Deadworld Isekai

“Do you think it will be enough?”

“To fix the whole thing? No.” Matt hefted the sack in his hand. Months of dungeon raids had filled it so full of repair stones that if the sack had a dollar sign printed on the burlap, it would have looked like he had robbed a bank. “But I’m hoping this will at least be a good start.”

If it isn’t, this gets a lot harder.

Barry hadn’t made any attempts to communicate with them with estimates of when the system was coming online, something Matt interpreted as a sign that Barry just didn’t know. Without any way to estimate what fraction of the system instance’s energy debt was “paying Matt back”, it could be days, weeks, or months before he was back to making Matt and Lucy miserable or dead.

Or he could be awake right now, lurking in the metaphorical shadows planning very literal deaths.

Matt's adventures the past few months had been a little bit more predictable than made sense in Matt’s experience. Without the system instance around, Matt suspected that Barry had played around the margins of what the rules allowed.

For example, Matt needed repair stones. Suddenly, repair stones were appearing constantly. Before this, Matt had only seen repair stones appear in dungeon rewards twice. Now, while they weren't an available reward choice every time, he could count on seeing these rewards every two or three dungeons.

If Matt was right and that increased availability in repair stones was due to Barry-shenanigans, he was probably looking down the barrel of a much harder repair project when the system instance woke up.

Unless, that is, he started taking on more dangerous dungeons.

He hadn’t talked to Lucy about it yet, but increased combat capabilities didn’t just mean simpler low-level dungeon clears. It also meant that they could handle harder and harder dungeons. In a conventional setting, this would be a given. Isekai heroes didn't hang around low-level dungeons forever. Matt couldn’t imagine that the system instance trying to kill EVERY adventurer all the time, and most adventurers would have parties to balance out weaknesses. In comparison, a bad matchup in a tough dungeon would take Matt down like Christmas lights at Easter.

Low-level dungeons meant consistent rewards, but it also meant an almost frozen rate of progress. Except for the Meltbats, Matt hadn’t been in real danger in months. For a class that leveled by surviving substantial danger, that meant a nearly frozen rate of improvement.

His long-awaited list of notifications reflected that.

Overpowered

You’ve taken down a dungeon without taking a single enemy-inflicted scratch. It wasn’t much work for you to survive this, but enjoy this one-time reward for doing it with style.

Cautious Grind

You’ve put together a list of consecutive dungeon completions as long as your arm, all graded at 20% your level or lower. Prep work is a fundamental part of surviving greater threats, and you are nothing if not diligent in polishing your fight against enemies that don’t stand a chance against you.

There were dozens of notifications like these, each giving small XP rewards for Matt keeping himself out of danger and eating progressively weirder things. There were even a few for completing large amounts of dungeons or surviving an individual dungeon multiple times. But if the list he was looking at was correct, his achievements had mostly stopped updating about halfway through the sleeping-system dormancy period.

Did the achievements add up? Absolutely. But Matt's mind was preoccupied with one of the last achievements.

Error Terror

You have survived a dungeon failure. Through no fault of your own, the dungeon collapsed and became dangerous to occupy. Congratulations on not getting turned inside-out, kicked into an interdimensional nether void, or winking out of existence entirely. That can happen! It doesn’t, usually. But it can!

Despite surviving, you probably didn’t have a great time. Given that and the rarity of the incident, your experience merits some compensation.

Rewards: +1 PER, increased affinity to teleportation from external sources, and resistance to teleportation-related disorientation.

Matt hadn't shared that last notification with Lucy. He could tell that after the years of loneliness and the traumatic battles against the system, the last thing Lucy needed was the looming threat that Matt might never return from a dungeon because of a random malfunction.

The past few months of safety had made visible improvements to her state of mind. It was understandable, considering she didn’t have to watch her best and only friend almost die every few days. But it also meant that she had become overly careful. Even within the realm of tackling weak threats in lower-level dungeons, she had spent hours figuring out safer approaches to taking down the mobs.

—

The lifestyle of the Gaian wastelander overlord featured a lot of walking, and even though the museum was close to the farm, that was only relative to the week-long dungeon journeys.

Matt flicked open his stat screen. It now looked alien to him.

Matt Perison
Level 1 Battlefield Survivor
Class XP: 10/100

HP: 170
MP: N/A
STAM: 95

STR 18
DEX 32
PER 20
VIT 34
WIS 22
INT 10

Class Skills: Survivor’s Reflexes (LV1), Advanced Survivor’s Combat (LV1), Eat Anything (DISABLED), Spring Fighter (LV1), Rub Some Dirt In It (LV1), Pocket Sand (LV1), Survivor’s Digging (LV5)

His new class was great. Advanced Survivor's Combat had got its shakedown run when taking down the Meltbats, and now Matt took some time to test out his other skills. Even though they were back to level 1, it was more of an aesthetic choice than anything else. His skills read level 1, sure, but with some basic testing, Matt could tell they at least retained most of their old efficacy. They would only grow stronger from here.

Some changes were weirder. The XP needed to hit the next level was significantly lower than it had been when he was a level 10 survivor. But if the XP requirements grew anything like how they had when he was a bog-standard survivor, that wouldn’t matter much within a few levels. The XP requirement for the next level was still almost bottomed out, which Matt didn’t expect. His stats had jumped enough that his best guess was that the XP was applied to the old class before the evolution, giving him levels he now couldn’t see without digging through his notification history.

Through a combination of lucky breaks with eating-related stat increases and the massive stat dump that came with the achievements, Matt was much stronger than before. But strength was only enough until it wasn’t. He still doubted he was anywhere near where he’d need to be to take down, say, a Gaian ape. If the system instance came back swinging, he needed to be ready. He needed to take more risks.

And that meant having a long, serious discussion with Lucy. Achievements that put his life in danger would delay the system instance from waking back up and also make him stronger. But that discussion could wait a bit. First, it was time for lunch, with another gigantic salad.

—

Halfway through his salad, Matt interrupted Lucy's planning. She had been spending more and more time working on plans in recent days.

“I’m hoping that dumping all these repair stones into that plinth at least repairs it enough that it wakes up,” Matt offered.

Lucy looked up, annoyed. She huffed back, “Is that even possible, Matt? Like, say we could repair a thousand daggers with those. That seems like a lot, but… that tower is more than a thousand daggers worth of broken.”

Matt shrugged, “It might work. I have no idea how the system prioritizes where the energy from these stones goes. That’s part of why I want to do this now, and not later. I don’t know if the instance can screw with it or not.”

“So, better to do it while he's asleep?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, your call. But I’m not going to go easy on you if we both end up puking on the dungeon entrance floor again.”

Matt was reluctant to call Lucy out on the fact that she hadn't really puked. Rather, he had watched her glitch out like a living computer for a minute or so. That was one of the worst minutes of his time on Deadworld, where he couldn't do anything to help and could only pray while he puked his guts out.

—

Within a period of time that fell very snugly into the growing spectrum of what Matt considered negligible, they were at the museum.

“So, what do you think? Just dump them all on it?” Matt asked.

The problem of actually using the repair stones was one that had only just occurred to Matt. The plinth stubbornly repeated its warning about the dungeon being broken but refused to elaborate on how to fix the problem.

“I guess that’s as good as anything. Worth a try, anyway,” Lucy responded.

Matt took out a handful of stones and dropped them directly over the plinth, making sure to give himself a fair margin of safety in terms of how close he got to the plinth. His regeneration was supposedly better now, but he had no desire to test how well it had improved by having a section of his forearm or hand teleported away.

The entire handful of stones clattered uselessly to the ground near the plinth.

“Matt.” Lucy was laughing. “It doesn’t look like that worked.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” Matt looked down at the plinth, which stubbornly refused to display any new information at all. “So, shit. What do we do now? I probably should have thought of this earlier.”

“Yeah, probably. Don’t beat yourself up. I hear that for some people, thinking is the hardest work of all.”

“Listen, when 95% of what I think about is stuff that's trying to kill me, the other 5% has a tendency to get dropped.”

“Like a handful of repair stones, never to be recovered,” Lucy bantered back.

“Who says I won’t recover them?” Matt liked the banter, but there was a real problem in play here. To fix the dungeon, he needed to feed the plinth repair stones. But if the plinth couldn’t actually eat the stones, that left him with a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution. It was entirely possible he’d have to ditch the whole project and just be content with using the repair stones to keep his limited personal arsenal in tip-top condition.

Unless…

When Matt had first encountered the plinth, his Survivor’s Instincts had keyed in on it being a possible source of parts. Other dungeon plinths didn’t trigger this. That meant his mental model of the dungeon room, plinth, and dungeon interior as all pieces of the same whole didn't apply to the museum dungeon. If this plinth was different, there might be something he could do.

Bending down and grabbing three or four repair stones, he knelt by the plinth and mentally willed the stones to fix the plinth.

Gaian History Museum Dungeon Plinth

This dungeon plinth is a maintainable portion of the Gaian History Museum Dungeon. It is, in both form and function, a close imitation of a system dungeon plinth. Created by the Gaians, this plinth doesn't have a direct link to the world’s dungeon system and thus is limited in the protection and self-repair it offers.

This plinth has been repaired from an inoperable state.

Durability: 47/600

“Shit, that worked? You repaired the plinth itself? It looks the same.” Lucy was right, nothing had changed in the plinth's appearance.

“Yeah, it worked.” Thankfully, Matt had the notification to tell him that he was on the right track. Matt started to feed stones one-by-one into repairing the plinth.

“So that’s how it works? You just repair the plinth over and over?”

“I don’t think so. I think I’m actually just fixing the plinth itself at the moment. But I’m not willing to bet the entire bag of repair stones on a mostly-broken plinth. I'll get it back to 100% durability and try the teleport again after that. Better safe than sorry.”

When the plinth was back in factory-new condition, Matt carefully gathered all the dropped repair stones, placing them back in the sack. When that was done, he slowly raised the sack of repair stones above the plinth, as if he was offering some sacrifice to the plinth.

Please work.

Repair Stones Detected!

Would you like to contribute repair stones to the ongoing maintenance of this dungeon?

Y/N

Matt willed the affirmative. Just like that, the sack was suddenly emptied of the hundreds and hundreds of repair stones it contained. It looked like moving things into the dungeon didn’t come with all the glowing-orb bells and whistles of when rewards materialized in the real world. But that made a kind of crazy magic-world sense. It was presumably a lot harder to make real-world items from nothing than it was to suck real-world repair stones into a fake one.

There were no notifications, no dings indicating he had done something important. Matt had worked hard for all those repair stones, and the work was about to get a lot harder. Not that he wouldn’t do it, but going to all that effort would be a lot easier if he could get some motivation in the form of an early payment for his work.

Come on, little plinth. I need a win here.

Matt lowered his hand to the plinth. For a moment, nothing happened.

Ding!

Warning: Limited functionality

The Gaian History Museum Dungeon has recovered from a critical error and the subsequent shutdown. An analysis of the dungeon shows that all critical basic functions have been restored. The dungeon may be entered safely, but portions of the simulation will be limited or unavailable.

Enter Dungeon?