This week for Translation Necessary Thursday I’m covering the beginning of a new stage for Linley! It’s Coiling Dragon Volume 08 by I Eat Tomatos!

Plot Synopsis: Linley Baruch, Scion of the once world-famous clan of Dragonblood Warriors, escaped successfully from the Radiant Church narrowly avoiding death at the hands of the Holy Emperor Heidens, and escaped out of the burning Fenlai city and ran towards the O’Brien empire. He encountered Shaq, Clayde’s son and accompanied him towards one of the border cities. He also had forged a huge lump of Adamantite into a huge sword. He then pretended to leave and watched waiting for Clayde to reunite with his son. After they got ready to run, Clayde realizing that Linley must be near wanted to keep close to the Warrior Ascetics of the Radiant Church. However they refused to allow Clayed to travel with him and Linley ambushed them as they were trying to leave the city. He killed Clayde, only to be ambushed by six Special Executors of the Radiant Church. Trapped in a formation that would kill him, Linley preparing himself to die, Doehring Cowart left the Coiling Dragon Ring and used the last of his soulforce to cast a forbidden magic to disrupt the spell allowing Linley to kill the six afterwards. However Grandpa Doehring was dead, and Linley fell into a serious depression, only after being reminded by his close friends that he still needed to take revenge on the Radiant Church did Linley regain his will to live. He set off to train like he had never trained before all the while walking towards the O’Brien Empire to meet up with his brother Wharton.

Plot: This marks the start of a new stage of Linley’s journey towards the peak, and it’s an awesome beginning. Linley and Bebe begin to travel for real after training for years in the Mountain Range of Magical Beasts. I loved this entry in the series, not only because we get to see a kinder Linley than we have for a while now, we also get to see him really grow on his own, without the aid of Grandpa Doehring.

Characters: Zassler and the Barker brothers are a couple of my favorite newcomers this volume, but there are tons of new faces. I loved pretty much all of them. This was a great book for expanding the cast of the series.

Overall: After the tragic end of the last volume this one was light enough to make up for it. I love this series, and this is just the eighth volume!