First of all, let's start with what this book is not...despite being promoted to litrpg groups, this is not litrpg, nor is it game lit. It is isekai. It is marketed as "perfect for fans of GameLit, Progression Fantasy and LitRPG." It is none of those three. It is mediocre isekai fantasy at best, or generic YA without the raging hormones. It is classified as litrpg or gamelit as an amazon category and it is not that at all. The ad copy makes it sound like Highlander ("Only one can be crowned Centurion,") but with 100 participants, and with magical artifacts! and in a dungeon! I'd read that. I wanted to read that. But that's not what this story really is. There are teams of 3 (Why 3? Why not something evenly divisible into 100, like 4 or 5? What happens to the odd one left over after the 33 teams are put together? They get a solo adventuring career.) They don't all fight to death until only one is left. It doesn't even take place in a dungeon, just a big wilderness area. The first trial (which is what they should have used instead of "dungeon") is the trial of land. 100 people are isekaid from Earth and two other parellel worlds to compete every 100 years and this has been going on for 95 iterations. Wonder how the first participants from earth fared using their goat herder skills or hunter gatherer abilities. This is just one of many things in the world building that were not thought out well. The 100 artifacts come from a brilliant person and were created 9500 years ago. In all that time, no one else has come along able to duplicate or improve what the original genius has done. Every 100 years, people from a more technologically advanced planet than Earth arrive along with people much more magically advanced than Earth, and they lend their expertise (and their cell phones and any tech or magic that got isekaid with them) to help improve things on the main planet. Think about how ludicrous that is. Can you imagine someone on earth five thousand years before the Egyptian civilization creating things so fantastic that nobody (not DaVinci, nor Jobs, nor Tesla) has been able to manage? I could overlook all this is if it was just hand waved in the first few chapters and we went straight to the dungeon, but no, we get chapters and chapters about this stuff before we get to any conflict with real stakes (and I'm not talking about the vampire kind). The main character is a sad sack boxer with a losing record who just decides he isn't going to be a loser anymore. Very originial. He gets matched with an artifact called The Pygilist. It is one of many bad portmanteaus in this book. Pyro and Pugilist only have the first letter in common, and since the vowel comes from pyro, it gets pronounced Pie-gilist. One of the parellel worlds has vampires who get their nutrition from synthetic blood. They are called sythires, no it doesn't make sense unless they were maybe synthetic vampire robots or something. There are fairies too. Our hero gets a world record synchronization score of 97% with his artifact. Since a very high synch rate means very high mana, he will have more mana than any other participant ever. Why? We are supposed to believe it's because he's a boxer and they are gauntlets, but surely other fist fighters have worn them. Fist fighting has been around for a very long time. He has no interest in fire, so you'd think a past pyromaniac contestant would have a high score, but it's one of those things that just is thrown out there for us to accept. The team angle comes in with how artifacts and people come together to make up a team of three. There is an element called entitlements and each team patron has one. This entitlement basically lets them jump to the front of the line and claim someone. You'd think that if he had a score better than any other participant ever, that everyone would try to pick him, but nope. There's also another artifact that is widely regarded as the best of the 100, so you'd think everyone would be queing up to use their entitlement on it. Nope. What happens if two patrons both want to use their entitlement at the same time? Not explained. Again, not well thought out. This novel needed a developmental editor badly. There's no real climax. It just ends at an opportune stopping point. There's no real arcs, or three/four/five act structure. There are way too many POV characters. I stopped counting at 8. Do we really need a POV chapter from the team coach, who doesn't even enter the dungeon? Nope. A chapter from a patron of another team? Nope. Maybe the POV of his patron is OK, but it's used to throw in some political manuevering that doesn't affect the main story of our isekai hero going into a dungeon. So much time is spent on unimportant matters that even at the halfway point, he's still not in the dungeon. Did we need a chapter about him going to a juice bar? or trying to buy coffee? Is it that important to the story. No. You could ditch two-thirds of the non-dungeon part and actually improve the story. The main character gets little in the way of character development, probably because there are so many other POV chapters taking up space. The novel needed a regular editor too. The dialogue is way too formal. Everyone has the same syntax and sounds like they are performing on a stage. There are typos, including some hilarious ones, like I guess you need to bring a lot of little kids into a dungeon with you. Why? Because you never know when you'll need your "first aid kids."