Deadworld Isekai

“Okay, now is probably the time to hit them, Matt.”

“Not yet. We can get more.”

Lucy and Matt had already verified that the ants couldn’t hear, which was a relief since neither of them were all that great at being quiet. That wasn’t the only piece of information they had obtained, either, although the other one was a little less specific.

Achievement: Hit and run (and run, and run, and run)

You initiated a battle, which is normal. You fled from a battle, which for you is arguably even more normal. Furthermore, you did both at once, which isn’t quite as common as either but still isn’t exactly a rare occurrence.

But in this case, you fled from the active pursuit of over 500 enemies with mobility similar to or superior to your own, and still got away with minimal damage. Way to go, Matt! Maybe don’t do that anymore.

Rewards: Survivor’s Light-touch Footwear, +3 Dexterity

“Three is enough.”

“Not anymore. I want five.”

Matt had been fighting ants all day. And all night. And all day. It turned out that the ants either worked in shifts or didn’t sleep. They were all over the place. He had briefly tried to sleep in a tree, then found out the hard way that tossing and turning in his sleep 30 feet off the ground was a great way to test the limits of his vitality stat. That same stat also meant he could keep rolling without sleep for a few days, so he opted to just tough it out until he had eliminated all the ants.

The way that Matt fought was through kiting. He'd hide in a bush after painstakingly making sure there wasn't a tunnel nearby, wait until an ant came by, cripple it, hide again until its pheromone beacon brought in some more ants to help, kill the first ant and its early friends, let the rest of the ants chase him, escape across the river with them hot on his trail, and then cut down a few more of them.

This worked fine, except for two things. The first was that it was taking forever. Matt had limited food and water. Worse, every time he ate some of it, a window would pop up, vaguely hinting that he was getting himself closer and closer to mana-deficiency. Nothing had happened yet, but the stress was building up.

The second was that it had gotten easy and therefore boring. The ants he had encountered were all pretty much identical to each other, to the point where Survivor’s Reflexes treated it as if Matt was in one long, protracted battle with a single foe. The weak point detection got more and more refined, eventually giving Matt single pinpoint targets that, when hit correctly, would immediately maim the ants. He was also getting better at hitting them, not even because of Survivor’s Combat, but just because of days worth of sheer practice.

The only thing keeping him in a relatively good mood were his new shoes. Weird naming convention aside, they were essentially sneakers. After months of heavy armored boots, enchanted but still heavy, the new light-touch footwear made his feet feel like they had wings.

The freaking breathability on these shoes. Unbelievable.

“Matt, are you thinking about the shoes again?”

“Yes. I would spend any amount of repair stones on these, Lucy. I’m not kidding. Infinity repair stones, if that’s what it takes.”

“Great, Matt. That’s a totally normal train of thought when surrounded by lethal carnivorous ants. But would it be too much for me to ask you to focus up, just a little?”

“Fine. Point taken.”

Resisting the urge to re-tie the wondrous miracles that were his shoes, Matt put his eyes back on the group of ants. After only a few more moments, two more ants surged into view. It was time.

“Now?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah, that’s enough.”

Matt surged out of the bushes, chopping off one of the ant’s antennae before any of them had a chance to react, and then was gone. He burned stamina as needed on Spring-Fighter to get across the river, then turned to fight.

Five ants was an interesting challenge compared to three, but he hadn’t been wasting his time grinding up his skills. He had found that Spring-Fighter could be used in absurdly short bursts, burning low amounts of stamina for a small but quick burst of speed. In a fight, that was more than enough to bend around an attack in a way the not-so-bright ants were always unprepared for and strike at their weak points.

The fights themselves were a relatively short period in the whole baiting, waiting, and kiting cycle of things, so Matt took his time. As soon as he had injured at least a couple of legs on the majority of the ants, the fight was suddenly a much more sedate affair. Matt would let his STAM climb, charge the group, pivot to the side using Spring-Fighter, and strike. Easy-peasy. The ants' numbers were enough to make it hard for him to end the fight in one charge, but whittling them away was just as easy and maybe even a bit safer.

Eventually, three ants were dead and one was so badly injured it would likely die on its own within a few minutes. That left one mostly intact ant, a challenge so unbelievably boring at this point that Matt could more or less zone out while weaving around its predictable clacking-jaw attack like a matador.

But he stayed focused. He moved in, spun around the ant’s jaws, and prepared to nail it to the ground with his spear. But as he thrust forward with his weapon, the pole suddenly felt alien in his hands. It wobbled off course like it had a mind of its own, missing the weak spot by a mile.

Ding!

Oh no. That’s not good.

The ants weren’t the best at following fast, elusive movement, but they weren’t so clueless that they couldn't turn around and take advantage of a poorly-aimed spear thrust. And while they weren’t exactly flexible, that traded off with them being unbelievably strong at the few motions they could do. One of those was this move that Matt called the death wheel. Normally, he'd be able to dodge the move. But it wasn't just his arms that felt weak, his legs were like jello too.

So when the ant wheeled around fast and hard, the outside of the ant’s mandibles cracked into Matt’s hip, destroying his center of gravity and sending him pinwheeling to the ground.

Before Matt could even think about getting up, the ant was over his right side, clacking downwards with its sharp mouthparts. Sometime during the fall, Matt had completely lost track of his spear, leaving him temporarily unarmed and without nearly enough time to get at his other weapons. This thing was going to take off his right arm, and he had nothing to stop it with.

Your shield, you dumb asshole.

Matt consistently forgot he had a shield attached to his right arm, in part because he needed both hands to effectively use his spear, and the shield tended to make it just a little harder to do that. Having a giant ant threaten to detach all his limbs was a hell of a reminder. He reached over with his left hand, hitting the catch on the shield just in time for it to fully expand, click into place, and momentarily prop the ant’s mandibles open. The metal immediately started groaning under the strain.

Matt reached up and started desperately working at the strap for the shield, which was effectively tethering his arm in between the ant’s mandibles and keeping him from running. It was no good. The tension of being yanked around by the ant meant the strap was too tight to disengage. That left him with one option for getting away, and he didn’t love it. Reaching down with his left hand again, he drew his knife and took a single heavy chop at the shield strap, cutting through it and a good section of his arm in the bargain.

It hurt like hell, but he was free, and the ant was still distracted with his shield for the moment. Matt flared Spring-Fighter, praying that it would work. It did. He thought for a moment about running, then reconsidered. The ant could follow him any place but across the river, and across the river would be swarming with ants any second, if it wasn’t already. He needed to finish this.

If I can’t count on hitting, I’ll just have to make sure I can’t miss.

A shattering sound indicated his thinking time was over. His shield had exploded into pieces under the pressure of the ant's bite. Matt shuddered to think of what would happen if it was his arm instead of a metal shield.

As the ant lunged forward, so did Matt. Throwing caution to the wind, he waited until the insect was close enough to start its jaw attack, then hit the afterburners on Spring-Fighter to propel him into the air over it. Twisting wildly through the jump, he managed to land on the thing’s back, more or less facing the same direction it was.

Even without Survivor’s Reflexes highlighting it, he knew where the weak point on the animal was. As the ant thrashed, he laid the point of his knife down on the precise spot where the insect’s exoskeleton split. It was a joint necessary for the ant's movement. It was also a weak spot. Matt slammed all his body weight down into the knife.

The ant jerked, then fell to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.

Matt jumped off the ant as Lucy started yelling. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Not sure. Something with my combat skill. Let’s get out of here first. I don’t want to risk more ants showing up.” Matt replied.

“I told you to not push yourself. Three ants is plenty.”

Matt scooped up his spear, ignored the ruined remains of his shield, and ran like the wind away from the area.

—

Mana-related Skill Malfunction: Advanced Survivor’s Combat

All skills of any kind require mana to function. Some (like a mage’s spells) rely on gathered external mana, which is converted into external effects without significant interaction from the body’s systems. Others, such as most physical skills, amplify the natural mana the body produces to achieve otherwise impossible physical feats. But this amplification is multiplicative, not additive. When the body’s baseline mana is compromised, so are the skills that rely on it.

By subsisting on mana-deficient food during a period of significant physical output, you have destabilized your baseline mana levels sufficiently to cause a skill malfunction. The affected skills may work at a diminished level, or fail to function at all. In more advanced stages of mana deficiency, no skills will function and stat effects will diminish until they offer no advantage at all. Eventually, permanent damage to your body and death become possibilities as well.

As your body’s mana ebbs and flows, the skill may be reactivated or disabled again at an irregular timing.

By the time Matt had got back to the relative safety of a tree, another notification had sounded with a temporary reprieve.

Mana-related Skill Malfunction Resolved

Your Advanced Survivor’s Combat skill has been reinstated and can now be used again. Please note that this skill reactivation is potentially temporary. If the issues with your baseline mana are not resolved, it or other physical skills could unexpectedly fail as well.