Deadworld Isekai

Matt didn't have a coach. He got the impression that even backwoods, podunk planets would at least have someone around who knew how to use the local weapons. Even cave men had an elder or chief around who knew how to launch spears at mammoths exceptionally well. It was just Matt's luck that he had ended up on the one planet where no one was around to train him.

That went double for his skills. Lucy knew a lot of useful information, but what she knew tended to be pretty basic. She had explained, when they met, that system guardians were dropped on planets well before their reincarnators got there. When they hit the ground, the first things they tried to learn were what classes were a good fit for the person they were helping, and as much about those classes as they could. Faced with pure desert, it was kind of hard to learn about classes. Was she helpful? Absolutely. But she was limited.

When it came to learning how to fight, Matt was on his own. It was trial-and-error against all the worst baddies Gaia’s weird evolutionary forces had ever created. And death was always on the line.

As hard as it was, Matt had been making progress. His first big clues came from his fight with the armored invader. Matt had been too scared to focus much on it at the time, but even though the guy only seemed to have a couple of moves, but they were perfect. Survivor’s Instincts had done its best to identify weak points in the invader overall, but it never fired during one of those strikes. The guy had precise footwork. No wasted movements. Zero openings. Given all the other bad choices the kid had made, it was pretty clear that a skill was driving that perfection.

In comparison, Survivor’s Combat did a lot less for Matt. The first level of Survivor’s Combat behaved like he had been given a one-lesson crash course in every weapon that ever existed. That was nice, but it was pretty far from being perfect. Every time he leveled the skill, he moved a little further down the competency line, but only in the sense that he took another crash course on the weapons.

At this point, he felt like he was rocking orange belt weaponry skills across the board. He was vaguely competent at everything, not great at anything, and much closer to being a normal person than an overpowering master of the blade. Or club. Or rock. Matt supposed this was why various system notifications had been so clear that Survivor wasn’t a pure combat class. It just wasn’t powerful in combat.

But that didn’t mean the class wasn’t powerful at all. Over time, Matt had learned that the real trick to getting the most out of Survivor’s Combat was to consider it as a tool for his other skill, Survivor's Instinct.

Survivor’s Instincts would point out weak spots or possible tactics for him to follow, and Survivor’s Combat would sometimes give him the skills he needed. The faster he could chain those two skills, the more lethal he was.

In what might have been the most important bit, Survivor’s Instincts often told him when something was too much for him to handle, and would scream in his mind for him to simply get out of the way. Right now, it was screaming something like it’s officially a bad idea to stand right underneath the giant bats who drip acid.

He didn’t need to be told twice. With Lucy cheering for him in the background, Matt quickly dashed out from under the circle the bats were tracing in the air above him, dodging drops of acid as much as he could. He still suffered from minor burns.

Seeing their quarry run, the Meltbats turned to follow. At the instructions of Survivor’s Instincts, Matt intentionally kept his speed slow enough that he remained in their probable attack range, waiting for them to strike.

Soon enough, one took the bait. As it swooped, Matt used his dash skill to jump a few feet back. The Meltbat didn’t crash into the ground, but it nearly did. It desperately flapped its wings and hovered in place for a moment. Matt struck, thrusting his spear deep into the thing’s chest, and twisting.

The thing let out a shriek as acid sizzled into the spearhead, then did something Matt didn’t expect. It flapped backwards, removing itself from the spearhead and taking to the air again, apparently none the worse for the wear. In the meantime, several more bats were swooping down at Matt. He dodged out of the way as best he could, evading all but one of them. The last Meltbat managed to trace down the pole of his spear, spiraling downward and digging its gross, acid-soaked talons into Matt’s leg.

Matt screamed as the acid burned the muscles of his thigh, then made the worst mistake he could have. In his pain, he ignored Survivor’s Instincts' prodding to stay where he was and tough it out. Instead, he jerked away. As he did, the claw ripped a good-sized portion of flesh out of his leg.

The sheer shock of it sent him to the ground, screaming, and luckily dodging another few Meltbats who had just come around for another bite at the killing-of-Matt burrito. As they flew overhead, drips of acid came off their disgusting rodent bodies, burning Matt and motivating him to get back on his feet, ruined leg be damned.

“Matt! Are you okay?” Lucy had panic in her voice. She hadn't expected this low-level dungeon to actually hurt Matt.

Matt swung his spear two-handed like a baseball bat, batting away nearby Meltbats. “I don’t know! There’s a ton of these things, and they don’t die when I stab them!”

Lucy took a good look at Matt's health bar and her worries went away. “Have you considered stabbing them MORE?”

“I have, dammit! They’re fast, okay?”

The swoops kept coming.

“Dammit!” Matt screamed as a particularly motivated bat’s claws nicked him on the arm on one side of his body and his hand on the other, hurting him and shocking his spear out of his hand.

Ding!

Not now, Barry, Matt thought, suppressing the notification as he desperately fought with the bats. Barry was a good guy, as dungeon system interfaces went. Hell, in Matt’s book, he was a good guy as saints went. He had no idea why Barry would start sending notifications now, though. It wasn’t like it could help much at the moment.

“You know what? Screw this.” Matt was pissed. “I’m going for broke.”

His next favorite weapon was his knife, but it was far too close-quarters oriented for Matt to want to use it on these things. The acid splash would eat him up far before he got through the bats. That left his club. He reached back and yanked the foot or so of bar steel from its loop on his pack.

As he did, the oddest thing happened. All of a sudden, every bat glowed. Every inch of their disgusting heads lit up yellow like they were getting hit by a spotlight. At the same time, the club settled into his hand comfortably in a way no weapon ever had before, begging to be swung.

Without knowing exactly why he could see them, Matt was suddenly certain that the lights on the Flying Foxes indicated places they’d be especially vulnerable to blows from the weapon he wielded.

Unless the acid is making me hallucinate. Also a valid hypothesis, I guess.

Assuming he wasn’t in the throes of the worst trip of all time, Matt suddenly found himself in a target rich environment. It made some sort of sick sense that a mostly-hollow animal with self-cauterizing wounds would be fairly resistant to piercing damage. At the same time, simple logic meant those same enemies wouldn’t fare so well with blunt force trauma.

Without better options, Matt decided to take a chance on whatever was going on. As the next bat dove towards him, he set his feet as best he could and swung the club. And for once, everything was, if not perfect, about as good as Matt could imagine it being. The timing was great, and the trajectory was perfect. The club took as much force from the rotation of his body as it could, and the very last inch of the bar made contact with the bat's head.

Its skull all but exploded. There was no question but that it was dead. It went limp all at once, pinwheeling through the air like a dead goose.

Finally.

The balance of battle, Matt had found, was a delicate thing. Once you found the trick to a fight, things felt very different. He didn’t blanch anymore at the thought of taking down a group of Clownrats. He knew how to deal with them, which made taking them down easy. On the other hand, a foreign horror like the Meltbats, unlike anything he had encountered before, posed a real threat. Until he found the trick.

The balance had now shifted in his favor. Matt's injured leg ensured he wasn’t mobile, but with almost every strike landing, he didn’t have to be. The club was doing everything he asked. As Meltbats came down from the sky, he put them to the ground, permanently. Despite all the pain, he was dimly aware that he was looking the coolest he had ever been.

Eventually, there was only one bat left in the air. Whatever primitive mind it had was just powerful enough for it to survey the battlefield and conclude things weren’t going that well. Matt felt the air start to churn as the thing hit the afterburners and started to flee away from him, faster than he had seen any of the Meltbats move before.

No you don’t, you bastard. I want out of this dungeon NOW.

Picking up his spear, Matt was vaguely aware there was no way he was going to make this shot. The bat was already better than twenty feet away and rapidly putting more distance between them. He threw it anyway. Against all odds, it was a good throw. It sailed through the air, piercing completely through the Meltbat, which discovered to its immense distress that it couldn’t fly with a spear through it. As it crashed to the Earth, Matt hobbled after it. Within a few seconds, he had gelatinized the last of his enemies.

“Matt…” Lucy was gobsmacked. “What in the hell was that? It was like you turned competent all of a sudden. Do you just… not suck now?”

“Lucy…”

“No, I mean it. You should have seen yourself. You stopped being useless. It was like you had actually practiced everything in a mirror.”

Matt rolled his eyes. If he kept feeding her openings, Lucy could go on like this for hours. It was the main way she passed her time, and she had a lot of time for practice.

“Anyways,” Matt did his best to put on his back-to-business voice, “I think Barry did something. He sent me a notification. I was actually just about to check it, if you're interested.”

“I am, but… aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?”

“The stabilization spike.” Matt realized with horror what she meant. The stabilization spike would keep a small section of monster meat from dissipating, allowing Matt to progress his Eat Anything! skill, which in turn let him get by better on less food. It was absolutely vital to his survival that he used the skill as often as possible.

It was just that there was no chance at all he was going to do it. None.

“I’d rather die than eat these. I mean that literally. If it comes down to eating the acid soaked giant bats or dying, I’m choosing death.”

“Okay, I understand, but is that true even when they are…”

Lucy’s eyes glinted as she finished her sentence, “Battered?”

“I hate you,” Matt sighed.

Lucy laughed, not at all discouraged. “And I deserve it!”