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Chapter 107: Into the Unknown
🕑 Added 2023-10-25 16:17:19 +0000 UTCMatt shook his head. “I’m happy here. But we all know I’m useless here as well. Or at least I will be. The hunting parties start in earnest next week, and once they are up to speed, I won’t be useful anymore. They will level faster than I ever could, and I can’t level with them because once they are strong enough to pull their own weight, they will take the significance out of my survival of dungeons.”
“We can find you other work to do…”
“What work, Ramsen? What work is there really where I wouldn’t be taking it out of the hands of someone better? That you wouldn’t have to fix in secret later?”
Ramsen didn’t reply. Matt wasn’t mad, but he was right. The work the Gaians were doing, even in terms of simple digging, was carefully planned and highly skilled. He couldn’t help with any of it, even if he was somewhat of an expert digger himself.
“But that’s not a good enough reason to put yourself at risk, Matt. Nobody minds you being idle. You saved us. You deserve a break.”
Matt shook his head. “It’s not just that, Ramsen. It’s also the system.”
“I thought it was dead, Matt. At least that’s what Barry has told you, correct?”
“Not the system instance. The system. The shield around Gaia is still breaking up, right?”
“That’s correct. But we’ve been looking into it, Matt. It might take years, still, before the system can see us clearly.”
“It might take years, Ramsen. But it might not. And we have no idea how the greater system will react to what went on here. I killed an instance and assumed control of an entire planet. I can’t think that reaction will be positive, whatever it is. We need to be ready. I need to be ready. Stronger. Able to fight off whoever and whatever it sends to us.”
Ramsen shook his head. “Matt, we have no idea where you'll go or if you can even get back.”
He wasn’t exactly wrong. The teleporter was a one-way trip, as far as any of them knew. If Matt left, any way back to Gaia he found might very well have to be on the other side. Without knowing where he was headed, there was no way to know if they had those kinds of capabilities, let alone if they’d share them. It really was dicey.
Matt nodded. “I thought about that, too. But when I first learned that invading another planet was even a possibility, it was through a power I’m pretty sure the system didn’t even want to grant.”
It was the wording of that particular power that convinced Matt he had a shot to get back to Gaia.
Pillager’s rights
Because of an unprovoked invasion, your authority is expanded to allow for a one-time invasion of the following territories:
Ra’Zor, Realm of 1000 Bleedings
Rewards for an invasion are adjusted for invasion force size and power, the change affected on the invaded territory, and other general metrics of success.
That “one time invasion” bit implied that there would be the possibility of more invasions, which implied that invasions themselves came with a built-in mechanism to get back. Matt normally wouldn’t trust a notification all by itself, but both of the invaders who had come to get him seemed to expect that they’d be able to return to their own planets.
Matt explained the wording of the notifications to the assembled Gaians, who sat for a moment, thoughtfully.
“That’s pretty light, Matt. You still don’t know if you can get back.” Ramsen said. “We already owe you much. You don’t need to do this.”
Matt shook his head. “You know I do. Eventually, the system is coming for us. For all of us. Without strength, we are doomed. I can’t get it here.”
Ramsen began to disagree again, before getting cut off by Ardi, who Matt was fast deciding was by far the most fearsome of the Gaian warrior-moms.
“Oh, be quiet, Ramsen. You can see he’s decided. Besides, you know he’s right. If anything, he’s just as safe out there as he would be here. The boy is already almost crying. Don’t make it harder on him, you old fool.”
Ramsen shrugged, knowing well enough not to argue with superior force. He walked over to Matt, putting his hands on his shoulders and nearly lifting him from his chair as he stood, then hugged him.
“If it’s what you have to do, it’s what you have to do. We can’t support you much, but we will give you everything we can.”
—
The next few weeks were busy. Matt was a big part of the plan to get the Gaian dungeon raid teams up and running without casualties, which meant his days were completely packed. After a quick conversation with Barry, the dungeon system did some sort of tricky adjustment to make sure the Clownrat dungeon was always available.
It had turned out clowns were not just terrifying to Matt. Every Gaian, without exception, was terrified of the things, even without any of the Earth-culture context surrounding them. If a Gaian wasn’t truly brave and dedicated to dungeon crawling, they’d usually refuse to fight the Clownrats at all. It turned out to be a helpful sorting mechanism, and after a few weeks Matt had ten teams of five trained.
In the meantime, he picked up several cheap items as prizes for leading the team through. By the time he was nearly ready to go, Matt had dozens of useful things he honestly couldn’t create with his skills. Some of them, like ropes and canteens, were just duplicates of things he already had. Other things like matches, camping cutlery, and packets of toilet paper would be useful to keep in the pockets of his clothes in case he lost his pack. If he was going to go to another world and face death, maiming, and overall danger at every turn, at least he wouldn’t do it without a ready supply of toothpicks.
Somehow, the Gaians took the influx of estate currency from the hunting teams and began doing even more work. With Lucy about to leave, she and Matt had dived deep into the options and menus of the estate until they figured out how to appoint Ramsen and a few other people to administrator status, with full rights to spend credits how they saw fit. Houses were now popping up everywhere, and somehow they had even paved the rough outline of a town square, complete with a fountain-fed garden.
Matt had also picked up a new pack in the past few months, given his first one had dissolved when he used Acid Skin. Between that and the fact that his unlosable, soulbound shovel had displaced most of his other weapons, he had plenty of room left to pack in several cloth-wrapped clay jars full of fermented vegetables the Gaians were nice enough to prepare for him. It wouldn’t last forever, but he wouldn’t starve in the first week or so on a new planet, at least.
Matt had asked Ardi how best to say goodbye to the Gaians. She had barely considered this before telling him not to. It would, she said, make it seem more final to them. Instead, she said his best move was just to spend a day in town talking to everyone before slipping away, and he wasn’t going to question her.
With very little fanfare, Matt walked away from a group of good friends who were very effectively pretending not to notice him leave for a trip that might very well leave him bleeding.
He tried desperately to convince himself it was worth it for a while before wussing out and just deciding not to think about it anymore.
—
“If we don’t find this portal pretty quickly, I’m going to scream.”
The difficulty with using Gaian maps to navigate was that all the landmarks they referenced to were gone by now, leveled by the same cataclysm that took the planet in general. Matt and Lucy had found the general location of the gate days ago, and were now painstakingly walking back and forth with their dowsing rod, trying to locate a buried gateway that could be anywhere within a few square miles. And that was assuming they had estimated the distance they had walked correctly.
“You might as well, Lucy. There’s nobody here to hear it.”
“You aren’t nobody, Matt. You just look that way.”
“That’s mean.”
“You have to adjust it depending on the situation. This is like the worst road trip ever. Saying you look boring at this point is like saying you are the best person on the planet most days.”
She wasn’t wrong. They were several hours deep in the process of digging up false positive treasures alone, mostly coming up with rocks and little bits of Gaian Nullsteel they piled up to bring back to the settlement on their return trip. A little snark was understandable.
“Well, I’m touched.”
“In the head.”
“Lucy!”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Let’s get back to walking an endless grid pattern.”
Luckily, they found it a few hours later, just before Lucy reached critical bad-joke mass and moved into puns.
Most things on Gaia were at least slightly buried, but this one was hidden deep. Matt was almost sure it was a false positive with how slight the dowsing rod was moving before he started digging. Once he was about head deep in the ground, his hopes started to lift again. In retrospect, this made sense, since it was buried to begin with. Eventually, Matt managed to clear out a small channel around the entire thing, leaving a fifteen-foot pit in the ground around a nine-foot Nullsteel box. There was no apparent way to open or activate it outside of two small, circular holes separated vertically by a few inches of space.
“Do you think I stick my arm into them? Both arms? I’m stumped.”
“If there’s one rule I want us to have as a team, it’s that you don’t stick your fragile flesh-arms into mystery holes as a first attempt.”
“What, then? It’s just a big metal rectangle. I don’t have a lot of other ideas.”
“I don’t know, Matt. Drop a rock through it? Anything but getting your arm chopped off would be great.”
Matt rolled his eyes, but stooped to pick up a rock. Gingerly, he dropped it through the top hole. It rattled around for a split second before dropping out of the second hole. They were, apparently, connected.
“What in the hell? It’s a loop?”
“I have no idea. I guess you could have people drop something heavy and prank them when it hits their knees.”
As stupid as that would be, it gave Matt an idea. He had one object in his pack that he couldn’t bear to leave home that would fit perfectly in that hole. Reaching into a pocket, he withdrew the Nullsteel ball that they had found long ago. So far, it had been used one single time, as a piece of ammunition to fire out of his mortar, and been the last shot against the Scourge. While it was great at hurting an overgrown plant, Matt had always figured there must be something to it besides that. He tossed it into the hole.
The whole apparatus groaned before the top of the box opened. Fifteen feet in the air above them, a gate rose from the box.
Matt clambered out of the hole as quick as he could. The gate itself was a complex working of wires, lights, and random metal shapes he couldn’t guess at the purpose of, all built into a tall arch. Visually, there was nothing indicating it was on. But given that all of his hairs were standing on edge and the air was increasingly stinking of ozone, he figured it was probably good to go.
“Matt, are you ready?” Lucy gulped. “It’s not too late to turn back.”
“No, it is. We have to do this, Lucy. It’s the only way.”
Given that he had dug a trench around the entire thing, stepping into the gate wasn’t really an option. Taking a deep breath, Matt leapt at the gate, directly into the unknown.
