Hi everyone! Hope you're staying safe and healthy
Happy to report that the next update has been uploaded to CoGDemos. This update is 21.5k words long, and is chiefly focused on showcasing the new battle mechanic, which will be a fixture for the remainder of the series. It's been teased before in the Aulain arc, but now it's here in full force, and henceforth will be tracked by the stats page (you'll know it when you come across it!)
As a reminder, saves from the old update will not be usable in this one. That said, the character creator can now skip ahead to after the schoolhouse section, meaning you can get directly to the new content.
The update is horizontally expansive, splitting off into two huge sections depending on which fork of the new mechanic the mage has committed to. That does mean that each individual playthrough will be on the shorter side; if you're in the mood for it, replaying the different forks will allow you to see more of the content that's been written for this update.
Aside from that, there's also plot movement towards the end of the demo, which sets up the final plot beat for Thulrum. With how things look, we should wrap up with this section by the end of the next update, and then we can move directly into Jiasei (which should be much faster to put out, because the arc's rewrites are fairly conservative).