This was a pretty mediocre book.
The main protagonist was a pretty unsympathetic idiot. He’s basically compelled into each conflict by force for the most part, complains the whole time, overestimates his abilities constantly, and swoons for his ex the rest of the book. He also pretty much goes through every confrontation without any real plan, and doesn’t seem to ever learn his lesson. After one failure, the main character reflects on his mistake, then makes the exact same mistake again in the next fight. Literally the only reason he’s not dead many times over is because of his substantial plot armor.
The antagonist is worse. His actual reasons for killing people are both shallow and undefined. He wants to get strong, has a sense of loyalty to his master, sort of wants revenge, is working towards some sort of utopian future for the masses… take your pick. He pretty much switches reasons every time he does an internal monologue. Basically he’s the protagonist without a love interest (he even has an annoying person ordering him around and showing up randomly).
The plot twists were all painfully obvious (I was actually getting frustrated that the reveal was taking so long because I was expecting it to lead to a meaningful change in the plot. It didn’t.) The
The magic system is pretty annoying. It’s meant to be a mystery, but it is never really defined enough to be all that mysterious. It changes when the plot requires and acts like a deus ex machina when convenient. I’m sure there will be further discoveries in the subsequent books, but the author failed to make the magic system interesting enough to warrant the effort.
Finally, the narration was fairly monotone. I ended up turning up the speed to 2.5x then finally 3x to get through aspects of the book that should have been fun but just didn’t sound interesting.