This story is starting to drag now, and Book 7 is where I finally admitted that to myself instead of pushing past it. Matt, Liz, Aster, and Susanne are still deep inside the Minkalla delve, fresh off one of the toughest fights of the series so far with three floors still ahead of them, and those final floors escalate hard. There’s no retreat option, no higher-tier allies to call on, every encounter pushing the group past what they thought they could survive, capped by a brutal final battle. By the time they clear the dungeon they’re banged up badly. Missing limbs, healing cooldowns maxed, basically crawling to the exit.
The dungeon plot itself lands well, and I want to be clear about that before I get into what didn’t work, because the escalation across those last floors is genuinely tense. It’s everything around the dungeon that’s the problem.
No villain, no destination, just more grinding
I’m all for the constant grind and progression that this genre runs on. That’s not the complaint. The complaint is that this one seems like it’s never going to end, and I mean that literally. What actually is the planned conclusion here? There isn’t an overarching villain or nemesis that I can see the party training to fight. It’s simply a grind to get stronger, book after book, with no real sense of what all that strength is actually for.
I kept waiting for Book 7 to point at something on the horizon, some faction or threat that all this power is eventually going to matter against, and it never quite does. Minkalla is dangerous enough on its own terms that the book doesn’t need a bigger villain to justify the difficulty. But a dungeon alone isn’t a series arc, and seven books in, I want to see where the arc is actually headed.
That absence is what makes Book 7 feel different from earlier entries in a way the dungeon delve itself doesn’t fully explain. A hard dungeon with an unclear purpose reads differently than a hard dungeon that’s clearly one step on the way to a fight the whole series has been building toward. Minkalla is brutal, but brutal toward what?
The alternate-life chapters didn’t help
A big chunk of this book is spent away from the main party in “alternate life” side sequences and secondary POV chapters. I know a lot of readers like this device in general, and I don’t hate it on principle, but in a book already struggling to justify its own length, cutting away from the one plotline with real momentum made the pacing problem worse rather than better. The dungeon floors are where the tension lives. Every chapter spent somewhere else is a chapter not spent there.
Compare this to Warformed, and the contrast is rough
I think about how Warformed has been written, and there are some real similarities in how both series handle progression, but the fact that Warformed is currently only two full books makes me genuinely eager for its third. With Path of Ascension, seven books in, I really struggled to finish this one, which is sad, because I remember genuinely enjoying Books 1 through 4. Something shifted between then and now, and Book 7 is where I felt it the most.
I’m not sure I’m going to continue with this series. I’d like to see where it’s going. The Minkalla ending, with the party emerging among the first teams out and drawing outside attention, does at least plant a hook for consequences down the line. But at the same time, this is a grind for me, and one I’m not progressing from as a reader. That’s a strange thing to say about a progression fantasy series, but that’s exactly where I landed with this one after finishing it.
3 out of 5
It was okay. The dungeon delve itself is well done, and the final stretch through Minkalla’s hardest floors is genuinely tense in a way I can’t take away from it. But a series needs more than escalating difficulty to keep me invested seven books in, and right now I can’t tell you what Matt and his party are actually working toward. If Book 8 gives me an answer to that, I might come back. Right now, I’m not certain I will.