Deadworld Isekai

Matt had read plenty of stories where a villain tried to tempt one of the protagonist's friends for betrayal. They'd always feel so fake. Why wouldn't the friend just say no? Even to the character within the story, it should have been obvious which way the wind was blowing. If they said no, they'd be no worse off than before. Whereas, if they said yes, they'd be a villain.

But applied to Matt? It felt different. He understood why the characters always took the offer. There was hardly anything he wanted more than a fresh start, especially after being cheated out of two separate lives. The system was offering him that opportunity. It would find him a new planet, presumably check to make sure that it was good before sending him there, and also throw in some extra help as a bonus.

All he had to do was crawl outside and wait. Would getting eaten hurt? Sure. But Matt was no stranger to pain. It didn't even have to be that complicated. There was nothing in the quest that demanded he give himself up to the monsters outside. He could do the deed himself, right where he was. Given what the system was offering, it would be hard to even think of it as suicide.

Only one thing stopped him, and it was a single line of text he could sense the system didn’t want him to think about very hard.

The assignment of an improved system guardian.

It might have been talking about making Lucy stronger or smarter. That was possible, except that the wording wasn't “improve his system guardian”. It said it would assign him a better guardian, without a single mention of what would happen to Lucy.

She had never said so outright, but Matt guessed that the end of him also meant the end of her. Could the system keep her alive and healthy? Maybe, but Matt had a sense that the system wouldn't bother with that even if it could.

The system's offer was everything he wanted. He could be alive and strong. He could be a hero. He just had to betray one mostly-fake girl, and he would have everything.

Five years, he thought. She waited here for five years. And she's the only one who's truly on my side.

He couldn’t really trust the system after the stunt that it pulled, but even if he could, the five years Lucy had spent alone would be enough. It didn’t matter if the system could put him on the best possible planet and guarantee the best possible outcomes. He didn’t consider himself a saint, but he still had to live with himself. And a clean life that didn’t last long was still better than a long one wracked by guilt.

“Screw you, system.” Matt wrenched himself onto his ruined leg. He had work to do.

—

Gathering the rocks took about a week. Every trip to the rubble pile and back was a hurried thing, with him hobbling as fast as he could through the excruciating pain of using his footless leg. Some trips, he didn't even make it to the pile. He'd abort when it became clear that his speed was slower than usual, and would return empty-handed.

In comparison, building the walls was difficult in a different way. He didn't have glue or cement, so Matt had to stack each rock in a way where they wouldn't fall down. It was a puzzle-assembling art he had to learn on the job, and the wall would tumble down with any mistake. It was worse because he had to leave a path for the monsters to go through, hoping they didn’t knock everything down as they passed. More than once, they did, making him start all over. But he got better at it. He had time.

Eventually, everything was ready. He strapped on his makeshift foot, popped a few food cubes, and drank some water. He was as ready as he'd ever be. It was time.

—

Matt “stood”, for lack of a better word, by an invention he had come to think of as the murder wall. It was two extremely sturdy walls of rocks, with one designed to have a big, stable hole in the center he could stab through.

The two wall segments were meant to be joined together. Plugging this center channel of the wall ended up being the hardest part of the plan. He only had minutes to build the wall before the next monster came.

Matt first made an outer layer with rocks that were wider than the channel. He'd turn them sideways, slip through, turn back, and stack them atop each other. Choosing the right base stones tilted the layer to lean back on the two wall segments with more permanent stone stackings.

He then reinforced the new center with a second layer of pure stone. There wasn't any distinct arrangement to it, just sheer mass. The idea was to draw attention away from the weak center of the wall to the stronger murder hole where Matt was.

Like everything else, stacking the new center in just a few minutes took practice. Matt leaned on his improved strength and stamina, carefully organizing the rocks and building muscle memory. He got it down to building a new wall in just over a minute, hopefully a short enough time that he wouldn't encounter an ambush and have to start all over again.

He hadn’t been sure it would work, but he had finished building the center wall in time.

His stump leg was now out of his boot and sitting on a low, flat rock that was cushioned by the same, dependable tunic he relied on for all his textile needs. He could pivot around the rock pretty well, which would hopefully be enough to pierce the monster's hide with his spear.

Building the spear was a hard task, considering the fact that he didn't have any sticks to work with like in the previous dungeons. He ended up lashing his knife to the end of the shovel, and created a bizarre piece of gardening weaponry. It didn't look super sturdy, but it was the best he could do. A better option would have been to sharpen the shovel itself, but when he tried that, the Gaian mystery metal was far too tough. A whole hour's worth of grinding made no visible difference.

For a man that had spent over a week in a tiny cavity, the wait didn't feel long. Within a few seconds, a monster approached. Matt had built the wall across the narrowest part of the tunnel, several meters behind the cavity itself. The extra distance during each trip was well worth the saved construction effort, though it did mean that he was effectively cut off from any retreat back to the cavity. He also hoped that the narrowness of the tunnel would keep the monsters from crowding the fortifications, allowing only one or two to approach at a time.

The monster moved closer, curious about the new obstruction blocking its route. Soon, it was within stabbing distance, but Matt held off from attacking. He first had to verify the second component of his plan, something that he hadn't been able to independently test before.

Over the course of Matt's stay at Chateau Du Cave, the beasts had become more or less accustomed to the smell of black dust from the rotted emergency food. With it now wetted and smeared all over his body, it seemed that the monsters couldn’t “see” him very well.

They really do rely on smell, Matt thought. Good. That gives me a shot. He waited for the beast to get comfortable, letting it investigate until it finally poked it’s big, ugly head up to the hole. This was the best look Matt had ever got at the monsters that had attacked him. Moles, makes sense.

He then stabbed the thing in the face with everything he had. He aimed at the eye, but a combination of the animal's eyes being slightly to the sides of its head and its instinctive jerk back made him miss, striking it in the forehead instead. The failure of the knife vibrated in the shovel shaft, and he heard a clear sound as the blade cut down to bone. It was a deep gash, but nothing fatal.

The mole hissed loudly and started tearing at the wall. It had begun.

Matt stabbed away for all he was worth, hitting the mole as many times and as hard as possible. He was injuring it, at least to a limited extent. After several seconds, the mole’s face was gushing blood, but it wasn’t deterred in the slightest. When the second mole came, the first was still standing and actively tearing at the wall.

Matt continued stabbing as hard as he could, hoping to delay the fall of the wall for as long as possible. He had built the wall thick, as thick as he could while sneaking around patrols of cave moles. As he punished the mole, it continued to tear away at the wall, shifting rocks off the stack and destabilizing it. Eventually, it managed to get enough rocks out of the way that half the wall fell forward over it. This too failed to hurt the mole enough to put it out of commission. By this time, there were a total of three moles in the vicinity, and they all rushed through the gap into the wider tunnel beyond, just in time to see Matt’s leg disappearing into the second wall.

The second wall was not like the first. Rather than blocking the whole tunnel, this was a semicircle of stones backed up to the side of the cavern, looking more like a castle tower than a wall. He had left a hole in the bottom, one that he could scramble through, but that would hopefully still be too small for the mole to traverse.

It was a semicircle because one horizontal wall had turned out to be his limit. He had tested the stacking in a dozen ways, and he just couldn’t plug the holes in the center fast enough for two full walls.

By nature of letting the moles pass, the tower could be designed as a semi-permanent structure, with no last-minute modifications needed. But while it offered all the protection of the walls, it came with no viable escape options short of total victory. Whatever came next would have to work, or he’d be trapped.

As the mole stuck its head through the bottom hole, Matt’s knife finally found an eye. The thing thrashed as Matt bore all his weight down on the shovel, riding the weight of the moving head as well as he could on one good leg. Eventually, it pulled back from the wall before falling still and silent. It was his first kill. He had hoped to have three by now. The other moles didn’t hesitate to attack the wall in the wake of their friend's death, and Matt started stabbing from the top, delaying them as long as possible.

The moles were brave, but not impervious to pain. Without Matt constantly attacking them, he figured that they could have gotten through both walls in just a minute. Now, it took several. Matt did his best to track the time as the wall slowly eroded under the moles’ gross paws.

Matt wasn’t able to see enough to be certain, but he felt confident that there were probably five living enemies in the section of tunnel behind the wall. He dropped the spear and turned to a stock of canisters by his feet.

The cooking fuel he had scavenged from the first lockbox was heavy. The only thing that had kept him from ditching the canisters was a distaste for abandoning any resource, given the survival theme of the planet. If he had actually used it for cooking, he would have probably used it up by now. But he hadn’t, and now some fun stuff could happen. The canister was meant to slowly heat up a small bag. To keep the gas flow at a sedate pace was a small limiter plug with a hole in the center. That limiter turned out to be removable if someone had enough time and a specific enough tool for the job. With the multi-tool, Matt turned a couple of canisters into fire hazards.

Now, he twisted the valves open on the canisters one at a time and shoved them out of the murder hole, spewing gas that he knew from experimentation would gather at the bottom of the room. Once they were beyond the wall, Matt used the torch to light a fuel-soaked rope fuse that extended outwards towards mole territory. He then tipped over a large rock to cover his entrance hole, praying that the shelter he had built would be enough to keep himself from getting blown up outright.

Was the plan stupid? Yes. But by now, stupid was becoming his entire brand. He crouched down, covered his ears, and closed his good eye as the fuse finally burned down to meet the gas and start all of his prepared chaos.

The explosion was bigger than he thought it would be. He was hoping for something that might injure the moles, or at least disorient them long enough for him to shimmy out and finish them off. This was not that.

The shock echoed through the cavern and toppled his wall of stones down onto him. He coughed and breathed in a cloud of dust that had been kicked up, and struggled to dig himself out of the rubble.

What he saw gave him a newfound respect for the wisdom of gas canister limiter rings.

In front of him, the moles burned. The light from the remaining fire in the room was predominantly from what little hair they had. The explosion had taken out four of the things, apparently all that was there at the time. He had hoped to get more, but his more immediate concern was that one of the moles had been blasted back to his crack. They were massive animals, probably more than 400 pounds apiece. He had no chance of shifting them and getting back to safety.

And though the blast had taken out the moles, Matt was less glad to see that the explosion had also collapsed his second wall.

He looked around desperately for the rising of a victory plinth, and was disappointed. That was a problem, especially with the fact that a new, fat mole had just rounded the corner, followed by another two smaller moles.

Matt hadn't seen the fat mole before, at least not clearly. He had heard it, though. One of the moles that crossed the tunnel in front of his hidey-hole had always been louder than the others, clomping along like a hippo. The first few times Matt's walls had been knocked down, it was because of this mole that he named Fatty. Matt had to widen the middle passage just for this special, fat mole.

Now, Fatty stood before Matt in all of his rotund glory, looking hungry and not at all concerned with the other fallen moles. And there was nothing between Matt and Fatty but the smell of burning moles.