Deadworld Isekai

The scariest thing about the not-a-boulder wasn't the fact that it was breathing, although that was fairly terrifying. It also wasn't the fact that it was big enough and solid enough to be mistaken for a boulder in the first place. Those points were dwarfed by the main source of Matt's fear: the thing looked mobile.

In the few moments that Matt was frozen with surprise, he noticed that the boulder's tan surface was cracked in a neat and orderly fashion. That implied joints, which then meant the ability to unfold, stand up, and destroy him.

Behind him, the guardian was cackling in a self-satisfied, I-told-you-so sort of way. For the first time, Matt was absurdly thankful that only he could see or hear her. In front of him, the boulder's breathing remained relatively placid, undisturbed by Matt's presence. Matt began to very slowly back away.

Over the last few weeks, Matt had discovered that he didn't like the act of sneaking. Being stealthy meant spending a lot of time getting scratched by bushes and underbrush. It meant muscles that were stiff and sore from hours of crouching. Trying to stay stealthy while moving was even worse. Moving slowly for a few moments was fine, but there was a certain minimum speed that the body wanted to go. Willing muscles to stay below the speed limit for any significant amount of time resulted in nothing but searing pain and general misery.

There was tree cover in the distance, but the beach itself was huge and the treeline felt miles away. Matt expected the boulder to shift and come after him any moment, and he had no idea how fast the thing would be. He didn't dare ask the guardian, since that would mean making noise and running the risk of waking the thing up. He was thankful for the sand padding his footsteps as he slipped backwards.

Eventually, Matt created enough distance between him and the sleeping Bonecat. Now, the risk of the thing seeing or smelling him outweighed the chances that it had super-hearing. He bolted. After creeping for several minutes and with the added top speed from his increased DEX, it felt like he was moving at jet fighter speeds. Within a few moments, he was behind the cover of plants and at what he hoped was a relatively safe vantage point.

Almost as soon as he caught his breath, Matt looked back to the boulder. It finally roused itself. Watching the thing stand up was scary. The cracks Matt had seen earlier turned out to be just as they had looked. The thing slept like a turtle, covering up its joints and weak spots. But as it started moving, the boulder transformed along its exoskeleton lines, extending out legs, a head, and a spiked tail. In its new form, it began to toss around the beach.

Matt began to understand the name, at least a little. It didn't move like a cat. It clomped around like an armored dinosaur, heavy and without a single apparent worry that anything would notice it. After all, what would hunt something built like a biological tank? Who would willingly approach something with curved bone claws the size of Matt's arm and jutting out of every foot?

But despite that, there was still something feline about the shape and the lazy way it prowled. It somehow managed to look like a cat. It might not make sense on paper, but it did to the eye. This massive mountain of a thing was still somehow cat-like.

The Bonecat moved around the beach in random patterns for a few moments until it caught something. It paused and started to snuffle at the sand near where Matt had materialized. As he watched the cat, his heart started to sink. The cat slowly tracked his path to the trees, plodding over the same ground that Matt had used to retreat.

“Oh, looks like big boy over there has a lead. I wouldn’t stick around if I were you,” said the guardian.

“Thanks, but I want to learn as much about that thing as I can. And it looks like I have some time.”

Matt's words had just left his mouth when the cat paused. It looked like it was yawning, but raised its head up in the air. Back on Earth, Matt had both a niece and a nephew, and he had watched both of them for their parents from time to time. He was a relatively fun uncle, which meant the kids had a lot of fun toddling around his yard. It also meant that they had plenty of opportunities to get cuts and scrapes. Eventually, he invented the term “injured toddler inhale” for the deep breath that the kids took just before screaming. This reminded him of that.

“Oh no.”

The sound from the cat's mouth was like an air horn mixed with a parrot's squawk. It was louder and more grating than anything that Matt had ever heard before. Worse, it was accompanied by the cat kicking off the ground and charging like a freight train towards the treeline. It was coming straight at his position.

Matt didn't hesitate. He took off as fast as his feet would carry him.

The cat was fast, but Matt hoped the trees would slow it down some. The forest was pretty tightly packed, and the Bonecat was anything but small. Matt had already run through several gaps that were far too narrow for the Bonecat to squeeze through. He hoped they were enough to slow it down. Where he could, he sought out thick growths. Instinctively, he realized that the cat was tracking him by scent and not by sight. He hoped the dense mass of trees would force it to deviate its path and potentially lose track of the scent trail Matt was leaving behind.

Those hopes were dashed as Matt started hearing the trees crash to the ground behind him.

“That wasn't a bad idea. Really. Except the cat is heavy enough to topple any tree it hits, and has claws that can cut pretty much anything down in a swipe.”

“Could you be quiet?” Matt huffed, out of breath, “Even for a little?”

“It’s bigger, faster, and stronger in every way. If only someone had warned you about this kind of thing.”

“Don’t make me do it, Guardian.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

He dared. There were lots of situations where he’d avoid a system command to be polite, but getting chased by a metric ton of condensed death wasn’t one of them. “Be helpful,” he commanded through his out-of-breath wheezing.

“Oh, dammit,” the guardian frowned and leapt in front of him where he could see her, “These things are big. And fast. And sharp. But, like I said, they are specialized. It’s charging like a bull, right?”

Matt could hear the trees falling behind him, “Yes, it is. But so what?”

“Well. Bonecat lesson one: specialized monsters are specialized. This one is specialized for knocking down anything in front of it. But that means it’s bad at almost everything else. Including turning.”

Oh, shit. Yeah, that makes sense, Matt thought. He immediately turned off at a right angle. He heard the cat suddenly get closer as he went from running directly away from it to running perpendicular to its path.

But, as the Bonecat reached the point at which he turned, he heard the crashes go further. It continued in the same direction for a bit before slowly curving around to track him again. As a bonus, it seemed to take a few seconds before it found his scent trail again, which bought him a breath of additional time. He almost immediately swerved again. There was no use under using the weakness now that he knew it.

The guardian was keeping up with Matt's running somehow. She appeared in front of him again.

“Second lesson: this thing is tracking you by scent, right? That means it’s going to be able to track you for days if it has to. Some animals are more persistent than others, but it doesn’t matter because you don’t have the endurance to keep running like this. It’s going to catch you eventually.”

“And?”

“And what? Figure out some way to lose your scent. Find some running water, or something. I’m very, very pleased to tell your dumb ass that I don’t know the exact location of rivers on this simulated island. Figure it out yourself.”

If he was going to figure it out, he’d have to do it soon. In all of his running, he had yet to see any rivers at all. He didn’t know if tropical islands could even have rivers. But his lungs were going to pop at some point, even with all the extra vitality points feeding new stamina into his heart and legs. And then he realized something very important.

The ocean!

He waited a moment or so to hear the Bonecat course-correct one last time, then beat it as fast as he could towards the ocean, throwing in a handful of short right-angle turns for good measure as he went. Given how good the thing’s sense of smell was, he was banking on the idea that it couldn’t see as well as it could track by scent. If it could, he’d be screwed.

Matt broke the treeline and smiled inside when he saw that the section of the beach he had reached was much smaller than the section he had woken up on. He put everything he had left into one last sprint, hoping with everything he had that he’d hit the water before the Bonecat managed to get to him. He splashed through the incoming waves as fast as he could, getting into deep enough water to swim in just before the cat finally burst through the trees.

Oh, hell, it’s hard to hold my breath right now. Matt ducked underwater and realized how ragged his lungs were. He could barely hold his breath for ten seconds and put his head above the water just long enough to catch a breath. Then, he started to paddle deeper into the water, hoping that the Bonecat didn't know how to swim. After ten or so breaths, Matt gathered enough bravery to look behind him and see if he was being chased.

It was a welcome sight. The Bonecat was standing very still on the beach, near where he went into the water. He wasn’t a Bonecat emotional state expert, but he could have sworn it looked confused.

“Lessons three and four: Bonecats can’t see shit, and they aren’t very smart. You got very lucky getting to the ocean before it got to you. As long as you keep swimming for a bit, you should be fine. Congratulations, my idiot friend. You get to live.”

Matt started swimming sideways. The guardian assured him that he could go to shore any time, but he wasn't taking any chances. He swam for another 20 minutes or so, close enough to the shore that he could have put his feet down at any time, but still far enough out that he could continue to do most of his swimming underwater. It didn't feel great. It felt like he was setting new records for the longest time a person could spend winded, but when he finally came to shore, he was sure that he had thoroughly and completely lost the cat. He would have been happy about it, too, except for the one thought that now filled his entire mind.

How in the hell do I kill something like that?