I'm glad you decided to take a break from The Name of God, if only because it gives me a chance to give you a critique. TNoG is a little intimidating (mostly because there's so much of it), and when I tried to read the backlog I had trouble pushing through it.
Okay! First, I will gripe at you for the rough language. It took me quite a while to spin my autocorrect engine up high enough for it not to drive me to distraction. I assume you must be aware of this, and are planning to fix it, so I won't gripe too hard about it.
Next, I will gripe at you for the beginning. The hook is pretty weak, (I know I don't have much room to complain here...) but beyond that I felt like I had to read for too long to get a grasp of the situation. It wasn't until I was about a fifth of the way through that I felt like understood what was going on. This is due to two things: first, your exposition needs work, and second, there are too many interconnected things going on at once right from the start.
Since I'm a programmer, I think of this like reducing coupling. You need to refactor your scenes so they depend less on each other. Therefore, I can read a small chunk and feel like I understand it completely, then continue to build on that base. (I seem to recall you're a programmer. If you're not and/or that made no sense, let me know and I'll explain in different terms.
)
To attack this, you may consider just starting earlier. At his escape from prison, perhaps? At least, at a point when there's less going on at once.
About that exposition. The piece is very explainy. I felt like there were too many asides and too many explanations. This is a stylistic thing and therefore hard to quantify, but even your fights feel explainy. The whole thing is like a chain of explanations instead of a narrative. It gets tedious after a bit.
Yeah, and about those fight scenes. They're a bit tedious. I don't know for sure why I feel this way, but I'll try to explain as best I can. Part of it is the explainy narrative style. A large part is, I think, that most of his opponents are horribly outclassed, so the outcome of the fight is really quite obvious. Once it becomes clear that he's just going to tear through and obliterate everyone in his path, it becomes tedious to have to sit through a blow-by-blow of him doing it. The Judge fight was more interesting.
Of course, the judge fight also read like an anime. Fight, talk, fight, talk. Pontificating about one's power in the middle of a fight. Powering up in stages. "I'm sure by now you've started to figure it out." Etc. Ugh.
At this point, I'm curious how he ever got caught, and how he lost the sword. The militia don't really seem competent enough to pull that off, not against him.
For the questions:
1) It's hard to make a murderer likable. One way is to make him into a killer and not a murderer. The difference? A soldier is a killer. A police officer is a killer. They usually have just cause for killing people, so they're not murderers. Can we see that Dariel has just cause for slaughtering a lot of people? Well, if he's really right about the sword, then he probably is. But, well, the passage doesn't make this clear. In fact, it actively works to cast doubt on it.
The other way is to use the Darth Vader phenomenon. Vader is one of the most beloved characters in Star Wars. Nobody likes Luke. Luke's a whiny puke. I personally have a hard time empathizing with him because he's so annoying. Vader, on the other hand, is pure awesome. We like watching him in action because he kicks so much trash. We want to dress up as him for halloween.
2) The magic systems are already pretty interesting. You don't have any work to do there.
3) Make it more clear what's going on. When he wall runs, it took me a while to realize that's what he's doing because the way you worded it made me think he had pushed away from the wall. That's one example, but there's a bunch more where the action is just not clear. If you can clearly describe awesome occurring, it
will be interesting.
I did like the magic systems. They were interesting, and I wanted to know more. You seem to have a well-developed (if not entirely unique) world here. It seems that Dariel is well-developed in your mind, though you could do a better job characterizing him with your writing. A Fren in action has a lot of potential for awesome. I'd read chapter 2.
Yeah, I said chapter 2. I said it to teh Falcon, and I'll say it to you: with that ending, this is not a prologue.
Hope that makes sense and is helpful. Hope it doesn't dissuade you or anything. I
am trying to be helpful, and not just a hater.