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TheGreatConst

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Magic's Mantle (Ard's Oath #1)

by Bruce Sentar (Goodreads Author)

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TheGreatConst said: " I have mixed feelings about the story as I'm halfway through it. At times, it feels AI generated, which is strange as LLMs were pretty bad back in 2023, so maybe Bruce recorded the book in audio and then transcribed and edited it with AI, or just use I have mixed feelings about the story as I'm halfway through it. At times, it feels AI generated, which is strange as LLMs were pretty bad back in 2023, so maybe Bruce recorded the book in audio and then transcribed and edited it with AI, or just used it to improve style and increase word count.

There are just so many minor inconsistencies. It wasn't anything major until chapter 23 (which I'll explain later), but those add up. And btw, the author changed the book cover to, probably, cater to the more mainstream crowd, but this is purely harem fantasy and the initial cover had a sexy image of the main female lead. Speaking of which, her introduction also made me consider dropping the novel and surprised me as something rarely done in harem novels, but let's say she was "redeemed" and I ended up liking their romance. The problem with that is that it wasn't even clarified for a while if she only made out with a bunch of guys (which she DID) or also had sex with them as a part of her curriculum. I guess I can forgive the fact that her mouth was public property considering the setting... at least she kept herself chaste for the MC. BUT I can't forget the fact that if the MC didn't wake up as a mage, he'd be 100% cucked as there's no way she'd abandon her station to stay with a village boy.

I dropped the author's Returnee's book in just a few chapters because of how inconsistent and nonsensical it was in terms of power levels for a litrpg, and this one is only marginally better for a progression fantasy. Granted, the mages are not supposed to be physically much different from normal humans (which implies a whole set of other problems for the genre, for one MC's strength would never feel absolute or that meaningful as anyone can just kill him in sleep or poison him) but even anchors get hurt against normal humans in one scene, and look almost invincible in others. In one scene the MC is fighting a bunch of magic empowered enemies, in another he's ambushed by completely mundane bandits and survives only because they wanted to kidnap him instead of killing, showcasing the incompetence of his supposed guardians.

I don't actually hate the MC's personality, but it's a book that requires you to suspend your disbelief way too much, to ignore all the dumb and strange decisions that exist only to make the plot more exciting and the things more challenging to MC. The inconsistency in the power system is quite absurd, MC's magic teacher for example couldn't use her magic at the distance of a crossbow, but he himself took care of people so far away that they were just dots to him.

The part that broke the immersion and made me reconsider continuing is a fight against bandits halfway through the book. Out of nowhere, one of them uses LIGHT MAGIC, something that didn't appear in this story so far, and one of the elements that the MC didn't unlock (I searched the term throughout the book, it seems he still can't use it at the end). There's NO explanation - is she an anchor (warriors that take magic from the mages)? If so, who gave her the magic? Why is an anchor among the bandits, and without her mage? At the end of the fight she was impaled but not dead. That's the last time we see her, she doesn't appear again and is never mentioned.

I can't get it out of my head - why was a random bandit using one of the rarest magic types? How? There was no mage, no mention of her being an anchor, nothing. Just a random scene that defies the logic of the story's entire magic system without an explanation. The story is too coherent to be completely AI written, IDK, maybe as someone else said, "someone else started writing the book halfway through"? Maybe the author just hired a ghostwriter who didn't understand how the magic system worked? IDK. And I'm afraid that the series only gets worse with more and more such inconsistencies.

But what I know is that, for now, I lost my interest in the book. ...more "

May 24, 2026 04:21AM · see review