Deadworld Isekai

“That was way too close, Matt. Waaay too close. I’m talking you-shouldn’t-even-have-won close.”

“I know. But what choice do we have? It's not like the skills were going to magically come back. We have to get that mana generator. This whole mana deficiency problem is moving even faster than we thought it would.”

During the last few months, Matt and Lucy had gotten into the habit of having a quick debrief after the completion of a dungeon. With easier dungeons, these were often non-starter meetings, since there wasn’t a lot to talk about after a simple Clownrat massacre. When the meetings took longer, it was usually because Lucy used the time to bust Matt’s chops over some mistake he had made. They kept it up because they both agreed it was a good habit, but it was only on very rare occasions that the actual discussion turned out to be important.

This was one of those times. Lucy wasn’t wrong. Matt shouldn’t have won that fight. The only reason he wasn’t ripped apart by a half-dozen angry soldier ants was that they turned out to be more emotional and panicky than either he or Lucy had anticipated. Given that he had only survived because of an unlikely thing neither of them had guessed, it was worth sitting down and assessing their options.

“It doesn’t matter. You lost two abilities, Matt. Both the big ones you use to not die. And you didn’t get them back until AFTER the fight. That’s not sustainable. Maybe it could work if your natural way of moving wasn’t like a gangly 15-year-old who just experienced a growth spurt. But it is.”

“Actually…” Matt started to say something, then thought better of it.

“What?”

“It’s not important. Let’s talk as we walk.”

Rather than walk, Lucy plopped down on the ground and crossed her arms.

“No. I’ve been with you long enough to know your ‘let’s not worry Lucy’ face. I’m already worried, Matt. Out with it.”

“My skills haven’t exactly come back yet.”

“That’s… Matt, that’s not good.” Between the battle, catching his breath after the dungeon, and the few minutes they had spent arguing about it, there should have been enough time for his skills to kick back in. But they hadn’t.

“Shit, Matt.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I wish there was more information on mana deficiency in my system. What if they don’t come back?”

Matt shrugged. “Even without the skills, I can probably still grind in lower-level dungeons.”

“Yeah, but… that’s going to take forever, Matt. What if this problem starts eating stats?”

He shook his head. “I've been thinking. The problem's unfortunately worse than that. If I'm right, mana isn't a problem with the system. Mana is something in me that the system interacts with. This could get worse than not just having the system in play.”

Lucy paused for a second to digest the information, “Dammit, Matt. We're screwed either way, aren’t we? If we go into the dungeons, maybe you die. If we stay at home…”

“Yeah, maybe I die. It’s not great.”

“Did you at least get something out of this dungeon?”

That was another problem. The estate was just a useless hunk of land without its essential items, the sort of baseline stuff that was the bare minimum. Thankfully, those things tended to be cheap in terms of estate points. On top of that, things that would have been easy to acquire on Gaia during its prime were also fairly cheap, as if the prices had been set during that era and never updated. Matt figured that the combination of the two was why his low-level adventurer's dungeon income could afford all the cool estate stuff.

The mana generator was a different story. The generator was a piece of luxury magic tech, both uber-cool and blatantly non-essential. Was it nice to own? Probably. But the idea that it was either a necessity or a pre-existing object that was native to Gaian tech was much, much more questionable, and it was priced to match that extreme uncertainty.

“A lot for us, yeah. But we’d have to do a couple dozen dungeons more at this pace.”

Lucy flopped her hands down into her lap, looking defeated.

“So what do we do?”

“We go home and water the plants. We can figure things out from there.”

—

For the trip home, Matt put on his Wastelander Boots. He hadn’t ever accumulated a huge amount of enchanted magic gear, mostly opting for more practical stuff that fulfilled more immediate needs. The Wastelander Boots were an exception, something he got from an achievement with the Pocket Sand skill, and didn’t have to ignore in favor of repair tokens or sources of drinkable water. And he unironically loved them.

Wastelander Boots

These boots were enchanted to better cope with the unenviable tasks of walking across vast stretches of nothing. They are designed to help you escape areas that are unambiguously hostile to life faster, so you can go on to bigger and definitionally better things.

In areas with minimal plant and animal life, the Wastelander Boots grant a 15% increase to non-combat movement speed.

Given the overall lack of landmarks in the area surrounding Matt’s estate, it was easy to forget he was wearing the boots until he got wherever he was going significantly faster than he should have. They didn’t shoot fireballs, auto-heal when he was standing on holy ground, or anything nearly that dramatic. They weren’t as armored as his armored Survivor's Garb boots, or as comfortable as the sneakers he had picked up in the dungeon. But they were magic boots. They did a magic thing. He liked them and wearing them put him in a better mood.

The same was true of achievements, especially in the Barry-looking-out-for-him era.

Here’s Mud In Your Giant Eye

You have successfully survived an encounter with a superior opponent, blinded them, and used that advantage to cause their ultimate downfall. They can’t hit what they can’t see.

Rewards: +20 Class XP, +1 DEX, Pocket Sand promoted to LV2

Infiltrator

You have gone deep in hostile territory, posed successfully as enemy personnel before identifying, exploiting and destroying key weaknesses from the inside. Don’t feel too bad about the betrayal. They didn’t have to live with it very long.

Rewards: +30 Class XP +1 DEX, +1 PER

It Don’t Amount to a Hill of Beings

Either directly or indirectly, you have exterminated a giant colony of ground-nesting social insects. Luckily for you, they weren’t yellow jackets, or you’d be dead. You exploited your snowball’s chance in hell of survival to the hilt. Congratulations! Once again, you’ve failed to die, and by outlasting hundreds of different stamina pools, you’ve got a little extra to work with yourself.

Rewards: +55 Class XP +10 STAM

And that was enough to push him over the top into his first level-up as a battlefield survivor.

Matt Perison
Level 2 Battlefield Survivor
Class XP: 15/200

HP: 175
MP: N/A
STAM: 110

STR 19
DEX 34
PER 21
VIT 35
WIS 22
INT 10

Class Skills: Survivor’s Reflexes (LV1), Advanced Survivor’s Combat (LV1), Eat Anything (DISABLED), Spring Fighter (LV1), Rub Some Dirt In It (LV1), Pocket Sand (LV2), Survivor’s Digging (LV5)

Matt noted with glee that the class evolution wasn’t just a matter of better skills, but came with some improved stat gains as well. He wasn’t thrilled that the extra assigned point was getting tossed into his strength instead of dexterity, perception or vitality, but he supposed it wasn’t the worst. If he was ever going to stand a chance of fighting things like the queen ant one-on-one, he’d need to be able to dish out an equal amount of damage.

If he lived that long, that is. Good boots and stats did a lot to help Matt’s mood, but that didn’t mean there weren’t things that could immediately dash it.

Ding!

“Lucy, I got a system ding.”

“You aren’t even doing anything right now. Oh, shit, Matt. Does that mean…”

I’m Back

Hey there, Matt. I decided to take the time to write this one out myself, since it’s been a while. How have you been? Getting lots of achievements, and having fun recently? Good. I have a few fun little “growth opportunities” planned for you.

One fun thing that I learned after waking up is that you should have had much, much more time. You know how long I was supposed to be out? I did the calculation, and it was supposed to be something like two years. If you had spent that time just gearing up and leveling up, you’d have had an awful lot of time to get tough, and not be, as your system guardian might say, “the kind of person who always looks surprised when they trip over nothing somehow”.

Instead, you spent all your resources on repair stones. Did you know that even the system isn’t 100% efficient? When Barry spins up those repair stones for you, he’s using energy that the dungeon gathered. Normally, that’s not a big deal, but on this hellhole of a planet, having thousands of dungeons passively gathering energy is enviable. You in turn converted a lot of that energy into repair stones, and then dumped them into that weird dungeon.

What’s in there, by the way? Never mind. I guess it won’t matter for much longer.

Anyway, when you use those repair stones, MOST of the energy goes into the job, but not all. Essentially, you spent four months waking me up sooner, for nothing. Good job!

The best part about it? It turned out it was mathematically impossible for you to get quite as many stones as you did without a hand on the scale. Enjoy your next dings.

“Not good?” Lucy could see the look on Matt’s face.

“No, not good. And it’s about to get worse, I think.”

Ding!

Dungeon System Administrative Action Notice

Inherent in the rules applicable to the dungeon system is an element of randomness. While there is a certain amount of customization of the “prize pool” necessary to make sure that various classes get applicable gear, this cannot be applied to generic utility items, such as repair stones.

It is a matter of record that the Reincarnator Matt Perison had a stated desire to get “a lot” of repair stones. By holding its hand down on the scales, the dungeon system showed excessive and undeniable partiality to an individual in excess of what the system rules allow.

As a penalty, control of Matt Perison’s non-dungeon achievements has reverted to the control of the Gaian System Instance. The dungeon system will experience a two-week dormancy period, and any energy it would have used for administration of the dungeons over that time will be turned over to the Gaian System Instance immediately.

“Shit, this is really bad. Barry's down. For helping us. Looks like he’s out for two weeks.”

“Damn. We told him not to.”

Ding!

Dungeon System Temporarily Deactivated

The Gaian Dungeon System is undergoing an in-depth analysis intended to make sure it’s in working, operation order. This every-few-centuries maintenance is long overdue, and will result in all dungeons being temporarily closed for both native and reincarnator use.

Good luck hiding from what’s coming, Matt. The extra energy from the dungeon system let me order up something a little bit sooner than I otherwise thought I would. I’d ask you to thank Barry for me, but I’d hate to generate a quest you won’t get much of a chance to finish.

“Shit. Shit. He cut off access to the dungeons. Says he doesn’t want us to have the opportunity to hide from whatever’s he’s sending.”

“So that's what we need to do. If he doesn’t want us to wait it out, it must be something that can be waited out. It said every dungeon?”

“Every dungeon planetwide. He has control over them down with Barry out.”

Lucy scrunched up her face for a moment, then snapped her fingers. “What about dungeons Barry doesn’t control?”

It took Matt a moment to realize what Lucy meant, and then he was off at the fastest sprint he could maintain without a skill.

—

Matt already had most of what he owned with him, packed tight into his long-suffering pack. On the way back to the estate to stock up on whatever vegetables they could carry, the Gaian Defense System appeared to try to kick on, only to fizzle.

“Do you think it’s being suppressed, Lucy?”

“More likely that it’s just broken. Honestly, it’s weirder that it worked the first time.”

It didn’t matter much because any activity from it was a good alert that an invader had arrived. The words in the alert didn’t give that much extra information. Having stocked up on whatever food they could, they hightailed it towards the museum as fast as Matt’s legs could carry him.

They made it without incident, only to have the shock of their lives when they opened the doors to the plinth room. Standing in the center of the room, clad in long, blue robes, was a very tall, very pale man holding an ornate staff.

“Well, there you are. Oh, and the system compass resolved! Splendid. I wondered why it hadn’t yet, considering this plinth won’t let non-citizens in. I suppose I was waiting.”

The man waited a few moments for a response before appearing to realize that both Matt and Lucy were too shocked to give him one.

“Oh, I’m very sorry. Introductions are in order, of course. My name, I am glad to tell you,” He made a wide, sweeping gesture over his body with his staff, “Is Leel, the fourth adoptive son of the Cavelar of Ammai.”

He paused to adjust his glasses, sensing Matt and Lucy still needed a moment to gather themselves.

“And I hope I’m not rude in saying so, but you don’t look much like a demon king at all.”