I like how the five POV characters make a balanced dungeon party: Sigrun is melee damage, Xin is utility support, Marcus is the tank, Jabari is ranged DPS or a second melee, Fuuka is the caster/summoner. Five is just the right number.

Fuuka has “saved the day” several times, and at times it feels a bit deus ex machina. She also seems to be the most powerful, but she’s the oldest and most experienced of the five, so that much makes sense.

Håkon is nice, and his comic relief is a great pressure valve for the story. Without him the world could easily turn cruel and go grimdark. He also feels subtly important to the bigger plot. He’s just a baby now, ripe with potential.

Dilinur is the de facto leader and political figurehead. She could serve those roles well, and there was a brief showcase of her combat skills in Volume 1, but mostly staying behind the scenes in Volume 1 plus her (fairly early) abduction in Volume 2 means she reads more like a plot device now.

Diego is in an awkward place. His character feels barely defined, and beyond being the Polaris’s captain it isn’t clear what his purpose is. At Ch 41.2 two of his lines were red flags for too much AI assistance. The Polaris has been transport and a “stage for plot” in Volume 2. Maybe in Volume 3, where deep space is more prominent, Diego gets a bigger role.

Iron Roach is great. I’m a fan. But his place in the supporting cast, alongside Dilinur and Diego, means he isn’t getting as much spotlight.

Both Diego and Iron Roach belong to the same tier as Dilinur and Håkon.

Game of Thrones / ASOIAF isn’t a great model for a story like Nucleus. It’s hard to know which characters matter when people keep dying, and the survivors aren’t so much heroes as the lucky ones who didn’t get axed.

I recall Sigrun broke the 22-point PRIMAL threshold a few times in Volume 2. That’s on top of Marcus having his PRIMAL shift up and down.

I like that there’s a system and a limit behind the gates and the rules of cultivation. I think the only time it came up was in the Volume 2 cultivation scenes, where it was shown mixed with a light lecture. It also makes Fuuka’s mysticism cool, though I still dislike her on moral grounds while respecting that she’s consistent and well written. Think about good examples like The Lord of the Rings: there’s clearly a system behind how Gandalf casts, with strengths and limits, but Tolkien showed it instead of teaching it like a class.

I like the idea of the gas giants and Proxima Centauri. You get moons close to each other, so plenty of quick travel and skirmishes are possible. Like Jupiter and Saturn.

I’d caution against over-reliance on AI assistance. I’ve read enough books to tell when the assistance is too heavy and taking away the human voice. It got more noticeable toward the end of Volume 2. For your case I’d recommend this tool: blader/humanizer.

On space travel: there’s good and bad to characters losing time to FTL trips. The middle part of such a trip could be accelerated, though. Time dilation as a concept could help: time slows down when you travel close to the speed of light, so you don’t need to spend a full year, or even four months, when one month per light year is the default FTL speed in Nucleus. A professional laid it out here, and it should help when you write such passages again: The Overview Effekt (YouTube).