Jjhutto_Son of Flame
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B3. Ch. 26 Bullet speed.
🕑 Added 2024-08-08 13:39:29 +0000 UTCNyuk kept up the cold shoulder act right up until he heard Tilly’s plan for the next test, “Human, are you crazy?... Actually, no one needs you to answer that. Maybe your Identify is broken. None of my men are below 40, and Gods, I’ve somehow made it to level 52! Let me tell you that Bottleneck is a real-”
“Alright! Enough jawing, none of us gets to sleep until this is done. So let's head out.” Julius called, dropping the subordinate act as quickly as he had picked it up.
Tilly fought down a grin at the lapin's characteristic response, and looked up at the sky, noting that the sun was already above the mountain ridges, “Actually Nyuk, he is right. I only have an hour or two at most before I have to be back in the city, so I’ll just have to show you. Nyuk just nodded reluctantly at the dodge and moved to follow as Tilly headed out to the wall.
The group was up and over the wall without another complaint. In fact, besides Nyuk, many of the other rangers seemed almost eager once they heard the objective of the “special detail” and before he knew it, he was standing with his back against the cliff facing twenty tired, angry Rangers, holding their weapons at the ready.
Tilly glanced over at Julius and Marq, who had posted up twenty yards to the side of the line of fire. The acolyte looked nervous, and Julius… Julius’ mask of cynical professionalism was barely covering his eagerness as his diabolical scheme took shape. If that man's sleep was going to be interrupted, you could bet he was going to do whatever he had to in order to get some entertainment out of it.
“You’re sure about this?” Nyuk called one more time from his leftmost position on the line of ranged fighters. Tilly eyed the unit warily, but after one more pause to check that yes, he was, in fact, being an idiot, he nodded slowly, hating how extreme he needed to take this for it to actually produce useful knowledge for him in the future. He needed to push himself to the extreme and know exactly what this next title could do if he wanted to be able to make the right call in the heat of battle.
“Yeah, I don’t think I have much of a choice in this one... Begin firing at my signal, and cease at my or Julius’ command. If it looks like I am avoiding being hit too easily, scale up your attacks until my call or ten breaths have passed. Everyone clear?”
“Yes Sir!” They called back, hands hovering over knocked arrows, and in one case, a sling a whirling sling.
Taking another breath, Tilly centered himself and raised his hand. The Rangers lifted their weapons in response, ready for the signal. Tilly pulled up his Bracelet command, electing Dexterity and the now familiar ripple of frailness ran through his body, followed by what felt like tiny jolts of electricity. His body jerked in response to the magnitude of increased connection and muscle memory that rolled through his frame in an instant.
Unfortunately, he realized too late that a hand signal was probably a bad idea when he was testing out another physical stat. His eyes whipped up to the sounds of releasing arrows just as his pupils dilated to an insane degree. On instinct, he tried fruitlessly to dive to the ground, but his body did not respond.
No, that wasn’t right…
The rate at which he was processing the scene before he shot forward even as the world slowed to an almost comical degree. His body actually was responding, but slowly, as if he was trying to move through mud. The projectiles themselves were similarly affected and while they were moving considerably faster than him, that only meant that they were floating through the air like slow-toss water balloons. Tilly watched in fascination as the nearest arrow warbled back and forth, shimmying through the air as its deadly point surged toward his eye.
After watching the arrow travel almost half the distance it needed to reach him, his mind finally adjusted to the new perception rate, and Tilly realized his dive was not going to clear him from the path of almost any of the projectiles, so he improvised. He took the driving foot of the dive and engaged his hips, shifting the trajectory to a more lateral maneuver.
As he pushed into the motion, he felt the full effect of his new stats finally take hold of his body, reforging every fast twitch fiber and nerve connection into something that was a magnitude more efficient than its old system. Somehow the process of electrons from the brain through nerves to muscles was reforged into an instantaneous expression of motion, outside of thought.
He pushed off the ground, diving through the air as if it were water directly toward the cloud of projectiles right as they coalesced to meet him. Before his conscious mind had even noticed, his subconscious had set his dive at a corkscrew, causing him to minimize himself as a target, and shift out of the way of each projectile as it came for the space that had once been his chest or head.
These boys really meant business…
Arrowheads nicked along his head, shoulders, and arms, grazing him everywhere, but none landing a penetrating blow. Before he fully comprehended what had happened, he was rolling to his feet, having miraculously made it through the storm of projectiles with only scratches.
However, his chosen opponents were no slouches when it came to Dexterity and they had been accruing plenty of experience against fast opponents out in the field. Another wave of projectiles was already being loosed even though Tilly’s diving dodge couldn’t have taken more than a second. Not only that but judging from the spread of the follow-up attack, they had released in a wider pattern, intentionally cutting off Tilly’s path to escaping the next round of projectiles.
The follow-up was coordinated, focused and seemed to have occurred without any intervention from their commander… Tilly glanced over at Nyuk, impressed before activating his new title, quickly scanning the notification.
Warning, you no longer fulfill the requirements for the Title: [Resolute]. The title has been revoked but can be regained if the requirements are met again in the future.
Congratulations! You have earned the Title: [Preternatural]
[Preternatural]: Your Dexterity Stat is higher than all of your other Stats combined. As long as this remains true, you may advance your awareness and movement speed to ten times its base for three breaths.
Tilly's lips curled in a slow smile as the projectiles swimming through the air toward him slowed to a crawl. He fought to stand up from his crouch, fighting against the heavy weight that was normal time. His awareness had moved so far beyond the normal flow of events that he was reminded of his first encounter with Origin.
Time was still moving though. Nyuks arm was already slowly drawing back another arrow, displaying a speed that would have been an incomprehensible blur from Tilly’s old point of view. Now though? He felt like he had all the time in the world. He did a mental inventory of his breaths, recognizing the slowly releasing pressure in his diaphragm as the exhalation of his first breath after activating his title. The title would last three breaths before he returned to his Bracelet-enhanced high Dexterity state for another 6 breaths.
Taking his time to carefully consider his position, he pushed his body to step slightly to the side and lean forward, reaching out for the one unavoidable arrow on his chosen path of escape. The movements took an arduous amount of time, and he had to focus on the motion of each muscle to make them happen at all, straining against his limits to move in this new world of hyper-slowed time.
Honestly, he shouldn’t have been able to move at all at these speeds, he just didn’t have the strength for that level of explosive movement but the change in his body had not just heightened his awareness to an insane degree. His coordination had become perfect, every muscular process involved in each motion felt fluid to an almost instantaneous degree.
The casual step he had undertaken, took over forty-five seconds from Tilly’s point of view, and that was with him straining at his maximum output. The slight lunge forward that followed, along with a gentle raising of his hand to meet the body of the projectile coming for his chest, all took another minute after that.
If it wasn’t for the fact that he had yet to finish inhaling his second breath, he would have felt like he was doing Tia Chi in the park. Finally, the tips of his fingers brushed the body of the arrow, moving along with its slow momentum forward, and angling it just slightly off its path. The contact instantly bruised the tips of Tilly’s fingers, but otherwise was surprisingly easy.
What followed was several more rounds of grueling physical chess as Tilly carefully navigated the strategically shot projectiles aiming to pin down his preternatural movements. The line of Rangers kept firing, releasing what must have been several arrows per second, but Tilly picked his way through and around them over the course of his next two breaths. In his titled state, each breath felt like it took around five minutes to fully progress through his body, and not wanting to miss such an incredible opportunity, he spent all of it studying his body’s application of force on the environment around him.
Every new movement was a revelation as if he had only known how to use the skeleton, ligaments, and muscles in crude crashing motions. Now, under the limits placed on his body in this new state, each gesture had to be perfectly controlled, exerting the minimum force necessary to achieve each maneuver. It was one of the most profound physical experiences he had ever experienced, and as he felt himself finishing his third exhalation, time snapped back to slow, instead of glacial.
By this point, the Rangers had fanned out and many were empowering different Abilities to make sure he did not last the full 10 breaths. Tilly knew he had learned everything he needed from the exercise, and he cut his fourth inhalation short to shout, “Stop!”
His vocal cords vibrated deeply in his throat as the sound escaped his lips and reverberated around the still-coming projectiles. With his speed greatly reduced from the withdrawal of the title’s power, Tilly winced as he spotted several arrows and a spinning riverstone that he no longer had time to dodge.
As his command reached the line of fighters, they instantly complied, even as Tilly launched into another contorting dive. He had to shift into a strange, curled hunch as his feet left the ground. The previously identified unavoidable projectiles found their general mark but thankfully missed the vitals they had been zeroing in on.
Knives of pain dug into his thigh and right arm, along with the deep crack of an empowered stone shattering the shoulder he had raised to protect his head.
“Cease fire!” Julius shouted, rushing forward with Marq. Tilly for his part grinned through the pain as four times as many projectiles flitted all around him missing due to the unpredictable position he had adopted with his final attempted dodge.
Tilly gasped through the pain, straightening slowly as the Rangers followed in Julius’ wake. The Bracelets thrummed back to life and his stats returned to their normal spread. Before Tilly could say any different, the Bastion gave him a quick look over, before shooting his hands forward like striking snakes. In an impressive display of coordination, he grabbed the two arrows lodged in Tilly’s body and yanked them free.
“ARGGG!” Tilly yelled out in pain and surprise, as Marq began casting next to Julius, bathing Tilly’s injuries in the blue light of his healing magic. His returning Endurance, along with the healing dulled the pain almost immediately and he looked around at the Rangers eyeing him curiously until he found Nyuk’s eyes.
The lapin had on a rare expression of wonder, and Tilly began searching for some cool line to drop on his friend when he noticed the worrying presence of a flashing notification icon on his HUD. He had muted damage reports… and he hadn’t gained a Debuff or anything…
Ignoring their looks, he pulled up the notification screen,
Congratulations! Your body has experienced a level of coordination and speed reserved for the semi-divine. Your careful observation of the experience has resulted in a minor absorption of this higher level of physical integration. +4 increase to your base Dexterity.
Warning, you no longer fulfill the requirements for the Title: [Resolute]. The title has been revoked but can be regained if the requirements are met again in the future.
Tilly groaned, his eyes shooting up from his screen to glare at the sky, “You have got to be shitting me!”
“Told you this was a bad idea” Nyuk added a second later.
Comments
Wyatt Hilbert
Thanks for the chapter
