"Battle Priest:
The Mad Legion" by Alexey Alexandrov, summary Automatic translate

The novel was published in 2021 and became the second book in the "Battle Priest" series, written in the LitRPG style. Its action immediately takes on a larger scale than a typical adventure in a game world: the story opens after the First Contact War, when members of the Shank race are mastering human virtual reality capsules and want to study humans through the game.

The prologue shifts the action to the Shank embassy on Earth, where the ambassador and a spy discuss the safety of human full-immersion technology. One of the Shankians is about to enter the virtual world, considering such an environment a convenient way to observe Homo behavior, their habits, and reactions. It’s already clear that the events within the game are not just idle entertainment for the aliens, but part of their ongoing surveillance of a potential enemy and ally at once.

The main action is told from a first-person perspective by a battle priest who found himself in Broceliande against his will and now tries to use the game as a means of survival. He recalls being trapped in a capsule from a closed institution, quickly adapts to the new world, and sets a simple goal: earn a lot of money so he can one day escape this beautiful, yet still caged, place. By the beginning of the book, he already leads the "Mad Legion" clan, and is surrounded by his trusted companions — Aurora, Vitamin, Hackgrim, Nissa, Ili, Azuma, and Dariger.

The first chapters show the group’s daily life and emphasize that for the hero, the game has long ceased to be something easy and entertaining. The party hunts monsters, levels up, divides loot, and builds an internal economy so that everyone can master their craft and meet the needs of the entire team. Hackgrim takes care of blacksmithing and mining, Vitamin focuses on skinning and herbalism, Ili works with alchemy, Azuma with leather and scrolls, Nissa sews, Dariger makes jewelry, and the hero himself is left with cooking and fishing.

These episodes are important not as a mere pause, but as the foundation for further progress. The hero constantly feels the difference between those who can sit in capsules with almost no restrictions and their comrades, who are constantly pulled away from the raid by real life. Because of this, any expedition must be planned with an adjustment for the schedule, the availability of people, and even who can be led at the right moment and who must be left behind at camp.

One of the immediate goals is completing the quest to consecrate the weapon. To do this, the group must pass the final waypoint — Tara Monastery, the very place where the hero once began his journey in the game. The road to the monastery leads through battles with wolves and other forest creatures, camping by the fire, gathering resources, and constant discussions about how best to get companions past the guards who might not be welcome within the monastery walls.

As the private quest progresses, it becomes increasingly intertwined with the grand politics of the province. The hero is no longer just a wandering character with a hammer named "Democratizer," but the head of a clan with its own people, interests, points of influence, and enemies. He understands that being alone in such a world is almost doomed, so he strives to strengthen the legion as a fighting, economic, and diplomatic unit.

A major part of the book revolves around the confrontation with another faction of players, which the hero and his companions dismissively call "the Ironmen." The conflict erupts over fortresses, roads, passes, and the right to control the province’s territory. In one major episode, the hero secretly deploys several raids through a portal, assembles a strike force, and prepares a surprise exit from the fortress to disrupt the enemy camp, regain the initiative, and demonstrate that the "Mad Legion" is capable of striking first.

The plan succeeds. When the bridge is lowered and the gates open, the legion’s column bursts out and literally crushes the confused Order. Some of the enemy try to fight, others flee, but both are quickly finished off: Or attacks from the air, the hero strikes with his hammer on horseback, his companions cut down the retreating soldiers, and on the hill, the rest of the legion’s army finishes off those who decided to hold out to the end. After victory, the soldiers collect the spoils and immediately move on, before the enemy has time to recover.

The war against the "irons" is depicted as a series of brutal, calculated actions. The hero isn’t focused on a spectacular victory, but on wearing down the enemy, disrupting their resource gathering, cutting off their usual routes, and forcing the other clans to think twice before encroaching on his land. This is why the march north toward Sterlgala isn’t a random raid for him, but part of a long campaign for the clan’s survival and recognition of its strength in Avanax.

At the same time, another threat is pressing on the province: the goblins. After the first greenskin assault, a council is convened in Laven to discuss not individual squabbles, but the possibility of a common collapse. It transpires that if the goblins take the capital, the entire province could become a goblin kingdom, after which the horde will advance, capturing castles one by one. For the hero, this conversation is also important because it forces him to think beyond personal differences: old patterns of inter-clan rivalry lose their meaning when a systemic catastrophe looms over the map.

In the later pages, the hero also engages in purely economic matters. He fortifies the castle, counts the remains of the vault, selects defensive machines, and spends almost all his resources on the heavy, repeating ballista "Dark Elf Reaper." At this point, it’s especially noticeable how the book connects combat with management: every raid, every assault, and every quest comes down to iron, wood, ore, ammunition, and an empty coffers that must be filled.

The final major plot begins with a village case that initially seems minor. The hero arrives in the village to investigate the disappearance of the village elder, Mikhey, and quickly notices oddities in the locals’ testimony. The missing man’s wife insists that her husband went east, but the hunter and the innkeeper both agree about the west, and even recall that he had disappeared for long periods before, traveling along the mountains with a large supply of food. Instead of a clear, systematic mission, the hero receives only a tangled web of lies that he must untangle himself.

He travels west with Potapych, his pet bear, battling boars along the way, gathering meat, and exploring the area in case of a future raid. Late in the evening, the trail leads him to the ruins of an old fortress hidden in the mountains, where new signs of life are discovered, quite unlike any random ones: a functioning well, a new door, smoke from a tower, and a camouflaged passage through the bushes. Inside the tower, the hero finds not a helpless old villager, but an armed warrior with a different name and a different status.

Mikhey turns out to be Baron Mikhevir, an elite level-one hundred opponent. A figure from the game’s past suddenly appears before the hero, disguised as an ordinary village elder, and this substitution immediately changes the entire plot. The old man no longer speaks with rustic simplicity, holds his sword and shield like a seasoned fighter, and declares to the hero almost without hesitation: "Forgive me, but you must die."

The book ends with this dangerous revelation, then returns the reader to the Shank observers. In the final scene, the ambassador receives a report about a special clan, mostly composed of "evil" ones, recalls the recent war with the humans, and orders continued observation. Because of this, the final scene connects the personal story of the war priest and his legion with a larger framework — how an alien race studies humans through the game and tries to understand their capabilities in a new, seemingly peaceful space.