Deadworld Isekai

As the imp came towards Derek, he thrust the sword forward as hard as he could.

It wasn't a strong thrust, considering how badly the demon had shredded his arm and how weak Derek was, even in peak condition. Beads of blood were pooling down his arm and vitality would only kick in after the battle, so he had to end things fast.

Unfortunately, there was no way that Derek could hit a pinpoint strike like a thrust against a moving target. The imp easily dodged his attack and kept rushing forward. Luckily, Derek had anticipated that. Earlier in the day, Derek had been startled to see an imp duck beneath his attack while still in midair and keep its momentum. It had proven to be a pretty effective move, one that had made Derek scramble in response.

Not this time.

This time, the imp's dodge was countered with a pretty good-sized rock, about the biggest that Derek could palm. Derek had found one within arm's reach as he stood up, a fair bit of luck. As the imp rushed forward, it smacked head-first into the uncomfortable reality of Derek's rock. To it, that rock was a pretty good-sized boulder.

The hit didn’t kill it, but the imp was stunned and flopped down to the ground. Derek's sword arm had enough strength left to drop the point of the sword straight down on the demon, ending it.

Fuck yes! Derek thought, trying and immediately failing to lift the sword back up to an overhead victory pose. Ouch, no, nevermind.

Artemis was there almost immediately.

“That was, Derek, really amazing. I have never, in all my life, seen a grown man almost lose in a fight to one of those things. It was like watching a town guard get slapped around by an angry baby.”

Derek scowled, and almost snapped at her. Asadel didn’t take that kind of crap by a non-hero, non-reincarnated nobody of a trainer. But Derek wasn’t Asadel anymore, and a deep breath reminded him that Artemis wasn’t what he used to think of her, either. She was a lot of things. She knew all the things that he needed to know, and plenty of other things too. She was his trainer. And most importantly, she was stronger than him.

“I… agree. What could I have done better?”

It took Artemis a full five seconds to recover from the shock of that one. It was the best hit he had landed all day.

—

Derek was still limping when they got back to town. Artemis had a healing skill, something called Scout’s Aid, but although it was able to close up the relatively minor wounds on his arm, it wouldn’t do anything for the more obscure, internal wound of his calf cramp. He eventually managed to get the muscle to unlock, but it still hurt.

Artemis had shrugged when he asked her what to do about it. She spent all her time around various combat and warfare classes, people who uniformly had high enough VIT that they didn’t have to care about mundane things like cramps. Unfortunately, Derek’s knowledge of cramps was similarly limited. It started and stopped with the concept of stretching. He knew stretching worked before exercise to prevent cramps, but had no idea if it would help after the fact.

That said, he’d try anything. He doubted it would injure him, and dodging the expense of a full healer would be nice. The only problem was that all the stretches he actually knew for legs came from the old man, who had tried to convince him that flexibility was valuable. There was some truth to that – flexibility wasn't enhanced by stats for most classes. That would have been fine if it wasn’t for the fact that every stretch the old man had shown him for legs involved a kind of wooden rack of his own devising, one that was meant to be used from a variety of positions to “get the most ya can, outta ya time”, as the old man put it.

Derek's hunt had started in the early afternoon and all the fighting, healing and advice-getting had taken time. Now was past the time when the old man usually closed up shop, which meant Derek could probably just go into his training yard without bothering anyone. The old man had given Derek a free pass to go into the yard at any time. He might be mad at Derek, but he hadn’t ever revoked that permission.

Buoyed by doing something that felt borderline illegal and the fact that the old man would never know, Derek limped his way across town to the old man’s shop. The gate to the yard never had a lock, probably another missed sign that the old man was both more respected and more scary than he appeared. The rack was in the same place though, and Derek got to work.

The walk there had done him some good, but the first stretches were excruciating. Worse, at the time the old man had been running him through the routine, Derek had barely listened. He now found out he had retained at best 20% of the stretches he had been taught, and had no idea what muscle groups they were supposed to target. He ran through what he did remember, in pain the whole time, hoping that by the end of a couple of run-throughs it would all be worth it.

“That’s all wrong, ya know.”

Derek disengaged from the stretching rack and wheeled around to find the old man standing there.

“Ah… sorry. Yeah. I don’t remember as much as I should. And sorry for, you know, being here. I thought you’d be home.”

The old man grunted out a sarcastic laugh. “This IS my home, boy. You were never curious what was on the second floor?”

To the extent Derek had thought about that, which wasn’t much, he had assumed it was probably full of iron or something.

“That’s hurt?” The old man pointed at his leg, the one in pain.

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“I can see.” The old man walked over and knelt, lightly pinching the back of Derek’s calf with his big fingers. It hurt. A lot. “It’s right here. What’d ya do to it? Get it cursed? Poison?”

“Just too much exercise.”

“Too much exercise? Vitality should have taken care of that. Did you forget to put any points in there?”

“No.”

“Dumped it all into strength, did ya?”

“No!”

“It’s stupid, boy! I’ve told ya about it! Every class needs vitality! Strength is no good if you're gassed out. Less good if you’re dead!”

“I didn’t dump it into strength, you old goat! I’m level 1! Where do you want me to get strength from?”

The old man paused, puzzled.

“Boy, you have been back for weeks, and you didn’t level? Not once? You've been moping around this whole time?” The accent was gone all of a sudden.

“Not moping around. Training. Just… I don’t have a class, so I don’t level.”

The old man paused. “Sit down.”

“Why?”

“Just sit down, boy. Wait.”

The old blacksmith lumbered towards his shop, and Derek heard the sound of clanging and shifting objects for several seconds before the old man reemerged, holding a small metal flask.

“Here, boy.”

“What’s this?”

“Rub it into your leg. Just a dash will do.”

Derek glanced up at the blacksmith’s eyes, there was nothing in them except an expectation that his command be obeyed. Derek twisted the top off the flask, emptied a small splash of the liquid onto his hand. He then realized he was wearing long pants, necessitating that he shove his hand up the side of his pants to get to his calf. He rubbed it into and around the sore spot as hard as he could, given the soreness.

Within moments, both his hand and his leg were on fire. Not literally, of course, but there was a deep, powerful burning sensation, like being in a scalding-hot shower after a cold-water swim. Or the opposite. It was hard to tell. Derek yelped and tried his best not to writhe around, failing to pretend like he was toughing it out.

“Swamp dragon fire. Not really fire, you know. Sort of a defensive measure. When you fight them, they douse you with gallons of the stuff. But what’s left afterward, once you cut the fire-bladder out? Best stuff on Ra’Zor for muscle pains.”

How does this guy still get muscle pains?

“Don’t look at me like that, boy. You ever use a hammer for two days on a rush project? Not all of us are reincarnators. The system’s not as generous with the common folk, I’m afraid. Fewer stats that go less far.”

As the old man explained, the burning was finally subsiding. As it did, Derek noticed the soreness was gone. Not better, not a little improved, but fully gone.

“You need me to pay for that?” Derek asked. It couldn't be cheap. Swamp dragons were, from everything Derek had heard, not easy to take down. Not just because of the liquid fire, but because hunting them required fighting a two-ton animal in the swamp. Anything useful that came from a monster like that was expensive, even if you could harvest it by the gallon.

“Not cheap if ya buy it.” He flexed his big arm. “I brewed that batch myself, so to speak.”

Claiming to take down a swamp dragon solo was usually the kind of thing people said as an obvious tall tale. It wasn’t impossible, but Derek could count on one hand the people in the town who could actually pull it off. And those were reincarnators, favorites of the system who got the best it offered. For a normal person, it was a much more farfetched claim.

Somehow, Derek still didn’t doubt the blacksmith's words for a second. The old man had taken down a swamp dragon to get magic muscle soreness cream. It wasn’t a claim, it was a fact.

Derek had tons of questions. Obvious, quest related questions about who the old man was, what he was hiding, and why he was hiding it. Questions that, if answered, would contribute to huge potential leaps in his own personal power.

Somehow, there was a more important question. As Derek opened his mouth to talk, a sob slipped out with it. He managed to keep more from spilling out long enough to make his query.

“Why are you still being nice to me?”

The old man looked at him, an unreadable look on his face. The accent came back. “Ya want to know? Ya always hurry. I was like ya once. I was a boy from a small, boring place. And I wanted something different, wanted to run towards danger. So I did. Left town. Joined the army as a squire. Ya had to be fourteen back then. I lied, got in anyway.”

He paused, chewing on his beard where it overlapped the corner of his mouth, then spit the hairs back out. “Came home a year later and found out I didn’t need to run towards danger at all. It was running towards me, except I left before it could get me. Whole town was gone. Buildings, people, everything. The demons got ‘em.”

He walked over to his weapons rack and pulled a spear and tossed it to Derek, who barely reacted in time to catch it out of the air. He then grabbed the metal pole that he used to whale on Derek before.

“I did a lotta things after that, killed a lot of things, saw a lot of things, got some new names people gave me cause of some of the things I did. But nothing more important than the things I didn’t do.”

He swished his metal pole through the air like it weighed nothing, like an inch and a half thick bar of steel was a normal piece of equipment for a light warm up.

“So I see a kid in a hurry, one that has potential? I wanna help ya actually do the things ya can do. Nothing more to it than that.”

Ding!

Secret quest completion: What Nobody Else Knows

The blacksmith doesn’t like talking about his past, but normally, that’s just because he doesn’t care about what he did before. What you just got? That’s different. It’s a whole new level of deeply hidden past.

Not only did you complete the quest, you also established a lasting bond with the quest subject. You’ve succeeded in a way that overshoots the expectations of the original question.

No class found. Generating a class based on immediate circumstances to facilitate acceptance of quest reward.

Class Assigned: Common Man

In some ways, this class is both the most basic and most advanced of classes. It gives no skills of any kind, gains no experience or skills from achievements, and levels based entirely from the work the user puts into it.

Common Man’s stats are an amplified version of the rewards a non-system being would receive through conventional training. It has the potential to stretch to the highest heights of strength or wallow in the lowest troughs of weakness, depending wholly on the user’s will and effort.

“So, was that pulled muscle just from lying around, or are ya finally ready to train?”

Derek settled into the best stance he could muster, holding the unfamiliar weapon in what he was sure was the wrong grip. Even without the old man saying anything, he could tell he was bad.

But that would change. He would change it.

“I’m ready to train. I’m coming for you. Get ready, old man.”

The old man grinned, swung his pole, and immediately launched Derek through the air like a floppy, man-shaped baseball.

Maybe don’t taunt the hidden blacksmith. Lesson learned.