Aaaaaaand we’re back to the vicious Ayakami ninja fight taking place in the present, as the prominent “NOW” caption helpfully clarifies; as noted earlier, every other scene in Empowered vol. 7 is technically a flashback. Here, we’re kicking off one of my favorite fight sequences from this fairly violent volume, gotta say. 

For the record, despite the fractured and rearranged chronology of the published version of this volume, I actually wrote and drew this ninja battle last, as a single, complete story, before breaking it up and scattering the fight pages throughout the book as brief interludes of present-tense action. Gotta say, I really wish I’d produced this volume differently, as I wound up with waaaaay too few pages left for the ninja action after cranking out the rest of the chapters first. Even though we wound up expanding Empowered vol. 7’s pagecount to the near-record number of 224 pages—most previous volumes had been only 208 pages long, BTW—I still found myself having to cram the climactic fighting into fewer pages than I would’ve liked.

Panels 3-6: Note that I referenced this fight choreography from a martial-arts book addressing the theoretical non-lethal usage of the jitte, a club-type weapon historically wielded by Edo-era police officials—though, notably, the bit about breaking the target’s neck was emphatically not addressed in said tome. (You were just supposed to throw the restrained individual to the ground, as I recall.)

Today’s Patreon update: Open slot in the weekly schedule today! Not sure what I’ll be posting, but something will go up today. I’ve been posting every weekday (sometimes multiple times per day) on this Patreon for over a year, so why stop now? 

-Adam Warren