I didn't get everything from last month I wanted, unfortunately. Three out of four is alright, I suppose, but the one was something I really did want. Missing a middle chapter of a mini-series is just aggravating.
Verity wants to go on her first dungeon crawling adventure and is allowed to join the well-known Captain Bastion's party. She does not impress, as her first attempt at combat ends with her hitting the team healer with some vial of green stuff, and the healer taking a crossbow bolt through the neck.
No problem! Verity has some magical talent and can take over as healer, sort of. This is good, because Bastion is determined to kill Gridda, a very old and blind, but powerful, dragon. They reach Gridda's keep, and things continue to go south, but Bastion is determined to kill this dragon, even if it costs him the rest of the party.
Most of the story contrasts Verity's kind nature with the rest of the party, who consider Gridda's children monsters to simply be exterminated. Even when one of their own dies, that's just an excuse for the rest of the party to loot the corpse. Yu throws in a lot of panels of Verity, blood splashed across her face, staring in horror at one act of violence or another. It seems clear there's some sort of reckoning coming, where Verity either becomes like the others, or goes her own way.
And that does happen, sort of, but in service of what's meant to be a surprise ending that kind of undercuts the whole thing. It was one thing when Verity seemed to just be a compassionate person who wanted to form bonds with other people. The ending slants it so she's more looking after specific people who mattered to her. You can make a fair argument it's still better than Bastion, who discards his people as soon as they're more trouble than they're worth, but it's not quite as strong an ending as it could be.
Plus, it means accepting Verity planned this all out from the start and there's no evidence of that. A lot of panels of her looking frightened, confused, uncertain. Yu doesn't use internal monologue in any form, so we get nothing of what's going on in her head that suggests she's anything other than what she appears to be: someone who might have too soft a heart for this kind of work, or at least this particular crew.
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