Chương 61: It’s always the leg with speedsters

Dennis was pretty sure that he had finally figured the stats out. He had more than enough level-ups and points of comparison. In the end, it was quite simple. Ten points in a stat doubled whatever the stat did. In the case of Dexterity, it was obviously his speed. Ten points was the baseline.

The value that the average human had at first level, and looking at how low his Strength and Constitution were at the beginning of it all he was confident that ten points was the value for a normal, healthily fit human, which Dennis wasn't. Dexterity: 63 (20) Constitution: 14 (10) Mind: 63 (20) If his math was right, Dennis was more than thirty two times faster than the average healthy and moderately fit person. But that wasn't it, and his math wasn't right, because it wasn't just the Dexterity that he had buffed.

With Mind as high as he had, Dennis' movements were perfect. Every step, every little twitch of a muscle was completely under his control and optimized with the efficiency that was simply impossible for a baseline human to replicate. There was no wasted energy in his movements. None. He wasn't moving like an average human, he was moving like a purpose-built machine that exploited every single law of motion to utilize everything he had to a finest degree.

That made his math wrong, and it also made him much, much faster than it suggested. If he had to guess, Dennis would say that he was about fifty times faster than a normal human, though the precision of that guess probably wasn't that great. If he had to guess, he already left the sound barrier somewhere behind. Metaphorically, at least, as there was no actual air in this world. If he had to guess, he could outrun bullets. He didn't have to guess to know that the army of overpowered monsters around him was screwed.

They just couldn't do anything. It wasn't fair. There was nothing fair about it. The overwhelming majority of the monsters were still higher level than him. So what? Their builds sucked. Or, maybe they didn't suck exactly, they were mostly balanced in terms of offence and defence, and maybe just somewhat specialized into being a bit tankier or a bit more damaging and… it just didn't matter.

Dennis' skill gave him two points for the price of one, and points were worth more the higher they went, and he put everything he had in one and one thing only. In game-like terms, he was imbalanced. In game-like terms, he broke the game. If the world was a game, this shit would've been patched the moment the developer caught a whiff of it. The world wasn't a game. It just had stat screens. Speed was the king of stats. Or, well, Dexterity. Oh, someone had a lot of Strength? Good luck hitting him. High Constitution?

Try tanking the oversized mockery of a sword going at around mach 2 or so. High Mind? Well, maybe they'd have the time to realize how fucked they were before being cut into pieces. High Soul? He still had no fucking idea what the Soul did, but it definitely wasn't surviving a decapitation. The Voices of High Authority seemed to be the proper mage archetypes. He dodged a blast of spikey darkness magic that was flying vaguely in his direction, if what he did could even be called a dodge.

Not being hit by it was the same as not being hit by a distant car that you could see far away on the road. Could crossing a street be considered a dodge? He just walked out of the way. He was near the mage just a moment later, the sword going in a wide arc and hitting like a hammer. It impacted a translucent barrier, instantly shattering it, shards of magic falling on the ground as the creature exploded in dusty gore. Whatever that barrier was supposed to tank, it couldn't tank Dennis.

Whispers of High Authority were helpless. At a first glance, they didn't do anything but politely die, but he had a strong suspicion that they were the ones responsible for the massive kill-domes that killed more of their allies than Dennis himself. While they technically were the biggest threat to him because of the instant oneshot attack, so far luck and speed were on his side, and they just couldn't hit him. He had great fun aiming them at the biggest groups before running the fuck away laughing.

Arms died in one hit. Swords died in one hit. The only ones he didn't bother fighting were the Eyes and the Spine. They were just too bulky, and also, harmless. Sure, a giant floating leviathan of a snake looked scary but only until you realized that since the fight started the creature crossed maybe a few hundred yards of distance at most. It wasn't just slow, it was so slow that from Dennis' perspective it pretty much didn't move at all. It felt like the fight lasted forever.

He was killing hundreds, and yet even more were coming from the portals, the tide of enemies simply unending as if High Authority was trying to throw the whole-ass planet's worth of monsters at him just to tire him out with sheer numbers. No luck for them, though, because Dennis was at most pleasantly sore. Despite how long the battle felt, only thirty seconds or so had passed since he crawled out of the Eye. He could keep up the pace for a while. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road.

If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Level up. Free points +6 Heroic Dash 43 -> Heroic Dash 49 Hold the godly sheet, please. We'll figure it out after the battle. He wasn't sure if he imagined the reassuring hum of the skill. Eleventh level wasn't as much of a game-changer as it was cementing his indisputable dominance.

Just like that, thirty seconds into the battle and with six humble points more in his skill, he went from being about fifty times as fast as a normal human to being closer to a hundred times as fast. The city was his battlefield. All of it. After all, it took less than ten seconds to cross it from end to end, at least this simplified and miniaturized version of it. Honestly, bringing an army to fight him was a mistake. What use was an army? They couldn't flank him, or pin him down. Mass-slaughter was his specialty.

He invented a new kind of guerilla tactics, evolving the principle of 'hit the enemy where they didn't expect it' into 'hit the enemy fucking everywhere all at once'. Dennis was unbeatable. The omnipresent death that obliterated everything, everywhere. With his new speed, he finally started killing the monsters faster than they came. He was killing monsters faster than they rained on a whole fucking city, like catching the rain one droplet at a time. Thirty four seconds was the mark where it all went to shit.

Apparently, Whispers of High Authority did more than just stand menacingly and die on demand. It took time for them to cast. For half a minute, they were enchanting the ground. Laying down traps. He stepped on a glyph. It was a little thing. A small etching on the asphalt that could be honestly mistaken for one of the random cracks that littered the old roads. Only, there were no cracks on the roads in this world. It felt like stepping on a cold, dry ice with his bare feet.

He heard a crunch, a sound similar to someone loudly eating a potato chip in a tv advertisement. His right foot became numb, and a cold piercing feeling was rapidly crawling up towards his calf. A quick glance was all that he needed to confirm that he stepped on a fucking magical mine. Which exploded. Was exploding? There was an ongoing explosion going on right under his ass, and his leg was in it.

The same grayness that the kill-domes had was rapidly expanding from the glyph in all directions, an explosion of conceptual death caught in slow motion. There were no thoughts in his head. Mind made him used to having plenty of time for thinking in all situations, but when pushed to the very limits there was no time for thought. Like a person touching a hot stove, there was only reaction. Pure instinct. He yanked his leg out of the blast zone before the edge of it touched his knee.

He pushed himself with the other leg as far away as possible. The pale wave of death was still expanding, rapidly. He pressed the giant sword against the ground and pushed himself off of it, giving himself just a little bit more momentum and leaving it behind. A moment later the weapon was already inside the blast. He stumbled when he placed his weight on his right foot but used the stumble to launch himself further from all fours like an olympic sprinter.

Like a wild animal, Dennis moved, the shockwave of death almost touching him from behind. In one second, he crossed almost a quarter of the city, narrowly dodging another glyph on the ground at the very end, almost tripping from the movement, only his paranatural body control saving him from being splashed against the wall of the nearby building. He had just a few moments to catch his breath and gather his thoughts before the risk of staying in one place would become too great.

He couldn't feel his right foot, had lost his weapon, and every second the ground got littered with more and more nigh-invisible traps.

"Fuck." / - /"What just happened?" Stacy was looking around in alarm.

"I don't… feel this place anymore?"

"It seems that I've absorbed the skill," Stuart said quietly, still trying to figure out the new feelings that were assaulting his mind.

"You could do that?!"

"Apparently." It felt like he gained a new sense. Weirdly enough, he was no stranger to having new senses. At first it was their ability to feel the magic around them, then the supernatural knowledge of the places where he needed to go. Now this one. Stuart was becoming an expert in getting used to new sensory capabilities. It was a lot like having a telescope. Which made sense, considering the source of his new skill. He could zoom at places, specifically places that he couldn't reach, and… make them closer.

The amount of places he could pick from seemed endless. He knew literally nothing about them, aside from the fact that they were unreachable. It was a kaleidoscope of limitless paths, each one just the same as any other, a cacophony of knowledge that was simply impossible to comprehend in any way but as a whole. A lot like looking at the starry sky for someone who knew nothing about astronomy. It was vast, and pretty, and you could point your finger at a random star.

He wasn't overwhelmed, like someone looking at the picture of the universe wouldn't be overwhelmed. It was just too much. All he could do was observe, and pick a place while knowing nothing about it. A Proper Time and Place stood nearby, hesitantly pointing its finger at one of the stars. It shone brightly, as if trying to grab his attention. While all other places just existed, indifferent to him, this one wanted to be found. It was screaming at him… He shook his head.

No, not at him, at everyone and anyone who could look. I am here. Find me. Like a beacon, desperate to be found by any skill that had the capacity to notice it. Stuart understood the hesitancy of his skill. That place… wasn't really proper as much as it just really, really wanted to be found. More than that, he felt some sort of interference messing with his skill. A wrecking ball that was distorting its decision making, a boulder of uncertainty thrown in the once-clear pond.

Whether he would reach that place or not, there was no guarantee that it was the right decision. It might as well doom them all. An explosion went off somewhere in the city, making him shudder from the sheer metaphysical wrongness of it. Fuck it.

"Okay, guys. Gather up," he said, trying to project a sense of confidence that he didn't feel.

"I'm about to do something dumb." Thankfully, his friends trusted him. He just hoped to not betray that trust. He reached out to that distant star and felt his mana drain. It's not enough. Not even close. The distant star reached back, flooding him with power. Their surroundings distorted, messily blurred by an invisible eraser. A moment later, they found themselves on the beach. Stuart realized that he had fucked up as Stacy screamed.

They were in the most pointless place in the world, and the void refused to acknowledge their existence.