Deadworld Isekai

With the superhuman senses of someone with 20 PER, Matt could just barely smell the alarm pheromones the normal ants put out. He had to be pretty close to get a whiff of the citrus tang. If Matt’s perception was just a little bit lower, he probably would have missed it entirely. Presumably, the same smell was “louder” for the ants, who could pick up on it from thousands of feet away.

The vapor that the queen expelled was the exact same scent, as far as Matt could tell. That wasn't too out of the ordinary. Matt would have been shocked if the queen ant didn't have a way to say hey-there’s-danger-over-here-you-guys in some way or another. The strength of the colony was numbers, and it didn't make sense for the queen to not leverage that.

What was less expected was how strong her vapor was. Where the other ant’s signal was so quiet as to be almost a whisper to Matt, this had to be the ant equivalent of an air-raid siren. The entire throne room smelled like a freshly mopped office building, and it meant trouble.

“What does it smell like, Matt?”

Matt’s face was grim. “Citrus.”

“Shit. How long do we have?”

“If we're lucky? A minute or so.” There wasn’t much time for talk. Matt was already sprinting towards the queen, aiming to arrive at the side of her hopefully disabled mandible. As he hoped, it really was at least partially broken. The queen lunged towards him, but apparently couldn’t extend the mandible outwards to widen her strike anymore. He easily dodged around it, and finally found an opportunity to use his most neglected skill.

"Pocket Sand!” He yelled, feeling like a doofus. None of his other skills required verbal activation, he thought. Why this one?

Pocket Sand

You have walked the often-neglected path of utilizing combat powders, which is weird. On more than one occasion, you have blinded an enemy with sand, dirt, or some other less common powder, and you are now getting rewarded with a skill completely appropriate for the kind of guy who thinks you can become a ninja by spending enough money at a mall knife shop.

Pocket sand streamlines the process of reaching into a pouch, pocket or other kind of partially-enclosed storage and gripping a reasonable amount of any fine-grained, loose material. It also amplifies your ability to throw it, making it go farther, fly straighter, and resist wind slightly better than you’d expect.

Pocket sand’s effectiveness scales off DEX and PER, and synergizes with Survivor’s Reflexes to find both ocular and non-ocular powder-sensitive targets.

Matt had occasional uses for Pocket Sand, but in the easy dungeons they were grinding during the time the system had been asleep, those opportunities were rare. It was a skill that wanted a single target big enough that he couldn’t just kill it outright, and that moved slow enough that he could hit it in the first place. Mostly it was just something that he kept in his literal back pocket, looking for a big, otherwise tough opponent with eyes to use it on.

If this wasn’t that very scenario, he didn’t know what was.

A cloud of sand emerged from his hand and covered the queen's remaining good eye. Panicking, she started backing up. Taking advantage of the situation, Matt jumped up and clubbed the ant hard in the same eye. To his surprise, this combo worked great. The queen’s momentarily blindness meant she didn’t move to avoid the blow, and as the club impacted the eye the entire organ burst, leaking bluish-green liquid that he had come to associate with ant blood.

“It’s blinded, Matt!”

“Yeah! Let’s get to work.”

Blinded didn’t mean defenseless, but it did mean a noticeable shift from damn near invincible to something he could handle. It seemed that the queen still had a scent-sense of some kind, but she was much worse at tracking him, to the extent where he was able to hit her flanks and legs at will.

He attacked from as many weird angles as he could, using Spring-Fighter liberally, since he’d either win the fight and clear the dungeon or be swarmed by the ants that were coming back. He desperately tried to get into position to launch onto the queen’s back or slide under her belly, but she seemed aware of these vulnerabilities and protected them to the best of her abilities.

And then the worst possibility became reality. Matt made a feint at the good side of the giant ant’s jaw, hoping to make it drop its head so he could burst Spring-Fighter and hopefully go up and over her lowered skull. As he did, he heard a ding and felt the loss of all the enhanced speed he was counting on to either make the maneuver a success or pull him out of danger. The ant jerked its good mandible towards his arm, which was stretched out as far as it would go to sell the reality of his club-feint.

The arm remained outstretched as it hit the ground, cleanly detached halfway up his bicep.

Matt screamed, and tried to backpedal, but the ant was on him, cutting and gouging with its good mandible. Nothing else got detached, but he picked up several deep cuts on his torso and remaining arm as the thing thrashed semi-blindly at his last known position. Rub Some Dirt In It kicked in and managed to staunch some of the bleeding, but Matt’s short timer was getting even shorter.

Matt's mind went blank for a second. The pain made it hard to concentrate on anything but the rising fear in his chest.

Swinging back from a cutting motion that had already nicked him again, the ant managed to club Matt with the outside of its good mandible. Matt was flung to the earth, bleeding and helpless to enhance either his movement or combat. At the same time, he heard the rumbling of the guard ants approaching. He had seconds, not minutes, to bring this fight home, or he’d be swarmed by the better part of a dozen enemies, all fully capable of fighting him on even terms.

The queen ant could apparently smell the blood, and her killing instincts told her this was the time to finish a weakened foe. She moved forward more slowly, sweeping her mandibles back and forth in a sort of lethal sweeping motion that would catch up to him eventually. Luckily, the scent seemed to be as much of a disadvantage as it was an advantage, just in a different way. The trail of Matt's blood left in the sand seemed to confuse her a bit about his exact location. Her attacks were probing, not precise.

Closer. Come on. Closer.

“Matt, do it now!”

Most of Matt’s skills didn’t build up momentum. Survivor's Combat didn’t get better over the course of a fight, and Spring-Fighter was a finite resource he had to ration out carefully. But Survivor’s Reflexes was an exception, and every second Matt had spent fighting was a second it spent narrowing down the weak points from a general range to a maximally damaging pinpoint location.

The queen’s weak spot indicators weren’t needle-point accurate yet, but they didn’t need to be. Matt had bought enough time. He had also kept just enough of his recently expanded stamina pool to activate his Trapper Keeper skill. As the queen moved forward, she finally stepped into range of the skill’s deployment range.

Trapper Keeper (Skill)

The Trapper Keeper skill does not level, and is instead keyed to the level of your Survivor’s Reflexes skill. At the current level, Trapper Keeper allows you to store one trap of your choosing in an interdimensional space. The trap can be deployed instantly, allowing you to cover hasty retreats or to settle arguments in an unusual way.

Trapper Keeper will keep a preloaded replica of your most recent trap. Once this trap is deployed, the skill is disabled until another trap is created and stored.

Under the queen, a sandwich of carefully cut and layered shelf-sections appeared, loaded with all the tension springs Matt had packed with him into this dungeon. Since a worried Lucy had insisted that Matt overpack, that was a lot of trap springs on boards on trap springs on boards.

This trap was built shitty and unstable on purpose. When it hit the ground, it would almost immediately burst upward with hundreds of pounds of stored force. It had taken hours to figure out a combination of twisted rope tourniquets, balanced rocks, and Matt’s own weight that would even let them compress the trap. The trap's failure to keep itself from springing itself was a wonder of half-assed, intentionally shitty design.

Trap poles were contorted to the breaking point between each of the boards to cause one effect, and one effect only. To carry the payload. Matt had considered using the shovel as the payload, but it seemed like spreading the force of the trap out over unnecessary areas was a possible point of failure. Instead, the trap carried the only other substantial piece of Gaian mystery metal Matt owned.

With a squelch, a claymore once owned by a kid that Matt had beat to another planet, one that Matt couldn’t use as a weapon himself, drove deep into the ant queen’s belly weak spot. The squelch was followed by an unnatural scream as the ant reared up on its hind legs, desperately trying and failing to lift itself off the sword.

The sword hadn’t buried itself to the hilt, but that was fine. It just needed to hurt her badly enough that she lost track of Matt for a bit and prevented her from turning as easily as she had throughout most of the fight. It did both.

As Matt found the energy to run toward the back of the queen, he saw the long-lost door guards finally returning. As he used his remaining good arm to swing up onto the queen ant’s back, he hoped they'd be too slow to stop him. The queen was thrashing around as much as she could on the sword, and luckily, this involved a lot of lifting, mostly from the tail-side forward. Matt was able to slide down most of the way to the weak spot halfway up her back, which turned out to be a small hole in the exoskeleton that reeked of a pungent citrus smell.

Matt hung onto the hole with a few fingers until a lull in the queen’s bucking, then unstrapped his knife from his pack. Before she could rear again, he slammed the knife down into the hole as hard as he could. The handle of the knife stood proud of the surface of the queen’s exoskeleton, looking oddly like a saddle-pommel. Matt gripped it as hard as he could, then held on for dear life as the queen lost her mind in pain.

The guard-ants had rushed up, but the queen’s blind rage had gone far beyond noticing the difference between friend and foe. A few of the guard ants who approached head-on as were immediately disabled by friendly mandible-fire as the queen swung wildly at anything that moved. The others tried desperately to get to Matt, but were held back by a combination of reluctance to approach the aggressive queen and the novel difficulty of how to climb another of their kind as it thrashed wildly around the throne room.

They still tried, but before they could solve the problem of climbing the queen, it became a non-issue. She gave one last jump, and let one last unnatural scream escape her horrifying mouth. Then she collapsed down.

She’s down. Come on, plinth.

“Matt! Get moving!”

Lucy stirred Matt from his mounted position. The queen was a big, bad beast, to be sure. But the remaining guard ants she hadn’t killed were more than enough to take Matt down in his weakened state. He was soaked in blood and a citrus scent. He doubted that all of the ant-friend pheromones in the world could cover his non-ant smells.

Matt needed to get distance as quickly as possible. He pulled out his knife and made ready to leap off the queen’s back. But as he did, all that blood loss caught up with him. His knees buckled, and he went into a rolling fall down the queen’s side, almost exactly into the section of the ground around her corpse most crowded with her soldiers.

Whoops. Sorry, Lucy. At least we got close.

Sure, he’d struggle. He’d try to run. But it wouldn’t do any good now. He wasn’t giving up. He just simply was out of resources. And his punishment was going to be painful. Unlike the queen's sharp mandibles, the other ants had mandibles that were the crushing-and-ripping variety. Matt could see them inch closer to his face.

And then the ants failed to attack. One and all, they crawled away from Matt and up the side of the queen, feeling her with their antennae. It looked like they were desperately trying to find any way to help they could, and failing. In any case, they had little concern for an invader now. In those few seconds, the plinth rose silently from the ground, then stopped. Matt wasted no time in crawling and stumbling his way to it.

Matt glanced at the available rewards just long enough to verify Mana Generator wasn’t among them before opting for the estate credits option. He didn’t even verify how many of them he was getting before confirming his selection.

And then he was out.