Mark looked at the gun aimed at his head. It was so close that he could see a scratch on the barrel.

  Then his eyes moved back to the monitor, where the Counter-Strike match was still happening, where his avatar stood motionless. Useless.

  He hated himself for even looking at the computer at a moment like this. He hated that he was still sweaty and tense from the focus, the adrenaline of the tournament.

  He forced himself to look back at the man with the gun. The only light in the room came from the computer monitor, and in that darkness, he could barely see the face of the man threatening his life.

  Was there some sadness in his eyes? Maybe their friendship wasn’t completely over?

  Mark thought that he could beg. He could cry and whimper and beg for his miserable life. And it would probably work. But all he said was:

  “Fuck you.”

  And those were his last words before the man pulled the trigger, and Mark fell from his chair to the floor, feeling as if he had received a powerful punch to the chest.

  The shot had seemed very loud in the small room. And in the following silence, the only sounds he could hear were his chair rolling away until it hit the wall, and the loud sound of his computer working at full power.

  And the damn match. Still happening. A new round had just started. He could hear the distant shooting from the speakerphones.

  Mark looked at his hands, now covered in blood, with a pang of regret he realized he was still holding the mouse. He let it go over the growing pool of his own blood. He didn’t feel any pain, but when he tried to take a breath, he started to choke. His heart was beating wildly.

  The man crouched and approached the gun until it rested on Mark’s forehead. Mark could feel the warmth of the barrel on his skin. From the computer he heard shouts from his teammates asking him where the hell he was. Telling him that they were being slaughtered.

  He saw the finger on the trigger slowly pulling back… He could start to feel the agonizing pain in his chest.

  “Fuck y—” he started to say.

  Then he found himself surrounded by strangers, with the open sky above them. There hadn’t been any movement. Any apparent break in continuity. One moment he was in the darkness of his room, waiting to be murdered, and now he was in a beautiful field of grass, feeling the warm sunlight on his skin.

  If he focused, he could still feel the small pressure of the barrel of the gun resting on his forehead. But there was no longer a gun, and the feeling was slowly fading away.

  There were hundreds of strangers around him. And they seemed as confused as he was. A man of similar age—early twenties—looked at him with wild eyes, and asked:

  “What’s happening? Where’s my family? Did the volcano stop?”

  Mark didn’t care.

  “Fuck off, dude,” he answered, jerking the hand of the stranger away from his arm. “You’re dead, I’m dead. Let’s not make it each other’s problem.”

  And he took a few steps away from the crowd, looking at the glorious sun, at the massive white clouds slowly moving through the blue sky, at the beautiful green field extending for miles, until it reached a magnificent forest full of massive trees.

  He felt as if he was awakening after the longest slumber. Did the past few years really happen? The crimes, the violence, the last months of reclusion and emptiness… did they happen? Or was it all just a strange dream he would soon forget? It felt as if everything was slipping farther and farther away. He was awake now, and life was a colorful wonder.

  He took a cautious breath, fearing the pain in his chest. But nothing hurt, and then he took a deeper breath, and it was glorious to fill his lungs with air so pure. It was unlike anything he had ever known—crisp, untainted.

  Real. More real than the stale odor of a room he hadn’t left for the last two weeks.

  Exhilarating. A gift. The most glorious gift.

  His eyes filled with tears, and he started to walk towards a small hill near the crowd. What better place to fall to his knees, and thank God for his generosity?

  Because this had to be Heaven. Somehow, God had considered him worthy of salvation.

  He wasn’t religious, not really. But lately, he had been having the same nightmare over and over; he kept imagining that he died and faced the final judgement, and God towered over him carrying a massive bag, and started throwing over him all the gifts he had received, telling him with thunderous voice: “look, look, at all the things I gifted you: a loving family, good friends, a healthy body, a keen intelligence, opportunities, so many opportunities! So much potential! So much that you could do, and what did you do with it all? How dare you come to me knowing you wasted everything I ever gave you? I despise you. You are no child of mine”, and after passing judgement, he would condemn him to an eternity in Hell. A continuation of the hell he had built for himself in life.

  “Thank you, God, thank you,” Mark murmured while he continued to walk up the hill, looking at the beauty that surrounded him, ashamed because he knew it was a gift he didn’t deserve, “thank you, thank you…”

  He reached the summit and fell to his knees, tears already falling down his face. He lowered his face against the ground.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank y—”

  And then he looked up. And he saw that on the other side of the hill there were thousands of men… no, millions of men, divided into small crowds, with about a couple of hundred yards of distance between each group of men. There should have been a massive amount of noise. But all those million of men were standing there in absolute silence. The silence was so complete that he could listen to the soft flapping of some birds flying overhead.

  An army of angels?, he thought for a second with the beginning of a smile on his lips. Then he focused on the closer group. They were near enough for Mark to see their faces. Their expressions of terror. The strange clothes they were wearing. Their swords and shields and maces and axes shining under the sunlight.

  Those are no angels, he thought. They were tall, blond, with powerful bodies. They seemed like… Vikings?

  He was close enough to see a man at the edge of the group, raising a massive axe and hitting something lying at his feet, over and over. His face contorted with fury while he bellowed something Mark couldn’t hear. A red mist of blood covered him while he hit again and again the mangled body of the man he had murdered.

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  Soon, the whole group of Vikings revolted and started attacking each other in a bloody, brutal melee.

  It was surreal. He heard somebody shouting at him from behind.

  “You, asshole! Will you come back? You’re totally giving away our position!”

  Mark tried to force himself to stop looking at the silent, brutal carnage happening in front of his eyes. But it was too fascinating. Those men were attacking each other with reckless abandon. One man continued to swing his mace even after losing an arm; another ripped someone’s throat with his teeth; another thrust his sword through the eye of a man who had raised his arms as if to beg for mercy, and then proceeded to start cutting apart the head.

  “Didn’t you hear me, dude?”, a man asked from behind Mark, after having gone up the hill to reach him, “you cannot… you cannot be…”, he was gasping a little from the small effort of running up the hill, then he saw the brutal carnage happening at the other side of the hill, “Holy fuck… I knew it was going to be… But still…”

  “What’s happening?” said Mark, now looking at other groups of men from farther away. There were thousands of groups the same size as the crazy Vikings. He had never seen so many people in a single place.

  And some names were starting to appear over the crowds. It was a floating sign that he was somehow seeing, even though he knew it wasn’t real. Right above each formation; it included a standard on the left, and a name on the right…

  “Those names…” Mark whispered, “those names…”

  “They are the names of legends,” answered the other man, having caught his breath. “All of them are legends. Or at least, they are supposed to be.”

  Mark recognized many of them.

  Napoleon.

  Nobunaga.

  Genghis Khan.

  Sun Tzu.

  Leonidas.

  Xerxes.

  Washington.

  Julius Caesar.

  Alexander the Great.

  From the height Mark enjoyed, he could see that some groups were starting to organize themselves in military formations. No group of soldiers had yet engaged in combat with another group of soldiers. Any violence that had occurred until now had been limited to fights within groups. But Mark knew it was a matter of time until the violence extended. He could already see the soldiers of some formations eyeing with distrust the soldiers of other formations.

  For the first time, Mark focused on the man standing next to him. He was tall. Blond. A little overweight. He had an accent from some nordic country, maybe Sweden. He could have been a direct descendant of the violent Vikings down the hill, who were still hacking at each other with gleeful abandon. Only instead of spending his life engaged in pillaging and murdering, he had spent his life in front of a computer, eating donuts and listening to Human Resource ladies talking about whatever Swedish Human Resource ladies talked about. Some bullshit, probably.

  “What the fuck is happening?” Mark asked.

  “That’s what I’m going to explain right now,” answered the Viking-that-never-was, “but first I’ll get the attention of everybody else; we don’t have time to explain this twice.”

  They both looked at the group of strangers they had appeared with. It was obvious that it was different from the other groups.

  It was smaller than the others. If the average formation seemed to have about two thousand men, this group probably had less than a thousand.

  Most groups were exclusively formed by men. In this one, there were some women—though they were a minority, making up roughly one in twenty.

  Sometimes in life you saw a man, and something in his face, in his expression, made you know that he did something dangerous for a living. Maybe he was a cop, or a soldier, or a criminal used to getting his way by killing the competition, but you just knew he was dangerous.

  That he was used to violence.

  Almost all the men Mark could see on the other side of the hill fit that description.

  And barely none of the men in the group he had appeared with fit even remotely with that description.

  They all seemed… normal. Normal people. They were wearing simple clothes that had a certain medieval feel, with coarse fabric, and simple dark colors, but it felt more like people doing cosplay than somebody truly used to wearing those clothes.

  All the men on the other side of the hill had weapons. Some of them, like Genghis Khan’s Mongols, were riding horses. Very few of the people in Mark’s group had any weapon.

  Even their reaction to the situation was different from the one in the other groups. Most of the groups on the other side of the hill seemed to be divided between those who had started hacking at each other with passion and those who had achieved some sort of discipline and were already organizing into formations.

  In Mark’s group, the reaction had been different. There wasn’t any semblance of discipline, but nobody had truly hurt anybody. A few nervous breakdowns had happened; some people were still crying. And a few fights had started and been swiftly stopped by the people around.

  One of the fights had been between two young men, both carrying swords at their hips. They had exchanged some awkward punches, probably the first ones they had thrown in their entire lives, and neither had seemed to even consider drawing their swords.

  The man standing next to him looked at the crowd, and he seemed to have frozen. The domesticated-Viking, as Mark had decided to call him, was pale, his eyes a little wide with fear.

  Mark could understand. He had never liked speaking in front of a crowd. He remembered freezing up while giving a presentation in college, barely managing to repeat in a monotone and broken voice the talk he had memorized. That was before he had dropped out to pursue a short-lived criminal career.

  But he seemed to have received a new opportunity. A new chance to amend his mistakes. He wasn’t going to start it with cowardice.

  Also, he wanted answers.

  “Everybody!” Mark shouted at the top of his lungs. “Shut the fuck up! This man right here has all the answers you want!” He pointed to the man standing next to him.

  The crowd started to shush each other until there was silence. They looked up at them from the foot of the hill. Some seemed skeptical. Others seemed ready to get those answers with violence.

  The man standing next to Mark looked a little taken aback. Maybe he had expected a couple of extra seconds to collect his thoughts?

  “What?” murmured Mark. “You do have the answers, right?”

  “I mean…”, the man covered his mouth with a hand, “Not all the answers”.

  “Oh…” Mark looked at all those people now paying them all their attention. How fast could a group like this turn into an angry mob?

  “No. It’s okay. I have been preparing for this moment for the last few months,” whispered the man. Then he advanced a couple of steps and extended his arms in a welcome manner, “Hello! Welcome to Terastes, the Forsaken World!”

  The crowd stayed silent, and Mark could understand. From their perspective, they were in a beautiful heaven, all the chaos hidden behind a hill and completely silent. It didn’t help that a pretty bird with red feathers started chirping gleefully.

  The shame-of-all-past-Vikings continued:

  “If you are here it means you have been chosen. You have been given a new opportunity.”

  Mark could see some hopeful smiles starting to appear. Somebody fell to his knees, probably to thank God.

  Mark remembered the man hacking another one to pieces with a massive axe. Enjoy that while it lasts, sucker, he thought. Mark had already realized that this new opportunity would come with some costs. It didn’t surprise him. He had realized a very long time ago that nothing in life was free.

  And the deconstructed-Viking continued:

  “The gods of this world have given you an opportunity to serve in my army. I will be your general. You will be my soldiers. And under my command, we will defeat the greatest generals in history to conquer this world!”

  He kept his arms extended. A hopeful smile on his face.

  Is he expecting an ovation?, thought Mark, because this is not going to go the way he expects.

  The crowd’s disbelief and confusion were quickly turning into anger. One of the clumsy fighters, his eye already swelling with a bruise, had realized that being armed was actually a pretty useful thing, and he had drawn his sword. The metallic whisper of the sword leaving its sheath sounded very, very loud in the peaceful field.

  And Mark realized that if he didn’t do something fast, he could be facing the choice between running to the other side of the hill and joining the Viking axeman for some fun, or trying to convince the mob that he was totally with them and joining in the lynching of the poor bastard standing next to him.

  “Everybody!” Mark exclaimed, “He could be saying some truth! On the other side of the hill there are some armies and maybe some famous generals!”, then he thought for a second, and amended his already very heavily noncommittal statement. “Not that I’m with him or anything, of course! I don’t trust him either!” he added, hoping to keep open the possibility of joining the lynching to escape.

  Immediately, people started to walk up the hill, curious to see what was on the other side.

  The not-much-of-a-general, not-much-of-a-Viking standing next to Mark was having none of that. He started shouting with his heavy Swedish accent:

  “No! No! You’ll reveal our position! They will kill us all! Trust me! Don’t peek! Don’t peek!”.