In a way, this was the first time he had a chance to test out his skill with Mind and Dex equalized. The big fight where he nearly died didn’t really count since he was, well, delirious and nearly dying, which was not conducive to proper appreciation of real, genuine super speed. He tried activating it a few times during his stay in the fort, but the thing was uncooperative when it came to mock danger, refusing to work when they tried out a few scenarios where people were ‘kind of’ going to be hurt. No speed buff for him unless it was a real deal.

  So this was the first time, just pure running without fighting through hordes of goblins or the horrible exhaustion, and it was amazing.

  The surroundings blurred past him as he ran through the streets. To be fair, he probably wasn’t faster than a car, but on the other hand he was definitely as fast as a fucking car, and the amount of control that he had over his movements was ridiculous. He could take sharp turns, he could easily maneuver through abandoned cars or any other obstacles, he could almost instantly stop if he wanted and show a middle finger to the laws of physics, and he was fast. Okay, maybe not ‘The Flash’ fast, but absolutely ‘Dash from Incredibles’ fast. It was intoxicating. He was laughing. In superspeed.

  Dexterity was somewhat similar to his skill, in a way that it was… a thing. An entity that had weight and changed the world to fit its own definition. It was much more straightforward than Heroic Dash, it didn’t have any stupid opinions on the way it should work, but he still could sort of converse with it, feel it out. And now, while it was buffed and that much stronger, listening to what it said got so much easier. Unlike his own skill, he knew that there was absolutely no chance of him convincing Dexterity to work differently. It was… older, maybe? More set in its ways? But that was fine, because it was great.

  Dexterity was the speed of movement. It was a simple declaration. I move. It cared about nothing else. It didn’t touch anything else, and when physics and common sense dared to stand against it, it made them obey. In its domain it was absolute, and its domain was moving faster.

  At the speed that Dennis was going wind resistance was supposed to start hindering him, thus making him slower. But Dexterity said that he has the authority to move at this speed, and so he can.

  Mind felt like the opposite of Dexterity. While Dexterity was a simple declaration that cared about enforcing one thing only, Mind was telling him about a million things and had all of the opinions. It was a mess of declarations with a vague purpose of thinking better. Faster thinking? Yes. Better memory? Sure. Better management of memory? He didn’t even know what that was, but he had it if he wanted. Improved creativity and artistic comprehension? Of course, yes, he could have all of it, all the wisdom, all the talents, everything that is Mind is better.

  It didn’t do much.

  It was a chorus of uncountable throats who couldn’t agree on what it meant to be smarter, and it was aimed vaguely in one direction. It helped with killing all his emotions for the comfort of cold logic, and with becoming a creature of pure passion and madness. It allowed him to listen to his subconsciousness in a way that gave him almost unnatural intuition, and to get rid of it altogether because having subconsciousness is a weakness of lesser races who aren’t even aware of what’s going on inside of their heads.

  Mind was a mess, and by trying to do everything, it didn’t do much, but it had a few declarations that it–almost–agreed on. It was essential. Thinking faster was good, and not forgetting things was good. Anything else he would have to beat out of it, like he was with his own skill.

  It was enrapturing, how his stats and skill whispered to him. Not with words, but with pure instinctual understanding, like when someone looked at a big object and knew that it was big.

  Ah.

  So that’s why it was possible to level up skills with stat points. Skills and stats were the same. One kind of thing. He might as well have Heroic Dash as a row on his stat sheet. Or Dexterity as skill.

  Cool. A bit weird, but okay.

  Where was he running again?

  High Mind was great for not stumbling randomly, but it also made him more likely to think about random stuff just because he could. Between one step and the next he could wonder about dinner, replay an old argument in his mind to see if he could’ve said something better, and read the menu on the storefront of the nearby restaurant. Having a stat of 27 made him so above peak human that his thinking might as well be called alien. Not that he was necessarily smarter or uncomprehensible, but the sheer speed of thinking changed the way he thought on its own.

  Ah fuck he got distracted again. He wondered how a person with ADHD would feel with high Mind. Did it cure mental illnesses, or make them worse? The stat said ‘yes’, the same way it said yes to everything mind related, so it could go either way or do nothing at all.

  He didn’t know precisely where he was going–and that was just stupid because the skill knew where he was going–but he had a good guess. Currently the main raiding party was clearing the roads between the fort, a pair of gas stations, and the commercial centre, with the goal of being able to ride a truck and load it with all the goods. He knew their route and could approximate where they were on the map that he saw once, and he knew where he was on that map, and while he was never that good with navigation, the Mind made it trivial. It was like he was his own GPS. He remembered every house, every street, it was as clear in his mind as it was when he was looking at the map. Honestly, it felt like cheating.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  He sprinted like he was representing his country in the Olympics. That lasted for about thirty seconds before he had to conclude that breathing was also a good thing to be doing and slowed down a bit, trying to pace himself. There was still quite a distance to cover and while he was arguably more fit than he ever was, his endurance was still shit. His heartbeat should probably be counted in beats per second, and it wasn’t a small number.

  The wind at this speed was really pleasant for cooling off though. How the fuck it affected him enough to cool him but not enough to start being a hindrance he had absolutely no idea.

  He crossed two streets and turned left. He jumped over a car–holy shit he could jump far, and the ground was approaching scarily fast–and gracefully landed without breaking his run, or his legs. As long as he was moving Dexterity would help him, but he knew that there would be a limit to its help. If he jumped like that and hit a wall he would’ve died, but touching the ground and continuing the movement was apparently not even bad for his knees.

  Still, jumping was scary. Got it.

  He was a bit worried that the buff would randomly stop working midway when the party would stop fighting, but that didn’t happen. It took him a bit less than two minutes before he saw the gas station and yep, the party was there. Still fighting, if it could be called fighting. He slowed down to a walk to give himself more time to assess the situation.

  It was still a super fast walk since the buff was active, but it gave him a few extra seconds before he would reach his destination, and the skill didn’t care much about how fast he was going as long as he was going in the right direction. Huh. He tried to slow down more, reducing his speed again to what would be just a normal walk, and that also worked. Huuh. He slowed down even more, trying out his best impression of the slowest walk possible. He was like a snail, indomitably approaching the party inch by inch, and that was also fine. He was–almost–standing still.

  That was a neat loophole, though he couldn’t figure out how to abuse it yet.

  Though that wasn’t exactly true, he was abusing it by trying to catch his breath like he was drowning in oxygen.

  He glanced at his watch to mark the time. The boosted Mind was a cheat on its own. He remembered perfectly which way he took on the map, and he knew the scale of the map, so it took him just a moment to calculate the total distance travelled. Math was never his strong suite, but he figured out the numbers in a blink.

  Forty two miles per hour, on average. He truly regretted not checking the time just after his sprint at the beginning, the final part of his run probably took the total number down a lot since he wasn’t built for running whole minutes. Would it be about sixty for the sprint? More? Why was he self-conscious about the number? Was he insecure about it? It was a baby speedster number. Sure, he was beating all the human records by a large margin, but he felt faster than this. Everything around him blurred and all that.

  Ugh, whatever. He won’t tell anyone the actual numbers until he broke the sound barrier.

  He wondered if he would make a sonic boom when he did. On one hand, Dexterity negated a lot of harmful physics for him so the way he interacted with the air was wacky. It was similar to the way he didn’t feel much impact on his hands when he chopped goblins to pieces. But on the other hand, those goblins totally did feel the full force of mass times acceleration, so maybe the air would explode? Is that what happened when someone reached the sound barrier?

  Ah, fucking Mind. He had a fight going in front of him.

  Though to be fair, barely a second passed since he stopped. There was no time dilation effect in a way he imagined it, with everything crawling through molasses and cool low-pitched music playing in the background, but the Mind was absolutely fucking with his sense of time. Or like, with his sense of urgency? He knew how much time passed, it was just… not as urgent as he used to. The situation in front of him barely changed, after all.

  The reason why the party didn’t finish the fight in the few minutes he took to get here was clear, it wasn’t really a fight, it was a shootout. A very cowardly shootout.

  A pair of goblin archers were shooting arrows at the party from the roof, and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere. The party, in turn, was mostly hiding behind cars and few impressive shields, and shot back. With bows.

  It was the laziest fight he had ever seen. An arrow flew from the goblins, and the party hid behind their defences. A dull sound of it hitting the pavement indicated the change of turns. A few arrows flew from the party and goblins ducked on the roof. The party missed. Then it was the goblins' turn again.

  The whole fight was turn-based, and no one could do anything. He guessed that it would end when someone would be left with no arrows. That was probably the party’s plan. They had a lot of arrows.

  Dennis yawned, and decided that his help wasn’t really needed here. Sure, the buff was active since, well, the arrows could kill people and stuff, but the goblins were checkmated in the most boring way imaginable, and it was only a matter of time when the raiding party would win. And patience. It was a matter of patience.

  He milked the situation for what it was and continued testing the limits of his skill by making a small step to the left. It strained a bit, but still worked. The question was how much of a detour he could make on the way to his target? The condition was to try to reach them in order to save. Could he take a longer route? Could he move further away if needed? Arguably, to help he needed to reach the goblins, not the party. Could he?

  This was a rules lawyering territory, and the stupid skill had stupid opinions, but it was Dennis’ time to educate it.

  He took another step towards the goblins. It still made him closer to the party, but he could’ve stepped directly towards them and he didn’t. The skill grumbled more, and wasn’t that bullshit? It was fine with him almost standing still, but trying to actually help with the fight–by killing the goblins–was somehow less acceptable than doing nothing? Was it hit in the head when it was a child? Didn’t the thing know the definition of ‘save’?

  He took another small step towards the goblins, and while the skill didn’t snap, it fucking whined like a child in the toy store. The only thing that stopped it from turning off was the fact that Dennis had the authority to pick his path to the target, and wasn’t that interesting? So he was allowed to pick the path, but the thing didn’t like his pick even if it was his right? Oh, it was for getting around the obstacles? Who decided that?

  He did. Kind of. When he made the skill. He made the skill? Then why the hell was it so stupid half the time? He sure as hell didn’t remember making such stupid use-cases and limitations. How exactly was he supposed to save people with it if it didn’t fucking work when he needed it to save people?

  While Dexterity was an unyielding declaration of movement, and Mind was a madness of billion voices who would never agree, Heroic Dash was just… a vague desire to be faster to come and help? The thing knew about itself more or less as much as he knew about it. It didn’t fucking know. It didn’t have any space to be more than what it was, and it wasn’t much.

  The skill finally snapped as he took another step, returning the world to normality of his almost human stats. He stood there, watching as the arrows flew back and forth, thinking.

  Huh.

  Did the thing literally ask him to level it up?