Deadworld Isekai

"It’s still not dead? I don’t get how that could be. I mean, look at it.”

The worm was laying directly on a big bed of wood and coals, still partially aflame in parts. It was clearly getting roasted, no less. But there wasn’t any ding yet.

“Should I go stab it? I could. It’s pretty still.”

At that moment, dust fell down from above, along with a few clumps of dirt. Something was moving at the top of the ravine.

“Oh, shit, Matt. Another one?”

Matt’s spear was still inside of the worm. He wasn’t going to get it back any time soon. He grabbed his combat knife and got ready.

“Yeah. Dammit.” His leg was almost completely healed now, but there was no way they were going to get as lucky with a second worm. This was going to be hard, if it was even survivable.

Then a shadow moved over Matt’s head, and through the sun he could see the silhouette of a worm falling towards him. He flared Spring-Fighter as hard as he could, pushing away from the roasting worm. That was the only direction he had a good chance of actually getting away from the worm from.

Suddenly, he heard a soft but very real splat on the canyon floor. Turning around, he instantly began to laugh.

“What?” Lucy turned around, then immediately began to laugh herself.

It was one of the little ones.

Ding!

Quest Complete

You not only eliminated the quest targets, but managed to take out the optional, frankly nearly invincible source of the worm infestation in this forest. Pro-tip, Matt. If a big, invincible, foreshadowed enemy appears, it’s possible you aren’t supposed to fight it at all. This was an evasion thing, Matt.

The good news is I can give you some extra stuff. Fun fact: You know how you never see bows in the loot? It turns out I can’t give them to you at all anymore. It’s probably a class-limited thing. I did find something else. I think you will like it.

Rewards: ???

“Good News, Lucy. Barry is back.”

—

Matt stabbed the Stabilization Spike into the worm. That was the easy part.

“This you will eat, but not the bats?” Lucy looked at Matt suspiciously.

“I’m… like, listen.” Matt was struggling to explain the concept of appetizing food to someone who didn’t eat, and failing. “The bats weren’t the same thing. Those were gross. They were dripping with acid. I specifically don’t want to eat bats.”

“But big giant worm things are okay? Because you don’t specifically not want to eat them?”

“Well, yeah.” The worm was dissolving into dungeon-stuff pretty fast now. Matt withdrew the stabilization spike and began carefully carving off most of the worm’s skin as well as anything on the inside to breach the conceptual barrier between meat and guts. He was already taking a big enough risk without dealing with whatever was going on inside this thing's digestive system. “Plus, this just smells good. It smells like food. I don’t get to eat a lot of good food.”

“Are you sure it’s safe? There are reasons beyond just not getting stats from it that we haven’t been eating dungeon food,” Lucy asked.

Matt finally sawed off all the questionable bits from a pretty good chunk of the worm meat, plopping what was left down on his shield like a plate. Luckily, the multi-tool could turn into a pretty respectable fork. On the other hand, he had no shortage of knives.

“No idea. But the impression the system gave me about eating dungeon food without an eating skill before we were on the outs was it was more of a long-term problem. Like eating mana-deficient food, where if you did it for a long time it would cause problems.”

Matt sawed off a piece of the meat with his knife and held it up to his nose, smelling it. It seemed edible.

“This doesn’t seem like it’s going to cause me immediate problems. But if it ended up being deadly poison, the plinth is right there. If it’s a long-term thing, it’s just one meal, and I’ve got honey with me.”

“So you…”

“I’m eating this worm-steak, yeah.”

Matt lifted the piece of worm up to his mouth and stuck it in. For the first time since the plants started sprouting on the farm, he was eating something because he wanted to, not just for survival. He was eating for pleasure. And the worm-meat didn’t disappoint. It was smoky and tender, somewhere between pork and chicken, and he loved every non-existent calorie of it.

“I don’t even eat, and I still know how gross it is that you are enjoying that so much,” Lucy commented from the side.

Matt just made a bigger show of eating in response. If the steak was killing him, it wasn’t doing it in any obvious way. He ripped into the rest of it with gusto, finally devouring the entire thing, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and putting away his fork and knife.

“See? No big disasters. Everything was just…”

And then the pain hit.

Ding!

Interference with system skill detected.

—

Leel was making no real effort at being sneaky. There was no place to hide in this horrid wasteland, anyway. If Matt and Lucy were at home, they’d see him from miles away. Hopefully, they’d come out to meet him. That would at least give him a chance to run.

The system had been trying to get him to come to his enemies’ headquarters for days, offering shit reward after shit reward. He had refused, temporarily content to draw better and better gathering circles for his mana recovery. Each circle made a bigger and bigger difference, until finally, he had some semblance of a workable circle design. It would both gather mana and also use some of that same mana to repair itself as it fought with the shitty wasteland environment over time.

With that, Leel had managed to get himself well into the low double digits of mana. But it wasn’t enough. Not that he wasn’t exorbitantly proud of himself. He was. The work he had done was a masterpiece for someone of his level, even by the standards of his home. But to really empower the circle, he needed more than just raw, unparalleled genius. He needed better raw materials.

Then, the system finally offered raw materials as a reward after he had refused poor system offers for days on end.

Ape-iary Assault

The dreaded demon lord Matt has assembled hive after hive of monstrous, unnatural insect-mammal hybrids that, if not dealt with, will spread his vision of life across the entire Sarthian continent. Only you can stop him from reaching his goals.

Storm his headquarters, destroy the Ape-iaries with fire, and live on in legend as the savior of Gaia.

Reward: Enhanced Arcane Paint

Leel had originally rolled his eyes at the idea that there was anything in this dreadful place to be the legendary savior of. When he read more, the system finally managed to pique Leel’s interest with an actual reward he could use. Why it hadn’t done so earlier was anyone’s guess, but with better paint, Leel could do more things that put him closer to destroying Matt and getting out of this godforsaken place.

That was only half of the trouble solved. The other half was that he still had to generate food and water for himself, something that dipped into his mana reserves and taxed whatever circle he had built. Worse, he was doing it in the least efficient way, a direct mana-to-calorie conversion from nothing. But Matt had food. He had seen it during their fight, and though he hadn’t thought it particularly relevant then, it could make all the difference now.

As Leel walked forward, he noticed a difference from the red dirt that he was used to. He was passing sprouts of various kinds, and even some mature plants. He let them pass. Whatever the highest-quality food his foe possessed was probably closer to the center of his property, near his little shack and the most dense of his flowers.

What kind of man grows flowers in a place like this? Oh, well. He’ll be dead soon enough. I suppose I can forgive him some level of luxury.

That didn’t mean Leel had to be careful with the plants, though. As he reached the hedge of flowers, he crashed straight through, laughing. He was pretty confident that Matt and Lucy weren’t home now, and he loved the idea of them seeing that they’d been robbed from far off. Then they'd race home, only to have Leel dance off into the sunset with his new arcane paint. The fact that this planet didn't have a sunset or sunrise didn't bother Leel as he daydreamed about his foes steaming in anger. He was still laughing as he stepped out of the hedge and heard the click.

A stone-bearing trap jumped out of a hidden, mostly horizontal trench in the ground. It slammed into what small amount of shield Leel could manage to materialize in time, shattering it and continuing on to impact with his leg. The shield had robbed enough of the stone's energy to keep it from doing worse than leaving a bruise, but it was enough to make Leel stumble to the side, where he triggered another trap.

This one splintered his shin. Sending him rocking into an Ape-iary before falling to the ground.

Leel screamed, writhing in pain on the ground. He had nowhere near enough mana to fix this wound, but had enough to at least stop the pain and set it on a quick path to healing. But that required him to burn the majority of his remaining mana. It wasn’t even a choice. Leel did not like pain. With a glow from his hand and a quick sweep across his leg, he was partially mended. He couldn’t move very fast, but he hardly needed to unless Matt and Lucy came back at just that moment. He bent to the ground and removed a few vegetables.

He had abandoned any thought of removing the Ape-iaries on this trip. But with the vegetables in hand, he’d be able to sustain his mana levels much better. When he came back, it would be in greater force, aiming at targets he could hit from a distance.

It was only then, at the height of his pleasure with himself, that the buzzing in the air became louder as a cloud of apes descended on him.

—

Matt was in pain. Horrendous, total pain. But no part of him actually hurt. His arms and legs were fine. His torso was uninjured, as near as he could tell, through the all-encompassing torture. It didn’t seem to come from his stomach or his guts. This was different. The pain was real, but coming from nowhere. It was like the pain was eating his soul.

And then, suddenly, it was gone. He became aware of Lucy screaming at him and sat up as quickly as he could to reassure her, and nothing hurt at all. He was fine.

Ding!

Ding!

“One second. I seem to be fine now. I have to figure out what happened.”

With Lucy still calling him a moron in the background, Matt brought up the notification from before he felt the pain, leaving the new ones to stew for a moment.

Interference with system skill detected.

An outside force is interfering with a system-assigned skill. The system will now make use of user resources in order to fight whatever changes are underway. Please stand by.

Matt supposed that his pain had been caused by that, although the system was being suspiciously vague here. Sometimes, he got notifications from the system that he assumed were stock messages, mainly from the lack of edits threatening to kill him. This might have been that, but he had a vague feeling it was more.

Does the system not know what’s going on?

Matt moved on to the next notification as quickly as possible, immediately shocked that it wasn’t either of the two colors he was used to. To the point where he couldn’t immediately read it. This wasn’t Barry, or the System. It was the only other window color he had ever seen. It was from the Gaian alert system that had let him know the sword guy had arrived. When it didn't alert him to Leel, Matt had assumed that the alerts were somehow broken.

Gaian Defense System Skill Modification Activated…

System Resistance Detected. Activating “Fight the Tide” protocols.

System Resistance Abated. Modifying Skill.

Eat Anything! > Palate of The Conqueror

Hello, Gaian. In accordance with the Gaian wartime pact, your skill has been modified. As the possessor of the first successfully modified skill, we both thank you and warn you. Our skill modifications are not guided except to the extent that they push directly back on the guidelines and dictates that determine system behavior.

As such, the skill you have obtained is not one whose parameters we can predict. It could be useful as easily as it could be a disability. Only one thing is sure: it goes against the grain of everything the system itself wants. In this goal, every living Gaian is now united.

You will note that your skill is currently LOCKED. Proceed immediately to the closest wartime base or capital to have the skill inspected for fatal errors and unlocked by someone with appropriate levels of authority.

Fight the Scourge. Evict the System.