Mark felt Emily’s cold hands on his chest. The [Heal] spell sent an unsettling sensation through him. He could feel the open gash shrinking, his torn muscle knitting itself back together with an itching sensation.

  “You okay?” he asked. The girl was pale, her breath unsteady. After finishing, she stood still for a moment, eyes closed, as if struggling to pull herself together.

  “Yes, sure,” Emily answered.

  It had been more than ten hours of battle—the sun was starting to set, and the orange light entered through the portholes. They were in the cannon bay, the farthest room of the lower deck. The sound of the fighting arrived to them muffled by the couple of doors that separated them from it.

  Mark brought back a couple of coarse blankets from a nearby closet and put them over Emily. The girl looked up at him with gratefulness and hugged herself under the blankets, starting to shake uncontrollably.

  “Maybe take twenty minutes off?”

  Mark wanted to tell her to take a longer rest. To really rest. But they needed her. Without her, people would start dying. Without her, they would’ve already lost—and all of them would be dead.

  Mark knew that when Tobias and Emily used their Mana too hard—exhausting it over and over—the consequences were brutal. A deep, unnatural cold spread into their bones, as if they had been dropped into freezing water, leaving them shivering and unresponsive.

  Tobias once described it as: “Willingly walking into the abyss, not knowing if I can claw my way back before the cold swallows my very soul.”

  Of course, Tobias is a melodramatic asshole, Mark thought.

  “I’ll take five,” Emily said. “People need me.”

  And Emily’s a hero.

  “We’re all proud of you,” Mark told her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up at him with a faint smile. And then continued shivering under the blankets.

  Mark looked around the cannon bay. Liam was sitting in a corner, looking at the floor with a thoughtful expression—he had been like that since he had killed one of the Mongols with a hatchet. He kept fighting when needed, but he was keeping his distance from everybody.

  Two Vikings were moving the cannons so they would point towards the entrance of the cannon bay, to use them against the Mongols if they managed to break through into the lower deck.

  Another two Vikings were lying on the ground; one unconscious, the other feverishly muttering incoherent words. Both had been severely injured, and Emily’s Mana was too exhausted to heal them. She was focusing on the people she could bring back into fighting shape, and her leftover energy she used to keep the injured Vikings alive—hoping to properly help them when everything was over.

  Harald was sitting near the door to the cannon bay, his body leaning on the wall. The Viking was taking a short nap. Mark approached him, respectfully put a hand on his shoulder, and shook him a little.

  “Time to go back.”

  The Viking started to rise, yawning. He even luxuriated with a little stretching.

  “Sure. You go ahead, I’ll follow in a minute; I need to take a leak.”

  If anyone else had said that, Mark might have suspected them of trying to avoid fighting again, looking for an excuse to slip away from the chaos. But he had seen the Viking fighting—how he reacted to risking his life, to murdering his enemies.

  The man fucking loved it. He thrived on it.

  His very soul cried with joy when his enemies crumbled under the brutal blows of his axe.

  He would probably take the leak as fast as possible, to make sure his biological needs wouldn’t take too much time from the thrill of the slaughter.

  Mark closed the door to the cannon bay behind himself and entered the narrow corridor where they had been stacking the corpses of the Mongols—after stabbing them in the head to make sure they wouldn’t come back as undead. They had already killed almost thirty of them.

  The corridor was darker than the cannon bay, with only one small porthole on each side. Most corpses were covered in ominous darkness, but from time to time, a small, heartbreaking piece of humanity was highlighted by the wavy sunlight entering through the portholes; a hand lying still on the floor, or some eyes staring at the nothingness, asking questions Mark had no answer for.

  For the first time since the fight had started, Mark found himself alone.

  It was weird, he thought. Just an hour before, he had killed a Mongol—making him trip down the stairs and then stabbing him in the temple. In that moment, he had felt like a god among men. All his weariness and exhaustion washed away, replaced by adrenaline and the intoxicating thrill of victory.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  And now he was feeling melancholy. He was thinking about who those men had been—what was their story. He had become friends with somebody like Harald, born more than a thousand years before him. Could he have become friends with those Mongols too?

  He tried to feel something special. To achieve some sort of insight, a moment of enlightenment.

  But there was only death—the smell of the corridor was atrocious.

  And the corridor was over, and the battle was still happening, and his comrades needed him.

  And the adventure called.

  Mark opened the door to the square compartment the Mongols had to storm if they wanted to access the lower deck.

  “Daddy’s back, motherfuckers!”

  Arthur, Erik Bloodaxe, and Bjorn turned to face him. There was some tension in their movements, a certain urgency provoked by the adrenaline still pumping through their veins.

  Then they relaxed a little when they realized it was just him. The only Mongols in the small compartment were on the ground. Erik Bloodaxe approached a mortally wounded Mongol lying on the floor, placed his foot on the man's neck, and pressed down until it snapped.

  Even Arthur seemed a little taken aback by the cold brutality. He was carrying a bloodied sword, covered in small injuries that weren’t worth [Healing]. He looked at Mark:

  “So… You already recovered some Skills?”

  “Yeah. They’re not fully recovered, but I got…”

  “Where is Harald?” Erik Bloodaxe interrupted. He looked at Bjorn and Arthur. “Both of them must be relieved. They are starting to make mistakes.”

  “Erik!” shouted Bjorn, indignant.

  “It’s not your fault, Bjorn,” answered the Viking king. “Your leg will collapse under you at any time—don’t think I didn’t see you almost falling when that Mongol jumped over you. The wench didn’t heal you properly, right?”

  “Hey!” Mark said.

  “She’s doing all she can,” Arthur added.

  Erik Bloodaxe rolled his eyes.

  “I know. I don’t blame her. But the fighting is taking its toll. And you must rest if you don’t want to make mistakes.”

  The situation was getting desperate. The Mongols had finally had the opportunity to rest, and they were Leveling. They didn’t have any especially dangerous Skill. But they were getting stronger and faster.

  They explained to Mark that one of the Mongols had used a [Power Strike] against Arthur, who had barely managed to dodge it. Apparently, the Mongol had been as surprised as Arthur by the Skill—and his saber had ended lodged deep within a wooden wall, impossible to pull out. Arthur had taken the opportunity to waste his own [Power Strike] with a horizontal slash that had cut the Mongol in two.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Arthur said. “I fucked up. I got nervous. Should have kept the Skill for when I really needed it.”

  “The Mongols are not coming?” Mark asked.

  Arthur looked up the staircase, toward the open door to the outside.

  “They retreated again. They seem to be smartening up—now, if they can, they try to escape alive. They probably immediately try to nap, so they can Level faster.”

  “How many of them do you think are left?”

  “About thirty. And we currently have twelve soldiers still in fighting condition,” Erik Bloodaxe answered immediately.

  Everyone fell silent, the challenge of the upcoming battle hanging over them.

  “They must be running out of water already,” Mark said. He felt a little guilty about not taking down the second barrel of water—it had seemed impossible at the time, but everything would have been over if he had managed to do it. The Mongols wouldn’t have had time to Level.

  Maybe I should have risked trying to take it down?

  Arthur seemed to read his mind. He gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder.

  “They’ll get desperate soon enough. We’ll finish them this night.”

  Harald arrived at the little room. He seemed quite relaxed.

  “You’re finally here,” Erik Bloodaxe said. “You’ll take Bjorn’s position. Mark will take Arthur’s.”

  Then the Viking king looked at Mark.

  “Wyatt’s covering the left side. Go ask him if he needs to be relieved. He’s like these two idiots,” he added, looking at Arthur and Bjorn. “Men who don’t know when to ask for a rest are a danger to everybody. This is your second life, Bjorn. You should have learned this already.”

  Bjorn smiled at his king.

  “Maybe on the third one.”

  Erik Bloodaxe snorted, but he also smiled. Even when arguing among themselves, it was clear the Vikings were united by a deep sense of brotherhood.

  Wyatt was keeping watch over the living compartments on the left side of the ship. There wasn’t any real risk, because the portholes were too small for a person to fit through—only Mark could pass through them, using his [Phantom Presence] to vanish for a moment part of his body.

  Mark hadn’t seen Wyatt in a few hours. And he agreed with the Viking king: even if he wasn’t in the battle itself, just keeping watch for that long could be pretty exhausting. The tension took a real physical toll.

  He walked out the left door of the room and entered the little hallway that opened to the living compartments. There were three doors in the hallway. The space was designed for three small cabins, although the wooden separations were easily taken down, allowing to make a single cabin with more space.

  He looked at the first cabin. There was a dried trail of blood on the floor, from back in the beginning, when Wyatt had dragged the injured Viking toward the cannon bay. In order to circumvent the fighting room, Wyatt had taken down a wooden compartment, walking directly into the kitchen and then to the hallway where they were now keeping all the Mongol corpses.

  Mark looked for a second; Wyatt wasn’t there.

  He moved to the next cabin. Here, all the Gamers had huddled together the first day. The empty hammocks were swaying idly.

  This compartment was also empty.

  Mark felt some inner alarm screaming within himself. He heard a soft grating noise in the next compartment he couldn’t identify. He almost asked aloud so Wyatt would answer. But something told him it was better to stay silent.

  He arrived at the door to the third compartment, and he looked inside. The shock made him stay still for a couple of seconds.

  Wyatt was dead on the floor next to the door, sitting with his back leaning on the wooden wall. He had a grimace of surprise on his face, and an arrow lodged in his throat—his hands were still bloodied, as if he had hopelessly tried to pull the arrow out.

  Two Mongols were already in the compartment, helping a third one enter through the porthole—it must have taken them a while, but they had managed to expand the little porthole by serrating through the sides.

  Mark started to retreat slowly, not even daring to breathe, when a hand reached out from within the room and pulled him into the compartment.

  He tripped and fell to the ground, in the middle of the small room. The Mongol commander stood over him, starting to draw his saber. He was smiling with a cruel scowl.

  The two other Mongols turned around and approached Mark, surrounding him.