The greatest battle in history had just begun. As soon as the metallic gong had exploded from the sky, the veil of silence had been lifted; whatever had kept the armies from each other had disappeared, and now they could hear the actual sounds of battle, of millions of men moving around, shouting orders, screaming in pain, and the clash of weapons being used to kill other human beings.

  The greatest battle in history had started… and they were running away from it.

  Fast.

  As fast as possible.

  That had been the great plan of their would-be General, Johan ILoveFurries007.

  “We’ll run away as fast as possible from all the fighting and killing and dying. Then we’ll come up with another plan when we’re safe”.

  It had been a simple plan. A little underwhelming. But Mark had to concede that it was properly compelling and well-received.

  Johan had run down the hill, through the still-paralyzed crowd, and towards the distant forest, a couple of miles away. For a few seconds, everybody had watched him getting away in a clumsy half-running/half-walking fashion. Then almost everybody had hurried to follow him.

  Very few people were stupid enough to stay and watch a battle raging a few hundred yards away from them.

  Mark was among those chosen few. Arthur, his best friend and murderer, was also among them.

  Mark was lying on the ground near the top of the hill, peeking at the battlefield below. A few yards behind him, on the side of the hill hidden from the battlefield, he could hear Arthur trying to convince some guy to exchange his sword for Arthur’s frying pan. Concretely, he was trying to convince the guy he had threatened to give a wedgie to.

  Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t having much success.

  “I’m not giving you my sword!” said the guy with the sensitive eyes.

  “I don’t want it for myself.”

  “I’m. Not. Giving you. My sword,” repeated the man, clutching the sword’s hilt.

  “Ok… What’s your name?”

  “Why…”

  “Just tell me your name.”

  “Tobias,” answered the short man, suspiciously.

  “Hello, Tobias, my name is Arthur. I was cruel when we were all talking. I was nervous, but that is no excuse. I apologize for my comments”, he looked at him seriously, “I mean it. I apologize. But you do know what having a weapon means, right?”

  The short man looked at him, confused.

  “What?”

  “Having a weapon means you have a duty to protect the people who are unarmed. Having a weapon means you’ll have to wait behind while others make a run for it. Having a weapon means you could be risking your life in bloody fucking battle two minutes from now. Are you up to that, Tobias? Are you honestly up to that?”

  The man took a few seconds considering it and eventually unsheathed his sword and gave it to Arthur, who said:

  “Thank you. Courage takes many forms. There’s no shame in what you just did”.

  Then they crawled up the hill and joined Mark and about a dozen more at the top of the hill, peeking into the battlefield.

  The axeman, who Mark could now see was very aptly named Erik Bloodaxe, was trying to resist with the few men he had against the charge of a better-organized army led by a general named Jugurtha.

  Mark realized that if he focused on the names, he could find out more information about them. He didn’t have to read it. It was as if he could feel it emerging from deep within his soul, as if the information had always been there.

  [Erik Bloodaxe - Viking King]

  [10th-century Norse king, known for his ferocity and ambitious conquests. He killed several of his brothers to gain access to the throne. Erik ruled as king of Norway briefly before being deposed and later became king of Northumbria in England. He was eventually betrayed and killed in the Battle of Stainmore].

  [Jugurtha - Numidian King]

  [Born into Numidian royalty, he managed to take the throne through cunning and assassinations. A master of realpolitik, his strategic use of bribes kept Rome at bay, exploiting its political corruption to maintain power].

  Mark kept looking around. It was incredible to see so many armies maneuvering, fighting with each other, making temporary alliances to destroy another army, and then succumbing to attacks on their rearguards when their new allies betrayed them.

  Generals were being killed almost every minute, and each time one of them was defeated, a powerful metallic gong sounded from the sky, announcing their defeat.

  Some armies were completely dominating their enemies. Mark saw how some general called Gaius Marius fell, trampled under the hooves of a Genghis Khan’s Mongol charge. Genghis Khan lowered himself in his saddle and cut the head of the defeated general, parading it to his cheering men.

  The most famous generals, though, seemed to be surviving this first battle.

  Julius Caesar’s square formation was maneuvering with discipline between battles, avoiding any direct conflict, apparently trying to get away from the chaos.

  [Julius Caesar - Roman General].

  [Born into a patrician family, Julius Caesar rose to power through military genius and political maneuvering. He expanded the Roman Empire through the conquest of Gaul, and his defiance of the Senate and crossing of the Rubicon led to civil war and his rise as dictator. He was betrayed and assassinated. When he died, the Roman Republic died with him].

  Genghis Khan’s Mongols were now riding away from the trampled soldiers of Gaius Marius, towards the battle between Erik Bloodaxe and Jugurtha. Those two generals, seeing the charge coming, tried to maneuver away, but there was nowhere to hide. Some of their men actually went flying when hit by the powerful charge of the horses. Most were simply trampled over.

  Erik Bloodaxe killed a horse and the Mongol riding it with a single brutal swing of his massive axe, and tried to resist the slaughter with a few loyal men.

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  "So what do you think?" asked Arthur, giving his back to the battle and looking for a moment at the slow crowd of gamers getting away from them. "Should we join the others, or try to make it out on our own?"

  Mark turned his head to look at the marching crowd of gamers. They hadn’t gotten very far. Many of them were in poor shape, and everybody had to wait for the slower members of the group. It would take them only a few minutes of running to catch up with them.

  “You were never interested in gaming or the clan, so you never talked to Johan,” answered Mark, looking at his old online friend. “But he is intelligent. Kind of weird. And obsessed with true-crime shows. But he can have moments of true brilliance… I think the first challenge of all the generals was getting their soldiers ready to act in only a few minutes, after being awakened in a new world, when just an instant before they were dying back on Earth. It could have gone as badly as it did with Erik Bloodaxe down there, but Johan at least managed to get everybody moving”.

  He looked towards his old online friend. Johan was leading the way towards the forest, shouting encouragement, trying to start everybody singing a marching song, and being rejected with jokes and derision. He noticed Mark was looking at him from the distance and made a gesture asking him to come.

  “So Johan did a pretty good job,” Mark continued, ignoring the gesture of his friend. “We were one of the first armies to move. They will get to safety”.

  “Except we are not an army. And we didn’t get ready to fight, just ready to run away. And he was lucky everybody decided to gang up on you with jokes of fuck you, Mark. He was losing them”.

  They both turned around to continue watching the battle. Erik Bloodaxe parried with his massive axe the saber of a mounted Mongol and managed to cut down one of the rear legs of the horse, making the Mongol fall to the ground. The Mongol scrambled to get away, but the Viking king killed him with a single swing of the axe. Erik Bloodaxe howled his triumph, raising his bloody weapon towards the sky, as if he were defying the gods themselves. And then he was hit on the back by another Mongol rider, the horse trampling over him.

  Mark felt strangely disconnected from everything that was happening a couple of hundred yards away.

  "Still, it’s not bad," he said, "Johan saw the opportunity and took it. And in any case," he added, "I’m unarmed, and you only have that sword. So I doubt we would get very far alone. And from my perspective, you murdered me like fifteen minutes ago, so I don’t feel very comfortable just walking into the sunset with you."

  Arthur rolled his eyes and raised his arms with mock exasperation.

  "Sure. Be like that. All vengeful and petty," he said, and then smiled and patted him on the shoulder, "it's good to see you again, Mark. I missed you. Life was a little bit more boring when you were gone."

  “How did the whole business with Tito end?”

  Arthur shrugged.

  “When the volcano started, the end of the world began; and I decided to go out with a bang. I declared war to that fucker. And eventually, I destroyed him.”

  He smiled at Mark, and it was the smile you would see on a wolf before hunting down its prey.

  “I actually fulfilled one of my dreams: I burned my phone. My ID. Everything that tied me down. And after I became nothing more than a shadow… I went on a fucking rampage. Not against Tito: against his entire organization.”

  “You killed them all?” asked Mark, incredulous, trying to remember how many people were in Tito’s organization.

  “The government trained me for this kind of urban warfare, and the circumstances were right: the police had better things to do than stopping criminals from killing each other. So I had time to pick them up one by one. Some I killed up close. Others I just killed with a rifle from a distance, or approached them with a gun and shot them in the back of the head while they were walking in the park… So much blood… So much needless suffering…”

  He seemed sad, melancholic. But Mark looked at him and knew the truth without any doubt.

  “You loved every second of it, didn’t you?”

  Arthur looked at him very serious, almost hurt. And then broke the charade and smiled.

  “It might have been the greatest time of my life. You wouldn’t believe the excitement of hunting down some dude through a forest.”

  “And Tito?”

  “At the end, I had him bleeding out of a bullet wound on the leg, tied to a chair. I had fantasized about making it slow and painful, but I guess I didn’t have it in me. I was exhausted…”

  “You let him go? That dude, after what he did to us?”

  “What? No. Of course not! I just shot him in the stomach and let him bleed out. Painful. But fast enough. Then I spent my last months at a cabin in the woods, waiting for the end.”

  “How did you end up dying?”

  “You know me. When the air got poisonous enough, I just put a gun to my mouth and finished it myself”.

  “Did you suffer?”

  “Before the bullet? Immensely. My lungs were slowly filling with blood, at the end.”

  “That’s nice… It does comfort me a little”.

  Arthur chuckled.

  “I’m glad it does. Now being real… You know you forced me to do it, right? I begged you to work with me. And you left me no other option.”

  Mark ignored for a moment the battle raging in front of him, and he focused on the open sky above them. He took a really good look at this beautiful new world he had gotten into. And he remembered the last months of his life, disillusioned with everything. His life of crime hadn’t been the adventure he expected. No excitement to be had, just an ugly sin that had forced him to surround himself with traitors, cowards, and small, greedy bastards. He remembered the gray depression, the kill order given by Tito. He remembered hiding in a rented apartment and waiting for the end.

  And something pulsed within him. And for a second, he was transported to another place, to another moment. And in front of him was an army of dead, millions of them, trying to destroy a city carved of white marble.

  Then he felt another pulse rushing through him, and he witnessed a massive dragon roaring and spitting a jet of flame that destroyed the mounted knights trying to kill it.

  Then he was back in the present. Back in that beautiful field.

  “My friend…” he said, his heart still beating fast, still feeling the adventure of the images he had witnessed, “You’re right. We’re in a new world. Together. Fuck the past. Let’s enjoy this.”

  “Now you’re talking. I think some of those Mongols are coming for us,” a couple of mongols had disengaged from their fight with Erik Bloodaxe’s Vikings, and after spotting the gamers at the top of the hill, they were starting to ride towards them, “I’ll let you choose. Should we fight? Or run away?”

  Mark thought about it for a second. They could probably avoid being hunted down by the Mongols; there were a dozen other gamers who would be slower, easier pickings than they were…

  But he didn’t turn around to run. Instead, he unsheathed a dagger from the hip of a young man who had started to retreat, running away with the rest of the gamers who had been witnessing the battle. The man protested, but Mark ignored him and took a step forward, towards the coming Mongols. He liked the feel of the weapon in his hand. Its weight. And something deep within him demanded the thrill of the battle.

  “So what, Mark”, Arthur insisted, a smile on his lips. “We’re not running?”

  Mark took another step forward.

  He remembered hiding in that apartment, covering all the windows with tape, and waiting in that darkness. Playing video games for days on end while he waited for death to come.

  Hoping it wouldn’t take long.

  Then he smiled.

  “Nah. I’m tired of running”.

  Arthur laughed and walked next to him. He moved the sword around, getting a feel for its weight, its maneuverability.

  “God, I have missed you…”

  Mark took another step forward. Whatever was inside him was pulsing with more strength. He felt as if his whole body was burning.

  He took another step. And he saw a mad king laughing uncontrollably while his empire burned.

  Another step. And he saw a furious god destroying a city with its own bare hands.

  Another world. A glorious opportunity.

  The speed of the two Mongol riders was barely reduced by going up the hill. Their faces were contorted with fury. They shouted a war cry. Their curved swords were raised above their heads, ready to cut them down.

  Mark could feel the pounding of the hooves over the soft ground of the hill. More metallic gongs kept sounding from the sky, as more generals were murdered. And it seemed as if the gods of this world had gone crazy with the blood spilled. It was a crescendo of sound that demanded more.

  More blood, more violence, more death.

  Mark thought about the voice he had heard. His supposed special class…

  [Kilser the Traitor - Horsemen of the Apocalypse].

  And the two Skills he had received.

  [Traitor’s Premonition], [Phantom Presence].

  Somehow, he knew whatever was pulsing within him, giving him those strange, amazing images, was the [Traitor’s Premonition].

  It was strange, but he could feel the Skills within him. Like breathing. Like raising a hand. Or moving a foot. He knew they were there, and he knew he would be able to use them without thought.

  And he really, really wanted to use them.

  The Mongols were only a couple of yards away...

  Mark remembered his first instinct when he had arrived in this world. And he realized it had been the right one. He smiled, and his smile was pure, joyous. And he said one last time.

  “Thank you, God.”

  And prepared to fight.