Deadworld Isekai

For better or worse, Matt had time.

The monster that took his foot had scratched and struggled around the crack to try and finish the job, but couldn't do much about solid rock. Eventually, it lost interest and left. When other monsters came around, Matt tried his best to be silent and listen as they stopped and sniffed the air before also trying and failing to dig or squeeze their way to him.

Combined with the dark environment, Matt had pretty good evidence that these monsters were scent hunters. That wasn't good for him, since his nose was nowhere near as good. But at least, they were hunters who couldn't reach him for now. They also appeared to be solitary, and never moved in packs. In a normal iteration of this dungeon, there would probably only be a single one of them, but the swarm monster option had increased their numbers without changing their normal solitary behavior.

Somewhere, Lucy is freaking out. The system hadn't mentioned what it had done with her. For what Matt knew, she was likely still standing alone outside the dungeon, wondering what the hell happened. Every minute he spent in this hole was one she was likely spending stressed and worried, or at the very least, cussing him out and calling him stupid.

I still need to be smart about this.

As much as he wanted to get out of the cold and darkness, his rational mind told him to make good choices. The first was to wait. His foot and eye didn't seem like they were planning on regenerating any further, but maybe vitality would surprise him. And he had no idea how the monsters actually moved and behaved. In a situation where any surprise might kill him, it was worth gathering all the information he could. He had plenty of food and water, so he waited.

After a couple of days, Matt's foot and eye still had not come back, but he did learn some things. The most important of which was that the animals never seemed to double back. When one of them passed, it would be at least several minutes before the next monster came by.

He also figured out how to hide his presence in the crack. At the end of the first day of waiting, one particularly motivated cave monster managed to wake him from what little sleep he was getting. Annoyed enough to work against his fear and with nothing to lose, he looked in his pack for anything worthless enough to chuck at the monster. It wasn't exactly the smartest thing to do, but it would make him feel better. That was important. He wasn't about to pass up a morale-building opportunity.

After a quick inventory, most of his possessions were eliminated from the running. The torch was valuable and finite. His weapons were also best kept on him. Even trying to put together a spear seemed like a bad idea when the monster might yank the blade away. In the end, Matt was left with one obvious option: his bag of dust.

Not every bag of food cubes he had found in the storage chest had survived the test of time. At the time, he had decided to take some of the horrifying rotted dust that resulted from years of decay. He had combined multiple bags worth of dust into a single package, and also added to it when he encountered similar dust in the storage depot. With plenty of it and no clear use, he had no reason not to chuck a handful of it at a giant subterranean horror.

Surprisingly, this had a huge effect. The little bits that actually made it to the animal clearly freaked it out. It pulled back from the crack and Matt could hear it rolling around outside. It spent quite a while trying to clear the dust from its fur before moving on.

More importantly, the much larger portion of dust from Matt's throw had ended up on the floor, and seemed to mask his scent. Subsequent monsters, which Matt named moles, would walk near it and immediately give up on the crack when they smelled the stuff in there.

Good. That’s something. Let’s keep finding things like that.

—

After a day and a half more of rest with no real improvement to his physical predicament, Matt started working on preparations to go out. The first came in the form of improvements to the crack itself.

He had sneaked a few minutes between monsters to examine his surroundings and found that he had taken the worst possible route through it. A foot to the left, there was a slightly larger path that led to the same cavity. With a bit of chipping from his multitool, he managed to build a method for him to get in and out of the crack quickly without widening the mouth of the crack. It was as good as escape routes went.

After that, he worked on a much bigger problem: mitigating the loss of a foot. With one of his boots presumably lost to the stomach of an underground abomination, he packed the other boot with pieces of metal and cloth from the tunic when he first arrived at Gaia, shaping it to more or less fit the stump. Using the laces and pieces of rope to lash his contraption to his leg, he eventually found a way to slowly hobble around on with both legs. It was painful as hell, but he wouldn't have to crawl.

Leaving the crack, the experimentation continued. He found that while the beasts didn't like the dust, it wasn't exactly repellent. He laid down a thin line of it from wall-to-wall at the narrowest part of the cave. They walked over it.

Matt also found that “cave” was probably the wrong term for where he was at. Not far from his crack, he found a pile of rubble tucked away in an alcove. It could have been from some kind of cave-in, but it looked more like an intentional debris dump, something planned by workers as opposed to naturally occurring.

He had to keep these outings as short as possible. A day or so of waiting had shown him that the minimum time he could count on between animals was less than two minutes. He’d leap out, hobble, do some work, learn some things, and scurry back. Every time he’d learn something new.

At some point, he learned that a tripwire trap wouldn't work. A full day's worth of hidden-hole fabrication efforts were just enough to cobble together a trap out of tent-poles and trap spikes. Although Matt wasn't hoping for the trap to seriously hurt the monsters, he was still disappointed when the monsters stepped over his tripwire with so much care that he suspected the dungeon was cheating.

It didn’t matter. It was still information. He put it with the rest of what he was learning.

—

In between excursions, he had time to kill and questions to ask. The first task he set himself to was spending some time with his system interface. During his time on Gaia, he had come to have a grudging respect for the sheer enormity of system windows available to him. Most of them were useless to him, with names like “magical atmospheric conditions” containing a massive amount of N/A indicators wherever information might go. He assumed they were for other classes, left in place and empty rather than fully locked away from him. He had seen hundreds of windows like these.

It took him about an hour of trying different dungeon-related queries to find the exact window he was looking for, one packed with automatic preferences for interacting with the dungeons. The dungeon system at least didn’t appear to be lying about his settings, and all the various toggles it had mentioned were set to the difficulty-enhancing levels it had claimed.

In Matt’s thinking, that meant two things. First, someone had messed with his settings, and there were only three possible culprits to blame. It was simple to rule himself out, even in terms of doing it by accident. He hadn’t known this window existed, and it wasn’t easy to find. Unless he was a much smarter sleepwalker than he had any reason to believe, this wasn’t a crazy mess-up on his part.

Lucy might have done it, but every interaction he had ever had with her indicated that she wasn't able to see his system screen, let alone interact with it. It was possible she had spent all this time working an incredibly complex long-con, but he doubted she was capable of it. On top of that, he just didn’t feel like she had any reason to. Things had been much better lately between them. Despite her early history of asking him to die, he felt like they were friends now. And friends did not booby trap friend’s dungeons.

Even if he still wanted to suspect her, there was a much more likely villain in play: the system itself. With few other ways to learn about the problem, he queried it again and again. Lucy had told him it wasn’t actually allowed to fully ignore questions under its own ruleset, and at first, it seemed to try to circumvent this with non-answer responses. But even those responses contained nuggets of information.

Invalid Query. The system cannot directly harm a reincarnator. Invalid Query. The system cannot alter system settings against the expressed wishes of reincarnated individuals. Invalid Query: The system does not “try to shank” reincarnators. Every action the system takes must directly create a possibility of growth for the individual the action affects. Invalid Query: Death is always a risk for reincarnators, as it is for any being. No aspect of the existence of harm was ever in question.

After hundreds of these questions, Matt had a good idea of what happened. The system’s carefully worded responses left a negative space of loopholes, one that ended with a course of action suspiciously like what had happened.

Had Matt expressly commanded the system not to change his dungeon settings? He hadn’t. It took him a full day to find the toggle that let him unambiguously make clear that the system was not allowed to do this, and set it to “deny”.

Had the system directly tried to harm him? Nope. All the harms were indirect, inflicted by the dungeon working in the normal ways dungeons worked, even if the danger was amplified tenfold by the system’s interference.

It was even arguable that this challenge, if overcome, would result in growth for Matt. It wasn’t like there weren’t rewards. And, it wasn’t as if he wasn’t learning things. Death really had always been a risk since he landed on Gaia.

In the end, Matt came to two big conclusions. The first was the system had done this. Was there a small possibility he was wrong? Sure, but not one he took seriously. The system was out to get him. The question was now why. The first schism with the system had come when Matt had tried to use his Gaia authority. Something about it had marked Matt as a problem to the system, but it wasn't like he had gained it recently. The pattern of system behavior wasn't adding up.

Second, the system was willing to deal. After hours of fruitless questioning, it dropped the real bombshell.

Quest: Give up.

The system can’t remove a reincarnator's life, but it can give them a new one. Death hurts, but you know from experience it doesn’t hurt forever. Giving up gives the system an opportunity to correct its mistakes.

We can fix this.

Rewards: Guaranteed reincarnation, increased system support, and assignment of an improved system guardian.