Deadworld Isekai

Matt took the new mana-deficiency change in stride. At this point, not a lot could phase him. Some days were good days. Some days were not so good days. In the end, he was going to try his best to survive.

“It's okay. We'll figure out a way around this.” Matt reassured Lucy after explaining his notifications.

“Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better, Matt.”

“To be honest, me neither. There's basically no warning on this problem. It would almost be better if it turned off and stayed off. That way at least I wouldn’t have to realize mid-strike that I had screwed myself trusting it.”

“There’s a bigger problem, Matt. We don’t have time now.”

“Yeah.” Matt had been hunting ants at a rate of dozens per day, but there were still potentially hundreds of them to go. The food issue was progressing faster than either he or Lucy had expected. If it continued at the same pace, he could lose all his skills entirely. They needed to hurry and finish the mission before then.

“I can’t take all these ants at once.”

“No Matt, of course not. I think it’s time for plan B.”

—

“Make sure you don’t kill it, Matt.”

“Got it. Now quiet. It’s really hard to do this without engaging with Survivor’s Combat.”

After some experimentation, Matt had figured out something vital. Survivor’s Combat was pretty much automatic, and acted on its own to amplify whatever move he was trying to make. It made a careless strike look as if he had practiced it thousands of times. But it turned out to be a relatively simple matter to suppress the skill if Matt wanted to.

He had never had any reason to purposely make his strikes weaker before, but in the mana-deficiency notifications was the implication that using his skills were probably going to make his problem worse.

Using just his stats and his superior and newly acquired understanding of ant battle tactics, Matt was now wildly hacking away at ant-legs completely unassisted, barely avoiding mandible attacks and pointy-leg stomps as he did.

It took five agonizing minutes, but finally the ant was down. Every leg was disabled, and it was antenna-less and blinded. Matt knew the next part would suck, and he’d feel bad about it later, but there was no way their plan could possibly work without it. Carefully and slowly, he began prying the exoskeleton of the ant open.

This wasn’t his first ant-prying rodeo, unfortunately. It had taken them multiple tries to find the exact ant part they were looking for, and the last ant had started to fade before he could get a stabilization spike in it. Hopefully, this ant would hold up a little better, but he was being as careful as he could anyway.

Using his knife as a chisel and the survivor’s club as a hammer, he slowly separated the animal down the centerline of its back, along a natural joint in the chitin. Breaking it open, he saw his questionable prize - a softball-sized gland near the thing’s back. Matt cut around it, hoping the ant would survive the amputation. As long as the ant lived, parts of the ant wouldn’t dissipate. They had tested that, too.

Matt sprinted away from the ant, Lucy following close behind, directly towards a nearby entrance of the colony. Plan B was pretty simple, and revolved around one important fact. The dungeon quest hadn’t said that every ant had to die, just that the colony had to be controlled, and the spread of ants had to be stopped.

There was more than one way to skin that particular cat.

If the quest could be taken literally, and Matt hoped it could, even something like permanently plugging the colony up would work. Of course, that wasn’t an option, unless Matt somehow snagged some weird hell of an achievement to build a giant bunker construction project. The other option was the adventurer version of demanding to see the manager. They were going to go straight to the boss and see if they could get this handled. Killing the queen, or queens, would be much, much faster than tracking down and killing every single ant.

Actually getting to the metaphorical manager’s office was a different story. That would take some finesse.

At the mouth of the colony, Matt took the ant-gland, held it over his head, and jammed it with the stabilization spike. The gland spilled its liquid all over Matt. Whether or not the original ant died past this point was not a gamble they were willing to make, they just hoped that the spike’s effects would keep the pheromone working. There wasn’t any way to know for sure, since they had never tested the spike on organic insect perfume. But it was better than nothing.

Now they just had to test to make sure it worked, and in the name of speed they were taking a bit of a risk. Matt jumped down into the hole, dropping a few feet down a steep ramp before the tunnel leveled out and continued off several meters before bending off to the left. The tunnel was the height of an adult male. Just enough for Matt to move around in, but not enough for him to jump. But before seeing what was around the corner, he had a more immediate problem.

An ant was apparently guarding the entrance, and was doing so from just far enough in the tunnel that Matt was able to avoid landing directly on it. But only just. The ant approached Matt with antennae waving back and forth, and Matt kept his eyes glued to its mandibles. If it tried to get him, he was more or less backed up against a wall and would need all the warning he could get.

“Matt, shit. You sure about this?” Lucy watched the ant with worry on her face.

“Nope! Let’s just see how it goes, I guess.”

The ant crept closer and closer until its antennae were just a foot from Matt’s face. Then it suddenly lost interest. Either Matt had just got a lot more handsome to ants, or the pheromone had actually worked to trick this ant into thinking he was a friend. He was suddenly glad he hadn’t killed the guard ant; that would have called the entire colony over.

Wait…

It would call the entire colony over, except the queen and any other ants that had jobs more important than defense. They would presumably stay in place, counting on the rest of the ants to defeat the intruder.

“Lucy, I’m going to do something different. Hold on to your butt.”

“Wait, is this stupid different, or good different?”

Matt quickly shifted his pack around his body, took out one of his trap spikes, and shifted the pack back.

“Probably a little of both.”

The advantage to killing a bunch of ants with highlighted weak spots was that Matt eventually got a feel for why each spot was weak. A couple of them were connected to systems so vital they resulted in instant death, like the joint between the neck and head. Others limited mobility. But there was one spot on the back that seemed to scramble the ant’s nervous system. It didn’t kill them, but it just wasn’t a nice place to get stabbed.

Matt took his chances on letting Advanced Survivor’s Combat out to play for the split second it took to jab a trap spike into the guard ant like a demented combat acupuncturist, and then immediately turned tail and ran deeper into the colony. As he did, he felt a sudden strong whiff of ant-lemon-alarm-pheromone fill the tunnel. It was stronger than anything he had smelled before.

Surprisingly quickly, the daylight filtering into the tunnel petered out and Matt was left in the dark. Flipping on his flashlight, Matt was momentarily thankful for invader-armor guy. Had the other guy almost killed Matt? Yup. Had he left surprisingly little in the way of usable loot? For sure, unless you liked random smooth stones. But was he the only guy on Gaia that Matt had beaten to quasi-death with a shovel, who also turned out to have abandoned a bag a couple of miles away with a magic flashlight in it? Yes, and that covered quite a few sins in Matt’s book.

Ants started pouring towards him from every side tunnel he passed. They also came directly down the tunnel in the direction he was running, which was what he was counting on. So long as he was passing ants going the opposite direction he was, he stood a good chance to be heading deeper into the colony. He assumed the queen would be, if not in the deepest parts, at least pretty deep.

Emptying the colony in one direction also meant he stood a better chance of surviving if things did go sideways, since he had essentially distracted every guard the place had. And since the alarm smell was meant to mark areas rather than individual targets, the ants couldn’t identify him as the source of the problem at all. Or at least that was the assumption. Matt was enormously happy to see it being proven true, especially considering the alternative was getting ripped to pieces almost immediately.

Matt even had enough time to gripe to Lucy about the dungeon. “I don’t get how anyone was supposed to clear this. There are thousands of these things, and these are narrow tunnels.”

“I’m just guessing, but I think most teams would have a ranged fighter. Remember that Survivor’s Crossbow I told you to take, but you ignored me? Imagine how easy it would be for an archer class to pick these off from a distance. As long as they had enough arrows, they could pretty much just post up in a tree near an entrance and kill dozens of these things an hour, with zero risk. The ants would never even figure out where they were.”

“Got it. Yeah, point taken. It’s probably about time I get some kind of ranged attack.”

“After the mana generator, Matt.”

Matt grimaced. Besides the part where it might save his life, the mana generator was profoundly boring to him. It wasn’t cheap, and it was going to be hard passing up that much loot, if he even lived long enough to actually buy the damn thing.

The tunnels were long, but the make-Matt-seem-like-an-ant-pheromone was doing a much, much better job than Matt or Lucy expected. If anything, it was too good. Whatever the liquid in the gland did, it saved Matt the trouble of dying amid thousands of collie-sized ants. Unfortunately, as they got further and further from the alarm-spreading ant Matt had injured, the ants started paying more and more attention to them.

“Sure.”

—

Luckily, the attention wasn’t hostile, but it still slowed them down as they tried to move past ant after ant trying to figure out what Matt was saying in the smell-language of ants.

Eventually, the incoming ants petered out. The direct attack on the colony was apparently a big enough deal that almost all the ants went to deal with it. Without any outward-moving ants to reverse-engineer his course inward, Matt was now forced to wander the tunnels, trying his very best to keep moving in a general direction without getting turned around.

The entire trip down, he was passing weird ant rooms. The majority of the larger cavities the tunnels connected to seemed to be filled with stripped bones. Maybe these were the “trash” rooms of the colony, where the ants threw their bones after stripping the meat off. Some were more inexplicable, like a room full of medium-sized round rocks, or one room that was almost completely packed out with leaves. If Matt was an insect enthusiast, he would have found it interesting.

In the kind of danger he found himself in, the time it took to even glance in each room was a time sink he couldn’t afford. It eventually turned out that he needn’t have bothered, anyway. The queen’s throne room was pretty hard to miss. For one, the entrance was bigger, much bigger than any tunnel or door to a storage cavity Matt had seen. It was also the only room packed with larvae and eggs.

But the most striking feature Matt could see from outside the cavity was what mostly clued him in on the room’s importance. The entrance was flanked with not just a few but a solid ten guard ants, each three times bigger than normal, and to the last ant, they looked determined not to let anything past them.