Deadworld Isekai

Ever since Matt had disabled automatic system window popups during his first fight with the Clownrats, they hadn't really been an issue during battle. He'd fight the foe, whether it be Flash Turtles or Meltbats, and check the achievements later. In the worst case scenario, that might mean he’d miss something relevant to a battle until after it was already finished, but that was still better than having his field of view blocked while something was trying to rip his guts out.

Now he was learning it was an even bigger advantage than he had thought.

Matt was still reading the window when it suddenly blinked away. The first half of the window had provided a lot of information, but nothing about how fast the ants could turn around within their own tunnels. The ant decided to fill that knowledge gap by shooting out of the tunnel like a bullet, pincers clacking towards his neck.

It felt like a horror movie scenario. One minute he was reading about some impossible terror, and the next minute the monsters in the text came hurtling out at him. Only the window disappearing gave him the advance notice he needed to react.

All things considered, the ant wasn't moving all that fast. But by the time the window disappeared and Matt's reflexes kicked in, the ant was almost on him, too close to dodge or block. If there was ever an occasion to try out Spring-Fighter, this was it. Luckily, it didn’t take a lot to activate and with very little effort it combined with the dodge he was already executing, seamlessly speeding up the motion.

He definitely over-dodged, getting way too far back to be in position for a counterattack. But the fact that he could even do that meant a lot. Matt glanced at his stamina bar, seeing he had drained about an eighth of it doing what amounted to a near-instant physical teleportation over a split second. He’d have to get better economization, but he had some ideas of how to do that.

The first move had to do with the enemy in front of him. The Survivor’s Instincts portion of Survivor's Reflexes was a bit underpowered now that the skill leaned away from WIS in favor of PER, but even in its weakened form, it could tell Matt that this individual ant wasn’t too big of a deal. Now that Matt was ready for it, he didn’t even need his Spring-Fighter to stay out of its attack range.

It came clattering while Matt moved backwards and to the side, taking advantage of the ant's inflexible insect mobility. As he did, he pulled his spear out of his pack and started peppering the thing with pokes to slow it down even further. Once the spear was in his hand, Advanced Survivor's Combat also kicked in, marking general areas on the ant's exoskeleton. He had targets now.

The brightest targets were on the back, but hitting them meant leaning above the ant's jaws, and that seemed like a bad idea if Matt wanted to keep all his limbs. Instead, he started hunting more minor weak points, starting with the joints on the ant's legs. Before, this would have been absolutely impossible. At the speed the ant was moving, it would have taken him a dozen stabs to get anywhere near hitting it. With Advanced Survivor’s Combat, Matt found that he could pretty much hit them at will with precision blows, and unleash serious hits every two or three attempts.

Disabling the first leg didn’t do much. The insect had too much built-in redundancy. But the third leg Matt disabled was both the second of the front legs and the second on the ant's left side, and it visibly stumbled with half of its legs out of play. This took away enough speed that Matt felt comfortable striking out at the antenna, taking one pretty easily and the second even easier as the ant thrashed around.

It was a little sadistic, but Matt considered leaving the ant alive rather than strike at its now exposed back. So long as it could move, he could keep working to move Advanced Survivor's Combat forward. He was eager to learn if there was some hidden functionality to the skill, and it was also a safe bet that there were some “you’ve been in a fight for a long time” achievements to mine.

Before he could succumb to that particular temptation, his increased perception and Survivor’s Reflexes were just enough to notice an input that had been coming in from the periphery of his senses. With the ant basically disabled, he now had time to focus on that worry, identifying it as a sort of citrus-y smell he couldn’t quite place.

“Is sniffing the air during a fight gonna be a thing for you now? Is that part of one of your weird new skills?” Lucy wasn’t getting all the inputs that was Matt, and she couldn't smell anything anyway. By now, it was pretty obvious the ant didn’t pose much of a threat anymore. “Are you just trying to grind in the fact you can do something I can’t?”

“No, listen, it smells weird right now. It smells like… lemon floor cleaner! That’s it. My mom used to use it instead of the pine-smelling one. This smells like that.”

“And?”

“It’s just weird. Where is it coming from?”

That line of thought immediately led Matt to the only thing in the area that really could be producing the weird, citrus-y smells. That was the ant itself. The smell of its yellow blood was pretty distinct and had increased the more it bled, so the lemon smell wasn't from the blood. But if it wasn’t that…

Shit. Pheromones.

Matt took off running just as he heard a much louder clattering kicking in behind him.

“I might have fucked up.”

—

The dungeon system's description of the ants had said they could run as fast as a man at a full sprint, and that was basically correct. But Matt could both run faster than the average man and could zigzag in a way the ants weren’t great at. This would have let him get a comfortable lead pretty quickly if it wasn’t for three things.

The first was that the ants never seemed to get winded. If Matt remembered right, insects didn’t have lungs so much as they had holes in their skeleton that sucked in air passively. Running might even help them breathe better. Would they gas eventually? Maybe. But for now, they were doing a better job keeping up than their baseline speed implied they should.

The second, more annoying problem was that the scent these things were putting out was omnidirectional, it looked like the colony had little tunnels everywhere and scouts out in every direction. Every now and then, an ant would shoot out of the bushes from an unexpected angle, and he’d have to stumble out of the way or even use Spring-Fighter to avoid getting eviscerated. Those little tolls on his speed and stamina were adding up, and the ants were slowly reeling him in as a result.

The third issue was a mixed blessing, as Matt’s Spring-Fighter skill was part of what was allowing him to keep ahead of them. But that came at a constant, noticeable drain to his stamina. Not just the stat bar, either. That Matt could handle. But apparently, the skill also overclocked his cardiovascular system and multiple uses were tiring him out faster.

He couldn’t let that happen. Survivor’s Reflexes' threat assessment function worked off PER, it seemed, and was working better than ever before with his increased stats. The signals Survivor's Instinct sent were nearly subconscious most of the time, but the upgraded skill enhanced Matt's danger perception to the point where there were now visual aspects in play. Looking behind him, he could see the crowd of ants basically boiling with danger, the air above them shimmered like the space over an asphalt roof on a hot day.

When the first mandible grazed his heel, Matt knew he was in trouble. Mandibles were a great motivator to speed up, but soon enough the burst of adrenaline wore off, and the ants were still moving at their fast pace.

“Help.” Matt was economizing energy as much as he could and cutting words to save oxygen. “Might be in trouble. Need a tree. Something.”

“Got it. Looking.” Lucy copied Matt's speaking style.

Matt guessed that the ants could climb, but if he could get up a tree first, he had a small chance of being able to keep them off him with the spear and long enough to catch his breath. If nothing else, he might get at least time to think of something better than running until he got swarmed and eaten. Experience with Lucy’s restrictions had taught both of them that while he wasn’t allowed to send her away from him for scouting purposes, she was perfectly capable of noticing things that he could have missed around him and telling him about them. The object just had to be within Matt's potential field of view.

“There, across the river, hanging over the bank. That big one.”

It was perfect, a tree with branches big enough that he could lay on them, but skinny enough that the ants might have trouble keeping all their legs on those same branches. He waited until the tree was at about a 45-degree angle from him before changing direction to cross the river, hoping that would gain him a bit of a lead to climb the tree with.

Matt splashed through the shallow river like a maniac, getting soaked as he did. Any hope that the ants would be allergic to water were dashed as he heard them crashing into the river behind him. When he made it through the water and hit the opposite bank, he leapt up towards the tree, catching a low branch and swinging up as he looked for something big enough and stable enough. Something that he wouldn’t fall off from when he stabbed downwards against the ants later.

By the time he had transferred to the next branch, his plans had to change again.

“Matt, look. Down.”

Stabilizing himself against the trunk of the tree, Matt looked down at the ants, expecting to see some horror-movie vision of them climbing the trunk. Instead, they were milling around, confused. Matt sincerely doubted the ants were smart enough to be tricky. This looked like they legitimately had lost track of him. Which was weird because he had been in full sight the entire time.

The river.

Matt had cut off the antennas to blind the first ant he fought. He hadn’t stabbed out its eyes because it didn’t have them. Ants worked off scent, and the lemon-cleaner smell they’d been spraying around until now was probably, Matt thought, a general “hey there’s something interesting or dangerous over here” type of message. He had been careful during his fight to not let any foreign liquids tag him.

It was more likely that these ants were tracking him through his unique human scent. These ants were hunters, not gatherers, so it made sense that they could follow Matt's scent trail as he ran. But when Matt jumped out of the river at the tree, he hadn’t actually touched ground again. Whatever sense these things used to track prey apparently wasn’t long-range enough to actually see into the distance or him fifteen feet up a tree.

Matt suspected the ants were deaf too, but he wasn’t going to chance it more than he had to. He sat down on the branch, found a balance, and controlled his breathing to be as quiet as he could make it. He was still huffing pretty loud, but it wasn’t enough to alert the possibly deaf ants. He was safe, for now.

“Matt, I think we're gonna be okay. The only ants that followed you across the river were the ones that were almost close enough to bite you. It’s like they could smell you in the water, but only for a moment. Any ant that was farther away than that isn’t even bothering to cross.”

Matt was very, very happy to not be getting eaten right now. But this was more. Having a reliable method of retreat also meant you could strategize to hurt your enemy and fade away before they could do anything about it.

Matt was about to go full guerrilla.