The plan, at the end, was fairly simple. They didn’t have that many variables to play around with. Dennis was supposed to kill all the goblins, and Lily was supposed to be in danger, and nothing could change that. The main risk with the previous plan–where Lily just went invis and that’s it–was the possibility of Dennis accidentally colliding with her at full speed, or of some goblin finding her through sheer luck. Unlike with the fort, the church had less goblins nearby, and less space, it was comparatively cramped so the risk was that much greater.

  So they decided to just forego invisibility altogether.

  “Are you ready?” he asked her while they were hiding behind the corner.

  “Mhm.”

  “Go.”

  She disappeared, and he was left waiting.

  The church was way more impressive than he imagined it. When others said ‘old church’ he thought about some kind of old shack, made from rotten wood and halfway to collapsing. He didn’t know why. It’s just what he thought about when he heard ‘old’.

  But it was a fucking cathedral. The thing was huge. And quite beautiful, with intricate engravings on the walls and a whole ass statue built inside the wall above the entrance. There was some kind of… Ambience to it, that he wasn’t sure how to put into words. There was an aura surrounding the building, and he was pretty sure it was genuine magic. Not as a figure of speech, but in a way not dissimilar to how the goblin spawn zone felt. It wasn’t exactly the same, but probably of the same nature? There was an edge in the air around it, a feeling of uncertainty, of impermanence. Sometimes it felt like if he blinked the whole structure would just disappear. Then the feeling passed.

  Around fifty or so goblins were chilling near the entrance, not doing anything. There was no camp, no activity, they were just there. What did they eat? What did they do? Nothing, apparently. He deduced that they’ve tried to get inside the church at some point, but the only entrance that he could see was closed with the kind of ‘fuck you’ door that couldn’t be easily breached, and the windows had welded bars on them. So the creatures just… Did nothing outside. Most of them were just sitting on the ground with their eyes closed as if they were half-asleep. Some were genuinely sleeping. A few walked aimlessly, but never far away from the church.

  All of them were at least a second level. Some of them felt like they could be at the third.

  They reminded him of the old people at the beach, just lazing around and sunbathing without a care in the world. To think about it, that was likely the case. They were bathing in that aura or something like that. Probably. Or they were attracted to it. Were they attracted to the aura because they were leveled, or were they leveled because they were somehow using it to get exp?

  Hmm. If the latter was the case, this was proof that there existed an alternative way to leveling besides slaughtering thousands of monsters. Could that be a solution to his approaching exp problems? Just sit around doing nothing near a church? That wasn’t too–

  Lily appeared right in the middle of them, projecting an aura of vulnerability.

  Right, grind now, think later.

  A few of the goblins stirred and they looked in her direction. His buff activated and the world slowed down.

  Finally.

  He gripped his dagger in the reverse grip because that looked way cooler and ran straight towards her. The limbs started flying almost instantly. Not a drop of blood touched his skin because he was that good.

  Essentially, the plan was as simple as they went. Since they couldn’t have Lily sneaking around invisible, they made her visible. Her role was to just stand still and look weak. Okay, not just that. She also projected an aura of weakness, not as strong as the last time thankfully, and a bit more specific. She broadcasted that she was the weak spot. That to beat Dennis, all the goblins needed to do was to kill her. It was even true, so all she had to do was just crank it up, make it more obvious, and the goblins were taunted.

  All Dennis needed to do was to kill them all before they killed Lily. It took a bit of convincing but thankfully she believed easily enough that he could pull that off. After all, at this point he had a reputation of being able to do that kind of shit.

  The area in front of the church wasn’t that spacious, and that meant that pretty much all the goblins were in his reach. With his speed, everything was in his reach. He could cover ten yards in the same time it took a goblin to make a step. Everything and everyone was less than a second away, as long as he kept his buff.

  It kind of was the reason why he didn’t use his katana anymore. The main advantage of it–the reach–was just useless for him. The dagger on the other hand was light, so his hand didn’t get tired so fast, and short, so he could swing it even faster. And it was still long enough to chop limbs off, so that was that.

  He reached Lily in just a moment, killing five or so creatures on his way. Instead of stopping, he practically flew past her. Even though inertia dragged him further away from the girl, the buff snapped only for a moment before turning back on.

  Maintaining the buff was the trickiest part, but they came up with a–sort of–reliable way to keep it active. Essentially, the point was to perpetually try to reach her but never succeed.

  He killed all the goblins behind her and rushed in her direction again, this time slightly changing the angle. The sleepy goblins were just starting to get up. He wasn’t sure that even a second passed since the fight started.

  As if it could ever be called a fight.

  He passed her again, feeling the buff turn off and on almost instantly while he allowed the inertia to carry him further away. It was a neat trick, since in order to work it required him to do a small jump along the ground. Scary as hell, but it allowed him to simultaneously move away from the girl and try to reach her. He just couldn’t. Not instantly. Turning around at that speed required some time, time that he generously spent killing everything that dared to be on his path.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The move was dangerous as hell because it required him to lose control of his movement for a fraction of a second, for both his feet to leave the ground and trust the past-Dennis who did the jump that he won’t just splat into a wall or some other obstacle while flying. It was finicky, with tons of ways it could go wrong, and honestly felt like playing russian roulette every time he did the jump.

  But it was skill-dependent, and he had all the skill, so his rate of success was 100%.

  This was a fine-tuning of his idea about running in circles that got ever so slightly smaller around the party. Obviously, circles didn’t work, the skill was too bitchy to allow that, but changing the angle of approach just a bit? That was fine. He wasn’t running in circles, he was running in narrow ellipses. He was orbiting her. Like an electron orbiting an atom, flying at ridiculous speeds, barely touching it but always missing only to come back to try again.

  He called the move Atomic Destruction. Lily agreed after he removed ‘anal’ from the name.

  She understood nothing about morality damage, in his humble opinion.

  A full circle around her took him slightly less than a second, ending a few yards to the side from his starting position. Then he did it again. And again.

  Lily was the eye of the storm. The center of the clock that had deadly Dennis-shaped murder hands rotating around it. She was vulnerable, yes, but that vulnerability was covered by a literal aura of death surrounding her. Her hair fluttered from the wind from his passing, and she stood there nervously, fidgeting and not knowing what to do with her hands as everything around her died.

  The nature of his movement meant that he didn’t cover all directions at all times. Like the hands of the clock, there were obviously empty spaces that he didn’t cover because he recently passed them, or didn’t reach yet. Those areas of relative safety were what goblins used to try and reach the girl. She squeaked and closed her eyes shut when one reached as close as two hands away, but Dennis expected that to happen. Some goblins getting close, not the eye shutting part, that was just stupid, she could’ve at least tried to dodge.

  But just like his movement pattern meant that there were zones where he couldn’t easily reach without making a sharp turn–which was awkward to pull off–it also meant that he passed the area immediately near the girl two or even three times per second. It was frequent enough that he was reliably sure that he’d be able to deflect arrows if any flew at her, not that there were any, simply not enough time passed for the scant few archer goblins to do anything. That area was basically the ‘shredder zone’. Nothing survived it.

  When Lily opened her eye to peek, that goblin that almost got to her was separated in four different pieces, mostly because Dennis wanted to show off and he passed it four times before the body fell to the ground. The ground around her was a bloody mess, but not a drop of that blood fell on her since he kind of was an expert in blood-aiming at this point and he wasn't, like, purposefully mean. He hoped she appreciated the gesture, it wasn’t easy to pull off without himself getting covered in blood as well. The blood puddle touched her shoes though, there was nothing he could do about that.

  By the time goblins started to seriously try and fight back, half of them were dead. Some of them were tougher than the others, some of them were a bit quicker, and two of them even started waving their hands to summon fireballs as if they had time, and they died all the same. That was just the nature of being grouped up so closely when Dennis was nearby, he was fast enough to count as a fucking AOE attack. There was nothing they could do.

  One might think that having a literal crowd of goblins would make it hard to move around, like some sort of–heh–crowd control, but nope, the combination of his talent and high Mind made slipping by them trivial.

  They had no chance, honestly. Unless one of them had a skill that would counter him, but that would just be bad luck, and anyway they hadn’t. High level goblins specced mostly in goblin wizards, as far as he could tell. Not exactly helpful when they didn’t have any time to cast.

  The whole fight lasted eight seconds. Coincidentally, it was just a tiny bit more than the amount of time he needed to make a full rotation around the girl, thus completely covering all the area in a fifteen yard radius around her.

  It was over.

  They were standing in the middle of the pile of corpses. Half a hundred leveled monsters slain in the span of seconds just like that. He was catching his breath, but honestly, he wasn’t that winded. He could do it again if needed.

  Lily slowly raised her foot, looking at the blood dripping from it.

  “Ew,” she grimaced, and put it down. He could hear a splash when it hit the ground. “Ew ew ew.”

  “Understandable,” he agreed calmly. “But look on the bright side, I’ve almost got a level! Let’s do it again!”

  Lily ignored him, quickly tiptoeing around the bodies and out of the blood puddle. She almost ran to the nearby house, fiddled with the lock for a few moments and disappeared inside.

  “Or we can break into random houses, sure,” he murmured to himself as he followed her.

  Inside the house, he could see the bloody footprints leading to the bathroom. Lily was leaning on the wall, trying to clean her shoes with towels. He tried to turn on the tap to see if there was any water, but had no luck. Most houses didn’t have any, unless they had a system that stored water, but those were rare.

  “How did you know that the door was unlocked anyway?” he asked while grabbing the spare towel to clean up his own sneakers.

  “It wasn’t,” she replied. “I just pretend that I know how to pick locks. It’s usually enough, most locks are really cheap and easy to pick.”

  “The fuck?” He stopped for a moment. “What the fuck can’t your skill do? Next time you’ll tell me you can pretend to be a god and just smite your enemies.”

  She shrugged.

  “Maybe if I have enough mana,” she said. “It’s all about mana costs. And… how scary it is.”

  “So do you actually know how to pick locks? Or is it more, like, you convincing the lock that you picked it?”

  The question made her pause.

  “Dunno. I think I knew how to pick them when I was doing it, but I don’t remember how I did it. But that doesn’t mean I actually knew, just that I believe what I’m acting. But maybe I knew? Does it matter?”

  “You could try to teach yourself to actually pick them,” he said. “Leave detailed instructions on how you did it before dropping the act, see if it’s gibberish.”

  She dropped the towel, inspecting the stains on her shoes and sighed.

  “Can we just go?” she asked. Her voice was dry. “Check what the hell is wrong with that church and return home?”

  “That thing’s locked up like a fortress,” he pointed out.

  “I can pick the fucking lock, Dennis,” she hissed.

  “You really liked those shoes, huh?”

  “Fuc–,” she froze mid-speech, her expression almost panicked as she realized something, before she took a deep breath and her usual smile returned.

  To think about it, he didn’t remember seeing her smile like that today.

  “It’s okay!” she said cheerfully, without a care in the world. “Let’s go check what’s inside that church! And then patrol more and kill more goblins!”

  “Didn’t you want to go back to the fort?”

  “Nope! Let’s go! I bet there’s treasure inside!” She practically rushed to the exit.

  “Weirdo,” he mumbled, before getting up and following the girl.