out loud.

Jason is sitting with his sister Erika. His mother Cheryl will not budge: the kind of woman whose grief had to settle into a shape, and once it was shaped she couldn’t admit she had been wrong about the shape. The household has been tense for weeks. Erika is asking him to leave Emi out of it, as much as he can. She is asking him to keep her daughter on Earth-rules a little longer.

He says no.

“I’m done playing by Earth rules, Erika. Magic is real, magic is awesome, and it’s the new reality you live in, like it or not. I know it seems strange and alien and dangerous, but it’s the thing that will keep our family safe.”

Then the line:

“It’s a time of miracles, big sister. I’ve been focused on the dangers, but I came back to show you wonders. I got distracted and lost track of that somewhere along the way. I want you to trust me, Erika. Life is about to get amazing.”

This is not a softening. It is not a turn. It is what becomes available to him only after every other thing in this volume has been paid for. He cannot tell his sister that magic is a wonder until he has counted the dangers in front of her: the bedside grief over Nanna, the weeks of secrecy, the night his mother slammed the door, the institutions that have been hunting him, the bomb on the plane, the friend he died and came back for, the powers he gave up to be standing in this kitchen at all. The wonder is not the absence of the dread. It is the wider truth that the dread was a part of.

I think this is the move every adult eventually has to learn to make, and the volume earns the line because Jason has learned how to make it inside the book. You can’t lead with the wonder. The wonder is what’s left over when you have stopped lying about the cost. Game of Thrones got leaked here, and Shirtaloon’s universe took that as a chance to write a better ending.

The wonders are real. The price is also real. Both at once. That is the whole thesis.

XI. We were all monsters (Ch 71)

The volume’s last act has one more move, and it’s the one I keep turning over.

Jason starts it

Chapter 71 is called “We Were All Monsters,” and the conversation it contains is not the one I read on the first listen. On a relisten, with the audio bookmark you set on the line where Jason approaches Amy, the chapter reorganizes itself. Jason starts it.

He slips away from the family while Kaito is showing off his magic helicopter, walks across the lounge to where Amy is standing alone, and opens with: “You’re a problem.” He is helping her family pick essences. They are working out a magical inheritance. He is using the working session to deliver a sixteen-year-old grievance. He will not let her relax into the ordinariness of the task. He picks at her marriage to his brother. He says, quite casually:

Brothers don’t do what Kaito did. My brothers are in another universe.

Amy returns fire.

“It was high school, Jason. We were all monsters. I know you think that people hated you in school and you were the misunderstood loner, getting by on cleverness and guile. I hate to break it to you, but that was just some teen angst crap. Most people didn’t like you because you were a bit of a prick and thought you were too good for everyone.”

He loses the argument and doesn’t try to win

He doesn’t argue with her. He says it sounds harsh. He doesn’t try to win the conversation. He keeps poking. Eventually Amy asks why he hasn’t gotten back together with Asya, who clearly still has a thing for him, and he answers:

I can read her emotions and she can’t read mine. I’ve learned that successful relationships require a balanced power dynamic. Otherwise, one half will just get crushed when the other half bangs his brother like a drum.

That is a cruel sentence. He says it to a woman whose adolescent mistake he has been cultivating into a permanent grievance for sixteen years. He is not innocent in this scene. He is the one who walked across the room.

The series title is He Who Fights With Monsters. The full Nietzsche reads: take care that you yourself do not become a monster. Amy in this chapter is performing the more uncomfortable corollary: we were already monsters, and the work is admitting it. Jason has spent four volumes becoming someone he can stand to be. Amy is reminding him that the version of himself he’s been growing past was not as innocent as the wound made him remember. The household around him calcified around the telling he supplied, and the calcification is part of why nobody stopped him from leaving in the way he left, and the calcification is also still active now, in him, in this room, in the way he just opened a conversation with you’re a problem sixteen years after the fact.

Adulthood, in my experience, is partly the work of looking back at who you were in your twenties and not flinching. Not absolving yourself either. Just looking. Saying: that was me. The version of me that exists now is what I have made of that, on purpose, over years. Jason at bronze rank looking at himself in high school is the same move I find myself making at thirty-two. The new game+ doesn’t only run forward. It runs backward through the memory you brought with you, and asks you to be honest about what you carried, including the parts you have been letting yourself off the hook for.

XII. Walkabout (Ch 73 & 74)

The volume signs off on Jason going on walkabout. But I missed, on the first listen, why.

“The worst of both worlds”

In chapter 73, “I Need Time,” Jason has a long conversation with Farrah on the cloud house’s deck. He tells her about Rufus, the first person in Pallimustus to take him seriously, and what Rufus told him in the early days:

“He told me that your world was a chance to reinvent myself. To become the person I wanted to be, without the baggage of my old life. I didn’t always succeed, but I always tried.”

Farrah finishes the thought for him.

“Now you find yourself back here and weighed down with all that baggage you put aside.”

Jason agrees. Then he says the thing the Cold Eyes scene was setting up, the thing the Amy chapter was the evidence for, the thing the wizard rant was the warning sign of:

“You want to be the best of both worlds.”

“Literally. The problem is, I feel like I’m becoming the worst of them. All the baggage from here bringing out the reactionary aggression that kept me alive over there.”

There it is. The volume names its own threat. Earth Jason was a man with a chip on his shoulder big enough to deform him. Pallimustus Jason was the version of himself with the chip turned into discipline, into reach, into care, into the will to walk into the Builder’s tower. Coming home risks the two collapsing into each other in the wrong direction: the Pallimustus weapons in the hands of the Earth grievance. The reactionary aggression that kept him alive over there, brought back into a city where almost nobody outranks him. That is what the cold eyes were. That is what the you’re a problem was. The volume has been showing us all along.

Reinvention as continuation, not redo

Asya tells him the International Committee is worried. They have grown to depend on his looting power, his reach, his willingness to drop into incursions branch-agnostic, like Santa Claus, a phrase the book offers without flinching. People have started organizing themselves around your presence; people have started planning around the assumption that you will show up. That assumption is the trap.

He goes anyway.

Walkabout is an Australian word with weight, and Shirtaloon, Australian himself, uses it with care. It is a chosen quiet. A solo undertaken on purpose, for the work that other people’s presence cannot help with. Jason in chapter 74 has just rebuilt his entire aura-control skill set from the ground up, scaffolded from vampire technique and gold-rank reach and Shade’s instincts and his own absurd strength. He has tested it in a Sydney shopping centre. He has brought his best friend Greg into the magical world—warlock ninja, he calls himself, which is a Vol 1 line in a Vol 4 mouth. He has put the family in motion. He has set up the strike teams to keep the Network’s books balanced while he is away.

And then he leaves, alone, and the volume ends.

The walkabout is not a victory lap. It is a corrective. It is Jason removing himself from the situation that was pulling him toward becoming the worst of both worlds, before that pull became the new shape. I’m going to start by letting Erika take over the family stuff and pulling out of Network activity while I get my aura control in order. Then I might take off for a bit. The reinvention doesn’t end at the Builder’s tower. It is ongoing. The new game+ has to be tended.

I’m writing this review on a relisten. The relisten is its own kind of walkabout. The first run is the velocity. The relisten is what you do when you have stopped needing the velocity and want to look at the architecture. I came back to Volume 4 to consolidate what I missed, the same way Jason comes back to Earth to consolidate what Pallimustus taught him. The review is the sit-with. The walkabout is the sit-with done on purpose.

The argument, plainly

Volume 1 was consolidation. Volume 2 was acceptance, the lift, Team Biscuit. Volume 3 was the Inviolable Self, marked Resolute against the thing that would have erased him. Volume 4 is what those three earlier volumes were for. It is the book where Jason has to be all three of them at once, in the world he died out of, and where the worst of both worlds is a real and named threat that he chooses to walk away from before it can finish becoming him.

He earns the wonder by paying for it. He earns the walkabout by doing the work that made it available. He earns the dad scene by dying first. He earns the synthesis by letting every person who has ever been generous with him stay in his head. He earns the relisten you and I are taking by writing a book that holds up to it.

If you have read this far you already love these books. So I will just say: this is the one where the series stops being about a man learning to survive a world that wasn’t his, and starts being about a man learning to bring two worlds into one self without letting either of them eat the other.

That’s the move. That’s what new game+ is for.

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Wavey Culture | REVIEW

Canto Puro, Por Wavey