Lucy wasn’t happy with Matt. “I can’t believe you took those stupid sticks. That’s pretty much an entire extra dungeon that we have to do now.”

“It’s a drop in the bucket. We have plenty more to do anyway, and you don’t understand how great these sticks are. Do you know how much better my traps will be with quality sticks? Quality, self-repairing sticks that I don’t have to whittle?”

The Clownrat dungeon aside, the trip had been going swimmingly. Lucy had been right that the dungeons would start offering estate credits in the reward. They came in varying amounts; the most Matt had seen was 120, while the least had been forty.

For his indirect role in the untimely demise of King Clown, Matt even got an extra bonus on top of the needed estate-improvement credits.

Extendable Spear Pole

Keeping your distance from your enemy is important. This spear pole is designed with the improvised-weapon aficionado in mind, easily working with any short-handled weapon to make a polearm. Despite the name, this is not limited to the “pokey” family of weapons—get creative!

Things were going so well that he and Lucy decided to extend their trip well past their initial plans. They shifted from a “just buy the soil and some grass to make sure it works” footing to a “let’s risk a few more dungeons to save time on long-term food production” plan.

It was also a rare zero-conflict trip for the duo. At least, that was the case until Matt was tempted by the siren song of better trap components. The dungeon had offered him long, graphite-like trap poles, cleverly camouflaged to blend in with the average color scheme of historic Gaian forests. It was a perfect complement to his spike traps.

After the near-miss with the gigantic alpha Clownrat, Matt had rededicated himself to the art of trapping. It was safer, though slower. A lot of his time had been spent carefully preparing poles for various traps. This prize promised to cut down the time for the more repetitive parts of trap-making, and he couldn’t resist it.

“You don’t have to whittle them anyways Matt. Just use Survivor’s Instincts and it’ll use your dumb hands to whittle them for you. You can sit there slack-jawed and absentminded the whole time.”

“But that doesn’t do anything for blisters,” Matt responded.

“What do you think your vitality stat is for?” snapped Lucy.

Prodded on by boredom, they kept up the argument until they struck camp for Matt’s next sleep period. Matt had begun taking the time to set up his tent more consistently, under the rationale that sleeping in full light every “night” might do weird things to him, long-term. The tent didn’t block out one hundred percent of the sunlight, but it at least made things dim and Survivor’s Instincts made it a quick, well-worth-it process.

Matt took off his boots, preparing to go to bed, while Lucy set herself up to plan the next leg of their trip. Before he actually laid down, Matt decided to take advantage of the lull in the arguing to clear up something that had been eating at him.

“So, there’s one thing I don’t get,” Matt said.

“Just one, Matt?” Lucy retorted without looking up.

“Uh, yeah.” Something about Matt’s tone made Lucy realize that this was serious, she looked up from her work. “So, I’ve had this Gaian authority since almost the beginning. Well before I met you at least. And the system didn’t have any problems with it for this whole time. Now all of a sudden, it does. I don’t get it. We aren’t trying to use it to subjugate innocent people or be the bad guys. We’re just trying to survive and maybe turn Gaia green again.”

“And you’d think that the system would be on our side for trying to do so, right?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah, I guess. At least … I don’t know. I don’t understand why it would let me have the authority in the first place. Why give me it and then start having problems with me actually using it?”

“I think that’s just it though.” Lucy walked over to the mouth of Matt’s tent, where he was sitting. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on either. But I don’t think the system actually meant for you to have the authority. It’s a pretty powerful thing, the system. But I’ve told you before that it’s lazy. It also likes to be entertained. So I don’t think it really expected this.”

“But I got the Gaian authority without even doing anything. Why would it not just give me something else?”

“Well, no. The system still has to operate under certain rules. It might be lazy and not have realized that Gaia was wrecked and sent me here for five years. I’m still mad about that, by the way. But it doesn’t seem like this particular instance of the system can call home for assistance. It was probably just waiting for you to give up and call it a day.” Lucy paused. “Think about it. If you had gone to any other planet or picked any other class, you wouldn’t have what you have. There’s no way it planned for that.”

“Yeah, but why not just kill me then? It was helping me until … that.” Both of them knew what Matt was referring to.

It was more than that. Matt’s growth had stalled. Most of the substantial rewards that he got were coming from the dungeon system rather than his general system. When the system did give Matt rewards, both the messages and prizes attached to them were as minimal as they could to be.

Ten Dungeons Completed

You have completed your tenth dungeon. Congratulations.

Reward: 1 Class XP

The support before might not have been enthusiastic, but it was at least more substantial. The gulf between those two mindsets was puzzling to Matt.

Lucy sighed. She paused for a bit before responding, as if trying to find the best way to break bad news to Matt, “I don’t know. My best guess? It was hoping you wouldn’t actually try to use the authority. Or you’d die before you could do anything with it. Or it was having too much fun and didn’t realize what was happening. Or it thought it could convince me to keep my mouth shut.” Lucy scoffed, as if she had heard or felt something unbelievable. It took her a second to reformulate her thoughts. “The point is, Matt, that I don’t think it planned any of this. And for a while, maybe it was playing it by ear. I don’t know. But it’s certainly trying to stop us now. That’s the reality we have to live with, whether we know exactly why it’s doing this or not.”

With that, Lucy walked back to her work. Matt thought about what she had said, but only for a little. It had been a long day, and tomorrow held new dungeons.

Some of those dungeons turned out to be busts.

“It could have at least offered me credits. I don’t get it. What even was that shit?” Matt complained.

“It’s a level 1 dungeon, Matt. The prizes aren’t meant to be great. In a living world, that probably would have been a dungeon they would have used to test newbies to make sure they were suited for the adventuring life in the first place. It’s fine. It wasn’t like you were in much danger anyway.”

She wasn’t wrong. The featured enemies of the dungeon had been what Gaians had apparently referred to as Swamp Woggons, and looked a bit like a shelled turtle. They were big, flat, reptilian things with what looked like a nasty bite. More importantly, they were slow. Matt, on the other hand, was fairly fast now. He circled them with his improvised spear, jabbing until they fell. The worst part of the entire dungeon was walking through the mucky swamp itself. Otherwise, he was never in any serious danger.

Lucy continued, “Still, I would have thought you would have at least taken the loot.”

“It was another torch, a shovel that seemed worse than what I already have, and a backpack. I already have a backpack, it’s right here.” Matt pointed behind him.

“Says Matt, the big pack rat who collects scraps of metal. Did collector-of-useless-stuff Matt die or something?”

“You say it so easily. I’m the one who actually has to carry everything around. If it ever becomes important that I have two torches, I’ll be glad to go back. Before then, I’m not lugging that stuff around on a trip.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

Lucy is becoming quite agreeable. Matt smiled.

Most of the time, Matt had to dig to get to dungeon entrances. The average placement of postapocalyptic Gaian dungeons trended strongly towards “slightly underground,” due to what Matt assumed was decades or centuries of settling into a dead planet.

But every once in a while, they would find one that was gloriously above ground. When that happened, they’d see them from miles off, standing out like a shining metal sore thumb.

“Look! It’s one of the visible ones!” Matt pointed at the sight. As the two crested a hill, the dungeon had entered their vision. It was just a door leading into a small metal room. It looked like a house with a field of uneven rock below.

Matt was psyched. After the acquisition of the controversial trap sticks, they had cleared out several more dungeons. If they were successful here, this was the last planned danger of their trip. Soon, he’d be a gardener. A peaceful, dungeon-diving gardener who only murdered enough simulated enemies to buy seeds, hoes, and maybe eventually a hammock.

“Yeah, Matt, but don’t get your hopes up. For all we know, this is another overleveled dungeon, and we won’t get anything out of it but another long walk.”

The dungeon was still the better part of a few miles off. They set off towards it, Matt clearly cheerful and Lucy trying her best to look like his mood wasn’t infecting her.

They cleared about half the distance before their good mood was shattered.

“Lucy, is it supposed to be glowing like that?” The dungeon had started to vaguely twinkle in a way Matt hadn’t seen before. The luminance stood out against the two red suns. They were too far-off still for any noise it might have been making to be audible, but based on how it looked, Matt suspected the dungeon might be humming.

“That’s weird. You know when you were in the dungeon, and I was left outside? That’s how the dungeon looked when you came out. It’s how I knew to run back and wait for you,” Lucy said with a hint of hesitation.

Matt felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. He managed to ask Lucy what she thought could possibly be coming out before a familiar noise and blue screen appeared to justify his sudden paranoia.

Ding!

System Alert: Dungeon Break

Due to pushback from the dungeon system, the system would like to be explicit about the justifications for its subsequent actions.

In that spirit, Dungeon Rule #3021C states that dungeons that have accumulated an excess of energy or have not been cleared for a sufficiently long period may be prompted by either the dungeon system or the system itself to undergo a dungeon break.

Dungeon breaks are a necessary incentive, encouraging adventurers to clear dungeons regularly. Our records indicate that this particular dungeon has not been cleared in what can be described as a sufficiently long period.

Enjoy, Matt.

Quest Assigned: Survive This

The system has done its best to get you to quit messing with powers you aren’t supposed to have. It asked pretty nicely, actually. Do you know how rare it is for the system to make direct deals with already-reincarnated individuals? Not often. You should have taken it.

You’ve done pretty well with fast monsters, big monsters, and smart monsters. Let’s see how you do with something that’s all three.

System-mandatory rules state that cleared dungeon breaks come with substantial additional rewards due to the emergency nature of the threat. The system is betting it won’t matter.

Rewards: Improvements to your primary weapon.

The doors on dungeons were fairly large, much larger than Matt would expect to be necessary for human-sized entrants to get in. He had previously assumed this was to make it easier for groups to enter plinth rooms. Now, watching his newest problem exit the doors, he realized the real reason. Gaia had some big wildlife, and occasionally, it would have to be able to squeeze out of those little rooms.

This particular specimen of big wildlife was pretty close to what Matt understood as an ape, something mostly bipedal with its arms for balance. Even from afar, Matt could see that it had legs far thicker than any ape should reasonably have. And, it was big enough that Matt could make the monster out from the better part of a mile away. When it spotted him, it beat its chest and charged.

“Matt. Run!” Lucy yelled.

He didn’t have to be told twice.