Chương 62: No side effects, trust me bro

Dennis was in quite a pickle. Shit was fucked, in other words. Not only couldn't he move his leg properly, which reduced his speed from 'fuck you' levels of absurdity to a point that he might be too slow to dodge another random AoE oneshot attack, but also the entirety of the city was slowly but constantly being littered with more and more nearly unnoticeable traps like someone was playing the Vietnam Simulator.

More than that, Lily had somehow managed to disappear from his senses for a moment only to reappear right on top of the far-away target. He couldn't say exactly where, but the direction that he felt from the girl and that mysterious person matched pretty much perfectly. How the fuck did that happen he had no idea. Shit was wild. He allowed himself a few spare milliseconds to think. Should he just run away? Cut his losses?

Heroic Senses didn't detect the nerdy group of roleplayers as 'savable', but Kriya said that they would die if he ran away. He was a bit worried about the girl randomly teleporting, after all he was kinda responsible for her, but she didn't feel like she was in more danger than the usual 'already dead in a savable way'. Could he even try to stay? Was that an option, or only certain doom? Would the nerd group still die if he left, or did he fight enough? They probably teleported with the girl, didn't they? Somehow.

It wouldn't make sense for her to suddenly change her location while the wizards didn't. They were supposed to keep an eye on her. If that was the case, there was nothing really holding him back from running, except for– Those sweet sweet levels… And baiting the High Authority into coming out like a final boss. And beating the shit out of it, and forcing it to put all the floating people back into the real world. That was totally the plan. Exp was just a tasty side-effect of his heroic ambition.

Absolutely not the main reason for him to stay. That nice, juicy exp… The few milliseconds that he allotted himself for thinking were up. The verdict? He needed a battle plan. The Voices and Whispers had figured out a way to counter his speedstery awesomeness. He needed to counter their counter, otherwise he would just explode on a random mine, or finally catch a stray undodgeable dome of death. Not to mention that he was slower again.

Still overwhelmingly fast, but slow enough that the danger to his life became even more prominent. He couldn't afford to make any mistakes. No, he needed to be not just perfect, he needed a way to somehow deal with unknown dangers and shitty luck. He needed Kriya Shakti. The discount danger sense with a cool name and questionable side effects. Fucking skill that used mana. That was a problem. Dennis evaluated his options as he baited one Sword to cut off the hand of the other.

A bit of speedstery sleight of hand produced a new giant sword for him, freshly baked. Then he hobbled the fuck away because the whole ordeal took almost five seconds. The dome of death covered the place almost the same instant he left the area. That was too close. What were his options? He was holding three levels worth of skill expansion. It was plausible that he could use that to somehow get his hands on some sort of mana regeneration boost.

He toyed with the idea as he killed a few dozen more monsters, being really fucking mindful of where he stepped. Convincing his skill that having more mana would make him a better hero was expensive. Prohibitively so. The core of it was running fast and saving people. He couldn't convince it to give him more Soul the same way he did for Constitution, because a case for why Soul was necessary was much, much more complicated than Con. Con was simply 'if I tire less, I run more and save more'. Soul?

He had no idea what it did, and he needed mana, not Soul, and he didn't even need mana as much as he needed Kriya, and he needed Kriya to be better at fighting, not exactly at saving people. In other words, three levels of skill expansion just wouldn't cut it, and the results would be dogshit. Trying to get a mana buff instead of a Soul buff was for some reason straight out impossible. There wasn't even a price tag for that.

The most likely explanation for that would be that mana was somehow directly and closely related to Soul and couldn't be produced without it. That made sense in Dennis' mind, as Soul was the source of the thing, so what would make mana if not the Soul? The closest he came to a working idea was stealing mana from monsters that he killed.

It was at least possible, but only if the monsters in question had a Soul of their own, and still costly as hell because stealing pieces of someone's Soul after killing them was kinda hard to portray in a heroic light. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Dennis doubted that various body parts of High Authority had a Soul.

They looked like mindless summons, though if they didn't have any then that raised a question how exactly did Voices and Whispers cast their magic. In any way, the idea to use the skill expansion for more mana seemed to be a bust. Two close calls with nearly invisible glyphs later Dennis was seriously reconsidering his genius plan of baiting out the High Authority by fighting all of its summons at once.

He wasn't losing, but he wasn't winning either, and it would take just one unlucky moment for the stalemate to break, and not in his favour. And the more time passed, the more he realized that he was… quite worried about Lily. His skill was reassuring him that she was fine, but not knowing what exactly happened to her and if she was as alright as his skill claimed made his skin itch. It just wasn't right. He needed to end this fight as soon as possible, by either running away or doing something drastic.

The idea came to him when he almost died again, nearly failing to run out of the death zone before magical bombardment hit it. It wasn't really an idea, more a vague feeling, an idea of an idea.

He wasn't sure if it was his intense focus, or if his attunement to supernatural senses somehow sharpened from all the explosions going off, or if it was just a spark of sheer genius, but somewhere between the moments of 'oh fuck thank god I dodged that' and 'shit I need to run' there was a quiet whisper of a feeling that he was being an idiot. Dennis was prone to bouts of intense self-hatred from time to time, but they were never about his intelligence. There was an impostor in his mind.

He zeroed in on the thought instantly, tracing it to the source and finding Kriya. At level one the skill was insanely quiet. Almost impossible to hear and listen to. From that perspective the fact that it somehow managed to be loud enough to insult Dennis was even kinda impressive. He tried to figure out what the hell was it trying to rant about. Kriya Shakti. Passive/Active. Part of One Who Defied Heavens. Defying fate thrice frees you from samsara. Effect: Major resistance to scrying and precognition.

Minor fate manipulation. Minor Soul enforcement. Okay, yes, he was a bit of a dumbass. In his defense, Dennis only had the skill for less than a minute. It wasn't fair to expect him to know about all of its intricacies. Kriya Shakti was made up of three parts. The first was a true passive that fucked up the attempts to predict him and generally freed him from having a predetermined fate.

The second was what he called the discount danger sense, the feeling of standing at the crossroads and knowing exactly where each of the roads went. The third was Soul enforcement. An aspect of his shiny new skill that he literally forgot about. To be fair, he thought that it was a passive and didn't really do anything useful, so he didn't check. Yeah, he was a dumbass. Soul enforcement was an active part of his skill. Not a toggle or a button, but more like a thrust lever. And it didn't cost mana.

He had to admit that it was dumb of him to rack his brains about the options that he had to win the fight while literally ignoring the 'make soul strong' skill. Especially because one thing that he knew for sure about Soul was that it was the source of mana. That thing that he needed right now. Dennis pushed the metaphysical thrust lever all the way up to one hundred percent. Something inside of him became numb. It almost hurt, but not really. He didn't feel any pain.

Only a weird discomfort in a place that he didn't know existed. It felt like he was a sponge that was squeezed. Squeeze. Mana: 10 / 10 Dennis felt giddy. Weird. A bit lightheaded.

"Oh you dumb fucks, you're so done!" he shouted in triumph.

"Come to daddy!" The tide of the battle turned. He'd found a counter to their counter. Dennis went on the offensive, hobbling straight to the mages as fast as he could. If he stepped on that stone, he would die. Dennis went around the magical mine. The Whispers started dying en masse. He was like a bullet, but with a giant fucking sword, and he didn't stop. If he remained in this area, he would die.

Dennis disengaged, a magical dome of death covering the group of Whispers almost the same moment, finishing them all off. He went for another group, chopping up another Sword's arm on the way and getting himself a second giant sword. Wielding two giant swords at the same time in a fight was straight up impossible. It was awkward, the swords were heavy, and his stance was so full of openings that someone of equal speed could just ask him to die and he would probably agree out of shame.

Even just hitting someone properly was almost impossible, the swords were just too heavy to even raise above his head with one hand to do a strike. None of that mattered, because angular momentum was a thing, and Dennis could spin like a helicopter of death to kill all of the monsters around him at the same time. It was amazing how many dumb fighting moves started being viable once you got dozens of times faster than your opponents. Unless he moves to the east side of the city, he would die.

Dennis barely managed to make it in time. There was a roar of destruction behind him. A giant laser cut through half the city, coming from the Spine of High Authority, which apparently was less of a snake and more of a dragon.

"Nice save!" He laughed as he continued killing everything in his vicinity. Level up. Free points +6 Heroic Dash 49 -> Heroic Dash 55 He didn't know what exactly the magical mine did to his leg, but with the new level he was starting to feel it again. Chances were that it was a concentrated existence erasure or something like that, and exp countered that. His hobble turned back into a proper jog. Kriya Shakti was saving his ass every time he got in trouble, and when he didn't have any more mana? Squeeze.

Mana: 10 / 10 He just used his unlimited mana hacks. The tide of monsters didn't end, but Dennis knew that he had already won the fight. Omae Wa Mou Shindeiru. They died.