Deadworld Isekai

The man had stopped talking, and the video froze. The exhibition was over.

“Matt, this can’t be real, right?” Lucy asked.

Matt shook his head. For all their normal banter, he couldn’t think of a single relevant thing to say.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what reason these people would have to lie. And they couldn’t have been lying about the scourge. We’ve seen what Gaia looks like. Whatever happened, it was total annihilation. If true, the scourge ate everything, until there wasn’t anything left at all.”

“It’s just, Matt, the deal is that the system is lazy. But it has rules. I’ve never heard of a rule that lets it destroy a world. How could that exist?”

“I don't know. Let me think. If the system appeared, in most places, everyone would try to become stronger. That’s probably the normal reaction, you know? Everyone would go and try to be superheroes. The Gaians didn't. They didn’t want the system. And they barely used it until the system forced their hand.” A scary thought crossed over Matt's mind before Lucy vocalized the same idea.

“It was punishing them?”

“Maybe. Maybe it needs people to use the system. I don’t know. It could just be that it’s stupid and didn’t think about the danger, or didn’t realize the Gaian would modify the seed. I honestly don’t know. But he,” Matt gestured towards the man, “if he’s right, the system broke the balance. It caused the threat to this planet, and then it failed to send the help that this planet needed.”

Matt walked up to the man. Whatever his job was, it seemed important. His speech gave the impression of someone entrusted with power, someone who seemed like they took that trust seriously. He was asking for help, not demanding it. If Matt was looking for a leader for the Gaian people, he could do worse.

Looking into the hologram's eyes, Matt said, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm late.” The shock of everything was still setting in. Matt was barely surviving, but he wanted to say something. To make a vow in response to everything that he had seen today. “I can’t make promises. And I know you can’t hear me. But.. listen. If there’s anything I can do, I will. Even if it’s just making the system’s job harder. I’ll do that. If I can hurt it, if I can hold it to account, I will. I promise you.”

It was stupid to talk to a hologram. It couldn’t hear him. Hell, whatever system this dungeon ran on couldn’t hear him either. Barry couldn’t see this place. The system instance was probably still asleep. Besides Lucy, this was the most alone he could be. He doubted even ghosts could get in here.

Matt sighed, and began to turn away. But out of the corner of his eyes, he saw the simulated man blink. Not the simulated man’s eyes alone, but the whole man winked in and out of existence, like someone had flipped a light switch off and on as fast as they could. Matt braced himself for an emergency teleport and did his best to batten down the hatches to keep from puking if it came to that.

It didn’t. Suddenly, the simulation’s eyes came alive and locked with Matt’s.

“Reincarnator?”

And then, before Matt could react, the man was frozen again, just as blank as before. Matt waved his hand in front of the unresponsive eyes. It was out. He looked back at Lucy, who was still muttering hateful words at the system instance. She hadn’t heard. The thing had come to life and whispered a single word. Unless it hadn’t.

Am I going crazy? Is this what mana deficiency does? Is this what being alone does?

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“What?”

“We're going to need a lot more repair stones.”

—

For better or worse, the holographic square was a nice place. There was normal sun, hardly any dust, and that rare not-a-wasteland vibe that was so often lacking for their little talks. And so, they decided to stay in the museum for a bit longer.

“I know! I'm not sure if it really happened either. And I get that it’s hard to believe. But we have to do this. I swear to you, the hologram talked to me. It called me reincarnator. It was real, really real. Who knows what happens when we get all this running again?”

Matt waved his arm at the projections around them. It was hard to tell if what he was referring to was really a positive. The downside of using the museum's town square as a meeting room was the fact that they were surrounded by dozens of projections in a permanent, illusory kind of rigor mortis.

Earlier, when Matt was trying to figure out if he was going crazy, he had rushed out of the last exhibit and went to the second phase of the museum. A living museum always had weird actors who would talk about their lives in some abstract third person. If Matt was correct, he might see another simulation that could truly speak.

The good news was that the museum did generate a few individuals from each presentation for them to talk to and interact with. The bad news was that when Matt ran to the closest simulated figure that looked like an angry American colonial blacksmith, the figure attempted to greet them before freezing up. Not momentarily but entirely and persistently. Just a sudden Gaian caveman mannequin holding a stone spade.

The rest of the projections were the same, and after trying to have conversations with each, they returned to the town square full of projections. It was creepy, yes, but somehow still better than the boredom of the wasteland.

“No, Matt.”

“It really happened! I swear!”

“Matt! Listen to me! It’s not that I don't think it happened!”

“What, then? What could be more important than this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Matt. Making sure you don’t starve to death or turn into some kind of mana-deficient undead thing, or whatever happens when you keep eating the cursed turnips. And mana generators are fucking expensive, Matt. You have no idea.”

Matt paused. She had a point. “We can do that stuff after?” he asked.

“No. Absolutely not. We get the turnips fixed first. I’m putting my foot down, Matt,” Lucy's tone gave no ground for disagreement.

Matt opened his mouth to argue again, only to be met with the very sternest of little-girl glares. It was over.

“Fine. You win.”

—

It was decided. They would do dungeons, Bigger, more dangerous dungeons than they had tried before. They would buy a mana generator and hope for the best, and if Matt was still functional by that point, they’d work on collecting repair stones.

Of course, this was all dependent on the system staying quiet. If it woke back up, all bets were off.

And then, something wonderful happened, something Matt could have predicted but never actually got around to hoping for. When they went to the clearly marked exit of the museum dungeon, the teleport diverted them to some new location. They expected to land outside the dungeon but instead went to some place completely different, and to Matt, infinitely better.

“Holy shit,” Lucy whispered.

“Lucy? Lucy!” Matt exclaimed.

“I see it, Matt. This is insane.”

“It’s a gift shop. Lucy, it’s a damn gift shop.”

In science, there's a concept called Carcinization, which is the idea that, no matter what environment you start with, however wet, dry, harsh or gentle, eventually, you'll find animals that look suspiciously like crabs. Almost nobody thinks that this occurrence is because of some crab creator god working behind the scenes to create animals in its own image. Instead, the consensus is that the crab design was so stunningly useful for surviving on Earth that it was almost harder to design an animal that wasn’t like a crab in some way.

It turned out the same concept held true for gift shops. Matt was god-knows-how-many light years from Earth and in the ruins of a society that has almost nothing to do with Earth. Yet, everything was alright. There were buttons. There were boxes of Gaia and Sarthia stickers. There were cheap, stupid toys and cheap, almost non-functional wind instruments, and every aisle was capped by open-top boxes filled with countless educational posters.

It was perfect. And not just for Matt.

“Sweet Moses, Matthew. They had better have yo-yos. Do you think every society eventually discovers yo-yos? Because I’m not leaving without a yo-yo.”

“I hate to bring this up, but you probably can’t leave with a yo-yo, in that you don’t really have…”

“Hands? Yes, I know, Matt. But if I see one, I can duplicate it with my magic hologram illusions. I want a weird Gaian souvenir one.”

“But…” When Matt first saw Lucy, she had been sitting by an illusory campfire on a fake, non-physical log of her own making. Since then, she had barely bothered to project anything but herself. Matt had assumed it was to try to look more real, something he didn’t care about but that she seemed to find important. If she wanted to move away from that, it was fine.

“Matt! I found them!”

And so she had.

One more win for convergent evolution.

Lucy had Matt shuffle through all the various Yo-Yo designs, eventually settling on a Sarthian sports-themed design featuring a weird, oval ball. Matt decided to grab one himself too, just so they could enjoy them together.

Error. Item currently unavailable for materialization. Please select a different item.

“Shit, it won’t let me take one.”

Lucy laughed as she tried and failed to get the illusory yo-yo she had generated to work. Matt wasn't sure how that even worked. A hologram trying to replicate another projection. It hurt his mind. He walked around the gift shop, trying and failing to claim the other items.

It was only by luck that he found something he could take, something near the counter that he probably wouldn’t have even seen if he wasn’t desperate to take something with him.

Sarthian Victory Garden Seeds

Gathered from the most productive of the continent’s plants, these seeds represent the hope of our people. Participate in the effort to defeat the Scourge by growing your own victory garden today!

“Are you happy?” Lucy asked.

“Not exactly. I wanted a Frisbee. But it’s better than nothing.”

—

After a quick stop at home to stuff what non-cube food looked the least perishable in Matt’s backpack, scatter the victory garden seeds on some moist soil, and give the plants a quick deep watering, they were off. The nice thing about breaking into a whole new level range of dungeons was that they didn’t have far to go to find one.

Despite the fact that he was in most ways technically over-leveled for it, a level 10 dungeon was the highest-ranking dungeon Matt had ever entered. He hit the ground, ready for literally anything from mutant moles to small dragons. And then there was nothing. No beasts, no birds, no animals or monsters of any kind. Just endless, boring forest as far as their legs cared to take them.

“Are the enemies in this one invisible? Is that the kind of danger you get from a double-digit dungeon level?” Matt asked.

“I doubt it, but maybe. There has to be something weird going on. Try stabbing the trees.” Lucy responded.

It was an hour later when their attention was drawn to some rustling in the bushes. Matt moved closer, only to see pointed legs and the rear of an exoskeleton disappearing into a hole.

“Oh, hell.”

“What is it?”

Ding!

Dungeon Objective Found: Clear The Colony

What’s the best part about huge, carnivorous ants? Well, in the case of Wolfpack ants, it’s that they tend to clear out most of the wild game near their colonies pretty quickly. This limits the population of most colonies to hundreds of ants instead of thousands. It’s much more manageable!

The downside is collie-sized ants with jaws that can slice through small trees, run as fast as a human in a dead sprint, and use pheromones to communicate with hill-mates a mile away. Your mission is to stop the spread of the ants in the forest, ideally before they do more damage to the local fauna than they already have.

We hope you bought multi-target attacks! You’ll need them.