Lord of Demon Hunting

If you miss the Amber Sword strain of satisfaction—a tech-savvy homebody entering a game and rewriting fate through foreknowledge and skill—Lord of Demon Hunting is hard to skip. Deathwing Nefarian is an old-school Western-fantasy writer with systematic settings for class advancement, races, geography, and planes; the thrill of an archer's ranged crits, the clash of twin-blade melee, and the maneuvering of legion advances switch on the same field without a hitch. Its structure also deserves praise: the early border-scout survival arc is tense and clean, the mid-game shift to city building after taking the main city picks up the managerial pleasures of lord fiction, and the late-game foes escalate from orcs and undead to a demon-plane monarch, widening the scope layer by layer. The author does not shortchange supporting characters: Lisa, Akasha, Nata, and Kardashian each get screen time and arcs, and the romance, though heavy, does not steal the show. A caveat: this is an old book begun in 2013 and finished in 2019; some villains and useless allies act dumb in the multi-thread narration in ways that read as formulaic today, and many readers find the ending rushed. Still, a completed 3.42-million-character novel that does not collapse into an unfinishable mess is rare in this genre. Suited to readers catching up on the Amber style, and to anyone wanting a long kingdom-building epic.