The story so far

It's been awhile since the last chapter, so this post is intended as a catch-up.  If you're a future binge-reader, you probably don't need to read this.  I hope the internet is nicer in your time.  For everyone stuck in the present, here's your refresher!

SPOILERS UP TO LANCER 2.34!

The Team

Our heroine(?) Lilith is a newbie godslayer on her first non-probationary mission to a planet called Theria.  She works for the Eifni Organization, a paramilitary group that deploys transhuman supersoldiers to other universe to kill all their gods.  This saves the souls those gods would otherwise have devoured and reduces the potential for those gods to hit triphase and eat Eifni's universe.  Eifni's home planet is called Veles.

Joining Lilith is:

• Markus (87 years old), the team's social expert.  Usually pretty fun dude, and also apparently a trained masseuse.  Lilith finds his tendency toward exhibitionism uncomfortable, but otherwise they're good buddies.

• Val (233 years old), the team's technical officer.  A trained paraphycisist—that is, an expert in the science of etheric interactions—he was assigned to this mission because he is one of the foremost experts on fighting oracle gods.  He has absolutely no chill.

• Abby (548 years old), the commander.  An adherent to an ancient warrior code called The Old Ways.  Well, technically it's Gorodovir, but all the viewpoint characters have universal translators so I have to use the name that makes me look like an uncreative hack.  Let no one tell you artists don't suffer.

• The Ragnar, an Eifni warship with the ability to jump between universes.  It was damaged in an ambush during planetfall, but Val ostensibly fixed the major problems by using the souls of innocent sea creatures as raw material.

There were other recon teams deployed to Theria the same time as Lilith & co., but they also suffered ambushes and are presumed KIA at this time.  If all recon teams are killed, Eifni will assume the pantheon of this planet is too dangerous to handle carefully and will kill everyone on the planet to starve the gods out.

The Tools

In Godslayers, gods are etheric beings who subsist on the etheric radiation produced by human cultures—as well as the souls of humans who die in their clutches.  To allow humans to reincarnate instead of becoming divine dinner, godslayers use etheric technology to, well, slay gods.  These include:

• Comms: An extremely versatile etheric augment with a variety of functions.  Technically has two parts, the comm socket—a neural implant allowing the comm to communicate with the brain—and the comm itself.  Military-grade comms function as universal translators, etheric scanners, and long-distance communication devices.  They also have an etheric shield that protects the user's soul in the event of bodily death.  The one thing they can't do is seamlessly translate puns across languages, much to the author's regret.

• Disruptor weapons: a class of weapons defined by their use of a destructive etheric charge to annihilate the concept of the target, which in the case of living beings includes the target's soul.

• Pulsers: Nonlethal etheric weapons that disrupt the mind-body connection of the target, rendering them without consciousness for a brief period.

• Translation devices: any tool that allows for the conversion of matter to ether and/or vice versa.  Translators can be general in function (e.g. the translation engines on the Ragnar) or more narrow (e.g. the commander's force mace contains a translator that produces kinetic force).

• Etheric amplifiers: a class of device that amplifies an etheric signal.  This can be used to generate an arbitrary signal by extracting it from background noise, but is most powerful when used on an existing signal.  The team has hand amplifiers, which can generate moderate significance at the volume of about one room; they also have larger scale amplifiers which are used to kill gods.

• Lilith's cloak is an etheric augment built into the prosthetic parts of her soul.  It works by countersignalling the fact that she exists, which would be great if it didn't affect her too.  Lilith counteracts this effect by practicing presence meditation to keep her existence salient while the cloak is running.

The Targets

The Therian pantheon has twelve major gods and some minor gods we haven't encountered yet.  About half have been relevant so far:

• Kives, goddess of fertility and the future.  Kives is an oracle god, meaning she does time bullshit.  Normally oracles aren't super good at the time bullshit, but Kives has somehow managed to construct an etheric superstructure inside the boundaries of realspace and is using it to amplify her powers.  The team tried to strike her first, but after a string of humorous accidents, inferred that Kives was offering a truce.  So instead they went after...

• Kabiades, the god of beauty and sports.  Husband to Varas, who is ruler of the Therian pantheon and goddess of merchants and queens.  Among the matriarchal Estheni, worship of Kabiades involves a lot of running around naked and aggressively demonstrating one's domestic potential—if you're a man.  The women seem content to sit around watching for some reason.

Also relevant:

• Horcutio is the god of violent change, particularly natural disasters involving the sea.  Husband to Kives and not happy about it.  He incarnated as part of the initial ambush but his aim wasn't very good.  To be fair, if he'd landed that hit I wouldn't have a story, but shhhh.  It's hard to take out a god like that in one blow, so the godslayers plan to kill him with repeated shocks to his identity.

• Alcebios is the goddess of madness and death.  No one likes her, so the suspicion that Lilith is one of her demigods is making a lot of people nervous right now.  According to paraphysics, Alcebios would be considered progressive biphase, meaning she's got two solid aspects and is on the way to her third.  But you need to be super stable to make it to triphase and there's basically no way Alcebios can pull that off, so the godslayers plan to leave her alone and let the chaos of their mission empower her to death.

• Androdaima is the goddess of creation and discovery.  Her devotees are known as Makers.  Androdaiman religion is very practical; Lilith described the bits she's encountered as "basically religious OSHA."  It's expected that the godslayers' mission will result in a fatal vibe of destruction, so no operation is currently planned to kill her.

• Javei is the god of oaths and revelation.  His followers are known as Oathkeepers; they enforce contracts of all kinds, and can also be hired to apprehend criminals, which I'm sure is extremely fair to everyone involved.

• Meris is the goddess of secrets and of being a big pain in the ass to Lilith specifically.  Her agents are known as Whispers; one of them, a woman by the name of Lirian, has been fighting Lilith for most of the Lancer arc.

The Plot

• During the Planetfall arc, the team killed a minor ancestor god in a farming village named Salaphi.  The hit on that god required Lilith to kill the village leader, an old woman named Arguel, which is still haunting her.  The etheric fallout of that event has ruined the town.  Lilith and Markus are undercover as Salaphian refugees, with Markus claiming to be an athlete and Lilith claiming to be one of the village's nobility.

• The godslayers plan to kill Kabiades by infiltrating Markus into the Kabidiad, which is basically the Olympics if the Olympics were also the holiest festival of the god of himbos.  The winner of the Kabidiad is ceremonially married to the Empress to symbolically evoke the marriage between Kabiades and Varas.

• Etherically speaking, this event is a "conduit," meaning both gods will be sharing power so that they can both benefit from the veneration.

• The plan is for Markus to stab the Empress during the conduit event, which is so antithetical to the idea of Kabiades-as-perfect-husband that the event, properly amplified, will shatter Kabiades.  Val's calculations indicate Varas will take collateral damage and may also die.

• The team began their mission in the city of Vitareas, which is ruled by five families of "graced."  In Estheni culture, the graced are families descended from a demigod.  Lilith and Markus have embedded with the city's oldest noble family, the Vitaressi, after Abby faked an assassination attempt on Roel Vitares and Lilith and Markus got injured driving Abby off.

• The assassination attempt was blamed on Lirian, who became increasingly obsessed with the secrets Lilith was hiding.  This led her to hold Roel hostage for answers, a confrontation that left Roel crippled, Lirian in possession of a pulser, and Lilith's already murderous rage toward Lirian severely inflamed.

• Meanwhile, Markus had been rising up the ranks of Kabiadesian contenders and working towards the laurels that would grant him access to the Kabidiad.  He's also been crushing on Cades, the star athlete of Vitareas.  Cades is sponsored by the vicious and underhanded Voranetti family, who seem to have some kind of blackmail on him.

• Kuril, the current head of the Vitares family, is trying to restore the house's glory to what it was in the old days, before the Jeneretti family took over leadership of the city.  She adopted Lilith as a member of the Vitares family, apparently so that she'd have someone to help while she got pregnant with the next generation of Vitares kids.  (In Estheni culture, this person is known as a "sashbearer" and it's a common arrangement among the well-off.  iirc the infodump on this is coming up in a couple chapters). Lilith feels guilty that she'll need to leave Kuril after the mission is done.

• Lilith managed to outmaneuver Lirian and get her into Oathkeeper custody—at the price of Oathkeeper attention on her maneuvering.  Unbeknownst to her, Lirian also left her journal under Roel's pillow.  Since discovering it, Roel has become increasingly isolated and emotionally withdrawn, only tolerating the company of Bofa—Kuril's consort, beloved and respected by everyone except Lilith because she can't get over his name—and Alouren, Roel's childhood friend and fellow enthusiast of Merisite intrigue novels.

• Lilith's guilt over Roel's crippled leg drove her to secretly tell Roel about assisted movement devices.  This was technically an act of treason against the team, but no one seems to have noticed—or at least they're pretending not to.  The Velean social environment is an exhausting maze of feints and inferences that Lilith is only beginning to understand, but she's learned enough to know that godslayers can pursue personal objectives—as long as they don't conflict with the mission.

• So Lilith's concocted a plan to bring glory back to the house of Vitares.  The commander okayed it; the Vitares girls are in on it; and Markus is hopeful he'll learn why Cades has suddenly started avoiding him.  Turns out the Voranetti have been stockpiling raw materials and driving up inflation within the city.  To get the proof they need to strike at them, the Vitares have... faked some really shiny metal and offered to sell it to people who can't buy it?  Great plan, Lilith.  Not overcomplicated at all.

That brings us up to the present.  If you've got more questions, you can ask them in the comment section or on the Godslayers discord.

Lancer 2.35 releases tomorrow on here and December 16th on RoyalRoad.