Deadworld Isekai

If setting traps hadn’t been fun, resetting traps over and over again was torture. After several repetitions of the cycle, Matt had to actively slow himself down. At one point, he barely avoided the business end of a self-sprung trap, courtesy of his own inattention. Not wanting to face a pack of enemies with the added handicap of a spike in his belly, he managed to force himself to exercise more caution.

The flip side of the coin was that it was a ton of fun to watch the traps go off. The Clownrats naturally grouped together with their pack, but only when they had an enemy to fight. They didn’t register the traps that way, and even when the damage from the traps was minimal, they’d still scatter in a way that made it easy to pick one or two off.

It wasn’t necessarily more fun to sweep in and mop up the survivors with his knife, but it was at least satisfying. Over the course of several surprise attacks, his general fear of clowns had morphed into something more like mutual hatred. He still didn’t like them, but it now felt like he was meeting them as despised equals on a battlefield. There was still plenty of danger involved, but every clash was survivable. Eventually, it was the Clownrats that fled the battlefield, not him.

He was winning. After a full day’s work, Matt pulled his knife out of a Clownrat neck, then sat and waited for the ding that would signal his triumph. He had defeated his fourth group, and was ready to claim whatever prizes the dungeon was offering and go home. After a few minutes, he had finished catching his breath from the battle, but the ding never came. And it still hadn’t come after he had taken down his traps and moved them off the path.

“System, are you pouting? I killed the four terror herds, you know.”

With no clear response incoming, Matt pulled up the dungeon quest window again.

[Don’t Send In The Clowns]: You have observed a pack of roaming Clownrats. Clownrats represent a threat to this forest and to complete the dungeon, you must eliminate them.

Objective: Eliminate Clownrat packs 3/4

Reward: Low-Grade Dungeon Loot Selection

But he really had defeated the four packs of Clownrats that roamed in the forest. It wasn’t until he saw a fifth pack made up of all the surviving escaped rats that he realized “eliminate” applied not at the pack level, but to every member of the pack. He had inadvertently assembled a group of Matt-hardened veterans, and the system wasn’t going to let him off the hook until they were dead, too.

Luckily, it wasn’t something a few more traps couldn’t fix.

—

After a few more repetitions of traps, it turned out Matt had engineered himself quite the problem. He doubted the remaining Clownrats actually understood traps, but they definitely understood shit going down in a weird way, and had become wary of any differences in the local terrain. When they saw trip-wires, they went as far around them as they could. There wasn’t enough time to dig a pit in the time it took the Clownrats to cycle through the path, and Matt was all out of trap variants that didn’t rely on tripwires or propped-up rocks.

Matt was going to have to fight four Clownrats, one of them the alpha-mom variety, without any of the benefits that his traps had been creating for him. His previous experience doing that was success in killing one rat before the others swarmed him and almost killed him in retaliation. He wasn’t exactly confident he had learned enough from that encounter to improve his odds of a better outcome much.

It isn’t like he didn't learn anything in the past few fights. One of the bigger problems Matt had encountered with the rats was that they were low to the ground. To stab one, he either had to stoop or intercept it as it flung itself at his face. Neither were ideal circumstances. He also had to fight them within their effective range, where they could bite him just as easily as he could cut them.

He had also learned a bit about fear. When the Clownrat had bitten him, he had panicked – there was no other word for it. He killed it, sure, but more out of sheer terror than some preformulated plan B for when things went wrong. Later on, when the Clownrats were scared of him instead of the other way around, he did much better. It was almost easy.

There was no way he got as much out of that first fight as he could have, both in terms of the initial clash and as he ran away. That was clear to him. Did he have time to train himself up? Not to any extent that would matter. Was he sure he could take down four Clownrats before they took him down? Not at all.

But he was pretty damn sure he could at least do better.

—

The mother Clownrat was more than annoyed. She was pissed. There were children to protect, yes. But they weren’t HER children. Her children were gone. The new animal had taken them.

At first, she hadn’t paid attention to the differences. There were new smells in the air, but not every new smell meant danger. Sometimes, it meant food to scavenge. Then, the path that she knew every rock of was disturbed. Later, she found the signs of a fight. It wasn’t her fight, and she hadn’t thought about it. If there was a danger, she’d smell it. She’d see it coming. She’d protect her young.

Then, her child was ahead of the pack, snuffling for food, when he was attacked by a branch. And that was new in a different, worse way. She couldn’t expect or prevent the attack. And then another of her children was under a rock. And when she tried to shift the rock, another squealed as it got tangled in a branch. Before she could help any of them, the new animal was among them, killing. Not just killing one of her young, but all of them. More than it could have needed for food.

The terror took her and she ran. She had abandoned her children out of a primal fear.

And then she found these young, not hers but still young, and took them with her. Now, she could see even more differences. Vines where there shouldn’t have been vines, and rocks that smelled of the new animal and placed in unnatural places at unnatural angles. She wouldn’t be fooled again. She always walked in front and always led her adopted young away from the danger.

Now, as she rounded a new corner, she found the new animal, holding one of its branches. It was pushing around leaves and logs, searching for food that should have been her children’s. Suddenly, she wasn’t thinking about avoiding danger. The only thoughts in her mind were of rage and revenge.

—

Matt didn’t know that the rats could move as fast as the alpha-mom did when it sprinted at him. When he had been chased before, the younger versions were slower by more than half. He had counted on more time, but he’d still make it work.

He stuck his new makeshift spear blade first in the dirt and grabbed his torch. The Clownrat wasn’t wrong, he was messing with leaves and wood. The part she got wrong was that he wasn’t looking in it so much as he was spreading as much of it as he could on the dry path. It had taken him hours and hours to find as much as he had.

The rat had closed about half the distance between them by the time he lit the torch and set a few different points of his dead foliage carpet aflame. It would take more time for the flames to race through the leaves than it would for the rat to get to him, but it would have to do. If he was lucky, the Clownrat would slow down out of fear. Unfortunately, he wasn’t lucky, and in a few more moments, the mother Clownrat was nearly on him.

Matt had been strategic in choosing his current position. He grabbed his spear and jabbed it at the rat. It glanced off the thing’s thick skull, cutting open a wound but not killing it. More importantly, the blow slowed it down enough for it to feel the heat from the growing flames and begin to panic. Matt could see the rat's eyes switching from flame to Matt, trying to choose between its desire to bite him, and its reluctance to move through the flames.

After a few moments, “bite the human” won out. Matt was already gone, having moved off the path and towards the smaller rats that were just now catching up. It looked like survivor’s instincts was right when it told him that the rats relied mostly on smell. The large one didn’t know he was gone until it was too late. He prayed the lashing on his knife would hold up, then jabbed it deep into the closest of the smaller rats.

It squealed, then went limp. Hearing it, the mother-rat screamed.

The second rat didn’t die as smoothly. It took two stabs, not one. He could hear the mother rat crashing through the leaves, and was relieved when the first hit to the third child-rat was mortal.

Some of that relief evaporated away, though. The third rat's death throes ripped the knife from the bindings and left him with nothing but a branch to defend himself with. He shook himself out of his shock at being partially disarmed and turned to face the mother. It was too late to bring the stick up, or really do anything.

The rat hit him full in the chest and knocked him completely off his feet.

—

Bite. Scratch. Bite. Hate. HATE!

Without his stick, the new animal couldn’t do anything. He struck her with his paws, but like all animals, he was weak without his sharp parts. She wasn’t worried anymore. She was going to make him feel it all. He flipped himself over, which threw her off him for a moment. But she took a chunk of his flesh with her.

She wasn’t worried about the new animal escaping. Wounded animals were part of her food, and she had damaged this one enough that he wasn’t going anywhere fast.

On the other hand, she was fine. She snarled at him. He should know, she thought. He should know that she was strong. He was weak. She was coming for him and there was nothing he could do. On his back now, he slid away from her, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the ground.

Go ahead, new animal. Try and run.

She stayed on him, harrying his feet as he cried out with ever bite. He just kept sliding back, too slow to escape her. And then he reached behind himself, to a bush, and it was only then she saw one of his wrong vines stretched behind the leaves.

No!

She leapt at his hand to stop him. Midair, the last thing she ever heard was a snap as the vine released the catch on Matt’s trap.