The twenty Mongol riders charged down the hill at full speed, their sabers ready to take down the three Gamers waiting at the bottom of the hill. The charging formation was organized like a spear, with five riders leading the attack from the front.

  Mark felt the power of the charge on his bones, the ground beneath trembling under his feet. It was overwhelming. Terrifying. He felt as if a train was moving at full speed toward him, and it would flatten him, no matter where he tried to run.

  We are dead, he thought.

  There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to escape. His two Skills were exhausted. The charging Mongols were unstoppable.

  His luck was over.

  “Ready… Hurl!”

  The hoarse shout came from the Roman detachment, now about eighty feet away. And a rain of javelins flew towards the charging Mongols. The air was suddenly filled with the piercing shrieks of the injured horses, the screams of pain of the Mongols that had been hit, and the shouts of anger and fear of the Mongols that managed to stay on their mounts.

  The Mongol charge was broken, especially the left and the center of it, where the javelins had been targeted. And it passed, leaving the gamers uninjured, except for Tobias, who didn’t manage to completely avoid one of the now riderless horses, and was thrown to the ground and almost trampled over.

  The Mongols at the right of the charge, that had been spared from most of the legionnaires’ attack, kept the inertia of their charge and moved past the Gamers at full speed, advancing farther into the flat ground on the other side of the hill, getting away from both the Gamers and the Romans.

  The Roman detachment kept moving towards the Gamers. Arthur rushed to help a stunned Tobias up from the ground. And the three young men moved a little to the side, so their laughable defensive line was now facing the approaching legionnaire formation.

  “What the fuck is happening?” Arthur asked, still holding his sword.

  The Roman who had ordered the javelin attack was approaching them. He was in his mid thirties, with a face sharp and angular, marked by discipline and war. His eyes were determined, and his mouth was compressed with the tension of battle.

  With a few gestures, he ordered his legionnaires to take position at the back of the Gamers, and Mark realized they were trying to protect them from a possible arrow attack from the Mongols, who were now organizing themselves in the distance, getting ready for a new charge.

  The commander of the Roman detachment looked at the three Gamers, probably trying to decide who was the leader, and for some reason, decided to focus on Mark:

  “Are you one of the soldiers of the general ILoveFurries, Seventh of his name?”

  It took Mark a few seconds to process that statement. The centurion had said the stupid gamer-tag of Johan like something he had just memorized, but with absolute respect, as if truly speaking about one of the greatest generals in history.

  “Yes?” Mark eventually answered.

  “I bear a message from Gaius Julius Caesar, conqueror of Gaul, savior of Rome. Will you listen to it?”

  Mark looked at Arthur, who seemed to be as astonished as him. Tobias was staring at the Roman soldiers with his mouth agape in sheer disbelief. The Roman commander waited politely for Mark’s answer. So Mark repeated:

  “Yes?”

  The Roman commander nodded and adopted a more informal tone, lowering his voice.

  “Julius wants to speak in private with your leader. He wanted me to tell you that we don’t have to be enemies. To please reconsider.”

  Mark realized that the Roman, behind his mask of stoic discipline, was as dumbfounded as they were. And Mark couldn’t stop himself, and he answered:

  “You also don’t know what the fuck is happening, right?”

  The Roman raised his eyebrows with surprise, his mask of discipline broken. Then he laughed. Many of the Roman soldiers, sweaty after all the marching and starting to take position near the Gamers, also smiled.

  “The world has gone completely crazy, hasn’t it?” the Roman commander answered. “One moment I was being murdered after failing to protect Julius in the Senate chamber… And then the old bastard was standing in front of me, younger than he had been in years, with his arrogant smile and a speech about strange gods, and plans to conquer a world that isn’t our own.”

  The commander snorted his amusement and started moving towards the rest of his formation, who were waiting for the now incoming Mongol charge, but he stopped for a moment to add:

  “By the way, I saw how you took down those riders. Good job.”

  “Thank you. I’m Mark.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, Mark. I’m Hadrian, centurion of Julius Caesar’s legions. Deliver the message. And hopefully, we’ll be allies soon.”

  Mark saw him running towards the front of the formation, shouting orders to his soldiers, who raised their large rectangular shields and waited for the Mongol charge. Moments before the fight, the legionnaires shouted “Roma Aeterna!”

  Then the two small armies clashed with ferocity, the air filled with the clang of steel and the cries of men and beasts.

  “Time to go,” Arthur said, starting to move suddenly. “I’ll try to get the horses,” he added, referring to the horses of the Mongols they had killed, that were wandering some distance away, scared from all the noise and chaos. “You get ready to leave.”

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  He stopped for a moment and looked at the bloodied dagger Mark was still holding in his hand.

  “And don’t you dare clean the blood off your weapon,” Arthur added.

  “I know. I wasn’t born yesterday,” Mark answered, passing his other hand over his face, where the blood of the Mongol he had killed was starting to dry under the sun. He winced when he touched his right eye, which was already swelling after the kick he had received from the Mongol.

  “Oh, great. You wouldn’t believe the kind of idiots I had to work with after you were gone,” Arthur answered, and then he made a small gesture towards Tobias, telling Mark to take care of the scared Gamer.

  Mark looked at Tobias, who was paralyzed, still holding the saber he had taken from the dead Mongol. Mark approached him and took the saber from Tobias’ shaking hands. Then he looked around to make sure nobody was paying attention.

  But Arthur was walking towards one of the horses while he murmured reassuring words. And the Roman and Mongol soldiers were too busy killing each other—the Mongols had lost their advantage now that they had stopped moving, and they were formed in a small circle, trying to resist the Roman legionnaires who had surrounded them. And the Gamers in the forest couldn’t see them, with the Mongol-Roman battle happening in front of Mark and the others.

  Mark took a deep breath and thrust the saber deep into the chest of one of the already dead Mongols. Then he returned the bloodied weapon to an even more confused Tobias.

  “What?” Tobias said. “Why?”

  “People will listen to us more if we arrive as fucking heroes with bloodied weapons,” he looked to make sure Arthur was far enough so he wouldn’t listen. Arthur had managed to mount one of the horses, and was trying to make it obey his orders to approach the other horse. Then Mark focused again on Tobias. “There’s something you need to understand about Arthur…”

  Mark reflected for a second. How much should he share about his best friend? He eventually decided to reveal only a small part of the truth:

  “Arthur will never accept to become a pawn in somebody else’s game.”

  That’s enough for now, he thought. He’ll find out the rest if he sticks around…

  Of course, bloodying the saber was a stupid lie. They already had bloodied weapons. The Gamers in the forest had almost surely seen the fight, even if they were too far away to know the details. For god’s sake, they were going to arrive literally riding the horses of their defeated foes.

  So why do it, then? Why make this useless lie?

  Mark looked at Tobias, who walked with him with his bloodied saber, having become an unwilling accomplice in a useless lie.

  Already a pawn in somebody else’s game.

  Arthur approached them, riding one horse and pulling the reins of the other, and told them to hurry towards the forest. They moved around the Mongol-Roman battle, keeping a healthy distance, and then moved directly to the forest. Mark looked, and he thought he could see somebody waving at them with both hands, telling them to hurry. Then he focused and saw a small name-tag over the person waving, and he realized he could find Johan even from this distance.

  They moved towards the forest as fast as possible. Arthur riding one horse, Tobias the other, and Mark running next to him, holding the reins so Tobias’ horse wouldn’t stray away.

  They only stopped a couple of times. Once so Mark could take the scabbard of the young man he had stolen the dagger from. Just a few minutes before, the young man had been full of life, excited to watch the massive battlefield happening in front of him. Now he was dead, killed by an arrow in his back that he hadn’t even seen coming. His empty eyes stared at the blue sky of the world he had just arrived to, unable to explore the mysteries it held.

  The other time they stopped was to try to help the last Gamer who had been hit by an arrow. Just a couple of minutes ago, he had been screaming in pain. But when they arrived, he was already dead. A deep pool of blood lay beneath him, extending over the green grass of the field. Mark took the small bag the man was carrying on his hip and realized with amazement that it was a holding bag, an actual magical holding bag. It was a little bigger than his fist, but when he looked inside, it had the size of a carry-on bag, with some dried food, a camping tent, and some clothes.

  “How are we playing it?” Mark asked, approaching Arthur. He lowered his voice so Tobias couldn’t listen to them.

  Arthur had been luxuriating in the warm sunlight caressing his face, and took a couple of seconds before answering.

  “We play the part of heroes, of course. We fought trying to protect the others,” then he looked back to make sure Tobias wasn’t listening. Tobias, now trying to steer by himself the unruly horse, didn’t have time to eavesdrop. And Arthur whispered, “And we’ll find a moment to have a private conversation with the Furry Lover, so we can leverage the meeting with Julius Caesar into more information, and access to decision-making.”

  Mark nodded. Create a reputation to protect yourself, and use information as a weapon to gain control over others. Nothing new. Having a background as criminals did provide a pretty versatile skill set.

  He approached Tobias to make sure he wouldn’t mess up their plans. Tobias, apart from begging his horse with gentle nudges so it would go to the forest, was also looking back from time to time at the battle between the Romans and the Mongols. The noise of the battle was getting muffled with the distance. Fewer and fewer Mongols were still riding their horses. And it seemed a matter of time until the small Mongol detachment was exterminated. The rest of the Roman army, the part that hadn’t engaged in combat with the Mongols, had already started to move towards the forest, but they were going to enter it a couple of miles away from the Gamers.

  Mark snapped his fingers to get Tobias’s attention, breaking the trance he had been in while looking at the battle.

  “What? Is something else happening?” Tobias asked, still a little in shock, looking everywhere as if expecting another charge of Mongols to appear from nowhere to kill them.

  “Don’t tell anybody about Julius Caesar wanting to talk with Johan. We’ll speak with him about it in private,” Mark wondered where Tobias had been when they had been fighting the two Mongols, and if he had seen how Mark had used his [Phantom Presence] Skill. “Also, don’t tell anybody anything about our fight with the Mongols.“

  Then he remembered that moments before the Mongol charge, he had said that Arthur had been the one who murdered him:

  “Actually, say absolutely nothing at all. We fought trying to protect the others. We’re fucking heroes. You’re a fucking hero. Focus on that: You’re a hero.”

  And that was the point of bloodying Tobias’s sable.

  It was the same thing as protecting the reputation of a guy who froze up in a shootout, telling everybody that he had been brave and taken down a couple of guys. You did that, and suddenly his reputation depended on you. On your goodwill towards him.

  And he would never forget that.

  If he saw it as a favor given by a friend, or a chain tying him to you… that was mostly just a matter of perspective.

  And time.

  They were reaching the forest. He looked at Arthur, already approaching the waiting crowd of Gamers looking from the tree line. He was still riding his horse, and he greeted everybody with a big smile, waving his bloody sword around so everybody could see it. Mark knew Arthur could be subtle; he could live immersed in shadows and lies. He thrived in them. But if he could choose, he had always preferred the flashy option. Probably not the best for somebody on a criminal career…

  But it did help when he was throwing parties. Or pumping people up. Some people in the crowd started cheering, and somebody actually shouted: “Fuck yeah! Let’s go back and kill them all!”

  “Also…” Mark added, looking at the sword Arthur was waving around, and remembering how he had gotten it from Tobias, “never again let somebody take your fucking weapon. Are you crazy? We could have been monsters, waiting for the moment to kill you.”