Matt had been working the shovel pretty vigorously. Up to a certain point, the bad guy had been more or less tanking the hits. It was very much “bad beating” and not “fatal wounds” territory. Then, without warning, armor-guy went from “actively resisting”—to the extent he could—to completely limp.

The defiance and fear in Matt’s foe just winked out. Matt would have thought that his enemy had been knocked out, but the rag doll moment happened between strikes. One second Matt was accomplishing blow after blow, the next second it was all over.

“Did he—seriously—just die?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know.” Matt made an exploratory thwack with his shovel and got no reaction. “Maybe?”

After some experimentation with more hits and watching really, really closely to see if the invader moved, Matt finally got enough courage to check his opponent’s pulse. There wasn’t one.

“I think we won,” Matt said without emotion.

In any other time, this would have been a moment of great celebration. But even Lucy understood that killing a person was a different kind of thing compared to killing a gigantic, terrifying bone monster or a rat that looked like a clown. When Matt went to pry the helmet off the guy, she didn’t question why. If he needed to see his face, he needed to see his face.

As dinged as it was, the helmet wasn’t entirely welded to the other reincarnator’s skull. It was tight enough that Matt was pretty sure taking it off would have hurt like hell if the guy was alive, but … he wasn’t. Matt eventually worked it off, and then slowly stood up. The face screamed, “I haven’t taken my driver’s test yet.” This was a child.

“He’s a fucking kid.” All of Matt’s emotions were catching up to him. His fear from almost dying, his relief to be alive, and his guilt from what he had to do to stay alive. It all swirled into indescribable anger. “The system sent a fucking kid to kill me. And I killed him. Lucy, I killed a fucking kid.”

“Matt, it’s not the same thing as …”

“No, I killed a kid. This isn’t okay, Lucy. It’s not okay.”

“Matt, you can’t blame yourself.” Matt was pacing, and Lucy became worried he’d do something stupid. Only the immediate lack of local options for stupid things to do reassured her that he wouldn’t.

After what felt like hours, Matt looked up, rage on his face. “I’m not blaming myself. No. I’m blaming the system. It shouldn’t have done this. It’s sort of bad that it would Isekai some kid in the first place, but maybe the kid’s life got tragically cut short by a stampeding bull or something. But this? Sending him to fight an adult, on this planet? How could it do that?”

“It sent you here, Matt. It sent me here. The system does a lot of shitty things.” Lucy could only go with the flow.

“Yeah, it does.” Matt took a deep breath and sat. “But this isn’t okay. It’s not ‘the system is lazy, so it didn’t know’ and things happened. It chose this. This is different.”

Lucy paused before her next question. “You … you seem more mad about this … than the fact that it’s trying to kill you?”

“I am. Honestly. It crossed a line. Whatever weird beef the system has with me over system authority, I chose that. I could have stopped. But this? There’s no way this kid knew what he was getting into.”

A bunch of memories were now falling in place. Of course, the kid wasn’t a dedicated run-through-the-pain sort of person. He was a kid. Of course, the kid only used big, flashy moves and had no sense of tactics. He was a kid, probably only doing what felt cool to do, like this was a damn cartoon. But this was real life.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah?”

“Fuck the system.”

“Agreed.”

“No, more than that.” Matt had steel in his voice. “I don’t mean we just keep doing what we’ve been doing. I mean the system needs to get hurt. The system needs to face some consequences. This is war.”

Lucy was silent for a moment, then she whispered, “Matt, it’s a deal.”

After a short rest, it was time for the least triumphant looting of all time.

Matt didn’t want to go near the body, but the reality was that he couldn’t let any resource go to waste. He had collected the rotten cube-dust, and even that had played a role in his survival.

The system had equipped this kid to kill him, and Matt would gladly ransack this body if it meant a better chance at avenging the kid.

The equipment mostly turned out to be a bust. The claymore was far better than Matt’s mostly broken Survivor’s knife, and the armor also looked like an upgrade. But when he tried to swing the sword and shimmy into the breastplate, he got a rude awakening.

Class-Restricted Gear

The item you are attempting to equip is restricted to the Blademaster class. As a member of the Survivor class, you can’t equip it or use it in its normal function.

Matt asked Lucy, hoping for a workaround. It took a few minutes for her to dive into her reference materials and learn more.

“Oh, that sneaky son of a bitch. Nope, he got us good.”

“There’s no workaround?”

“Not at all. Some equipment really is class-restricted. It’s supposed to make it harder to exploit people for dungeon farming, which is a really disturbing thing I just now read about. If you are a fencer and get a rapier, the system can class-restrict it, so a higher-level swashbuckler won’t steal it.”

“So I can’t get any use out of this stupidly gigantic sword?” Matt lifted the claymore into the air and swung it a few times. “It feels like it would still work.”

“That’s because you aren’t trying to hit anything with it. I hate to say it, but it just wouldn’t swing correctly in combat. And since the Survivor class is pretty rare, I wouldn’t count on getting usable gear from any invader, not just this one.”

“You think there will be more?” Matt asked.

Lucy rolled her eyes. “If you were the system, would you stop with just one?”

She had a point. Matt moved on.

“What about this canteen? Same deal?”

With the claymore and armor off limits, Matt tried to at least find something that would let him feel like he had broken even on the whole deal. There was a canteen, one that looked the same as his canteen. He took a look into it and saw water swirling around. There were also a bunch of stones.

“It should work. Most items should. Everything I read about class restrictions had to do with weapons and armor. There might be some corner cases, but it seems like at least items mostly don’t get restricted.”

That left the kid’s pockets. Matt wasn’t eager to dig into them, but he did. A quick examination produced a few stones, and nothing else.

“What are these?”

“No idea. It’s really annoying, by the way, that your class didn’t come with an analysis skill.”

Matt shrugged, sorting the stones away in his pack. “It’s not like we could really trust the system to be honest with item descriptions at this point.”

“You really shouldn’t have done this. You’re going to traumatize yourself.” Lucy was giving wise counsel but Matt wasn’t in the mood to listen.

Carrying the kid’s corpse back hadn’t been easy. Matt was lean, but a limp body wasn’t easy to carry. Lucy wasn’t wrong about the trauma, either. It was hard to be numb to the fact that Matt was carrying the dead body of someone he had killed. But there were some things he didn’t want to get numb to, and dead people was one.

“I’m not burying him out there,” Matt said, waving at the endless wasteland, “in all that. He deserved better.”

“He tried to kill you.”

“Still.”

They were finally back at the estate. There weren’t a lot of options for scenic burial spots and Matt wasn’t confident about getting the body to the top of a mountain before it started to stiffen up. That narrowed the options to places much closer to home. Matt didn’t mind that.

Sorry, kid. Under a tree is the best I can do, given the circumstances.

Matt had to dig around some roots, but was eventually able to find a spot with enough room to accommodate the body. It didn’t take too long. He was getting pretty good at digging.

Neither Matt nor Lucy were particularly religious, so the post-burial festivities were pretty lackluster. They watered the plants, and did their best to heal whatever damage that the swordsman had done as he stomped around the farm. Matt slept. It was uneventful, but uneventful was fine. It was events that kept trying to kill him. They enjoyed the calm while they could, waiting patiently for the next shoe to drop.

Midway through Matt’s next waking period, it dropped.

Ding!

Limited Rest for the Wicked

Hey, Matt and Lucy.

I’m glad to see you survived all that. I wish I could have helped. Though in my defense, I’m just a series of nonambulatory buildings loosely connected by an accidentally sapient AI. But I still feel bad.

I know it’s been a big couple of days, I wanted you to get some rest. That said, could you drop by? There’s some stuff you need to know.

Barry

PS: Just so you know, the ambient energy collectors on the dungeons have just about finished rebooting the first batch you cleared. It’s probably not as far of a walk as you think to the closest uncleared dungeon.

“What do you think he wants to talk about?” Lucy asked. Matt didn’t have a good guess.

“Besides loot? No idea. But so far, it’s been worth it to talk to Barry. It seems like he has access to information we can’t get. Plus, he’s a decent guy, and those are in short supply around here.”

The system wasn’t lying about the dungeons, it turned out. The very first dungeon Matt had ever cleared wasn’t exactly close, but it was significantly closer to home than any other dungeon. After trekking there, they found the doors already open and the plinth active.

Matt put his hand on the plinth and fired it up. It was time for another visit with Barry.