There were a lot of quiet arguments and heated whispers.

  Some people called him some very unkind words despite being within the striking distance of his sword. It was like they enjoyed being smacked.

  Still, his main argument had a lot of weight.

  What were they going to do without securing themselves a safe place? Hide in a basement? Pray to not be found? There was a reason for why they spent a whole ass day walking here, and that reason was still valid.

  More than that, the people who were currently holed up in the fort would totally die without their help.

  For some reason that argument worked way worse than the one about having a safe place, despite being more heroic.

  Still, it was already evening. The sun was slowly setting below the horizon, and they were still a group of what was, in essence, more than forty hobos. And the fort was right there. And they had a plan that would totally work and give them a safe place to sleep.

  A lot of people doubted the workability of his plan.

  He asked them to propose a better one. Things turned constructive from there.

  He explained in detail how his skill worked and what were the conditions needed for it to last. The group brainstormed from there.

  One of the big concerns was Lily’s safety. She was, after all, the one who would be in danger, by the definition of what his skill needed. It was mostly Nancy, John and Jenny who were the main contributors to this part and after some time they led Lily away from him and whispered a lot of things to her in hushed tones.

  An interesting development was the fact that Dennis was not allowed to know parts of the plan that were about the girl’s safety. Not because no one wanted to tell him, but because he needed to believe that the girl would be in danger.

  “It won’t work if you just lie to me,” he said then. “I know like, supernaturally, that the skill will not activate if she’s not there.”

  He was reassured that the girl would be there. Somewhere. Around the fort. Maybe hiding behind it? Who knows.

  It was a curious thing how objective truth and belief both affected the chances of skill working. Like, Dennis was sure that it won’t work if the girl wasn’t there or in danger, but if the skill had a way to literally check then why didn’t it just tell him where to run to find the girl? Could he abuse this mechanic? Like, theorise that there could be people in danger in some particular house and see if it activated? Play twenty questions with it?

  The plan was slowly formed.

  The ‘melee people’ would go away and hide, led and protected by John and a few others who didn’t reach the third level but were competent enough to fight off a few stray goblins without much trouble. In case their plan fails and their party dies the others would have at least a chance to escape and try to find a safer place.

  Lily would go in first, covered by her skill.

  Dennis would kill as many goblins as he could while her invisibility lasted.

  The party would go in after that, collect Lily, and try to kill everything that remained.

  That was the gist of it. There were more details like tactics and where to attack from and stuff that he wasn’t allowed to know, but the essence of the plan was that simple.

  He just needed to kill every goblin around the fort in less than one minute and twenty seconds. A few hundreds of them. Simple.

  For the skill to be able to activate he had a secondary objective of finding and saving Lily in that time. Technically it was a primary objective, but Dennis hoped that the girl with a literally bullshit level of invisibility wouldn’t be able to be found so easily.

  The people were led away. The party stood in a formation a bit to the left, ready to rush to the spot that they picked. Lily was hiding behind a tree a few dozen yards away from him and closer to the fort, without using her skill yet. Her mana was full. Everyone was ready.

  He unsheathed his sword for what felt like a hundredths time today, and held a dagger in the other hand.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Ready?” he asked quietly. The girl nodded. Everyone in the party nodded as well.

  “Go,” he said and the girl disappeared.

  One mississippi, two mississippi…

  He felt his skill activating, allowing him to run at the few closest goblins but nowhere further. Lily couldn’t reasonably get anywhere further yet.

  Three mississippi, four mississippi…

  The search area was increasing in size almost explosively. His augmented Mind was cataloguing every possible path she could’ve taken.

  She needed more time in order for him to not actually find her. The invisible girl needed to outrun and hide from a speedster. This was a macabre version of hide and seek, with goblins as bonus points and a distraction for him while he would seek her.

  Five mississippi, six mississippi…

  His skill was starting to grumble at him that if he wasn’t going to go and rescue her he might as well not have the buff.

  Still, he was waiting for the last moment for it to not snap, and yet he couldn’t wait for too long because he was burning Lily’s mana, and with it time he would have to kill all the goblins.

  The time that they decided would be a minute and twenty seconds. He had at least three hundred goblins to kill, so his pace would need to be about four goblins per second to reach that.

  No one believed that he would reach that.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He did a runner’s crouch, his blades slightly touching the ground, his mind focused to the limit. The search area was expanding, covering a good half of the fort already. Dennis didn’t know Lily’s Dexterity, and it was on purpose. He would have to guess, and to be on the safe side he had to assume that she could run fast.

  Seven, eight…

  The path for the most effective route lit up in his mind like a beacon, 21 Mind working in tandem with his fighting talent telling him where he would step, how he would dodge, what he would kill, and where he would look.

  It would be really embarrassing if he would find her in the first few seconds. He wasn’t allowed to do it half-assed.

  Nine, ten.

  The world blurred in his vision from the pure speed, his mind not being able to properly follow such a fast movement. It was fine. He planned where he would step, and knew exactly how he would need to move. It was like doing something with your hands faster than you could think about it because you predetermined every move.

  He was really curious what his exact speed was, because he remembered how fast things were moving relative to him when he was riding in a car, and right now he was faster. Forty miles per hour? Fifty? Definitely faster than the speed limit in towns, that was for sure.

  It took two seconds to approach a small group of goblins, and he passed it without slowing down. Limbs started to fly in the air behind him but he was already on the next group.

  He couldn’t exactly find an invisible girl who was no different than the air, so how could he save her? That question had a simple answer, he just had to kill every goblin in every place where he suspected she could be.

  And she knew that, so it was reasonable to assume that she would run to the biggest congregations of goblins.

  His path was pure efficiency. He even left some of the creatures alive and behind him because he would waste more time by making a 0.3 second detour.

  He wasn’t the Flash, but he imagined he had a very real streak of red following his path, just a little more bloody than his favourite hero.

  Four seconds passed since he started the slaughter and the first limbs were touching the ground. He didn’t keep track of how many goblins he killed, that was useless information and he was way too focused on the important things, but he was pretty confident that he was beating at least the ‘three goblins per second’ benchmark. There were just too many of them, and he was aiming for the places where they were most concentrated and where he could kill the most of them in the least amount of moves.

  He felt himself smiling as four goblins were slashed in pieces nearby while he was already going for the fifth.

  He was a speedster that needed more speed and was concerned with the fastest way to do his task.

  He was trying to save a little helpless girl.

  Ignoring the context, and he very much did, he was living his dream.

  He was so glad that the apocalypse happened. Not much of a heroic thought, but it was the actions that mattered, yes?

  He would’ve started laughing if he didn’t need to control his breathing. More than a full minute of this would be the real challenge for his stamina.

  One of the good news was the fact that he didn’t really need to concern himself with dodging. At this speed nothing could reasonably even swing a weapon in his direction, not when he covered a dozen yards in the timeframe it took a goblin to swing. He was more concerned with not running into some weapon than trying to dodge some hit that was vaguely aimed at him.

  And anyway, despite the fact that he already killed more than a dozen of the creatures, they still mostly didn’t realize what was happening. Only some of them were starting to scream and look around, trying to grab their weapons.

  It took them five more seconds to start to properly realize what was happening and try and do at least something as a countermeasure, not that they achieved much. They just couldn’t do anything.

  He was a blur of death, killing group after group faster than they realized that he was upon them.

  The area in front of the fort was already mostly cleared, so he moved to one of the sides. The most effective path to kill all of the goblins would’ve been to slowly circle around the fort, but sadly it was not the most effective path to protect Lily, since it was unlikely that she was behind the fort yet. He would need to backtrack after this one and clear the other side before he started to work on the rear.

  There was only wind, speed, and intense focus. The sun did not set yet, but it was already dusk, which added to the challenge of not stepping on something unsteady.

  After the thirty second mark he had to slow down a bit. The muscles in his arms burned from the neverending swinging of his weapons, especially his right arm. Physics defying stats or not, swinging an actual katana with one hand nonstop for half a minute was something he couldn’t actually do. Not that he stopped, but his tempo certainly decreased.

  He couldn’t hear anything over the drumming sound of his heartbeat in his ears. It was hard to breathe. His legs felt wobbly.

  That didn’t stop him from slaughtering a few groups more, but he was forced to change his approach. Now, instead of just blitzing through them leaving nothing but flying limbs, he had to slow down when he reached the groups and fight them almost fairly, taking up to five seconds to clear up each of them before he rushed to the next one.

  With the decreased speed he was starting to notice that not all goblins were the same in terms of strength. What didn’t matter at all when he was a blur of unstoppable death that oneshotted everything suddenly became a problem. Some goblins were faster than others, some were stronger, and some he couldn’t even dismember, the slower swings not being enough and making his blade get stuck in the flesh and losing him even more time.

  He finally noticed that goblins also leveled up. Not many of them, but about every tenth goblin had a second level.

  It meant that each of them killed more than twenty or even thirty people, didn’t it? Elevated Mind did the math in an instant.

  This gathering of goblins was responsible for the death of over a thousand people, at the very least.

  He snarled, parrying a strike that was coming at him and killing his attacker in the same move, slicing the neck of the other one nearby with his dagger at the same time for the efficiency of it. He quickly looked around, noticing that more goblins were running at his position, slowly cutting off the escape routes.

  He was getting so slow that he had to parry the hits. He was dismantling this particular group for so long that the other goblins started moving here. How long did it take to kill this group, seven seconds? Eight?

  It was barely one kill per second. He was getting too slow, too stationary. Too tired.

  How much time passed since the start of the fight? About fifty seconds? He killed at most half of them.

  Well, it’s not like he had a choice to stop. To stop was to die, and it would doom everyone else to the same fate.

  First, he had to reposition. There were way too many goblins running at him.

  He picked an escape route and ran with the burst of overwhelming speed, passing a few goblins and killing them while doing it as an afterthought.

  It was when he escaped the encirclement that his skill failed and he stumbled on the root that was hidden beneath a tall grass, falling painfully on the ground and sliding a good fifteen yards more from the pure inertia, like he was a biker in a traffic accident.

  He felt a sharp pain in his right hand, and realized that he lost his sword somewhere in the fall.

  Standing up took four fucking seconds. Every movement of his right hand sent more pain through him, and his breath was raspy.

  He was dizzy.

  There were dark spots in his vision, and everything felt like it was underwater.

  He saw a goblin running at him from up front, but Dennis didn’t really do anything. Just standing felt like a challenge, like that one time when he got really drunk.

  His skill was not working.

  Why wasn’t his skill working?

  Ah, right…

  He stopped trying to save Lily and started fighting. Repositioning in a fight didn’t count as ‘trying to approach an ally to save them’. Maybe Lily was somewhere there, in that horde of goblins that he left.

  Maybe she actually was, to think about it, and not as a thought experiment. There was a genuine chance of her being there, surrounded by agitated goblins who could just… stumble into her, invisibility or not.

  Dennis was looking at the cleaver moving toward his neck. An overhead attack, again? What was it with those goblins and overhead attacks?