His grinding excursions outside the fort quickly became a routine.

  That is to say, they got boring very quickly.

  Maybe for someone else the uncertainty of irregular deadly combat would’ve been exciting, the feeling that he could be ambushed at any moment and that one mistake could be the difference between life and death should pump adrenaline and evoke emotions that were almost impossible to feel in ordinary life, but he wasn’t a fucking adrenaline junkie or anything of the sort. And he didn’t make mistakes. So these grinding sessions evoked the same feelings as completing pointless ‘kill 100 boars’ quests. Which was none. The only thing he felt was bored determination.

  Still better than gutting fish. Or peeling potatoes. Or helping with moving the furniture so they could expand the living rooms.

  It felt like Nancy made finding work for him her personal quest. Every time he dared to look at least a little bored she threw something at him, and telling her ‘no’ was almost impossible. He still didn’t understand what kind of verbal trickery she used to force him, and he fell for it every time. Currently, his main theory was that it was a hidden skill. It had to be.

  Naturally, it meant that he tried to spend as much time outside the fort as possible. Usually he left early in the mornings, almost at sunrise, and returned only when the sun started to set. The nights were dark without the light pollution from the city, especially if it was cloudy, and he didn’t have night vision. It was funny, in a way, how different his daily routine was from pre-system times. He was never a morning person, or a person who had a healthy lifestyle, and yet here he was, waking up early, going to bed early, spending most of his day doing what could be considered moderate exercise, and eating healthy food. His mom would’ve been proud.

  He froze mid-step in the middle of the intersection. He felt his heart beat once, and he could’ve sworn that he heard it, the sound was almost deafening, and the monochrome world suddenly gained color for just a moment, and his breath hitched. Then the feeling passed.

  Error.

  Revaluation process terminated.

  Whatever.

  He continued his walk.

  Progress was nice. While killing an individual goblin was a drop in the bucket, they added up. Already, he was almost halfway to the fifth level, and he had no intention of slowing down. Actually, he would’ve very much preferred to speed up, but that was unlikely without taking major risks, and there was no point in risking his life while not saving people. There wasn’t much ‘heroness’ in killing a giant lizard when it didn’t bother anyone, and seeking out risky opponents just to boost his leveling speed felt kinda stupid? Why would he risk his life to get a level a few hours faster? No, fighting giant monsters or hordes of goblins was for the moments when they were attacking the NPC’s. Except that one time when he killed a giant cat. Or more like a giant lion? The thing was an ambush predator, it wasn’t his fault that it ambushed him. It gave him a small scare since he couldn’t exactly parry the animal, but he was fast enough to kite it so it bled out pretty quickly from a dozen shallow wounds. And blindness. Throwing daggers in the eyes of giant things was an OP tactic.

  Still, despite the amount of times he told himself that he was fine with the grind, it was getting to him. It was the closest thing to being a hero that he could get right now, and yet it was so far away from what he wanted. What he wanted was to blur in front of hopelessly dying survivors the moment before they got killed and save the day. To say ‘Fear not, I am here!’ and slay everything threatening around them faster than they could blink. To mysteriously disappear the next moment, while they were still not comprehending that they were saved, because there was a kraken attacking the neighboring town and he was already halfway there.

  Walking the empty streets and killing starving goblins was very far away from that fantasy. Something had to change, because once he gets his level up he will be stuck. It had been almost two weeks since the magical apocalypse started, and he wasn’t heroing all over people yet. That was unacceptable.

  He walked over a pair of naturally dead goblins. Not that it was natural for them to be dead, but they were already dead before he killed them. That was a thing that he was encountering more often lately. Sometimes the bodies were even fresh, and almost always they had a piercing wound in their heads, like from a bullet or a rapier. He wasn’t sure what to think about them and honestly he didn’t really care since he wasn’t a detective type of hero.

  His main problem was that there weren’t any people to save, or, to put it more correctly, he had no idea where they were. Typically, he was supposed to eavesdrop on the police radio frequency, or find out about disasters on the news, or have superhearing or at least a team who sat in their headquarters and told him where he was needed. He had nothing like that. He failed at the very first step of heroing, which was finding the trouble. What was the point of having superspeed if you didn’t know where to run to? And it was doubly frustrating because his skill synergised with knowing where to go like nothing else, like it was created for it. Which, to be fair, it was. Dennis was pretty sure that he could have his buff for hours if only he knew where to run. He could be faster than a fucking car as long as he was chasing savable people, and it was perfect for being the kind of hero he imagined to be, the speedster who was everywhere and saved everyone in an afternoon, and it was fucking useless because he didn’t know where to go. There just weren't any survivors. None. Zero.

  To think about it, it was a bit uncanny how they didn’t find a single one after the first day, when during the first day they were, like, everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain. He remembered agonizing over the way his group kept inevitably picking up more useless followers just by the virtue of existing. Then, after the first night, nothing. The best they could find were a few hidey-holes with no one there, like an empty basement that was locked from the inside. It was a bit creepy, but ultimately useless.

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  At least the quiet walks were good for contemplation, so he spent the last few days carefully thinking about his roadblocks to proper heroics and the ways he had to solve them. In essence, he had two interconnected problems – finding the trouble and reliably using his skill to beat the shit out of the trouble. Initially, he hoped that people in the fort would function as a sort of intelligence gathering headquarters, and would just know where he was needed, but that didn’t work out. That made him think, if the classic ‘I heard that there’s a bank robbery on the news’ didn’t work, what about the supernatural ways of finding people to save? Superman had his super-hearing, and, more importantly, the Flash did a super fast grid search of the whole town on numerous occasions. While Dennis was nowhere fast enough to repeat that feat yet, it should be technically possible. Like, legally, by the definition of his skill, doing a grid search is trying to reach people to save them, he just… didn’t know where they were yet.

  The bad news, he couldn’t force his skill to activate to do a grid search of the town. The good news, the feedback that he was getting from it when he tried was complicated and almost incomprehensible. In other words, it wasn’t a hard no. He just couldn’t find a trick to beat a ‘yes’ out of it yet.

  What was even more maddening was the fact that the cheat that they did with Lily to activate his skill worked, and this was basically the same thing, just a bit more ambiguous and on a much larger scale. And he knew that it was possible to beat it until it worked, he did it once already, the thing was just being stubborn for no reason. Well, he would bet that he could be more stubborn, so his plan A was to whine at his skill until it caved and allowed him to do a sick-ass speedstery grid search. It was a work in progress, albeit without any progress yet.

  Plan B was to see if lowering his ambitions a little bit would give better results. Instead of screaming at his skill to give him the buff to search the whole town–which he still did regularly–he tried to aim it at specific places where people in trouble could reasonably be.

  Yeah, he was aiming it at the fucking church. Still didn’t work. Neither did the hospital, the nearest police station, or even the gun store where they left the cripples, though that was a long shot. He wondered if it meant that there were no people there, or they didn’t need saving, or if he hit some other limit. The biggest question was if there was any divination component to his skill. If there was, then the thing fucking knew where people were and didn’t tell him, and if there wasn’t, then it was running on his own knowledge and could be reasoned with or tricked. Either way, it needed testing.

  Plan C would be to train a sidekick who with miraculous luck would roll some kind of people-seeking divination skill, and Dennis hated that plan, so currently he was trying out plan B Variation 2, which was memorizing the route that the main raiding group took and pinging them with the skill in hopes of it working when they got attacked. It wasn’t exactly what he needed, but if it worked he would get some valuable insight in how the skill worked. After all, he had almost all of the necessary requirements fulfilled. He knew where they were–if they didn’t deviate from their path–and he knew that they were in moderate amounts of danger, like, generally, and it wasn’t just some purely theoretical danger either. It was a fact that goblins would attack them at some point, and goblins were deadly.

  He wouldn’t know exactly where they would be, or when they would be attacked, and they were a mile or two away from him, but he desperately hoped that with this many restrictions the skill would finally budge. If it would, it would mean that teaching it what ‘theoretical danger’ meant would be a viable path. Best case scenario, he would be able to force the skill to just tell him where to go, or to allow him to go anywhere he thought he could do some heroing. Eventually. With enough whining.

  He tried to activate the skill again, thinking about the place where the main party probably was right now, and about the sudden arrows killing them. The feedback he was getting was… close to positive, not enough to make the skill flicker on and off, but close, so either the thing cheated and knew that there weren’t any ambushes happening right now, or he didn’t convince it enough yet. Most of the times it was really hard to understand what the thing wanted from him, he wasn’t even sure that treating it like an intelligent conversationalist was the right approach, but he could get hunches and weird ideas when he thought at the skill in different ways, like poking it with a stick and seeing what happens. The skill was a thing, a separate entity that did stuff, and while he didn’t think that it was intelligent, it had opinions. And those opinions could be changed. And Dennis was great at changing people’s opinions, especially when they were wrong. He was a great debater with mastery in internet forums, so the skill had no chance in the long run. He will shittalk it into compliance.

  He helped himself to a bag of chips from the nearby convenience store before continuing his lazy grinding session. It wasn’t theft if the owners were dead. Probably. Legally? He decided to treat it more like a lost and found situation. Or more like graverobbing? But, like, historical grave robbing, the one that Indiana Jones did, which was legal.

  Anyway, he definitely did not steal the bag of chips, because they had no owner and therefore could not be stolen, so his heroic morality was untouched.

  He was halfway through the bag when another routine ping activated his skill.

  Dexterity: 27 (20)

  Mind: 27 (20)

  He swallowed the chip in a small fraction of a second. It was probably the fastest swallowed chip in the history of potato chip swallowing. Did Dexterity make it travel to his stomach faster? If it did, what did that mean?

  He was a bit shocked because this time he didn’t try any particular new and inventive arguments to force the skill to work. Spamming the ‘on’ button was a strategy on its own, but he didn’t expect it to work. There was no real difference between the way he tried to activate it now and ten minutes ago. And if he didn’t change anything on his end, that meant…

  Bitch knows things that I don’t.

  He will abuse so much shit out of it later. Fucking stupid hidden divination component in a running skill. And the thing dared to play coy with him! ‘Oh no Dennis, you need to know who to run to,’ it would say with its pathetic high-pitched voice. ‘I have no idea where those savable people are, nooo, but I wouldn’t activate in a location where an invisible girl factually wasn’t present, it’s just the rules!’.

  Yeah, he owned its sneaky ass now.

  The skill started straining because he was still standing in one place instead of running. That was fine, he wasn’t going to stand still for long. He had another small test planned for the situation when he finally forced the thing to work.

  He released the bag that he was holding and it started to fall while he checked the time on his watch, memorizing it to the second.

  Then he ran.

  When the bag touched the ground, he wasn’t even on the same street.