Dennis had never thought about it, but pretty much every household owned a thermos. Just, take your average person. They probably own one, even if it was forgotten somewhere in the cupboards. If he went into any random abandoned apartment, he might not find any food, it would already have been looted by someone or left to rot. But he would find a thermos. Thermoses were a universal constant of life. Like toothbrushes, but not as depressing. Seeing a toothbrush in someone’s abandoned bathroom felt like intruding on the remnants of someone’s life. Thermoses didn’t hold such significance. They were just neat. You could put warm water in them, and it would remain warm. That was cool. Or, well, the opposite of cool.
In other words, Dennis realized that thermoses were an easily acquirable loot, and Mary was a freak who got one for every one of them, and filled them all with tea.
It was good tea. But who the hell filled four thermoses' worth of tea for a trip that was supposed to take a few hours at most? He would bet that she’d make sandwiches to go with them if she'd had the chance. Luckily, bread didn’t exist anymore.
Her freakiness aside, it was convenient for moments such as that, when he needed to kill some time. He filled a cup for himself, gave one to El’el so she would mutter manically about magic while staying properly hydrated, and one to Lily so she could stress out like hell, but now with tea.
Maybe Mary knew something he didn’t.
He spent his time watching the clouds with a cup in his hand. Waiting for Mary to trip on a goblin so he could go rescue her, bring her back, and resolve this weird mess. It felt too passive of a plan for his tastes, but no matter from which side he tried to prod his skill, he couldn’t make it target her. Couldn’t save people from an admittedly understandable decision to get the fuck out of a potential mind-control situation, not unless it was actively killing them. So, he was banking on the chance that she would get in over her head at some point soon. It was inevitable. You didn’t sneakily run away from a party alone in a post-apocalyptic world and not get eaten by a monster. Things just didn’t work like that.
He hoped she was safe.
From time to time, he prompted El’el with another spell theorycrafting question, when it looked like she was on the verge of solving the previous one. Kept her busy. The most effective one, so far, was when he asked her about healing through vibration. That made her crash like an old PC without enough RAM. Trying to explain how vibrating molecules at superspeed would accelerate cellular regeneration and give him a healing factor was… Well, it was certainly helpful in terms of keeping her distracted, even if she started to flinch every time he said the word ‘vibration’. Honestly, it was amazing how incapable she was at stopping herself from trying to figure out a magic spell that she had never heard of. Like a kid distracted by candy. He approved of the dedication, even if it seemed silly to hyperfocus on something like that.
He hoped she would feel better before she remembered what he was distracting her from. Or, better yet, he hoped to keep her distracted until Lily finally grew the balls to clear up the whole mess.
Every time Lily glanced at him, half-panicked, he gave her a thumbs up and an encouraging smile. It seemed to be working. Sometimes she smiled back.
Honestly, the amount of pants-shitting terror the girl felt was wildly disproportionate to what he thought her ‘horrible secret’ was. Concerningly so.
Maybe she grew a taste for human flesh after being dead for so long, Pet Sematary-style? He was trying to figure out how many eaten babies he could ‘forgive’ before he’d be forced to deem her a villain. The correct answer had to be zero. Logically, zero. Right? Yet he was absolutely sure that he wouldn’t treat her as a villain if she ate just one baby. Maybe two. Who liked babies anyway? They were barely people. One–or maybe two–was not a great loss. But allowing someone to eat babies was so absolutely unheroic that he couldn’t believe that he had even entertained the thought. It was clearly soul-related, which was concerning, since it meant that having a Soul made him kind of okay with Lily eating babies. That was not the plan he had in mind when he decided he needed the thing.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait for too long.
About twenty minutes, if he had to guess?
His tea grew cold, half-forgotten as he tried to decide on the acceptable number of baby-casualties, when Heroic Senses finally pinged him.
El’el’s mutterings grew quiet. A glyph of shimmer-vibration-rapid cell division-stabilization was slowly dissolving in the palm of her hand. Burning in flames, more like. It looked ugly as hell, clearly born dead on arrival. It was kinda impressive that she had even managed to create the thing. He knew nothing about magic, but one didn’t have to be an expert to recognize shit on sight. His boosted Mind stat helped. From the look of things, she’d be busy with it for a while.
Lily sat frozen with a cup halfway to her lips. It was good that she calmed down enough to remember to drink it. Things seemed stable enough to–hopefully–not explode during the few seconds he’d be gone. Could be a few minutes though, depending on what exactly Mary stumbled into and how heavy she was.
Taking a deep breath, he stood up. Nothing else moved. The world was silent, and still.
He really fucking enjoyed pretending that he had a time-stop effect, didn’t he? Even though he was just thinking and moving really fast. Somehow, it wasn’t the same thing, but if he squinted at it from the right angle it kinda was. A trick of perspective.
He took a step.
If he just ran away, he would regret it.
He didn’t take a second one. Glancing around, he couldn’t spot any obvious problems.
Kriya was surprisingly silent since the big battle, which at first he attributed to his lack of mana, but this was the first time he heard from it in a while even despite having his Soul back.
And, of course, it was as useless as he remembered. Like, okay, good for minesweeping, vague as shit for everything else, fate manipulation his ass.
A bit more specificity would be appreciated, pretty please?
A vague feeling of ‘fuck you’ was all that he got for an answer. And it ate half of his mana for that.
Too many possibilities, in other words. It was not a future-reading skill, but a choice making one. Whatever his current ‘choice’ was, it just warned him about its consequences. Sometimes. Reliably if the choice was to step on a mine.
Thankfully, he was a genius beyond geniuses. Intelligent beyond what was humanly possible a hundred times over. With the buff, he could call himself the smartest man alive, and no one would be able to dispute him, because his number was bigger, which meant that he was smarter, of course.
It took him half a second to come up with an answer that felt right. Which was, of course, very fast and impressive, and not an equivalent of five-ish minutes of agonized brooding. Of course.
The lack of response from Kriya hopefully indicated that he was right. It probably would have alerted him if he was wrong. Hopefully.
On the side of Lily’s cup, he left a sticky note.
‘Saving Mary. Don’t do anything dumb. Hijack my skill later and we’ll be back. It’ll be okay.’
And another one in El’el’s palm, right underneath the half-destabilized glyph.
‘Saving Mary. Hope you know how to read English. Be nice to Lily, she’s not evil, I think. How do I vibrate my hands to throw lightning? It needs to be red.’
And that was that.
Apparently, people reacted poorly when he ran away without an explanation. Especially Lily. Super-especially Lily. Honestly, was there at least one time when he left her alone and she didn’t do anything dumb? He could learn from his mistakes. So he explicitly asked her not to do anything dumb while he was away. Judging by Kriya’s silence, that seemed to be enough. His skill would’ve notified him if he were shooting himself in the foot. Probably.
Heroic Dash didn’t even grumble at the pause. It was amazingly forgiving since the last upgrade, especially for detours that were both well-meaning and completed in less than a breath. He could feel smugness coming off of it, like it was bragging, showing off its newfound versatility. It seemed that Dennis wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sure what was allowed or not. They explored their new capabilities together.
Good skill. I’ll feed you more points later.
And he was off, running into the vague direction of someone probably dying. He assumed that it was Mary since it was more or less where they’d thought she’d gone.
Buildings blurred in his vision, surroundings existed only for as long as he decided to acknowledge them, only to be changed a moment later. Again, it was all a trick of a perspective. Five minutes could feel agonizingly slow, or like a blink. Only, in his case, it was a question of whether a second felt agonizingly slow, or like… well, a second. All in his head, and he had ninety-nine points of head powers.
He passed a mall. A parking lot. A park, another parking lot. Lots of parking lots, come to think of it. Really, how far away could someone run off in less than half an hour? As far as he knew, Mary had butterfly powers, she shouldn't have been able to get that far. Unless she invested in Dex and Con? It was hard to judge, but he was pretty sure she had enough levels to outrun at least a bicycle, if she invested some points that way. The larper party were all weirdos, but they weren’t weak. Compared to other people, of course.
He passed a crooked stop sign and a surprisingly well-maintained pickup truck. Compared to other abandoned cars, at least, since those tended to be dirty like hell, and had flat tires or broken windows. This one seemed like it recently came out of a car wash.
He shook his head, going further. Whatever.
He didn’t have to go much further.
His skill pointed him at one of the nearby buildings. An art gallery, of all things. Or, an arts center? Was that what they were called? It looked ugly as sin, so there was definitely ‘art’ involved somewhere in its naming scheme.
He opened the door and went inside.
The air was stale. Sterile, even. The foyer was so white he had to squeeze his eyes to readjust. It was unreasonably bright, and the ceiling was practically infested with those white office lights, all of which were somehow on. From the outside, the building itself looked pretty small, so the fact that there were three corridors that he couldn’t see the end of was pretty concerning.
The floor was marble. Clean, and smooth to the point of being reflective. Again, he distinctly remembered that the building from the outside looked like it had seen some better days half a century ago, so a small fortune in marble was a bit… telling.
All of it felt very… artsy. In a bad way.
His skill was pulling him towards the left corridor.
His only relief was the fact that there were no ghosts in that church that he and Lily stumbled on ages ago. Maybe there wouldn’t be ghosts in here either. Or weird Echo-portaling cracks.
The building was obviously a skill space, though vastly different from how he remembered them in the Echo. Corridors without an end, for example, did not happen there. Or working lights.
Resolved to not touch any fucking cracks if he encountered them, because fuck that, he moved deeper in.
The corridor was semi-normal, if one didn't count the fact that it never ended and had no turns. There were rows of closed doors on both sides of it, and a copy-pasted water cooler every fifty yards or so. He passed them all in a moment, moving towards his target like a hound. At least the illumination was pretty good.
It didn’t take long for him to reach the needed door. Nothing took long, for him.
It was the same as any other, just a white wooden door with no label.
He opened it.
Inside, he saw five dudes fighting a Сthulhu. They appeared to be losing. It was hard to gauge, when nothing moved.
AN: Currently watching 2.5 Dimensional Seduction. I was dodging it forever because, like, ecchi is not a particularly good genre in terms of… everything, but I got baited by a pretty scene from tiktok and damn. After a few episodes of tits and fanservice, it actually turned into a very good cosplay exploration? With plot and drama? Not worse than Dress up Darling, I think. I’m at episode 10 right now, and so far I’m impressed, though it might be because I didn’t have high expectations to begin with.