Chương 78: Don’t trust the birds

He remembered once having a thought. A conclusion he reached about the risks that were okay to take in order to save someone. It was easy to be a hero when you didn't risk much, and when it didn't take much effort. But a true hero was someone who beat inevitable odds. Superman could save someone from a fire as easily as tying his shoes, but his most epic moments, the most 'hero' moments were when he knowingly went into a kryptonite-laden trap to save a random hobo. Or something. He didn't follow Superman that much.

The point of it all was, saving someone effortlessly was cool, but doing that when there was genuine risk and danger was even cooler. And when the odds of death and failure were all but certain, and the hero still pulled through, that was the coolest shit. Dennis wanted the coolest shit. So, a while ago, he made a decision to commit. To risk his life even if the chances of success were close to nothing, as long as the goal was heroic.

After all, dying while trying to do a heroic thing was still better than pussying out. Letting someone die because trying to save them was 'certain death' was something NPCs did, usually to let the true hero aura farm even more when they did the impossible. Dennis opened his eyes with a gasp. He was lying face-first on the ground, partially covered by sand. The sun wasn't too high up yet, it was still morning, and the warmth had just started to banish the chill of the night.

It was that time when the ground was still cold, but the air was warming up, creating a pleasant contrast. He sat up, hearing the grains of sand slowly fall from his body, and looked around. There was nothing but cracked ground around him for miles, with slim patches of dry grass here and there. He was… in a desert? He licked his lips. They were dry. What was the last thing he remembered? Right. It was morning, and he was crossing some sort of desert on his way to the next target.

The sun wasn't that much higher than he remembered, so not much time passed. Did he… faint? He fucking fainted. With a grimace, he stood up, wincing from the sharp sting of pain in his left foot. The pull to the next target was still there. It was always there. Technically, he couldn't count the number of targets he felt the pull towards. They were everywhere, in all directions. The closest one was just usually the strongest, but it was always a chorus of countless throats, screaming 'save me'. It didn't stop.

The world slowed down. He felt better, buffed Constitution lessening his fatigue and speeding up the recovery. Things didn't hurt as much, when he was fast. He started walking. Running or even jogging was beyond him, but his surroundings still blurred. Even five times slower than he could've been, the speed was just ridiculous. He wondered if his walk was faster than a plane's flight. Probably. Maybe. He hadn't seen any planes since he came back. Fainting was embarrassing.

Another thing that never happened in the mirror world no matter how much he pushed himself. It was a meat-body problem. He was getting sick of those. Dennis walked towards the next target. The sand below him was the same as concrete, his movements fast enough that his feet just didn't have the time to sink in. He would walk towards the next target, and do what he could, and then go save the next ones, and then the ones after that. He would do that until there was no one left to save, and then he would rest.

That was the plan. Simple. Reliable. Heroic. He was pretty sure he would die before he ran out of people to save. Or just… faint again, and waste more time. He was lucky that he wasn't out for long with this one. Or maybe he would get an infection, though 17 Con should be enough to deal with that? Maybe? Unless it was spread thin trying to keep him functioning, which it was… Pushing through the night gave him half a level, which was nice, but ultimately useless. He doubted that one more level would help him much.

One more Con point would be nice but not game-changing, and more speed would be nice, but… he needed to be, like, a thousand times faster to be able to fix everything everywhere, so one level wouldn't change the grand picture. The problem in front of him was simply not solvable with one more level. Dennis knew that he was doing the right thing. Right? Right. He was saving people, so it was the right thing. He made a decision to ignore chances of success long ago, so the only thing that was left was to keep pushing.

He just… didn't realize how the principle of 'don't hesitate to risk your life to save someone' applied to things like dying from exhaustion. It was more about jumping into fire to get someone out, or fighting a strong monster to protect people. Being killed by tiring himself to death because savable people just didn't end wasn't a way he had imagined himself going. But it wasn't like he could stop. It was easy to make an argument that he would save more people in the long run if he allowed himself to rest, but…

On one hand, that idea sounded suspiciously close to 'greater good', and thus was villainous, and on the other, he wasn't confronted with principle, but with a series of moment-to-moment decisions. There was a target. Real people who needed saving now. And faced with the decision to save them or to say 'nah, I'm tired', he would always pick the first one. He could always do one more. There was always just a little bit more gas left in the tank. Would always be, until he died. Fuck. He was going to die.

Killed not in a badass boss fight, but by a fucking moral dilemma. With his current course, it was inevitable. Was he… making a mistake somewhere? No, the other way would be to not save people in front of him so he would do more good in the grand scheme of things, and greater good was villainous, you never ignored someone in trouble in front of you, even if there were ten people in trouble somewhere else, so saving the next target on his neverending list was always the right choice…

From the depths of his sleep-deprived mind, a thought came. He couldn't trace the source. Didn't he decide to direct as many people as possible to safety because that was the more efficient choice, and in doing so abandoned those closer to him? Who knew how many people died in LA because he was running around the whole continent instead of sticking to one place. His 'imminent danger detector' from Heroic Senses didn't work globally for some reason. You might be reading a pirated copy.

Look for the official release to support the author. Didn't he leave people to die when the monsters that were killing them were too tricky or time-consuming to deal with? It was an easy trade, to leave one group to save ten, but that wasn't right, that shit smelled like greater good too much, why would he… He stumbled on the outskirts of some small town. Thankfully, falling in superspeed was fine as long as he stayed in superspeed. Not much different from stumbling during a normal run.

Fuck knows how Dexterity worked.

"Fuck," he whispered, standing back up.

"Fuck." He wasn't sure if he was doing the right thing. He was doubting his own decisions. He was contradicting himself. Soul: 0 (2) His Soul was growing back. The town was one of the smaller ones, with only five or so spawn points if he guessed right. There was an outpost to the west side of it, with makeshift walls and people keeping watch. He moved past it without stopping, going deeper into the center and finding a few small lost groups there, less than a hundred each.

He directed them all to the outpost, and they were no longer 'lost'. The whole ordeal took him a few minutes. No one even saw him. He'd need to stockpile on more sticky notes. It was a while since he found a really big group of spawned people. While most of them started their count in thousands, as time passed, they intermixed, split off from each other, found safety, or simply died to monster attacks, and now what he usually found was small or medium-sized parties.

It was a pain in the ass, what it was, because as people dispersed, what was once a town that required five stops to clear up became the work of a few dozen. It took way more time to help them all, and he didn't even want to think about the dumbfucks who got lost again and required directions twice. Sometimes more than twice. He was pretty sure there was a guy who had four sticky notes on him. Topographic cretinism was his guess. With the town cleared, he picked the next target and– And stopped. The wind was nice.

It blew gently, and the air was warm. He liked the feeling of it on his face. He was still in the town, but… There were so many plants. Just… so much green, everywhere. Lawns were overgrown and spilled onto the roads. Trees and bushes desperately needed trimming. He could hear birds singing, and the grass was still wet with dew. It smelled amazing, and the air was so fresh it felt like he was somewhere deep in a forest. He liked the smell. Loved it. He didn't notice how overgrown everything was.

He genuinely hadn't seen the difference in how towns and cities looked now compared to how they had looked before… What did Naithan call it, day zero? That was a bit dramatic of a name. Some nerd definitely stole that from a zombie apocalypse movie, and everyone just went along. He chuckled. It sounded weak. He almost couldn't hear it over the sound of leaves blowing in the wind and birdsong. He was so used to always hearing his voice, no matter how quiet, in the oppressive silence of nothing.

And now– Dennis slowly raised his hand. His skin was dry as paper, and covered with flakes of dried blood. His hand was trembling. From exhaustion, most likely. He touched his cheek, and felt something wet.

"Do I–" His voice broke, the sound raspy, as if he were a veteran smoker.

"Do I… need it?" he asked the birds.

'You sure are shit at being a hero when you have it,' a pigeon cooed rudely.

'Smelling flowers instead of saving lives. Pathetic.'

'Don't be like that,' a sparrow chided the pigeon, jumping from branch to branch.

'A hero needs to care. Otherwise it's just a job with no pay and poor work-life balance.'

"But what if I… care about the wrong thing?" Dennis voiced his biggest fear.

"What if I won't care at all, when I have the choice? It still says zero, and I'm already just–"'Standing in one place like a dumb useless fuck when people are dying and you could've prevented that,' the pigeon finished for him.

'Making excuses. Considering stopping. It's a weakness.'

'Don't you trust yourself?' the sparrow asked, chirping.

'In the end, you're still you. Just make the right decisions.'

"I don't know how," he whispered.

'Then you will fail.'

'Then you will learn.' The birds flew away, spooked by a sudden sound from the bushes. He liked the sound of their wings flapping. He glanced at the bush in question. The moment he did so, a goblin bolted out of it, fleeing in a blind panic. Shit. Was he having a small mental breakdown in front of a random goblin? Did he make it shit its pants with his fucking existential presence or something? Damn, that was cool. Though leaving a goblin alone was no good.

They were dangerous things, and there were a lot of helpless people here and there. The goblin wasn't attacking anyone right now. His current target was 'lost people', and the method for saving them was 'pointing them towards safety'. He couldn't fight a goblin under those conditions, but… he could just change the conditions. The target – people in this town. The goblin didn't threaten any one of them right now, but it was a danger to the group.

Sooner or later it would attack the outpost, or one of the scattered parties. The world slowed down. Dennis picked up a pebble and threw it at the creature. The entirety of its upper body exploded. The threat was gone, the 'town people' were safe. They disappeared from his mind. The world resumed its flow. Almost on instinct, he started picking the next group to save, but– His mind was so silent. Nothing was screaming at him. He needed to reapply a target. He just needed to– There was a single target in his mind.

It was there for a while, unnoticed until now, lost in the cacophony of thousands. Almost silent, a hesitant plea for help. No, not even for help. It was weird. Someone needed him, enough to trigger his skill, and yet it felt… unurgent. Almost optional. And quite far away.

"I'll check that out," he muttered to no one. Maybe the birds would come back to answer him, or someone else. He was used to finding random conversation partners.

"Just, check that out, and then I'll continue." And enjoy the blessed silence in the meantime. He wasn't sure who he was trying to convince. Surely, it was fine to pause his rescue operation, to do a smaller rescue operation, right? It was still heroic. He was still doing the right thing. His priorities were still right. The fact that he was taking his time on the way to the weird target was just… an added bonus. It didn't feel urgent, so it was fine if he didn't push himself as much as he could.

And tried walking on water when he was crossing a river. And stole a honeycomb from a beehive he noticed on the way through some forest. The bees were too slow to do anything. He just gently plucked them out and left them hovering in the air. He couldn't stop snickering, thinking about confused bees. He really needed to sleep. He found himself back on the beach in LA. The skill led him into the same apartment he ran away from. El'el and Mary were sleeping on the couch.

Lily was sitting on the floor in the kitchen, with her back leaning against the wall, bags under her eyes. There was an untouched plate of mac 'n' cheese on the table, cold and congealed. The moment he stepped close enough, the buff disappeared. The girl noticed him almost instantly. A small, relieved smile appeared on her tired face.

"You came back," she said quietly. Did she just… not sleep at all? That wasn't healthy.

"I knew you would. You always do. I made you pasta." It was almost like a switch was flipped. The moment she saw him and said those words, her eyes closed and her body started to fall sideways. Dennis caught her in a burst of superspeed. Which was some bullshit in terms of what it meant to 'save' someone. Heroic Dash was like a puppy, way too eager to save this specific girl from things as silly as 'potentially hitting her head'. Did she hijack his skill or what?

"Don't leave," she mumbled as he placed her on a bed.

"You need to eat and rest. Silly Dennis. Dumb." The girl was half-asleep. He sighed. He needed to– He could maybe grab a bite. Calories were important. He fell asleep with a fork in his hand, sitting at the kitchen table.