Deadworld Isekai

After her outburst, the guardian stared at Matt as if he had suddenly shot her. He walked a few steps closer to her, expecting her to snap out of it, but she didn’t. She remained frozen in place like a statue. He was worried he had broken her somehow.

“Hey, guardian?” Matt waved his hand in front of her face. “You in there? You okay?” He debated yelling in her ear and decided against it. But there weren't a lot of options to communicate with someone who was a hologram. It wasn’t like he could shake her or tap her on the shoulder. Thankfully, just as quickly as she had fallen into her stupor, she shook out of it and began screaming at him.

“You have what, Matt? Gaia authority? Somehow? And you didn’t tell your assigned system guardian who is supposed to keep you alive about it? This whole time?”

As if to emphasize her words, she started throwing punches at Matt. On some level, he was aware she couldn’t actually hit him. Instinctually, though, there was no part of him that wanted to tangle with the tiny little rage-monster coming at him. He kept backing up.

“All you do is yell at me and call me stupid! How am I supposed to know what is and isn’t important?” Matt tried to defend himself.

“You TELL me and… and I tell you! It’s easy, Matthew.”

Eventually, Matt had to order her to be quiet, hoping it would calm down. She materialized a little fake illusory chair for herself and sat. After a few minutes, she seemed to regain some semblance of sense. She waved at him to get his attention, then pointed at her mouth. Given that she was still sitting, he was willing to take the risk of unsealing her and seeing what she had to say.

“Tell me everything. How did this happen?”

“Okay. No more tantrums?” Matt paused to see the guardian's blood pressure rise, “So I’m a survivor class, right?”

“Yes, yes. It's dumb, and it’s not a class anybody actually takes.”

“Sure, fine, but it’s not as if I had better advice at the time. Anyways…” As best as his fuzzy memories of the event would allow him to, Matt relayed everything about the event. He talked about the sudden influx of stats and the brief god-like euphoria he had felt, then having the stats yanked away without being given any choice in the matter.

He even told her about bashing his hand against the ground and almost breaking it, which he thought would make her laugh. It didn’t. “Anyway, I went from feeling strong enough to rip that Bonecat in half with my bare hands to just being just a normal guy within a few minutes. In return, I got a power that hasn't done anything. I think at least. It was kind of a shitty deal.”

The guardian took a deep breath, “No, Matt, it wasn’t. Do me a favor. Open your system screen.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Once you have it open, try to call up your citizenship tab.”

“My what?”

She sighed, “Just trust me, alright?”

He pulled it up. It was a relatively sparse screen, the most interesting aspect of which was a box with a citizen ID number. The box was the part of his system screen that changed values as he looked at it, and it clicked over from one several-digit number to another while he watched.

Matt Perison

Citizenship

Global: Gaia

Continental: Sarthia

Kingdom: Sarthian Empire

Official Residence: Sarthian Capitol District

Authorities

Global: Alpha Level Authority, Planet Gaia

Continental: N/A

Kingdom: N/A

District: N/A

Individual ID: 827-292-176-455

“Why haven’t I seen this before? If it’s that important, you should have told me to read it.”

“Because it wasn’t important, Matt. Please stop asking questions. The main use of this page is as identification. You see that number that keeps changing? If a guard or something wanted you to prove who you were, you’d pull that up, and they’d usually have a skill to verify who you were.” The guardian was unusually serious.

“There’s a guard class? Who would take that?” Matt asked.

“A person who wanted a reasonably good government job and pension. Matt. Just. Please. Shush for a second. I swear.” Given that the guardian was getting worked up as she talked about the citizenship tab clued Matt into the possibility that he really was talking too much. He liked having the opportunity to mess with her, but it was beginning to seem like he had actually missed something important. “The thing that gives a guard the ability to check your ID isn’t their class, it’s their authority. If you became a Sarthian Capitol District Guard, you’d get authority corresponding to your job. And it would work when you were in your district. Do you follow?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She pantomimed knocking his forehead with her knuckles. “Glad it’s sinking in. So, national level authority would be for someone like a King, or a General of an army. They’d have authority that went with them over the whole kingdom. It lets them do… stuff like laws and commands. For continental authority, think of an emperor or something. It might let him issue edicts to the kings.” The guardian was now pacing, radiating nervous energy. “The point is, at every level there’s a set of abilities you get depending on what your role is.”

“And, what are those at the planetary level?”

Suddenly, the guardian withered in front of Matt. It was like a balloon being deflated, but on the scale of a whole person. Her words started coming out stammered, “It's… Usually, the ones who have that power… are the planet's villains… The people that reincarnators like you are supposed to fight… You're… you're not meant to have that level of power.”

Achievement: Forbidden Knowledge

You are digging into knowings that you should not know, and considering a path you should not take. Some ground was not meant for human feet to tread. You have a role to play, but it is not this one. Beware.

Rewards: None

Was that a... threat? Matt wrested his attention back from the system window, only to see that the guardian had started flickering. The sight reminded Matt of the Bonecat dissolving earlier that week. He jumped in, “Wait, stop. Stop. Please, stop. You're…”

The guardian looked down and stared at her hand as it went in and out of existence. A look of horror crossed her face. She looked back at Matt and opened her mouth. No words came out.

Matt hurriedly continued the conversation, “Ok, you don't have to talk about it. It's… let's talk about something else.”

“No. Matt. This is big. You're… well, you were the most important person on the planet, in an arbitrary way,” the guardian paused, as if trying to feel out a certain boundary with her words, “Now, you're actually the most important person. In a way that matters.”

“Okay, we don't need to continue. It's ok.” For the first time since he had been dropped on this barren planet, Matt felt a pang of fear. It was much worse than the mashup of clowns and rats. It was the feeling that he might lose something that meant a lot to him. His only companion in this place. Someone who the system had also screwed over.

“No, this is important. This… I, well… Listen, Matt. A big part of why, you know, I didn't want to follow you already was because I thought it was pointless. Anything you did would just delay the only result you could possibly get: dying alone on an empty planet. And I’d have to watch all that, knowing I was helpless to change anything. But now?” The guardian was still saying something, but Matt heard nothing. All he could see was her mouth movements.

He tried to read her lips, “It… makes… a big difference.”

—

Regardless of what planetary authority was or might do, they couldn’t do anything about it at the moment. Not that Matt didn’t try. Matt tried yelling at the planet to declare himself as the god-emperor. By the fifth or sixth time, it was pretty clear that actually accessing anything useful from the authority was pretty far beyond his reach.

With nothing pressing on their schedules, they ambled toward the nearest ruin Matt could remember seeing, one with only the footing of a single building above the soil. Matt held the dowsing rod in his hand as they approached, hoping it would buzz once they got to the building. It didn’t.

“Well, that’s a bust.” The guardian looked just as disappointed as Matt felt. Ever since the conversation about his Gaia authority, the guardian felt, well, more human.

Matt noticed that instead of her being angry at him all the time, she was more relaxed. And while things like food didn’t matter to her, she was now fully capable of being bored. After a long walk through barren nothingness, it was clear that she had expected something. The displeasure of being robbed of the payoff was like a visible weight on her tiny back.

“Wait, wait.” Matt pointed the dowsing rod at the few bricks left above the surface. “So, think about it. This is the only building we can see, right? That doesn’t mean it’s the only building that was ever here. Maybe it was the most durable building, or the tallest building, or something. There could have been more stuff that’s just buried now.”

The guardian perked up. “And we can look for that stuff?”

Matt grinned, “Sure.”

—

Not knowing the exact range of the dowsing rod was annoying, since it made searching in any kind of orderly grid potentially inefficient. For all Matt knew, it might be able to work a mile out. But if he started with a grid that big when the actual range was much smaller, he would also potentially miss what they were looking for. Eventually, he and the guardian settled on walking outwards in a big spiral, spacing each loop about twenty feet from the last. One of the few advantages of Gaia’s dead soil was that it picked up footprints pretty well, and they were able to visually verify that they hadn’t screwed up the pattern.

It was almost a half hour before they got a hit. Without any warning, the dowsing rod started buzzing and blinking in Matt’s hand, like he was getting summoned to a hostess table at a chain restaurant by one of those weird remote-control alert coasters.

“Dig it up! Dig it up!” The guardian was dancing in place, finally with some life injected into her by the prospects. Matt smiled as he used the variance in the rod’s vibration to zero in on the exact location of the object. Kids, as far as he knew, were universally excited by treasure hunts. It looked like the guardian wasn’t any exception.

Actually digging up the thing turned out to be a tough job. The best tool Matt had for the job was the multi-tool, but the biggest digging implement it would turn into was somewhere between a garden spade and a very small shovel. He got immediately to work, but after digging for a few hours, it became abundantly clear that the objects the dowsing rod found weren’t near the surface at all. The shovel only moved a small amount of dirt with each plunge, and unlike dungeons, Gaia’s surface gave him very little to improvise a better tool from.

“Have you found it yet?” The guardian had long since slipped back into road-trip mode. This was the tenth time she had asked the same question. Matt gritted his teeth. His hands were all blisters, and his back was killing him. After the Bonecat trap, he wasn’t exactly desperate for more digging. Having an annoyed pre-adolescent on his back the whole time wasn’t helping him enjoy the experience much.

“For the tenth time: no. I promise you that I will tell you right away if I do.”

“Are you sure you will remember, or is this another ‘Matt forgets having authority over a whole planet’ situation?”

“Listen, you little shit…” Matt was pulled back from the yelling-at-a-child brink by a sudden ding on his spade. He had hit something.

“I got something!” Matt started kicking loosened dirt off the object with his feet as the guardian ran back to the hole to see what he had found. “It’s about time. I swear if I had to move another teaspoon-sized scoop of dirt with this shitty thing I was going to go crazy.”

Moving a bit more dirt uncovered a looped handle of sorts, still attached to whatever was still underground below it. He was through with digging. He set his hands on the handle of the shovel and threw all seven of his strength points into the mightiest heave he could manage. The object ripped free of the soil and flew up into the air, landing between him and the system guardian. They both stared at it as it lay between them on the ground, then the system guardian started laughing. Hysterically, maniacally laughing.

Matt scowled.

“It’s not funny! It’s…”

His anger washed away as the guardian’s laughter proved contagious, and eventually they had both laughed themselves to tears. When they got tired, they laid on the ground beside the treasure that had patiently waited through countless eras to be dug up.

It was a shovel.