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Chapter 75: Speed

"Natz, look, he's way fiercer than Rambo!" While Bai Mo was clearing the perimeter, inside the defense line, the young soldier Ai'ni Lu, catching his breath from the intense fighting, spoke to his comrade beside him.

"This isn't a normal war movie anymore, this is X-Men versus Alien! That's Phoenix! Ai'ni Lu, you idiot!" Natz, beside him, was already completely captivated by Bai Mo, who was wantonly unleashing his psychokinesis.

"Phoenix, my foot! He's clearly a man."

"Does gender matter? As long as he's domineering enough. I just love this kind of overwhelming, crushing power."

"I've known you so long, and this is the first time I've learned your true preference. Looks like I can't sleep in the same barracks as you anymore." Ai'ni Lu clutched his rifle and took a step away.

"Scram, scram, scram! I'm not into *that*! I meant I admire him! You Neapolitan bumpkin always misunderstand us Northern Italians."

"You're the bumpkin! What's wrong with Naples, huh? Did Southerners ever provoke you? All Northern Italians are fussy, pretentious perverts like you!" Ai'ni Lu retorted, unwilling to back down.

Just as Natz was about to retort, he felt a heavy whack on his helmet.

"Which bas—" Natz hadn't even finished the "tard" when he turned his head to find his platoon leader had given him the whack. He forcibly swallowed the rest of the curse back into his mouth.

"Isn't this... isn't this just to relax our nerves a bit?" Natz tried to explain.

"Don't make excuses. This is war; relaxing your brain might just get a hole blown through it, and then you won't need to make excuses anymore. If you want to relax, wait until after the war, when you're alive and back home. Then no one will care if you're streaking or drinking."

Ai'ni Lu covered his mouth, chuckling from the side.

"And you! Ai'ni Lu, which training manual told you to hold your rifle with one hand on the battlefield! What's your other hand doing!" The platoon leader pointed at Ai'ni Lu, who had one hand over his mouth and the other holding his gun.

"You two little punks, if this weren't a battlefield, I'd make you each do at least two hundred push-ups when we get back. Remember, this is a battlefield!"

"Fourth Company, Sixth Company, move quickly to support the Southern Front! Fifth Company, stay and hold! The Southern Flank doesn't have a powerhouse like this, worth a hundred thousand men, and the pressure there is immense right now. Stop staring, stop gawking! Your comrades are fighting for their lives!" The commander bellowed into the radio at the company commanders on the Northern Flank, urgently diverting most of the troops to the Southern Flank, which Bai Mo couldn't support.

Immersed in shaping tornadoes, Bai Mo paid no heed to the farce unfolding between the two, which he had inadvertently caused. Although he could hear the sounds from a good portion of the battlefield, only the commander's deployments caught his slight attention.

As he continuously moved at high speed, he gradually realized how slow, how sluggish, the movements of the surrounding mutated creatures and soldiers actually were. They were no different from the slow-motion scenes he used to watch in movies.

"Too slow, too slow! Everything is so slow. It seems it's because I've always been accustomed to this kind of world, never truly leaving a low-speed existence. The real world I can perceive is actually ten times faster than the original world. I just hadn't reacted to it, always thinking that was all I could perceive. Only by moving at high speed did I realize this is how the world should be perceived! What I experienced in everyday life was merely my brain's self-deception, content with the status quo," Bai Mo muttered to himself.

"The improvement in my neural reaction speed is actually an improvement in my perception speed of the entire world. To think I was a little happy back then just seeing bullet trajectories! It's only now I've realized that the *entire world* has slowed down! Hahahaha! Hahahaha!" Thinking about it further, Bai Mo couldn't help but burst into uproarious laughter.

The soldiers watching from afar saw Bai Mo, who was still wreaking havoc, suddenly burst into laughter, and an inexplicable chill ran down their spines. In the eyes of these soldiers, anyone who could slaughter indiscriminately and laugh like a maniac while doing it was generally not a normal person.

"Well, heroes always have their quirks," Natz continued to rationalize for his temporary idol in his heart.

"Rambo wasn't this crazy, laughing while he killed," Ai'ni Lu whispered. However, he didn't dare speak any louder. Although he wasn't afraid that Bai Mo, who was dozens of meters away, would hear him, he was very much afraid of the platoon leader's fist.

"It's a shame I still haven't mastered it enough to conjure up tornadoes, but that's not important anymore. I can practice tornadoes anywhere I find an open space; there'll be a day I can make them. But if I don't see through the illusion of this low-speed world, my worldview will never truly change."

"My thoughts move ten times faster than before, and my physical strength can completely support ten times the activity speed. Why should I continue to live at normal speed and waste time?" This thought suddenly arose in Bai Mo's mind.

With that in mind, he began to try and adapt to this new speed of life.

As he advanced at full speed, exceeding 150 meters per second, Bai Mo attempted to guide his psychokinesis not with his divine sense, but with his own fingers.

Every time he wanted to attack a mutated creature, he made a rule for himself: he had to first point at it with his index finger, and after killing it, he had to silently count it in his mind.

One minute later.

"This is still too slow; I only killed 452 in one minute," Bai Mo said, quite dissatisfied with his performance. "On average, I pointed at fewer than eight per second. It seems I still have a long way to go before completely adapting to a ten-times-speed world."

Bai Mo's playful experiment naturally led to a large number of creatures slipping through his defenses. To compensate, he had no choice but to resume using his divine sense to perceive and clear out the mutated creatures that had breached his defense line due to his own lack of skill.

However, for ordinary soldiers, pointing eight times a second was already at a level where they would only see afterimages. After all, eight frames per second barely qualifies as continuous animation.

After finally clearing out all the mutated creatures that had breached his defenses, Bai Mo learned his lesson. He simply decided to use five seconds as his unit of measurement, testing his effective operations within that timeframe, much like measuring APM.

"One minute is too long; it's not easy to clear out all the escaped creatures. In five seconds, it shouldn't be so hard to patch things up. At their speed, they can't leave my killing radius within five seconds."

"Fifty-one in five seconds, seems like some progress." Bai Mo casually annihilated the other mutated creatures he hadn't pointed at, then plunged back into his practice.

"Fifty-three."

"Fifty-seven."

...

"Eighty-one."

"Eighty."

"It seems my current upper limit is around eighty effective operations in five seconds. Factoring in the ten-fold reaction speed, that's roughly equivalent to a normal person pointing about 1.6 times per second. But reaction speed shouldn't be calculated linearly, so if I convert that to two times per second, it's actually not that fast."

To Bai Mo, the so-called battlefield was nothing more than a sand table, where he could draw and erase as he pleased.