Still stranded in the virtual world of Freehaven Online, the Toxic Muffins, lead by Justine, are given new hope after a beloved guild member died upon failing digitization.
Mirae has come online.
No one can message her, but they have a quest leading them into the depths of Hades, an underworld that serves two planes of mortal existence, to retrieve a lost soul and escort it back to the living. They hope that's what Mirae is.
For mortals, entering the underworld is no easy task. There's no respawn within Hades and resurrection spells now have a lengthy cool down. Justine's party will face monsters, ghosts, and even deities in their journey. To make matters worse, Hades doesn't release souls easily, and getting back may be just as testing.
Justine needs to forge a rock solid adventure party to find the gates of the underworld, locate Mirae, and bring her home to safety, because if she doesn't Mirae could be lost to both the real and digital worlds forever.
My Opinion: 661 pages, $5.99, Not Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a solid improvement over book 1, just about all the issues I had with that novel don’t exist here. This is a solid LitRPG adventure story that takes the characters from the series into the bowels of Hades. They go on some quirky Greek mythology themed adventures (like finding new books for Cheron to read), and setup some storylines for book 3. The setup for getting the main character into the adventure is much simpler and overall the novel is streamlined.
There are two negatives that are worth mentioning: 1) One of the big emotional moments in book 1 is undone. 2) The author doesn’t do a good job of either summarizing the events of book 1 or re-introducing readers to the world, game mechanics, or premise of the series. Which will make the novel harder for new readers to understand or connect with. You sort of have to read book 1 to understand who everyone is and what’s happening.
Overall, I ended up liking the book 2 in the series more than book 1 and appreciate the effort the author put into improving the storytelling.
Score: 7.3 out of 10
Freehaven Online: Lady Thunderlord, Into Hades: A LitRPG Adventure (Freehaven Online-Book 2)