So, I just finished writing about the first book in the series and scheduled it for posting. You would have already been able to see it at the time you are reading this, but for me, it's been only a few minutes since I did that. Now, onto the second book. It's called Earth's Gambit as you could have read in the post title.
The book starts with Alan and his new guildmates going to the Academy to train before being unleashed on the world of the Game. Their academy life starts with a test of getting into the center of an arachnid mob colony. Alan is the first one (maybe even the only one) who gets there. And it's all thanks to his bionic eye enhancements. With them, he's able to see which threads the spiders use for seeing their enemies and which are dummies.
Then, when this first test is completed, he is grabbed by a Machine Lord named Cerberus who practically claims him and demands to be his teacher. Well, more like he orders it. But Alan gladly accepts. And starts learning more. Also, he starts to learn how to properly use his AI Eve. To have her run background checks while he makes the decisions instead of having her do everything. It's slow progress at first, but he starts to get better at it.
Alan's training with Cerberus is interspaced with talking with his friends, joining a tournament, finishing one of his other quests, the one where he needs to need 10 major players, and, if he can, learn their objectives. Also, he gets infected with a bunny virus. That one is a little funny, because he, in the end, needs Cerberus to do a somewhat of a purge. And then, he starts to learn about the true hacking in the game. And Cerberus sets him a challenge. He manages to complete it just in time for him to not be late for a tournament that a Predecessor insisted he attends after he won a free for all tourney before.
FYI, I did not indicate the segments this was written in. I decided to just write as I read and add to this whenever possible. And that's it. Tell me which one you prefer. Timestamps or not. I can do either, but I think I prefer writing without them and just putting the finishing time stamp at the end before scheduling it to post.
The book starts with Alan and his new guildmates going to the Academy to train before being unleashed on the world of the Game. Their academy life starts with a test of getting into the center of an arachnid mob colony. Alan is the first one (maybe even the only one) who gets there. And it's all thanks to his bionic eye enhancements. With them, he's able to see which threads the spiders use for seeing their enemies and which are dummies.
Then, when this first test is completed, he is grabbed by a Machine Lord named Cerberus who practically claims him and demands to be his teacher. Well, more like he orders it. But Alan gladly accepts. And starts learning more. Also, he starts to learn how to properly use his AI Eve. To have her run background checks while he makes the decisions instead of having her do everything. It's slow progress at first, but he starts to get better at it.
Alan's training with Cerberus is interspaced with talking with his friends, joining a tournament, finishing one of his other quests, the one where he needs to need 10 major players, and, if he can, learn their objectives. Also, he gets infected with a bunny virus. That one is a little funny, because he, in the end, needs Cerberus to do a somewhat of a purge. And then, he starts to learn about the true hacking in the game. And Cerberus sets him a challenge. He manages to complete it just in time for him to not be late for a tournament that a Predecessor insisted he attends after he won a free for all tourney before.
FYI, I did not indicate the segments this was written in. I decided to just write as I read and add to this whenever possible. And that's it. Tell me which one you prefer. Timestamps or not. I can do either, but I think I prefer writing without them and just putting the finishing time stamp at the end before scheduling it to post.
Feh... So, Alan's time at the academy continues. He learns more, identifies the one who killed him during the Assassin's game, and also continues to develop his hacking skills. And then he's given a quest. A major quest. About a Data vault. But the conditions to enter it are quite hard to meet. So when he gets an additional quest, this time about the war on Earth, which would cut his Academy time short, he gets the bright idea to hack into the Data Vault. And he succeeds. Somehow. And there, he finds an interesting new AI. Lambda. And Lambda is going stir-crazy in there. He wants to go with Alan. And gives him an ability from the vault to be able to have two instead of only one AI.
So now Alan has two AI and goes to Earth with Kitana. There they need to work on destabilizing the economy in order to further the goal of the Legion of Man against the United World Government (UWG). That leads to one of their own betraying them and Thiago, one of the people Alan did the tutorial with, dying in the eyes of the war.
Of course, the efforts are made even harder by Haxlards interrupting everything. So yeah... Quite a mess. And then the group that now contains two more from the tutorial, flee... Tactically retreat to Mars. Where the Legion of Man has a base of operations. And then Alan and co. are given a quest to figure out how to take over a UWG war class spaceship. Well, I'm not actually sure if it is a war-class ship, but it's fuck-ass huge. And now they're brainstorming.
Oh, and Eve, one of Alan's AIs temporarily died during the "boss-fight hack". So he has to respawn her which will take a week.
So, they plot on Mars. And they are invited to the main ship protecting the planet there. Mainly because Alan requested the use of the simulation room there to figure out how to take over the UWG mothership or whatever that spaceship is, apart from being huge.
Only, there he learns that Icewolf and Kitana and the rest of the group he's now with, are not part of the Legion of Man but are there undercover and are actually UWG agents. They want Alan to join them in their efforts but he refuses and fights them all. Then he dies and respawns back in his guild.
And that's basically the end of book 2. Oh, and the war for the Earth control between the UWG and Legion of Man is thus over with the UWG being the winner and Alan being a wanted man on his home planet. Good thing he physically moved to Kersath, right? Like, in the real-life, not only in-game.
I've also immediately started reading the last book. Well, I think it's only three books long. But maybe I'm wrong and there's a fourth waiting for me. We'll see when I'm done with book 3. Until then, I won't bother finding out.
The book was great! Admittedly, sometimes I was mentally screaming at Alan to fucking use that useless brain of his! And to be honest with you, I don't trust Eve. I trust Lambda more than Eve and Lambda is a little crazy so that says something. But Eve... She's too... I don't know. There's definitely something going on there.
I want to trust Phantom and Void, two of the Black Rose Guild members, but honestly, right now, while I don't distrust Phantom, I trust Void more. Phantom's keeping something big a secret. And until I know what it is apart from some communication breach or whatever, I'm gonna withhold final judgment on him. Who knows, maybe he's a good guy... I'm hoping he is, but we'll have to wait and see.
The book is really easy to read and the text flows really well. There were, again, like in book 1, stat and quest updates, and other "in-game messages" that were done in a way that breaks the normal text monotony. I like it when something like that is done. Though one thing I have to be honest with you about, I found some grammatical and spelling errors. I mean, it doesn't really take away from the story, but still. I'm not sure if I only found those because I'm not a native speaker and therefore pay a bit more attention to the rules and so on than your average native speaker, but yeah. There were mistakes.
But I don't generally mind so long as the text is legible and the mistakes are only a few. If there are too many, which is sometimes the case in fanfiction, I won't read it no matter how good the idea is. No matter how good the story is.
One of my pet peeves is when the text is just one single block of text. I hate it when there are no paragraphs. I get lost in a text like that. I don't mind a single paragraph when it's a short-ish blog post or similar, but in a story, if you don't separate direct speech in its own paragraphs, then go die and don't write anything ever again!
Well, that was a little rant from me about writing stylistics. Back to the story. I think I already told you everything I wanted to... One thing that I should probably add is that I got the books in an e-book format from Amazon. I'm from the Czech republic and they definitely don't have a Czech translation. And frankly, even if they did, I wouldn't buy them in Czech. I go to my local book stores to find inspiration. And then I go and get the book in an e-book format in English instead.
I did almost buy a book, but then I pick up the second volume and I read: "You might like this if you liked Terry Pratchet."
Or something along those lines. I don't remember exactly. And it was in Czech anyway. But! I decided against the book after reading that. Why? I hate Terry Pratchett. I was forced to sit through several hours long seminar on him and his books done by the moron who translates him into Czech. And my professor was sitting next to me so I couldn't even read my own book while tuning him out!
I had a Perry Mason book and I was loving it!
But Terry Pratchett? I can't stand his kind of humor. I don't find it funny at all! I find it stupid and annoying. And yes, maybe it's just because something might have been lost in translation, but I'm never gonna read Pratchett unless you pay me some serious money.
And that's it. Really, I'm done ranting. Last thing. I promise. Tell me if you think that the men in Chinese historical dramas look like Tolkien's elves. I wanna know what you think about that! For reference: The Untamed. Love that series. Though I did skip the 30 flashback episodes. :D
~AnnElfwind
Written on the 18th (17th midnight) of August, 2020
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