Chương 64: About Mach 17

There was something deeply unfair about being a speedster. Level up. It was a cheese build. And like any other cheese build in an RPG, it broke the game balance. Like stacking explosive barrels underneath the final boss, or being a mage who leveled up nothing but 'explosion', or investing in defense so much that it was simply impossible to die. Builds like that typically were supposed to be patched out of games, because using them wasn't really 'playing the game' so much as exploiting it. It just wasn't fair.

Level up. There was no 'fighting' Dennis. He could be caught in a trap, cursed, betrayed, poisoned, erased from existence by a conceptual attack that said 'Dennis dies', but he couldn't be fought. Only be dealt with. Accounted for. And if someone didn't have an answer for how to deal with him, they lost. He wasn't a creature with 'power level' that would lose against someone with a higher 'power level', he was a tricky rule that said 'you lose the game unless you did a backflip two weeks ago under a full moon'.

Level up. He had weaknesses. They were plainly obvious. Once something managed to touch him, just hit him properly once, he would die. Good luck doing that though, when he had Kriya active. And his strengths were getting ridiculous. It felt like that moment when you were playing a game and suddenly realized 'oh I won'. The game just didn't end yet. It felt like he broke something fundamentally important. Found an infinite money glitch. Cheated the progression by throwing a few magelights above a distant mountain.

A few weeks after the world went to shit he was a firm believer that leveling in this System was hard. He wasn't wrong. The exp requirements for a level were stingy as hell. It took killing hundreds of goblins to get from level three to four. Weeks of everyday grinding to get even close to five. And that was for him, with his bullshit fighting talent and general overpoweredness. For a normal person? A typical adventurer? Reaching level nine and getting a second skill might be a dream achieved in years.

Every next level required just that much more exp, just that much more life-or-death fights where your opponent was quite insistent on killing you and had a good chance doing so, since if you wanted decent exp you had to fight someone close to your level. In this world, levels were generally really hard to come by. Level up. Unless you were a speedster who was exponenting, of course. One of the main bottlenecks for the speed of leveling was the amount of enemies you killed.

After all, someone could be the most unbeatable god of the boundless spear that pierced the heavens, never losing and generally being the best, and yet they would still grow only with the speed it took them to find and kill a new monster. The speed of leveling was limited by, well, speed. And he was getting faster. Dennis was getting faster with every level, while keeping up with the exp requirements. At least as long as he was in such a target-rich environment.

In the time it took him to kill one Arm, he was killing two. In the time it took him to kill two, he was killing four. With every level, the amount of exp needed for the next one grew like crazy, but he kept up. Level: 16 Mana: 2 / 10 Strength: 7 Dexterity: 99 (20) Constitution: 17 (10) Mind: 99 (20) Soul: 1 Skills: Heroic Dash 79, Heroic Senses, Kriya Shakti At some point he got enough exp in his veins that his leg recovered. At least he suspected that it was the exp, but it could be Constitution at work.

It was fucking crazy, but the more he ran and killed everything around him, the stronger he got, the less tired he got. He was sprinting at his full speed for minutes and honestly he doubted he even could get tired at this point. Maybe in a few hours, or in a day? But if he fought for a few hours he would get even more levels, more Constitution, so that wouldn't be a problem. It was a self-reinforcing loop where he got better at leveling up faster than the exp requirements came at him. Exhaustion wasn't a problem.

The longer the battle went, the better and more rested he was. Faster. Deadlier. Being a speedster wasn't fair. It was kind of funny how all the ridiculous amounts of monster-slaying was done in the name of giving Lily a bit of shared exp to protect her from the nothingness-decay. Felt a bit silly, really. A bit of an overkill.

But despite how flimsy that reasoning felt right now, it was still fundamentally true, and so Dennis could use it as a means of getting some sweet overwhelming power while killing monsters as they fell from the sky. Literally. He could cross the city in less than two seconds. There weren't many monsters left on the ground. He was killing them as they descended more often than not. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The monsters were mindless, but the army was not. He could see the signs of an intelligence controlling them all. High Authority was clearly trying to adjust its tactics, but everything it came up with so far was laughably inefficient. It tried to surround the mage-groups with exploding runes from all sides, to which he just laughed and killed them all by throwing pebbles.

Three more snake-dragons arrived and tried to cover the whole city with their laser-breaths at the same time in an attempt to touch him, to which he just briefly left the city for a few seconds before promptly coming back. At the scale the battle had reached, it apparently counted as a tactical manoeuvre for his skill, and thus part of the fight and allowed. There wasn't much left of Not-LA after that move though, only debris. It covered most of the glyphs on the ground, which was a win in his book.

Of course, Dennis should've been dead a few dozen times already. From random magical bombardment, or glyph-traps, or even those lasers. But he just didn't get caught, because he was that good. Yeah, okay, Kriya was saving his ass. Every ambush, every close call was met with a feeling of standing at the crossroads and knowing which path to take.

He was treating it like danger sense, and it was in the context of the fight, but the skill itself felt more like understanding the consequences of your actions and having a chance to change your mind. It just so happened that the actions were usually 'stepping on a mine' and the consequences were 'you died'. There was just one slight worry on his mind. A little problem. A teeny tiny complication. Squeeze. Mana: 10 / 10 Using soul enforcement to get more mana felt good. It didn't, at first.

When he used it for the first time it was a feeling of numbness in a place that didn't exist. A slight dizziness. Like a shot of alcohol that made your face feel numb. But now, after using that neat little cheat a few–or not so few–times more, he didn't feel any discomfort at all. If anything, he was feeling better. More clearheaded. Like the world started to make sense, and everything was where it was supposed to be. It made killing the monsters way more fun. He was enjoying himself. He was a true speedster.

He was laughing. He was happy. Something was wrong. With the advent of skills and magic, physics became a suggestion at best. He wondered what it meant for the first law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only moved or transformed. Did that rule still apply? Exp didn't seem to come from nowhere, he was getting it as he killed the monsters, and the stronger the monster the more exp he got. Spells cost mana. Active skills cost mana.

Passives were weird in that way, they just worked, but they were weak initially and got stronger the more points they got and that implied some kind of transaction of power there. Basically, it seemed that to have something you still had to fuel it somehow. Dennis was glad to have a cheat that restored all of his mana with a push of a button, but he knew that there had to be some kind of cost. And that worried him, because he was probably already paying that cost, and he had no idea what it was.

His only clues were the feeling of numbness at first, and the weird clearheadedness he was experiencing right now. Sort of like enlightenment. A feeling of being where he was supposed to be, and doing what he was supposed to do. One of the snake-dragons flew a bit too close to a destroyed building. He ran there instantly, and jumped on the creature's tail from the remains of the roof. A fraction of a moment later he finished running along its spine and cut off its head.

He had ample time to run back the same way he came and continue his slaughter as usual before the creature even started falling on the ground. Everything was so simple. He reveled in the world where only he could move. He was fighting countless monsters summoned by a villain who was surely responsible for killing a fuckton of people. He was winning. Numbers were going up.

He was protecting both Lily and the group of nerds, and probably saving the lives of countless idiots who wouldn't have a chance to get idiotically killed by an Arm in the future, which was a thing that happened surprisingly frequently. If things went on like that, maybe he'd have enough speed to just kill all the Arms everywhere in the world. A heroic deed of epic proportions, that was. He was living his best life. Something was wrong. And not even the fact that he couldn't feel the far-away target.

Honestly, good riddance, that. He was so sick of being stuck in that stupid self-imposed quest to save it. It being finally properly dead meant that it wasn't his problem anymore. Oh well. He would certainly avenge it. By getting even more levels and destroying all evil everywhere in a blink of speedstery awesomeness. The hidden cost to using Kriya for mana was worrying, but it wasn't like he could really stop using it.

Undodgeable attacks that came with no warning happened, and no amount of fighting talent could help with those. Despite his best efforts, he still got almost caught in this or that bullshit sometimes. He needed the danger sense, so he needed the mana. The only way to stop was to disengage. He could run to Lily and move her and the nerd group somewhere safe, effectively ending the fight. His precog resistance would probably hide them all. He probably had enough speed to get to Lily in half an hour or something.

Technically, the only reason he was fighting at all was the levels at this point. That was a pretty good reason to fight, to be fair. The only problem was the hidden cost. Dennis didn't feel like he was paying with anything important, so… Ugh. How did that saying go? Would he regret it? He was pretty sure that he could just ask Kriya. If he continued abusing the Soul enforcement, he wouldn't regret paying the cost. Well, that solved it. It was really nice to get such a clear answer out of the skill.

The bitch ate almost all of his mana for that though, greedy little shit. Killing the monsters to his heart's content and coming out of the fight more god than human was a fine course of action. Kriya ate the last two points of his mana, probably notifying him of another fucking glyph-trap that he didn't notice. Shit, he was sure that he checked that spot properly– If he didn't stop moving, he would die. The fuck? That was a new one. Some kind of magic with auto-targeting against moving opponents?

That was going to be a bitch to deal with. Dennis stopped at the intersection, waiting for the danger to pass. Well, the remains of the intersection. Almost immediately as he did so, he lost the buff. Ah, so it was a warning for him to not get splattered. Yeah, a sudden stop with his speed was a bit more deadly than a car crash… What the fuck happened?! There were almost no monsters on the ground, only new ones that were falling from the sky.

He had maybe ten seconds or so before some mage managed to bombard his position. Spines took time to charge their laser-breaths. Arms and Swords would land and approach him more or less at the same time as magical bombardment. Eyes were just looking at him ominously. Glyph-traps were harmless unless you stepped on them, and Dennis wasn't exactly moving right now. Lily was dead. Deader. It was a bit weird that the thought filled him mostly with annoyance. Couldn't she do that a bit later?

Though maybe she was resurrected? That was also annoying. He was the one who was supposed to save her. Someone could be stealing his heroic achievements. Something was wrong. Aside from the fact that he was going to die very much soon, having no targets for his skill. He should probably do something about that before trying to figure out what was wrong. Kriya? Was there a way for him to survive this? Squeeze. He almost shuddered. It was like a weight was being lifted from his shoulders. Mana: 10 / 10 Maybe.

Fuck, that was a dumb question. The skill could help him understand the consequences of his decisions, not show the path to victory. He needed a plan. A course of action that could get him out of this. Kriya could verify if it was valid. He just had to think fast. He had maybe ten seconds, but he could think really fucking fast even without the buff. It was time to abuse his cool-ass precognition power to its limits.