Chương 42: Signs of culture

The town hid behind the horizon. All around him, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing. It reminded him of that scene from the Matrix, the one with the guns. A weird place to find yourself in. Real easy to get lost. If that mysterious dying person finally died right now, Dennis would be thoroughly fucked. Completely lost in the void of pale white. But they were taking their time, so Dennis had his target, so he was running. Walking, honestly.

After the first half an hour the lightweight girl somehow gained sixty pounds or so, without visibly changing at all. It was magic, he was sure. Cursed magic. If this world had been governed by physics and chemistry, his muscles would've been screaming at him some very unkind words. But it wasn't, so instead he just got to listen to the synchronised whining chorus of Strength and Constitution. If eldritch could speak vulgarities, he was clearly learning a lot of new and interesting words in skill-speak.

Those two stats defined what he could move, and what could move him, and they had some strong opinions. He was placating them by walking slower, or sometimes outright resting for a few minutes. In a way, gauging his endurance got pretty easy. He just listened to the stats. It was like he had an actual stamina bar, and all he had to do to keep moving was to juggle it at the near depletion without letting it actually run out. He was constantly tired, but never so much that he couldn't move.

The exhaustion was annoying to deal with, but in a way it was only mental. His breathing was calm, and he didn't sweat, and if one judged only by the look then Dennis would've looked completely fine. Sure, he was on the brink of collapse all the time, but threading that needle was just a matter of focus and willpower, and wavering was just not something that he did. After all, he was exactly where he wanted to be. In the grand scheme of things. His hometown appeared on the horizon.

After all, he never lost the buff. Yes, he wasn't sprinting or even jogging, but even then the path that took their party a good chunk of a day took him less than two hours. Assuming that the distances between the cities were the same? Maybe they were shorter, it was, understandably, hard to tell. He was coming home. Kinda. His target still felt really fucking far away, so it would be more correct to say that his home was on the way.

Honestly, he was getting pretty worried when he realized that the sheer distance he traveled already barely made a dent in the total path. Just how far could Heroic Senses reach? And how was it possible for that ridiculous range to pick up just one target? He wasn't sure that his target was even on the same continent now, if this world even had continents, and yet even with that ridiculous range of the skill there was only one target for him?

He kind of assumed that the mysteriously dying person would be, like, in the nearby city or something, so the fact that he still had such a way to go was worrying, to say the least. He was still going since saving someone in trouble was the right thing to do, and it's not like he had that many options to begin with, but the sudden understanding that this thing would take days or even weeks grated a bit. Not even mentioning the hassle that would be traveling back to the fort.

He should probably find a way to heal Lily and bring her back to the normal world first. She won't be happy with him if he drags her to Europe or something. Thankfully, his hometown had one of the best possible solutions to one of the problems. Best meaning the most likely to actually work, not that he knew any actual solutions to anything yet. He slowed down a bit more as he approached the first houses, breathing in relief as the intensity of nothingness reduced.

It wasn't too bad, to be honest, and spending a few hours in the place between places did more or less nothing but bring him a bit closer to the next level, but the feeling itself was unnerving, like sitting on a slightly uncomfortable chair with the knowledge that if you sit on it for too long the discomfort would become permanent and never fade. After small consideration, he allowed himself half an hour of rest, breaking into one of the houses and appropriating the couch.

Who knew if there were any new weird monsters here, and meeting them with his 'stamina bar' almost empty wouldn't be nice. With nothing to do to pass the time, he just laid back on the couch and stared at the ceiling, listening to his stats and waiting for them to tell him when he'll be rested. Annoyingly, unlike in games, half an hour wasn't enough. While his body and stamina restored a bit, there was some kind of threshold that his recovery couldn't cross without substantial rest. Maybe even some sleep?

While he did hope that he didn't need to sleep anymore, Lily slept before so he knew it was possible, and he felt himself lagging a bit as well. Surprisingly, it was Mind that grumbled at him the most for not sleeping. For how long was he awake already? He wasn't sure, but certainly more than a full day. It seemed that, despite his hopes, he did actually need to sleep still, kinda-undeadness or not. He could just go longer without it because of his high Mind, and he didn't feel the need while his buff was active.

Still, he wanted to at least check out the place before he found a nice bed for himself to crash. Maybe even in his own house, if he'll manage to find it between the identical copies. So, despite feeling pretty comfy, he got up, strapped Lily back to his back, and moved out. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. His destination was the park. The spawn point.

Nothing directly indicated that it would be anything special in this world, but also, nothing indicated that it wouldn't be. Kind of made sense to check if there was anything different with the place, especially since it was on the way. After all, goblins had to be coming from somewhere, right? It would be more crazy for them to just materialize out of nothingness without, like, existing first.

Goblins were different from each other, they had different faces, and voices, they acted differently and wore different rags, and all of that meant that they weren't just mass produced clones. While magic meant that anything was possible, some things were more possible than the others. Sure, it was possible that the system just copy-pasted them into existence, but he believed that it was much more likely that they came from somewhere. And he was somewhere right now. Very much somewhere. Occam's razor was a thing.

Mostly useful as a way to sound smarter while arguing with someone on the internet–which was actually the reason why he even bothered to learn about it–but also useful for situations like this one, when everything was possible and nothing was known. Goblins appeared out of nowhere in the park. They were either created out of thin air, or teleported from some other place, other world. He was in the other world.

What made more sense, that there was another world from which the goblins came from, or that they came from here? Basically, he was hoping that goblins were using this world to spawn in the normal one. If that was the case, maybe it was possible to hitchhike the process? It wouldn't solve the 'Lily is basically dead' problem, but a way home was a way home. Useful to have and all that. The way to the park was a short one.

Not all of it was in the same direction as his current target, but he found that when the target was so far away he could steer the path much more than just a few steps. Not getting lost in the identical houses was tricky, but the general layout of the town was still relatively the same. With his current 'baggage' he had to be a bit more careful than usual, so he went further inside the town before backtracking to the park the slow way in order to have a buffed escape route in case things got funny.

He couldn't fight with Lily on his back, after all. He could try leaving her somewhere to act as a second target in case there would be a fight, but he wasn't sure if he would even need that, and thinking about doing it left him with an uneasy feeling and triggered too many errors, which was just annoying.

Honestly, the whole soul-growth business so far was deeply annoying, and he had half a mind to find a mountain to meditate on and find enlightenment to break through whatever barrier was stopping it from growing, or to find a demon to sell whatever he had managed to grow just so the thing stopped spamming him. Either way would work, as long as it stopped bothering him. Anyway. He was almost there.

For a moment he was worried that the park wasn't an important enough place and just straight up stopped existing, but that wasn't the case. He approached carefully, keeping a metaphorical finger close to the 'run the fuck away' button, and nearly bolted when he saw three fucking Arms standing in a circle in the middle of it, surrounding a tree. Come to think of it, wasn't there some kind of old oak tree under which people used to confess and stuff?

He wasn't really interested in stuff like that, but some things are learned just because you live nearby. The 'confession tree' was all the hype when he was still in high school. The only reason Dennis didn't just nope out and turn around was the fact that he didn't actually feel anything from those Arms. In fact, neither the monsters nor the park itself felt like anything to his senses. While the park existing at all marked it as a place of significance, he couldn't feel any 'park' aura from it.

And with the way spending some time in literal void sharpened his senses so much that he was starting to distinguish the voices of his weaker stats, he was pretty confident that his third eye wasn't the problem either. This place was dead. And those Arms, despite standing pretty menacingly around the tree, were dead too. If there was any 'tree' or 'park' skill here before, it was also either destroyed or consumed, like in the church. The place remained, but the meaning of it was lost.

He relaxed a bit when his eyes confirmed what he felt. The monsters lost their glossy darkness, just like the one Lily had slain. Despite standing around the tree like in some sort of bizarre ritual, the things were basically statues of themselves. He came closer, carefully studying the surroundings and trying to figure out what happened here. Indeed, some new kind of magical bullshit had clearly taken place, but it was already over. Some sort of ritual?

At some point in time the Arms gathered around the oak tree–which he assumed was the focal point of an aura then–and did some magical arm-waving, if he was reading their poses correctly. Then, after some time, the tree aura just died and the monsters died with it. Correlation was not causation, but it was probably safe to assume that this place being a spawn point a few weeks ago was somehow connected to mumbo-jumbo happening in this world.

There weren't any goblins around now, but it kind of made sense if all the goblins were teleported to his world. Most likely, the tree-aura was somehow used up as a gateway for the spawning process before it ran out. Maybe the Arms were used as batteries as well? That could explain why they were dead, at least. He doubted that the 'tree of confessions' had as strong an aura as the altar of a very old and probably very important church, so it had to be juiced up a bit for the goblins to be able to pass through.

Probably. Maybe. Okay, yeah, he was getting quite deep into pure speculation at this point. In any way, this all but confirmed two conclusions. First, the skill-places were somehow connected to his world, or could serve as gateways. After all, they teleported here through one, and the goblin spawn point also used it in some capacity. Second, whoever the summoner of those Arms was, he was not friendly. Maybe even a villain.

After all, if summoning some golems to sit and chill at skill-places could be excused somehow, deliberately opening portals into his world for goblins to come was very much not excusable. Dennis was feeling some strong bad-guy vibes at this point. Maybe that 'high authority' was even responsible for the apocalypse in the first place. Studying the Arm-statues from up close revealed a third conclusion. On the faces of each and every one was a pretty high-quality carving of a dick.

One of the statues had a 'Fuck you' spelled on its chest in plain English. And on the tree itself…

'Gareth was here'.