Chương 52: You’re a wizard, Barry

Dennis was panting from exertion, his left arm seemingly almost vibrating from unnaturally fast movement. The friction was terrific, and the heat was increasing at an unprecedented pace. Heroic Dash was whining at him for using the far-away target in such a way, but Dennis had nothing but time to build his case and pester his skill day after day until it finally relented and agreed that the action was heroic if seen in greater context. Much greater context.

It was just grumpy lately with all the new fascinating ways Dennis was using superspeed for, but those ways were still allowed, because what he was doing was clearly done in the name of heroism and everything that is good. Dennis could hear crackling. In his eyes there was a spark. His nostrils caught the smell of smoke.

"Yes," he whispered passionately. The wooden log caught fire." Yes!" he screamed.

"I am the Lord of Unnatural Flame! Take that, lack of oxygen! Ahahah! Did you see that, Lily? It works!" The girl sat nearby, leaning against a tree, dead and unimpressed. He did a victory dance around the bonfire, basking in the warmth. Lately, his dancing skills had been improving.

"Experiment number forty seven is a triumph!" His laughter filled the forest, and could be described as not entirely sane.

"Write that down! Huge success!" Mana: 0 / 10"I guess we'll have to wait for mana to regenerate again," he said quieter as he sat down on the fallen tree, still amazed at the sight of the first true light he had seen in weeks.

"Damn, Lily, if only we knew about all the shit you could do with mana at the start… You would've been overpowered. Overpowereder!" Mana was tricky, he thought as he waited for it to slowly tick back. But it was damn broken, if only in this world. His experiments with it didn't produce many results at first. One of the limiting factors was that he didn't have much of it and it took its sweet time coming back after use, and it wasn't like it really did anything noticeable after he figured out a way to spend it.

His current heroic plan–besides just running towards his only target and hoping that Lily's Constitution would somehow restore her–was to figure out some wizard moves since he had mana now, and just heal the girl by inventing healing spells from scratch. That plan wasn't really working at first, that is, until he had a breakthrough. His first theory, the one he came up with all the way back when he was shouting for Gareth, was partially right.

The basic assumption was that it was intent that mattered, so he was trying to throw mana around for days while wishing it to do random stuff, and it did jack shit, didn't even get used up until he tried to make the couch he was sleeping on sturdier because he was getting sick of all the dust, and that did something. Having a lead and a working way to actually spend mana accelerated his wizardly progression like nothing else. He still didn't have any healing spells that reliably worked. But he was getting close.

The pinnacle of his research, for now, was the bonfire in front of him. Pointless trees made of dust didn't burn in this world. Trying to produce fire with friction didn't work because the only thing that would produce was a pile of disintegrating dust. Even if he threw a twig into a fire, it wouldn't burn because it held too little meaning to know that it could burn. Like an image of a twig, it was useless for anything but looking at it.

Mana: 1 / 10 He broke off a little piece of wood from the tree he was sitting on and leaned towards it, as if to whisper a secret." Flammable," he told it conspirationally, the idea clicking into the wood like a forgotten puzzle piece, making it more real in a very specific way. He threw it into the bonfire, and watched the flames spread. Intent didn't matter that much. Ideas did. Concepts. It was almost like his mana got transformed into a very small, very simple skill that he then gave to the wood.

The skill of being Flammable. There were limitations. Lots of them. There was a reason why it took him so long just to imitate a lighter. Not everything worked. Most of his crazier ideas did nothing. Complex ideas did nothing. Even some of the simpler ones failed. It was like… like he wasn't making those proto-skills with his mana, but more like inviting them? Resonating with them? Resonating was the correct word.

The skill of being Flammable already existed somewhere, and all that Dennis did was politely invite it into the wood. He wasn't creating the skill, he was finding the correct resonance, the correct combination of intent and meaning where the skill responded and got lured into existence from whatever skill-limbo it lived in before. It didn't cost much to make wood flammable.

Dry wood resonated with the skill like Dennis with Dream, like lifelong friends who just got temporarily separated but now they were together again. If Dennis infused more mana, the wood would've burned brighter. Because… that's what it was. Ultimately, all that he did was infuse mana into an active skill. He just didn't have the skill beforehand. The wood did. Or the world?

It took mana to temporarily summon the skill into existence, and more mana to make it work, but at the core of it what he was doing was just an extension of how skills worked. Put mana into a skill, get results. He clenched his right fist a few times, trying to get a feel for how responsive his arm was now. Soon. He looked at Lily, noting how some of her bruises had faded, and scabs formed over most of the wounds. Soon. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

To be fair, the bulk of Lily's healing was probably just her Constitution at work, but he had allowed himself to believe that maybe a small part of it were his wizardly contributions. Healing was a dumb, shitty, expensive and good for nothing skill–or spell? –that ate all of his mana in a second and visibly did something that Dennis would generously call 'statistically negligible'. But it did something. Mostly it just ate his mana and delayed his experiments. But maybe it helped.

The problem was that Dennis didn't resonate with Healing. He could bribe it into appearing by throwing mana at the problem, and then force it to work on him for a little bit before the thing consumed all of his reserves and decided that it didn't like existing anymore. Trying to heal Lily was even worse, because apparently self-determination was a thing, and forcing changes on something leveled other than himself cost fucking extra.

At least he assumed that it was some kind of self-determination principle at work, but in plain terms it meant that Lily was not just 'legally dead' but also resistant to his spells. He was throwing a lot of mana at the girl, over the course of days. There was a reason why he thought that Lily with her mana pool would be even more fucking overpowered in this world. Meaningless things had negative spell resistance.

Making the wood burn was extra cheap not only because it enjoyed 'burning' as a property, but also because nothing contested his will. His authority to make the world work the way he wanted it to work was especially strong here. Lily's authority to resist his fucking healing made him want to smack the shit out of her after she wakes up. At least he was pretty sure now that she was recovering, and not just dead in a weird way.

"We're getting somewhere," he told her quietly.

"I just feel it. I just need… more mana, or a better healing spell. Or maybe the far-away target can heal you. After all this time, there's no way they're just some random normal person. The void would've eaten them already if that was the case. What the hell are they even dying from? The horribly slow murder with the extremely inefficient weapon?" He threw another log in the bonfire and made himself more comfortable, preparing for sleep.

"I wonder how the guys in the fort are doing," he muttered as drowsiness started to overtake him.

"Without… us. We are the best they had, even if dumbasses didn't want to let you grind… They probably got eaten by a dinosaur… But they could hide behind the walls? Unless the dinosaurs figured out how to build ladders… then they're screwed…" He dreamt of outrunning a dinosaur with a ladder in its tiny arms. It was accusing him of being a bad son, but he was faster. / - / Constitution: 9 -> 10 Dennis was running.

It was all that he did for the vast majority of his time, but especially lately because after the third week towns started getting smaller and rarer, and sparse vegetation that he could see here and there seemed to belong in a desert. The sand was also an important indicator. Can't forget about the sand. He hated sand. His pace was precisely measured to keep him just on the verge of collapse and not a tiny bit more.

The pleasant hum of Constitution was constant, the stat singing to him in a deep bass about endless perseverance and making old-man jokes about entropy and what it did with its mother at the beginning of time. Dennis didn't pay it any mind. It was a familiar song. All things considered, the stat increase was late. Dennis' daily routine consisted of running, sleeping near a skill-place, and occasional experiments with mana. He had no idea by this point how much distance he had crossed, but it had to be a lot.

Especially considering that he no longer was the same guy who could only barely crawl after a few minutes of exertion. No, he was running. Jogging, to be precise, while carrying quite a lot of weight on his back. Ten in Constitution didn't sound that impressive, it was most likely just an average for a human, but one has to remember that humans are built for endurance. Dennis was running a lot. And he had a lot of free time during those runs.

The higher the stat, the harder it was to raise it through use, as Constitution proved. But that also meant that the lower the stat, the easier it was. There was one stat that Dennis was supposed to raise easily with barely any effort, and he currently was in a dire need of mana for his wizardly experiments. And, well… there was a little bit of hope that more Soul could unfuck whatever was wrong with him, thus making his dream actually possible.

Getting rid of hate-guilt-spirals would also be welcome, and it wasn't like more Soul would make them worse. Probably. At least Dennis couldn't imagine them getting worse. Anything would be better than fundamental incapacity for being a hero. So, while his runs looked boring from the outside, they were anything but.

He had a pleasant background music from Constitution, he was constantly casting more Healing at Lily the moment his mana regenerated, and he was doing Soul-searching while gracefully dodging all dangerous thoughts that would put him back into what he called 'whining mood'. It wasn't really working, but he literally had 'a song of perseverance' running in the background, straight from eldritch-entity FM.

The problem with growing Soul, and with the natural stat growth in general, was that to grow a stat you had to exercise the stat, preferably constantly and to its limit. It was somewhat easy with Con because he could hear it working, he knew that he was squeezing every drop out of it. He had no idea how to exercise the Soul, and it didn't offer any suggestions. He couldn't hear it, after all. One point was not much.

Well, it was plenty compared to nothing, but in the grand scheme of things no matter how the void sharpened his spirit senses or how hard he focused on them, he just couldn't hear that one meager point no matter how hard he tried. What did the Soul do? He couldn't hear the thing, but noticing its effect was, well… It had a noticeable effect alright, even if he wasn't sure what to do with it. Currently, the Soul made him doubt.

It was a source of constant second-guessing, it made him question his deepest convictions and forced him to see his actions in a new light. Not that it was showing him the right way, if anything he sometimes found himself thinking some real dumb shit that should never be questioned. Like, what if it didn't really matter if one was a hero or not? What if the water wasn't wet? Was it really that cool to save people? Superman was a speedster, wasn't he? Maybe it didn't really matter if he saved Lily or not?

It was dumb. It was so fucking dumb. Dennis had no real understanding what the Soul did, but he sure as hell understood that there was a reason why it wasn't called Wisdom or something. Come to think of it, Lily was a prime example of that. The girl had more Soul than thirty Dennises combined, and look how that turned out for her. Wisdom, Soul wasn't. Another obvious effect of the thing was mana. Soul produced mana, and mana allowed Dennis to do… random magical stuff? Empower skills?

Would just spending mana increase his Soul stat? He doubted it. And while it was an obvious effect, it wasn't useful in determining how to grow his Soul. And the last one… Well, he had to admit that Soul did more than just question his every thought like a parrot who only learned to say 'why?' It also made him… care. Not about everything. But some things. Some things that never should've bothered him now did. It was arbitrary, really, what he found himself invested in sometimes.

That was the most terrifying change really. He was really happy when he made that bonfire, and it made sense as a result of hard work towards a heroic goal but… He was also really happy to see real light again. To feel the warmth. To share it with Lily, no matter how incapable she was of appreciating it in her state. He wanted to tell someone about the two lovers, and maybe find someone alive who knew them and ask them questions. He missed the people from the fort. Not Lucas though, fuck that little shit.

He wanted to talk to his mom, even though they never really had anything to talk about. They still didn't. If he somehow found her, and she was alive, he still had nothing to say. And yet he still wanted to. Those things he didn't understand. How the fuck was he supposed to make Soul grow? What muscles to exercise? He had no idea, but he kept throwing shit at the wall. And he continued running.