Summus Proelium

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Cassidy Evans grew up in a rich family in an incredibly prosperous Detroit. Twenty years ago, random people across the world began to have encounters with small, mysterious glowing orbs granting them amazing superpowers. Through those two decades, as people have gained these strange gifts, this once-failing city has become a hub of revitalized economy. Detroit is now one of the centers of super-tech manufacturing, and Cassidy's own parents stand at the top of that, the wealthiest family around. Yes, Cassidy has led a very special life, in many ways. But there are secrets in her past as well. Secrets within her family. A simple act of sneaking out will begin a domino effect leading her to learn those secrets. Witnessing a murder, gaining her own powers and barely escaping with her life, her first night is a busy one. But it's only the start, because as Cassidy will learn, it isn't the constant super-powered gang fights and life and death decisions around every corner that truly weigh on you. It's the Family Business. This story updates Monday and Friday one week, Wednesday the next, and so on back and forth as it alternates updating with my other story.

Information

Status: Ongoing
Year: 2022
Author: CeruleanScrawling

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.6/ 5.0
Followers: 1,733
Views: 3,289,778

What readers say about Summus Proelium

“I started reading this on Monday. I caught up on RR that day. It is now Wednesday. I have now caught up on their website. There's three years of backlog there. Cassidy and co. Have an amazing story that is most definitely worth reading about, do yourself a…”
SepiRoyal Road5.0 / 5
“Aight speaking as someone who has read this whole story on wordpress, it's a fantastic superpower story with plenty of emphasis on creativity. None of the powers are just "very strong" or "very fast" but are much more interesting and continue to be used in…”
StarkindRoyal Road5.0 / 5

Reviews

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Community Reviews(10)

SepiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I started reading this on Monday. I caught up on RR that day.
It is now Wednesday.
I have now caught up on their website. There's three years of backlog there.
Cassidy and co. Have an amazing story that is most definitely worth reading about, do yourself a favour and go read it.
StarkindRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Aight speaking as someone who has read this whole story on wordpress, it's a fantastic superpower story with plenty of emphasis on creativity. None of the powers are just "very strong" or "very fast" but are much more interesting and continue to be used in unpredictable and exciting ways. What few 'flaws' the story has are mostly a matter of personal opinion and I highly advise you not to judge this book by its cover. The story contains excellent tension and suspense while keeping it engaging yet skillfully balanced with more lighthearted and fun moments to avoid being emotionally draining.
To summarise, give it a shot. You might be surprised.
RetiredMoonRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
İ have been reading this book on wordpress for almost a year and i have loved this book ever since I started reading it everyone should read it .it is honestly an amazing book with interesting characters and a fun plot.characters do have character growths and they get better each time you see them.the plot progress is nicely. Love you and your work Cerulean.
BidenBidenBidenBidenRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This story is much better than most stuff on this website. All the problems I have with this story are very minor and easy to overlook. I’m going to critique the story somewhat in this review but I strongly suggest you read it, it’s very enjoyable. The main character is mostly good, I like the way her stress and suffering around her family is portrayed. Sometimes she feels a little bland, especially with her sense of justice. I know she is a very principled person with a strong sense of right and wrong, but I don’t feel the same intensity in her inner monologue that I see in her actions. I’m about a hundred chapters in but she mc hasn’t expressed anger much if at all. The story is also slightly wordy sometimes and character actions are sometimes slightly mismatched with motivations. I know this review seems somewhat critical, the story is actually excellent, and I strongly suggest you read it
Haru Desu KattoRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The author has crafted a well-designed and interesting universe. It feels familiar, but it has some key differences that set it apart from other settings. I suppose it reminds me most of AstroCity, which was one of my favorites.
Style - Writing is witty and clever, and fun to read. There's plenty of action, but I'm even more pleased with the banter and teenage angst. The romance is best when it's unrequited - and I definitely want to see more for the main character.
Grammar - Practically flawless. I noticed only a few errors on my read through, but the author quickly responded and fixed them.
Character - The characters have depth, with their own motivations, interests, and flaws. It's especially interesting to see different individuals interact. Sometimes they fit well, sometimes they grate against each other. It's great!
Story - The story is REALLY good. Events and consequences generally follow well, plus there are plenty of fun twists. However, this is the only category where I'm not giving a full five stars. This is for two reasons:
The first reason is that there are too many side stories. Yes, it's fun to see the world from different perspectives, but it's just too much. During my read through, I found myself lazily skimming chapters about characters that I didn't care as much about. I feel like I could have completely skipped those chapters without missing anything important. It would be interesting to learn these other characters backgrounds from the point-of-view of the main character. Learning them as a side-story alternate POV flashback isn't much fun.
My second complaint is that the reader sometimes has to completely suspend disbelief - either that or invent outside logic to explain the plot. I have several examples, but I'll explain the three that annoyed me so much that I wrote them down in my notes when they happened.
In the first example, the main protagonist is ALWAYS finding trouble no matter where she goes. Even when taking what should be a safe sid
DeadmanwalkingXIRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I'm not great at leaving reviews and this is my first on this site, but the top review of this story when I write this is really, deeply, incorrect in a specific way, and I felt the need to step in and mention that.
This is a fun read, usually fairly upbeat tonally, with inventive power use, an interesting world, and a fun protagonist who both is and acts like she's a teenager, and it certainly isn't as dark as something like Worm, but calling it YA or assuming things will all work out happily is deeply false and becomes more and more obviously so as the story continues.
Some spoilers discussing that, follow:
The heroine has it revealed very early on that her family are basically the super-mafia. This is not handled casually or like they're somehow 'good criminals'. They straight up run a protection racket, are willing to kill anyone who gets in their way including people like an innocent 16 year old girl who knows too much, and are generally deeply ruthless people.
They're also actually excellent parents to the protagonist, which leaves her very conflicted, and rich and powerful enough that she needs evidence to turn them in to, well, anyone. Her family and trying to figure out what's going on are a major plot point and it's not handled like they will magically all get along perfectly by the end of it.
And that's to say nothing of the other villains, who include people like a pair of incestuous serial killer siblings. Those particular villains regularly engage in torture, mass murder, and a variety of other unpleasantness which, while not usually described particularly graphically, is also not glossed over. Most criminals, including the protagonist's parents, are mentioned as better people than this (being more along the lines of mafia bosses or gang leaders)...which is true, but not necessarily saying much.
Other examples of dark things include a parent selling their child into slavery where they would be brutally tortured until they complied, serious child abuse
DeattrahopperRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Warning: This Story is LONG I would personally recommend taking breaks after Arc 8, 17, and 26. Which is where this would probably be cut off if this was a book.A story about a new superhero navigating their way through Detroit and the various organizations that fall on a surprisingly complicated moral spectrum. This story has a pretty heavy character focus and tight fight choreography. The real selling point is the authors ability to manage tension, with varied organizations all after the Protagonist for their own reasons. Cassidy has to make hard choices in order to continue to do good in a world filled with villain's and corruption.The individual characters have concise and logical motivations that they pursue both on and off screen. The "meanwhile character X" interludes do a fantastic job of providing prospective and allowing us to understand what and why things are happening throughout the city. It also give the author the ability to make a LOT of ironic jokes. This is a PG-13 type story so character death is very rare and instead the author focuses on getting a lot of mileage out of each character making them feel fleshed out and unique. Coupled with the numerous world building touches this story really stands out in terms of depth compared to other superhero/fantasy stories.
Aaron Sofaer (aka Pastafarian)Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Full disclosure: I have read the full contents of this story over at Cerulean's other site. My review holds for both the content available on RR and for the full content.
Cerulean's great. Good character work, great action, fascinating worldbuilding. Nice mix of coziness and wild tension. Absolutely heartwrenching interpersonal stuff. Hilarious and delightful non-canon/AU content.
Seriously, just wonderful all around.
Endless PavingRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
It's not too unpredictable. You have your modern city with suburbs, industrial districts, and places where graffiti and litter is more common than others and a socoety revolvi g around superpowers trying to survove between heroes and villains.
Story Title That's Unusually Difficult to Remember is about your average angsty high school teen who has life drama, concerning emotions, and might suffer from carying amounts of bullying who through the power of PTSD scenarios has gained a wacko set of supernatural abilities that follow their own rules and are outright unique so as to have limited equivalence to any other superpower set who then skulls around in dark alleyways and gets involved in criminal gang politics and hero stuff and still has to go to school and secretly has a life as well.
The plot has some dramatic points and the characters have my preferred quotient of interpersonal drama and complexity (ignoring those guys who just love being evil and stuff, because who not it's easy plot) and interact very dynamically with plot events such as who and who does not know what secret or who knows that who knows what secrets. If you ever want to know why secret identoty is its own tag you only need a story like this to set you straight.
Violence. Liem all good action plot stuff violence exists and is used to rank socoal status and how much money they can steal from one another. What I do like is that the action violence scenes do still heavily interact with the character dramas going on and have movong parts beyond win/lose. Additionally the fighting and violence doesn't heavily get leaned on to mindlessly fill chapters with a single question of will they won't they doe in this single confrontation scene in this one corridor. Oh no, each corridor up to the boss foght has its own complexities that build up on one another as the threat level in one room can spill over into another from rooms that we've been through, rooms we're headed towards, as well as rooms we sure ho
TelRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
It's hard not to compair this story to Perfect Run as super heroing is such an integral part of the story. Where Perfect Run is black and white moral golden era comic book goodness, this is more realistic a world where complications happen and the world is painted in shades of grey.The MC has some real depth of character which I love.Other characters may need a bit more love however.More important than what the super powers are, their uses have been very clever. Honestly that is probably the selling point here entertaining superheroing. Already there have been weird absurd super situations, and all of them are very fun and well written.It's overall not as frantic as some on pacing, but I would highly recommend it to anyone that likes a good super story.