Chương 103: Wasn't me

It had to be an achievement to remain overweight fuck-knows-how-long after the literal apocalypse. If physical exertion and lack of food didn't get the guy – shouldn't stats do the trick? If Constitution moved the body towards physical perfection of healthiness and beyond – well, the dude's version of perfection was a bit too round. His stats were bugged. That had to be the case. He had the levels, Dennis could feel that – so why the hell was he fat?

At the very least, he had enough Strength to casually throw an office chair in a fit of anger. There was no way the guy hadn't invested a few points in Constitution alongside that. Though, okay, maybe Constitution wasn't exactly about having the right BMI. Dennis was just slightly frustrated. He couldn't carry the guy anywhere. This was the Lily problem, but actually instead of just his grumblings.

Dennis just didn't have the strength necessary to do anything except push the guy around a little, or perhaps roll him like a ball. Not safely, in any case. He could shove him. Apply momentum. Make the body fly from sheer inertia. That would be a very unhealthy move, since it was essentially the same thing Dennis used to explode monsters nowadays. To pick up and gently move? Nope. No way in hell. Dexterity allowed Dennis to fuck with the ways his speed fucked with physics.

The effect could even sort of extend to items he carried, or Lily-shaped people. Which meant that Dennis could either fail to move the dude because the man was too heavy to lift, or accidentally explode him. Carrying the guy was out of question. He could either ignore momentum and inertia like they didn't concern him, or he could use the full force of Mach-fuckton to explode things. It was almost as if Strength wasn't a completely useless stat.

He wondered if there were some crazy feats that people who invested in it could pull off. He didn't know if stats were equal in their power and usefulness, but there had to be at least some kind of balance. Right? Dexterity allowed him to do so much, even if it was constrained by Mind to be actually useful. Strength couldn't simply suck as a stat. Soul gave people mana – which was literally omnipotence on a budget. Constitution was a path towards being an immovable object. Every stat was strong in some way.

What the fuck was Strength good for? Well, besides carrying fat asses and– Anyway. He managed to slightly push the dude to the side, just so the fireball missed his face. That didn't fix the problem of being in the same room as an exploding fireball, but it did fix the fireball in the face problem. Small steps and all that. Thankfully, the explosion of it against the wall wasn't as bad as Dennis feared. Less like a grenade and more like a wave of densely packed fire splashing against a surface.

It still lit things up, all right, causing a few bookshelves and the wallpaper to catch fire, but that was it. A fire hazard instead of an explosion hazard. El'el probably wasn't actually trying to kill the guy. Or, she sucked at magic. One was more likely than the other, come to think of it. Would be crazy if it turned out that throwing small blasts of fire at people was just how elves insulted each other. Kind of like 'Fuck you', but in Elvish.

'Eat my fire balls' sort of thing. She wasn't unhinged enough to just casually start killing people who she disagreed with. Right? That would require a truly alien mindset. The fireball had to be a cultural difference. And, honestly, a good answer to a thrown chair. The fat ass didn't have the excuse of being an alien when he decided on that particular negotiating move. Dealing with the fire was a mess. He couldn't put it out. Couldn't exactly throw sand at walls, and he didn't have any sand to begin with.

Fire extinguishers were nowhere in sight. Filling cups he found with tap water and throwing that at the fire just made him sad. And, besides, didn't work. It was like the fire was made out of magical napalm. Or he just sucked at being a fireman. Since he already knocked everyone out–yes, including El'el, she shouldn't be throwing fireballs at people–he was left with a bunch of unconscious bodies in a building that was rapidly catching fire. Not as rapidly as he could move, but still.

Those wallpapers were amazingly flammable, and there was something inside the walls that was even more flammable than the wallpapers. Aside from the fat ass, getting everyone out and placing them gently in a row on the ground outside was a question of a few seconds at most. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. As for the fat dude…

thankfully, Heroic Dash was upgraded enough that Dennis could use the superspeed to do quite a lot, as long as it was for the right cause. It took him about ten seconds or so, but he had managed to find quite a nice cart in a warehouse on the other side of the city. The thing was just big enough to fit the dude's ass right in. The chair-throwing fatso was saved, rolled on a cart to just near the row of unconscious, thug-looking people.

Standing outside, supervising the results of his own hard work, Dennis took a deep breath and let the buff drop. The weather was quite pleasant. The row of thugs was neat and tidy. He was starting to see the smoke and wisps of fire rising from the third floor of the mansion. He wondered if firefighters were a thing nowadays. It was probably volunteer work.

No way the NLA guys managed to preserve the governmental structures enough that they had taxes and stuff, and without taxes they wouldn't have jobs that existed off taxes. Anyway, that wasn't really his problem. Everyone was saved, and one burned down mansion was no big deal. Dennis froze, the sudden thought making him flinch. Unless they'd ask him questions. No way there wouldn't be anyone angry at him for something like that, even if technically the fire wasn't his fault.

Come to think of it, thugs didn't usually live openly in mansions. And there had to be a reason why El'el just casually left Sydney's house to talk to them. They were probably legitimate businessmen or something. He eyed the people on the ground critically. What exactly made him think that they were thugs again? Well, they had guns. And they were guarding the entrance. And their boss was throwing a chair at El'el. That had to count. Retroactively. Hmm.

Okay, thinking about it a bit more, Dennis really didn't want to stay and see what was going to happen once they woke up. It was a foreboding feeling of knowing that someone was going to yell at him for something. He picked El'el up, thinking about the dangers of chair throwing mobsters and their armed thugs. Surely they'd have a bone to pick with the elf after she burned down their home. Which she did. It wasn't safe for her to stay here. It wasn't what he'd call strong arguments, but it worked.

There was already proof that they were dangerous to her–the chair thing–and the weapons and the burned house added significant weight to the evidence that El'el would be pretty unsafe anywhere near the scene of her crime. It was totally her crime, by the way. He wasn't the one who had thrown that fireball. Heroic Dash grumbled, but allowed him to run the fuck away, carrying the elf on his back. He moved back to Sydney's mansion.

/ - / After leaving El'el in her bed to sleep off her sudden bout of unconsciousness, he went to Sydney's room in order to prevent any future misunderstandings. Dennis could learn from experience. Misunderstandings were the root of all evil, and had to be eliminated with prejudice. He didn't even barge in. That would've been rude. He knocked on the door. Gently. Then not so gently. Sydney was a heavy sleeper. Kicking the door finally did it.

"What?!" an angry wail came from the other side. She still didn't open the door.

"Go away…"

"Can you open the door?" he asked.

"Is there an emergency?" the sound of her grumbling was muffled as if she was talking from beneath a pillow. And through a closed door. It took him a few moments to decide that this had not been, in fact, an emergency, since he already solved the whole thing.

"Not really!" he shouted back.

"Then fuck off…"

"I just wanted to say that if someone asks you about the burned down mansion nearby, it wasn't me!" Sydney didn't reply. Shrugging, he turned around to leave, feeling that the mission was accomplished. The door opened behind him. A zombie stumbled out, reaching a hand to grab him. The foul odor of death filled the hallway as it opened its mouth.

"Which mansion?" it rasped.

"The one at the end of the street," he said, trying to hold his breath.

"Three floors, lots of thugs, a fatso in the office upstairs? Gave me kind of embassy-like feel, honestly." Sydney blinked slowly, her hand still holding him by the shoulder. She didn't seem to be completely awake, to be honest. He was pretty sure that if she'd close her eyes for more than five seconds she'd fall back asleep.

"And it's–" she stumbled, struggling with the words.

"You have–""It wasn't me!" he promised.

"I absolutely, totally didn't burn it down."

"Then…" She raised the other hand, frowning, as if asking the world to wait for the thoughts to come into her head.

"If you didn't burn it down… Is it… burned down?"

"Well, yes," he tentatively agreed.

"But it wasn't me. And– I mean, I'm not sure if it's burned down yet. How long does it take really for a building to burn? I guess it's currently in the burning down process. Probably gonna take a while. It's been barely a few minutes." Sydney took a deep breath, closing her eyes.

"Do they need me?" she finally asked.

"No, everyone's fine. I moved them out of the fire."

"R-right," she muttered.

"A speedster who saves people. I guess you just wanted to warn me in case someone blames you? Would make sense with your freaky aura to be wary of prejudice." She removed her hand from his shoulder and massaged her temples.

"It's fine," she muttered quietly.

"I'll kick out anyone who bothers you about that. Everyone's safe?"

"Yeah. I moved them into the yard." Sydney nodded, and turned around to go back into her room, stumbling and almost falling in the process.

"If no one is dying, it's whatever," she mumbled.

"I don't care until someone dies. Who cares about buildings? Christopher will have a new one built for him in no time. I bet the prick had insurance…" She kept muttering as she closed the door.

"Right, they don't do insurance anymore…" was the last quiet thing he heard, followed by a dull thump of a body falling down on something not-so-soft. She probably missed the bed.

"Who's Christopher?" he asked through the door.

"The leader… of the Farmers' guild…" replied the half-asleep voice.

"Go away…" They had guilds now? That was cool. Satisfied with the successful misunderstanding prevention, Dennis went to see how El'el was doing. She shouldn't be unconscious for too long. At least that was the feeling in his gut. Somehow, Dennis just knew that his karate-chops took a few minutes at most to recover from, and were potentially headache-inducing. He still wondered how exactly karate-chopping related to sword-fighting. He still had to find a way to save Gareth. He still had questions.