I Ate the Tutorial Boss: Full Spoiler Guide

Morrow Veyle is a Shoggothid: a shapeshifting, flesh-eating thing from outside that has just built itself a very good-looking body. He forces a door into Processing Room 6, eats the man who has a six-year-old hanging on a hook, and inherits that man’s access to a dungeon district that registers people as property. The girl has purple curls, a scuffed shoe, and the firm belief that he ought to help. I Ate the Tutorial Boss is Jax A. River’s monster-protagonist LitRPG: a dark comedy dungeon crawl with crunchy stat panels, an eat-to-learn build, a six-hour purge clock, and a found family worth tearing the district apart for.

What it is

Thirty-six chapters, almost all of them inside one day. Dual POV in close third person: most chapters follow Morrow, several follow Amelia Vorelia. Pask’s district is a tutorial dungeon of stone houses under a low red sky, hung over a black funnel. Everyone abducted into it wears a return mark, and three stone Return Clasp hands pull any escaping ship back down. The System here is bright, smug and bureaucratic. It says DING. It charges for exits.

Morrow starts at Embodied Level 1 with CLASS: UNASSIGNED and picks Freeform Ravager over Plated Ravager and Borrowed Figure. Every kill offers a trait choice, and every skill has a stated MP and Depth cost per second. Amelia picks Wayfinder and learns Recall Pebble, Bite Edge and Return Mark I. The crew of a stolen Star-Sail Skiff fills out the party: Hettie Brackett, a Harpoon Rider and captain; Ingrid Cossitt, a Snarewright who can cut a return mark off a person; Agnes Dobb and six rescued animals; and four crew with their own small jobs.

Who will love it

Readers of villain-MC and monster-MC LitRPG who want real build decisions: attribute allocation at every level, branch choices with a named trap option, and fights won by reading a mechanic. Readers who like a protective monster and child pairing played for both laughs and stakes. Readers who want gore with a light touch and no harem. If you came for romance, this is the wrong shelf; if you came for a boss fight solved like a puzzle, it is the right one.

Tropes

• Monster protagonist; arrival in a dungeon world; class selection and skill branches
• Eat-to-learn trait absorption; level-ups with attribute allocation
• Protective monster and child; found family; rescue animals
• Tutorial boss with a respawn core; guardians at Levels 6, 7, 8 and 10
• Ticking clock (the District Purge); deals with strings attached, all refused
• Heist and loot; sky ship escape; sapphic side romance

Heat

No heat level is shown for this title. There is no sex on the page and the lead has no romance. Hettie and Ingrid flirt, kiss in chapter 20, and shut a cabin door for twelve minutes in chapter 28.

Content notes

Graphic gore and dismemberment; the protagonist eats people and monsters on the page; child kidnapping, with a child first seen held on a hook and in danger throughout; human trafficking and captives treated as property; a banner of a man standing on small skulls; a child’s grief at being separated from her parents; frequent profanity.

Full plot, with spoilers

Morrow frees Amelia without feeding the hooked door and gets his first level. The System offers to buy his 31% quarantine key. He declines. Amelia matches a seam-pattern he stole long ago: she is the daughter of Trevor, an angel, and has two mothers. Six years have passed in her home world while six hours passed for his vessel. His road back is gone, so he promises to find her one.

In the kennel a dungeon wall tries to eat the caged animals, including the puppy that was used to lure Amelia. A sunny service exit turns out to be a throat. On the roof they find Hettie’s crew and a skiff nobody can fly out, because every person aboard is marked. Morrow kills the Level 6 Gate Guardian from inside its own feeding throat and keeps its cleaver. Amelia ties a red bow on it and insists it can kill people and still be pretty. She also bites a bell clapper in half with a void-mouth and announces that she ate the ding.

Morrow steals the Caged Cinder out of Pask’s toll engine to power the hungry sail. At the midpoint Quentin Pask, District Boss and TUTORIAL BOSS — LEVEL 8, offers him a job: Roaming Raid Boss, in a Crownmaw Ravager body, for a 20% loot share. Morrow notices the body cannot step past its boundary, calls it a leash, and refuses. The six-hour District Purge starts. He cuts Pask’s head off on the throne and the kill pays nothing; Pask walks back in whole through a freed captive’s return mark.

Amelia exposes Pask’s SAFE EXIT as a painted illusion over stairs that lead back to the capture floor. With Morrow’s new Joined Coil and Ingrid’s Cut Trigger, the first return mark comes off a living person. Morrow spends his key to block one clasp for thirty-one seconds, the lift nearly tears the cabin off, and Hettie saves it with a rope over a statue’s crown. He tells her it is her ship. Amelia breaks down and says she wants both Mommas; he promises both. A traversal trial and the Floor Guardian give them the Toll Service Chart with one of three route bearings. Dolores, who keeps saying the ship owes her floors, recognises a split silver hoop and supplies the second.

The darkest stretch is chapters 23 and 24. The System offers an emergency exit to Morrow and Amelia only. The common recall feed that holds the captives is also what holds the district up. Morrow refuses the exit, Ingrid cuts the feed, the district falls, and Morrow spends his last intact world root to catch it in a world cradle, which tells things beyond the district exactly where he is. Something knocks once against the edge. He crushes the Pursuit Guardian under the district.

They loot Pask’s personal reserve, 2,400 gold crowns and six violet stones. Amelia rejects the gold because the coins have no chocolate inside, and Morrow adds that to the indictment. Pask shows his caged True Core. Morrow steals one armor plate and Ingrid turns it into a Contact Trap. Morrow kills the Level 10 Returning Guardian by waiting at its rebound mark. When the stairs collapse, Amelia carries all ten people across by portal, Morrow last.

The ending (spoiler)

On the dais Pask offers two departures. The first comes with a return claim held by his core. The second is free, in exchange for Amelia’s location. Morrow sends Hettie away with the girl and lies: guest suite 17:0. While Pask searches an empty glass room, Hettie and Ingrid throw over the trap, already charged with a blow Morrow struck into it. During a Core Sweep, Ingrid cuts the gold link between body and core. Morrow wedges his cleaver so the core cannot retract, binds it with Joined Coil, Ingrid snaps the trap shut, and Morrow eats it with his arm-mouth. The kill is permanent, the return anchor is destroyed, the purge is cancelled, and the third route bearing was inside the heart.

It costs him a bent cleaver, his last world root, and three points of stamina to stand on. He reaches Level 10. After eight hours of rest, Amelia learns to anchor a portal to a moving deck so she can bring him aboard. The skiff passes under the split silver hoop and through three white spires into an open sky with a floating city in it. She still has no road home. She names him Big Brother Squiggles. He answers, “Very well, little sister,” and agrees to insist on breakfast before any conquest. The back matter names the next book, The Raid Boss Stole My Ship.

Where it sits

A new series opener set in the same wider world as Angel Queen, readable alone. For the author’s harem LitRPG, start with Hell Took My Dog; for another no-romance LitRPG, see Morgan Cipher’s The Final Boss Is One of Us.

Reader Questions

Book page: I Ate the Tutorial Boss. Author guide: Jax A. River. Browse the full catalogue at Centuria Books.