Literature / He Who Fights With Monsters

He Who Fights With Monsters is an online LitRPG fantasy serial by Shirtaloon.

Jason Asano, half-Japanese and half-Australian assistant manager at an office supply store, wakes up naked and hairless in a hedge maze. Strange screens, like in a video game, start appearing in front of him, and then there are the monsters wandering around. With time and exploration, he manages to fight past the monsters to find people... only to discover they're all cannibals.

After teaming up with some other captives and escaping the cannibals, Jason discovers that in this new world of magic, power is everything. He gains essences, powerful abilities that allow him to cast incredible spells. If he becomes an adventurer, he can use these powers to help people, to make money, and to gain social capital. He grows in power and prestige in the city of Greenstone, an oasis in the middle of a desert, fed by a magical spring. Along the way, he discovers corruption, conspiracies, and gods.

And maybe, just maybe, he'll find a way home.

Not to be confused with the trope He Who Fights Monsters.

It can be read on Royal Road (here), Patreon, and Amazon Kindle and audiobook.

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This work includes examples of:

• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: In book one, Jason is sent to kill a nest of monster rats in the Old City sewer. He has no trouble walking through it.
• Aerith and Bob: Few people in Pallimustus have made-up fantasy names, though many are at least archaic or unusual. Others... are not. The Adventurers that mentor Jason are named Rufus, Farrah, and Gary.
  • The Walsh tribe are exemplars of this. Kenneth, son of Brian, son of Kevin, son of Jeremy, son of Dennis whose lineage traces all the way back to Jeff, Lord of the Hunt.
  • The vampire Craig Vermillion goes by his last name in professional settings.
• All Deaths Final: In theory, resurrection is easy. Souls flee to the deep astral on death; if you manage to draw a soul back to a world, it will instinctively create a new body for itself. The problem is that the Reaper, one of the Great Astral Entities, does not like this, and trying to resurrect people is likely to get its attention. While mortals likely couldn't do this reliably anyway, the Reaper is the only reason the other Great Astral Entities don't just constantly resurrect their followers.
  • That being said, resurrection magic does exist, even if it's rare (only Gold-rank healers and above are known to have it) and has a very strict window of opportunity (since the resurrection magic has to catch the soul before it flies off into the deep astral and put it back into the body).
• Almighty Janitor: According to Soramir Rimaros, Jason is this, having become a “very powerful diamond ranker that has yet to catch up to his rank.”
• Alternate Universe: Pallimustus have similar geography, personal names, flora and fauna, timekeeping, etc, except Pallimustus has magic. It turns out that this is because the previous Builder built both worlds on the same Frankensteinian template with different levels of magic. See Patchwork World below. The Earth that Jason is from is also not quite the same as ours. For instance, Hillary Clinton was president in the 90s, not Bill, and everyone loved the final season of Game of Thrones.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Gods of Pallimustus each embody a fundamental concept such as Knowledge, Healer, or War, and can take mortal form. The Great Astral Beings also each represent a concept but they're so vast that they have trouble interacting at all with the mortal existence.
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: In book three Jason comes across a mine that is dumping nonmagical "trash" gold, so in book four when he returns to Earth, he has 400 kg of gold bouillon to sell. As of book eight, the Astral Gate in his soul realm means that he could essentially make infinite money. He doesn't abuse it though, because he doesn't want to wreck the global economy.
• Assimilation Backfire: The Builder gets Thadwick poisoning; that is, the Builder makes a couple stupid mistakes because he was "infected" by Thadwick's pettiness, spitefulness, and general Upper-Class Twit-ery.
• At the Opera Tonight: Several significant interactions in the first three books take place at the Greenstone opera house.
• Badass Boast: Raythe, servant of the Great Astral Being of Time, is confronting a Diamond rank messenger who declares that he won't be easy to kill, even for someone like her.

  "That's alright," she told him "I have time."

• Bad Boss:
  • The Builder sacrifices his iron-rank cultists to make bronze-rank clockwork cores out of their star seeds. When asked to sacrifice their own iron-rank priests to host said cores neither of the Purity church leaders hesitate at all.
  • The Messengers enslave "lesser" beings by breaking their will, and many will execute a slave for making the merest suggestion that they have made a mistake. The lower rank messengers aren't treated much better. A standard punishment for speaking out of turn is to have their mouth sealed shut.
• Bad Powers, Good People: The powers Jason gets a hold of are all on the "evil" side of things, letting him become an affliction specialist. He is able to kill by inflicting agonizing poison and rot on his enemies, but in general is a pretty nice guy.
• Bag of Holding: Storage-space powers and Bigger on the Inside bags are relatively rare and aren't cheap, but most adventurers have either one or the other. Jason's personal storage-space power gets a number of upgrades, including one that turns it into a full-on Pocket Dimension.
• Beyond the Impossible: Diamond is the absolute pinnacle of what an individual can attain. Transcendents are those who have surpassed diamond.
• Big Fancy Castle: Emir's Cloud Palace has multiple spires and domes, is made of clouds, and can transform into a cruise ship.
• Blood Magic:
  • The Red Table is a blood cult that is really into blood magic summoning.
  • Jason has the Blood essence, which mostly gives him affliction-type powers that make people bleed and life stealing powers.
  • Combine blood and death essences and you get a vampiric version of the undeath confluence which turns the user into a vampire. Vampires get blood magic "flavored" by the third essence used to create the undeath confluence.
  • Clive has a spell specifically named "Blood Magic", which allows him to consume his own life force to power his other spells. The spell also mentions that another person's life force can be used instead, but warns that doing so will leave a permanent mark on the user's soul.
• Body Backup Drive: Some vampires can create backup bodies for themselves or others in the event of their deaths. Instead of going to the Reaper, their soul goes to their new body.
• Born as an Adult: Messengers are born as fully grown adults with imprinted knowledge, although they still need to go through indoctrination to turn them into zealots. In book eleven Jason accidentally creates the first of a new species, who is born as an adult with Jason's cultural knowledge.
• Break the Comedian: Jason keeps getting put into positions where he has to chose between his wellbeing and the consequences of failure.
  • In the second arc Jason gets put through the wringer and by the end of it his cheerful personality is increasingly a mask and that mask doesn't fit very well anymore.
• Bring It: In book nine during the battle of Yaresh, a messenger challenges Jason to a one-on-one fight by calling out to Jason's cloud fortress using his aura to project his voice. Jason responds, louder, projecting his aura across the entire section of the battlefield.
  Jason: IF YOU WANT TO FIGHT ME, THEN COME IN HERE AND GET ME.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Asya invokes this trope by name:
  Asya: You're not a comic relief sidekick, Jason. You're a bunny-ears lawyer.
• Came Back Strong: Outworlders are people who died, sometimes as a side-effect of a miscast summoning ritual in another universe, who gain a set of personalized racial abilities. They are also entirely made of magic, meaning that they don't really need to breathe, don't have internal organs, and generally gain all the passive abilities of higher-rank bodies at far lower levels. By the time an outworlder reaches silver rank they can theoretically survive decapitation (although this would still be horribly damaging to most people).
• Cannibal Clan: The first people Jason meets in Pallimustus are a bunch of cannibals.
• City Universe: Interstice is a city the spans an entire (small) universe in a single flat plane. It is often considered the capital city of the cosmos.
• Company Town: The first town that Jason visits is called North East Quarry Village Four, although it seems pretty idyllic apart from the occasional monster attack. The spirit coin farms also have generic names like "Geller 7."
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Jason mentions this trope by name after creating a hoard of illusory ninjas.
• Chick Magnet: Rick Geller accuses Jason of being one, because every time they encounter each other Jason is with at least one or two beautiful women, one or more of whom may be a princess. At one point the goddess of Fertility sends a group of acolytes to interrupt a meeting between their teams just to uphold Rick's expectations.
• Death World: The Pallimustus equivalent to Australia is so dangerous that only Gold and Diamond-rankers go there.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Great Astral Being the Builder was once a mortal who was given the role after the previous Builder did mad experiments with the realities he was creating.
• Determinator: Jason never gives up, even when he should. Soul tortured by a Great Astral Being for days on end? The Builder is forced to give up. Ambushed by someone a rank higher than him? He keeps fighting until he is knocked out. A city facing an invasion of monsters? He doesn't stop fighting until the monsters are all dead and the people are evacuated.
• Divine Right of Kings: Interestingly, the divine right comes from one specific god, the God of Dominion. The rest of the gods have nothing to do with kings and queens. Dominion only grants the right to people who impress him by absolutely refusing to bow even to him.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Jason gets the blood, darkness, and sin essences, which combine into the doom essence. The first spell he gets from it is even called "Inexorable Doom".
• Dramatic Irony: Danielle Geller assumes that bringing in the high priest of Purity will ensure that the victims of the Builder cultists will be returned to their families intact. The church of Purity is working with the Builder cult and the high priest makes a point of making Jonah Geller die in an extremely grotesque way.
• Dungeon Crawling: Jason, Humphrey, and Clive's first contract together leads them to an abandoned underground complex full of hidden treasure, traps, and a giant monster at the end. The Reaper Trial also resembles a classic dungeon crawl, being set in an overgrown city in an astral space.
• Eating Optional: Essence users no longer need to eat, drink, or dispose of waste. All they need to survive is a dense enough source of magic (like spirit coins) and breathable air (and well-trained silver-rankers don't even need that). However, most essence users continue to eat food anyway because spirit coins are utterly tasteless and mildly unpleasant to eat (Jason describes the experience as being similar to licking a 9-volt battery). This comes in useful when Earth is under rationing.
• Empty Quiver: In book six Jason and Farrah steal a magically enhanced nuke in order to blow up a bunch of vampires.
• Enemy Mine: In book six Jason is trapped in a place with a bunch of his more powerful enemies. They are forced to work together to save the world.
• Fantastic Livestock: Most farm animals on Pallimustus are hexapedal lizards.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Pallimustus has some familiar fruits such as apples and coconuts, but also a wide variety of strange ones.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Jason decides to name him new familiar, a shambling pile of sentient blood and leeches, Colin. He lampshades that naming his summoned apocalypse beast something more threatening would just make him look more evil. His third familiar resembles the God's Eye Nebula, and is an Avatar of Doom. Jason names it Gordon.
• Friendly Rivalry: Vitesse and Rimaros have opposing styles of training adventurers. Vitesse favors versatility, encouraging their students to have a wide variety of spells and attacks for almost any situation. Rimaros favors specialization, aiming to be the best by honing a spell type to its absolute limit. Vitesse adventurers sometimes tease Rimaros adventurers for suffering from Crippling Overspecialization, but Rimaros adventurers fire right back by claiming that Vitesse adventurers are a whole crowd of Master of None "do everything, poorly" fighters. Each strategy does actually make sense for their part of the world.
• Functional Magic: Most magic comes in two broad categories; essence magic and ritual magic.
  • Essence magic is internal and comes directly from the user, making it powerful and difficult to counter, but it's expensive to get the powers in the first place and improve them. Each person can absorb three essences, after which a fourth confluence essence will appear. Confluence essences cannot appear in any other way, and only some clergy refuse them (instead taking one from their god). Each essence is aligned with a concept or element, such as Jason's Dark, Blood, Sin, and Doom. A person with a full essence set will have 20 essence abilities. Absorbing each essence unlocks an ability, but the reset need to be unlocked with awakening stones. Essences and awakening stones manifest naturally in places that align with their nature, such as a dark essence appearing under a gloomy staircase or an awakening stone of the rain appearing during a rainstorm over a pond.
  • Ritual magic is external, relying on ambient magic, circles of power, and material components. The advantage is that anyone can learn to use it, including non essence-users. People often learn one or two rituals related to their jobs.
• Giant Enemy Crab: On several occasions Jason faces shabs, which are large, chitinous sharks with eight crab legs and a pair of pincers. Thankfully they don't move very quickly.
• Giant Footprint Reveal: In book nine the team passes an oddly shaped pond in the middle of a ruined city—it is the footprint of a giant Diamond rank monster.
• Girl Next Door: Jason's first love and childhood best friend was the literal girl next door. It did not end well for Jason.
• God of Evil: Every god on Pallimustus has priests and temples, but those of dark gods are actively hunted by other churches and the Adventure Society. They are forced to save up their resources and can only act when the timing is right. Notably Death is one of the good gods, but Undeath is the worst of the dark gods, and is so hated that even mortal enemies will band together to destroy his priests. Other dark gods include Pain, Destruction, Disguise, and Deception.
• Godzilla Threshold: Jason worries that with his power set, when he gets too powerful he might start to think nothing of setting off an apocalypse. Sophie points out that with the way he makes enemies, someday he might need a swarm of leeches that can devour a planet's worth of life.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Essences can make incredible feats possible with the silliest of concepts.
  • The Walsh tribe for instance, specializes in the Duck essence.
• Hidden Depths: Clive initially appears as a stuffy, scatterbrained Magic Society bureaucrat who Jason easily runs circles around. Then he mentions he grew up on an eel farm who got his expensive education on a scholarship for merit, and demonstrates that he's actually a quite powerful (if inexperienced) adventurer. He ends up being one of Jason's closest friends.
• Horse of a Different Color: Instead of horses, Pallimustus has two-headed scaled creatures called heidels. Despite having human upper bodies, centaurs there also have two heads.
• Houseboat Hero: Jason often keeps his cloud house/vehicle in the form of a houseboat.
• A Hump In Name: Humphrey is deeply dismayed when Jason (to Jason's delight) learns that his family nickname is "Hump."
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Chapter titles are usually a phrase from near the end of the chapter.
• Impossible Item Drop:
  • Jason is initially very bemused at how the Organ Drops from the monsters he kills come neatly wrapped in butcher's paper or tied with twine.
    Jason: [examining a bound bundle of snakeskin looted from an Umbral Mountain Snake] What, did I loot the string from the snake too?
  • Particularly noticeable is the epic-rank dagger he receives as a quest reward for killing the snake. Not only does the dagger come with its own sheath, it comes with a belt to hang the sheath on.
  • He sometimes will loot items that are much larger than the creature that they came from, such as a 6-foot fantasy sword from a fist-sized monster.
  • This becomes a plot point in the second book, when Jason loots an intact Star Seed from a Builder cultist. When another cultist hears about this, he insists that it is absolutely not possible as a cultist can use their implanted Star Seed as thought-operated Cyanide Pill or Self-Destruct Mechanism, meaning that someone would have to kill them instantly without them knowing.
• Improperly Paranoid: Timos the Builder cultist veers between this and Properly Paranoid. Any failures that can be ascribed to him are inevitably the result of his assumption that his enemies know more than they actually do.
• In the Hood: Jason wears his hooded Cloak of Shadows so much, it's become part of his identity. Amusingly, each of his three familiars also adopt this fashion (at least initially), though Colin's "cloak" is a bundle of bloody rags tied together in the rough shape of a cloak.
• Iron Woobie: Jason. Book 3 gets him tortured, body and soul with a star seed and then killed fighting the Builder. Books 4 through 6 have him reconnect with his family and his old friends, only for them to come face to face with what he has to do to ensure their survival. The ones that survive that long that is. Book 7 gives him some hope of having a normal adventuring career... nope, instead he discovers that Storm Princess Zara used his name to get out of an arranged marriage, entangling him in that political mess. Book 8 leaves him firmly at the center of the political quagmire of the Storm Kingdom, to the point that any three star silver-rank mission in the local adventurer's guild starts with "figure out what Jason Asano is doing".
• Last-Name Basis:
  • Because of the nature of their initial relationship, Jason and Sophie usually refer to each other as Asano and Wexler.
  • Shade calls almost everyone by their title and last name (with the exception of a few women whom he likes and/or who have the same last name, though he still uses their titles). When he calls someone by their first name, you know things are dire.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Silver rank people can levitate if they concentrate, and some meditate while doing so.
• Locked Out of the Fight: Many messengers have a dueling power that isolates themselves and a single opponent, either in a Pocket Dimension or with an impenetrable barrier. The isolation lasts until one of them dies, and if the fight takes too long it kills both of them.
• Make Them Rot: Jason's spells and abilities deal exponentially-increasing amounts of necrotic damage, which is described as thick, black Tainted Veins spreading across anyone afflicted with them.
• Magic A Is Magic A: The magic system is mostly consistent, with only a couple instances of Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Meat Puppet: There are several variations of meat puppets. Most require soul torture to work:
  • Star Seeds can be used on voluntary or involuntary subjects. See Mind-Control Device below.
  • Converted are similar to involuntary star seeds holders, except their essence abilities are wiped out, and it requires invasive surgery to carve on their bones.
  • Lesser vampire curses shut down a person's soul and turn them into mindless mooks. See Our Vampires Are Different below.
  • The Order of Redeeming Light can use a ritual that brainwashes their victims into fanatical Purity worshipers, and transforms celestines and elves into humans. It's actually a modified lesser vampire curse, and is an obvious clue that the god Purity isn't actually the god Purity. Sometimes it turns them into mindless drones.
• The Men in Black: The Network is the faction of essence users on Earth. Since they control the magical item supply, they operate much more like a military or spy organization than the Adventurer's Guild.
• Mind-Control Device: Servants of Great Astral Beings are implanted with star seeds that allow the Great Astral Being to impose their will on them, either through temporary direct possession or to give mental directions. They can also be imposed on an unwilling subject by first breaking their will through soul rape, leaving them as meat puppets. Their physical aspect is wired throughout the person's body, making them extremely difficult to remove without killing the person, and they can be used to make the person explode if they're caught. Most Great Astral Beings only give them to their highest servants, but the Builder seems to give them out like candy.
• Monster Mash: The Cabal is the faction on Earth representing "old" magic, primarily made up of supernatural beings such as vampires, cyclopes, and werebeasts. They have controlled money since it was invented, and are implied to have their hands in religion. Considering that at least some of its founders were Messengers this is very likely.
• Naked on Arrival: Jason not only finds himself naked in a new world, but also lacking any hair whatsoever. He later finds out that this is because his body was annihilated in the travel between worlds, and he instinctively created a new one when he arrived. The fact that he, technically speaking, died makes him sit down and process for a bit.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: Swear words are seldom used in the text, both because Jason doesn't normally swear and because the dialog that does contain them isn't spelled out.
• Nay-Theist: Jason has a very low opinion of religion, even though there's absolute proof that gods exist in his new world. It doesn't help that most of the local religions, due to their remote location away from the main churches, tend towards the Corrupt Church. The God of Dominion finds him hilarious.
• No Name Given: The world to which Jason is transported isn't named until book 4, and is instead just referred to as "the world."
• Noob Country: The region where Jason first arrives has low magic density, meaning that the monsters that spawn there are almost always low-level. In fact, the world-famous Geller family sends all their low-level members to Greenstone to train in a relatively safe place.
• Offscreen Afterlife: It is possible for souls to leave the Reaper's realm with its permission, but they are unable to describe what it is like, either because they didn't have a body to remember there or because they aren't allowed to.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Several duplicate names appear, and they are usually remarked on.
  Other Gordon: I represent the government in these negotiations. Gordon Truffett.
  Jason: Well, now you're Other Gordon. I've already got a Gordon and he's more important than you.
• Our Angels Are Different: Messengers are a race of winged humanoids who rarely touch the ground with their feet, and instead float around using their superior auras. They are born fully grown from birthing trees with full cultural knowledge, and are immediately sent to indoctrination to make them believe that they are the superior species in the cosmos and all others should kneel to them —which keeps most of them from realizing that they themselves are a slave race to their kings. If they even think about rebelling, their king can remotely kill them. Some of them have the ability to summon angelic abominations in battle.
• Our Gods Are Different: There are several kinds of godlike beings.
  • Planets with sufficient amounts of magic develop gods whom embody concepts. The ones associated with mortal things such as Healer, or War, interact with mortals more than ones like Ocean. They take whatever appearance is most appropriate at the moment, including changing gender or species. They are unable to act outside of their scope or if it would interfere too much with another god's remit, have a limited amount of influence to expend, and "only" live as long as their world.
  • Great Astral Beings exist in the deep astral and are so vast that they need humanoid vessels to even approach thinking on a mortal scale, but aren't gods and do not have any interest in worship (with one exception). Most have no gender identity, but some have one ascribed to them and may be referred to as she/it or he/it.
  • Astral Kings are completely immortal beings that each contain a universe in their soul wherein they are completely omnipotent, limited only by their understanding of reality. Outside their kingdoms they usually are "only" Diamond rank, but are still considered Transcendent rank, much like the gods.
  • Diamond Rank people are ageless, have Resurrective Immortality, and are the apex of mortal power. Half-Transcendent Diamond Rank people are a step away from Complete Immortality.
• Our Souls Are Different:
  • Souls are the essential core of a person. When they die, their soul goes to the Reaper in the deep astral, unless it is sent via a channel to another world where it instinctively forms a new body, thereby becoming an outworlder.
  • Changes to a soul can only be made with the person's consent. It is possible to torture a soul into consenting, but if the person has enough will to endure the torture it's impossible to break in.
  • Since essence abilities come from the soul, most means of creating meat puppets either require soul torture or block off the essence abilities for the puppet, and usually make them into mindless drones.
  • Essences and awakening stones don't so much give the person powers as unlock their soul's potential in specific patterns.
  • Healing magic uses the soul as an blueprint, so ordinary wounds don't leave scars on essence users or people with access to healing magic. Some traumatic or live-changing events will leave marks on the soul though, which manifest as scars. After a couple of incidents in book three, Jason ends up covered in scars. Your personal identity can even be one of these marks, such as tribal tattoos, while most tattoos (including magical ones) are erased upon ranking up.
  • If a soul is disconnected from the body in some way they won't be able to form memories, but may be left with an impression of what happened.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Comes in a number of types.
  • Greater vampires are individuals who volunteered to be turned and had their souls altered by the process. They can get a variety of powers depending on their bloodline, can create lesser vampires, and are weakened/harmed and eventually driven insane by magical sunlight. They also weak to fire and some Blood Magic.
  • Essence user vampires are similar to greater vampires. They are created by an essence user forming a confluence essence that includes the blood and death essences.
  • Lesser vampires are created by greater vampires, some types of monsters, and some death essence abilities. They are basically fast zombies and have whatever powers they used to have suppressed while under the curse. It can be cured if the victim is cleansed before their body is altered too much by the curse.
  • Blood servants are not vampires but are people who consumed vampire blood, strengthening them. Not only is it addictive but they lose their strength if they don't regularly consume more vampire blood. Since this is mostly done to normal-rankers the process of dropping from iron or bronze-rank tends to be very, very unpleasant.
  • Energy vampires are created from obscure methods (the only way described is a burned-out former vessel of a great astral being somehow feeding directly on a soul, which is understandably uncommon) They can apparently drain essence users of their own rank or lower into dried-out husks extremely rapidly.
  • In book eight it is revealed that The fires of purgation are a modified lesser vampiric curse used by an extremist branch of the church of "Purity"(actually the god of Disguise). It modifies the aura of the victim to read as human and makes them fanatically loyal to "Purity", to the point of actively ignoring any evidence that the god they serve is really Disguise. They retain their essence powers, but lose their racial abilities and don't appear to be able to rank up normally.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In book nine Jason assumes a false identity to draw less attention to himself. It doesn't last very long.
  "I'm Ja... John. It's not a fake name."
• Patchwork World: The previous Builder was "sanctioned" for creating Earth and Pallimustus using pieces of existing universes as a template.
• Person of Mass Destruction:
  • One of Jason's familiars is classified as an Apocalypse Beast—The Sanguine Horror, a hivemind of self-replicating leeches "known for scouring entire worlds of life, leaving them nothing but barren rock. [An] unrelenting hunger that you eradicate down to the last scrap or it keeps growing, keeps feeding and never, ever stops." Colin doesn't, because he's a good boy.
  • Half-Transcendent Diamond Rank people can blow up cities with a single attack.
• Physical Religion: Gods not only exist, they talk to mortals very frequently, often in town squares and places of worship. Priests basically have a hot-line with a direct connection to their god installed in their souls; Arabella, Rufus' mother and priestess of Healer, describes it as Healer's presence always being there in the back of her mind.
• Planet Looters: The Builder is trying to assemble a universe by looting pocket worlds off the side of existing universes, leaving much destruction in his wake.
• Pocket Dimension: Astral spaces and their variations are small semi-physical regions attached to worlds, often accessible via a portal. These can be as small as a town or as large as a continent. Most of the water in the Greenstone region comes from continually open portals to an Astral space that is an island chain in a freshwater ocean.
• Power High: Ranking up is described as a euphoric experience, like the world's strongest adrenaline rush. When Jason absorbs his Essences and ranks up to Iron, he feels like he could run a marathon, up a mountain. And then he comes down and starts vomiting impurities out of every orifice in his body.
• Power Levels: Monsters, people, and some magical items are ranked normal/lesser, Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond (the last semi-mortal rank), Half-Transcendent, and Transcendent.
• Practical Currency: Coins on Pallimustus are made of magic, and their value is based on the rank of the magic that they are made of (eg, 10 Iron spirit coils = 1 Bronze spirit coin). They can either be eaten by essence users, used to power magical items, or to power rituals.
• Precision F-Strike: Jason rarely swears, and swearwords from other people are usually hidden with Narrative Profanity Filter. However, occasionally no other words will do.

  Soramir Rimaros: What the fuck?

• Properly Paranoid: Timos the Builder cultist whenever he isn't being Improperly Paranoid instead. He is the reason that the Greenstone Builder cult survived long enough to summon the Builder, and had been hiding in plain sight for years until his superiors forced him to recruit Thadwick instead of killing him and dumping the body.
• Reality Warper: Within their astral kingdoms, astral kings can control every aspect of reality, from reshaping space, to changing how light works, to turning off death or changing a person's species. However, if they do it wrong, the changed person is likely to immediately drop dead upon leaving the astral kingdom.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Played with; one of the themes is authority figures seeming reasonable, but ultimately having major blind spots just like normal people.
  • Rufus is a mid-ranked adventurer and heir of a prestigious academy. Attaching his name to Jason's lets Jason avoid some major problems early on and climb the social ladder quickly. His main flaw is that he tends to blame himself for any problems his subordinates face.
  • Danielle Geller is the head of the city's most prestigious adventurer family because she brooks no shirking. Everything they do, they do well, and they insist that all their subordinates are treated fairly. Jason notes that her only real problem is that she isn't quite aware of the problems with a hereditary power system; ultimately, if the head of the family decided to screw everyone under them, there's nothing anyone else could do about it.
  • Thalia Mercer acknowledges her son Thadwick's failures and selfishness, is much more socially adept herself, and repeatedly puts the good of the city over herself and her family's interests. But she is, ultimately, still a doting mother, and when she finds out that her son was running an illegal False Flag Operation in order to run a man off his land, the worst punishment she'll allow him to receive is a stern talking-to.
  • Elspeth Arella, director of the Adventurer's Society in Greenstone, is dedicated to rooting out the corruption in the local branch no matter the cost. As it turns out, she's been corrupt herself from the start. She merely decided excising corruption was a good platform to rise to power and eventually be promoted somewhere else. When a good deal turns up, she decides to sell a girl to a rapist without a blink.
• Research, Inc.: The Magic Society is supposed to be a way for magical researchers to pool knowledge and cooperate on projects, but many of its leaders use their positions to take credit for their subordinates' work for their own prestige and profit.
• Resurrective Immortality: Diamond rankers gain this. According to one Diamond rank POV, it tends to take centuries of plotting and preparation to both kill a diamond ranker and ensure they stay dead. It also can be slowed down if someone uses a looting power or life-force harvesting power on their corpse.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Several of Jason's powers emulate role-playing video games (looting, party chat, identify, map, inventory and quests). Most of these powers aren't entirely unique to him, but the exact combination is extremely useful.
• Running Gag:
  • After the recording of Jason going full Terror Hero in a simulation gets around, people tend to greet him with "aren't you that guy with the evil powers?" This stops during the events of the second arc when Cerebus Syndrome starts setting in.
  • The fact that when they first met, Jason accused himself of sleeping with Clive's non-existent wife, and later, accused Clive of sleeping with Jason's non-existent wife, gets brought up a lot.
  • Clive keeps complaining about how Jason killed Landemere Vane, the best astral magic specialist in the region. Jason keeps retorting that the guy was a cannibal who was planning to eat him. This mostly drops off after it becomes clear that Landemere was plagiarizing information gained from the Builder cult.
  • When Rufus introduces Jason to his parents, Rufus asks him to go "full Jason." He complies by pulling an elaborate prank posing as a shady amphora salesman. Sketchy amphora have been mentioned several times sense then.
  • Jason's chin is extremely pointy and large. When he ranks up and it starts to get smaller, people ask if he has had chin reduction surgery.
  • Rufus mentions his family's school so often, Jason makes a drinking game out of it.
  • Jason is obsessed with crystal wash, a magical cleaning fluid. He buys up all available stock wherever he goes.
• Semi-Divine: The god Hero only has one miracle: If someone accepts that they will die in defense of others, he can offer them a drink from the Cup of Heroes, which transforms them into an extremely powerful demigod... for a few hours, before it kills them.
• Servile Snarker: Shade is quite fond of this behavior. His accent inexplicably sounds British, and becomes fascinated by the "quiet dignity of duty" associated with butlers. He even eventually takes a buttling course via correspondence. Once he gets to know Jason he realizes that Jason would be decidedly uncomfortable if Shade didn't occasionally make jokes as his expense due to the nature of their relationship.
• Sex Magic: At higher levels, people mostly loose bodily urges, but they still can dual cultivate to mutual benefit.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Jason absolutely refuses to take slaves, even as an extremely easy way to take away an enemy's mook army.
• Sneeze Cut: During the battle of Yaresh, Jason sneezes (which shouldn't be possible, since Jason doesn't have sinuses anymore), and correctly guesses that it's because someone was thinking about him. Shade realizes that this is a manifestation of the special sense that previously produced Jason's quest system.
• Sound-Effect Bleep: Swear words are seldom spelled out, usually covered by Narrative Profanity Filter or cut off by conveniently timed explosions. However, a character introduced in book 11 makes a literal bleeping noise whenever he tries to swear.
  "[Bleep]ing rubes. Wait, what the [bleep] was that? [Bleep]. [Bleep]. What the [bleep]? This is some grade-A bull[bleep]."
• Standard Fantasy Races: Pallimustus has several sapient species and sub-species, with some variation from standard. Each has six racial gifts that can change under certain circumstances.
  Jason: What about dwarves? Gnomes? Non-copyrighted small people who live in hillocks?
  Gary: I don't know what any of those things are, except for hillocks.
  • Human essence abilities advance slightly more quickly and have a inclination toward special attacks. The rest of their gifts vary depending on what essences they use.
  • Elves have Pointy Ears and are typically slender, though some can be extremely muscular. They do not seem to have a lifespan any longer than humans. Their racial gifts include affinities for life magic, nature magic, and spells in general.
  • Leonids are large lion people. Both males and females are covered in fur, and many wear minimal clothing. Gary is said to closely resemble Ron Perlman's character in the Beauty and the Beast TV series. They are resistant to heat, are supernaturally strong, and can make a loud roar to stun enemies.
  • Outworlders are members of any species who have died and had their souls transported to another world, where they reconstitute a new body. Since this doesn't happen very often, they are extremely rare. Their racial gifts are all altered by the transformation, but they always gain the ability to speak and read any language, as well as some kind of guide ability that lets them adapt to their new world. Jason's gives him RPG popup windows with text explanations of his abilities, and the ability to identify enemies and objects, etc. When Farrah is resurrected as an Outworlder on Earth she gets the ability to have knowledge directly downloaded into her mind from someone who trusts her. They also tend to be weirdness magnets.
  • Celestines have brightly colored or metallic hair with matching eyes. Their racial gifts are quicker Mana recovery, affinities for utility, dimensional and holy magic, and they often gain Super-Speed. They are born from either two Outworlders or from their descendants.
  • Draconians are large scaled people said to be descended from dragons.
  • Smoulders have dark skin, black hair, and glowing red eyes, and have earth and fire affinities.
  • Runic people are similar to Smoulders, except they have runes on their skin and bones, and have an affinity for rune magic.
  • Sapient species not native to Pallimustus or Earth include angelic Messengers and Chihuahua-headed Valash.
• Star-Spangled Spandex: One of Jason's first skills is Cloak of Shadows, a full-body hooded cloak that he can summon around himself. It appears to be made of the night sky, complete with stars. It can let him fade into shadows, reduce his falling speed, lets him walk on water, and later allows him to fly and disguise his movements.
• Supervillain Lair: After claiming one's first territory in a transformation zone, a fortress is created using the claimant's subconsciousness as a guide. In book 11 in the third transformation zone, Jason's fortress takes the form of a mountain shaped like his head. It has a war room with a lavafall on the back wall. His office has nine secret exits, there's a Lava Pit with cages hanging over it to hold prisoners, an observation room looking out each of his eyes, and an elaborate Self-Destruct Mechanism.
• Technology Uplift:
  • For the most part not an issue, because Jason was never a scientist and so can't really explain the way his world's technology works. Plus, the world has enough Magi Tech that they don't really need a technological uplift (except for communications). However, when he tries to explain to Clive how tides and gravity work, the Goddess of Knowledge immediately tells him to stop.
  • In a later book it is mentioned that the real reason she stopped him is because he understood barely enough to create a massive amount of misinformation that wouldn't be corrected for centuries, something that goes directly against the domain of Knowledge. Also he has a habit of providing just enough information to confuse people, because he's a Troll.
  • In book nine Farrah and Travis start a business developing improved global communication, which is expensive and inefficient in Pallimustus.
• Terror Hero: Jason's affliction spells and shadow teleportation make him perfectly suited to terrorizing his enemies. During a simulation match, he picks off his enemies one by one, strings up their corpses, mocks them loudly, and even throws in an Evil Laugh. He does not appreciate when the recording gets around the city. In the second arc, Jason is confronted by a group the Engineers of Ascension's magical clockwork cyborg superheroes and kills the lot of them by turning off their clockwork cybernetics using a soul attack. From the point of view of people watching, the superheroes confront him and then all start bleeding from their eyes and drop dead.
• Title Drop: The title quote is first referenced in book two.
• Tom the Dark Lord:
  • One of the first villains that Jason faces is named Darryl Caruthers. Jason mocks him for this.
  • Todd "The Necromancer" Halverson refuses to introduce himself by name but Jason's ability lets him learn it anyway.
  • Jeff, Priest of Undeath.
  • Heroic examples include the very serious elf Brian, son of Kevin, and his son Kenneth.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Thadwick. The only reason he continued to survive was because his mother found two of the most competent adventurers in Greenstone to keep his stupidity from killing him. And then he goes and joins the Builder cult. Later books make a joke about how he managed to screw up being a Human Sacrifice.
  • Miranda from the Global Defense Network is The Friend Nobody Likes due to her ridiculously toxic personality. The only reason she survives as long as she does is because she has a desk job. And then she goes and joins a group that betrayed the Network and had no issues with killing Network personnel. When the traitors kill her for being annoying they comment that her personality is practically a suicide note in its own right.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Jason rejects a star seed and gains powers that allow him to more effectively oppose the Builder from it.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: To Jason, this is the worst kind of person, which makes working with the Network particularly difficult for him.
• Twofer Token Minority: Jason claims that his brother was this for their elitist private school classmates. Unfortunately they only needed one token Asian/poor friend to prove how accommodating they were.
• Troll: Jason prefers to insult, mock, or just confuse people in order to keep them off-balance and allow him to manipulate them however he wants. He says he was like this even back on Earth, but he has leaned into it more as a stranger in a strange world.
• Uncanny Village: The team is sent to a remote village in book nine that at first appears fine, until they notice that everyone is moving the exact same way. the entire town has been killed and infested with brain worms.
• Unfortunate Names: When the team is registering for the Monster Surge, Stash chimes in with "Team Buiscuit!". Humphrey is not pleased when the busy clerk won't let them change it to something more dignified.
• The Worm That Walks: Instead of a rolling pile of leeches, Colin's Bronze-rank form lets him shape himself into a roughly humanoid shape, complete with a "cloak" of bloody rags.
• Walking Spoiler:
  • Any mention of Outworlders other than Jason.
  • Any mention of the setting of the second arc. Jason dies after sacrificing himself to kill The Builder's mortal vessel, but his soul is sent back to Earth and he is reborn again.
  • Noreth (aka Mr. North) the rune spider can't be discussed without talking about secrets regarding Earth's Global Defense Network and the Engineers of Ascension.
  • It is impossible to talk about the god of Disguise without revealing that Purity was sanctioned (or turned themselves into a MacGuffin) centuries prior to book one and secretly replaced by Disguise.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Affliction skirmishers and dodge tanks are both considered inferior to their counterparts (affliction caster and defender respectively) due to the fact that they need high levels of skill to be practical and they usually don't have the Required Secondary Powers of their counterparts (AOE and health boosts). High rank individuals tend to be respectfully wary of any of these that manage to survive to Silver; in the case of affliction skirmishers they often will outright refuse to provoke them without an extremely good excuse and the backing of a full party of guild-level fighters.

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