Thank you for reading all the way to chapter 7!

As you may have noticed by now, there are quite a number of negligence errors, stilted word usage, neologisms and unexpected stylistic choices in my writing. Two reasons:

1) My first language is Finnish, which is very different from American English all the way to the level of how punctuation marks are used. I'm pretty good at English, but I'm not a native speaker, and this is my first original long-form fiction written directly in English. And I don't use Grammarly or anything else to check my writing. So, for example, if I use “him” for a female character or vice versa, it's because Finnish has always had only gender-neutral pronouns and I get easily confused...

2) I want to keep going forward and fast. That's the theme and concept of this project. For example, I use brackets to indicate who is speaking like in a stage play because, well, it helps me to write faster. I studied screenwriting in the past and I've seen some Japanese-to-English fan translations do it like this; using it helps me to keep better track of characters and names, and somehow keeps me in the writing flow naturally.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

You're welcome to point out my mistakes and ask for clarifications (and I'm grateful if you do, especially if you find a plot hole and I can somehow fill it in a future chapter!), but further editing has to wait until the whole story is done. For example, I already thought about changing the three-year timeline gap to five years and changing the ages of the characters, but I don't want to go back to change previous chapters, if it's not absolutely necessary. So if you're reading this note in the far future and main character is still 25 years old, I never went back to edit anything.

And yes, I have routed the whole story from start to finish. I think that's the only way to write a coherent story about speedrunning. I have to know my stuff beforehand just like the main character does.

Finally, about the content warning tags. I put in all warnings as a precaution because a) I don't know how strict Royal Road is about this stuff, and b) I don't know how deep into graphic details I'm going to dive until I write those parts of the story. In general, to use anime series as a comparison, the violence will stay roughly around Berserk/Black Lagoon/Elfen Lied levels. But it's also possible that I simply skip the most disturbing parts (like Rainwoman's backstory) and keep the story more lighthearted. We'll see.

Enough litsplaining, back to the story~