They were within the pocket dimension. It was night, and the ocean was filled with darkness. Above them, millions of stars shone brightly. Erik Bloodaxe had been waiting for them on the upper deck, sitting on the ship's railing and looking at all those stars.

  “You didn’t sleep much,” Arthur said.

  Erik Bloodaxe kept looking at the sky, his eyes showing a hint of weariness.

  “A king can never sleep much. Too many worries and things to consider. Too many traitors to hunt. Too many shadows lurking in the darkness, slowly driving you mad…”

  Mark and Arthur looked at each other, not really knowing what to say. They had seen how the Erik Bloodaxe’s army had colpsed into infighting minutes after resurrecting—so it was clear the king’s paranoia was well-founded.

  “How long will we be here?” Arthur asked, deciding to go straight to the point.

  The Viking king gradually broke from his thoughts and turned to the Gamers, a faint, sarcastic smile pying on his lips.

  “Don’t worry. The Glimpse of Valhal—or pocket dimension, as you call it—will colpse in about a week. Maybe a little longer; ten days or so.”

  “How can you know?” Mark asked. “Were you told in the meeting among the generals?”

  “I just know. How can we speak the same nguage when we have been born in different pces, thousands of years apart? We have been changed by the gods of this world.”

  The king sat next to a couple of casks of water. On top of one, there was a wooden cup. He picked it up and tossed it to Arthur, who caught it in midair.

  “There are a bunch of cups like that below deck.”

  “Okay…” said Arthur, turning the cup in his hands. Then, out of nowhere, he groaned, “Fuck…”

  Erik Bloodaxe smiled.

  “It has a little splinter, doesn’t it? I cut myself with it earlier today, when my men and I came here the first time.”

  Arthur yanked the splinter from his finger and examined the cup with interest.

  “So, we’re on the exact same ship?”

  “A perfect replica of it,” Erik Bloodaxe crified. “The ship we appeared on the first time was consumed by fire. So the cup I cut myself on was also destroyed.”

  He approached Arthur and Mark.

  “Order your people not to touch anything. I want this ship exactly as we found it. And everyone needs to know this vessel inside and out…”

  Arthur and Mark exchanged gnces.

  “You want to bring the Mongols here,” Mark said.

  The Viking king smiled. And his smile was dangerous—the smile of a predator.

  “Exactly. And when they come, we’ll be ready for them. We’ll know this ship so well we’ll be able to move through it blindfolded. And they’ll find themselves in an unknown terrain—and we’ll hunt them like animals.”

  Erik Bloodaxe walked by the two Gamers and started walking down, below decks.

  “Follow me. I’ll show you around.”

  They followed. Mark asked from behind the Viking.

  “If we spend about a week here, how long will it be for the Mongols outside?”

  Erik Bloodaxe waited for them at the end of the staircase. His angur face was covered in shifting shadows by the nterns swaying in the corridor.

  “I don’t know. You witnessed us entering the Glimpse of Valhal the first time, didn’t you? Help me calcute it. For us, it was about fourteen hours. It was a brutal battle—my men and I took cover below deck, and we made the enemy bleed for every step.”

  Mark tried to remember.

  “On the outside it was maybe ten minutes? Probably less.”

  “Yeah, closer to five than to ten,” Arthur added.

  The king nodded.

  “So it will be less than a couple of hours for the Mongols. Great, they won’t have too much time to rest.”

  They reached the square room at the foot of the stairs. On each side of the room opened a corridor. To each side of the staircase opened a corridor. Earlier that day, the Vikings had taken one of them, and the gamers the other.

  “As you know,” the Viking expined, “these are the living spaces. There’s also a small kitchen on the side of the ship where you slept. There’s more than enough food for everyone, so you’re welcome to use it. If the woman you brought with you is a gifted cook, she can prepare meals for everyone. If not, Harald was always handy preparing food when we were on campaign.”

  Erik turned around and walked deeper into the ship. Mark and Arthur, still on the staircase, started to walk behind him. There was a small corridor, with a few compartments to each side, filled with food, water caskets, and other provisions. In one of the compartments, there was a small armory, with a bunch of swords, daggers, and bows.

  The Viking opened and inspected each compartment while talking distractedly.

  “That ILoveFurries of you… he told everyone that part of his army was going to be composed of women. That some of them had been his most elite soldiers. I never quite believed him, but I guess I was wrong. I can’t wait to see what the young wench is able to do with a sword.”

  Mark, who seriously doubted Emily had ever held a sword in her life, tried to lower any expectations.

  “This particur… wench is not trained as a soldier. She is more a strategist.”

  The Viking took what seemed like a magnetic compass from a shelf, inspected it with curiosity, and left it in the same pce it had been.

  “Don’t worry, young man. I know none of you are trained with weapons—at least not with swords or any weapon I’ve ever seen. One of the modern generals—I forget his name—bbbered about it when we were all resurrected. The fool realized too te that he had made himself and every other modern general a target. So Johan, who was the most modern general of all by almost a century, couldn’t have been trained in weaponry either.”

  He looked at Mark, trying to gauge him.

  “You fought with other tools, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Interesting. We’ll try to teach you all we can. Hopefully, this strange Leveling system will serve to accelerate your learning. Bjorn told me that back in the cave, you, Mark, used some sort of witchery to escape from his grip—I’m assuming it was a Skill?”

  “Ah… Yeah. It was. It’s called [Phantom Presence].”

  Mark expined a little what it did.

  “Interesting, interesting…”, answered the Viking king as he continued to walk deeper into the ship.

  “So this is one of your Viking ships?” Arthur asked.

  “What?” asked the Viking. “No. I have never seen a ship like this—our ships didn’t have lower decks. We focused our ship-building on speed and maneuverability. This one seems to be very focused on increasing cargo. And although it pains me to say, this is superior craftsmanship than our own—I have never seen a ship as magnificent as this.”

  “Really? I assumed each general would have a pocket dimension fit to his life.”

  “Doesn’t seem to be the case—at least not for me. I doubt something like this even existed in my lifetime”, answered Erik Bloodaxe. “And now we arrive at the most interesting room of them all…” he said, approaching a thick wooden door that he pushed forward.

  The two Gamers followed him into the next room. It was spacious, bigger than any other room they had seen. Mark took a deep breath when he realized where they were—and he smelled salt, wood, the acrid residue of gunpowder, and the glorious metallic tinge of firepower.

  There were two massive cannons, each one aiming to the exterior through a gunport, toward each side of the ship. Their ammunition—heavy spheres of solid iron—was neatly stacked in reinforced wooden racks, ready for use.

  It was the cannon room.

  Arthur and Mark looked at each other.

  “Holy fuck…” Mark said.

  And then Erik Bloodaxe approached one of the cannons and gave it a little kick.

  "Do you guys know what the hell these are?"

  Mark and Arthur ran to get the Viking King away from the cannon. And rushed to expin what those weapons were —their incredible potential for destruction. Apparently, they hadn’t been invented when the Vikings existed.

  A few minutes of expnations ter, Erik Bloodaxe pointed to the end of the cannon room, where there was another wooden door:

  “Even deeper there’s another room —the final room. It’s some sort of storage for these strange devices. You called them cannons, right?” He studied them with a little distrust. “I’m eager to try them. Are you sure they’re as powerful as you said?”

  “They are powerful,” Arthur answered. “I’m not an expert on history, but I’m pretty sure they changed warfare forever. Right, Mark?”

  Mark didn’t answer. He had just gotten an idea. And, like all the ideas that had occurred to him since the start of his strange adventures in this world, it was potentially awesome.

  And potentially deadly.

  “You know, you’re right, Sir,” he told the Viking king. “I’m not exactly a soldier. I was chosen by my general for my ability to think… creatively, to adapt to different circumstances, to evade certain rules—if they get in the way…”

  “You’re a criminal, then?”

  That caught Mark off guard. Erik Bloodaxe smiled and added:

  “It’s okay, young man, I’ve been called that too.”

  Mark smiled back at the king of two nations.

  “You know what they say, right?” he answered, “If they hate you, you must be doing something right.”

  Erik Bloodaxe chuckled.

  “What an immoral era you must have been born into,” he said with a ugh. “They hate you, so you must be doing something right…”

  Mark continued walking.

  “Yeah. Maybe. I’m thinking about when you came back from the pocket dimension, you brought back a bucket of water, didn’t you?”

  The Viking king made memory.

  “Yeah, I think I remember Bjorn using it to put out a fire on Leif.”

  “So you can bring something from the Glimpse of Valhal, right?”

  “Yes. I guess you can...”

  “Well, I wonder if there’s a weight limit to what you can take with you…” Mark said, as he palmed one of the massive cannons with his hand…

  Erik Bloodaxe took a few seconds to understand. Then he started to ugh.

  “So that’s why ILoveFurries brought with him people like you…”