You don't always get a second chance... unless you're a pawn for an eldritch horror that: (A) can bend time, and (B) is a sore loser.
Justin Thyme is not a good man, nor one destined for glory. He was meant to die in obscurity, yet another level 82 Templar that was just about to get chewed up by a horde of skittering monstrosities clawing at humanity's last enclave.
One short conversation with a time-splitting monstrosity later, and Justin finds himself flung five years into the past—right when the Earth was first chosen to host the 9,947th Gladiatorial Games.
Justin must now do all that he can to help save the world from crumbling under the twin pressures of monsters and murderers. But it's not all about grinding experience, gaining the most levels, and kicking the most ass. He can’t even stand out too much, lest he draw the attention of the other eldritch horrors observing Earth’s struggles for their amusement.
No, it’s all about making the right connections, sowing the seeds of hope, culling the pests causing despair… oh, and exploiting the hell out of the System with his ‘borrowed’ ability to tweak time to his advantage.
My Opinion: 431 pages, $4.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
*First 25% a bit of a slog, but the story gets much better after*
The first 10% of the story is frankly a bit tedious. It sets up a regressor story using an alien that lost a bet on how long humanity would last on their instigated RPG apocalypse to send the main character (MC) back in time to help people do better. Then once back on earth at the very start of the RPG apocalypse, it's a huge info dump about game mechanics instead of any kind of emotional response to the chance to start over or character development.
The rest of the story is fairly slice of life with the MC finding places to educate about the new rules of the world and the hardness that comes with evil people suddenly getting power. There are semi-regular fights, but despite the fact that the MC disables all his notifications, there’s a load of unneeded text that breaks up the battle a bit too much. Additionally, there’s a continued deluge of info dumps from the MC as he describes other people’s classes, their abilities, all the stuff they could hypothetically do, and all the minuta that honestly would have been better to just show. For example, I don’t need to know the stats of all 7 pieces of equipment the MC wears, and I don’t need a full character sheet including descriptions of all the powers when the MC only gets one new power.
This peters out about 25% into the story and it actually gets much better from here on in.
The story still has a bit too much minuta sometimes, but a lot of the info dumping goes away. The fights get really good as the MC gets a team and faces foes that are his equal. There’s a really good variety of class builds that skew towards PvP, but are interesting to read about. There’s a good bit of cruelty and evil that fits the apocalypse style story. I also liked seeing the wider view of how the MCs information changed the timeline and how well the entire earth does, though it's never clear how the MC knows about the changes. Eventually you even get a bit of background on who the MC was during his first life, which surprisingly wasn’t a good person at all. Like a terrible, terrible, human being. My only complaint here is that the reader doesn’t get to see his redemption arc from. The story ends in a pretty good and unexpected way which capped things off nicely.
Overall, the first 25% of the story is pretty rough sometimes and I didn’t really care for much of it. But the rest of the novel really redeemed itself and I eventually really got into it. I’m not sure everyone will want to slog through the beginning but if you like an RPG apocalypse story that focuses heavily on PvP and has some neat builds, then it might be worth the slog.
Score: 7.2 out of 10