Deadworld Isekai

“What could he possibly want back there, Matt?” Lucy had been silent for most of Matt's fight with Leel, but now they seemed to out of danger, she was back in a talkative mood.

“No idea. It’s not like he’s been there.” Matt was huffing as he tried his hardest to close the distance between him and Leel, who had a good few seconds of lead on him. “But I’ll be damned if I let him mess up the turnips.”

Matt was faster than Leel, but between being winded and having taken several shots to various parts of his body with a staff, it wasn’t by much. By the time he closed the distance, Leel was standing in the center of his property, taking big, heaving breaths.

“You… made a mistake. Following me… here,” Leel gasped.

“You know, I don’t really think so?” Lucy grinned, physically incapable of being out of breath and loving every second of it. “Matt here is about to beat you to death with a shovel. If the system gave you a way to run back to planet asshole, it’s probably time to use it.”

Leel shook his head. “No. No evacuation stones. Don’t need them. Refused them.”

Matt raised his shovel. He had felt bad about killing the kid before, but this wasn’t a kid. This was a homicidal magic guy who somehow gave a strong enough don’t-leave-your-drink-unattended vibe that it even got to Matt. Whatever compulsions Matt might have against braining people with shovels didn’t apply nearly as much here. As he went in to finish things, Leel took a deep, deep breath.

“I don’t need them because I have this.” Leel extended his finger, like a gun. Suddenly, something heavy hit Matt in the cheek, like he had been punched. It caught him completely off guard, and he pulled back, staggered.

“One of the signs of a true mage,” Leel said, having slightly caught his breath now, “Is how little mana they need to cast a spell.” He shot Matt again, twice, with whatever invisible force he was using. Both shots caught Matt in his hands, forcing him to drop his shovel. And then another shot hit him in the chin, almost blacking him out and sending him reeling backwards.

“Whatever you did to my mana regeneration slowed it down an incredible amount. But not completely. I have a few points again,” Leel gloated. He shot at Matt’s hip, which disturbed Matt’s center of gravity and sent him crashing to the ground. “Something is wrong with your stats. I could tell fighting you. You should have been able to beat me. You didn’t. You fought like a child fights.”

Matt crawled across the ground as Leel peppered him with whatever invisible force he was conjuring, taking hits to his back and legs as he did. Each individual hit was painful, but not lethal. Unfortunately, he had no way to respond to it. This was bad.

“This spell takes a small fraction of a point of mana, per cast.” Leel was breathing easier now, evidently recovering. He was speaking with a confidence that spelled out bad news for Matt. “If you had even a few points of vitality, this would bounce off your skin with little more effect than a bruise. It’s actually, and I am not joking, for killing insects.”

Matt kept crawling while several more shots hit the back of his neck and head. Leel was getting more accurate. Matt was now reeling, dizzy enough that he could feel it even though he wasn’t standing. He reached out his hand for to pull himself pointlessly forward, and felt a plant. Looking, he found it was one he didn’t immediately recognize, and was confused before his addled brain realized it was a shoot from the victory garden.

The estate-purchased soil was crazy stuff by itself. Matt and Lucy had turned it up a notch by enhancing the soil near the center of the garden with every cheap soil enhancer they could buy, and used that plot as a sort of experimental garden. Plants would grow quickly there and give Matt and Lucy a chance to see how each seed fared in the weird Gaian light and weather conditions. If the plants were healthy and Matt and Lucy liked them enough, they would then include the new plants in their full-scale farming.

Several days had turned out to be enough to get some of the faster-growing plants in the Sarthian seed pack to mature, mostly grasses and flowers. Unfortunately, Survivor’s Reflexes didn't identify any of them as a resource, in and of itself.

Why would the museum call those seed the “most productive” if they weren’t producing a resource?

Suddenly, Matt thought of a resource that decorative plants could produce, and prayed it was the right one. The problem of why his estate plants didn’t produce mana had always been a hard one. Even in top-grade soil, the food Matt had been growing was little better than poison. Something was wrong with how the estate system was interacting with the actual conditions of Gaia.

But where the museum hadn’t been strong enough to make a yo-yo, it could still give him a pack of seeds. A pack of seeds it claimed were gathered. Betting on a long shot, Matt pulled himself just a bit forward and sunk his teeth into the stalk of one of the flowers.

“Last meal? My heavens, you really are livestock,” Leel laughed.

As Matt’s HP bar continued to bottom out under Leel’s bombardment, he heard the most welcome sound he could imagine.

Ding!

Mana Deficiency Condition Status: Lessened

You have ingested food with normal mana levels, in the loosest sense of the word. Your mana-deficient condition has been stabilized and very slightly improved. For further improvements, seek higher-quality food.

Stats regained: +1 STR, +2 VIT, +1 DEX

Abilities regained: Partial use of Rub Some Dirt In It (4% efficacy)

It’s not enough, Matt thought. His HP bar started climbing, only to be immediately drained back downward with Leel’s shots. The flowers were vegetable matter, but were either far enough from being actual food or so barely sufficient in mana that without Eat Anything!, they just weren’t enough to pull him entirely back from the brink. If he had time, maybe he could figure out how to transfer their effect to his other plants. Or to figure out a way to condense them somehow. But he didn’t have time.

“Did you enjoy that? Good.” Leel leveled out his hand. “I suspect you will be blacking out pretty soon. I’ll try to make sure you don’t feel your ultimate end, Matt. I’m at least that civilized.” As Leel prepared to fire, Matt felt something crawling on his face, and reached back instinctively to brush it away.

The. Bees. The bees!

Matt called on the tiny bit of DEX and STR he had got back from the flower and somehow got to his feet, wandering like a drunkard towards the Ape-iary. The bees had only recently been producing significant amounts of honey, but something about the little flying monkeys and the memory of how horrifically tropical the Gaian ape had tasted had kept Matt from digging into it. He had been getting stats eating horrible things in the dungeon, and didn’t very much feel like bringing that gross home.

Now, this was a different story. The bees had access to those flowers. So if anything was a condensed form of whatever those flowers had, the honey would be. After taking a dozen more shots, Matt managed to make it back to the Ape-iary, shoving his hand straight in and dragging out a piece of sticky honeycomb.

And then, as he lifted his hand to his mouth, he realized he couldn’t see. His knees collapsed under him as he felt himself losing consciousness. His ears were buzzing. He couldn’t talk. To his horror, Matt realized the last thing he’d ever clearly sense was the taste of the honey. It absolutely reeked of over-ripe bananas.

“Matt! No!” Lucy screamed. “Get up!”

“Oh, no, I don’t think he will, dear.” Leel grinned. “I’m honestly shocked he stayed on his feet that long. I said he fought like a child, but that was unfair. I’ve tested this out with friends, and children in the street generally lose consciousness after just a few shots.”

“You are an unbelievable asshole. I’ll kill you.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much chance of that.” Leel was mostly recovered now, and regripped his staff in both hands, swooshing it through the air. “It’s a good thing, too. You won’t have to live very long after seeing this. Honestly, you should feel proud. It was a close thing. I’m once again completely out of mana.”

He walked over to where Matt was laying, and lifted the staff into the air. “I’ll have to do this inelegantly. It pains me. I suppose both of you can take that to the grave.”

The staff dropped down like a meteor, crashing into Matt’s skull.

—

Matt had once, just once, been choked out. His brother-in-law was a stout, corn-growing and corn-fed, Mississipi farmer boy who had once put him in a headlock as a joke, then squeezed just a little harder than Matt’s city-boy neck was prepared for.

That’s how Matt found out being unconscious wasn’t like the movies, where someone would get knocked out and their whole world went dark.

Instead, Matt found he was never really fully asleep. He could still see, but his brain couldn’t make sense of anything. He saw his sister's husband panic and drop him on the ground under a folding table. Waking up after being unconscious was like having shadows lifted off the images that he previously couldn't make sense of. It wasn't until after he regained his senses that he understood what had happened.

Matt's current situation wasn’t exactly like that, but it was similar. He could hear Lucy screaming, and he vaguely wanted to do something to fix that, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying or where it was coming from. He could hear Leel prattling on about something, and he was annoyed by that, but he had no idea how he could go about getting him to shut up.

And then, suddenly, another sound crashed into him. A few seconds later, he suddenly regained the ability to understand what had happened.

Ding!

Mana Deficiency Status: Recovering (50%)