Deadworld Isekai

This new dagger glowed green as soon as it left its scabbard. The demon he had killed to craft the dagger was nasty, all acid and poison and refusal to die. In the end, it took Flambo loading Brennan's previous dagger with a seriously dangerous amount of flame and a plunge into the demon's eye to end the fight. The stuff Brennan had gotten on himself after the subsequent explosion had left him bed-bound for a week, but it also left him in possession of a particularly nasty set of fragile, poisonous bones.

The new dagger wasn’t any good for prolonged battle. It was brittle and weak, and it took the better part of a day for the blacksmith to realize that the bone was better ground down into a spike instead of trying to shape it into an actual knife.

Brennan ducked another glowing shot attack, referenced his senses to make sure he was aiming at the right weak spot, then jammed the poison dagger to the hilt in the demon’s neck.

The dagger would either kill him or it wouldn’t, but Brennan was out of time. The fact that Artemis agreed was evident as a trio of staggered arrows crashed into the injured rhino guard, toppling it to the ground and leaving a gap for Brennan to escape through. Without a second thought, he activated Tactical Retreat, dumping almost his entire stamina pool to raise his speed to insane levels as he ran through enemy soldiers towards the edge of the camp.

By the time he reached the borders of the enemy forces, he had some minor new nicks and cuts. John was nowhere to be seen, but that was expected. If he was following the plan, he would have retreated already. John was tough, but he was slow. He needed a lead to get back to the wall at the same time as the others.

As Brennan crashed into the darkness, he ran almost headlong into a group of several bird soldiers. He guessed they had been chasing his crew around, reinforced by the observation that they were flying almost at ground level, a behavior he associated with any flight-capable enemy that had recently experienced Artemis’ arrows. As good as that might normally make him feel, it spelled trouble here. He and the group were moving towards each other at alarming speeds, much faster than he was comfortable dodging at. His retreat skill was meant for speed, and nothing else.

Before he had the chance to slide on the ground like a baseball player and hope the demons were surprised enough to let him past, the entire group exploded.

“That’s almost the last of my mana.” Flambo said, stepping out of the darkness and running with Brennan through the now lit-up remains of the fireballed bird group. “We should probably go.”

By the time they got to the door in the wall, Artemis and John were already through. They hadn’t taken out all three generals, but they never expected to unless things lined up just right.

Two out of three isn’t actually bad. Especially with no casualties.

John was pretty screwed up, but he was always like that after a fight. He was handling it with his usual good grace, joking that he didn’t need any help as the town’s military healers got to work sealing up the dozen or so serious cuts on his body. Brennan knew better than to get in their way, and spent a few seconds helping the guards secure the stone slabs in place behind the door before climbing the wall to see the aftermath of their attack.

Whatever fine-tuning the demon generals had been working on had gone all to shit already. The troops were running around everywhere, trying to confirm that the source of the sudden violence in their camp was gone, or trying to eradicate it if it wasn’t. They hadn’t found the scattered corpses of the exploded bird-troops yet. Otherwise, they’d know that the humans were gone.

Artemis slipped under his arm, and they stood there for a while without talking. After fifteen minutes, the enemy camp had calmed down, and the two saw the telltale motions of a military force beginning to pack up and move out. Whether they had killed the head general or just enough officers overall, the demons had lost their will to fight. They were leaving.

“Do you ever wish you could chase them? We’d be a lot better off if we could eliminate the whole army, for once,” Artemis asked.

In the back of Brennan's mind was a small voice telling him that it would have been if he had just let the demons attack the wall. They wouldn’t have killed any generals, but the overall number of demon troops killed would have been multiple orders of magnitude higher.

“Yeah. But you know, I’ve tried that already,” Brennan said. Artemis was one of the few people Brennan had told about his one real, ill-fated attempt to sneak into demon territory and kill the demon king. He had been much younger, but not that much weaker, since levels came much more slowly as a person's level got higher. That was less true for reincarnators, of course, but even they were soft-capped eventually.

Brennan had got surprisingly far before running into his first demon patrol. Could he put them down? Yes, and he did. But he couldn’t hide the bodies, and soon various forces of flying, walking, and digging demons were all out looking for him. He cut dozens and dozens of them down, each one easier to kill than the last. But there were too many. By the time he staggered near human territory, he was reduced to hiding in what amounted to a hole in the ground for days before their patrols gave up.

“Even if we did, even if we destroyed that whole army, it wouldn’t matter,” Artemis whispered, ”The demons breed faster than we do. They control more land than we do. If they take our land, they burn it. We can’t unburn theirs, not as easily. We can hold the line. Nothing more.”

That was how it had been since before Brennan’s time. The demons would get stronger, and the humans would create some technology or tactic that would push them back. Then, the system came, and the humans were able to train to levels that would have been absurd to even dream about before, but then the demon lord rose and snatched back all the human progress. The demons got stronger, and the system sent reincarnators, but never enough to do anything but maintain the status quo. There was always a balance. The system would send them enough manpower to keep fighting, but never enough for them to stop the fighting once and for all.

“I was thinking… maybe we should go inside.”

“Inside inside?” Artemis said, slyly.

“No, just inside. In the special tent.”

—

The special tent, as Brennan termed it, was a crafted item. If there was one thing he missed about Earth, it was being able to just go home to a climate-controlled, comfortable space that was entirely his own. He had wanted something like a bedroom he could hide in, a place where he could sleep without being sweaty, cold, or bothered in any other way. Unfortunately, Ra’Zorian technology was built around war, not comfort. They were a sturdy, uncomplaining people who had spent almost no time ever thinking about things like air conditioning or water that didn’t have to be drawn from wells.

So Brennan did it himself. The frame was made of demon bones of various varieties, all with a different effect when powered by a small amount of magic energy. One of them would make the tent warmer. Another, from a frost-themed demon, would cool it off. He had bones that would kill the Ra’Zorian equivalent of mosquitos, bones that made light, and bones that poured water. By any sane standard, the tent was packed with enough rare magic to make it worth more than most mansions.

It had cost even more to have it put together. The craftsman who took on the project had claimed that the bones didn’t like being in proximity to each other in that way, and that they resisted it and broke when he tried to force it. Brennan forced them, pouring amounts of money back into the local economy that would have shocked anyone but another reincarnator. He hired mages, enchanters, rune masters, and anyone else who could pick up a hammer. Finally, and he understood that it was pretty much an accident, they got the tent together.

After that, the tent wouldn’t come apart. It would collapse, so he could carry it around, but it wouldn’t disassemble with anything less than what he expected would be destructive force. Appraisers looked at it and didn’t see anything special. It was just, for lack of a better word, stuck. But it worked like he had planned, and that was enough.

Brennan didn’t figure out its other properties until much later, when a stealthy demon managed to get all the way in the tent with him and stab him with a sleeping potion-infused dagger. He barely managed to kill the thing before he conked out, waking up hours later covered in demon blood and badly, badly hung over. But when he walked out of the tent, he got a shock.

Ding!

Achievement: Counter-Assassination

The text of the achievement had been normal. The only weird part of it was that it was delayed. That was his first clue that the tent was special in a different way. The system couldn’t see inside of it. That hadn’t mattered much until Brennan became older, a bit more suspicious, and met Artemis. Now he considered the tent and the weird, system-defying interference it put off to be among the most important things in all of Ra’Zor.

It was also where he hung out with his girlfriend when he could swing it.

“I love this thing, by the way. Do you know how liberating it is to know the system can’t see what we do in here? Inside, or inside inside, either way,” Artemis teased.

“I get it, Artemis. But first, you know, let’s talk about the fate of the world stuff?” Brennan said with a serious tone.

“Spoilsport. Fine, get on with it.”

“I was thinking today about, you know, the balance.”

“Yes. And how we have to get you stronger, so you can break it.”

“I’m not sure I think that’s possible anymore.” Brennan shook his head.

Artemis perked up, looking concerned. This wasn’t the kind of mood she was used to seeing from Brennan. “No? Then what have we been doing this for?”

“Not for nothing. I can do things I couldn’t before,” Brennan sighed. “I’m more powerful, which is important because we might be the only two people on this planet who actually care about this. Everyone else trusts the system.”

“Not everyone else. I think the blacksmith has his doubts.”

“Well, maybe. But the point is, even if I could run into today’s demon army and kill every soldier in it, I wouldn’t make a dent in the overall demon army. And by the time I can do that, the system will adjust. There will be new demons, or they will suddenly learn new spells. It won’t make a difference.”

“So what do we do? Give up?”

“No. Never.” Brennan propped himself up on his arm. “If the system wants to maintain a balance, we just need to find a way to get it off balance. We need to change faster, in a way the system can’t see. Or at least in a way our system can’t see.”

“And how do we do that?”

“I’m not sure. But it can’t come from here, from Ra’Zor. If it’s homegrown power, the system will adjust. It has to be something we bring in from the outside. A ringer from another planet, with a different kind of power. I don’t know.”

Brennan rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling for a bit, thinking. After a few moments, he shifted to dial down the tent pole bone that was keeping the lights on. Artemis shifted over, throwing her arm over him and curling into his side.

“We will get there, Brennan. I’m tired, too. The system says it gives us power to fight the demon lord because he’s the enemy. And we fight. I don’t think it even cares about good and evil, so long as we keep fighting.”

She sighed and held on to Brennan a bit tighter.

“I just wish we knew someone the system really, genuinely didn’t like. It feels like they would be a good place to start.”