A Play For Time Ch. 4 (System Apocalypse) (Patreon)

A/N: Back with Chapter 4! Name is also locked in now, sticking with A Play For Time going forward so I hope people like it.

Heads up... the first half of this chapter is in the format of a Forum Post.

I'm not sure how it came out to be honest. Not sure I'm entirely happy with it. I think the biggest issue is that no one talks like this on a normal forum board lol. But I couldn't be bothered to txtspeech and emoji it up to be honest.

It does what I want it to do, so hopefully people don't hate it too much. Still, this might be the last one of these that shows up in the story unless people absolutely love it lol.

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♦ Topic: ??? user in the leaderboards?!

In: Boards ► Leveling

2445618901 (Original Poster)

Posted On Aug 13th 2024:

Okay so not sure if I'm using this board correctly, or if I'm even posting in the right place. Also not sure if I'm going crazy or something.

But does everyone else see the Number One on the Leader Board as question marks for the Name and Level? Their class is apparently Chronomancer but other than that there's nothing. What gives?

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►1209867754

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

I'm telling you, it has to be a glitch or a bug or something.

►3512398773

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

You've been saying that for the past fifty pages. But if it is, it's the only 'bug' or 'glitch' that has been found across the entire world in the past few days. The System seems to work flawlessly, so why would this be the exception? Maybe it's not a bug at all, maybe it's a feature.

►6623419087

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

351 is probably right. Though I doubt it's some privacy feature implemented by the System. I was looking at the leaderboard in the first day after System Initialization and there was no privacy for Rank 1 back then.

At the start, Number One was occupied by that Kyle guy and Number Two and Three were Bruno and Theresa. Now they're Two, Three, and Four and nothing has changed except for their levels and class titles.

►1111457634

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Seems pretty obvious what's going on to me. All that talk about Earth being partitioned off until three of us hit Level 100 and form a Triumvirate is just bullshit.

They slipped in an alien during Initialization or something and beefed them up with all sorts of secret contraband goodies. Now, even if two of us get to Level 100, that alien will have gotten there first and have a slice of the Earth pie regardless!

►4123654980

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Don't be stupid, that's such a moronic theory. If the aliens were going to try that, they would have inserted three and just taken all of the Triumvirate spots for themselves.

No, isn't it obvious what happened? The Number One spot is occupied by a fucking Chronomancer! You know, TIME magic?! Clearly, they traveled back in time and are using all of their foreknowledge to get ahead of the pack!

►1111457634

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Wow and you said my theory was moronic. Maybe stop huffing fumes for a second and get real. The System would never allow something like that to happen!

►4123654980

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Yeah? What the fuck do you know about what the System will and won't allow?

It's allowed half a billion people to die in the past few days. The System isn't benevolent. It's not your fucking friend. Get real dude.

►1111457634

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

You're the one talking about time travel! There are plenty of Chronomancers out there. They get spells like Time Splinter, which is just a reflavored Arcane Missile, and crowd control like Slow. They don't get fucking time travel! That would break the whole damn System!

Its way more likely that we're dealing with an alien. At least we know aliens are out there now. Just because there's only one of them doesn't mean I'm wrong. Maybe they could only slip the one alien past the System's safeguards or something!

►3512398773

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Guys, c'mon. Calm down there's no point in fighting. We're all in this together, right? This message board is supposed to be for exchanging information and learning new things about how to best Level.

►4123654980

Replied On Aug 17th 2024:

Calm down? Or what, you're going to tattle on us? As everyone already noticed, there's no Report Button on these boards. No moderation at all. We can say whatever we want. Talk about whatever we want. If I want to call 1111 a retard for his stupid alien theory, then I can. Don't like it? Then fuck off.

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►1441233786

Replied On Aug 19th 2024:

I saw him today. Ran into him out in The Graveyard. He saved my life.

Whatever he has obscuring things, it's not just on the leaderboard. In person, his name and Level were concealed by question marks as well.

►6623419087

Replied On Aug 19th 2024:

Holy shit you saw him! And you know he's a guy?! What does he look like? How deep in The Graveyard was he?!

►1441233786

Replied On Aug 19th 2024:

I know he's a guy because of his voice. I don't know what he looked like because he was wearing all-concealing robes.

He's gotta be pretty high level, but then we already knew that I guess. He was deep enough in The Graveyard that the undead he was fighting were all above Level 25. Some were close to Level 30.

►3458762143

Replied On Aug 19th 2024:

You've gotta have more than that. What sort of spells did he use? And you said you know he's a guy because of his voice? What did he say to you? What language was he speaking? I know the System gives us all a Universal Translator, but you would have known if he was using it so...

►1441233786

Replied On Aug 19th 2024:

He spoke English. I don't think he was an alien. As for the rest... I'm not going to say. He's entitled to his privacy, I just wanted people to know he's real and exists. Whoever he is, he's out there. Maybe one day we'll know more.

Several People are Typing...

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Caleb bites savagely into the ration bar, tearing a chunk off and taking a swig of water from his canteen to wet it before beginning to chew. All the while, he’s reading up on the latest posts from his thread. Well, not HIS thread. The thread about him. And it’s not even the only one of those out there. There are hundreds if not thousands of threads about the mysterious entity at the top of the Leader Board.

He’d known the moment that he donned the Robes of Mystery, picked up from a Hidden Quest before beginning his grind, that it would drive everyone insane the moment he took the top spot on the leaderboard. That was okay though. That was, frankly, part of the plan.

Still, this thread he’s looking at right now, at nearly a thousand pages long, is definitely the most popular. As such, it’s the one he bothers perusing whenever he has to take a five minute break and let his mana recharge.

Seems the cat is out of the bag now. That Shadow Thief he’d saved has ratted him out. Honestly though… Caleb can’t really bring himself to be that upset. If he’d wanted her to stay quiet, then he should have killed her when he had the chance. Or better yet, he should have just let the tree eat her. He didn’t have to save her. He didn’t have to spare her. But he’d chosen to do both of those things and now he had to live with the consequences.

To her credit, she’s right. The whole point of the System Message Boards was to share information. Of course, the lack of moderation did mean that there was a whole lot of junk and misinformation one had to sift through to get to the nuggets, but that didn’t mean it was useless.

The amount of times that info from the SMB had saved his bacon back in the original timeline… he’d lost count somewhere along the way. To say nothing of how much scouring he’d done of years and years of forum posts to make his plans for this trip back in time in the first place.

The System Message Boards were the one place that Kyle couldn’t conquer. Maybe if he’d let an actual Triumvirate form that would have given control over the boards, but he’d never been brave enough to find out. Instead, the ‘Great Karshan’ had simply had his lackeys watch the boards day and night, trawling them endlessly to find any information about potential rebel movements to squash. Caleb had been one of them.

Of course, most of the time Caleb had been looking at the Message Boards for supposed dissidents, he’d actually been hunting down information on secrets for his second go around.

For instance, the SMB was where he’d gotten the idea for using The Graveyard in the first place. Most people would take one look at the Open World Dungeon and give it up as a waste of time. Endless waves of low level Undead that got tougher the deeper you went in, but no linear path to take with actual Bosses with good loot.

Any groups currently trying to Level would find themselves slowed down massively if they came to The Graveyard. The experience split just wasn’t worth it.

But for a Chronomancer, or indeed any kind of Mage Evolution with the right toolkit, The Graveyard was a veritable gold mine. There was a pretty simple reason for this… nothing in The Graveyard had a ranged attack.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t undead elsewhere that had ranged attacks. Undead Spellcasters like Skeleton Mages and Liches were very much a thing in this new horrible world of theirs. It’s just that they tended to be confined to proper Dungeons as Mini-Bosses and Final Bosses.

The Graveyard didn’t have proper bosses though. It only had Rare Spawn versions of the normal mobs that populated it. And since not a single one of those normal mobs had a ranged attack, neither did the Rares. Meaning that someone with the right toolkit and plan could kill such creatures in massive piles near-endlessly until they stopped giving experience.

There was one more thing that nobody in this timeline had figured out about The Graveyard yet. As far as he knew anyways. They’d realized that they could enter The Graveyard from any actual graveyard in the entirety of North America, but what they didn’t know yet was that you could exit in any graveyard as well, not just the one you came in from.

Indeed, The Graveyard was actually just one massive flat circle. If you went along the edge, you would only encounter low level undead and eventually you’d run into another exit back into the real world. If you went deeper in, the level of your enemies would increase… but only until you got to the middle. Then, they would start to decrease again if you kept going in a straight line all the way to the other side.

In the original timeline, The Graveyard had actually become a form of fast transit for higher levels. Since the highest level undead in the entire Open World Dungeon was only Level Thirty, once you were around Fifty or higher, you could use The Graveyard to travel from one end of North America to the other in about half an hour so long as you knew where you were going.

All in all, Caleb couldn’t bring himself to be too mad about that girl… Alice, ratting him out. She seemed to be doing her best to straddle the line between providing the sort of information that the System Message Boards were meant for, and also protecting his privacy.

Of course, as Caleb finishes his rations and watches the thread go flying by, quickly accumulating dozens more pages and slipping over a thousand in total before his break is done, he hopes the poor thing will be alright. She’s at least smart enough not to respond anymore after they start calling her all sorts of terrible things. Some seem to believe her. Many more think she’s lying for attention. It wouldn’t be the first time being fair. Not even the first time in this thread.

Heh looked like they were already coming to the consensus that her sudden silence meant she’d been lying the entire time. Not that that would stop some idiots from rushing into The Graveyard to try to run into him too, Caleb knew. Some would probably do so to their permanent detriment.

… But that wasn’t his problem. And even if anyone else made it all the way to the middle of The Graveyard any time soon, it wouldn’t matter. Caleb was done here.

A glance at his Level shows his progress at this point. Level Thirty-Five. He’s just reached the point where the last of the undead in The Graveyard are worthless to him now. That means it’s time to move on.

Though… even then his anonymity won’t last forever. Or even much longer. The Robes of Mystery were a great item, but they only worked on Level Thirty-Nine and below. Anyone at Level Forty and up would see right through him, meaning that they would see his Name and Level on the Leader Board at that point as well.

Switching from the Message Board to the Leader Board, Caleb smiles faintly. Kyle, Bruno, and Theresa are all Level Twenty-Four at this point. They’re making good time, he has to admit. Better time than they did in his original timeline if he isn’t mistaken. But then… in his original timeline, they were at the top the whole way through. There was no contest, and indeed the fifth place this time around has just managed to hit Level Twenty in the time since Caleb’s last break. Already falling behind.

Kyle must be pushing them harder this time around. It must be eating him up inside, not knowing who’s taken his top spot from him. Caleb knows Kyle pretty damn well. Even if he didn’t know Kyle this far back, he doesn’t doubt that he’s exactly the same. Small-minded. Egotistical in the extreme. A total bastard, through and through.

Reading the forums was always fun, but what Caleb really wished for was to be a fly on the wall wherever Kyle was right now. To see how the fucker was reacting to all of this would be… delicious.

Brushing off his hands, Caleb rises to his feet and takes another drink from his canteen before tucking it away and fixing up his hood again. Grinning beneath his mask, the Chronomancer lets out a dark chuckle as he side eyes the Leader Board one more time.

“Keep chasing, Kyle. You’re never going to catch up.”

Taking a moment to reorient himself, Caleb starts heading for the particular exit he needs that will deposit him closest to his next location. The Graveyard had served him well, but it’s usefulness was at an end now. At Level Thirty-Five, it was time to move to the next grinding spot on his list… and continue to make Kyle eat his dirt all the way to Level One Hundred.

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A/N: Hmm, here's another look at Caleb. I hope this Caleb POV explains to those who want more Caleb POVs why it would be a bad idea if we ONLY got Caleb POVs. See, what you saw Caleb doing in Chapter 3 through Alice's perspective... is literally all he's been doing for the past seven days since System Initialization.

His whole plan is to cheese his Time Magic for aoe farming hundreds of melee mobs that can't ever actually get close enough to hit him, all the way to Level One Hundred.

Now to be fair, that plan might not survive all the way to Level One Hundred. I've got ideas in that regard. But for now, Caleb POVs are kind of boring, lol. Its just him rounding up dozens, sometimes hundreds of enemies, dodging their attacks, and dragging them through crowd control and aoe spells that steadily kill them off.

Luckily, that just means I can spend some of these early chapters setting up other major characters and enjoying their drama lol.

On that note, I figure next chapter pretty much has to be peek into Alpha Squad's dynamic after how I ended this chapter. Caleb might not be able to be a fly on the wall as Kyle slowly combusts at being Second Place, but we sure can be!

Hope people are still enjoying, and please be sure to continue giving me feedback and suggestions and your thoughts on everything so far! It keeps this story alive!