Deadworld Isekai

In high school, Matt had briefly joined the track team. He would never, ever admit his motivation to anyone. At the time, he really wanted to get six-pack abs to impress some girl that he hadn't even talked to.

He knew that there was no way he'd stay disciplined enough to do sit-ups and planks to reach the goal. Looking around for a common thread among the ab-having individuals he knew, it was pretty easy to put two and two together and see that the common thread among them was sports. So he joined, as well.

Like a lot of teenagers, Matt wasn't the best at thinking rationally when he had his eyes on the prize. In the heat of his pursuit for abs to impress a girl, he failed to ask some very relevant questions about his relationship with running. This proved pretty fatal when he realized, days into the track-and-field experience, that he hated running.

At first, he told himself that it was just because he was out of shape. Then, he got into slightly better shape and, well, it didn't help. Then, he convinced himself that he had to find the flow of running, to let it seep into him and to love it. That was dumb.

Within a month, Matt quit the team. He never got the girl, partially because of what he hid under his ill-advised band t-shirt choices. As an adult, he was a bit more mature in attributing the failure to never actually working up the courage to talk to her. At the time, he consoled himself with the fact that he'd never have to go through the hell of long-distance running again. He didn't suspect how wrong he was.

—

Matt had been running for two days.

“This… really isn't…. working. I'm going to have to try something… crazy.”

“How do you even try something crazy at this point Matt?”

48 consecutive hours of running would not have been possible in Matt's Earth body. Hell, it probably wasn't possible for any Earth body, even those who ran ultra-marathons and actually enjoyed running.

With a few additional vitality points from dungeon clears, Matt's Gaian body could run that long. Though it did take a few weird hacks and great suffering.

When the ape had first emerged and charged, Matt had taken off like a frightened jet, clearing hills and terrain faster than ever before. But looking behind him, he found the ape still gaining ground. It wasn't a significant amount, but the ape was getting noticeably closer with every passing second. Eventually, it was close enough that Matt could pick out more details of the monster, and none of them had fun implications.

The ape was not only big enough to pick Matt up and pound him into the ground like a stake, but also big enough that it looked like a high-speed freight train. It also looked flexible enough that bull-fighter type dodges didn't seem like they would help. To make matters worse, its entire body was covered in thick, matted hair that concealed pound after pound of solid muscle. For the first time, survivor's instincts had failed to give Matt even an idea of where the enemy might be vulnerable. Instead, “no significant weak points, run” blasted through his mind with the intensity of a strong trumpet.

This is a bad match-up for me.

It got closer and closer, eventually closing the gap to just a few uncomfortable minutes behind Matt. And then it just stopped. Matt looked behind him to see the thing’s heaving chest and made the connection: the system had been able to order up a gigantic, strong, and fast enemy, but had to cut corners somewhere. It took a lot of energy to move that much bulk, and Matt had an edge on stamina.

Taking advantage of the pause, Matt increased the gap. Occasionally, he'd glance back to see how much his situation was improving. It took a few minutes before the ape roared back to the chase, freshened up but significantly slower than before. Matt had to stop at that point, he didn't want to burn out and face an enemy winded. By the time Matt starting moving again, the gap had shrunk significantly but the balance had adjusted about a half-minute in Matt's favor.

At first, Matt thought he could outdistance the ape by putting some terrain features between them, cutting off its slight-lines enough that it would lose track of him. Unfortunately, the ape came built with either scent-tracking, or the intelligence to follow Matt's very obvious footprints. After a few hours, Matt had amassed about a ten-minute lead on the thing, but the lead alone wouldn’t help. He’d have to do more with it.

Matt kept running, but now he had a plan.

Between his new sticks and tent components, he had just enough material to set up a pretty decent whip trap, one that would push significant power into his improved trap spikes. It might just have a chance of injuring the thing.

The problem was getting the time to build the trap. Matt led the ape around in a huge circle, growing his lead as much as he could. Every couple of hours, he'd loop back to his trap site, deviating from his course enough so that the ape wouldn't blunder into the thing, throw together a few more components, then rush away.

Completing the trap took an entire day. Between every tent component he had, his extendable spear-pole, all of his trap sticks, improved trap spikes, and every sharp object he owned, he was able to put together a sort of mega-trap. If anything could take down the ape, this would.

Passing the trap one last time, Matt adjusted his course to go past the trap. He didn't hide it very well so if the ape was the least bit smart, it wouldn't trip it. But one could hope. Matt stopped above a nearby rise to watch as the monster came closer. He prayed that it would be stupid enough to not care about the trap until it was too late.

“Matt, it very clearly sees your trap,” Lucy said, exasperated.

“I know,” Matt's tone belied his stress.

“He’s not going to trip it, and you put all your weapons into it.”

“Lucy, I know.”

“Oh, we are so screwed,” Lucy sighed.

The ape regarded the trap curiously for a few seconds. Then, for some incredible reason, it slowly walked up on the trap anyways, coming inches from the trip-wire.

Lucy's eyes grew wide. “What? How, are you serious? It's going to trip it anyway? Matt, you lucky bastard.” She followed that up with, “It can't, right? It can't be that dumb.”

The ape’s foot caught the wire, and the trap sprung hundreds of pounds of stored potential energy directly at the ape. Every sharp thing Matt owned whistled through the air. It was the deadliest non-explosive trap Matt had ever put together.

The projectiles hit the ape's chest, then stopped. The thing huffed in a way Matt could swear was laughter, ripped the trap out of the ground, and hurled it off into the distance. It had taken no damage.

“Shit! Shit. What… what even is that thing? How could it not get hurt?” Matt was starting to freak out now.

“I don't know!”

“How do I kill it?”

“Matt, I don’t know!”

And so, Matt had to keep running.

Given how little damage the whip-trap had done, Matt immediately gave up any hope of building a new trap. There was no way he'd have the time to build anything with a chance of hurting the thing, and he'd have no reliable way of setting off an explosive trap.

The lack of time was further reinforced by a timely, sarcastic system message.

Ding!

Alert: One level of exhaustion gained.

Vitality is pretty good. You can run farther and faster than you should be able to. It’s nice, right? But it’s not unlimited. After running for more than three days, you are starting to hit the limits of what vitality can do for you.

You’ve picked up a level of exhaustion. It’s not a big effect in absolute terms. You'll find that you can't run quite as far as you did before, and rests take just a bit longer. But in relative terms? Whoo, boy. It could end up being an important difference.

The system wasn’t wrong. In most situations, exhaustion wouldn’t be a big deal. But, in the current situation, it was the difference between building a gap from the monster and losing ground in the case. Without better ideas, he charged along anyway with knowledge that he was now on a timer, one that was steadily ticking down.

Alert: One level of exhaustion gained.

The system regrets to inform you that the game can probably be called at this point. It’s now just a matter of time.

Maybe it was the running, but Matt's mind spun faster than ever before. Every sprint-and-rest cycle allowed the ape to make up a minute's worth of distance. The animal’s speed advantage was mitigated slightly when Matt ditched his pack. He didn’t want to know what a lack of food and water would do to him under the circumstances, so he brought his canteen, a packet of food, and a few other things that would fit in his pockets. One of the pocket items was brought along on a hunch. Everything else was discarded in favor of reducing his weight as much as possible.

But it was still a losing battle.

“Yes… I think, I have… an idea. It’s not… I can’t imagine it will work.” Matt was barely getting the words out between breaths.

“You aren’t going to fight it, right? I can’t see that working out.”

During the run, Matt had circled back to his trap and desperately ripped out the spear-pole and his knife. He was armed, but Lucy was right; there wasn’t much chance the spear was going to help him.

“No… Something else…. Can you pull up your plans?” Matt was huffing around every word now. He had to stop talking soon. He was at the point where every mouthful of oxygen mattered. “The dungeon itinerary?”

“I can, but I don't think this thing will give up if you duck into a dungeon,” Lucy said.

“Maybe… We might find out.” Matt stopped talking.

Even if the ape did give up when Matt went into a dungeon, it was still a death sentence. He had limited food, and his frequent in-dungeon experiments with Eat Anything! had shown that leveling the skill did little to make dungeons a sustainable source of food. Even if this ape starved to death, Matt suspected the system could just release more. Outlasting the problem was likely not an option.

He was still reliant on what he could scavenge, and the ape wasn’t going to allow him to dig fun little holes all over Gaia. It would find his footprints, follow them, and that would be that. But it was the start of a plan. Something in Matt's mind told him that he was forgetting something.

After three more hours of running, they got to the dungeon. By now, the ape was less than a minute behind them. Matt was at the end of a stamina cycle, too. By the time he rested up enough to matter, the ape had arrived. He ducked into the dungeon and stood over the plinth as the ape jerked the doors wide open and squeezed through the entrance.

The ape looked on expectantly as Matt put his hand to the plinth. Matt might have been crazy, but something in the thing’s eyes told Matt it had expected this, that it knew something like this was coming. Any hope of hunkering down in the dungeon to wait out the ape evaporated.

Matt’s hand met the top of the plinth. It didn’t react. It was dead.

The ape started moving forward, filling the space between Matt and the outside world with a truckload of dusty simian muscle.

Matt extended his spear, pointing it at the thing. It huff-laughed and batted the spear out of Matt's hands, ripping a fair amount of the skin off Matt’s palms. It wasn’t in any hurry now. There was literally no place Matt could go. It lifted one of its gigantic paws and batted lightly at Matt’s chest. He was flung all the way to the back wall like a baseball. All the air left his lungs as he clutched at his ribs in agony.

I swear, it looks smug. Matt didn’t know if it was his increased perception stat, but he could swear the ape was pleased with itself, happy and triumphant after finally chasing down its prey. It lowered his head and roared in victory at Matt, its chest barely scraping the top of the plinth as it did.

“No, Matt!” Lucy screamed.

Matt ignored his instinct to flee, shoved his hand into his pocket, and poured all of his intent into activating the Dungeon Reward Retrieval Token.

Go, little plinth. If ever you loved me, go.

The plinth immediately sprung into action. Knives couldn’t penetrate the ape’s hide, but light apparently could, something that became clear as the ape's chest began to glow blue. Matt’s new ape-emotion reader stopped giving off “I’ve got you now, prey” messages, settling into more of an “Oh, shit, shit” vibe.

The ape stopped paying any attention to Matt and started panicking. It shoved at the walls and floor in a desperate attempt to stand back up. The plinth wasn’t having any of it. The ape was well and truly stuck with its chest to the plinth. Matt did his best to distance himself from its flailing, doing his best to croak words out to Lucy through the pain of a shattered rib cage.

“Hey…”

“Yes, Matt?”

“Plinths… you said that they draw in material from their surroundings when they materialize loot?”

Lucy had to make an effort to tear her eyes away from the ape. “Yeah, wow. I can't believe you remembered. How did you think of this?” She gestured at the ape. “It doesn’t seem like it can get away at all.”

Matt struggled to his feet as the ape’s flailing slowed down. He watched its breathing become labored as the blue light in its chest got brighter and brighter. Finally, he took the risk of leaning down towards its face, close enough that he could smell its weird, sweaty breath as it hit his face.

“I normally wouldn’t enjoy this, but...” He glanced at its chest, half-dreading what was about to happen. Then he spoke again, steel in his voice. “But you made me run, you asshole.”

The blue light suddenly cut out and a mid-quality shovel materialized in the ape’s chest.