Deadworld Isekai

“Nope. No. Nuh-uh. Nope, never, no.” Matt was adamant.

“Matt, you have to fight them!”

Matt wasn’t yet winded enough that he couldn’t talk while sprinting. “I don’t, and I won’t. We can live in this dungeon! It’s nice!”

“You'll starve to death,” Lucy wasn't playing around anymore.

Matt activated Survivor’s Dash, hopefully putting more distance between him and the yet unresolved issues of this particular dungeon. He opted not to look back, choosing to preserve his capacity of containing trauma for later.

“I won’t! There are berries here. I’ve been leveling Eat Anything! pretty hard. I can probably live off the berries now,” Matt said in between steps.

“Okay, maybe, but what about the estate, Matt? What about the plants, and revitalizing ruins?” Lucy asked.

—

A few days earlier, things had been calm. Things had been good.

Barry’s prediction that the system would be sleeping off its energy-deficit coma for a significant amount of time had proven true. Without system-driven shenanigans, Matt and Lucy's lives were much, much more predictable. That meant safety and control.

On the agricultural side of things, it was time to work. The fields needed so very many things to consistently grow plants. Matt hadn’t known that soil required a very particular biome of microbes and bacteria to do its job right. Then, several kinds of plants started failing for just that reason. He didn’t know some plants relied on wind to pollinate them until Gaia’s weird lack of weather caused another few different crops to fail.

The estate system’s vast list of purchasables came with solutions for every single one of those problems. Need wind? The estate system didn’t have a way to provide that, but it did have huge emergency devices meant to protect delicate crops in coastal regions. Newton’s third law meant that those could be installed backwards and upside-down to create wind that would pollinate the crops without destroying them. It took several experiments to get the angle just right for helping the crops without destroying them, but they got it.

Need bacteria? The system had little pills for adding these little microorganisms to the soil, which apparently was a necessary first step to producing workable soil in some swampier Gaian biomes. They didn’t involve dozens of reps of almost getting crushed by giant turbines, but they did cost a lot of credits. Need more of the big industrial water-sources the system called Windmill Stones because of the planet’s weird refusal to rain? Matt did, and they weren’t cheap.

All these costs added up.

—

Getting the credits to whip their fields into semi-sustainable shape took the better part of a month of grinding dungeons, extended by the need to re-arm Matt. The swordsman invader had done a number on his weapons. It was nothing repair stones couldn’t fix, but fully broken weapons took multiple stones to repair, and that was only if Matt could find all the pieces. His spear had merely been bisected, which made repair relatively simple. His knife had been absolutely shattered, and even after a thorough search, he couldn't find all of the fragments. It was toast.

But after clearing several dungeons, Matt not only managed to get rearmed, but now had a slightly improved arsenal to complement the situations his spear couldn’t handle.

Survivor’s Combat Blade

Somewhere between a very short sword and a very long knife, this blade is a utility player meant to work best in situations where versatility is needed. It doesn’t have the reach or power of a full-sized sword or the concealability of an assassin’s dagger, but if you find yourself fighting in a house or cave, you will appreciate the manageability and ease-of-use of this can-do stabbing implement.

Survivor’s Club

Stabbing is great and all, but we all need variety to help pass the time. The Survivor’s Club prides itself on sounding like a support group while actually being an incredibly boring lump of bar steel with a handle on it. It’s heavy. It makes no attempt at balance. If you swing it hard enough, it might swing you around in circles like a cartoon batter missing a fastball.

That said, it’s a natural at breaking things like bones and natural armor. When your stabbing just won’t do the job, this club is ready to provide brawn to cover the failings of the brain.

With all the adjacent dungeons coming back online, they were able to make frequent day-trips, clearing multiple low-level dungeons a day. From experience, they either knew what Bonecat-bearing dungeons to avoid, or how to handle all the old familiar Flash Turtle-type weird threats. It was easy going.

But as expensive as it was, equipping his fields was cheap compared to Matt’s biggest, most exciting cost.

—

Matt briefly considered how reasonable Lucy’s argument was. The estate was getting more and more automated, but every automation they installed meant more fields to plant. The estate still needed tending. If he never left the dungeon, everything would eventually wither. The planet would be dead once more, and all his efforts would be for nothing. They would never uncover the mysteries of Gaia, or restore it to its former glory.

“No. Fuck it. The plants can die. I’m not fighting those things.” Matt wasn't going to budge.

On Earth, Matt had once heard someone at work mention an animal called a Flying Fox. It sounded awesome. There was no better name for a fanciful animal, and even though he only heard the name in passing, he filed it away for his evening. He spent the rest of the daydreaming of videos of tiny, cute semi-dog animals yipping and yapping in joy as they whipped through the air playing with each other.

The reality turned out to be somewhat different.

Flying Foxes turned out to be bats. Not just bats, but giant terror bats with five-foot wingspans and evil vampire dog faces. Wikipedia informed Matt that despite what they looked like, Flying Foxes ate fruit and bugs, not kidnapped children and souls. Matt didn’t care. He could not and would not contemplate sharing a planet with such terrors. When he read that they reproduced slowly and thus were slowly becoming extinct, he thought, Good. Cull the heretics. Let them know fire. Let them be stricken from the Earth, and let their names never be spoken.

Then he watched a bunch of TV and basically forgot they existed. Until now.

The system called its variant of Flying Foxes as Meltbats, and Matt hated them with every element of his entire being. Not only did they look every bit as horrifyingly awful as Flying Foxes, they were also wet. All over their body, they were visibly moist with some sort of sticky, horrible liquid.

Where the liquid dripped on the ground from their freaky bat-talons, it hissed.

“Matt! Look! They aren’t that scary!”

That was easy for Lucy to say. She lived her life in the weird conceptual space between hologram-that-only-Matt-could-see and full hallucination. She had no chance of contracting rabies. Matt couldn’t help looking to see what she was up to, and as his eyes dragged themselves forward when he saw gigantic horror-bat after gigantic horror-bat ripping their way through the space she occupied.

“You know that makes it subtly worse somehow, right?” Matt huffed.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Matt. Enough. Get to work.”

“Fine, fine.”

Matt planted his feet, then ducked immediately as his Survivor’s Instincts skill kicked in and screamed for him to lower his body to avoid the acid-dripping claws of the bats. Screw this, he thought. Time to go extinct again, you weird, leathery flying bastards.

—

The biggest cost hanging over Matt and Lucy’s heads wasn’t related to survivability in battle or a steady food supply. It was instead something hardwired to seem just as integral to the human experience.

They were curious.

Expanding their farm had meant the re-emergence of a gigantic, wrecked spire. A Gaian dungeon, they were informed, dedicated to the history of the mysterious, barren world on which they now spent their lives.

When the dungeon was fully emerged, they didn’t walk to it. They sprinted.

Once inside, they found a plinth. In every visible way, this plinth was like any other they had ever seen. It was the exact appearance and size of the plinths that carried them into the dungeons they conquered to get what essential supplies they needed for Matt to survive. But Matt’s Survivor's Instincts were just refined enough to pick up one difference: he could use this plinth for spare parts if he needed to. No other entrance stone had ever given him the same feeling. That meant the plinth wasn’t, at least as far as his skill could tell, indestructible.

He didn’t intend on destroying it anyway. Without a second thought, he reached out and activated it, instantly teleporting him away from his plane of existence.

Besides the few instances where the dungeon system had stopped him in an in-between space, teleports into dungeons had always been instantaneous. This was different. Somehow, this teleport dragged a bit, taking a second or so to complete. Not only that, but the second was a painful one. The nature of teleporting meant Matt didn’t have a body during that exact moment in time, but if he had, he would have described the pain as similar to a momentary but excruciating headache.

Before he could worry too much about it, he was through.

The room he found himself in was small and predominantly made of a marble-like stone, with thick pillars of the same material supporting the heavy roof. It had no apparent entrances or exits, and reminded Matt of the foyer of an ancient, classically inspired building, so long as that foyer was built to accommodate an individual or very small group.

A beautifully deep and powerful male voice sounded in the room. Unfortunately, it was speaking gibberish.

“A’chi T’alu Marton. Shuil, oul…”

Ding!

Translation activated. As a reincarnator, your Gaian citizenship grants you understanding of all commonly used Gaian spoken languages.

“...and you are welcomed to the museum. If you think us presumptuous for calling it The Museum, please understand that this name was not without justification. It is a marvel of both Gaian ingenuity and system assistance, sketching every aspect of our lives.”

In front of Matt, an image winked into existence, like a video projected on the air. In it, he saw flashes of activity. He saw beautiful smiling faces. He saw moments of happiness as friends moved through markets together or played games in beautiful fields of grass. The people were very much like humans. They were perhaps a bit less tall, with more softness in their faces. But they were beautiful. Young or old, male or female, they brimmed with health and happiness.

As the video dissipated, Matt realized something strange. These people weren’t acting. On Earth, this kind of video would be acted, edited and cut to create a representation of life just slightly better than the actual reality. But this wasn’t a yogurt commercial. This was, he realized, how these people lived. These were the people he was supposed to save.

“Within these walls, you will learn about our people. About yourselves. You will see how we have lived, and how we live. You will see the failures and triumphs of our past, and learn about the hopes of our people. Most of all, you will learn about the danger that threate…”

The voice froze for a split second before the room was plunged into darkness. Or, if not darkness, at least nothingness. As Matt looked down, he saw that he was standing on nothing. His head was beset with a splitting pain, and his ears started to vibrate with a loud, hissing feedback. Within seconds, the combination of the two drove him to the floor in agony.

Emergency Error Correction

Simulation failure detected. Threat to the life of simulation participants detected. Initiating emergency expulsion of simulation participants.

After a split second more of pain, Matt found himself on Gaian ground, disoriented and retching. Worse, Lucy seemed affected as well. Matt looked over at her to see her glitching in the same way she did when she tried to talk directly about his authority over the planet Gaia. It was the kind of disruption that had only happened when the system was awake.

It was minutes before they were back on their feet. Lucy made it first, the static in her signal seeming to fade to nothing over the course of a half minute or so. Matt took a bit longer, but could feel his VIT stat pulling him back together as quickly as it could.

“Well, let’s not do THAT again,” Lucy said, as soon as Matt was able to keep his stomach from violently expelling his lunch over the entrance-room floor. “That was the worst.”

“Yeah, it was. But no, we are absolutely doing that again.” Matt reached for the plinth, desperate for just a few more seconds of seeing the faces of the people he had missed out on meeting.

“Matt, wait…” Lucy tried to stop him, but it was too late. It didn’t end up mattering. When Matt’s hand hit the plinth, he wasn’t teleported back to the room.

Ding!

This structure is currently damaged beyond safe operational parameters. To repair, please feed repair stones or other sources of system-driven repair into the teleport function of this plinth.

This system will attempt to approximate the total amount of durability points necessary to affect a partial repair of the structure and dungeon projection.

Calculating…

After a few moments, the system spit out the value he’d have to reach to reuse the museum safely.

It was a big number.

—

Gripping his spear, Matt looked above him. There weren’t just a few bats. There were dozens of them, flying in circles, waiting for a time to strike him with acid-drenched claws, so they could feed on his melting corpse.

More importantly, they were standing between him and everything he wanted to know.

“Come on, bats. Let’s do this.”