Deadworld Isekai

It turned out that getting to 1 HP really hurt.

The Clownrats kept up with Matt's fleeing surprisingly well. He was able to dodge most of their attacks by running in a zigzag pattern, but couldn't entirely shake them off. The good thing was that even though his running speeds didn't seem to be enhanced that much by his Survivor's Combat ability, his evasiveness in running did. Instead of tripping and crashing into the trees that appeared in his path, Matt felt confident in twisting, turning, and juking around them.

It wasn't all-powerful, however. By the time the Clownrats' stamina petered out, Matt was also just about dead – both in terms of his stamina and in a very, very literal sense. They gave up just in time, turning back just a few moments before he would have collapsed and given them the win.

He staggered further into the woods, and once he saw that the Clownrats had returned to their circular path, collapsed on the forest floor. Adrenaline had helped to numb the bites as they happened. Now, he spent several painful minutes trying not to writhe as his Vitality stat did its work and knit him back together. It was slow-going. Every few minutes, he would recover another HP, and it wasn't until he was at 10 HP or so that he stopped feeling woozy from blood loss and general pain.

Finally able to relax, Matt's felt a shudder of fear run through him. That was far too close for comfort, and he knew that his current skills were nowhere close to killing a pack of Clownrats without getting chewed up in a more permanent, fatal way.

The more he healed, the more his attention was drawn to the painful realities of his hunger and thirst. He didn't know which of the two would do him in quicker, and had no desire to find out. The dungeon system had put the task of killing the pack of Clownrats in front of him, and the longer he put that off the worse his problems would get. But after fighting and nearly dying, getting back up and going back into the fray was harder than it sounded.

Instead, he turned his attention to the notifications that had sounded during the fight. They made him feel better, but not by much.

Scar Collection Initiate

You’ve taken damage in combat for the first time. Assuming you survive, this is a valuable experience. Learn from it, and try not to do it again.

Reward: 1 Class XP

First Kill

You’ve defeated an enemy before it defeated you. Good job, but be careful. They might have had friends.

Reward: 1 Class XP

Tactical Withdrawal

Rather than stay and die, you ran away and lived. Survival isn’t about winning. It’s about making it through your problems alive.

Reward: 1 Class XP

In Matt’s view, these were pretty underwhelming rewards for what he had just been through. But they also made sense in terms of what he'd expect from his idea of hero progression. It felt like these were tutorial rewards, the kind of on-rails assistance you got early in a video game for learning how to play. He didn't expect a lot from that kind of achievement. If he was being fair, he also hadn’t accomplished a whole lot during that fight. The Clownrat kill was the only real success, and the system paid him out for that.

He was close to leveling up, which was comforting, but while he had received XP for his first kill, he saw that he hadn’t received any XP for the kill itself. Taking out another Clownrat might not trigger XP for a level up, and even if he did level, running back into battle was a risk that might very well end with him dead. He was trapped.

Trapped, trapped, traps. The system-driven knowledge often came up in weird ways. Sometimes, it was unconscious, like when he ran from the Clownrats. Now, a surge of memories came forth to show Matt how to make dozens of weird, primitive traps suitable for snaring or killing small game. It was a stark reminder that he was the proud owner of knowledge that he hadn't actually put any work into learning.

System weirdness aside, this was the exact kind of information that a tutorial or system guardian should have drawn his attention to. Preferably, before he risked his life against the Clownrats. Something like, “Oh, did you know you can make a bunch of traps and not nearly get bitten to death” would have been greatly appreciated.

For now, he had traps to make.

—

Matt couldn’t make a net, and digging a pitfall would take too long. But he was pleased to find that an awful lot of simple, nasty traps could be made with nothing more than rope, sharpened sticks, and time. While he didn’t have unlimited amounts of the last item on that list, his motivation for not being eaten alive by terrifying clown-rodents lent his strength to whittle triggers and gather bait.

It was unfortunate to learn that while Survivor’s Instincts taught Matt how to make traps, it didn’t do anything to help him be good at making them. It also didn’t provide him with the kind of callouses he’d need to do it comfortably, especially when making multiple traps with no tool but a knife. By the time he found himself crouched in a path-side hiding spot again, most of the skin on his hands was covered by cuts, scrapes, or just flat-out worn away.

The Clownrats finally showed, and as they rounded the corner, Matt was suddenly glad that he had chosen a hiding spot a bit further from the road. He had set the traps at a timing meant to catch the same group he had attacked previously. The remaining four beasts were noticeably more wary, their creepy clown noses snuffling at each bush as they passed. Matt was sure they would have found him if he had been in his previous hiding spot.

But they didn't. The Clownrats were completely unprepared when the lead rat hit the first tripwire and all hell broke loose. A whip trap, Matt had recently kind-of learned, was a spiked stick bent way, way back and secured by a rope in a sort of shitty-on-purpose way meant to fail as soon as an animal hit the tripwire. When the lead Clownrat did exactly that, a tree branch loaded with whittled sticks whipped out over the path, impaling it and slashing another rat’s leg.

Without a clear enemy to attack, the other two Clownrats scattered into the brush. One immediately hit a snare trap that used the rat's own momentum to tighten a noose around its neck, while the other, in a stroke of luck, jumped under a large rock Matt had set up as a deadfall trap. Deadfall traps were usually reliant on bait, and Matt hadn’t expected this one to work. When the Clownrat wriggled out from under the large rock, Matt wasn't in any position to take advantage of the injury. Honestly, he was more surprised that it had triggered at all.

He was even more surprised by the devastation wrought by his traps. Letting the deadfall trap escapee flee the battlefield, Matt looked at the three Clownrats in various states of health. Matt descended on them like an avenging angel sent to rid the world of the clown menace once and for all.

The first stop was the one mostly free Clownrat whose leg had been wounded. It snarled and tried to leap at him, only to find its ability to do so hobbled by its injured leg. Matt had learned his lesson from striking the bone of Diamond-eyes, and instead stooped to stab this rat through the side when its lunge fell short.

The stabbed Clownrat fell in pain to the ground. It wasn’t dead yet, but Matt figured he had a couple of seconds to deal with other problems before it recovered. He dove into the brush after the snared Clownrat, which had almost-but-not-quite wriggled out of the trap. As designed, the snare had closed over its head. No amount of thrashing could get it into a position to bite Matt as he approached from behind. Several stabs later, the rat wasn’t moving anymore.

He ran back to the path, where the whip-trap rat was still struggling against the spiked stick and the rat he had stabbed was back on its feet. If the stabbed rat was sluggish from injury before, now it was pathetic. Matt patiently baited it into snapping at him, then slipped to the side and stabbed it a few more times to finish the job. The last rat was still dying on the business end of his whip trap. He had won.

Ding!

This time, Matt didn’t suppress the notifications that came pouring in.

Tricky Combatant

The brave and the strong meet their problems head-on. You aren’t either of those things. Instead, you decided to be smart and let your problems hit traps, tricks, or other indirect damage you put in their way.

Reward: 1 Class XP

Overwhelming the Odds

You managed to defeat a clearly superior fighting force in battle. Something that should have killed you was killed by you, instead. We don’t care how it happened, we just care that it did. (Repeatable Achievement)

Reward: 2 Class XP

Level Up!

You’ve survived and grown. Enjoy the rewards!

Reward: Class Stat Increase, 2 Assignable Stat Points

Matt didn’t have a lot of time before the next group came through. He needed to clear the area and take what he could. Luckily, that didn’t involve cleaning up the now-bloody Clownrat corpses. The system had made clear that everything he could see was an illusion, and drove it home by slowly fading the dead Clownrats away from existence.

Lacking time to reset the traps, Matt quickly disassembled what he could. He’d set them up in a different area, one that didn’t somehow still stink of death, despite all the evidence of blood and battle evaporating into nothingness.

—

Once back to safety, Matt considered his status screen. As with his class assignment, it seemed the level up automatically assigned stat points to Survivor’s emphasized stats

Matt Perison
Level 2 Survivor
Class XP: 2/15

HP: 35
MP: N/A
STAM: 20

Assignable Stat Points: 2
STR 5
DEX 7
PER 5
VIT 7
WIS 7
INT 5

Class Skills: Survivor’s Instincts (LV1), Survivor's Combat (LV1), Eat Anything (LV1)

There were no new skills, though Matt was glad to see that his stamina and health had climbed with his vitality. More ability to take hits and flee was vital. The most interesting thing were the two new assignable stat points, presumably free to put anywhere he liked. His first thought was to stick them into vitality. So far, that had been his most useful stat and he hoped that more vitality would also allow him to heal a bit faster. His memories of nearly bleeding out in the woods were still fresh, and anything that shortened the pain sounded like a very good idea.

But before he clicked the plus button next to the stat, he paused and looked at his class skills. So far, Survivor's Instinct had been crucial in helping him in the very literal way the name implied. On the other hand, he wasn't very impressed by Survivor's Combat. Sure, he was a little better with the dagger than he should have been, but when the Clownrats were biting him, he hadn't been able to do much about it. His own attacks also felt only marginally more scary than they would have been back on Earth.

That left two possibilities. Either he had been granted the most underwhelming combat powers ever, or it didn’t have enough to work with. Strength seemed irrelevant here – he wasn’t trying to punt the rats into the woods. This was an issue of seeing what was coming and reacting to it before it got there.

While the rats were pretty quick, Matt could still follow their motions. It was his body that couldn't keep up to dodge the attacks. That meant it wasn't a lack of Perception but rather Dexterity. If he poured both points into Dexterity, there was a chance he’d be able to fight the rats better. There was also a chance it wouldn’t make that big of a difference.

Vitality was a sure-fire bet. In the end, it was a gamble between having the ability take more hits, or between maybe not getting hit at all.

Well, Matt was a gambler. Nothing ventured, nothing gained crossed his mind as he dumped both points into Dexterity. He hoped it wasn't a placebo effect when he noticed that he was moving a little bit faster. Either way, it was time to move back to the path and reset his traps.