Deadworld Isekai

“Oh, good, a forest dungeon,” Matt said.

“Why good?” Lucy asked, “Some of the hardest stuff we’ve fought has been in forests.”

Matt pointed up at the treetops, then down at the ground around them. “Shade. You don’t have to deal with this for obvious reasons, but this Survivor’s Garb is a full-body suit, and I’m carrying a full pack. It’s surv-prisingly breathable now…”

“Never say that again.”

“But yeah, shade is nice. Even just psychologically. The sun on Gaia doesn’t really burn me for whatever reason, but before we got our tree, I was just about going crazy always being exposed to it.”

Lucy looked around the forest as Matt stood up from his post-teleport reclined position. “Do you think we should ask Barry what’s going on here? If the dungeon’s back on, he should be too.”

“I don’t think we should bother Barry any more than is absolutely necessary.” Matt shook his head.
”Barry, I’m sorry, but even if you want to help more, it’s not worth giving the system instance more chances to screw us over.”

As usual, it wasn’t immediately apparent what horrors this dungeon had in store for them, so Matt and Lucy started walking, looking for any clues they could uncover that might give them a heads-up before an actual encounter. They didn’t find any, which was surprising. The dungeon simulations were pretty complete. They’d have droppings, footprints, and sometimes fur or shed exoskeleton sticking to bushes, just like a real forest would pick up.

Here, there was none of that. It was just tree after endless tree in a mostly-quiet forest. Matt and Lucy usually didn’t mind waiting, so after a few hours they were still pretty fresh and up for walking. But then something changed. Without seeing anything different or him picking up on any new cues, Matt’s Survivor’s Reflexes started to be more interested in rocks. Here and there, they’d find big granite boulders sticking up out of the ground, and Survivor’s Reflexes was calling his attention to each and every one of them.

“Lucy, wait,” Matt called. “I have to check out this boulder.”

“Is this the same thing as with the mystery metal ball? Are we getting obsessed with geology now?

“No, it’s just…”

“Mineral collections are the gateway drug to learning a new programming language, Matt. I’m just looking out for you.”

“Shush. Survivor’s Reflexes is telling me that these are important every time we pass one. I don’t want to ignore that.” Matt picked up a different, unrelated, and much smaller rock and chucked it at the most recent cluster of boulders, praying that it wouldn’t end up being a giant-stone-golem situation.

Nothing happened. Encouraged by the inactivity, Matt walked closer and prodded the rock, hard, with his spear. After that failed to get a reaction, he moved even closer, eventually walking and jumping on the rock. All the time, the boulder failed to rear up, unfold, or otherwise reveal itself to be a horrifying monster.

After a few minutes of examining the rock, Matt completely failed to discover anything special about it. “I don’t get it. Survivor’s Reflexes swears this is important. In fact, it won’t stop swearing it’s important. But it’s a rock. A normal, boring rock.”

“Do you think it’s just your skill acting up? Do you need more honey?”

“I hope not. You have no idea how bad…”

It was that moment when the ground behind Matt’s feet rumbled slightly, a whooshing sound filled the air and something rushed past Matt’s legs, taking a chunk of his calf with it.

“Dammit!” Matt screamed, spinning around. There was nothing to see besides a disturbed furrow of earth. Suddenly, Survivor’s Reflexes kicked in to remind him in even stronger terms that big rocks were a very good idea right now.

“Worms! Killer worms!” Matt yelled, scrambling up to the relative safety of the boulder.

“Are you really blaming this on killer worms?”

“I’m saying it’s something like worms. I don't know. I just got bit. But so far, Gaian wildlife from the dungeons haven't really been normal. There are so goddam many ambush predators. So either there’s a big invisible monster that digs a furrow as it slows down to attack, or…”

“The whole ambush predator thing applies to subterranean animals, too?”

“Yeah.” Something about this situation was familiar to Matt, oddly so. He suddenly broke into a wide grin as he realized what. “Oh, yeah!”

“Matt, why are you happy about this? We didn’t see these things for hours, and it wasn’t for a lack of looking. You are pretty good at digging, but you have to know where to dig, and that thing was fast. Why are you smiling?”

“Because,” Matt said, starting to laugh. “There’s a movie about this.”

—

They’re Under the Ground

Gaian loam-grubs are terrifying animals for the same reason sharks are, in that you can’t see them before they attack, and they live in an environment that they move through much, much faster than you can. They are fast, mean, absurdly sharp and use an entire planet as a suit of camouflaging armor.

Given enough time, a loam-grub is said to be capable of taking down an entire herd of Aanoranths by itself. Watch yourself, and watch the ground.

Objective: Eliminate Loam grubs 0/20

Matt’s second-favorite 90’s movie, second only to a movie about teenage hackers taking down an uncool corporate hacker with stupid viruses, was a movie about giant subterranean killer worms. There was a whole series about it, with dozens of different methods for dealing with problems just like this.

Granted, the problems weren’t exactly like this. The worms from the movie didn’t slash, and instead they grabbed and went back underground. They were also far too large to leave as small of a disturbance in the ground as Matt’s unseen attacker had. But other stuff almost had to be similar. The worms in the movie only had an indistinct vision of what was going on above the surface, driven by vibrations. He didn’t know if the dungeon’s worms saw through vibrations, but he was willing to bet several minutes of regen on the idea they had similarly fuzzy vision through whatever observation means they did use.

So Matt found himself stomping in the same place, trying his hardest to signal nonchalance while still moving around enough to be visible to the worms.

“This is stupid. It isn’t going to work.”

“Yes it is. And it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Matt… you didn’t have a lot of girlfriends back on Earth, did you? I’m getting that sense real strong right now.”

Before Matt could lie in his own defense, he heard another rumbling at his feet, another whoosh, and felt another stabbing pain in his leg. The only difference this time was that Matt had dug a long trench in the ground, lined on both sides with sharp trap spikes. Matt heard a confused wail followed by a splat, and turned around to see a short, stubby grub of sorts impaled on the spike and apparently dead.

Matt stabbed it again anyway, just to be careful.

“Matt, does that thing have a sidemounted mouth?”

It did, or at least what looked like one. It was a messy, slimy hole standing slightly proud at the thing’s side, lined with irregular, jagged teeth.

“That or that’s the front, and it digs sideways. Either way, I was right. This totally worked. These things are moving too fast to stop, and they don’t know that trench is there until it’s too late. And you know, the best part?”

“What’s that?”

Matt nudged the rapidly dissolving worm with his toe. “No cleanup.”

—

The trap worked much better than Matt had hoped. He’d set himself up as bait, and the worms would fly across and impale themselves. Even when they missed the spikes, the shift in elevation seemed to disorient them enough that Matt had time to turn around and pin them to the ground with his spear.

Eventually, they got wise somehow. But the movie was full of ideas for that. Was dragging a knife across the ground with a rope to get these things to bite fair? Nope! But it was a great way to take out several more of the worms. Matt was absurdly pleased to find that whatever else the grubs were, they were slow learners and solitary hunters at heart. By the time they got wise to Matt’s knife trick, there were only three left for his quest.

Two of them were taken out in a boring, non-movie way. He simply planted his shovel in the ground and waited until Survivor’s Reflexes gave him a bit of warning before leaning forward and popping the grub out of the ground. It took several tries before he got lucky and hit the very tricky timing, but once the worms were above ground, they were slow to recover.

Finally, there was only one grub left, and it wasn’t showing itself.

“Do you think one of them is smarter than the others?”

“That would be consistent with the movie, at least.”

Lucy sighed. “I get it, you love some dumb movie, and actors named after breakfast meats. But here, now, in the real world, could you please focus on how we are going to find one of these things if it’s smart enough to hide from us?”

Matt didn’t have an answer for that. It was a hard problem, and outside of spending weeks digging trenches all through the forest, he had no idea how he’d find the worm. Not that it wouldn’t do wonders for his digging skill, but the last thing he wanted was to come home to a torched farm, broken Ape-iaries and no honey at all. The fact that the hunting had been going so well and so quickly up to this point made the prospect of a long delay hit that much harder.

He was saved from total heartbreak by a sudden rumbling sound, not at his feet but far in the distance. The thick tree cover should have blocked his view of the approach for most animals, but his vantage point from a boulder let him pretty clearly see that something was lifting trees a few feet in the air before dumping them unceremoniously to the side. The sound was getting louder to the point of hurting his ears as it made a beeline straight towards him.

Matt had been both afraid that the worm would rip the boulder out from under him and hopeful it would bash into the boulder and kill itself. Instead, it stopped gently just short of the rock and reared out of the ground to reveal a schoolbus-sized body, spikes the size of a middle-schooler, that defended every angle of its grubby skin, and a front-mounted mouth in addition to the normal side-mounted monstrosity the smaller grubs had.

Lucy’s eyes were wide. “Oh, hell.”

“Lucy,” Matt said, too shocked to correctly remember what nostalgia he had been chasing up until now. “I think we're going to need a bigger boat.”

—

Ape-iary Assault

The demon lord Matt has assembled hive after hive of monstrous, unnatural insect-mammal hybrids that, if not dealt with, will…

“Oh, please, please be quiet. I have work to do, and I’m certain I’ve already heard all you have to offer.

While Matt was fighting grubs, Leel was, for the umpteenth time, attempting to paint a gathering circle that would work worth a damn on this god-forsaken planet. Each circle he’d draw would bring in some small amount of mana, enough to create a small amount of water, some food, and to cast a spell reclaiming the paint for when each excellent, refined circle design inevitably failed to sustain itself, fizzling out in the unnatural Gaian mana environment.

And the system would simply not stop bothering him, offering him dangerous quests he couldn’t take on without some form of defending himself to earn mundane, lackluster rewards he didn’t want or need. It seemed this particular system instance was not immune from energy deficits, doing it’s best to sell every quest despite only attaching bottom-tier rewards.

Leel would continue rejecting them, waiting for something better. He had to. With only low-single-digit amounts of mana to show for it, he had gone through the mana circle designs he knew and exhausted all of them.

It wasn’t simply a matter of sufficient rewards now. If something didn’t change, both substantially and soon, he’d starve.