.... not a fan on multiple levels. Asshole can't even fight a newbie mob yet can easily thrust thrue another human with relative ease? What an utter garbage plot device. If douche nozzle has the ability to do that much damage to another adventurer, he should have had no issue fighting a fucking horned rabbit even a child could kill with effort.
Look I could honestly give a shit less for this murder hobo with a Hero complex, but this whole "self-destructing antagonist" plot device is quickly reaching the top of my list of reasons I drop novels. It's right up there is rapey mind control, and the ultra dense harem protagonist that cannot understand the female leads intent even if she whipped out her boob and slapped him upside the head with it.
hmmm, I was actually just thinking of a novel that had a really good 'self-destructing antagonist' with a 'kicked out of the hero party' plotline. The only thing that keeps me from ever suggesting it to anyone or reading past when the hero dies is that the mc's storyline is fucking boring and they clearly aren't as competent as the author insists.
The reason for the mc and hero's falling out in that story is a little more understandable, though just in that I expect someone young to make such mistakes. The hero would sometimes mix their private and professional lives. They recently hired the hero's girlfriend (rather than 'party' it's more a 'guild' with them organizing people for different jobs) and the mc and hero were fighting over him promoting her too fast, not to leadership but middle management. Supposedly, with the mc as her superior and their 'well trained' subordinates, they can manage and show her the ropes but the mc is mad because the hero put an unnecessary burden on them because he was thinking with his dick. The girl herself isn't malicious or trying to trick anyone, the hero did it on his own and she's just in over her head and needs guidance.
So the hero and mc, who's supposed to be this great manager and tactician, get into an emotional argument and he fires the mc... again. They gotten heated like this before, and he apologized once they both calmed down. Mc decides he's not going to take the apology this time and goes off to form his own guild with a group of busty teenage girls complete with a horny priestess because of course there is. Then the hero's guild, which the mc had supposedly organized and trained so well, instantly begins to collapse without him, not because they are suddenly weak but because they can't fucking manage their time. They receive a delivery request, note that it takes X time to do it, and set aside X or X+1 time to accomplish it without considering possible delays or failures along the way. Because the author doesn't seem to understand that a well managed organization should be able to accommodate missing any one individual and that this sort of flexibility in personnel and timing is something that a competent mc in his position would have trained/built into their guild. They fail time sensitive deliveries for the military and can't afford the contract fines. They go bankrupt.
So, the hero wanders around town trying to think of how to financially revive the guild or whatever else he can do to get by and finds his girlfriend talking to another guy. She left the bankrupt guild, and him, to go work at another guild because of course she did, before either of them talk of love, atleast one of them should have a fucking job. Hero flies into a rage, pulls out his sword and attacks, cutting off her arm. He's arrested and she's hospitalized. A month or three passes and the hero is let out/breaks out of jail (don't remember). The hero has a plan to bring everything to peace...and it's not entirely bad. He's still strong so he goes and fights a criminal organization and takes over leadership. He then greatly reduces or eliminates the 'protection fees' they were charging locals and prostitutes and takes the boss's money to pay reparations to his ex girlfriend in the hospital. However, she's spent the last month or so in the hospital thinking about how she won't be able to work anywhere, even as a prostitute, while missing an arm and that, once out of the hospital, she has no where to go. Rather than accept the money and try to live off it, she asks the hero to kill her, which he obliges. Killing her and, for some godawful reason, reducing the protection fee on the prostitutes causes the guilds to make a formal request to the mc to stop the hero. They gave some reason about how it was bad for business if prostitutes in one area become too cheap because they kept more of their money, idfk. The hero gets a final confrontation with the mc, gets to say his last piece, and dies.
It was a decent setup; hero is supposed to be passionate and mc logical. Hero dived to much into his passion, pushing everyone too far and collapsed everything they built. His life spirals out of control not because he's resentful and arrogant but because he feels too strongly, and he lets himself be dragged around by those feelings. A trait the mc admits is good for a hero as long as there's someone like himself (supposedly) can keep them grounded...but yea, that was the only good part of the story.