I’m struggling a bit to get through these now, and The Dungeon Phoenix is where I noticed it. Tad Harrington closes the Warrior Titan dungeon at the start of this book, but it costs him everything. He’s killed by the dungeon’s boss, a void entity, and only wins the fight for his own body by inhabiting his former enemy’s corpse afterward. There’s no clean victory anywhere in this series, and by book four that’s starting to read less like grit and more like a formula the story leans on because it doesn’t know another way to raise stakes.
With no sign of his brother Liam anywhere, Tad has to clear his champion rank-up trial, hatch a mysterious void egg he’s picked up, and go rescue Liam and their friend Gerald out of Oblivion #1 basically alone. Along the way he fights a Phoenix for a Reforge Aspect that resets his stats back to level 1 with much higher multipliers attached. It’s a big power jump, and one that costs him nearly everything he’s built up to that point just to get it.
A never-ending grind, and a somewhat depressing one
That’s the thing I can’t shake about this book. It’s a genuinely never-ending grind, and a somewhat depressing one to be honest. Tad can never catch a break despite working his tail off constantly, and it’s a bit sad to watch at this point rather than motivating. I don’t need every LitRPG protagonist to be having fun, but there’s a difference between a hard-won victory and a character who’s just perpetually being ground down by a plot that won’t let up on him for one single chapter.
Fenrir, the void entity now sharing Tad’s body, is genuinely one of the better ideas in this book. The two of them eventually strike a pact to work together as brothers and rivals, which is new territory for the series’ void lore and one of the few threads here that felt like it was building toward something instead of just adding another obstacle. I wanted more of that dynamic and less of the grind surrounding it.
Liz’s arc is the one thing that landed
Liz, Tad’s fiancée, is pregnant with twins in this book, and one of them is a void child that threatens her life at birth. That’s a genuinely heavy stake to introduce, and her arc pays it off with a twist ending I didn’t see coming, one that resets her relationship with Tad going forward in a way that actually felt earned rather than just there to hurt. If the rest of the book carried the same weight as her chapters, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about where this series is headed.
The rescue of Liam from Oblivion #1 is the external motivation carrying most of the plot, and it works fine as a reason for Tad to keep moving forward. It’s the internal cost that’s actually memorable here, though: what leveling up keeps taking away from him every time he clears another obstacle. The series clearly wants me invested in Tad’s power growth, and instead I’m more interested in what that growth is doing to the people around him.
Not sure this one’s built to end
I think I need a defined beginning, middle, and end in my stories rather than an ongoing, never-ending slog, and that’s the real question mark hanging over whether I keep going with The Dungeon Slayer. There’s a setup here for a coming conflict with an antagonist named Omega, and on paper that should have me curious about where things go next. Instead I found myself wondering how many more books Tad has to lose everything in before the series actually resolves anything at all.
The pacing doesn’t help either. This book spends real time on the rank-up trial before Tad even gets near the void egg or the Phoenix fight, and while none of it is wasted exactly, it’s the kind of stretch that used to fly by in the earlier books and now feels like another obstacle between me and whatever comes next. I noticed myself checking how much was left more than once, which isn’t something I did reading the first two books in this series.
I’ve enjoyed watching The Dungeon Predator and The Dungeon Titan build on wherever this book leaves off, so the series clearly keeps some momentum going even through a book that wore on me this much. But four books in, I’m genuinely not certain I’m going to continue with these. The grind is the point of a lot of LitRPG, and I get that going in. This is the first time in the series it’s felt like the grind is happening to me as a reader as much as it’s happening to Tad himself.