There's a fantastic series of books by Andrzej Sapkowski, on which several wildly successful games of are based (you may have heard of them; they're called the Witcher Series, and I recommend both the games and the books). There's a great passage near the end of his third book, The Time of Contempt, where the main character is about to throw down with a wizard, and the short passage before the fight is described says something along the lines of: "Weeks later, as Geralt was excruciatingly stitched back together, he would think back on this fight and wonder what mistakes he had made. Ultimately, he concluded the only one was not running away before it started."

I was thinking of that passage a lot as I worked on this page.

Reader NPCs!

In the first panel, we have the ones submitted by Fadilah Andini, and a new one submitted by Elizabeth Robbins! Take a good long look at that elderly lady, the third from the right. You can't see it, but she has a cool dagger strapped to her belt.