Deadworld Isekai

“I probably should have asked this earlier, but how does magic work?” Matt asked Lucy.

“It works enough for you to start running, Matt.”

Before Matt could quite start turning, the fire leapt from the surface of Leel’s hand and formed into a kind of vaguely dart shaped sliver of flame. Without any apparent action on his part, the dart launched off his hand, audibly sizzling through the air towards Matt. Rather than flying like a bullet, it arced through the air as if it were some ball.

With Survivor’s Combat and some warning, Matt could have dodged it pretty easily. Without either, there wasn’t time. He reflexively threw his arms up, catching the bolt on his left forearm.

Matt screamed. Whatever half-formed hopes he had that the magic would fail in this desolate world without mana were immediately dashed. The dart didn’t explode like a fireball, or piece through like a piece of superheated metal. Instead, it hit him and almost instantly disappeared, plopping and dissipating without much impact at all. In the process, it somehow imparted extreme heat to his arm, like it was directly injecting flames directly into Matt’s flesh.

“Oh, screams of pain already?” Leel laughed as he formed another dart in his hand. “This is going to be easier than I thought, Matt. Those are some of my weaker attacks.”

“We don’t have to do this! We can talk!” Matt backed up furiously, trying to get enough distance between him and Leel so that he could dodge the darts. “I don’t think the system is on our side.”

“On our side? Matt, you poor lamb. The system isn’t on anyone’s side. I would have hoped you would have assumed me at least sophisticated enough to know that.”

The next dart launched, but not before Matt raised his shield that had been repaired after he left the dungeon. He caught the dart in the center of the shield, and it dissipated, heating up the shield itself. Instead of going directly into his arm, the heat spread out through the shield instead. It was a fair conductor, so a lot of that heat still got to his arm. Normally, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but with his arm already severely burned, it killed.

Pain is fine, if that’s all it is. Pain I can handle. Matt thought, not entirely convincing himself.

“When one deals with the system, one makes do with the reassurance that the system doesn’t directly break promises. Was I expecting that it considers an amateur from some backwoods world to be a planet-wide threat? No. But I don't care. I was promised rewards I care about, and a survivable scenario.”

He held up his hand, manifesting not one but three darts at once.

“The details, Matt, are just that. You would do well to learn the system only concerns itself with broad strokes. It’s quite powerful, after all.” The three darts fired in quick succession, one after the other. Worse, he did this while moving, causing each of the darts to arc towards Matt on slightly different paths.

Matt had played enough bullet hell games to have an idea of how to approach catching them all. If he tried for a separate movement for each, he’d get hit by at least two of them. What he needed was an arcing motion, something that would, in a single sweep, intercept with the path of all three darts. He almost did it, too. The first two darts sunk into his shield, while the third caught him in the shoulder.

The dart in his shoulder hurt about as bad as the dart in his forearm had, but that was expected. What was less expected was how hot the shield became with the combination of pre-heat from the first blocked dart and new energy imparted by the last two darts. It was bad. Matt could smell the hair on his arm cooking off.

Even if he could block all the darts Leel was throwing, eventually his shield would get hot enough that it wasn’t an advantage. And if he couldn’t actively dodge the darts, he could at least make himself harder to hit.

“Ready to run now?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah. Right now.” Matt took off at the fastest sprint he could, coincidentally dodging the next dart in the process. He heard darts peppering the ground at his heels. Unlike bullets, they didn't kick up dust, but left behind a patch of sandy ground that burned his feet even through the boots. Matt began to run a serpentine pattern, hoping that what he sacrificed in speed would keep Leel from zeroing in on just the right trajectory to cook his cervical vertebrae.

Suddenly, a voice boomed out over the wasteland.

“Oh, this is fun. I so rarely get to use my voice amplification spell. Some of my early magic teachers told me it was a waste of time, but how else does one carry on a conversation during a chase?”

“God, this guy is an ass,” Lucy commented.

“Yeah. More concerned about the darts right now, though, honestly,” said Matt.

“Fair.”

Matt stumbled as a dart burned into his leg, then regained his balance and kept running. Leel’s magically amplified voice kept chasing him.

“Your biggest mistake so far might not actually be what you expect, Matt. It wasn’t passing by your chance to attack first. I have countermeasures for that. It also wasn’t letting me get to my favorite attacking distance, although I do very much appreciate your gullibility in that regard. No, it was something different entirely.”

Matt glanced behind him in time to dive and roll out of the way of a new barrage of darts. Leel was getting better at predicting his movements, it seemed.

“No, it was a rather more mundane thing that put you at the greatest disadvantage. You see, you confirmed that you had very little experience with magic before. For a wizard, that means confirming that there are dozens of little precautions we’d normally have to take that can be completely disregarded for the duration of this combat.”

As Matt rolled away from the next batch of darts, he was forced to absorb another dart that he couldn’t dodge on his shield. Rub Some Dirt In It was clicking away trying to keep up with the damage, but every hit drove Matt closer to an undesirable serious injury.

“That in turn means that I can really let my hair down and enjoy this. It’s quite fun, you know. The Pursuit of Mundane Warriors was one of my favorite training classes, after all.”

Lucy was pissed.

“Matt, is this fucker toying with us?”

It was terrifyingly possible that Leel was, Matt thought. At this point, the darts were much more accurate. They were still mostly missing, but by less and less each volley. Matt wasn’t sure if that was because Leel was getting better at aiming, or if he had simply been playing with Matt on early shots. The worst part of it is that there was no reason for Leel to not have some fun, since Matt couldn’t easily approach him.

“Don’t beat yourself up over your own inexperience too badly. Even if you had played your cards very close to the vest, there would be little you could do. I’m a pure mage. Every skill point I’ve ever gained has been dumped into my mental stats. I can cast spells other mages can’t even consider, or maintain a stream of smaller spells for hours that would leave them gasping for mana within seconds.”

Leel looked enormously proud of this last point, like it was something rare on his planet. Matt supposed if other mages didn’t have servants doing everything for them, it would make sense for them to throw a few points into other categories. Leel seemed like the kind of guy who had people to carry around his stuff and didn’t feel the least bit awkward about it.

“And I’ve gained many skill points beyond mere leveling. I’ve had the finest training, and that translated into achievements you can’t even imagine. I was on the dean’s list at a first-class magical university. I’d imagine you haven’t achieved anything close to that, no matter how much dirt you’ve managed to roll around in with your little farmer class.”

Oh, this son of a bitch.

Somehow, the incessant talking had become worse than the severe burns at this point. And Matt had just enough time now to consider that maybe blocking these darts with a shield that was directly strapped to his arms wasn’t the best course of action. He hadn’t gained much distance on Leel, but had managed to get far enough away that careful dodging had a chance of working. He sidestepped a few darts while he unstrapped his shovel from his pack.

Matt hadn’t exactly been a sports guy growing up, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t played any at all. Some of his friends were outdoor kids, so he had the normal amount of messing-around-at-the-park casual experience almost everyone gets. Since then, he had spent a lot of time on a wasteland planet, batting at grotesque monsters with knives and spears. He wouldn’t have been nearly as good at it without the stats or skills backing him up, but it was still experience that he hoped would carry over.

Perhaps most relevant of all, his parents had forced him through a couple of seasons of little league baseball. Somehow, this piece was what gave him enough confidence to try out an objectively stupid idea.

Matt had spent a lot of time with the shovel, but only recently had he spent time exploring uses outside of digging for it. Rather than using Lucy's imaginary campfires, Matt had been using the extra branches from his Gaian tree as makeshift campfires to enjoy with Lucy. Even though there wasn’t a lot of Gaia left to burn down, Matt was pretty careful about doing the whole “pour water on it and stir” thing when he was done with the campfires. In stirring with the shovel, he had discovered an interesting but up to this point, unimportant fact about it.

It was a really, really poor conductor. Absurdly poor. It not only didn’t conduct heat from the fire up to his hands, it didn’t seem to heat up at all. It didn’t transfer shocks when he dug with it. It just seemed to reject the concept of absorbing energy at all.

As Matt got a grip on the shovel, a dart was coming in hot. He moved the shovel head in front of it while sidestepping a few others. The dart hit the shovel and fizzled. That confirmed he could block with the shovel, but he already sort of knew that would be the case.

“Is that a shovel? My word, Matt. I know I’ve been leaning on the whole peasant line of insults pretty hard, but you don’t need to help me. I’ve got it under control, I promise.”

Leel was laughing hard enough that his next few darts came in a little less precisely aimed. Matt was ready. Stepping in, he ate a dart to the stomach while taking the biggest, strongest two-handed swing he could. He figured that the worst case here was that the shovel would absorb the dart like it had done so before. But if the shovel really did reject magic, he hoped a strong enough swipe at the fire darts would keep them moving, just in a changed direction.

The first swipe connected and kept going without any resistance. It seemed that whatever else these darts might be, heavy wasn’t one of their characteristics. The bolt itself hit the bottom part of the back of the shovel head, which reflected it downwards to the dirt. But the shovel did reflect the dart. That was important.

Matt set up again, and managed to get another dart deflected without getting hurt.

On the third dart, Matt felt a different kind of magic happening, one that didn’t come from mana but instead from the pure, dumb luck that seems to follow people who are willing to try out bad ideas.

Oh, yeah. That’s a really good one.