This series a lot like Dragonball Z: a world–no, a universe–where nothing is more important than fighting, and everyone is always trying to level-up. As a premise it’s corny as hell. And just when you think it’s maybe tolerable regardless, there’s a chapter where some universal Hall Monitor steps in to swat away a baddie and literally roll back time to undo bad things. What a hot mess. So explain to me why I’ve now bought every one of the books in this series, and have listened to them multiple times? Because it’s the ultimate guide to how to develop a character. In this book the protagonist is the weakest, most incapable fighter of all–and over the next dozen books you get to watch as he tries to fix that. And the author definitely knows how to make his characters likeable. The audio production is excellent, and the plot… well, it doesn’t take a lot of processing power, to be gentle about it, so it works well as background audio for other stuff. Me, I’ll be over here waiting for the *next* book now.