Chương 53: Sanity is subjective

Lily was dying. More than a month had passed since he got stuck here, and the far-away target was still far fucking away, he covered maybe half the distance to it at most, the floating people were still not saved, just ominously floating above his head, and the nothingness aura still didn't give him a new level despite grinding him like sandpaper for all that time. It was somewhat close, sure. But not nearly enough. And he wasn't the only one it was grinding at. Yesterday, Lily felt stronger than she was today.

Two days ago, she was stronger than yesterday. It was a tricky thing to notice, the miniscule change was obvious only when he compared it over days, and even then just barely. She had reached the idle leveling cap, getting just about halfway to the sixth level. He had hoped that they would have more time. That the fact that they had more exp would allow them to endure for longer. In a way, it did. It took just a week or so for Gareth to start going crazy, after all. Now it started to happen with Lily.

Soon it will happen to him. There was a good chance that he'd start regressing before reaching the next level. It was a coin toss. He walked the streets hurriedly, checking out the skill-places one by one, not trying to find a place to sleep this time but desperately trying to find something. Some clue, some change, anything that would allow him to fight off the inevitability, because as they were right now they were fucked. The obvious solution was to kill more Arms for the exp but he didn't have a fucking weapon.

Dennis was–to put it humbly–pretty good with the whole fighting thing. He knew his own strength, he knew what Arms were capable of, and he knew for a fact that without a good sword or, fuck it, good something that could deal damage he just won't win. It was a game of tic-tac-toe, and he knew all the moves, and so he knew that there were none that would let him kill the creature. There was no uncertainty. He didn't have the damage.

Using the meager wisps of mana that he had to enchant his weapons with Durability or Sharpness produced mixed results. It worked, but the change was negligible. His daggers–because Muramasa was now a dagger, in a way–were already sharp and durable, and worse than that, real, which gave them their own kind of magic-resistance. He just didn't have the mana or expertise with magic to turn his weapons into something more than what they were already.

Using mana to enchant himself worked better, but it was nothing groundbreaking. He didn't resist his own magic, at least, but what he could do with it was limited as hell. Stats outright refused to entertain the idea of being empowered with mana, laughing at his attempts. Heroic Dash was a bit better, it didn't refuse the mana, but it had no idea what to do with it. It was a passive skill. It was made to be self-sustainable, and the tradeoff of that was not knowing or caring how to utilize mana for empowerment.

Dennis got a feeling that he could make the skill stronger with it, but he needed either way more mana, or to modify the skill and give it something like a 'mana input port'. If that would be a wise investment or not was anyone's guess. A shame, but achieving Ultimate Heroic Dash seemed to be a bit harder than just throwing mana at the problem. Still an avenue for research, if he survives. Haste was the best he could do right now.

Resonating with the concept of speed and imbuing not stats or skills, but himself with it gave him the equivalent of +1 to Dexterity or so for a fraction of a second before he ran out of mana. Pretty cool that it worked at all, but not enough to kill an Arm. They were on the precipice of being eaten by the void unless something changed, and Dennis was desperately searching for a solution. Just something to give him an edge.

A skill-place that was attached to a weapon, a weakened Arm, maybe a stranded survivor who could help with fighting or healing Lily. He couldn't find any living ones since Gareth, but that didn't mean they didn't exist. Thankfully, Dennis had a lot of places to check. As far as cities went, Las Vegas was pretty big. Usually when he stumbled into a town or a city he had no idea which one it was, the lack of signs or defining architecture turning anything into a 'generic town'.

'Welcome to Las Vegas' sign was pretty damn defining, even if the Arm sitting right on top of it made for an eerie sight. Why did it even climb there? That didn't look comfortable. The realization that he had almost crossed the whole continent threw him for a loop. He was just barely halfway to the far-away target, which meant that it was somewhere… what, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? There was no way for him to reach it before emptiness ate him, but also… the fucking ocean.

Last time he checked, he couldn't run on water. Actually, he never checked. But it was a moot point. Even if he could run on water, he couldn't sleep or rest on it, and there'll be no cities on the way, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the void would be even more aggressive. It was straight out impossible for him to reach the far-away target as he was right now. It was impossible for him to kill an Arm.

He might get a level from passive refinement if he waited for another week, but what would happen to Lily during that time? He was stuck on a trajectory towards complete erasure, and all his struggles and running and figuring out magic were fucking pointless, just random convulsions of a broken husk who couldn't stop moving or doing stuff no matter how useless it all was, because to stop was not an option. Not because stopping was death. He didn't mind dying that much.

But it was simply not a thing that he could do. That attitude towards the current situation was not that different from his attitude towards his heroism problems, come to think of it. Just ignore the hopelessness of it all, and struggle. Move. Do something, and maybe it will somehow work out, and if it won't, it won't. It didn't matter if he couldn't be a real hero, he'll just keep trying until something breaks.

He'll save Lily, save the floating people, his mom, people from the fort, fucking everyone, and maybe somewhere along the way he'll figure out what was wrong with him. To stop trying was not an option, even if all that he wanted sometimes was just… some rest. So he was moving. Looking for something. Checking every damn skill-place in the whole city one by one, even if chances of him stumbling on some sort of salvation were fucking low, because what else could he do?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. He just couldn't stop. / - / A quiet giggle echoed across the empty streets. It was a sinister sound. Luck places, fortune places… A cackle of a madman who grid-searched the whole city, one house at a time. Greed places, desperation places, hunger places… A deranged laughter that could be mistaken for a cry, it didn't stop. Violent murder places, cold and calculated murder places …

"Feeling disarmed, bitch?!" the mockery in his voice couldn't be more apparent. A fucking church. Small wooden thing. He passed it twice before deciding to look inside. He wasted days. Of course he did, the thing smelled like weddings. What the fuck was he expecting to find there? Inside of it, on the little podium, beside the little piano, stood the Arm. Unlike the other Arms which were usually guarding skill-places, this one was… well, grabbing it. More like trying to, and failing.

Dennis gently put Lily down near the entrance before going for his weapons, his grip good enough to double-wield again thanks to Healing. His giggling didn't stop even for a second. Even to him, there was something off about it. It didn't sound healthy, or even sane. To be fair, it's been a while since Dennis felt healthy, or sane. Thankfully, there was no one alive around to hear it and accuse him of something. Well, the Arm was, but that was fixable. It stood on the little podium in front of the focal point.

Instead of hands, it had cracks. From just below the biceps, like branches of a tree they spread around and inside the skill, and in other directions that he couldn't even comprehend, trying to grab it, and failing. The skill was too strong. The Grand Oath was not a small thing, and it was… Dennis wasn't sure… trying to invert itself? Self-actualize? Collapse under its own weight like a star?

The metaphysical sensations he got from it were wild, but they didn't really matter to him right now, because while what the skill was doing was fascinating, the Arm was doing what arms usually did, trying to hijack the process while the skill seemed to be vulnerable, and to grab it, and it was failing, and it was stuck in a stalemate. And it couldn't move.

"Just you w-wait a bit, Lily," he told the corpse in between the cackling.

"You'll see. You'll see. It'll be all right. I will fix everything. You'll see. You'll know…" He was going to stab the shit out of that Arm, and there was nothing it could do about it. He wiped a small tear from his face as he slowly walked behind the monster, the feeling of a new yet so familiar target entering his mind like a chime bell.

Somehow, instead of instilling a sense of urgency like it usually did, he could feel a faint echo of satisfaction flowing through his being with every step he took further away from Lily. Like his skill understood what Dennis was doing, understood that slaying the Arm while using Lily as a target was a direct and only way if not to save her, then to postpone her death, and it approved.

"Don't struggle too much, you piece of alien shit," he said to the monster's back. It didn't react.

"But please suffer. I hope you can. I don't care if that's not what a hero would say. It's what I want." He didn't need to take a step or even slightly move for the buff to suffuse him. It wasn't needed. Movement began from a thought. From the moment Dennis decided that he was on a path, he was. It was more than just an intention. It was the truth, the objective state of reality as he demanded, and Heroic Dash recognised that. They were buddies like that. The Arm was a huge fucking monster.

Dennis rarely had a chance to appreciate just how tall they were. When it stood straight, it towered over him, and without a sword he couldn't even reach the creature's neck to cut the head off. When fighting, it had to lean forward like a beast just to reach Dennis, and therefore he would use that to bait it into a position for a good counterattack. Outside of the fight, he would need a small ladder just to compensate for the height difference. Dennis didn't have a ladder, so he improvised.

Or maybe that was just the excuse. His daggers blurred in the air, biting perfectly into the same horizontal line over and over so fast that it looked like he was using a buzz saw. The cut across the creature's back started to glow red almost instantly, deepening inch by inch with every second. The noise that filled the small church was deafening, more appropriate for a sawmill than a place of worship.

The monster didn't emit a single sound, standing still while being cut in half as its whole being was focused on a process that could not be interrupted. The cracks in space that replaced its arms were vibrating, crying in a high-pitched sound that wasn't a sound as they slipped one by one off of the The Grand Oath. The skill shuddered in bliss, every broken binding speeding up the process of it becoming something more, the hum of eldritch song refusing to be outdone by the noise of violence.

Dennis was barely moving in Lily's direction, doing just enough to keep the skill active. Honestly, it would be more correct to say that he didn't move from his spot at all, almost solely focused on cutting that bitch in half. Heroic Dash wanted to grumble. It really did. Dennis felt it. He was barely paying lip service towards the 'reaching the target to save it' rule, his mind filled with desperate vindictive anger had almost no place for 'heroism'.

But the skill didn't turn off, because Heroic Dash itself was fighting against its own nature and restrictions to give Dennis more time, more seconds to vent his anger. Dennis didn't know if it was slowly learning to bend the rules, or if it was a display of some kind of alien compassion, and he didn't particularly care. Sparks of fire flew in the air as his own manic laughter filled the hall, joining in the cacophony of noise.

His weapons were red hot, and he smelled the burning of his palms before feeling the pain. He didn't care. Healing would get rid of minor burns. Two halves of the Arm fell on the ground, accompanied by the sound of the cracks shattering like glass. The Grand Oath triumphed, the whole aura coalescing into a point, inverting in a direction that didn't exist and disappearing without leaving a trace. Silence filled the hall, interrupted only by Dennis' labored breathing.

It stopped the moment the System message came, cut off in an instant as if forgotten. Level up. Free points +6"One point in Soul," he heard himself muttering. The world– Didn't really change. Error. Refinement process terminated. Free points: 6 Not even a feeling of anything snapping. Not even the tiniest bit of movement inside of him. Like he didn't even try. The laughter that filled the hall definitely did not sound like a healthy one.

With no way to reach the far-away target, no way to heal Lily, and no way to be a hero…

"There's something I can do now," he whispered to the corpse, with murder in his eyes.

"Lots of exp around for both of us, eh?"