Deadworld Isekai

“No way.”

“We should go under it? It might fall.”

“I…” Matt paused as the worm thrashed its tail around, trying desperately to dislodge itself. Thankfully, the actual body of the thing didn’t budge at all where it was wedged. Worms didn’t exactly have distinct body parts, but this one was being held up by what amounted to its chest, and at least so far, couldn’t get enough leverage by rocking back and forth to change that. “I’m actually pretty reluctant to do anything that might shake it loose, honestly.”

Over the next several minutes, the killer combo of Rub Some Dirt In It and Matt’s high VIT partially healed his leg to the point where he could at least hobble around on it. The worm had still failed to fall. Matt could technically reach it with his spear, but doing so would mean standing almost directly under the thing. Even if it didn’t fall on him, he wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with it in close quarters that soon.

“Well, take the risk on running under it, at least. Being trapped up against this wall is bad news,” Lucy said.

She had a point. Matt ran out from underneath the worm and found himself safe, uncrushed. She also had a point when she had him stake his spear into the ground, point up, so that if the worm did fall, it might just skewer itself deep enough to matter. But after that, Matt had no ranged weapon and also had no desire at all to climb up and tangle with the big spiked worm in the air.

In theory, the worm might die when it fell onto Matt's spear. In practice, Matt didn’t want to leave that up to chance any more than was absolutely necessary.

“So what’s the plan here, Matt?” Lucy asked, “We can’t just leave it like that.”

“Yeah, it’s not like it will stay up there forever. If nothing else, it might lose weight.”

“I meant that eventually we have to go home, and I don’t want to find everything in a smoldering ruin.”

“Yeah.” Matt was also worried about Leel, but being out in the world and on dungeon runs was a qualified risk they had to take. With any luck, Leel would end up as resource-compromised as they were and would be as worried about them as they were about him. Between that and the prep work they had done around the property, they were hoping it would be enough that he wouldn’t make too much of a mess of things.

Something about Lucy’s words, particularly the smoldering part, triggered something in Matt. It wouldn’t be the nicest thing he had ever done, but he did have an idea for how to handle this problem.

“I have an idea.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s an idea that might work. Don’t knock it.”

—

As they ran through the canyon, it hadn’t all been exactly flat, easy ground. The dungeon system simulated the geography pretty thoroughly, including erosion. That meant that rocks and dirt were scattered all over the bottom of the ravine, making uneven, mostly plant-less ground that got too little sun and water to be particularly productive.

The exception to the plant-less qualifier were trees. Not every tree was like the tree Matt had tried to body-slam into being a bridge in terms of ravine-adjacency, but a lot were. Over the course of however many centuries, plenty of trees and branches had accumulated on the ravine floor.

Finding them was easy. The ravine wasn’t that wide, so you could hardly miss them. Moving them was another thing entirely. The branches weren’t usually in convenient sizes and shapes, but Matt could often break them apart with a good whack from the shovel. However, the full trees were a different story. They were absurdly tough, even judged by the standards of Matt’s improved class.

Even chunks a few feet long were plenty heavy, and Matt’s cutting tools were severely limited. He eventually settled on a method of using a combination of the multi-tool as a saw to make cuts, shoving the shovel into those cuts, and then banging on it with a big rock until the wood cracked apart. Luckily, all of the wood was pretty dry, or else it would have been close to impossible with the tools Matt had access to.

—

“Just chuck it in there!”

“I can’t. I have to keep this stuff the hell away from its tail. It’s only up there still because it doesn’t have any leverage.”

“Point taken. But you don’t have to work so slow.”

Lucy had somewhat of a point. Matt was being absurdly cautious about how he stacked the wood, mostly because he had no idea how he’d handle the situation where something went wrong and the worm got down. Besides that, he knew just enough from having watched survival shows to know that big hunks of wood don’t generally catch on fire all that easily. So first, he gathered a good pile of leaves and twigs and piled them up beneath the worm, trying to get a pretty good carpet of easy-burning material. Then came branches, then longer-thinner sections of trunk. Finally, he carefully tossed as many big, thick trunk segments as he could on the pile without actually touching the worm.

Eventually, he had an irregular pagoda of chunks of durable Gaian mountain wood of varied moisture content stacked on top of kindling so dry it crumbled when he touched it. It was as ready as it was going to be.

“You done?” Lucy glanced over as Matt unstrapped his instant-light torch from his pack and lit it, walking to the smaller trail of leaves he had set up as a sort of fuse.

“Yeah. I’m just praying this works.”

Matt dropped the torch, and it became immediately apparent that he hadn’t actually needed to pray. The leaves caught on fire like they were soaked in kerosene, and within a few moments, the entire fuse was aflame and spreading fire to the greater pile of combustibles. It didn't take long before the entire stack of sticks was aflame, and some of the larger chunks were starting to join in. The only thing that was keeping the flame itself from hitting the worm was that as the stack burned, it collapsed in on itself, lowering the overall height of the fire, so it didn’t directly consume the worm.

At least, that's what Matt and Lucy assumed. They heard rather than saw the collapse of the wood stack because they were running away at full speed by then. It turned out whatever this wood was, it was not clean-burning. Both Matt and Lucy had assumed that whatever smoke was created would waft out the top of the ravine like a chimney, and some of the smoke did follow that path. But most of the smoke decided to distribute itself through the ravine, and it was seconds before Matt was coughing and hacking in acrid smoke. Rather than stay there and choke out, he ran until the smoke stopped following, much farther than he could see the worm from down the corridor.

“So how long do we stay here?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know. I can still smell the smoke, and you can still see it rising. It’s no use going back there while the fire is still burning, and I’m guessing we'll hear it if the worm falls down,” said Matt.

“So what, we just stay here until the fire burns out?”

“I guess. Honestly, I feel pretty bad about the whole thing, but it’s us or him.”

—

The worm was not pleased. The food had somehow managed to get lower than it, for one. But sometimes food could dig, so this wasn’t entirely new. What was new was that it couldn’t get any lower because it was stuck. It couldn't move forwards or backwards. This was not something it understood how to deal with, so it tried everything it could think of. Digging didn’t work, since it wasn’t in dirt. Thrashing was its usual next move, but for reasons it couldn’t comprehend it wasn’t able to thrash much, either. It was a puzzler.

Meanwhile, the food was doing odd things. Usually, the worm caught food it wanted, but when that failed, the usual behavior it expected from the triumphant food was to get the hell out of dodge. Usually, it'd still be able to smell the food and chase it down, but sometimes the food got away completely. This food, however, was doing things it found perplexing.

The food was dragging over non-food stuff that it had come across in the past. They sometimes made it harder to dig, but not by too much. The food was piling this non-food stuff below it, which was useless. It couldn’t eat them, not that it supposed the food was trying to get it to. They might slow him down a bit, but it had crawled over many of them getting here. They weren’t strong enough to stop it, like rocks. There was no reason to do this, but at least the food was still nearby for when it did get down.

Then the food did something even odder, something the worm didn’t understand. It started making a sort of heat, something the worm could feel but didn’t understand. The heat gradually somehow spread it to the non-food stuff. That's when the heat rocketed up in intensity and generated a new smell.

Soon, it couldn't smell the food at all anymore. The smell from the non-food stuff was so strong it was all the worm could sense, covering everything. The heat part of the smell was unexpected, but didn’t bother the worm. It had tough skin. It didn’t even hurt. Meanwhile, it assumed the food was long gone. It didn’t even know food could pull this trick. Well played, food. It thought. Well played.

Meanwhile, the smell was only getting thicker and thicker, and the worm was only getting warmer and warmer. And sleepier, which was odd. Normally, it had trouble going to sleep if it hadn’t had food. That was its whole thing, really. It'd eat food, then sleep, then eat food. It couldn’t go from sleep straight back to sleep, as a general rule. It had tried.

But this sleep was wanting to happen not only without food, but even without him wanting to sleep. Not that he was against sleep, exactly. It liked to sleep, and finding a nice spot to do it wasn’t always easy. And here it was, very warm, and without anything better to do.

It supposed it couldn’t hurt to sleep just a little. It could find the food later.

—

“I can’t believe how long that fire took to burn down,” Lucy commented as they picked their way back into the ravine.

“Just be glad I have all these stat enhancements and the Survivor’s Garb. I’m pretty sure a normal human would be cooked alive if they actually came here.”

“So, do you think it’s dead?”

Matt and Lucy were looking at the worm from a distance. It was a little blackened by smoke, and it wasn’t moving. But approaching it through the coals seemed dangerous, and as fire-resistant as he might be, Matt had no desire to get knocked down or tripped into the still-red embers of the inferno they had built.

Finally, he decided to do it anyway. He carefully stepped across less-hot looking parts of the fire, smelling his boots singeing with every footfall, until he finally got to the worm’s tail, which he could barely reach. It still wasn’t moving. He finally reached up with his knife, plunging it a good four inches into the thing’s tail. It didn’t move.

“Hey, Lucy, looks like we really did get it!” Matt yelled, just as the worm took that opportunity to finally come loose from the wall, crashing into and sizzling on the coals below.

“Oh, shit! Run!” Lucy yelled.

Matt didn’t need to be asked twice. He flared Spring-Fighter as hard as he could, getting instant distance from the worm at a cost of most of his stamina bar’s contents. But looking over his shoulder, he noticed the worm still wasn’t moving. As tough as the thing was, he didn’t think it would really choose to stay still while it got cooked.

“False alarm. Looks like it really is dead.”

Lucy calmly assessed the situation, then nodded. ”Or at least pretty close. It is weird that you don’t have a plinth yet.”

“Well, no time like the present to make sure.” Matt could see his spear sticking up out of the worm, and decided to take the risk of climbing on the thing for a moment, retrieving his spear, and then stabbing it several dozen times. As messed up as it was, Matt didn’t want to leave anything to chance. He moved towards the slowly sizzling creature cautiously, then stopped.

“Shit, Lucy.”

“What? What’s going on?”

Matt nodded towards the smoke rising off the creature as it slow-roasted in the coals.

“That thing smells delicious.”