“Busted,” Dennis said to the corpse-alike. “Absolutely busted. Stupidly broken. Absolutely no-fair cheatingly overpowered. Did you also get a Sovereign skill and robbed some saint of it to get this shit? Is that why it’s so fucking broken? An acting skill, Lily. An acting skill! Acting my ass! How the fuck– How…”

  The seemingly dead girl didn’t answer, being seemingly dead. By all the conventional metrics, really.

  “How the fuck did you manage to fuck up this much?” he asked quietly, undoing another stitch of his armor.

  Would've been easier if he had a rope. Or a first-aid kit, or… something. Like he did in the first few days of his outdoors grinding before ditching them despite Nancy’s nagging. But the small backpack was too bulky, annoying to carry and ruined his vibe, so he vetoed it after trying a few times. It’s not like he needed anything in there, after all, he could always just loot some random store nearby. The armor was enough. It could theoretically see at least some use, it was possible for him to be sneakily shot from behind or something. Not plausible, but possible.

  Lily seemed to be a like-minded individual, not bothering to take anything with her but a bow and a quiver. Or maybe she just couldn’t steal a backpack without being noticed, he didn’t know.

  So the armor had to be enough.

  The Frankensteinian patchwork of leather pieces that made up his armor was a horrendous thing, but in a roundabout way he was lucky to have it. The stitches weren’t rope, but the thread was exceptionally thick and sturdy, and there was a lot of it. So the last hour was spent in an impromptu handicrafting session, with a seemingly dead girl to keep him company. He was unmaking his armor, and making his own rope. Rope-like thing. The girl should be light enough for it to work, he hoped.

  She wasn’t dead. Okay, no, she was very dead, but in this world they all were kinda-undead, and more importantly, he could feel her existence. So it didn’t matter that she didn’t breathe or had no heartbeat. He also could do that, so those metrics kinda lost their meaning. He felt her level, so unlike that Arm–which was very dead–Lily supposedly had some ‘health points’ left. At least he decided to operate on that assumption. It was either that, or things that weren’t alive could have skills and levels.

  Which they could.

  He shook another error out of his mind. Ignoring them was quickly becoming second nature.

  He picked her up gently, placing her on his back and using the kinda-rope to fix her in place so she wouldn’t just randomly fall back. Had to lean forward a bit, and there was no way he could fight like that, but it was stable enough. The blood stained his shirt, but that wasn’t a problem, it was already red. Maybe he should poke that rib back inside though. It kinda poked him in the rib.

  Taking a few careful steps confirmed that the solution somewhat worked. Maybe he wasn’t the fittest guy in the world, but Lily didn’t weigh much more than a particularly heavy backpack, so it was fine.

  Off he goes. To the town square, first. Might as well finally check out the ‘statue’ aura source from up close, since the guardian was so generously slain.

  Were these monsters guardians? Or was this more of a territory protection thing? The aura was presumably good for staving off the nothingness from eating them, so maybe they just didn’t want to share?

  The way wasn’t long. Just a few minutes on foot. He reached the statue in a few seconds instead because he was a cheaty cheater and that far-away dying person was still conveniently dying in that direction.

  From up close the statue wasn’t that much more impressive. Some conquistador kind of dude who was important a few hundred years ago. The rock felt real as he touched it. None of that ‘compressed dust’, it was a cold and solid thing. Dennis was surprised to realize that this was the first time he touched something cold in this world. Actually, he couldn’t remember feeling the temperature of anything since they came here.

  The aura was not what he expected. Still weak as a baby, even when he was literally touching the source, if it was a skill then Dennis would barely classify it as level one. Even less, if that was possible. Even the fucking canteen aura was stronger than this, despite the fact that this was an important statue of a somewhat important dude. It still lost to the canteen.

  No one cared about the statue that much, he realized. Soup was just superior.

  The things he could hear from it kind of supported that. He expected to be subjected to a torrent of history trivia or realizing how actually important the dude was, but… Well, it whispered history to him a little bit, but the main message was about a common sight, an unchanging landmark. A symbol of the town, and a thing that was always there in the center of it. The thing that you looked at while eating ice cream, and a place you used as a meeting point with your friends.

  Below the statue there was a spot where the name of the guy was supposed to be engraved. It was empty. No one, ever, cared about the name.

  Basically, the statue had the ‘common meeting place with a mild historical significance’ skill. A shitty one, at that. Nothing even close to approaching what the altar at the church had, before those cracks ate it.

  Was there anything he could do with it? Maybe absorb it or something? Not that he wanted the skill, but if it had a skill, maybe it had experience that he could get by, ehh, slaying the statue?

  He glanced at Lily.

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  His statue-slaying equipment was kinda dead though. He could try throwing rocks at it really fast? That could actually work, but he’d need some sturdy rocks and a lot of enthusiasm. And time. And patience. A brick flying at almost 100mph was no joke, but the ones that were made of dust would just crumble in the air.

  Lily believed that destroying it wouldn’t do much, if he remembered it correctly. He wasn’t so sure about that, but he could see it. If the thing was more of a focal point then a source, destroying it would maybe disperse the aura a bit more, but that would be it. After all, those cracks that ate the church aura didn’t grab the altar, they grabbed the whole aura in its entirety.

  There had to be some sort of connection between the Arms, the cracks, and the places of significance. Since both the fort and the statue had the Arms chilling there, their presence indicated a pattern. More than that, the Arms themselves gave him a strong feeling of subservience, of following someone’s will, or purpose, or an order. The church didn’t have the ‘church’ skill anymore, and it didn’t have anything guarding the place. He would’ve noticed, those things were quite easy to notice. The church skill was the strongest one, and it was spreading in the real world. The others were weak, and he couldn’t remember feeling anything weird in the canteen before, and there were no reports of anything weird going on in the town center. The raiding party would’ve noticed that.

  Were the Arms even people or people-adjacent things? He assumed that they were particularly strong monsters, and they were some kind of entities for sure, but… When he tried to feel out Lily, the most he could say was if she was using her skill or not, or to gauge her relative strength. If she held some kind of ‘meaning’, like skills did, it was too chaotic to figure out. But the Arms were straightforward. They basically screamed their purpose at him with their sheer existence.

  Like a skill.

  “They’re summons, aren’t they?” he asked out loud. Nothing replied.

  He went to check out the body next.

  The first thing that he noticed was that the monster lost its sheen. The glossy darkness that surrounded it disappeared, leaving only the oversized body behind. The thing was huge, built from muscles upon muscles, but upon closer inspection he could say that it was kind of… generic. No scars, no tattoos, no clothes, it was basically a huge Ken doll made of the same pale-gray material that the dust was. No bones and internal organs either. A small kick confirmed his suspicion, breaking off a chunk of the body. Brittle.

  Yeah, the thing was definitely made out of the most abundant material in this world and then animated with magic. Kind of cool, to be honest.

  “If you were summoned here to watch the auras, it would make sense that someone out there wanted to watch the auras, right?” he shared his wisdom with the dead golem. “Why, though?”

  He was not cut out for this detective shit. Just give him a bad guy to beat up, or a few babies falling from a window of a burning building, please. He won’t even microwave them.

  It seemed that he was done with the place. Not that he got much use of it, but it would’ve been wrong to just ignore it after Lily fucked up so much for the chance to inspect it.

  “At least you’ve got a level out of it, eh?” he said to the corpse on his back. Or, well, not a corpse per se, just a person who was injured beyond the point of living. Totally survivable. “Must’ve been a lot of exp. You exp-thief.”

  He had no idea what to do with the girl. Well, obviously he wouldn’t just leave her like that, just taking a few steps away from the body made his skill scream at him that there was a person to be saved nearby, but he was a bit lost on the saving part. First aid probably won’t help here, not that he knew how to do it. He was reasonably sure that she could be saved because, well, the skill told him so, but with no options for the actual saving part it seemed that he was kind of stuck with just dragging the body around with him until some new opportunity presented itself.

  Maybe he’ll find some healing potions, they were a staple of a genre for a reason. Or a priest. A necromancer? A necromancer felt more appropriate. Or, if she was actually somehow alive and only on the brink of death, maybe her Constitution would heal her over time. How long did it take a person to heal from injuries like that? A few weeks? That was how long it usually took the characters to heal in comics.

  He really should push that rib back inside. Might speed up the process. And stop the poking.

  Was there anything else important that he should be doing here? Aside from trying to destroy the statue–which would be a pain in the ass and probably won’t do anything–he could go check out the church again and see that it was just a building again, or go back to the fort and kill or be killed by the Arm there.

  Could he beat it now? Was he strong enough? The mysterious dying person was still mysteriously dying somewhere, and Lily triggered his skill every time he took a few steps away from her, so technically he had two semi-reliable targets now. If he placed Lily’s body somewhere behind the fort he’d be able to consistently use the buff by switching back and forth between the targets in either direction. And he was fast as fuck.

  Honestly, winnable.

  Tempting, even. The girl got a whole level for one-tapping the thing. She was even a bit stronger than Dennis now. That was a lot of exp. He didn’t know the golem’s level aside from ‘fucking high’, it was too strong to compare to anything, but it had to be enough to get him halfway to the sixth, or even to just straight up level him up. Two levels in a day would be nice. Very nice. Supremely nice. Getting his ass on the right side of the exponential curve as fast as possible was of paramount importance.

  He’d just have to waste even more time by dragging himself and Lily there the slow way, and then risk his life in a fight that might not be as winnable as he wished. More than that, he would risk the lives of both Lily and the mysterious person because who else would save them if he died? All of that for a chance not to be a hero, but to just get more strength?

  He chuckled.

  Yeah, that was a temptation for pussies who were insecure in their current strength. He was way cooler than that. And he knew his priorities.

  He greeted the superspeed like an old friend, putting on the buff like a mantle. A promise that he gave himself, now tangible and judging, the power with infinite potential. But he was worthy. Of course he was.

  The first few steps were relatively slow, almost hesitant as he checked if the rope was holding and nothing weird was happening with Lily as he used his power to move another person for the first time. Would be really awkward if she wasn’t receiving the protection of Dexterity from normal physics. Snapping her in half by taking a sharp turn was not on the menu.

  But it was fine. Why wouldn’t it? His clothes and weapons received the benefits of his speed, and one semi-dead body wasn’t that different, it seemed. Kind of like Superman with his forcefield thing. He was a bit worried that he’d have to upgrade his skill for it to work like that, but this time Dexterity had him covered.

  Nice.

  He ran.