Chương 36: Range? What range?

What range?

Leveling up a skill felt surprisingly familiar to the way Dennis himself leveled up. The nature of this place and the heightened supernatural awareness allowed him to discern nuances that he never noticed before, and what he felt both made sense in hindsight and yet was kind of surprising. Heroic Dash was not, in fact, a dude who got a few levels, but with the way it felt Dennis imagined that it was almost the same. The skill transformed not unlike him, gaining more definition and weight yet staying the same.

It felt more real than it was before, like when a vague idea was put on paper. To be honest, he kind of expected a system screen to appear when he passed some threshold. Something like 'your skill is level 10, wanna upgrade it?' or something among those lines. Nothing like that happened though. Instead, he got a distinct feeling that a new free space appeared when there was none before, a direction for the skill to grow.

If what the skill was and did was written somewhere on a piece of paper, leveling it up got him a second empty paper where he could write more stuff down. He understood, instinctively, that if he won't write anything there then the skill would fill that new space on its own over time. It didn't feel like a bad thing, it was natural. The way he expressed the skill would be the way it would grow.

If he tried taking a longer way to the target, the skill would evolve in that way, allowing him more freedom in picking his path. If he tried to save someone from more abstract forms of harm, the skill would stretch the definition of what it meant to 'need saving'. If he needed to reach his target even faster, the skill would give him even more speed per every level. If he whined that he needed more endurance, there was a good chance he would get something like '+1 Con every 5 skill levels' as a new effect.

As long as he didn't contradict the purpose of the skill, the possibilities were endless. As long as he had that empty sheet of paper, he was a god. It could be anything. He was the one defining his skill, and there were no restrictions but the ones he already put in place. He felt giddy. In his metaphorical hands he was holding the power of a god. Pure potential, a mote of omnipotent power, a freedom to do anything. He could make it so the skill would let him fly. Shrink space between him and the target.

Give him power for every target saved. As long as it was to save people, to rush to help, to be a hero and do good, he could do anything. But not everything though. He had to pick. The possibilities were endless, but the power was not. The further away from the purpose of the skill, the more costly the addition would be. He could, he actually fucking could make it so the thing would brew him coffee on demand, but the price for that would be crippling.

The foundation was heroism and rushing to help, so for the thing to make him coffee he would need to define why the coffee was needed, how it was heroic, how it helped, what coffee even was and a fuckton of other things about matter creation. He'd need a book for that, not a sheet of paper. He could make it so the skill would create a portal to his world to save people there. Not right now, he didn't have enough space for that, but it was a path that could be taken.

He had a potential way out right here, in his hands. He frowned a bit, thinking it over. Doing it that way would be such a waste. How many levels would he need to sacrifice to get such an ability? It didn't sound too useful, aside from, well, a way home. Yeah no way he was doing that. This place wasn't so bad. It was such a waste that he didn't realize the power he had on his fingertips the first time he leveled up his skill.

He just didn't have the senses, couldn't properly listen in the cacophony of the real world to understand what he had. More than that, he was pretty sure that skill growth was as exponential as stat growth, so the first time he leveled it up he had even less of this godly juice than he had right now. Honestly, he had no chance to notice the thing before. It was a miracle that he managed to use it up on that cheaty interaction with Lily's invisibility instead of some really useless shit. Huh.

It kind of explained why he had no success in debating the skill into more compliance after that. Aside from some really minor additions, he used up all the free space. Okay, so, now he had a decision to make. Just to pick one of the infinite possibilities for his skill to grow, with no chance of changing his mind later and no guarantee of any new level ups in near future. When he'll pick something it would become a part of the foundation to build upon, making upgrades in the same vein cheaper and stronger.

Whatever he'll pick now would determine what he'll pick later just because of the efficiency. Whatever he'll pick now will need to both give him the most power in the short term and not fuck up his build in the long term. He could just decide that he wanted omnipotence, and it would do jack shit for a long time. Planning for end-game would get him killed now, and yet picking something convenient like portal-making would make him crippled in the long run.

Basically, this one pick out of infinite choices could make or break his build. No pressure. Could he leave the decision for later? Think about it a bit more? Yeah, he could, but there'll be a chance that the skill would add stuff on its own when he needed it. If he got into the fight with the Arm right now, he'll see his empty sheet of godly power filled faster than he'll regret it, probably with something stupid like '+1. 2 Dex per level' instead of +1 and without the Mind compensating for it.

Spending some time to think carefully about the choices would be fine as long as he didn't use the skill, but sitting on it would be begging for trouble. He adjusted his posture, getting himself more comfortable as he was lying on the roof. Okay. Sure. He could do that. He had good instincts for finding loopholes and abusing game mechanics, honed over thousands of hours, but the problem was that they didn't apply here. There was no tricky rule to subvert, no hidden depths, he straight out could do anything.

Whatever he thought about, it was possible. How the fuck was he supposed to pick anything, if it could close off everything else? This wasn't just decision paralysis, this was, like, the final boss of decision paralysis. Thankfully Dennis didn't have any problems with picking one correct option out of infinity. He'll just do it. It wasn't hard. What would make him the best speedster hero of all times, both short-term and long-term, while also being a power-efficient choice? Yeah, he had no idea.

More speed was always welcome, but speed alone won't solve any of his problems. It was tempting as hell to just fill the whole page of skill definition with 'moar powah', but he couldn't deny that he was in a desperate need of utility. He made a lot of complaints about his skill, but not a single one of them was 'not fast enough'. Maybe just one. Anyway. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The most obvious shortcoming of the skill was, of course, the activation requirement. He needed someone else who needed saving for the thing to even work, and even when that happened his options were horribly limited. Unlike in comic books, damsels in distress who needed saving at the last moment were fucking rare. Infuriatingly, getting rid of the requirement altogether was basically impossible. The skill was made to save people, he couldn't not have people for it to work.

With infinite options he could see a way to loosen the requirement a lot, but it would always be there in some form, and trying to get rid of it would be expensive. He would work pretty much against the foundation of the skill, so while possible it would be both ridiculously costly and crippling for its growth. You just can't have a skill that lets you save targets but not need the targets, that kind of legal tomfoolery requires a lot of bribes.

More freedom of movement when he already had a target was also desperately needed. Currently all he could do was move towards the target and kind of hope that it would work out. Atomic Destruction was a nice workaround, but it wouldn't work against stronger enemies and had lots of its own limits. Targeting… targeting was actually okay. It was the part of the skill that he managed to abuse the most, somehow. To prove a point, he was abusing it right now, using it as some kind of alarm system to keep watch for Lily.

He managed to use it miles away from the party to figure out when they were attacked, and he managed to use it even as some sort of info gathering tool to know that Lily was safe but invisible during their brief fight with the Arm. It was a weirdly developed part of the skill, with the unexpected scrying component to boot. How the hell his running skill had clairvoyance as part of its mechanics was still a mystery of the century. It was a question that lingered on his mind since that fight near the fort, when… Ah.

He was a dumbass. It was him who added the scrying component. Right then, during his first debate, when he managed to force it to work with Lily's invisibility. He used up six levels worth of skill definition for better targeting. No wonder it worked weirdly, he bruteforced the skill to work within a specific situation and got a bunch of weird side-abilities as a result. Targeting was, in a way, the most developed part of his skill. Because he did that. On accident.

It was kinda cool though, so he didn't regret it too much. He could add a variety of new side-abilities to the skill, but all of them would be minor. Did he even need any? Running on water could be cool, moving his targets without hurting them was something that he needed twice already, maybe some kind of endurance boost or health regeneration? He could straight up make it so he would have a lightning trail behind him, it wouldn't do anything, but it would be fucking cool.

And not that expensive, he was sure that explaining the importance of proper aura wouldn't take much space. Tempting, that one was. And he had to remember that picking something that would be good later wouldn't help him right now. In a perfect scenario, whatever he'll get will have to help him out with this whole mirror world situation. He refused to pick portal-making because there was no way he had enough juice for that one, and even if he did it would be useless for anything else. So…

Damn it, he was thinking in circles. Fuck, okay, let's simplify this shit. What was his biggest problem with the skill until now? What was needed the most? Savable people. The first step of heroing was having someone to save. Without them he wasn't even a hero, just a dude who wandered around and killed goblins, like a murderhobo. Nothing else mattered if he didn't have anyone to save. Before they got lost in this world, his main problem was the lack of targets, aimlessness.

Now, in this world, they were lost and had no idea how to get back, where to go. Again, it was a problem with the lack of intelligence. He didn't have HQ who told him where to go or convenient detective-sidekicks who figured out what to do. He was a speedster with no direction. Like an arrow that flew nowhere, what was the point of speed and deadliness if he had no target? Things got clear when looked through that lens. If HQ won't do it, he'll just have to do it himself.

He even had a foundation to build upon, the skill already had a half-baked targeting module, it already worked over long distances, could sniff out invisible people, even provide him with information. Upgrading that would be cheaper than adding something new, and he would get more power per point spent. Becoming some sort of speedster-oracle hybrid sounded weird, he didn't remember any character archetypes like that, but it kind of made sense that it wasn't done in the comics, didn't it?

He heard a giggle, and only a moment later realized that it was him. He was giggling. It sounded deranged. It was worse than speedsters with danger-sense. A speedster who always knew where the trouble was? He would vacuum clean the whole fucking planet, and do it in seconds. A proper superspeed was the same as omnipresence, and combined with what was essentially omniscience? It just wasn't done.

He couldn't remember any heroes with that power combination, and it made sense, because that combination was fucking cheating. The Flash who always knew where he was needed would make the whole world crime-free. It was absurd. Yeah, he's getting that. Trying to expand his skill's scope still felt like an internal debate, but for now while it had quite a lot of free space the thing was way more agreeable. Still, he tried to be persuasive in his arguments.

Bitch, you already know where targets are, so stop playing fucking coy and just tell me that. All the time? For everyone? Is he sure that he wants to have the knowledge about everyone in trouble being constantly shoved in his head? Dunno, make a filter or something? Like when you didn't work when Lily was invisible near the Arm even though you should've? Lemme adjust what the 'target' is. The target is the one who needs to be saved from mortal danger. There's nothing to adjust.

Lily is a special case, she basically has her own paragraph in his skill's definition. Well fuck you too. Your definition of danger sucks ass. There's more to it than just falling from a building or having a goblin run at you. It could be a threat of starvation, or captivity, or… fuck it, just make it so the target counts as savable if it thinks it needs saving. Yeah, he should go grind a dozen or so levels more and then come back to ask for global mind-reading. What is he, Professor X with Cerebro?

Ugh, fine, scratch the mind-reading part. Just make it so there's a gradation to threat and let me adjust the sensitivity to it. You already work with different types of danger, there's a fucking difference between dying in the next second and participating in the most boring shootout with goblins. Filtering that shouldn't be hard, no? And let's expand the definition of danger, if someone is stuck in some basement and starving they totally need saving, and… Fuck, do I really need to come up with all cases?

Read my subconscious or something, I dunno, I know– And just like that, he ran out of godly juice. To be fair, he wasn't really keeping track of it while arguing with himself, so the feeling of the skill being… constrained again was a bit sudden. It writhed and twisted before settling in a new configuration. The conceptual distribution of a skill was modified. Sub-skill budded. Heroic Senses. Passive. Part of Heroic Dash. An arrow can't fly without direction, and a hero can't exist without people to save.

Effect: Pericognition to find those who need saving. Two potential targets bloomed in his mind. He didn't know who, or what was happening to them, and he only had a vague feeling for how far away they were, but… One was quite some distance to the west. The other was nearby and moving, not that far away from the house where Lily slept. It was time to hero all over them.