Chương 51: No cause or reason, just feels right

Naturally, he didn't really have a plan. The opposite, really. If before the, ehm, the Soul-incident, he was mostly grasping at straws and doing what felt right for his heroic moral compass, now he didn't even have that, his mind constantly filled with doubts and second-guessing. Not that he didn't have the heroic moral compass anymore, he just… didn't trust it. Still, he had no choice but to be doing something, constant doubt be damned.

Gareth's advice wasn't that useful, but Dennis knew that he wouldn't forgive himself if he just sat on his ass and wallowed in self-pity. Maybe he could never be a real hero. But he could always do worse. He wouldn't allow that. He had to be doing something, if only to temporarily soothe the all-consuming hatred that was brewing deep in his soul.

The far-away dying person was quickly becoming just a part of the background, something that clearly wasn't a pressing matter and at its core was nothing more than a convenient source of superspeed. But it was a person. They were dying. A real person who needed his help while he wasted time pretending to be a hero. He never thought about them like that. It was never something more than a quest-marker.

Dennis shook his head, recognising the approach of another guilt-spiral and deliberately changing his mental tracks to something more productive as he trudged through the place between places. Guilt-spirals were unpleasant. Horrendously easy to fall into because of his buffed Mind, extra hard to stop because the Soul muddled the water, adding constant uncertainty to every thought he had so he couldn't simply reason himself out of it.

Worse than that, they were self-reinforcing, because heroes didn't get stuck in them, and more than anything he hated not being a hero, so the sheer fact that he had them made them worse, because what he was supposed to do was save people with a cheeky smile, do cool shit, and not… this. So. So. He was learning to avoid them at a rapid pace, and the way to do that was to do heroic stuff instead.

A hero didn't have time for self-pity, or self-hatred, or any other type of useless pointless wallowing because they were busy being a fucking hero. Every time Dennis felt another one approaching, he shifted his mind to doing or thinking something productive and heroic. In other words, he was learning the wonders of workaholism. Another city appeared on the horizon. Dennis was pretty sure this would be the one where he'd stay for the night. Or, well, sleep. He was getting pretty tired.

No he will not fucking wallow in self-pity because he needed to sleep, fuck you Soul, go die in a ditch. Having a Soul was so fucking not worth it. And he still didn't understand what the hell it even did. The city was one of the bigger ones, he noted, looking at the few skyscrapers in the distance. Could be Atlanta, but that felt a bit off-course considering the direction he was running, and it wasn't like there were any signs to check.

He settled into his usual routine, looking for a house that was close enough to a skill-place to benefit from some additional void-protection, but not so close as to aggro the Arm that protected the place. Superspeed was handy for doing it quickly, and his spirit senses were getting better to a point where he could kinda guess the direction to the closest skill-place just from the miniscule gradation to realness of his surroundings. After all, he'd been doing this for a while. Four days, since he left Gareth.

He still didn't know if he was doing the right thing. If trying to reach the far-away target was the right choice. But he was learning to live with the constant uncertainty that permeated his being. And he didn't know what else he could do. That target was the only certainty, the only decision where he was definitely doing something heroic and not wasting time. Probably. He passed by some cemetery, not seeing any houses close enough and deciding that death-aura was a bit too spooky to sleep in.

Totally a ghost-place. He passed a museum, the Arm there stood uncomfortably close to the houses. He quickly passed some kind of amusement park because the aura there had clowns in its impression, and fuck that. He almost passed the aquarium, his casual stroll in superspeed already bringing him further beyond it before he caught a red smear in the corner of his eye which grabbed his attention. There was blood on the ground.

His eyes followed the trail to the aquarium, noticing the Arm standing near the entrance like some sort of bouncer, outside the aggro range. He slowly followed the trail the other way. It was old. The blood that he could see was dry and most of the smears were covered in the dust that permeated this world. Managing to bleed so much in this world honestly sounded like an impressive achievement. He didn't need to go far. Just a few turns, to the small alley between the office buildings.

"Huh," he said quietly.

"You're seeing this shit, Lily?" The girl, as usual, didn't answer. That didn't stop him from talking at her more and more lately. Two dead bodies were lying in the alley. A young woman in a half-sitting position, her back leaning on the wall, and a young man without a leg, cradled in her arms. It was kind of romantic, Dennis thought, to die together while hugging each other in some nameless alley in the world of symbolism and nothingness. He wondered where the leg was. Probably on some tree.

"This is like a Gareth situation, you think?" He shared his thoughts.

"But without the resurrection skill. Dumbasses had some exp to them, got yoinked here through the skill-place cracks, and decided that there was nothing better they could do than go poke the Arm?" Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. He stood still for a moment, as if listening to the answer.

"Yeah, seems like it," he agreed.

"Can't cure idiocy. I'm sure you understand." There was no sound. Dennis stood alone in a nameless alley, with three corpses for company.

"I mean, there has to be a limit to undeadness," he argued.

"Some sort of hard limit where the world considers your injuries to be too much to count as being alive. You also don't feel them, right? They're dead. No different from the dust that surrounds them. Tough luck, I guess. They should've waited until idle leveling gave them a skill at least before trying whatever they've tried. Do you think level plays a role in survivability? Maybe having more exp gives you more leeway or something?" The woman's face was stuck in an expression of sorrow.

The man's was more of a combination of panic and pain. It wasn't a pretty sight. Well, kinda pretty in some sort of fucked up symbolic way, but definitely not in a 'look what a pretty sight' kind of way. While the man's cause of death was clear to see–because he was fucked up in more ways than just missing a leg–Dennis couldn't figure out what killed the woman. There weren't any life-threatening wounds on her at first glance. It was like… like the dude died in her arms and she just decided to give up on living.

Was that something that could happen? The instinctual answer was no, but… This world didn't operate on physics or common sense, but more on meanings and intent of things. Dennis wasn't alive because he had blood and all of his internal organs inside of him, he was alive because… well, he was alive. That's what he was. Self-determination could very well be one of the crucial factors that allowed people to keep going in this place.

When intent and ideas could become tangible things that affected reality, and the world itself operated by obeying things that had objective importance–in other words 'exp'–it sounded much more plausible that someone could just decide to be dead. What would oppose them, if physics didn't matter and intent did, in a world filled with nothingness? Dennis shook his head with a frown, recognising the signs of another speculative tangent and forcefully steering his thoughts in another direction.

Soul made them dangerous. Or was it Mind? Somehow, the tinge of uncertainty that the Soul introduced to his every thought made getting stuck in his head so much easier, allowing ideas to loop around themselves in endless circles of 'am I wrong?', and with his Mind he could have a lot of ideas very quickly. There was certainly some kind of stat interaction and imbalance between Mind and Soul that he managed to gracefully dodge before by not having any Soul in the first place.

He shook his head again, stronger this time, and gave it a few light smacks to stop thinking about stuff.

"We're wasting time," he said quietly to himself. Totally to himself.

"No point in gawking when there's stuff to do and people to save." He turned around, ready to continue his search for a suitable place to sleep. Dennis didn't even finish a step before stopping in place.

"That's dumb," he murmured, before looking back." Why?" he complained.

"There's no point. I would like to point out that we're on a time limit, and there's someone who actually needs our help." He started walking in circles, arguing with himself.

"That's– That's not even heroic," he kept muttering.

"I mean, a proper hero will be too busy for stuff like that. Which I am! This is work for the NPCs. We have places to be! Shit to figure out!" He kept glancing at the bodies, as if afraid that they could chime in to the conversation.

"It doesn't even pass the trolley problem test!" He threw his hands in the air, almost dropping Lily in the process before awkwardly fixing his posture.

"I mean, the triage thing! We need to sleep and keep going. What the fuck?! Why are you whining so much?!" Since when was triage a heroic thing?

"What do you mean since when?! This is the real world we are talking about. Triage is a thing! You can't just… dilly-dally and sniff every ethically pretty flower while real shit needs to be done! Shit that matters more!" For the greater good, eh?" Yes!" That's what a real hero would do, then. Triage. For the greater good.

"Yes!" he exclaimed before stopping in place, as if frozen.

"I mean… I– I don't really know…" The pair of lovers still lay in the alley, dead and uncaring for his plight.

"Who… Who am I even talking to?" he mumbled while watching them, etching their expressions forever into his eidetic memory." Heroic Dash, is that you, bud? Lily? Soul? There's no way I can hear the Soul when it's just one point…" There was no answer. Dennis was alone.

"I mean… A real comic book hero wouldn't bother…" Dennis whispered.

"Because they're busy saving the world, and this is just background work for the NPCs." He slowly approached the bodies with unsteady legs.

"A real world hero wouldn't bother either," he continued talking quietly to himself as he crouched down beside them.

"Because triage is a thing, and you don't waste time on corpses when someone living needs your help. I think."

"So why the fuck –" He reached out a hand and gently closed their eyes.

"–I don't feel like I'll regret this?" Dennis took a deep breath and placed Lily's body nearby.

"Fuck it, we ball." / - / Biting the inside of his cheek from intense focus, Dennis finally finished rounding the edges of the square chunk of brick wall that he cut out of the nearby building. The general fragility and dustiness of everything around him turned his task from impossible to merely annoying, but thankfully he was done. In front of him was a grave. He decided to do just one because fuck doing it twice but also he doubted that the pair of lovers would've minded.

Digging it with only his dagger as a tool was much simpler than he dreaded. The ground was made of the same compressed dust, and tearing the whole chunks out of it was surprisingly easy, if time-consuming. He didn't even get dirty, the matter simply disappearing altogether when the chunks were small enough. Pointless pieces of pointless dust had negative void-resistance, it seemed, and the moment they stopped being part of something, they just stopped being at all.

The grave, on the other hand, felt more real than anything around it, losing only to skill-places and living entities. It wasn't a skill-place, but it was a place. A thing. It mattered, and mattering was the only thing that defined how real something was. Of-fucking-course it mattered, Dennis wasted more than an hour on this thing. He finished engraving the tombstone and sheathed the dagger, feeling some new weird sort of satisfaction from a task finally done.

It was somehow different from beating a hard boss or buying expensive merchandise. Less joyful, but more… he wasn't sure, fulfilling?

"I guess I should say something," he muttered after taking a few steps back.

"Probably a prayer? I know one." He stood still as if listening to something, before shaking his head.

"Yeah, okay, it's probably the wrong prayer for this kind of thing anyway," he answered.

"And it's not like I believe in them. Gods should be punchable, not almighty. Okay, well…"

"I have no idea how you people keep getting killed by the Arms," he said quietly to the grave.

"They're not that hard to avoid, you know? I guess that if you don't expect the sudden aggro you can be caught by surprise, and getting away is not that easy because they're freaking fast, so… Okay, I can see how that could've happened. Still dumb." He sighed, trying to center his thoughts.

"What I'm trying to say is… it's sad, that you're dead and stuff. I wish you survived before I found you. We could've figured something out, you know?"

"I just…" he tried to find the right words.

"I wish I saved you. I'll try to be faster next time." Picking Lily up, he moved on, sparing just one final glance at the tombstone.

'Two lovers,' it said.

'F'.