The giant moving shape of Erik Bloodaxe formed by the smoke silently roared, raising its axe. It was so big that it seemed to be reaching toward the sky. Above it, the countdown for “The Hunt of Erik Bloodaxe” continued.

  “What the fuck…” muttered one of the Gamers near Mark. They were all watching from a distance, lying down behind a ridge.

  3.

  2.

  1…

  The cloud of shimmering smoke regrouped and coalesced until it formed a small cube, barely the size of a shoe box. It was throbbing and beaming with blue light. Everybody—the Gamers, the Vikings, and the army surrounding them—watched the cube getting higher, and higher… And then the cube fell to the ground as if suddenly remembering to obey the laws of physics.

  When the cube hit the ground, it exploded in size, unfolding with silent fury, and swallowing almost every soldier into its growing mass. There was a rush of air that reached even the distant Gamers. Only a handful of soldiers from the larger army managed to escape, sprinting toward a nearby slope. They hurled themselves down the incline, tumbling out of control.

  From the distance, Mark could see that the massive cube was like a window to another world. Inside it, he saw a sun shining on an open sky. An ocean expanding into the horizon. And on it, a small ship gently rocking with the waves.

  In the middle of the night, the cube shined with the light of the sun it contained, and started to levitate and tremble until it was a few feet above the ground. The few soldiers who had fallen down the sloping ground got up unsteadily and looked towards the cube with fear, their shadows extending backwards. Only four of them had managed to get away.

  And then the cube collapsed upon itself. In an instant. And there was nothing there. And darkness returned to the forest.

  “What the fuck was that?” Arthur asked.

  Mark looked at Arthur. His friend had his eyes very open, and he was a little pale. It was one of the first times in his life that he had seen Arthur truly afraid.

  “No idea,” Mark answered. He too was a little shaken. His heart was beating wildly in his chest.

  Tobias, on the other hand, seemed pretty excited. He was lying down next to Mark.

  “That had to be a pocket dimension,” he said, getting up as if he wanted to approach and give it a closer look.

  “Is that a Skill?” Mark wondered, grabbing Tobias’s arm to stop him.

  “I doubt it,” answered Tobias, who didn’t insist on getting nearer and stayed put with everybody else. “It felt more like a special event. If it was a Skill provided by a Class, he would have been among the most powerful generals. It must be a feature of the competition. You know… probably.”

  “Let’s hope so. If Skills can do that, we are seriously outmatched,” Mark said, thinking about his own two Skills, that had seemed so awesome just a couple of minutes ago.

  Gustav hissed at them.

  “Will you people shut up? They will hear us!”

  Mark answered without thinking:

  “It’s okay; we have the wind on our faces, so our voices won’t carry. And their night vision is impaired, with those torches around. We’re safe.”

  Everybody looked at him with surprise. Even Mark was a little surprised. Especially when he realized that he had considered those facts from the very beginning, as if his subconscious had been scanning his surroundings for threats. He could even see a path in the forest that would bring him to almost ten yards of the soldiers now approaching the clearing where their comrades had disappeared. They had taken a couple of torches from the ground, and they were trying to find in the now empty clearing some clue of the destiny of their comrades.

  Mark knew at what points he would have to stop. At what points he would have to crawl to take advantage of the foliage. The places he would have to avoid because the creaking of the leaves on the ground would announce his presence…

  Ten yards. The soldiers were distracted. The path was there. He was sure he could get to ten yards from them. The rest of the distance he would have to risk it… They would probably notice him; they were elite soldiers, after all. But at that point, he would be within reach; he would kill one of the soldiers by throwing his dagger at his chest, and steal his sword and finish the others in close combat…

  What the fuck am I even thinking? Mark wondered, pushing those thoughts out of his mind.

  He had done many things in his life, but never stalked soldiers in a forest in the middle of the night. And there was no way he would survive fighting three soldiers at the same time. Or kill somebody by throwing a dagger at his chest.

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  I tried that with a horse, and I’m lucky I managed to slightly nick it.

  He felt within and tried to check if he was somehow using his [Traitor’s Premonition]. But the Skill wasn’t active. And every time he had used it, he had known without any doubt that he was using it.

  So it’s probably not that, he thought.

  He remembered his battle against the two Mongols from this morning, when he had thrown his dagger against one of the horses, opening a path to escape. Why had he even considered throwing his dagger? He had known it would work, hadn’t he? It had felt a little like this, as if his mind had been considering options and escape routes at every point, as if his instincts were a little better honed than they had been in the past.

  “Look! The cube has appeared again!” one of the Gamers said.

  One of the soldiers left behind took a few steps backwards when the cube appeared from nowhere, as if unfolding upon itself, and Mark could again see within the cube a massive ocean, now illuminated by the moonlight, and a burning ship peacefully rocking on the waves. There were stars within the cube, shining on the dark sky. Mark wondered if the stars would have the constellations from back home…

  The cube dissolved into smoke again, and when the smoke cleared, Erik Bloodaxe and nine of his Vikings were standing on the now scorched earth of the clearing. Every soldier from the other army was gone.

  Erik Bloodaxe raised his bloody axe and roared his victory to the forest. To the world. He was covered in ash, with a serious burn on his left arm. A few of his Vikings fell to their knees, coughing. Another one threw a bucket of water to extinguish the small flames consuming the shirt of a comrade.

  The four remaining soldiers looked at them without moving. Paralyzed. Slowly coming to the realization that they had just lost almost all their comrades.

  Then Erik Bloodaxe charged towards them, and the four soldiers ran away, terrified.

  Directly towards the place where the Gamers were hiding.

  Some of them started to fidget, as if about to get up and run away.

  “Nobody move and they won’t see us,” Mark said, feeling again that strange certainty. He didn’t know why, but he was sure that considering the terrain they were in, the terrified soldiers would change directions slightly, choosing the path of least resistance that moved towards the left, and not climb up the ridge the Gamers were at.

  I know if I were ambushing them, I would wait for them in that little patch of trees from there, he thought, looking at some trees about sixty yards from them.

  “Somebody moves, I’ll kill him myself,” Arthur said when he realized a couple of Gamers had almost gotten up to escape.

  Nobody moved. And the Gamers stayed very quiet as they saw for a very long minute the soldiers running away from Erik Bloodaxe, getting closer and closer to them…

  One of the Gamers cursed when it seemed inevitable that they would be trampled over by the soldiers. But the running soldiers did change direction slightly when the terrain got more inclined, and they passed through the patch of trees Mark had predicted they would pass. Then they got lost within the forest.

  Erik Bloodaxe watched the soldiers escaping for a couple of minutes. While watching, he stood proud, the axe in his hand as if ready to do battle again. But when there were completely gone, he allowed exhaustion to overtake him, faltering a little. He left his axe on the ground and limped to help one of his Vikings, who seemed to have fallen unconscious after coughing for a while.

  Eventually, he awakened the unconscious Viking, and they all walked away, his healthier soldiers helping the ones too injured to walk by themselves.

  “That was fucking crazy…” muttered one of the Gamers, when it was clear the show was over.

  They started to get up. Emily looked at Tobias.

  “What did you call them? Pocket dimension?” she asked.

  Tobias was still looking at the place where the cube had appeared. His eyes were shining from the excitement.

  “Pocket dimension. Dimensional rift. It doesn’t really matter. I think that was a small world contained within the cube.”

  “You said it was a feature of the battle we’re part of?”

  “I assume it was. You just have to look at the sign that appeared above the battlefield. The hunt of Erik Bloodaxe. I think it might appear when a general is at risk of being killed.”

  “It didn’t happen on the battlefield this morning.”

  Tobias shrugged.

  “True. I am making things up as we go. So maybe I’m wrong. But now I want to get the magic book even more—who knows what we can accomplish with it?”

  Arthur interjected before the whole thing became some sort of debate.

  “Let’s stop chattering and get this fucking thing done. Tobias is right. We need the book. More than ever. I hope nobody doubts how much we need the magic book if we want to survive this shit.”

  Nobody disagreed.

  “No doubts?” Arthur asked. “Cool. Then follow my lead. We must be less than an hour away from the battlefield.”

  Mark realized that Arthur was compensating for the fear he had shown before with some decisive action.

  “Time to get the job done,” Arthur said.

  They organized the group as before, with a scout in every direction, and they walked towards the battlefield.

  This time Mark took the position as the forward scout. It wasn’t his turn, but he offered to take it, not wanting to risk putting somebody else in that position who might mess things up.

  He spent about thirty minutes walking through the forest in silence, paying attention to every small crackling sound and every shadow moving in the darkness. From time to time, he could hear screams of fear and pain echoing through the forest. But never near enough to be a risk for them. Until eventually, he crouched down slowly when he spotted two swaying figures in the distance. They were walking unsteadily, as if drunk, or very heavily injured.

  Mark moved back slowly to warn the rest of the Gamers.

  They organized rapidly to move a couple of hundred yards to the right to avoid the soldiers. Gustav offered to warn the scout on the left to make sure he followed them. Another Gamer went to warn the scout at the back.

  “No details on what happened to them?” Arthur asked while they waited for the scouts to come back. The Gamers had taken the opportunity to rest a little and mutter some comments. A couple of them walked behind a tree to relieve themselves.

  Mark shrugged.

  “Too far to know. I guess even the greatest soldiers can break.”

  “No kidding,” Arthur answered. “This whole day has been fucking crazy. That thing with the cube was…”

  He was interrupted when they heard a shout of fear from the left of the group, where Gustav had gone to warn the scout.

  Arthur and Mark looked at each other and then ran towards the screaming.

  When they arrived, they saw a terrified Gustav threatening with his sword a staggering soldier, who reached for him with outstretched hands—seemingly not caring about injuring himself against Gustav’s sword. The guy who had been scouting was wrestling on the ground with somebody else, trying to stop him from biting at his face.

  “Help us!” Gustav shouted.