Gustav had demanded explanations from Tobias about his bloodied saber—the one Mark had bloodied hitting an already dead Mongol. And Tobias was looking around like a deer in headlights, not really knowing what to answer.

  Arthur came to his rescue. He had been talking in private with Emily, and now he walked over and answered:

  “Tobias saved my life. One of the Mongols survived the Romans throwing their javelins. He fell from his horse, but he wasn’t too badly injured. Everything was pure fucking chaos. I was already on the ground, after being hit by a terrified horse, and the Mongol tried to finish me. I was about to be killed when Tobias arrived running and hit that motherfucker on the back, and stabbed him again when he was on the ground. He was scared. Who wouldn’t be? But he did what had to be done. Without him, I would be dead already. He saved my life.”

  Arthur improvised all those lies without blinking an eye. And he seemed truly furious when he approached Gustav and told him:

  “This is no longer the past. This is no longer a world where you can hide behind some fucking username and insult other people’s honor, knowing they have no way of defending themselves.”

  He shoved Gustav, forcing him to retreat a few steps, hitting the trunk of a tree with his back.

  “If I ever see you again attacking the honor and good name of one of my friends…” continued Arthur. “I will fucking kill you.”

  Arthur looked at the people surrounding him.

  “Let’s bring back duels. Let’s bring back honor. Let’s go back to the good old times when assholes had to really mind their tongues, or risk having them cut when the good people decided to defend themselves.”

  Then he focused again on Gustav. He approached a hand to his sword and looked at the one on Gustav’s side.

  “Maybe you want to go at it right now?”

  Gustav looked pale.

  “No. I…” he looked at Tobias. “I apologize, man. My words were out of line.”

  Mark looked at the barely hidden anger in Gustav’s eyes, and knew that this wasn’t over. Then he approached Arthur, and they walked together for a while, keeping a little distance from everybody else.

  Mark looked at Gustav, walking with some of the men, murmuring, also keeping their distance.

  “You shouldn’t have called him out like that,” he told Arthur. In any case, Mark wasn’t surprised. Arthur had always been deeply protective of his people. It surprised him more that he considered Tobias one of his people.

  “I know,” Arthur answered. “But I fucking hate people like that.”

  “It could be a problem.”

  “Not right now. I doubt he has the balls to try to kill us in cold blood. And I see how you earned some of these people’s trust. So I doubt he has much of a hand to play anyway.”

  “What did Johan tell you to convince you to take everybody with us? Back at the camp.”

  Arthur had been adamant about not bringing too many people on the mission to recover the magic book. But after Johan had whispered something to him, he allowed everybody who wanted to come to follow them.

  “He told me he didn’t trust all these guys,” he gestured to everybody who surrounded them, “not to try something while we were not there to protect him…”

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  “And you decided they would be much better with us? They just outnumber us ten to one. Very smart.”

  Arthur shrugged.

  “We decided to back his play, didn’t we? So we’re backing his play. Hopefully, he’ll cement his position while we’re gone. Also…” he looked around to make sure nobody was looking. “He kind of begged me to. And I felt bad saying no.”

  Mark thought about their brave leader, his face still shining in the sky. Currently the tenth most powerful general in Earth’s history. He remembered that he had also begged the old man from the temple to get a better start position.

  “That dude is getting too used to begging...”

  “Yeah… Not very inspiring, is he? General Johan, the Beggar, the Furry Lover.”

  “Johan, Beggar in Chief.”

  “I imagine him all angry, threatening another general, and whispering with fury in his voice: Don’t make me get on my knees and beg you to stop…”

  Mark laughed.

  “No wonder the dude ended up becoming a famous meme. He is a walking meme.”

  They had been making those jokes a little too loudly, laughing too loud, and people heard and approached them.

  They, too, had jokes to make. And soon the conversation devolved into a brutal roast of their beloved general.

  Mark felt kind of bad, because the objective had been to improve Johan’s position and increase people’s respect for him. And he was pretty sure some of the nicknames would be muttered behind Johan for a really long time…

  Because I’ll be the one muttering them… he thought, taking mental note of some particularly imaginative ones.

  Anyway, it’s better to be mocked than hated… nobody is stabbed in the back for being a well-intentioned fool… he added, knowing the excuse for the disloyalty was extremely hollow.

  Then Tobias proved helpful again.

  “And half the idiots in this forest must be terrified of him, thinking he has to be a brutal motherfucker.”

  People laughed at the absurdity of it all. And they seemed a little proud to be in on the joke. Part of the Gamer Battalion. The tenth most powerful army in the history of Earth.

  Mark saw an opening. He tried to gain some goodwill with Gustav. He looked at him and said:

  “You have to recognize his plan is not bad, Gustav. He was dealt a shitty hand, and the idea of specializing in magic and things the others will not understand is good. He saw an opportunity when others would have fallen to despair.”

  “Sure…” conceded Gustav, who didn’t seem very moved by Mark’s little attempt at diplomacy. “As long as it works. Right now, we are without weapons, without the magic book, and without any real chance of surviving this shit. But hey, his fucking face is in the sky.”

  “He looks like a fool…” Gustav added, scowling at the sky.

  Mark looked at the constellation shining dimly in the dark sky. The stars seemed to be moving as the night moved on. And that made the image of Johan move with them. He seemed to be smiling more deeply, and winking an eye while he raised even more the V-sign of victory he made with his fingers.

  “Yeah… that’s something we can agree on,” Mark answered.

  Gustav looked back, toward the place where they had been camping.

  “At least it will be easy to come back to the camp,” he said.

  They had been worried about finding the Gamer Battalion again. But their ability to find the direction Johan was in didn’t seem to have any limit. If they focused, they could see his gamer-tag even from this distance.

  Another hour passed. Tobias, who was now the scout on the right flank, ran back towards them.

  “Something weird is happening a mile away. Like, super weird.”

  Everybody followed Tobias—except a couple of guys who walked away, to call back the rest of the scouts to make sure they didn’t get lost. The relaxed conversations of just a moment ago had been replaced by tense silence. And in that silence, they started to hear the shouts, the orders, the screams of pain coming from the distance. They kept approaching, trying their hardest not to make any noise. And about a hundred yards away, they reached a small ridge, and on the other side, half a mile away, they saw two armies apparently getting ready to fight.

  One of them was seriously outnumbered, with only twenty soldiers. The other one, with a little more than fifty, was maneuvering to cut off any escape route.

  Mark focused on the smaller army, and a name-tag appeared above one of its soldiers—over a man currently threatening his enemies with his massive axe.

  [Erik Bloodaxe - Viking King]

  “No way…” Mark muttered. The last time he had seen Erik, he had been trampled over by a horse. “He survived the Mongol charge?”

  There was a cloud of shimmering smoke floating above the battlefield, illuminating the soldiers below. That cloud of smoke started to coalesce until it showed the giant moving form of Erik Bloodaxe silently shouting something in defiance. The moving cloud was taller than the trees from the forest around. And above, some strange letters shimmered.

  “The Hunt of Erik Bloodaxe will begin in…”

  And a countdown started. The shimmering smoke above changing shapes to form numbers:

  10.

  9.

  8…