Today was a day I’d truly dreaded. The World Boss would arrive, the first of what would likely be many.

  We’d grown, we’d networked, we’d leveled. That much was true. Mia had hit Level 50, I was just one behind, and most of the Ancients were either at, or closing in on, Level 75, which gave another Capstone.

  The only one I actually knew about was Dietrich’s, it was called [Adventurer’s Royal Keepsake] and allowed him to create a magical effect based on one of his past adventures, once per day, per ten Levels. So basically, seven extra magic powers per day, picked from a ludicrously long list of crazy shit he’d pulled off in the past.

  And Genghis Khan had recruited Sundiata Keita and his New Malian Empire almost casually, though I’d barely met the man, only stepping through the portal long enough to remove all the lead that had already leeched into the groundwater, greet the newly re-minted emperor, and then it had been right back to the Untersberg for me.

  Also …

  And then, of course, the fucking alarms went off. Because why wouldn’t the world-destroying monster be early?

  Thankfully, there was very little to do on my part now, both Charlemagne and I had already relocated to the supply dump, and most of the others had gathered in the Untersberg, which left me with just four portals to open.

  The aforementioned mountain, the staging area at Ulaanbaatar, Zerzura’s new parade ground, and the impromptu military camp outside of San Francisco.

  And while all of those portals spat out their users into the supply depot’s own staging area, I hurried into the command room, where Charlemagne had been sitting for the past eight hours, continuing to arrange things just the way he liked them, refining things with nary a break.

  It was at this point that one of the wall screens flickered to life, and Francis Drake appeared, looking far more put together than I’d have expected from a man currently engaging a world-level threat.

  “We’re about to engage the monster, it’s a Continent Boss by the name of ‘Volcanic Hellmouth, and some support would be appreciated,” he reported.

  Yeah, that was already in motion, but had he really just said that …

  “Continent Boss? Not World?” I asked, praying against all odds that I’d merely misheard him.

  “Continent,” Drake confirmed.

  I could feel my legs going weak, leaving me very happy that I was already sitting, and a near-silent “Schei?e” slipped from between my lips.

  “What’s the problem?” Drake asked.

  “It means there’s something worse coming,” I whispered. “A World Boss … if that damn volcano could set me off from the other side of the planet, how terrible does that mean an even higher tier of monster would have to be?”

  “You’re sure World Bosses are a thing, then?” Drake asked.

  “… Unfortunately.”

  “Well, at least we’ll have a warning if they’re that strong,” he replied.

  And with that, the call ended.

  Somehow, that little exchange had managed to hit me harder than anything else I’d encountered thus far.

  I couldn’t have sat there for very long, someone, Mia especially, would have given me a smack upside the head otherwise, yet … yet the news had still set my mind spinning off into a void of hopelessness, depression, and despair.

  If a monster that could threaten the mountain with destruction from the middle of the Pacific was only considered continent-level, then what the actual fuck could a world-ranked monster do?

  Would its very presence obliterate the land around it, could it erase countries with a thought and obliterate continents with a tiny amount of attention and effort?

  Or would a beast that strong be able to threaten the very planet under my feet? Not threaten to depopulate, most monsters could theoretically do that given enough time, but actually break the Earth?

  I …

  “Sir.”

  The voice was even, not particularly loud, angry, or otherwise attention-grabbing. It was simply an even delivery of my name, with the barest hint of reproach.

  Yet I don’t think Mr. Deeds could have snapped me out of my thoughts any more effectively even if he’d lowered himself to bringing out the firehose. My ghost “butler,” a phantom conjured by one of my Skills, was rarely physically present, usually either being off on a mission, or unsummoned … as he had been when I’d been having my little existential crisis. It seemed like he’d either summoned himself, or been called into existence by the fact that I’d needed him. Though regardless of what the answer would wind up being, the fact that there was no time for existential crises had already been established.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I hurriedly replied as extended my [Ambassador’s Instinct] until I located the place I needed to be … sort of.

  I wasn’t sure I had any place on the flag bridge of the HMS Wisconsin, but that was where the Skill led me to … as expected. Drake had okayed the use of his flagship as our local base of operations, and the temporary intrusion that may be required to get there.

  God, portalling to ships was always such a production. I could teleport to specific points I’d been to before, not places. Ships moved, and kept moving, it didn’t take much for the spot I was aiming at to be overlapping with a wall, blocking the portal. And since [Ambassador’s Instinct] had a limited range, I’d even had had to waste a portal to get close enough that I could sense Drake.

  “Vice Admiral,” I greeted him.

  “Ambassador Vogt, Midshipman Fletcher here will be escorting you to where you can set up,” he replied, gesturing to a man standing near the door.

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  I followed him, swiftly getting confused and lost. I’d memorized the path we’d taken, System-induced perfect memory was handy like that, but there was a big difference between that and actually figuring out how to navigate the ship on my own … so I made Fletcher an offer that he could hardly refuse.

  Any language of his choice in exchange for knowledge on how to make my way around ships like this one, provided I was fluent in the language he requested.

  Of course, by now, that covered Czech, Mongolian, Mandarin, French, Japanese, Cantonese, Spanish, ASL, Portuguese, Hindi, Korean, Gaelic, and Arabic. Plus English and German, obviously.

  And on top of that, there were several languages I didn’t outright speak but had at least picked up the basics. You know, having the vocabulary to order coffee and knowing enough insults to start a bar fight.

  Between using [Knowlege Trade] at every opportunity when it wasn’t strictly needed elsewhere and [Burgeoning Omniglot] endlessly passively accumulating knowledge, learning languages was a breeze for me now.

  After the trade, getting the compartment’s number was all I needed to find my way there myself, and open a portal back to where everyone was waiting in the Untersberg.

  Opening a portal to a moving vehicle wasn’t possible unless I was using [Ambassador’s Instinct] for directions. But from a moving vehicle? Easy. After all, it moved with the surroundings. So I opened a new portal straight into the staging area.

  I really should have done this earlier, and teleported them straight here, but in my defense, my cooldowns would reset in less than an hour and if the monster had shown up the next “day” as the System counted things, this process would already have been done by then.

  As it was, I took this time to hurry back into the supply depot, opened a new portal to teh base of the mountain for those who would be directly engaging the monster, and finally, returned to the control room with Charlemagne.

  ***

  Drake

  The damage dealt to the fleet, and the Wisconsin in particular, had largely been repaired on the way here, and even though they had used up a lot of their expendable munitions in that battle, the Germanic emperor had easily been able to replace them, taking full advantage of Mr. Vogt’s portals to get them here ahead of the fleet. As to how he’d figured out what they needed ... Drake didn’t know, but it had been eerily accurate.

  At least they weren’t jumping straight to fighting a walking volcano after getting battered around by an ocean that actively hated them.

  As it was, that thing was going to present quite the problem.

  Though having magical assistance from the outset, as well as the support of many nearby nations and an entire American fleet incoming should also make a considerable difference. Yet would it make enough of a difference in the face of this beast?

  Mount Tambora was over two kilometers tall and it had considerable mass belowground as well, all of which it had ripped out of the Earth to form a massive, ape-like, body that stood at least four kilometers tall as it knuckle-walked across the land, its “heart” glowing so brightly that it could be seen from the outside despite the fact that a minimum of several dozen layers of overlapping obsidian glass prevented any kind of deep cracks or seams from forming.

  The whole affair was topped with an immense misshapen head, with a face consisting of a two practically rectangular “eyes” that were really just lava-filled holes in the facade that somehow, unlike the wide slash that it had for a mouth, did not ceaselessly drool lava.

  As for the ape’s limbs, their glow was lesser, but not by much, and rivers of molten rock ran down them in twisted paths, making ridges and grooves stand out in stark relief while whatever plantmatter had survived the monster tearing its way from the ground was rapidly reduced to ash.

  The source of the lava wasn’t visible, the monster’s height prevented him from seeing, but Drake managed to deduce that it was somewhere up near its back, likely around the area that was now starting to spew smoke skywards, already turning the sky black.

  “We’re in range, Sir.”

  The Wisconsin’s guns thundered to life immediately, immediately followed by a string of explosions walking across the monster’s body, almost twenty kilometers distant, sending obsidian shards tumbling into the ground below.

  A scratch. A mere scratch.

  At least they’d confirmed that of all the munition types they had aboard, the armor-piercing shells were superior and this particular salvo had already been mostly made up of those. Though Drake was sorely missing the one and only nuclear shell he’d “made” during the overhaul, now that he was seeing the Continent Boss in the flesh, it felt somewhat wasted on a mere Nation Boss.

  The airplanes began trickling in at that point, unleashing coordinated streams of bullets interspersed with missiles and even bombs, their foe being large enough to be directly targeted with them.

  Yet a new problem was already manifesting.

  The ash.

  It had always been obvious that a volcano monster would unleash vast plumes of it, and that this would have a highly deleterious effect on civilian aircrafts’ engines, but this … it was already proving problematic even for jet engines.

  Keeping abreast of the back-and-forth between Porter and the commanders of the local air force informed Drake of the fact that a countermeasure was already being considered, it should be possible to conduct attack runs below the shroud of ash for the time being, but that would put the planes in the firing line of all the various pieces of artillery that were likewise attacking the monster.

  If the ash were just a little higher …

  “Ask Merlin and Lord Mac Cumail to lift the curtain of ash slightly, if possible,” Drake requested, turning to the sailor waiting at the door, ready to carry a message to the ancients just outside. Sadly, the PA system had not survived the battle with the Nation Boss, and the damage had been too deep to be easily remedy without sacrificing the repair of more vital systems.

  At the feet of the giant, light flickered and flashed as the forces there engaged, yet somehow remained utterly beneath the beast’s notice. Even the warships seemed to fall into that category, the monster was simply … orienting itself. Yet hundreds were likely already dead, killed by the quakes or the toxic gasses steaming off the monster’s skin like lethal body odor.

  It was at this point that he realized that one of the American ships was heading towards his current position. No carrier should be getting this close to the front lines, cruisers and destroyers were not only meant to escort them but also didn’t have to get this close to be effective, which would make that … another battleship?

  The Iowas couldn’t be reactivated in a timely enough manner, which was the entire reason why the Royal Navy had even gotten its hands on the Wisconsin.

  “Identify that ship,” Drake ordered.

  “IFF designates her as the USS Missouri.”

  The battleship museum berthed in Hawaii, if memory served.

  And as the Wisconsin’s guns thundered, fighter jets screamed overhead, and missiles hammered into the titanic volcano, the Missouri came into view.

  She looked rough. Not in the sense of damage, but that she lacked much of the polish a normal ship being taken into combat should have had. Hasty welds, runny paint, patchwork repairs, all speaking of this being a rush job.

  Not to mention that the remains of welding equipment, ladders, scaffolding, and the like remaining on deck indicated that the ship had been worked on practically until the moment it had entered combat.

  Barring the appearance of a second naval ancient, the Missouri and any other Iowas that were reactivated could not hope to match the complete and magical overhaul of the Wisconsin, but Drake sadly doubted the newcomer would be able to compete at even that level.

  Nevertheless, he was happy to see her.

  Once split apart by politics and treaties, the two Iowas were now reunited, sister ships heading into battle once more.

  One new, a nuclear fire burning at her core, the other an ancient juggernaut, half repaired, yet together, they would teach this jumped-up rock just why battleships had once been the truest measure of a nation’s naval might!