Deadworld Isekai

“We have two important things today.” As they walked to the next ruin, the guardian was shifting into a mode that Matt hadn't seen before. She almost seemed like a busy secretary trying to organize her boss's Day. “First, the authority, we,” she paused, looking as if she was expecting some lightning strike, “actually never mind. Let's keep going.”

Matt had been suspicious of his system for a while now. When he first showed up, the system hadn’t been exactly loud, but it had offered all sorts of information, achievements, and even quests. Since he had found the guardian, it had been comparatively quiet. Not completely dead by any means, since it still presented information. But he couldn't get the Forbidden Knowledge achievement out of his head.

“Yeah, I'm not too sure,” Matt replied.

I don’t want to think of the system as an enemy, though it certainly isn’t the best friend I’ve ever had, either, Matt thought. He needed the system, but the guardian didn’t seem to be best buddies with it. The question was why. Why was the system giving him such an ominous message? Why was the guardian acting like she was muzzled?

“And second, your food,” the guardian was back on track, “we only have a few days' worth left. Oh, and this has been bothering me, why do you eat the soup like that?”

The guardian pointed to Matt’s mouth, where he was still working on breaking apart some of the incredibly dense bread.

“The soup?”

“Yeah. They came in little foil bags, right? With water and some kind of fuel? You are supposed to add the water and heat them up… They make enough soup to feed five people. You knew that, right?”

Matt stopped chewing momentarily. “Yeah, I knew that. It’s just quicker this way.”

No matter what, Matt resolved, She can never know I didn’t know that.

—

The shovel that Matt had found turned out to be important in two ways. The first was that it was a really good shovel. Matt wasn't a garden tool aficionado in any way, but he had used quite a few during his illness-garden phase. This shovel was heads and tails above the normal hardware store purchases he had used to dig before.

Matt attributed the efficiency to the metal material that the shovel used. It was the same kind of shiny, steel-like material that the food lockbox had been made out of. Light, strong, and flexible. More importantly, Matt found a lot of it.

Here and there, Matt would find bricks and other remnants of buildings. They were all understandably fragile. Being buried for centuries and having all the durability sucked out of them does that. But when he unearthed something in good condition, it had always ended up from the same metal base. Most of the pieces were useless, at least for now. They mostly came in weird shapes and were probably parts of bigger machines. Yet, the machines themselves were nowhere to be found.

Did the things these were part of just rot off them, like flesh off a skeleton?

One by one, Matt and the guardian cycled through each of the ruins. His food supply kept dwindling. It had taken a lot of time for him to find the guardian in the first place, and if this pattern kept up, he'd be out of food long before they got through all of the ruins. He took every metal scrap he could find, and even though they were light individually, they added up to quite a bit of weight collectively. Something told him that they'd come in handy someday. But if they didn’t find any food soon, there wouldn’t be a someday.

It wasn’t until the tenth ruin that they got lucky.

“Ooh, that’s a big one.” Matt’s dowsing rod was going crazy in his hand, vibrating so hard it was almost making his hand go numb.

“Yeah, looks like it. Here’s hoping we can find some food for you, fleshy. At least that way, I wouldn’t have to watch you count food cubes seventeen times a day, like looking at them is going to make any difference.”

The shovel almost moved by itself, and it wasn’t long before Matt hit metal. Clearing away the dirt revealed a flat, horizontal surface.

“I think it’s a chest!” Matt exclaimed.

“Well, great. Get it out of there, then.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You never have to take a turn digging.”

“No,” she said, smirking, “I guess I don’t.”

Matt started clearing all the dirt from the top of the thing, but then ran into a problem: The top of the thing kept going. He dug for several minutes, clearing away dirt from the top of the object, but never finding an edge. Whatever this was, it wasn’t a chest. It was something much, much bigger.

It wasn’t a hard decision to keep digging. He was almost out of cubes. This might not be a chest, but he had a feeling in his gut that it was something important. Sure, he could leave and try to find other ruins, but that hadn’t been working out so far. He was willing to bet the last of his supplies that this would be something that could help. It wasn’t the first time he’d bet his life since he came to Gaia, and he suspected again that it wouldn’t be the last.

The object was more than a foot underground, and excavating even a few feet of it took a significant amount of time. By the time he found the first edge of the thing, several hours had passed. From there, he started tracing out the borders of the object with his shovel, hoping for some difference. Hours passed, and then he had to sleep. By the time he cleared the third border, it was well into his second day digging. He popped his last food cube, crossed his fingers, and prayed the last border would hold some clues to what this thing was.

Midway through uncovering the last edge, he got an answer to his prayer. There was a small outcropping on that edge, a two-foot wide rectangle that stuck out from the rest of the shape for several inches. Abandoning the task of uncovering the rest of the border, he immediately started to dig down, creating a ramp from the ground level down to the wall of the object underneath the outcrop. He had an idea of what this was, but it would have to be fully uncovered to be useful to him if he was right.

It was the end of the second day by the time he finally had the door uncovered.

 

—

“Okay, so, we’ve found some of this metal here and there. But it’s obviously not common, or they’d use it for everything. It’s durable enough to survive whatever happened here, and hard enough to scratch my knife. But we only find bits and pieces of it. So it’s rare. And rare things are valuable.”

“Sounds reasonable.” The guardian may not need food, but it would have been hard for Matt to miss the part where she craved interesting events. Matt didn’t even have to convince her to help him think this out. She was completely focused on the mystery of this room. “Which raises an interesting question…”

“Who builds an entire room out of this stuff?” Matt finished the thought.

Whatever this building was, it was entirely made from the Gaian mystery metal. From what Matt had seen, there weren’t any windows or hatches besides this one. In many ways, it was another lockbox like the one he had seen before. The only difference being that it was the size of a single family home and much, much harder to get to.

“It’s just a bummer that you won’t be able to get anything out of it.”

Matt jerked his head around. If he couldn’t get it open, it really would be bad news. “Why not?”

The guardian gestured towards the touchpad on the door. “It’s that thing. That’s, frankly, one hell of a piece of tech. It's tamper resistant and I have no idea what makes the thing go. Unless you have some kind of magic blowtorch I don't know about, you're not going to get this door open.”

Matt breathed a sigh of relief. He thought she had seen a real problem. Door panels were something he could handle.

“Oh, that? That’s no problem.” Matt put his hand up to the panel, which immediately sprung to life, displaying a familiar message.

Sarthia Prime Citizen established.

Gaia Universal Citizen status established.

Opening authority granted. Supplies are to be used in accordance with the Sarthia catastrophe relief efforts and Gaia unified government growth scourge resistance initiative goals. Failure to comply with these restrictions will result in punishment to the full extent of the law.

Sarthian Mobile Supply House Authority granted. Releasing Hatch.

The door hissed slightly, then clicked. Matt pressed his hand on it, and it moved easily inward on its hinges. Whatever this metal was, it held up remarkably well. The door didn’t even creak. He immediately stepped inside.

“Wait! Matt!” The guardian followed on his heels, screeching. “How in the hell did you do that?”

“We can talk about it later. First, I want to check this out.” It was dark inside the structure. Matt only had one real source of light in the form of his auto-lighting torch. He pulled it out and worked the mechanism to get it going.

“Fine. But we are talking about this later. No excuses.”

When the torch sprang to life, it revealed a kind of storage area, filled with row after row of shelves. Matt suspected that this really was almost exactly like the lockbox he had found, only bigger. The dozens of empty shelves in the thing were a testament to that. He imagined the dozens or hundreds of people who probably relied on this emergency store during whatever catastrophe had struck. Only it ended up not mattering. The supplies had only delayed the inevitable. The disaster had eventually taken everyone.

But not all the shelves were empty. In the back of the room, they found several floor-to-ceiling shelves that hadn’t been completely emptied out. On them were row after row of foil bags, hundreds of them in total.

“Well, okay,” Matt grinned, “This is the best present I've ever gotten.”