Everybody in the Gamer Battalion was looking up at the starry night. Astonished. A ranking of generals had appeared in the sky, formed by constellations of stars.

  And among the top generals of the Apocalypse, Johan ILoveFurries007 stood proudly at number ten.

  It was unbelievable. And Johan himself was looking at the sky with an open mouth. Until he realized people were staring at him. Then he closed his mouth and shouted, raising his arms:

  “What? You thought I didn’t have a plan? The plan is already working! Let’s conquer this fucking world!”

  Eric, the eighteen-year-old leader of the zealot part of the battalion, started cheering:

  “Let’s fucking do it!”

  Then his small group of zealots joined the cheering. Mark and Arthur looked at each other, overcame their surprise, and started cheering too, trying to get more people to support Johan. Then almost everybody joined in the celebration.

  Even while shouting, Mark paid attention to the few people who didn’t join the celebration. The one with the bruised eye was among them. He was looking towards the sky as if the stars themselves had betrayed him.

  “Yeah!” said Johan, “Let’s keep building and following the plan! I’ll give you responsibilities. We’ll have people cooking, we’ll organize guard duties, we’ll organize a data-gathering unit! We’ll push together to keep our advantage. And we’ll win! Go, go, go!”

  “Trust the plan, everybody!” shouted Eric, who looked at his general with the pride of a doting mother. “Trust the mother-fucking plan!”

  People cheered again, without as much intensity—except Eric’s zealots, who reached a climax of euphoria. Then the few people already with assignments moved to do them, making some jokes. And Johan made a gesture towards Mark and Arthur, asking them to follow him.

  They met with him near the horses. One of the horses had just relieved itself, and the smell was keeping people away. The cleaning duty had already been assigned to various people, without much success.

  “Is this really part of your plan?” muttered Mark, making sure nobody was nearby.

  “No,” Johan answered, also muttering. He stroked the horse's mane. “Of course not. How could it be? I think it has to be your Class. What did you call it? [Kilser the Traitor - Horseman of the Apocalypse]? It must be something special.”

  “You think?”

  “Has to be. It’s literally the only thing we have accomplished since we arrived here. Like, literally the only thing we have accomplished.”

  Johan looked at Arthur. He was a little disconnected from the conversation and kept looking up into the sky.

  “Are you wishing you could become a general?” Johan asked, smiling a little.

  Mark laughed.

  “Impossible. My friend here is not arrogant enough to believe his name should shine in the sky with the likes of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great.

  Arthur stopped looking at the sky, laughed a little, and gave them the middle finger. Then he said that he would get everything ready to go back to the battlefield and walked away.

  “He didn’t get angry, right?” Johan asked.

  “Nah,” Mark answered. “He does have a sense of humor. If he didn’t, he would be a fucking nightmare.”

  Johan looked at Arthur getting away from them.

  “Your friend terrifies me a little,” he muttered.

  Mark thought about some of the things Arthur had done.

  “He probably should,” he eventually answered. “And now let’s get ready to walk back, in the middle of the night, the last ten fucking hours.”

  But Johan didn’t seem ready to stop talking. He looked thoughtfully at the sky.

  “It is interesting, isn’t it? You accomplished a certain criteria, and got a Class. But I feel that at most you accomplished the letter of the Law, not the spirit of it. You know; we didn’t really hate you when we told you fuck you, Mark. It was mostly a joke.”

  “Mostly?” Mark asked, smiling a little.

  Johan chuckled and patted him on the back before starting to walk away, thinking aloud:

  “This could be big… very big… Potentially. Keep your Class a secret for now, will you? I think it could be valuable to keep it confidential for the moment.”

  “Shouldn’t you make sure nobody starts leveling in useless stuff?”

  Johan stopped walking and looked at him, daunted.

  “This will be a difficult conversation to have without sounding like a crazy person…” And it probably wouldn’t help that he had just drunk three big glasses of wine, not having eaten basically anything in the whole day.

  “Yeah,” Mark said, returning him the pat on the back and walking away. “Good luck.”

  Mark noticed Tobias was waiting for him. The overweight man had run out of the commander tent as soon as the conversation with Johan had been over. And he had gotten ready to leave, as if afraid they would decide to leave him behind.

  “We’ll leave in ten minutes. Arthur just told me. I’ll go too,” Tobias said very fast.

  “Sure. Cool,” answered Mark. He meant it; he was starting to like the guy.

  Mark started to walk away, wanting to take a leak before leaving for the battlefield, when Tobias added:

  “Do you think Johan will hold a grudge after what happened?”

  Mark looked at him, a little confused:

  “What? What happened?”

  “Well, you threatened him. Because you guys were threatening him. That’s how you got that information.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Oh, that?” Mark shrugged. “He was treated like an adult. He will need people like us. He’ll see it soon enough.”

  Tobias got thoughtful and stared for a few seconds at Johan, who was trying to explain the whole business of Classes and Skills to a very skeptical audience. And trying to answer as many questions as possible, without giving any details about his theories on exponential growth, just explaining that growth opportunities were limited, and they shouldn’t waste them in useless Classes.

  He finished by asking everybody to cancel any possible level-up they received—it was something you could do, he said.

  Johan’s explanations were given in a decided tone. With authority. He was growing fast into his position as a leader. It probably helped that he was a little buzzed.

  Mark looked at the silent Tobias. He seemed a little sad, even guilty. It was probably too much: the selling of souls, plans of world-conquer, gods enjoying the suffering of the living… so many secrets… And now walking through a forest filled with enemies to recover a magic book.

  “You don’t have to stay with us, you know…” Mark said. “You can leave us and focus on cooking or something like that. Maybe help with logistics. We will not force you to come with us. As long as you keep quiet about the things you have heard.”

  Tobias raised his eyebrows.

  “What? No! I don’t want to leave! I want to go with you!

  “Are you sure?”

  Tobias got more serious. He looked around to make sure nobody was listening, and he said:

  “I lived my whole life being a good person, or at least not a bad one. And I died knowing my life had been worthless. And I hated knowing that I had been a coward. I will do anything to make this opportunity count. I’m in. All the respect I got for the bloodied sable? Give me a chance and I swear I’ll earn it.”

  “Sorry, you just seemed a little worried…”

  “Well, I don’t want to leave.”

  “Okay, sure. Cool. I’ll go take a leak, see you on the side of the camp in a few minutes.”

  Mark started to walk away, towards the latrines they had excavated, trying to get a little intimacy… And Tobias walked at his side and started talking:

  “It’s not about that. I’m not worried about taking risks with you guys… It’s just… Did Arthur really kill you? Like, was he your actual murderer?”

  Mark remembered having said so just before the Mongol charge. And now he looked around to make sure nobody had listened. Thankfully, nobody seemed to be eavesdropping.

  “Lower your voice,” he muttered. “And yeah. He killed me. But there were extenuating circumstances. Like, I clearly don’t hold a grudge, do I?”

  In this case the extenuating circumstance was a giant mobster named Tito.

  “No. I guess not,” Tobias got a little thoughtful. “I have done some pretty fucked-up things too, you know? Back on Earth.”

  Mark had once killed Tito’s lieutenant with an iron pipe, crushing his skull until not even his family could have recognized him. So he was very curious about what Tobias, a guy whose deep eyes exposed a vulnerable and sensitive soul, considered “pretty fucked-up things”.

  “Did you? Can you give me an example?”

  Tobias took a couple of deep breaths.

  “I’m… I’m the one who made the fuck you meme video that made Johan famous. I didn’t leak it at the beginning—when it went viral in the Counter-Strike community—but once the supervolcano exploded, I made the video and put it on YouTube. The one with the government Mark side by side with Tobias screaming fuck you, Mark like a madman. And it blew up. I never considered the effect it had on Johan… I feel like shit, now knowing how much it made him suffer… So I understand how Arthur must have felt about… well, what he did to you.”

  So murdering me in cold blood and making a meme are now on the same level?Mark thought, vaguely offended at the notion.

  “And my feelings are even more complex because…” continued Tobias.

  Mark realized with dismay he would have to relieve himself while listening to Tobias’s regrets about creating some goddamn meme Mark had never even seen… A meme that consisted of saying fuck you, Mark over and over.

  “You know what?” Mark said, changing directions and going to the other side of the camp, where Arthur would be waiting. “I don’t need to pee right now. I can do it in the forest later. Let’s go find Arthur and start the mission.”

  “Really? Sure,” said Tobias, following him. Then he continued talking about the meme. “And yes, the video must have gotten like ten billion views or something crazy like that... But it’s not like I made any money with it, you know? They took down my YouTube channel, so I didn’t get any money from Adsense or anything. Like, that has to count for something, right? Johan cannot get angry for something that was basically an artistic expression, made completely altruistically.”

  Altruistic?, Mark thought. You just said you tried to monetize it, didn’t you? And how many “fuck you, Mark’s” are in ten billion views?

  “And it made a lot of people happy,”Tobias continued. “In the end, even if you consider the possible suffering of Johan—which I think is horrible, of course—, in the end, I did generate more happiness than sadness. So that has to count for something too, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The young man who had climbed up the folds on the statue’s cloak, so he could keep watch over the forest, was now begging for help to get down. A few people had been shouting him useless ideas from below. Then a couple of guys started making jokes—some of them pretty funny—and the situation threatened to become a roast of the poor lookout. Eric, who had been cleaning the horse’s excrements to prove that even the “second-in-command” was willing to do anything to help the Battalion, was now shouting for his zealots to find a rope to help their fellow idiot.

  When Mark passed by his side, Eric took a moment to smile at him and say:

  “Fuck you, Mark.”

  “Fuck you, Eric,” Mark answered, rolling his eyes but smiling a little. In the last few hours, they might have repeated this ritual like thirty times. Eric didn’t seem to be able to get enough of it, and Mark found it slightly amusing.

  Tobias continued talking, completely self-absorbed in his weird internal struggle:

  “And it’s true that I tried to recapture a little bit of the fame, by making a few dozen different versions of the meme. You know, putting the fuck you, Mark video of Johan on other montages. But it didn’t work. It was like trying to capture lightning in a bottle… Oh! What’s going on there?”

  They had arrived at the limit of the camp. And found Arthur arguing with a group of young men. There were about twenty of them, and their leader was the guy with the bruised eye.

  Arthur was smiling at him. And it was a very dangerous smile.

  “You’re going to the battlefield, right?” was saying the guy with the bruised eye. “We want to go with you.”

  Somebody had already gone to warn Johan, who arrived almost running, having stopped his improvised questions and answers forum.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’re sending them to the battlefield, right?” repeated the guy with the bruised eye. “To recover the book. We want to go there too.”

  Arthur smiled, still staring at the guy with the bruised eye.

  “And I just told them that this fucking mission will only be successful if we can do it with a small team. Fast and silent. I’m not babysitting twenty dudes. Most of them unarmed.”

  “We’re not asking you to babysit. We’ll be able to handle ourselves.”

  Mark looked at the group. They seemed angry. Extremely distrustful of Johan and everybody who worked with him. It didn’t surprise him that most of them were people who hadn’t cheered Johan a few minutes ago.

  “Why would you want to go back to the battlefield?” asked Johan. “What was your name? Gustav?”

  “Yes”, answered the guy. “And there will be weapons on the battlefield. All these people want to be armed.”

  “Yes, or do you want only your little friends to be armed?” said another guy. He was the one who had been searched by Eric and the Zealots, all his belongings thrown onto the ground for everybody to see.

  So they have noticed the weapon distribution… Mark thought.

  The man who had had all his belongings trampled over in front of everybody looked with contempt at Eric, who had formed his zealots behind Johan.

  Mark realized with dismay that some of those idiots were holding the hilts of their weapons, as if ready to draw their swords. Gustav and a few of his men —the ones armed—also started to hold their weapons, ready to fight.

  Mark looked at Arthur. Neither of them liked this situation. They didn’t want a fight; they had enough enemies already with all the armies of the forest. But they didn’t want to go back to the forest with twenty guys who disliked them. If they turned against them, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  It could be better to finish this now, when they were not outnumbered. When they had Eric’s and the zealots’ support. When most of their enemies were still unarmed.

  Fucking hell… I’m not doing very well in my attempts to change my ways…

  Mark felt within, and although [Traitor’s Premonition] was again depleted after his heroic avoidance of a candle…Thanks for that, Arthur, [Phantom Presence] was again at least half-recovered. And that would be enough.

  He decided on a plan. Quick and easy. He was going to taunt Gustav, let him try a swing at him with the sword, avoid it with [Phantom Presence], and murder him in front of everybody, cementing once and for all Johan’s position as the leader.

  Mark took a step towards Gustav, approaching his hand to his dagger, getting ready to fight.

  Arthur seemed to follow his train of thought. And he too approached his hand to the hilt of his sword…