In a world of countless enemies, Freddy’s unique power will help him thrive.
Freddy Stern, a twenty-one-year-old cashier, has lived a plain, albeit harsh life. Having been orphaned—twice—he’s spent the last ten years working and staying out of trouble. His only aspiration is to save enough money to become an archhuman.
His dream gets the jump on him when he barely survives a near-death encounter and finds himself in possession of 1% Lifesteal, a bizarre talent with numerous contradictions and just as many uses
With every dead enemy, he becomes a bit stronger, a little wiser, and a lot more ruthless. And no matter how much damage he takes, he can always put himself back together. Physically, at least.
But on his path to power, after having to look at the rotting guts of archhuman society again and again, can his talent keep his mind and soul as pristine as his body?
Or will that part of him simply remain broken…
You know those books where the MC keeps getting screwed over, and each time you think they’re through the worst of it the author laughs and slaps you in the face? This is one of those books.
Freddy starts this series pretty much as low as you can get. In this dystopian future, he’s working a menial minimum wage job and struggling the make ends meet. His coworkers are shit. His boss is shit. His rented shoebox is shit. And then Freddy gets jumped by a rift opening on his way back from work, its just par for the course.
Of course, there’s some upside to this. The epic skill / cheat / something that lets many MCs in our genre pull ahead, and I won’t go into this because the extent of the ‘relic’ and what it does is central to the plot and its more fun to read and find out than have someone break it down in a review. Bloodshed was defintiely one of the things I liked most in the book, though.
The book is definitely hyper-focused on Freddy himself. He makes friends, but they (at least so far) don’t seem central to the plot, and serve as devices that tie in to beat Freddy down or highlight how terrible his life is. This may be one of the series focusing on character growth, with the idea that the MC shouldn’t be likeable to begin with, so keep that in mind.
The writing is decent, the action mostly fast-paced and good, and Freddy’s primary ability (1% lifesteal) is both well defined (1% is 1%) and also confusingly subjective. 1% of what. Damage? Fraction of life-force depleted? Does it work only when punching things, or would poison and indirect damage work? Freddy is not your calculating, analytical MC though. He doesn’t dig deep into the mechanics to optimiser and take maximum advantage of his skill, he just stabs shit faster and harder. That’s still fun to read, and there are several good training sections where Freddy is able to flex his (power, not personal) growth afterwards.
The main exception I think to this is the final fight of the first book. The stakes and scale increase by like… three orders of magnitude… all of a sudden, and so many new techniques / skills / mechanics / parties are introduced at once that, while I got the Freddy won the fight, I still don’t know how and feel deep down that maybe Freddy actually should have been stomped into little pieces. Perhaps this gets explained better in later books, I’m not sure!
Anyway, I found it to be a fun read, but definitely was regulated to a specific mood of “I’m alright with hating the MC and the MC being screwed over, just so I can read Freddy cathartically kill people.” Which isn’t normally my cup of tea unless I’m having a very bad week at work.
Not as bad as Freddy’s average week, though.
Man, Freddy takes some shit.
