Enticed by promises of renewed power, a skeleton fights with but one task, to gain strength, in preparation for a battle beyond his wildest imaginings.
In life, Xanthus was a powerful necromancer with undead servants to obey his every whim. In death, the tables have turned. His soul plucked from the Well of Souls by Zekant, a Lord of Pandemonium. He has been changed, deposited in the Spectral Arena as a monster gladiator.
He is reborn as a skeleton and given a new name, Tetraites.
My Opinion: 179 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Another entry in a kind of shared universe, this one is almost a background story mixed with a predictable tournament fight. The main character (MC) is a bad man, whose soul was grabbed and used to create a skeletal soldier who is supposed to train with other sentient monsters in an arena in a god’s realm for the purpose to prepare for a universe bad guy (connected universe thing). The story is pretty straightforward with a series of arena fights, the MC getting stronger with some RPG ice power and undead power progression, with a clear rival that the MC gets to face by the end of this shorter story, then the end.
There’s also a little padding on the page count with an undisclosed short story that’s the last 10% of the story, making this even shorter than I thought it would be.
Overall, the action was pretty decent and the RPG power progression of the MC was just interesting enough to make the story entertaining. But the predictable direction and the fact that nothing really happens in the story besides the MCs character development cut down on the enjoyment a bit. It really felt like this was meant to be a prequel background story for a bigger character that shows up in another shared universe story.
Score: 7.2 out of 10
The Skeletal Champion: A Dark Dungeon Realm LitRPG (Pandemonium)