Deadworld Isekai

“And another thing, Matt, is that you don’t listen to ANY of my reasonable advice at all, not just with food, but with ANYTHING AT ALL, so this keeps on HAPPENING.”

“Lucy.”

“And with stupid things like EATING WORMS FOR NO REASON of course this is what happens, and then I have to sit here while you SCREAM for an hour…”

“LUCY!” Matt yelled, shocking his guardian into a momentary pause. “Eating the worm knocked some stuff loose with Eat Anything!, apparently. Weird stuff.”

He filled her in on the details of both what had happened to him and the new system notifications.

“That’s… Matt, that’s not possible. The system is the system. Nothing can screw with it, as far as I know. At least, nothing in the database indicates that it can be changed. Even Barry can only do what he does because in most ways he’s part of the system. This can’t be real.”

“I know, but there it is. This seems different from other messages we’ve seen from the Gaians, too. Did you notice the change in the slogan? ‘Evict the System’ is new.”

“So you are saying they got more pissed since they programmed the museum?”

Matt nodded. “Yeah. And maybe they got some work done in that direction. I don’t know. I just know this skill is apparently real. And what I think they mean by authority…”

“You can probably unlock it yourself,” Lucy finished.

“Yup. Now, I know you probably don’t want me to do that. I get it. But this seems import…”

“No, unlock it. Right now,” Lucy said.

Matt had prepared a full essay to convince Lucy of his idea. Normally, Lucy was the cautious one and he knew that he had his work cut out for him. But things didn't seem to be going by his script.

“Like, right now, right now?” Matt asked.

“Immediately. Now. Matt,” Lucy said.

“I thought you’d say no. Are you… okay?”

Lucy jumped close to Matt, and put her face inches from his.

“No, Matt, I’m not okay. The Gaians just moved the battlefield with the system directly into what sounds a lot like your soul. The system is still trying to kill you, and this skill does who-the-fuck-knows-what.” Lucy sighed. “But they aren’t wrong. At this point, anything that the system does or wants probably leaves you dead. Even just waiting for time ends up with you dead. It was the same for them. The system screwed with stuff, they didn’t like it, so it came after them. They stood up to it, they got knocked down. They lost.”

“But whatever thing that they cooked up didn’t help,” Matt interjected. Now he was playing the devil's advocate.

“They never used it. You said it yourself; that message was for the first Gaian modified. It was special. Whatever the scourge did to take them down, it did it before this was fully up and running. Hell, something we did probably shocked it to life. Who knows what we did, but you know what?”

Lucy looked as serious as Matt had ever seen her.

“What?”

“It doesn’t matter. This isn't something the system wants. It just fought like hell to keep you from getting it. That’s good enough, right?”

Matt was on the back foot. He now felt like he had to be the cautious one, the one who preached waiting and seeing rather than moving and doing. If the roles were truly reversed, now was the time when he’d look Lucy in the eye and tell her they were by no means unlocking this skill until they could learn more about it.

Screw that. Let’s do it.

“Fine. Let’s do it.” Matt had no idea what muscle he had to flex to get his authority moving, but he started running through every option he had. He looked at the system screen details for his new skill, but no amount of willing the skill through the screen would work. Which made sense, he supposed, since the system was the one providing the screen.

“I exercise my authority as the ruler of Gaia to unlock this skill,” Matt stated.

Nothing happened for a few seconds.

“Did that work?” Lucy asked.

“Nope. But I had to try it.” Matt continued trying different things. He pointed his finger at himself and tried to will the skill unlocked, tried meditating, and a dozen other things. “Nothing, Lucy. I’m beginning to think this isn’t something that was meant to be unlocked by yourself.”

Lucy furrowed her brow. “The pain.”

“What?”

“The pain you felt. You said it wasn’t attached to anything, like it was your soul. Can you remember what that soul felt like?”

Matt began to say no because the place the pain came from wasn’t really anything, but then stopped himself. The place the pain came from wasn’t really nothing, either. In retrospect, it was like a space or area he couldn’t see or sense, like a part of his body he had not known about until then.

He sat up straight and followed his memories of the pain as deeply as he could, trying his best to duplicate the non-pain feeling again. He was just about to give up when something in him clicked, and he saw the most simplistic system window he had ever seen.

Unlock?

Y/N

He pushed his will into the space, indicating the affirmative.

Ding!

Palate of the Conqueror: Unlocked

You have stood astride a world, your power uncontested, and all your enemies destroyed. That world and all the power in it is now yours. The Palate of the Conqueror represents one way for you to put that might to use, at least until someone rises and wrests the world from your grasp.

When you eat foods specifically associated with the planet Gaia, unpredictable but mostly positive changes will occur. The skill otherwise retains Eat Anything!’s properties at its most recent level of advancement.

“That’s a system-blue message again. It can apparently see this.”

“Good.”

“Well, sure. But I get nervous when the system gets quiet. It probably has to show me this message. But from the lack of edits and not threatening me, I'm getting a bad feeling. It’s probably up to something,” Matt said.

“Well, deal. That’s just Tuesday for us,” Lucy said with a smile.

“True that.” Matt returned the smile.

Matt waited a few more moments to see if any more information was forthcoming, then wandered over to the plinth that had risen out of the ground when he was enjoying his worm-steak.

“Looks like repair stones, estate credit, and vendor trash cape as rewards this time. Sort of a lot of them, too. Ready for an estate credit influx?”

Lucy lifted her hand up in a stop gesture. “No, wait.”

“I’m not getting the vendor trash, Lucy. We’ve talked about this. I’m not Dracula.”

“No, I mean don’t get the estate credit. Get the repair stones.”

“Why? That mana generator isn’t going to buy itself, Lucy.”

“It’s the museum. Remember how you said you saw the man say something, and I didn’t really believe you?”

“I knew it!”

“Well, yeah, sorry. But everything you said just got a lot more possible. Not only that, but between this and the seeds…”

“It turns out the Gaians were badasses?”

“Yeah. And every single thing they had their hands in right up until the end just got a lot more important. We need to get that museum up to snuff. And fast.”

“Got it.” Matt cashed in for repair stones, then went to the worm to recover his shield. Regardless of where his loot ended up in the dungeon, Matt had always gotten it back when he left the dungeon. Still, old habits were hard to shake, and usually, he’d get his gear back on his person if he could. As he picked up the shield from the ground, he noticed a tiny piece of fat that had escaped his first go around. He wasn’t really hungry anymore, but now that his eating skill was back, he wasn’t about to pass up free flavor, either. As soon as the food passed down his throat, he got another notification ding.

Ding!

“Another notification already?”

“Yup. I’ll check it out.”

Skin of the Worm trait added.

Skin of the Worm grants you superior resistance to abrasive damage, as well as lesser resistance against some other types of elemental damage.

Meta-trait occupied: Defense.

“What in the hell does any of this mean? What in the world is a meta-trait?”

“No idea, but I’m not knocking it. Here.” She pointed at a particularly rough rock laying on the floor of the ravine. “Scrape yourself with this.”

Matt did. It didn’t do anything. “I’m not sure if that would have scraped me anyway. I’m all juiced up on VIT and Rub Some Dirt In It at this point.”

“Then scrape harder.”

Matt did. No damage. It hurt, but even at his top strength, he couldn’t scrape his own skin. At the worst, he was making it a little pink.

“Okay, I think it's different. Good call on the testing. Honestly, that’s pretty badass.”

“Yup. Thanks, Gaians!”

Matt tried the honey, but nothing happened. That made sense. The bees were pretty far from being Gaian natives. Or natives of anywhere, as near as he could tell.

“Do you think we should go around eating some other stuff? Like the rest of the worm? Figure out this meta-trait business?” Lucy asked.

“Probably, but not right now. Let’s check on home first,” Matt replied. “I’m worried about what Leel’s been up to.”

—

Leel had fallen down a hole.

No matter how fuel-efficient Leel’s insect-killing spell was, there had been no reason to even try to use it on the ape-bees. There were too many of them to make a real difference. Instead, he swatted at them, trying his hardest to get away on his barely mended leg. As he hobbled away, he picked up dozens of stings all over his body. His robes were loose enough to keep air flowing around him, which was part of why he liked them. But they were also too loose to keep ape-bees out, a problem he had not anticipated in the least.

He wasn’t even sure what they were stinging him with.

But then the stings stopped. As soon as he got several meters away from the hive, the apes apparently hit some sort of defined perimeter and turned back, fussing over their now fallen hive. Leel’s face was too swollen by that point to smile or grimace, but he was at least pleased that the attack was over. He was home free.

Or at least he would have been, if an awful lot of adrenaline and recent pain hadn’t taken his attention off the need to follow the same route out he had taken in. In his hurry to leave, he stepped on an entirely new patch of ground, one that turned out to feed into a pit that was just a little deeper than seemed realistic for one man to have dug.

The fall broke more things. Leel was enough of a heap by the end of it that he couldn’t figure out exactly which ones.

—

Matt and Lucy were almost home by the time they saw the hole in their hedge.

“Oh, hell. Be careful, Matt.”

“Do you think he’s still here?”

“No idea, but who knows what he’s cooked up by now.”

They approached cautiously, or at least as cautiously as they could. Matt equipped his shield and spear, ready to throw the latter at anything that moved. As the moved past the hedge, they immediately saw the sprung whip-traps. Matt bent down to examine them for any sign, blood or otherwise, that they had done significant damage to Leel. Unfortunately, he was disappointed.

Suddenly, Matt heard Lucy gasp and choke.

Oh, you better not, you asshole. He wheeled around as fast as he could to see what terror Leel had managed to cook up that could possibly hurt Lucy. Only, he found her standing at the mouth of their pit trap, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe.

“Matt,” Lucy finally gasped out between chortles. “It looks like we caught ourselves a wizard.”