After surviving the onslaught of week one, Lucius has something to prove. He seeks to train under a living legend in hopes of being ready for the goblin siege.
He isn’t the only one looking to train. As his competition grows in strength, he must push himself harder than ever before.
Then, the unexpected happens. Players start to unlock abilities…
There is only one thing to do when facing impossible odds. Train harder!
My Opinion: 679 pages, $5.98, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: I received a copy of the novel to review, I purchased it when it became available.
I’ll admit right off the bat, I’m a fan of this series and the author. I remember reading it on the Royal Road years ago and it’s still among my favorite. The serial online version has been separated into parts, edited, polished, and added content has been created so that each novel has more of a story arc.
In this 2nd entry into the series, Lucius, the main character (MC) has just survived a goblin raid on his starter town and now he’s looking to do a bit of training. Thankfully the game provides access to the best weapons and combat trainers the world has to offer.
This training, combined with smaller combat scenes, character and story development make up 70% of the novel. If you’re a fan of those training scenes in DBZ or Rocky then you’ll love this part of the story. It’s among the best training stuff that I’ve read. In addition to general endurance and weight training, there’s philosophy, live combat work, and specialized weapon training. I especially like the spear and shield training. Heck I liked it so much, it became an inspiration for the weapons I had the main character in my own story use.
There’s a detailed game system in place that measures growth in not just the standard strength, dexterity, intelligence but rather it uses detailed ranking system for things like speed, quickness, fast twitch muscles, anaerobic, and more. Stuff you’d be more likely to come across in sports medicine or with a professional trainer. It’s an interesting change on measuring growth.
The last 30% of the story is this big epic fight against a goblin town. While there’s a lot more combat here, I liked it slightly less than the training stuff. I think that’s because the scope of the majority of the battles here are just too big for me to imagine well. It’s a challenge to picture tens of thousands of people in a battle and not have everything blur together a bit.
Overall, a really good novel. The focus on training worked well for me. But I love those training scenes in the Rocky movies. If you don’t like that kind of stuff, you may find all the training less interesting.
Score: 7 out of 10