To tell the truth, Dennis figured out that Gareth wasn’t a ghost somewhere in the middle of the prayer. Sure, him being a ghost was the only viable theory since all others were in conflict with factual facts as Dennis knew them, but even he had to concede that Gareth made a very poor ghost. He was just an unkillable hobo, as if that somehow made more sense than a ghost. How exactly did Gareth manage not to die from brain damage, or, well, the stabbing damage, was still an open question. Maybe the guy just didn’t need his brain that much. He did steal Muramasa, after all.

  Why didn’t Dennis stop with the prayer when he figured out that the dude wasn’t a ghost?

  Well…

  It was good to double check, yes? What if Gareth did burn in flames after Dennis finished the prayer? He was a bit wary of a sudden ghost attack ever since the church. Just… how the fuck do you even fight ghosts? With their incorporeal bodies, the cold and inevitable deadly touch that drained vitality and left you a husk…

  Dennis was fucking terrified of meeting a ghost.

  Anyway.

  “So…” He approached the guy with slow and confident steps, not sheathing his weapons quite yet. As he entered the stabbing range, nice and personal, he squatted down and looked him directly in the eyes. Gareth avoided his gaze, getting nervous, but not daring to move. Dennis felt his face making an expression, though he wasn’t sure which one. A kind smile? It was probably a kind smile. “Mind telling me what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I… Ahh…” Gareth fidgeted. “I’m sorry… What?”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dennis patiently repeated. Who knew, maybe the brain damage made the guy deaf.

  “Wrong… with me?”

  “Yes,” he said with more patience. Okay, he was losing the patience. “Just what kind of sick and twisted things are happening in that mind of yours? What kind of horrible person just casually strolls into someone’s house, explicitly decorated to indicate that it’s occupied, I must add, then steals someone’s sword, and then fucking threatens the resident with his own fucking sword?!”

  “But… there were arrows?” Gareth asked with an unsure voice. “I thought that I was supposed to come in…”

  “I drew the arrows so you'd know that the inside of the house is occupied!” Dennis shouted in Gareth’s face. It was quite intimate. “You were supposed to wait outside! Or maybe make noise for me to come out, I dunno! Who the fuck would want to be woken up by a random stranger?!”

  “I think… It was quite unclear, as an instruction…”

  “It was so fucking clear that it couldn’t be clearer! I worked hard on it! It was explicit!” Dennis almost fell on his butt as he waved his arms in outrage.

  “I… I’m sorry?” Gareth chose the wisest answer. The guy seemed lost in the conversation like Alice in Wonderland. His gaze was unfocused, and he never looked at one thing for too long. He spoke in a meek, disoriented tone, so unsure in what he was saying that Dennis would honestly believe that the guy was struggling with remembering words. He sounded like someone who was taking a guess during an exam and knew that they guessed wrong. But instead of exams, the dude seemed to struggle with basic speech. Something smelled. Metaphorically.

  Dennis frowned.

  He wasn’t that threatening, was he? Like, sure, he did basically kill the guy in the most coldbloodedly cool way possible so some fear points could be awarded for that, but Gareth didn’t look scared. Uncomfortable, yes. Confused, absolutely. Maybe a bit wary, but it didn’t look like the kind of ‘scared shitless’ that made people forget how to, like, talk. Was he just always like that? Ugh, talking to him would be fucking exhausting. And why the fuck did he talk like that? It wasn’t like–

  Ehh…

  “Oh shit I gave you brain damage,” Dennis exclaimed the sudden realization. “I’m so sorry, man. You probably deserve it though.”

  “Ah… Emm…” Gareth fidgeted more, like he couldn’t just sit in one place without moving. “No worries? It’s okay… Thanks for apologising…”

  Yeah, it was brain damage alright. Dennis knew parrots smarter than what he was witnessing. He almost felt sorry for the guy, despite the fact that the dude was a filthy sword-napper. And just filthy in general. Because he was a hobo. With brain damage. Stranded in an alien world. And he probably had a wife that he recently lost, or was a widower for a while but still kept the ring on him. Honestly, the dude was so pitiful that Dennis doubted even Lily could pull off projecting stronger vibes of being fucked up all around. And she was fucking dead. Ish.

  Gareth was like a puppy found at the bottom of a very filthy dumpster.

  And he was also immortal. That was also a thing. At least something was going well for the guy, in a way.

  Damn, categorizing mentally disabled puppy as a villain felt a bit too much at this point. At worst, this looked like the case of a guy who just lost it so much he became stabby, but not necessarily evil, and the heroic option for dealing with people like that was to toss them in a psych ward, but, like, kindly. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to double-check his suspicion.

  “So why’d you steal my sword?” he asked calmly. “And threatened me? That’s crazy stuff, dude.”

  “Oh… I… I thought you killed the girl…” Gareth mumbled.

  Dennis slowly and demonstratively looked at Lily’s body, the left half of which clearly took some very blunt damage. Then he looked at the katana in his hand. At the dagger.

  “Seriously?”

  “I mean… You’re covered in blood… Is it hers?”

  “No!” Dennis protested, before pausing to think about it. “I mean, yes, actually. But that’s just because I was dragging her around everywhere!”

  “W-why?”

  “To resurrect– Er, I mean, heal her! Which, by the way, you seem to know a thing or two about. How the hell did you pull off that trick? Are you a necromancer?”

  “Ehh… What trick?”

  Dennis sighed.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “What’s your Mind stat at?” he asked instead of answering. Trying to hold a conversation with Gareth was like pulling teeth.

  “F… Five? Ah, yes… Five,” Gareth said, completely forgetting his previous question.

  Dennis sighed stronger, sheathing his weapons back and moving to sit on the couch. The only guy who might know something about how this world worked and clearly had some means of resurrection was almost a vegetable. This was just his luck. Some sort of karmic injustice.

  The conversation that followed could be described as pure agony. Dennis was pretty sure he almost got an aneurysm once or twice.

  One perfectly calm and patient question after another, Dennis pulled the knowledge out of Gareth neuron by neuron. There weren’t many of those left.

  In short, Gareth was indeed stranded in this world for a while. Almost since the apocalypse started, actually. If the dude was to be believed, he somehow managed to survive and even kill some goblins for the whole first day, until finally they got him during the night and he succumbed to mortal wounds near the cemetery.

  Only, that didn’t happen. From Gareth’s own words, when he was on the verge of death he felt Death itself spread out from the middle of the cemetery, only to be immediately grabbed by something that Dennis was pretty sure were the cracks, and Gareth was grabbed along with it. In the mirror-world the bleeding just stopped so Gareth survived. Since then he was pretty much just fucking around and doing jack shit.

  “The fuck you were even doing at the cemetery?” Dennis mused.

  “Ah… Emm… My wife–”

  “Nope. Skip.” It was important to keep the guy on track, otherwise he would just devolve into incoherent mumblings.

  Despite living in this world for a few weeks already, Gareth didn’t know much more than the basic stuff that Dennis already figured out. He wandered the town and saw a few of the skill-places, and those places were always guarded by the Arms. He didn’t fight those, of course, and seemed to have great luck not aggroing them or surviving them somehow… Dennis wasn’t sure which one, since Gareth mentioned that he usually just ‘blacked out’ when he approached them too close, only to wake up further from where he was standing and continuing his wanderings.

  Dennis was pretty sure that those blackouts involved a lot of resurrections, based on his experience about how those Arms operated.

  “So how the hell do you resurrect?” Hunting for a way to heal Lily was still more or less a top-priority, though Dennis was starting to suspect that Gareth himself didn’t know the reason.

  “It’s… I don’t know–”

  “Of fucking course you don’t know.”

  “–it’s probably my skill…”

  “What the hell do you mean it’s your skill?! You don’t have the level for it!”

  After yet another very calm and civil discussion it turned out that the dude reached the third level, or so he claimed. Dennis knew how third level was supposed to feel like, and Gareth was not that. Still, Dennis didn’t have the confidence to proclaim himself ‘master of the system who knew how everything worked’ quite yet, so he had no choice but to accept the fact that the dude wasn’t just bullshitting him. And, honestly, the fact that he probably didn’t have enough brain cells to lie helped. And the fact that Gareth described correctly how the process of skill selection looked like. And–

  Okay, yeah, Dennis was salty that he discarded the possibility of it being a skill and because of that panicked about Gareth being a ghost. It was fucking embarassing, in retrospect.

  Anyway.

  Gareth’s skill was called The Will to Live, and the effect was something along the lines of ‘unless you give up, you can try again’. Forcing the guy to properly quote it was almost a hopeless endeavour since he constantly kept forgetting what he was doing after reading the first few words of it. It was impressive how abysmal his attention span was. Dennis just didn’t have the patience to get the exact wording of the skill, after he got the gist of it.

  The more they talked, the more the dreadful realization was creeping up on Dennis.

  “What level were you when you got here?”

  “Where did you put your free points?”

  “When did you reach the third level?”

  Gareth answered everything. Dennis did not like the answers.

  “When was the first time you noticed it? Which stat?”

  “Does it speed up over time?”

  “Oh for god’s sake, speed up over time means…”

  Gareth wasn’t dumb as a brick because he had brain damage from accidental stabbing. Why would he? This world, and magic in general, cared jack shit about physics. At first Dennis thought that the guy had, like, the Wolverine problem, where damage to the brain would make him lose memories or just become a bit wacky, but skills just didn’t work like that. They were conceptual. His skill didn’t restore neurons, or even memories, it restored Gareth.

  Or, well, the skill was restoring what was left of Gareth. Because the guy reached his cap of idle leveling and now, instead of being refined, he was being unmade.

  His stats were abysmal.

  Gareth was dying.

  From halfway to second level–and wasn’t that crazy? That was, like, more than a dozen goblin kills–he reached the third during the weeks he was lost, and then it turned around.

  It was interesting that even now, while being in front of a clearly dying guy and knowing that he needed quite a lot of help, Heroic Senses didn’t trigger. Whatever definition of danger the skill was using, Gareth didn’t fall into it, and Dennis didn’t know why, and it bothered him. Was it because of the source of danger? Did it somehow think that Gareth’s situation was natural, like dying from old age? Or did it think that the dude wasn’t savable, and therefore didn’t bother telling Dennis about him? Could it be that it just missed him? Why? What was different between Gareth and that mysterious far-away person who was still dying from a prolonged and unnatural cause? Dennis had a hunch that he knew what the prolonged and unnatural cause was, but that just raised the question, why target them and not Gareth?

  And how many Gareths were there, just missed by his skill?

  And if the skill didn’t see the guy as a savable target, did that mean that Dennis should just shrug and move on because it was supernaturally confirmed that the dude was doomed? Not savable. Not in danger.

  Dennis was silent as he just watched the man ramble for a while, half-listening to a scattered speech about the way his wife used to make breakfast. He usually looped back to talking about his wife when Dennis didn’t steer the conversation, come to think about it.

  Nothingness that surrounded them ground people into perfection, smoothing out the edges and making them more of themselves until no edges remained and the core of a person was further ground into dust.

  Gareth really loved his wife.

  That was the core of Gareth.

  What was left of him, really.

  Dennis really loved his new skill. It told him where he was needed. Who to save. Both like a headquarters and a simplified moral compass in one package, it just pointed him where he needed to be and who he needed to save to be a hero, no further questioning needed, like a quest marker in a game. Dennis was sure that the skill wouldn’t tell him to save any goblins, or any villains in general, so he would be able to use it to just skip the whole ‘should I save this person’ problem by listening to it. He was quite excited at the thought of expanding it into the ability to prioritize the targets, to build it into something like ‘the most efficient path to save the most people’.

  The skill decided that Dennis shouldn’t bother with trying to save Gareth. Maybe there really was nothing he could do, or maybe it was for some sort of ‘greater good’, like, saving Lily and that other target was just so much more important than a lost hobo. He didn’t really know what the thing was thinking. Couldn’t hear its whisper behind his main skill. What did the omniscient eldritch mind know that Dennis didn’t? A lot, probably.

  Dennis sighed, getting up.

  It was fucking dumb.

  “Come on,” he said, picking up Lily and strapping her to his back. “Let’s go.”

  “Wha–” Gareth forgot what he was talking about again, looking at Dennis with confusion. Honestly, the dude just lived in a perpetual state of confusion. “W-where?”

  Heroic Senses was a cool-ass skill, but it was fucking dumb if it thought that there was nothing Dennis could do.

  “To save your sorry ass,” he said, clicking his fingers a few times to keep Gareth’s attention. “Come on. Come. Follow me. You know how to follow? Yes, good job. You’re doing great.”

  He had a plan.