The call came at a rather inconvenient time, as I’d only just managed to get in a position where I could talk to Merlin, ask for advice on what my new Class might mean for me, perhaps even share some experiences.

  He’d taught me much of his etiquette knowledge in the past, but beyond that … he’d been the power behind Arthur’s throne, powerful and influential without becoming a threat, or even being perceived as the faintest shadow of one.

  And maybe, just maybe, I could lay my hands on some more spells?

  But then, my phone rang and I looked down at it, seeing that it was a known caller while [Piercing Gaze] informed me of the fact that the displayed contact was “real,” meaning the number wasn’t being spoofed.

  The American Embassy in Berlin, the entity I’d been advised to contact for future dealings. Probably so that the next time I popped up in an embassy, it wouldn’t be a completely random one, or maybe to spare Ambassador Jones’ sleep, considering how far ahead Ulaanbaatar was in terms of time zones.

  “Tristan Vogt, Ambassador to the Untersberg,” I announced as I accepted the call.

  “The National Mall has turned into a Nation Boss, I have been asked to formally request your aid, especially considering the high density of civilians would prevent most countermeasures even if the monster’s defenses do not neutralize them.

  “In addition, well, …” he trailed off.

  I sighed internally. Breathe in, breathe out, don’t be snarky.

  “… you’re trying to ascertain whether the lack of ratification can be looked over since it’s going to be hard to have the senate sit in session with a Nation Boss less than a hundred meters away?” I finished for him, managing to keep my tone even.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the line, followed by a sigh.

  “We will help, however, there will be a certain expectation of the treaty going through after this is over. If it isn’t … well, that’ll be our loss, and lessons will be drawn from that.”

  Translation: you’ve got the opportunity to screw us, but if you do, going forward, we wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.

  Though if he hadn’t hinted at the issue, I wouldn’t have mentioned or even referred to it.

  Help for fellow human beings in a situation where we needed to hang together or hang separately wasn’t contingent on getting anything back. Aside from maybe an absence of backstabbing, though that was more of a “generally expected societal norm.”

  But with us being on the verge of signing a treaty that would guarantee the thing we were already doing … the potential for BS was there.

  “Thank you,” the ambassador replied.

  “So, where do you need reinforcements? What about a command center? And is Union Station clear?”

  “Unio- … I believe so, why?”

  Because it was nearby, it was a place I had been, and I could teleport there. Something I sincerely doubted went for whatever wound up being the command center. A place I could retreat from to go look for where I needed to be for the sake of coordination but everyone else could jump straight into combat from was probably the optimal choice, in that case.

  “Because we need somewhere safe to travel to. Find out, please.”

  A particularly cynical part of my mind warned me that telling us it would be fine when it definitely wasn’t would seem to be a great idea to get us all killed to anyone unaware of the particulars of my teleportation, but I ruthlessly squashed that idea.

  We’d be careful, and take a couple of seconds to look through the portal before marching through as a general precaution, but diving down the rabbit hole of paranoia right here, on the eve of battle was just plain dumb.

  My phone buzzed with a “another caller is attempting to reach you, would you like to hang up your current call” warning, accompanied by Fionn’s caller ID, but I pressed that away, then contacted him via [Ambassadorial Authority’s] “face time” function.

  “Nation Boss in Washington, on the phone with the American authorities now, I’ll portal you here when you’re ready,” I rattled off while covering my phone’s microphone.

  “Please open the portal in the school’s lobby in five minutes,” he replied. “Though there’s a second Nation Boss in China that we may be invited to deal with.”

  Then he turned away from the “screen” to keep doing whatever he was doing. He couldn’t hang up from his end, but that was about it.

  “We should be ready to make the jump in ten minutes,” I spoke into my phone. “I’ll call you in nine minutes, I need to know if Union Station is still standing by then.”

  “I can do that.”

  And with that, the ambassador hung up, leaving me free to dial up Merlin while contacting Dietrich via my Skill, warning him that I was about to teleport him and Mia back while using [Ambassador’s Instinct] to guide the portal.

  “Nation Boss, Washington DC, we are reinforcing,” Merlin announced the instant he picked up. “Can you open a portal to the base of Big Ben?”

  “I can to the fence just outside it,” I replied.

  “Do that in eight minutes please, I will call when I am there with the others,” Merlin announced and hung up.

  Well, that was easy. And had, ironically, given me the perfect reason to make sightseeing a productive and potentially even necessary activity, since guiding people outside the range of [Ambassador’s Instinct] to landmarks so I could teleport them would make things so much easier. Of course, I still needed to find the time to do so … but if I did, I’d be doing that while learning magic in the back of taxis and the like.

  Mia and Dietrich marched through their portal, which I’d opened next to me, while I was busy armoring up, which basically boiled down to strapping on as much armor as I could, then using [Modern Makeover] to shift everything into something I could actually move in.

  “So, Nation Boss?” Mia asked. “How bad is it?”

  I shrugged but pulled up the first “breaking news” story I’d found, then showed it to her.

  “Holy shit,” she commented, then ran off in the direction of the armory with a cry of “Be right back!”

  “Let us hope the same strategy as last time works,” Dietrich commented, looking over my shoulder.

  “Let’s,” I said. Dietrich’s [Sword Art: Titansplitter] had reliably been able to force the previous Nation Boss to sacrifice one of its cores to prevent itself from being cut apart. If this thing had cores too, then he’d instantly be able to destroy the first, and another one every half an hour after that, since the sacrifice also artificially extended the offending Skill’s cooldown.

  Then, he turned towards the throne where Charlemagne was sitting, for once, illusionary pages and battleplans floating around him. His [Focus of Power] was a new Skill, and it had let him empower his throne so that it boosted the range of his abilities when he sat on it.

  Normally, he preferred to stay on his feet, walking around the planning table with whatever aides were helping him that day, or running around with one earphone in while doing something that did not require his full concentration … yeah, since he’d discovered all the various texts that were available on audiobook nowadays, he’d basically been lost to us when he was off the clock, or at least as off the clock as he ever got.

  “Will you be coming?”

  Charlemagne shook his head. “I shall remain here, there is no help I could offer there that I could not also offer from here.”

  Yeah … that new Skill was bordering on the overpowered. His strength may lie in logistics and discipline, not direct attack power, but that did not change the fact that he was devastatingly strong.

  I just went back to scrolling through my phone, trying to find out as much as I could about the Nation Boss, then opened a portal to Fionn’s academy at the allotted time to let in him, the Fianna, and half the student roster.

  “Tristan, could you teach your strongest attack spells to ever- …” Fionn began, but I cut him off. “I can teach a smaller number of spells to everyone in ten meters.”

  After all, I knew he couldn’t read the System the same way he could everything else, and that Skill upgrade was new.

  “Do that, then,” he said. “Tele- and terrakinetic spells.”

  [Lesser Telekinesis] and [Terrakineis], then. The former was a new acquisition, which allowed me to freely use telekinesis at low power, and the latter was one I’d gotten a while ago for building purposes.

  I’d also learned the stronger spell [Telekinetic Push], which hit harder but, much like the weaker [Lesser Telekinetic Push], only worked in one direction, away from me.

  “I’d like to wait until Mia’s back,” I said, and he nodded, then went over to Charlemagne to talk.

  Three minutes after that, I opened a portal to the street outside the Palace of Westminster and was surprised to not only see Merlin and Arthur march through, but also Vice Admiral Drake. It must have shown, because he took a second to state “some of my skills work with the military in general” before looking around the room.

  “We’re about to rebuild this entire place from the ground up,” I told him, feeling a little defensive about the fact that we were basically still living in a magical medieval castle with the occasional bit of technology lying around, as though this were a movie set and some dopey intern had left their phone lying in full view of the camera.

  In fact, the only thing that was left to do before Charlemagne reshaped the mountain was to get some more resources, metals not found in the Untersberg and various plastics and the like for electrical insulation, as well as crossing some I-s and dotting some T-s on the blueprints.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  We’d meet the fourth challenge guns blazing, even if things were only a tenth as effective and the enemies twice as powerful as expected, we’d still fuck them up in short order.

  Mia showed up at that point, and I used [Knowledge Transfer] before making a call to ensure that Union Station was still standing.

  I only had one portal left today. That was also why the Golem of Prague couldn’t join us, but it meant that if this portal didn’t work, we’d be hours late to the party since we had to take a plane.

  Apparently, it was.

  So I opened a portal, took two seconds to make sure it was clear, and walked out … behind everyone else, obviously. I wasn’t an idiot.

  The iconic train station was still mostly intact, somehow, but what damage there was had taken the form of cracks in the walls, floor, and columns, as well as chunks of rubble that had fallen at some point. Something more commonly associated with earthquakes, rather than monster attacks.

  “You have the directions for the command center?” Drake asked.

  I nodded, and started to walk off.

  Normally, this would have all been coordinated through the Pentagon, at least near as I could tell, but that particular building was less than two kilometers from the site of the battle, and based on the single historical example currently available, that put it very much in the line of fire. A problem that went doubly for the White House, which was even closer.

  Instead, the directions we’d been given were towards a nearby jeep which was supposed to transport me, and now Drake too, I supposed, to the actual command center.

  The Capitol, which had somehow escaped completely intact so far, blocked our view of the boss itself, but I still caught sight of a thrashing tentacle of grass and dirt as it rose above the buildings, allowing me to see its name.

  Well … it seemed the System had taken a very dim view of American independence, based on that name. Not that bad, considering all the monsters it had hurled at us thus far, but still adding insult to injury.

  A crimson streak came shooting down from the sky, hammering into the ground with an impact I could feel from here, followed by a weird cracking and tearing sound … that had been Gae Bolg, hadn’t it? The barbed spear which grew countless spines through its victim’s body?

  Oh, that would be a pain to get out, since each and every spine needed to be dug out before the weapon could be retrieved. Well, knowing Fionn, he’d help if not outright do it himself.

  But seeing the legendary weapon used this early was a sign of just how serious this was. And how far I still had to go.

  ***

  Fionn

  Carried skywards by the wind, he hung above the battlefield, where a two-kilometer stretch of parkland lined by old buildings had transformed into a roiling mass of fury and lethal intent, while ghostly soldiers from half a dozen different eras marched from the churning Earth, from spots that Charlemagne was already highlighting via his Skills as holding cores, identified by Dietrich.

  There were six. Five of them were mobile, constantly in motion, and near-impossible to accurately strike, but the sixth, the final, lay beneath a white spire that rose in a circle of undisturbed grass.

  So he made a choice

  One likely would not fix things completely, but should help massively.

  A mental nudge in the direction of the communications Skill connecting them directed Charlemagne to initiate one of their plans.

  Down below, a sword manifested in Dietrich’s hands, flashed through the air and a line of energy sprang from its tip, carving through the ground as though it were mere air, threatening to split the Nation Boss in half. But before it had gone even a third of the way through, the blade of light splintered, coming apart at the same time as a part of the monster seemed to still.

  So sacrificing the once-daily ability to copy a weapon to use Excalibur for this had been a good idea. Bisecting a dirt monster would likely not have done much, and the cores likely would have been able to dodge the [Sword Art] as it was right now.

  But now, at least a tenth of the monster was fully immobilized, only dragged along by the rest of its body.

  A crimson lance manifested in Fionn’s hand, malevolent energy already tinging the air as he scanned the area below. He needed to get Gae Bolg in a spot where it would pin the monster in place, and also restrict the movement of cores.

  So, where to put it … the wound struck by Excalibur remained open, and when the monster had sacrificed the core, the area closest to it had been completely paralyzed. That sword, it might not have been overly damaging, not beyond a normal supernatural sword, at any rate, but its ability let it do damage to anything and everything, regardless of what logic and the laws of nature said.

  Which meant that the monster was quite narrow in that spot, and if the bone tree Gae Bold turned into was planted there …

  The ancient cursed spear flashed downwards like a streak of lightning, pushed onwards at ever-growing speeds as Fionn’s Skills and magic until it hammered through the ground like a hot knife through butter.

  For a brief moment, nothing happened.

  And then, the very Earth itself seemed to go berserk. Any building within a couple of hundred meters that had still been intact up until this point crumbled, destroyed from the quakes alone, and a dust storm was starting to rise around it … but it was not simply the result of the destruction, no, that would have been too simple, too ordinary.

  No, this dust was rising into the air under the force of the monster’s sheer fury, creating a storm that blocked sight, deflected vision, and tore the flesh from anyone who so much as touched it.

  Not that it would overly threaten the likes of Dietrich, Arthur, or Ogier, but the lower-levelled soldiers now needed to keep their distance or die horrific deaths in a matter of seconds.

  ***

  Tristan

  Drake and I stepped into the command post in the middle of a … I honestly wasn’t entirely sure what to call it, but an extremely stressed general was obviously struggling with the impulse to punch something as he glared at the screens and his underlings were trying to figure out a way around the sandstorm that intercepted what attacks managed to bypass the anti-artillery protections.

  Apparently, hand-thrown grenades, grenade launchers, plastic explosives attached to rocks … it was all dashed to pieces or, worse, hurled back at those who threw them.

  And things weren’t looking much better for the small, lightweight, artillery that had been set up either. According to Charlemagne, they were beneath the notice of the defenses, but that also left their shells vulnerable to the sandstorm.

  The sandstorm …

  “What would be worse, that sandstorm, or a torrential rainfall trapping all that soil and opening the field of fire?”

  In hindsight, I should have made a choice here, either kept it to myself, or asked it out loud and with confidence. Not this … quavery suggestion. And beside me, I could feel Drake practically radiate disapproval.

  Though the general was the one whose reaction I dreaded the most. As he turned towards us, I could see the name visible on the front of his uniform.

  General Collins.

  Somehow, his name had failed to come up in the rushed conversations across the last few minutes.

  “Is that supposed to mean anything?” he asked in an even tone, though I got the feeling that he’d much rather have yelled that. “Are you asking a hypothetical? Because this is not the place for idle conversation.”

  I swallowed. Yep, that was exactly the reaction I’d been afraid of. Deep breath in, deep breath out, speak with confidence …

  “No, that was a genuine offer. Say the word, and I’ll create a localized thunderstorm with enough rain to ground the sand.”

  “How quickly can you disperse it?” the general asked.

  “Completely disperse? A couple of minutes. But I can stop the lighting much more quickly,” I replied after a brief moment of consideration.

  He nodded. “Good. Do it.”

  And with a grin that I wasn’t able to fully wipe off my face even with [Innate Etiquette], I cast [Century Storm]. An immense, overwhelming, inexorable power burst forth from my [Arcane Core], tearing its way free and blasting off towards the sky, with the only reason the building was still standing being that they remained metaphorical until they took their rightful place in the heavens, solidifying, becoming real.

  Black clouds began to gather, and if one did not look at the surrounding sky, one might imagine that day had turned to night. And even if one did see the clear patches of sky, those clouds seemed to ooze malevolence, being harbingers of not merely bad weather but a storm of downright apocalyptic proportions.

  Then, the first raindrops began to fall, each the size of a marble and with enough force behind it that anyone they fell one would wonder whether it had truly been water that struck them, or if it had in actuality been a nut or something similarly hefty that had fallen from a nearby tree or roof.

  And finally, the first lightning bolt struck, a jagged white line of pure energy that split the world as it tore its way down from the heavens and hammering into the tip of the white stone obelisk that sat in the center of the Nation Boss.

  The sandstorm writhed beneath the hammer blows of falling rain as though in pain, as though it were a living creature being drenched in acid.

  As I’d guessed, the sand and dust wasn’t actually a part of the monster, but rather, a spell effect, and the muddy mess currently falling back down to earth was clearly beyond its ability to levitate. It was an idea I’d had when I’d remembered passing construction sites who were spraying water on something they were working on so they wouldn’t choke everyone nearby with dust.

  Of course, I’d also warned my allies before I’d even started casting. And while Fionn could obviously have done it too, and had a much larger mana pool to boot, it was still finite. And [Century Storm] was something that could be cast at a distance, so … if it could be established that it would not interfere with whatever the military was planning, then it would fall to me to cast the spell.

  “Not bad,” the general said, then started barking orders.

  An aide ran into the room at that, looking more than a little shell-shocked.

  “China just launched the fourth nuclear strike at their Nation Boss,” she reported.

  “And?” General Collins asked, suddenly extremely apprehensive.

  “It also failed,” the aide reported. “The weapon has to be detonated at so great a distance that the monster can easily weather the impact.”

  Collins dismissed her, turned back to the wall of screens, and leaned on the table, and hung his head.

  “Oh thank God …” he sighed. I wasn’t sure if anyone else heard him, but I did. And I couldn’t blame him. Having the nuclear option be off the table when the fight was taking place in a major metropolitan area …

  “Major General Collins, can I introduce you to Vice Admiral Drake, Royal British Navy?” I asked, taking the lull in the chaos to announce who my “companion” was, who had just been standing there awkwardly.

  Well, not awkwardly, he’d practically radiated calm competence and endless patience, but we were still standing in the middle of the room, fairly uselessly.

  “I am not here to take command or otherwise interfere, this is your arena and these are your men, I am only here because there are certain boosting Skills I can provide that require my presence to take effect. All I need is a chair somewhere out of the way,” Drake added.

  “Thank you,” Collins said, then gestured at an empty chair sitting against the wall.

  “We also have information on the monster’s weaknesses,” I said as I stepped up next to the general and began sharing the information, though I was still more than aware of the Vice Admiral’s presence.

  That had been … weird. I’d barely spent an hour with the man, all told, and that was across multiple days, but between the impression I’d gotten and what I’d read in the history books, I hadn’t pictured him as the kind of man content to sit in the corner while others fought. Yeah, something was going on, I just wasn’t sure what.

  ***

  Drake

  Oh, the kid had seen right through him. Ah, who cared?

  It wasn’t like what he was doing was bad, nor would interfere it with what everyone else was doing.

  They had a saying nowadays, “better lucky than good.” And Drake didn’t disagree, fortune could deliver victories even the greatest displays of power and strategic brilliance couldn’t hope to reliably bring about.

  Yet luck was a fickle mistress, as likely to help you succeed as she was to doom you to a miserable death from sickness on the tail end of a miserably unsuccessful raid against the Spanish holdings in South America.

  Which made his ability to subtly tip the scales all the more valuable, if not downright “overpowered,” as one might say.

  Being named the [Reckless Admiral of Fortune] was quite the condemnation, as far as most people were concerned, but he wore it proudly, and used his powers for all they were worth.

  [Shared Fortune] to ensure luck would always be on the side of those fighting on the frontlines, [Sling of David] to empower everyone struggling against an overwhelmingly powerful foe, [Current Sense] to understand what was happening despite the distance to the battlefield, and finally, [The Hand of Lord Fortune] to directly intervene.

  The System had, quite literally, made him the arbiter of luck itself … after he had heaped every Skill Boost he’d ever earned onto [Directed Fortune].

  All of his Skills were powerful, yet this one could change the course of history and never be noticed, not even once. Also, enemies dying due to actual bad luck was never not funny.

  Francis Drake just leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and smiled as the Nation Boss’ day went from bad to oh so very much worse.