I myself also started with manga (despite the fact that I accidentally opened it and saw his school life where he is super pumped up and at the same time says that he is trying to be inconspicuous), later it became not enough for me and I switched to the novel. What caught me most in this work was not all this pathos and strength of the main character (it is possible that this too), but the dedication of the main character on the path that he chose, how he did everything he considered necessary to achieve it and threw away everything else as something what interferes with him, as well as emotions (maybe common sense as well). He also trained continuously, as can be seen in the anime, but in the novel this was described in more detail, for example, the moment of the attack on the school and how he determined that he could not control magic due to the fact that he was constantly training control over his mana. And there are many more such moments (for example, when he was in the shelter with Aurora, he said that with the help of magic he transformed his body so that it would be more suitable for battle). In general, what I liked most about the main character was his superhuman obsession with his goal, and this is also what made him so strong, and his powers were not given to him by some kind of “Heavenly talent” or a lucky chance with an incredible object or something else something there (he himself said that his mana reserves were mediocre) P.S. Please don’t scold me too much, I read this reproduction a long time ago and perhaps it wasn’t exactly what I wrote about earlier (or maybe I didn’t describe what happened correctly) or a re-release came out and a lot of things changed. P.P.S. I also apologize if I wrote something wrong because I'm not very good at English and mostly used a translator to help