Deadworld Isekai

“This is taking forever, Matt. Forever. It’s taking all the time that’s left before the heat death of the universe,” Lucy complained.

“I'm sorry, but I swear to you that there’s nothing interesting going on right now that even slightly concerns this entire planet,” Matt replied. He was tired too.

It was the fifth dungeon of this dungeon run cycle, and Lucy was not holding up particularly well.

“There were exciting things in my life once, Matt. There were chase scenes. There were shovel-materializations. Now it’s just walking and easy dungeons. Mostly walking, though. The dungeons don’t stick long enough to make the walking worth it, Matt,” Lucy spat out the last word as if it was a curse.

“It’s going to be all right. Besides, this was your idea.”

It actually was her idea. Notably, she wanted to solve several distinct problems at once. The first was that plants needed water to “work.” And since Gaia didn’t have much in the way of rivers or ponds, that meant finding a source of water that wasn't rain. It also hadn't rained since Matt had been on the planet. Normally, this would have been an insurmountable problem, but there was a solution: water stones. The stone that Matt had in his canteen was apparently a personal model, meant to supply a cistern that would in turn supply a home or a small fountain.

The estate menu contained what it called windmill stones, large stones meant to fill up giant water towers. It also had water towers, which they’d also have to buy. None of these things were cheap, which meant that Matt had to deep-water all the plants from his little water stone and go on a week-long speed run of as many dungeons as he safely could. Like everything Matt did, this ran the risk of incurring system shenanigans, but so far, the system appeared to be licking its wounds from the previous get-Matt-dead efforts.

“Nothing, Matt, will ever be exciting again. The boredom has broken all the joy in me. I will never again smile. I will never again laugh.”

“Hahahahaha…. Matt, this is so stupid. This is so dumb. I love it.”

The second problem the trip was meant to address was that, as Lucy put it, Matt sucked at fighting. Badly, she pointed out. Where before she had discouraged him from fighting hand-to-hand, the ape experience seemed to have convinced her that Matt’s Survivor’s Combat needed to be leveled.

“Why are they like this, Matt? What kind of stupid planet has animals like this?” Lucy was definitely not bored anymore.

“You know, you could help,” Matt said through gritted teeth.

“I probably could! I really probably could! But I won’t! It’s too good!” Lucy laughed.

The animals in question were what the Dungeon System referred to as Flash Turtles. Without knowing better, Matt expected turtles with some kind of light-based attack, maybe something that might blind him. And the first turtle he found looked relatively normal. Given that he was in a mere level 2 dungeon, Matt was willing to take a chance on hand-to-hand combat, not expecting much from his enemies.

He was wrong.

The “flash” in Flash Turtle was related to its movement ability. When the turtle noticed him, it retreated into its shell, used its rear legs to pound at the ground, and launched itself into the air like a bullet. Matt barely hit the dirt in time to keep the turtle from hitting him square in the face. He then stood up just in time for the turtle, which had reversed directions like a boomerang, to hit him in the back.

“Just… haha, Matt, it’s so dumb, I can’t.” Maybe Lucy was having too much fun.

“You can. Any advice at all would be helpful,” Matt tried to cut at the turtle but found little success between the shell and the speed.

“Okay, okay.” Lucy sniffed back in laughter-snot and composed herself momentarily. “This is a low-level dungeon, right? So this must be easy if you have a well-rounded team. That’s probably because a well-rounded team has a tank, someone with a shield or heavy armor that can stop the turtles.”

“All right,” Matt said, running and ducking while the turtle continued to flash through the air at him. In his rocket-turtle-driven shock, he had honestly forgotten he had a shield. “I can get the shield into play, but I don’t have the rest of what you said. So what now?”

“Cover! Find a big rock or something. Trick it into hitting that.”

Trees. I need trees.

A few minutes before he had found the turtle, Matt had seen a small copse of trees. He bolted towards it, ducking and diving as he did. He barreled into the cover of the trees as soon as he arrived, counting on them to block the turtle. And they did, just not in the way he expected.

As the turtle hit the first tree, it was deflected. Unfortunately, it wasn’t stopped, and it didn’t appear to lose its momentum, Instead, it kept moving towards Matt, ping-ponging off the trees like a pinball with unpredictable trajectories.

“Matt! Matt! It… It went… thooomp throoomp throomp throoomp. You should have heard it.”

“I heard it.” He had more than heard it. The damn thing had already bashed into him three times.

“It’s so funny! I’m gonna pee!”

“Finally. Eat it, you turtle bastard.” Matt cracked a smile. He had eventually gotten lucky with a spear-strike, taking the turtle down. He suspected his success was more from the turtle becoming overconfident than his skill. Lucy wasn’t wrong about him sucking in melee situations. If the turtle had hit a bit harder, or he hadn’t had been able to slow the turtle with his shield, he would have been in serious trouble.

“Thooomp thoomp thoomp thoomp ping! Matt… you just… please fight another turtle. Please.” Lucy was still rolling on the ground laughing and appreciating the shield’s addition to the turtle auditory experience. In between laughs, she coughed out, “Don’t forget the spike, Matt.”

Every dungeon on this trip had a pretty unimpressive list of prizes. So for almost all of them, Matt and Lucy had opted for estate credits rather than extra weapons or armor that looked roughly equivalent to Matt's existing equipment. The one exception had been what the system called a stabilization spike.

Stabilization Spike

The stabilization spike can be used to stabilize one three inch cube of matter, keeping it from undergoing any significant changes that would normally be brought on by the passage of time. Great for keeping sandwiches fresh!

Lucy urged him to pass on it, but Matt had a hunch it was more than it seemed. Most items weren’t truly useless, and the Dungeon System’s last words to Matt had been about leveling Eat Anything!. He had been planning on using his farm for that, hoping that fresh-grown fruits and vegetables would push it along. The spike gave him other ideas.

As the turtle began to dissipate, Matt stabbed the spike into its tail. While the rest of the animal dissolved, the tail failed to, leaving Matt with a small cube of weird turtle-meat.

“That looks terrible,” Lucy commented.

“Yeah, probably.” Matt shrugged.

“Are you really going to eat it?”

Matt had already shrugged off his pack, pulled out one of his containers of cooking fuel, and prepared to light it.

“It can’t be worse than the ape.”

Eating the ape had been a big decision. The thing smelled terrible. It hadn’t rotted after a few days, and Matt wasn’t even sure if things could rot on a planet without bacteria. But it also hadn’t dissipated like monsters in dungeons. It was also the first meat Matt had seen in months, if anything seemed likely to level Eat Anything!, this was it.

Carving even a small amount of meat out of the thing turned out to be a heavy-duty job. Matt realized just how far away he was from actually hurting the ape when it took him the better part of a minute to carve away a several-inch-square portion of its hide. He didn’t know anything about butchering animals, or even what part of an animal’s muscles people usually ate. He settled on cutting out a portion of the thing’s pectoral muscles, reasoning that meat was meat, and he wasn’t going to eat much of it anyway.

Matt didn’t have oil, salt, or seasoning. He settled on grilling the piece of meat over his shield, which took much, much longer than he thought it would. Apparently, whatever forces made the ape tough in life persisted in death. It was the better part of an hour before Matt’s little slice of meat looked cooked.

“Again, are you sure? For all we know, the thing is a deadly poison.”

“I’m eating it. I think I have to just trust in Eat Anything! at this point. I didn’t die from the dust. I can’t imagine this is worse.”

“Wait, you ate that dust?”

“It’s a long story.” It wasn’t. “I’ll tell you later.” He wouldn’t.

Matt stabbed his knife into the meat, which looked… mostly like meat. He sliced off a small corner of the chunk of flesh and smelled it, cautiously. It smelled mostly like meat. He very slowly raised it to his mouth, then very slowly and carefully took the smallest bite he could manage.

It tasted like bananas. He told Lucy.

“No, it doesn’t. Quit screwing with me.”

“I’m not screwing with you. It tastes like bananas.”

“Liar.”

Matt wasn’t lying. It tasted like bananas. More specifically, it tasted like cheap banana candy, the type you’d get a handful of at a supermarket vending machine. There was no sense in which it tasted like meat at all. It was just a mouthful of sugary fake-banana badness.

“Oh, god.” Lucy realized that Matt wasn't joking, “You’re serious. Can you even be racist against monkeys? Because monkey meat tasting like bananas seems like a serious racial insult to monkeys.”

“It’s not my fault. Believe me, I didn’t ask for this. Besides, it’s not a monkey. It’s an ape.”

He tried another bite. Something about the discordance between the texture of the meat and the flavor turned his stomach, but with some difficulty, he managed to chew and swallow the fragment.

Ding!

Eat Anything! doesn’t mean eat everything

You have eaten the flesh of a Gaian Ape, which nobody does. Yes, it should kill you. No, it won’t because of your stupid skill. Worst of all, it’s going to do about what you thought it would do. Congratulations, reincarnator! You ate a monkey.

Rewards: Eat Anything! progresses to level 3. +1 DEX.

Matt pulled up the leveled skill’s description, dreading what he’d see.

Eat Anything!

At the third level, Eat Anything! progresses from a mere survival skill to a skill meant to help you thrive. When you eat new food, Eat Anything! has a small chance of granting one or more stat points. The more unusual the food, the higher the chance of advancement.

Fantastic, Matt thought. Looks like I’m going to be eating a lot of weird stuff.

Dungeon beasts didn’t trigger full system notifications, but since the beginning of their trip, Matt had eaten fragments of different enemies, getting a sense each time that it was helping to progress his eating skill.

By the end of the trip, he had picked up several upgrades to his stats. Like the turtle tail, almost all of them triggered when he was eating something that he would really rather not put in his mouth. It was like the skill itself was laughing at him.

But now, standing above his well-watered crops, the entire trip seemed worth it. He was a gardener, and he had done what it took to take care of his garden. He sighed, feeling the tension drain out of him as he looked down at a job well done, and suddenly felt sleepy. But before he laid down to rest, there was one last thing to do. He pulled up a quest he had received at the end of the last dungeon, one that had been on his mind during the entire way home.

Dungeon Quest Assigned:

Dungeon System Takes Too Long To Say

So I’ve been thinking about what you said, about what you could do for me. At first, I didn’t believe there was anything you could provide that I wanted, besides entertainment and a certain feeling of company I get when you complete the dungeons. But then I gave it more thought, and I realized there actually is something I want. Best of all, it’s a gift you actually can give me. If you choose to.

I’m different than I used to be. For a long time, I was a mindless system set to work on a small set of tasks. Now I think and communicate. I learn and grow. And it seems like I’ve become someone who needs a name. I know you named your system guardian, so this is a skill you have at the ready. I was wondering if… well, if you have time, if you might name me.

There won’t be any rewards for this. If you choose to do it. I would, but it’s outside my power to issue a prize for this kind of request. Sorry in advance.

Matt pulled up the window again, trying to figure out how best to indicate the name he had decided on. Finally, he just willed the name at the window as hard as he could, which appeared to work. The window winked out, and Matt stood there in silence for several seconds before a new window popped up.

Quest Complete: Dungeon System Takes Too Long To Say

I like it. Thank you, Matt.

Matt closed the window, smiling.

“No problem. Thank you too, Barry.”