Deadworld Isekai

It was a strange experience to not have a body. Matt wasn't floating in nothingness. It was more like he didn’t have anything to float with in the first place.

Somehow, he could still think and imagine things. So at least he existed in a Descartian sense, but being a disembodied consciousness was an unwelcome additional wrinkle in an already very wrinkly week. As he not-hung in the not-air, Matt contemplated that his situation had somehow gone from bad, to very bad, to now utterly unpleasant. This was somehow worse than dying of hunger.

Luckily, he didn’t have to wait long.

Ding!

Entrant record not found. Is this your first time entering a dungeon?

Hopefully this thing reads thoughts. Matt tried his hardest to indicate it was his first time, mentally.

Response acknowledged. Scanning entrant memories.

Entrant memories do not include knowledge of this dungeon’s featured threats. Would you like to substitute an equivalent danger from your experiences?

If Matt was understanding the question correctly, the dungeon was worried he wouldn’t be appropriately afraid of the enemies it wanted to present him. If this dungeon ended up conforming to the isekai themes Matt was familiar with, he might end up with cute animals that would rip his throat out in seconds. It seemed like a better idea to deal with threats he could visually identify as dangerous as opposed to having to be paranoid about everything, or else walk around completely unwarned.

Response acknowledged. Generating dungeon. Please stand by.

“Wait! Tell me something else about this dungeon! What level should I be? What’s the point of it, even?” Matt shouted in his thoughts.

Any extra information might mean the difference between life and death, but the dungeon was already gone. And after a few minutes, so was Matt. Again.

—

I have to stop waking up in new places, Matt grunted in his mind.

Despite suddenly being shoved back into a body and unceremoniously dumped on the ground, it wasn’t all bad. For one, there was grass. Even before Matt opened his eyes, he could feel the grass blades bending against his skin. He opened his eyes to find himself in an idyllic grove. Too idyllic to really exist. It reminded him more of Bambi than reality. Then again, Gaia used to be a garden planet, maybe this was par for the course here, once.

Matt stood and almost started wandering immediately before realizing the implications of doing so unarmed. Mostly unarmed, anyway. He had the knife he got from the loot box, but it was in his backpack. He took it out and threaded it through his belt. The weight of the knife and sheath on his hip was foreign but comforting. He unsheathed and resheathed it a few times, making sure he could get at it on a moment’s notice. He wasn’t yet sure what the threats in the forest were, and even the birds chirping in the distance might end up being a danger to him.

After getting his weaponry in order, Matt retied his boots, gave himself a quick once-over, and started walking. The rest of the forest was as beautiful as where he woke up; flowers were blooming here and there, and the light cut through the trees just so, throwing golden beams of sun on everything. Even red, full berries were growing.

“System, can I eat food I find in the dungeons?”

All objects not explicitly created to be taken out of the dungeon are illusions created by the dungeon itself. Food found within a dungeon can be eaten, but any nourishment it provides is illusory. But the harm that some foods have will be real. It's usually not considered to be worth the risk.

Survivor’s instincts backed up the dungeon’s claim in a different way. In Matt's understanding, random berries in the woods are often no-no food. But Matt was truly starving. His eyes stayed glued to those berries. It was probably dangerous, but so was everything! He was very close to convincing himself he could just eat a couple. It would be fine.

With great effort, Matt tore his eyes away and moved on. He needed real solutions, and his only chance at them was finishing the dungeon. As he walked away, he felt a twinge from his survivor’s instincts, asking him to move cautiously. So, he tried to move as quietly as he could through the forest, avoiding every stick and branch that might make a noise. He quickly found he sucked at this, and that moving cautiously took forever. He gave it his best shot anyway.

After an hour or so, every muscle in his body was creaking. It turned out that while he was pretty ok at walking, sneaking took a slightly different set of muscles, a set that now hated him and was making that dislike as clear as it could. As long as he kept moving, these muscles wouldn't stiffen up, but moving itself was now terrible. He decided that if he didn’t find any enemies in the next ten minutes, he’d give it up.

He started watching the system clock. It took nine minutes, almost to the second.

—

Matt didn’t dare talk, but almost immediately found that the system would answer mental queries.

System, what in the everloving shit is this?

The system is not responsible for dungeon generation and cannot guess at the parameters used to create specific aspects of dungeons.

Fine, cover your ass. I’ll ask your friend. DUNGEON SYSTEM, what is this, you incredible asshole?

Clarify: Is the entrant asking about terrain, foes, or general dungeon facts?

You know perfectly well what I’m asking about.

Clarify, please.

The “foes”, dungeon system. Why are they clowns?

Matt had heard them long before he saw them. They produced a light chattering that stood out against the backdrop of bird noises. With brush still blocking his view, he had dropped to the ground and army crawled until he posted up behind a relatively large fallen log. Peeking over the top, he finally saw them.

The enemy was something like an earth rat, only larger and more willing to operate out in the open. There were five or six of them, all the size of fairly large house cats or fairly small dogs. That was bad news. A small dog was a menace on earth, and these came in a pack. They were walking on what appeared to be a rough game trail, and didn’t notice him. He had plenty of time to get a good, detailed look.

They were horrifying.

More specifically, they were clowns. The system had reskinned whatever animal this originally was as a disastrous little quadrupedal clown. They had red noses. Their feet were big oversized shoes, and their heads were covered with an assortment of big puffy wigs, little weird hats, and comical baldness. When they went to nibble on plants, they did so with human-shaped mouths packed with big rodent teeth. The system had even gone as far as to customize the face-paint on each individual animal.

As discussed, the dungeon system searched through creatures from your experience you fear and chose one at random, then used it to alter existing system creatures.

Creatures, dungeon system! You said creatures! Clowns are people!

Your psychological profile indicates that you do not believe that.

Matt paused. The system actually had him there. It wasn’t wrong to pick clowns in the sense that Matt did consider them horrifying fantasy creatures of a sort. The problem was that this bizarre combination of clowns with beasts had tipped him over the edge from “those are creepy” territory into the realm of “this is the worst thing I can imagine” territory.

Well, no problem. He just wouldn’t fight those. There had to be some exit to the dungeon. He’d find that, and hopefully avoid all combat. If the system wasn’t lying, his leveling was based on surviving, not fighting. He could sneak his way out of this.

Ding!

Dungeon Objective Discovered!

[Don’t Send In The Clowns]: You have observed a pack of roaming Clownrats. Clownrats represent a threat to this forest and to complete the dungeon, you must eliminate them.

Objective: Eliminate Clownrat packs 0/4

Reward: Low-Grade Dungeon Loot Selection

Yup. Fantastic. Great. Matt cursed the system.

—

Finding an ambush position took a while. He had to find a spot close enough to the path where he could spring out of it and surprise the clowns. He also had to find a spot far enough that the clowns couldn't see him until it was too late. The rats didn't seem to have great long-range senses, for what it was worth. He could see them from much further than they seemed to be able to see him. But he was guessing when it came to their close-range noticing capabilities and just hoping he got it right. Finding a spot he was comfortable betting on took more than an hour.

During that time, he also learned some important things. First, more than one pack of Clownrats was on the game path. He had clocked a second, distinct pack, following about a half hour after the first.

Second, the system seemed to have cut corners on general animal behavior and forest details. As he lurked in the sticky, branchy brush of his ambush point, he watched the two packs pass. Then, the first pack appeared again from the same direction that he had first spotted the pack. Either the path was a circle or the dungeon was unspawning and respawning the packs on some sort of timer. It didn’t matter to Matt how it was happening, but it was nice that he wouldn’t have to track each pack to get the job done.

With the first pack approaching again, it was now or never. He zeroed in on the alpha of the pack, or at least what he thought to be the alpha. It was a larger clown with a diamond pattern over its too-human eyes. Diamond-eye was slightly more frightening than the others, but that was why Matt had decided to take it down first. He absolutely wanted to avoid any situation where the thing ended up behind him.

The Clownrats crept up within a meter or so of his hiding place, still apparently unaware of Matt’s presence. They smelled like wet dog, and looked like nightmares he wasn’t creative enough to have. He almost considered letting them pass and avoiding the confrontation when diamond eye suddenly stopped, tensed, and sniffed the air.

Now or never.

Matt sprang from cover, knife in hand. Diamond-eye squealed in surprise, and the other five rats in the pack wheeled around immediately. But it was too late for him to avoid Matt’s attack. The knife point fell down on its back, at the portion of its spine between the back and head. Matt was hoping to sever its brain stem. If these animals were anything like earth beasts, that would be fatal.

And then his knife hit bone. When Matt was digging his garden, he would occasionally hit a rock with his shovel point. Whenever that happened, it was an unpleasant nails-on-chalkboard feeling that he avoided as much as he could. This was ten times worse, not just because it gave the same feeling, and not just because his hand was suddenly getting soaked with Clownrat blood. It was worse because it immediately became clear he hadn’t managed to kill the animal in one hit.

Diamond-eye bit him in response.

Ding!

You have been injured, -2 hp.

The damn thing’s teeth went deep, but it luckily didn’t hang on. Matt took the opportunity to stab Diamond-eye several times in the side, in a flurry of desperate blows. Diamond-eye went suddenly limp and a series of system-dings came up that Matt willed away as they came. He had to stoop to stab the thing, and as he straightened up, he felt another jolt of pain. One of the pack had got at his ankle. And the hits kept coming.

You have been injured. -2 hp.
You have been injured. -2 hp.
You have been injured. -2 hp.
You have been injured. -2 hp.
You have been injured. -2 hp.

Matt willed away the notifications as fast as he could. They were covering his view and he could hardly tell what was happening.

Dammit! System, stop telling me this stuff!

Query: Would you like to activate a less obtrusive HP tracking option?

Not right now!

Understood. Notifications temporarily suppressed.

Matt had hoped killing Diamond-eyes would scatter the lesser clowns. As he jumped back from his position, he saw the opposite was true. They were pissed. For the first time, it occurred to Matt that rats were usually social animals. It was entirely possible that he had just killed their mother. Either way, they were visibly angry and not backing down at all. Down to a handful of health points, he did the only thing he could do. He ran.