A good day's work today. I ended up not doing any writing on Friday, instead spending the day tweaking the outline for the final chapters and reading through the manuscript to date, fixing any typos or errors that I came across. I'm now in the home stretch, with only a few chapters left to go.

87,138 / 90,000 (96.8%)

The nine main characters of the title are already down to seven, with one more about to get the ax. The last chapters will be something of a blood bath, I'm afraid, with most of the rest of them falling before it's all said and done.

Only a short sample today, the most I can provide without spoiling too much.

Across the room, Guardsman Nguyen lay into the Shorn One with nothing resembling technique or tactic, only a blindly homicidal rage. Yao knew that, deep within the man-mountain’s tortured mind, he was reliving that same moment from his youth, in which he’d arrived too late the save the woman he loved from a gruesome end. Having entered the control station temple behind Yao and seen the Mexica in the yellow armor drawing blood from the almost naked Han woman on the sacrificial stone, Nguyen’s mind had gone back to that night, as it had done in the showers of Fanchuan Garrison weeks before. And just like that night when he had killed the guardsman who’d been in the act of raping a female member of the support staff, Nguyen would not rest until the Shorn One was dead, or he himself was, so long as he thought a woman’s life was in danger.

I'll probably be finished by Wednesday, at this rate, though I can see myself finishing tomorrow, or as late as Thursday. Either way, I'm definitely in the downhill stretch.