Deadworld Isekai

Lucy didn't stop prodding Matt to eat the bats until well after they had dissipated enough that it wasn't a realistic option anymore. Matt was pretty sure she was joking about it. There were just some foods that were too dangerous to eat. Even fully cooked, things like poison toads would probably do more harm than good. And acid giant bats definitely fell in that category.

Luckily, the process of dissipation didn’t take long. The mystery of Matt’s sudden competency increase remained to be solved, and as soon as Lucy’s merciless bat puns were suppressed, he pulled up his system notifications to see what had happened.

Class Evolution Complete!

Congratulations! You failed to die long enough that you forced the system’s hand.

After proving your worth in far more combat than you might think was necessary, it has been deemed appropriate to progress your class in a direction more appropriate to the kinds of challenges you will face. Not that you didn’t earn it, but you should feel lucky here. Class evolutions are rare. As you well know, the kind of stuff you had to do to get here was just as likely to kill you than result in any upside.

Class evolutions are more than a lateral move. There are some tradeoffs, but most of the core functionality of your class has been preserved while, in this case, your combat efficiency skyrocketed.

Your new class is called Battlefield Survivor. There are more details to be had from examining individual skills, but here are the highlights:

Your class focuses on surviving encounters rather than winning duels or dealing damage. So you aren’t the pure-combat equal of a greataxe swinging Tanker. But you are their equal in combat prowess. You've won past fights in a variety of ways, and that doesn’t change. Your fighting style will rely on good decisions, trickery, and creativity. Almost all your non-combat skills have been preserved, with only a few changes in how they work. Good news: you can keep eating slugs or whatever it is you do in your free time.

Enjoy!

PS: Yes, this also means what you think it means. Keep your head on a swivel, Matt.

Matt looked up from the notification, making eye contact with Lucy. “Yup. Class evolution.”

“No way! Is it good?” Lucy was excited.

“Barry seems to think so. I haven’t got into the details yet.”

“Well hurry up!”

Matt mentally flicked open the next notification.

Survivor’s Combat > Advanced Survivor’s Combat

The first iteration of this class focused on general baseline competence. You were good-not-great with any weapon you laid your hands on. Now you are more like an old, grizzled commando. You fight with each and every weapon as if you’ve trained with them for years. You might be less sword master and more angry sergeant, but the outcome is the same either way.

You aren’t a guy to be messed with.

Advanced Survivor’s Combat functions by giving you the skills of someone who has trained up to a high level of mastery in one weapon, but is using another weapon out of necessity. You have much improved footwork and significantly higher general competence with all weapons.

Rub Some Dirt In It

You lack healing skills or heavy armor, but that doesn’t mean you are easy to put down. Rub Some Dirt In It gives you the toughness and regenerative abilities of a store-brand troll, letting you bounce back to peak shape from small injuries that would add up for anyone else. And that’s just what you get while combat is ongoing. When you break free of active fighting and hole up, you heal even faster.

Rub Some Dirt In It functions by granting slow regeneration in combat, slightly faster regeneration while fleeing combat, and substantially improved healing when at rest or hiding. In addition, it grants small resistances to most forms of physical damage.

Survivor’s Dash > Spring-Fighter

Running away is great, but overall mobility is better.

There’s always someone faster than you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are easy to catch. Spring-fighter replaces the pure escape focus of Survivor’s Dash with overall, on-demand evasiveness. Spring fighter lets you move towards, away from, or around enemies at much greater speeds with small, unpredictable bursts of motion.

Sounds great? We think so too, but that utility comes at a cost. Survivor’s Dash’s exceptional movement speed away from foes has been replaced by a much smaller increase that is a significant drain of your stamina resource.

In addition, Spring-Fighter is not an automatic skill. It is under your full manual control, and is reliant on user control for its full potential. If you tell it to dodge directly into a sword strike, it will, and it won't look pretty.

Spring-Fighter functions by allowing you to convert stamina into injections of speeds that make their normal movements faster. This speed comes at the cost of a steep STAM drain that increases non-linearly the farther and faster you try to move.

Survivor’s Instincts > Survivor’s Reflexes

We all know what’s gotten the closest to killing you recently, and it hasn’t been insufficient knowledge of vines. In that spirit, Survivor’s Reflexes preserves all the benefits you receive from Survivor’s Instincts, but shifts further development in a combat-focused direction.

When Survivor’s Reflexes detects a weakness in an opponent’s defenses, it alerts you to it visually, replacing the subliminal mental alerts of Survivor’s Instincts. Given sufficient perspective and time, it will highlight these areas with an illusory light, showing you where to strike.

In addition, Survivor’s Reflexes also attempts to show you when to strike by highlighting moments when an opponent is off-balance or vulnerable.

Be warned: The ability of Survivor’s Reflexes to identify and highlight weaknesses is a function of your stats compared to your enemies, how much time you’ve studied them or extremely similar enemies, and your baseline (non-system) observations. In some cases, the skill will take longer to trigger. In others, it won’t trigger at all.

Survivor’s Reflexes continues to scale off PER and WIS, but now has a distinct bias towards PER.

“Oh, this is fantastic.” Matt was excited. He wasn’t terribly excited about losing his very best escape skill, but what he got in trade was at least equitable. Everything else seemed like a clear upgrade, including the loss of Survival Instincts to Survival Reflexes. The non-combat elements of Survivor’s Instincts had long been adequate for the kind of threats Matt tended to face. Being able to see where to attack stronger enemies, provided he could keep them from smashing him into smaller fragments long enough?

Exquisite. Matt thought, remembering how good it had felt to massacre the bats. The right weapon to the right fight. Delicious, almost.

“What happened? I can’t see your windows, Matt,” Lucy asked.

Matt quickly got Lucy up to speed.

“Wow, yeah, that does sound good. If what you did to those poor baby bats generalizes…”

In no world would Matt call the bats he had just faced as babies. “To be very clear, they were unholy abominations. If what I did to them applies to other things, we should be able to expand our level range for dungeons a bit.”

“Maybe. If we do it very slowly. No use dying.”

“Agreed.”

But that wasn’t all. Matt had several more notifications waiting for him. There couldn’t be many more skill notifications, so he assumed the others were minor stat increases and similar rewards for living his life while the system’s reward function was down. He mentally flicked open the next notification, hoping he’d see something good.

Eat Anything! > Combat Consum…

ERROR > ERROR

The window suddenly winked out.

“Uh… Lucy?”

“Yeah?”

“There seem to be some system difficulties.”

She looked at him, quizzically. “Good?”

“No, I mean, not the kind that hurt him. Maybe the kind that hurt us.”

The system window attempted to reopen before immediately fizzling out again before it could display any text. Then did it again. And again.

“Definitely not the kind of difficulty that's good for us,” Matt repeated

Matt caught Lucy up on the window weirdness while they waited. Minutes passed. Eventually, a new window opened and stayed open, this time in the background color that indicated Barry was talking

Dungeon System Message

An error with the Gaian System’s Instances notifications has been detected by the Dungeon system, which issued a query regarding the error. Sufficient time has passed for the Dungeon System to exercise Rule #45082 J, allowing it to look into unaddressed errors and attempt to resolve them if it so chooses.

—

Okay Matt, here’s the skinny: I have no idea what’s going on here. This isn’t an energy budget thing. The system instance wouldn’t have issued your class evolution or any of your achievements without the budget to cover all of them. If he sends one, he should send all.

More importantly, I know this isn’t the system instance because as far as I can see, Eat Anything! Is temporarily disabled. Not changed to something else, not left alone, but disabled. The system instance can’t do that. There are dozens of rules about skills. Something else is going on here.

As near as I can tell, some outside force is messing with this skill. The problem is that there shouldn’t be any outside force to mess with this skill. For now, sit tight. Enjoy your other skills, and I’ll work on this as fast as I can.

“Well, that’s not great.” Matt let Lucy know what was going on as he summed up the situation. “Especially with us running low on food cubes.”

“We have the crops now, though. You don’t have to resort to the food cubes much anyways.”

“True. Unless something bad happens.”

“Knock on wood.” Lucy pantomimed doing the thing she couldn’t, by definition, actually do.

Matt spent the next few minutes flipping through the rest of the notifications, finding most of them to be pretty mundane, with a few small stat increases and item drops. He would look through them later, he decided. Assessing his status screen would make for some nice bedtime reading. He had finally found a way to ignore the suns and without the threat of the system instance, he felt safe enough to kick off his shoes for solid sleep. He'd enjoy that for as long as he could.

“So, to address the elephant in the room…”

Lucy looked like she was waiting for this, apparently not wanting to mess up the new-skill cheeriness Matt had up to this point. “Yeah. It looks like the system instance is coming back online. How long do you think we have? Is it possible it’s awake now?”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t think so. Barry said that he’d have to pay us what we were owed before he could pay back his own energy debt and come online. I don’t know how long that’s going to take, but we should have at least some time.”

“How long?”

“Shouldn't you know? Hours? Days? Weeks?” Matt shrugged. “There’s no way to know. Short of asking Barry, and he would have told us if he could. I’m guessing that penalties-for-stretching rules mechanic works both ways.”

“Matt. I don't like this. There isn’t anything we can do?”

Above all else, the last few months had been nice. They had both, for better or worse, gotten used to a life that, while not completely safe, was at least dangerous in predictable ways. They still had to go into dungeons, but they could do so without worrying about system shenanigans pumping up the difficulty or creating some other kind of death-trap. Outside the dungeons, the worst risk they faced was Matt tripping over something, and there wasn’t much for him to trip over.

Lucy continued, “And it’s worse, Matt, because he’s going to be coming back pissed. And if he’s been able to think while he was offline, he'll be coming back with plans.”

“There’s nothing much we can do about it. Maybe we can delay it if we get more achievements he has to pay out, but…” Matt's voice trailed off.

Lucy nodded. She understood that the quickest, surest way for Matt to get achievements was by surviving things he shouldn’t. They both preferred keeping near-death situations to a minimum.

Matt found his voice again, “But we’ve dealt with it before. And we can deal with it again. We put the hurt on him once. If he comes back swinging, we'll just put him down again.”