Deadworld Isekai

Like most things on Gaia, the new dungeon was inconvenient and far away. The system compass pointed in a direction that was almost exactly parallel to the mountain range itself. That meant a journey through difficult, uncooperative terrain that was often broken to the point of impassibility by erosion.

But it was Matt's best shot at survival, so he set off with a grunt. The guardian followed behind him.

Going up, over, and around each obstacle was difficult for Matt, but it was also surprisingly difficult for the guardian. Despite being not-quite-real, she still had to traverse the terrain as if she were just another human. When the guardian first mentioned that she had searched the wasteland for various signs and clues about what had happened to the planet, Matt had assumed that she flew around with magic or something. Now, it seemed like she had actually done it in the same way that he did, by taking the whole painstaking job on foot.

Having company for the trip was nice, but not as nice as it could have been.

Absent orders to the contrary, the guardian clammed up as fully as she could. Occasionally, she'd break the silence to disagree with Matt on the route he was taking, always salted with insults. Otherwise, she kept quiet.

Matt didn't force her to talk with the authority that the system had granted him. As much as possible, he wanted to avoid using that authority at all. If for nothing else than for common decency. If the guardian had to be chained to him, he wanted to make those chains as light as possible. On top of that, “I command you to have a nice, casual conversation with me” would have been a really weird order to give. He wasn’t sure she could follow the command even if he did say those words.

And so, their journey was punctuated by insults.

“Wrong way, dumbass.”

“Nice going, idiot.”

“Tough nuts.”

For all the shade the guardian threw and even considering her high commitment to never letting an opportunity to do so pass, it eventually became clear to Matt that she wasn’t all that good at it. She approached it like an actual child would, knowing only a few curse words and using them liberally. “Tough nuts” came up often enough that he wasn’t sure she really understood what kind of curse it was. The guardian kept cycling through her loop of insults with astonishing frequency, but never adding new curses to the rotation.

“Hey, Guardian.”

“Oh, hey, stupid speaks. I'm thrilled.”

“Yeah, so, about that. My name is Matt, not stupid, as I think you probably already know. But I can’t just keep calling you guardian.”

“Yes, you can. I would like that very much, in fact.”

“You like being called ‘guardian’?”

“No, but I'd rather not pretend to get all buddy buddy with some idiot who is dragging me along by force to watch him get eaten by a zombie dragon or something.”

That put an end to the conversation.

—

Eventually, they reached the compass' destination, or at least nearly so. With only a few meters left to go, they had arrived at a sheer wall of rock, covered at the bottom by dried brush. Removing a substantial amount of the brush revealed a small tunnel of sorts, the exact kind of thing that Matt would have had no chance of finding without the system compass. It was the kind of thing worth asking about.

“Why hide the dungeons like this? The last one I found was underground. Doesn’t that make it pretty hard on adventurers without a system compass?” Matt asked.

“What an idiot. First, the system compass is something everyone gets. The system finds a way to shoehorn it in somehow or another. It’s not a real reward, it just feels like one,” said the guardian.

“OK, let’s say I buy that. What’s second?”

“Not everyone is an adventurer. Well, maybe here everyone is. But on a normal planet, you have all sorts of people. Tailors, garbage men, and that kind of thing. They would rather not get sucked into a death-trap on their way to work.”

“Makes sense.”

“Or, you know, kids. Imagine Billy goes missing, and you have no way to know he got eaten by the evil dungeon. That sort of thing.”

“Why not just put a failsafe on the dungeons? Make them have a confirmation screen, or something.”

“Beats me. Ask the system sometime.”

After crawling through the tunnel, Matt and the guardian were presented with a door that was superficially identical to the one Matt had entered before. The guardian walked up to it and put her hand on it.

“Level 3. Looks like this one is some sort of single-enemy challenge. That’s bad for you.”

“How can you tell that? And why so bad?”

“Tough nuts. I can tell that because it’s my job. I get a modified version of the system screen that tells me things about the local environment sometimes. Gates are one of those situations.”

“And the badness?”

“Figure it out yourself.”

Matt had successfully not used his guardian-command voice once during the entire trip to this dungeon, but this was too important not to know. He flexed it immediately.

“Tell me.”

The guardian had a chance to squeeze in one last curse before responding, “Asshole… The deal is that every dungeon has a combat mission and those missions are balanced to a particular difficulty level. But not every level is designed in the same way.”

“Okay, go on. How do numbers make it different? ”

“Yeah, I'm getting there. So, imagine a dungeon where the battle is with a thousand mosquitos. That’s a swarm. They might overwhelm you, but each individual mosquito isn’t that hard to kill. Those rats you were talking about? They were swarm-balanced. Easy to take down individually. All you need to do is find a way to kill them one by one. And that’s what you did. With the rats, you could use little traps to out-and-out kill them, or isolate them.” She bent down and started drawing a big, bear-like creature in the dust. “Now imagine something like this, only twice as big as you. That’s not a monster that’s designed to be trapped and killed in a single hit. It’s a monster that you are supposed to tank and kill with 1,000 cuts. You can’t do either of those things.”

“So you are saying not to do the dungeon?”

“That’s your call. If you have some way to take down something bigger and stronger than you. I’m just here to give you information.”

Matt considered this. He wasn’t against walking to some other dungeon, but there was a limited number of times he could do that. He had eaten quite a bit of his food coming to this dungeon.

At the same time, he saw the logic behind what the guardian was saying. He hadn't fought against a monster that he couldn't beat one on one yet. But if he couldn't kill it with one trap, he might be able to hit it with multiple traps over time. It wasn't like fighting swarms was easy either. The ways he could get screwed over were infinite.

“Thanks for the advice. I think I’m going to do it anyway, though. The risk-reward balance seems right,” said Matt.

“Your funeral. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Matt opened the door to find the same kind of stone pillar that he had seen in the last dungeon, and activated it. He once again found himself without a body, floating in space.

Entrant Record Found. Would you like to substitute the appearance of threats to an equivalent danger from your scanned experiences?

That was an easy question, now that he knew what the system meant.

“No, absolutely not. Never again.”

Response acknowledged. Generating Dungeon. Please Stand By.

After a short wait, Matt found himself laying on the ground of a dungeon. But where last time he was on grass, this time he was cushioned by a thick layer of sand. Before he looked around, he could hear the waves of the ocean buffeting the beach and smell the salt in the air.

“Ooh, lucky pull. You got a beach. The other way sand goes is desert. That’s much less fun,” the guardian's voice sounded next to him.

“Thanks. Also, did you forget to mention that you’d be coming with me?”

“Yes, I did. I’m figuring out this whole system-compulsion thing. It turns out I don’t have to tell you anything you don’t ask about. Neat, right?”

This shitty little gremlin is starting to get on my nerves, he thought.

Before he could strike back with some witty response, the system interrupted with a notification. Matt decided yelling at his hallucination could wait. Survival was more important.

Dungeon Objective Discovered!

[Stranded But Not Alone]: You are marooned on an island. That would be nice, if it were just you. All indicators point to something bigger and meaner than solitude prowling around. Eliminate it.

Objective: Eliminate Bonecat 0/1

Reward: Low-Grade Dungeon Loot Selection

“Oh, huh.”

“What is it, stupid?”

“Apparently I have to eliminate something called a Bonecat. Do you happen to know what that is?” Matt dismissed the system message and turned to look at the guardian, only to find her rolling around on the sand, holding her sides. For a moment, he thought she might be hurt somehow, but quickly discovered it was something different. She was laughing. Laughing so hard she was crying, and apparently not able to breathe. Even with a system-driven command to explain herself, it was a full minute before she calmed down enough to answer why.

“Oh, shit. This is great. You, my friend, are screwed,” the guardian looked enormously pleased with herself. She didn’t say “I told you so”, but she didn’t have to. The satisfaction of being right virtually oozing out of every one of her pores.

Matt rolled his eyes impatiently. “Cut out the editorial. What is this thing?”

“Ok, hold on. So you know how most things have the bones inside their body? That does something important. It makes them versatile. You having inside-bones is why you can move your body in different directions and be flexible and all that. But things with bones on the outside, like bugs, are different. They aren’t generalists. They are good at a couple of things. Just a couple of motions. That’s it. But they are really good at those few things.”

“And bonecats are…”

“Not cats, first of all. Not really, anyway. Their whole ecological niche is being able to kill big things while not getting killed themselves. Imagine something that looks like a skeleton tiger that can rip your legs off with a single swipe of their arm. This is the absolute worst thing you could have come up against at this level. I’m not sure if you can even cut it, let alone kill it.”

“I could try to tangle it up in something. Like a snare, maybe.”

“Idiot. Good luck with that. These things are strong. They'll pull trees out of the ground, and look around, what are you going to tie those snares to?”

The guardian seemed more talkative when Matt was in more trouble. He didn't mind that. The more she explained how screwed he was, the fewer questions he'd have to ask and command her to respond. Now that she was also finding clever ways around his authority, his questions would also need to have the exact wording to squeeze the right information out of her. But then, a nagging feeling he had felt in the back of his consciousness since the system notification popped up pushed itself forward.

When he had fought the Clownrats, the system had given him the objective to destroy them after he found them, not before. Here it was reversed. He was at a peaceful beach rather than in a dangerous forest. Using his voice of command to save time, he asked the guardian why that was.

“Oh, I don’t think you even need to ask me that. You can ask your friend over there.”

Turning, all Matt saw was a large tan boulder that had settled on the beach. Knowing the guardian couldn’t lie, his first thought was to go over and see if there was someone behind it. He had almost taken his first step when he noticed that the boulder was breathing.