The Elves are invading Galea. With evil growing in the southern lands they have come to put an end to it by any means necessary.
The forces of evil won't go down easily. Liam Ottani has learned many lessons since first logging into the crucible shard. Attacks must not go unanswered and one must strike where their enemy is weak.
With allies growing more unhinged and dangerous by the day and the mysteries of the universe deepening there are battles on all fronts and victory always comes at a cost.
My Opinion: 215 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
At the end of the last book, Liam and his group planned to counter attack the elves that were invading his kingdom. However, the plan to attack the elves doesn't go as planned and the airship they’re on is forced to shift realities. Everyone ends up in a dating sim! (25-40% section of the novel). Which is a combination of time management system and social building game systems. Think non-combat stuff from Persona 5. It’s actually a rather nice change of pace.
Then the elves somehow find them and they flee somewhere else.
At about the 40% mark, things seem to fall off the rails for me:
In addition to the characters being able to shift realities now, the story adds time travel. Some stuff happens that changes the timeline and undoes some of the harsher events of the last novel. Not sure if I like the results but it’s an interesting way to hit the undo button.
After that even more random seeming events occur. There’s more shifting to other realities including Cobalts home reality, the main characters original reality, a creation of a new pantheon, main characters losing all their memories and going through total shifts in personalities.
So many things happen in the last half of the story that it’s confusing to keep track of it all and it feels really fractured.
Overall, I really enjoyed the first half of this story. The addition of a new temporary game world was cool and added some variety to an action oriented story. However, the last half was just messy and contradictory and I didn’t care for it.
Score: 6 out of 10.
Gank: A LitRPG Adventure (The Crucible Shard Book 4)