The Strength of the Few by James Islington (Australian author). The first book, The Will of the Many, was awesome. Harry Potter in Roman times, basically. People cede (concede? give?) half their will (willpower, drive, energy) to the people above them. There are 8 tiers. Octavi are below Septimi, Sexti, Quinti, Qua... I dunno. So no one cedes to Octavi, and every Septimi has their will plus half that of all their Octavi, and so on up the chain, and the main guy is basically Superman, never needs to sleep, etc.. So the main guy refuses to participate, has been whipped for not participating, but winds up in this convoluted plot with all kinds of twists and turns. If you can tolerate the bullshit, it's a lot of fun. And the author is almost ChatGPT-like in his overuse of his thesaurus. Any time he could use an ordinary word, he'll use an obscure word that means the same thing. It's crazy. But the twists were fun. The second one — which I'm in the cleanup/epilogue stage of, 21 minutes left in the audiobook — is just hard to follow. Without spoiling the end of the first one, the main guy splits into 3 copies of himself. One stays in res which is the world from the first book. The other two go to alternate/parallel dimensions where things are different, and the three of them don't know about each other. Far fewer twists, and I'm not really sure what happened because the story kept jumping around. The three stories are kinda related, but... I don't know if we should care because whatever the other two accomplish, they can never go back to res. I think they can cede to each other, which makes for some interesting math, but the book never really did it. Maybe the third one will, but I'm not sure I'll be down for a book 3. I might need some clever YouTuber to make sense of all of it for me.

Anyone read the Hierarchy books (what they're called)? Anyone else confused by the second book but loved the first?

Ironically I'm considering reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons next. That's like 7 interconnected stories. I hope my reaction to Strength of the Few doesn't mean I won't enjoy Hyperion. But two different authors, maybe Simmons handles it better than Islington did.