Outrage of the Ancients

Of course the world ended while I was in the middle of nowhere, with only a blunt sword for defense.

Specifically, a hunk of metal that resembled a sword enough to look good in a movie, but would decidedly not be able to fulfill the same task as an actual, well, weapon.

And while I wasn’t alone, my twin sister, Mia, wasn’t exactly in any better shape than I was.

So in summation, our only real advantage was that there were two of us.

And, maybe, just maybe, these swords might be a bit better than just sticks at whacking monsters. They were blunt training swords that were meant for HEMA, though unfortunately, the two of us weren’t practitioners. At least, I wasn’t. I knew enough to make choreography look good and while Mia was taking it much more seriously than I was, she’d only been at this for as long as I had.

In actuality, we just liked to come up with somewhat complex choreographed fights, then hike out into the wilderness and act them out. I’d designed it, we’d test it to make sure it was doable, and eventually, we’d come back with some of my fellow film students to have the affair redone professionally. Or as professionally as we could afford.

For practice, to have stuff to put on YouTube to grow my channel, and, well, it was fun.

Escape reality for a while, pretend that we’re back in the days of monsters and heroes, even though in reality, the Middle Ages were mostly just the time with a whole lot of cockroaches and rats in places where they really shouldn’t be. And no monsters, unless you counted exotic animals that were described as monsters by panicked explorers.

But judging by the looks of that floating screen, we were about to come face to face with some creatures truly deserving of the title.

Something howled in the distance.

Uh-oh.

I grabbed my sword, noticing that Mia had already had hers out, and she’d likely been like that since the message had arrived, but she was in a weird stance, not one that I was overly familiar with.

“You need to stab them,” she hissed at me, eyes fixed on something I hadn’t seen yet.

I tried to follow her gaze, but all I could see was foliage. But I was right there with her on the stabbing thing. Getting whacked with a blade like what we had would hurt, obviously, several kilos of steel tended to do that, but they were too blunt to do real damage. But the point was still somewhat dangerous, stabbing was where most of the accidents happened. There was only so much you could do to blunt the tip before it started to be obvious in the videos.

So we trained with big, fat, stupid-looking rubber covers and only took them off once everyone had their part down pat.

But right now, there was nothing left to do but hope that these literal toys of ours held up to whatever was out there.

The thing or things out there made another noise, but it wasn’t a howl, it was a growl and it was far too fucking close.

I whirled around, then twisted back into my original position, turning back and forth, trying to spot the source of the sound.

“There!” Mia hissed, pointing at a creature that had gotten far too close for comfort. But there was something even more disturbing floating above it.

Quicksilver Wolf (evolved wolf), Level 3

So, we definitely weren’t just dealing with a weird hallucination, then. There was more to this nonsense. “More” I sure as shit couldn’t think about right now.

Instead, I hefted my sword and pointed it at my enemy, ready to defend myself for when this inevitably hit the fan. I really didn’t like the look of this thing.

Sure, it was pretty, a beautiful silver predator that looked like something straight out of a fantasy novel, maybe as the main character’s pet slash totem animal slash companion. A gorgeous animal, but one that I’d much prefer to observe from the other side of a fence.

It growled once more, its head low to the ground, teeth exposed.

I hurriedly glanced left and right to check if there were any others sneaking up on me, which may or may not be the case. I didn’t get a chance to find out as the wolf took that as its chance to go for my throat. My sword flashed through the air and smacked across its snout with a dull thump and it smacked against my chest in a very different pose than it had started out in, causing both of us to go to the ground.

If I’d been alone, this would have been it for me. I’d fouled up its initial attack, but now, it was on top of me.

Mia’s boot slammed into the creature’s ribs, followed by the flat of her dull sword smacking into its back and a second kick to the ribs.

Yipping in pain, the creature leaped off me and stumbled back, whimpering.

“I think it just hasn’t learned to be wary of humans,” I said as a shot to my feet, one hand grasping my sword while I patted myself down with the other.

“Don’t rely on it,” Mia hissed, glaring at the creature.

It still sounded like a kicked dog, which was really making me uncomfortable even though it had just tried to kill me. Yet the growling was back … fuck. They were pack hunters, just like normal wolves. Fu-uck.

A slightly smaller wolf emerged on either side of the first monster, and I shivered. This really wasn’t good.

And then, they lunged.

I managed to smack away the first one, and Mia managed to position her sword so that the second one’s own weight and momentum caused it to impale itself, but the third one cannonballed into her legs, jaws clamping down around her boot. She fell with a shout of anger, arms briefly flailing before she managed to get her sword around, hammering its pommel into the base of the wolf’s skull. And again. And again until the creature went limp.

All I did in that time was smack the smaller wolf I was facing with my sword. Every strike rewarded me with a pained noise, but this was a blunt prop and swords weren’t even all that heavy, only a few kilograms. I really needed to be able to take this thing down.

It tried to lunge at my leg but I kicked it in the face. We both lost our balance, but I managed to smash my sword into its leg as I fell on my ass at just the right moment, when the foot was on the ground and the leg couldn’t bend out of the way. So it broke, or at least, something cracked. I managed to get back on my feet while it was still trying to balance on three feet, and then … then I managed to start stabbing it.

This wasn’t something I’d ever forget for as long as I lived. The sound of bones breaking, organs squishing, the sight of blood running through the previously pristine silver fur … and above it all, the horrifyingly doglike sounds of pain this thing made. Those would be living in my nightmares, I just knew it.

But I did it. I wasn’t sure what I expected from killing what basically amounted to be a video game monster, some “XP gained” or “you have killed so and so” message, but I didn’t get anything like that. No, I was just left standing there, bloody sword in hand, staring down at the dead monster.

And then the howls started.

My eyes just flicked left and right, trying to spot the creature, while beside me, Mia just swore.

They emerged from the trees in a silver stream, I wasn’t even sure how many there were, at least ten, but probably more, I sure as hell couldn’t keep track of them or even reliably tell where one ended and the next one started.

Oh … we were cooked. But honestly, running was an even dumber option than fighting, and there weren’t any trees to climb that we could reach before the wolves were upon us.

“No regrets,” Mia announced. “I wanna live through this, but honestly, if I could go back and do it all again, I would.”

“Yeah …” I sighed.

After our parents had died, we’d barely managed to stay in school but nevertheless graduated and spent a year traveling around the globe before going to university, where we’d started doing our little film projects.

No boyfriends or girlfriends, an almost entirely shared circle of friends … it was probably unhealthy in the long term, but up until now, it had worked. We’d given each other the stability we’d lost along with our parents. Slim as our chance at continuing to live might be, that chance only existed if we, once again, tackled the problem together.

This time, the new arrival didn’t announce himself in any way, he just … showed up.

A massive black horse plowed through the wolfpack, appearing out of seemingly nowhere, trampling the wolves into the ground while its rider speared more of the damn things with a long spear, though it snapped just before the pair came out the other end of the pack.

But the horse wheeled around and they plowed through once more, and the man broke his second and final spear, so he leaped off the horse and waded in on foot, blade carving through them as easily as a knife through a rotisserie chicken.

I only then realized just how impressive the horse was, more resembling the ideal of what a horse could be, rather than anything that could exist in the real world.

And the man himself, well, the descriptor that flashed through my head was “silver fox”. He could be as young as fifty or as old as eighty, his face had a strangely timeless quality and his hair … people talked about old people having silver hair, but really, it was usually something between grey and white that could look good but definitely wasn’t fully silver.

His hair was, glittering like precious metal, while his eyes gleamed amber, something I could somehow tell despite the distance. They oddly reminded me of a stone eagle I’d once seen at one of those “showing off our birds of prey” shows at the zoo.

Overall, he looked like he’d just stepped straight out of Lord of the Rings, complete with old-fashioned armor, the likes of which hadn’t been made for centuries.

When the final wolf fell, the man marched over to us, the horse following behind him without him even having to make any gestures or calling out to it. Somehow, he was almost completely clean, only the occasional drop of blood on his armor, and the little bit he hadn’t managed to flick off his sword. As he reached us, he sheathed the blade and said something.

I frowned.

I hadn’t understood a word of that, but the language was oddly familiar. It was like listening to someone speak Dutch or Afrikaans, similar enough to my native German that I could mistake it for being German if I didn’t actually listen to the words, merely paying attention to cadence, and I could understand some words.

Also, the meaning of others seemed to be at the very edge of my understanding, but as for gleaning the meaning of what had been said, the speaker might as well have been talking in Klingon.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak that language,” I said. It felt almost racist to say that, but I genuinely didn’t know which language he’d used. I was sufficiently familiar with plenty of languages that were comparably similar to German to what I’d just heard to know that they weren’t what had been used.

Now it was the man’s turn to frown, but his face suddenly lit up and then, he introduced himself.

“I am Dietrich von Bern, a warrior and king from distant lands. Or a distant time. There was some kind of magic that trapped and then transported me here.”

I gaped at him but managed to shut my mouth before I embarrassed myself too much. Hopefully. If he was who he claimed to be. A living legend.

Dietrich von Bern was, in many ways, the German King Arthur, albeit vastly less famous. But he still had a ridiculously long list of achievements that boggled the mind.

He’d fought giants, even killed one that was functionally immortal, capable of putting herself back together even after she was literally bisected or decapitated.

He’d conquered the realm of the dwarven king Laurin.

He’d defeated Siegfried, the dragonslayer, in single combat, before killing a dragon of his own. And in the Song of the Niebelungs, he’d been the one who finally brought an end to the slaughter, defeating the men who’d betrayed and murdered Siegfried. But when they’d beaten the almost invulnerable hero, they’d stabbed him in the back. Dietrich had done it face to face, in a duel.

But honestly, I could buy that the man before me was, in fact, the legendary figure.

For starters, he mostly matched the description in the stories. Sure, his hair was silver instead of gold, but he was, well, an old man now. But his eyes, they were exactly how they’d been described. And he was just as much of a terrifying fighter as he’d been in his legends. Not to mention that riding off on a jet-black horse and disappearing into the otherworld, ready to reappear when needed, was exactly how Dietrich von Bern had “gone out”.

I bowed awkwardly, only bending maybe twenty degrees forward, but it was the first time I’d ever bowed to anyone, and stood straight less than a second later. It felt oddly right.

But Mia decided to introduce us before I could, looking the legendary king right in the eyes.

“My name is Mia Vogt, this is my younger brother Tristan.”

Normally, this would be the part where I reminded her that she was only older by a few minutes, but for obvious reasons, this didn’t feel like the right time.

“It’s been centuries since your day, and no one is even sure where ‘Bern’ was. Some say it’s the modern city of Verona in Italy, others claim it only ever existed in mythology,” I decided to inform him. “But your story is still known.”

“Do your people still have a king?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Good,” he said. “I have no intention of reclaiming the crown, but in my experience, kings do not accept even the possibility of rivals.”

Fuck, I hadn’t even considered that. The Bundestag probably wouldn’t be too happy with his existence either.

“How different is this world?” Dietrich asked, gesturing at us. I frowned, but belatedly realized he was referring to our clothes when he added “I’ve never seen people dressed like you before.”

“Incomparably,” Mia said while I pulled out my phone and switched on the flashlight, illuminating a patch of nearby shadow.

“You’re a mage, then?” Dietrich asked me, new respect creeping into his voice.

“No, I’m not, and that’s the biggest change. This is technology, anyone can use it and most people have access to it.”

I then switched off the flashlight, turned to him, and snapped a picture which I then showed to him. Dietrich grimaced and pinched the bridge of his nose. I also took a foto of the wolf corpses before I put away my phone.

“I think I’ll need a guide to this new world. Would you be willing to fulfill that role? I can’t promise it will be safe, I intend to fight monsters and prevent the threat of this ’System’, but I will reward you once I have the means, and …”

He shrugged, and gestured towards the corpses.

“If no one fights and defeats the monsters, we’re probably dead anyway?” I asked.

Dietrich nodded.

Mia and I exchanged a look, all that was needed to realize we’d both been thinking the same thing.

“We accept,” she said on both our behalf.

Dietrich stepped right in front of her, holding out his hand. It was clear what he wanted.

Mia grabbed it.

“I swear to you that as long as you are my comrades in this fight against these monsters, I will keep you safe with all my power, and that when all is said and done, you shall not be the poorer for it,” Dietrich solemnly swore and they both pulled their hands back.

“Do you have horses?” he asked.

“We have a car,” I said. “That’s a kind of horseless carriage.”

“Will it fit all three of us?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then let’s go, talk while we walk,” he announced, making a gesture towards his horse which vanished off into the trees. “My horse will come when I call, no matter where I am.”

And with that, we started to walk, him following us towards where Mia had parked.

“Tell me, is a voice talking about giving me something called a ‘Class’ and ‘Skills’ also normal now?” Dietrich asked.

“Nope,” I shook my head, while Mia said, “I only saw the warning about the monsters.”

“What’s my Class?” I asked, looking up into the air as though another weird screen were about to pop up just because I wanted it to. Nothing happened, though.

“Class options?” I asked cautiously.

“I was given my Class directly,” Dietrich pointed out, unhelpfully. I didn’t blame him, it was how things had worked for him, but that didn’t seem to be how this would go for me.

I nodded.

“I still have to try. I just hope everyone can get powers,” I sighed and closed my eyes before I went right back to staring into the air while the others looked out for more monsters, all the while advancing towards the car park. Me messing around with the System, Dietrich giving sword tips to Mia.

“Class choices.”

Nothing

“I want to select my Class.”

Bupkis.

“What Classes can I get?”

Zilch.

“Class options.”

Jack squa- … I belatedly realized that a window had popped up in front of me, it had just appeared at eye level. It followed my gaze on the horizontal axis and kept a fixed distance, apparently, and it was even transparent so that I could keep walking safely, but didn’t go up or down when I moved my head.

“So, that worked,” I announced, and looked at what I saw.

As you are young and are yet to gain sufficient experience in any one Class to automatically lock it in, you have to decide which path to walk, from the following options:

Film Student Lv. 9: All the world’s a stage, and you’re the one learning to capture its happenings.

Knowledge Devourer Lv. 8: Seek information and devour it, ever-expanding your pool of knowledge purely for the sake of learning

Modern Human Lv. 7: Live in the modern times, gain standard skills needed for survival in a highly technological society

Actor Lv. 3: All the world’s a stage, and you’re the one upon it, showing others anything save existence as it really is

Legend’s Guide Lv. 1: Guide a Legend through the modern world, be the bridge between the past and present

So apparently, you got auto-assigned your Class if you were really good at something.

“What’s your Level?” I asked Dietrich.

“Fifty-one,” he replied.

Impressive, but that also meant that there was a very high spread for what the threshold might be. In fact, it could be anything from Level 10 to 51.

But once again, that was an issue for later.

Right now, I needed to pick a Class, and it was damn obvious.

[Film Student] was useless for the current situation, depending on how destructive this whole affair was, [Modern Human] would soon become useless, [Actor] could be useful but likely wouldn’t, and as much as I itched to pick [Knowledge Devourer], how useful would it really be with monsters about? Getting knowledge required time, and applying it took even longer.

“You’re picking [Legend’s Guide], aren’t you?” Mia asked.

“Wait, you can see that?” I asked, surprised. Somehow, I’d imagined these screens were only visible to the user, I sure as shit hadn’t seen her “warning screen”.

“Yep,” she nodded. “So, you’re picking it?”

“I accept [Legend’s Guide] as my Class,” I announced, hoping I wouldn’t wind up having to try out another half-dozen potential commands.

Either the System was more forgiving with this command or I’d guessed it correctly, either way, it worked.

[Class gained: Legend’s Guide]

[Legend’s Guide Lv. 1]

[Skill gained: Knowledge Transfer]

[Skill gained: Innate Etiquette]

So, that just happened. I’d just heard about what Skills I’d gained, and now, I was just expected to, what, know them?

But I did, sort of, know them, and I could see if I could find out how to pull up my Skill list later.

For now, I was suddenly aware of exactly what I could now do. I could use [Knowledge Transfer] to send Dietrich “information packets” on the modern world while [Innate Etiquette] told me just how “badly” I’d acted earlier. Telling me just what I was supposed to do when face to face with a king.

However, it also told me that Dietrich’s attitude had then “disabled” the standard social etiquette, signaling that neither Mia nor I have to bow or call him “Your Majesty”, but I should still have started out from a position of extreme courtesy and then started reacting to how he was acting, adjusting to the etiquette he demonstrated. I could even call him by his first name.

It was a fucking weird sensation to suddenly have all this information forced into my head, but I had to admit, it was also kinda cool.

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked Dietrich.

“There are some swords I need to retrieve. One of these ’Skills’ that invaded the world is letting me find any ‘treasure’ that I have sufficient knowledge about. And while we travel, we’ll have time to discuss.”

“One would be Nagelring?” I asked, referring to his original magical sword. “You have Eckesachs, what are the others?”

Dietrich winced, then awkwardly scratched at his neck.

“This seax … isn’t Eckesachs. I don’t bring magical weaponry on hunts. I should have learned after the dragon, but that never ended up happening.”

I wisely decided to not comment, and Mia clearly saw the wisdom in that too.

“Eckesachs should be in my castle, or its ruins. Hildebrand had Balmung and he had me bury it with him but made me promise to retrieve it if it was ever needed. It’s a similar story with Heime and his sword, he died but told me to keep Nagelring where I could retrieve it and pass it to someone worthy if dangers that plagued Europe in our youth returned.

“And Mimung … honestly, I’m shocked I can find it. But it’s the strongest sword I’ve ever beheld, it’s a weapon capable of injuring even Siegfried through his otherwise invulnerable skin. Wittich killed himself by jumping into the ocean. But I know he’d have wanted his sword to be retrieved and used if disaster struck again.”

Dietrich was silent for a brief moment. “I never thought I’d be able to bury him.”

I winced. I knew the story. Wittich had been a long-time companion of Dietrich, and been with him through thick and thin, but eventually, he’d gained back his family lands, which were a part of the kingdom that Dietrich’s uncle Emmerich had stolen from the young king.

So, reluctantly, they’d parted ways, but remained friends. Until Dietrich had fought to regain his birthright, and Wittich had been called to arms.

During the Rabenschlacht, as the battle would later come to be named, Wittich had tried to position himself in a way that would minimize the risk of him coming into combat with any of his old friends, or even fighting at all, but Dietrich’s younger brother and the two sons of King Etzel, Dietrich’s strongest ally, had attacked him for being a “traitor”.

He’d only defended himself … but he’d been the wielder of the strongest sword in all of German myth and legend fighting three men who, depending on the person telling the story, might not even have shed the label of “boy” yet. He’d lived, his opponents … hadn’t.

Horrified by what he’d done, and fleeing an understandably furious Dietrich, he’d jumped into the sea.

“Can you two look out for me a bit?” Mia asked. “I want to pick my Class.”

“Yep,” I agreed.

“Of course,” Dietrich echoed me.

“Class selection,” Mia announced, and once again, a screen appeared.

As you are young and are yet to gain sufficient experience in any one Class to automatically lock it in, you have to decide which path to walk, from the following options:

Engineering Student Lv. 8: Learn how the world works in ways that are easily applicable to create useable materials

Modern Human Lv. 7: Live in the modern times, gain standard skills needed for survival in a highly technological society

Traveler on the Path of the Sword Lv. 5: Someone seeking truth and serenity by mastering the blade. Not for the sake of combat or war, but the self

Actor Lv. 4: All the world’s a stage, and you’re the one upon it, showing others anything save existence as it really is

Legend’s Apprentice Lv. 1: Be the first to learn under a Legend from ancient times, gain power and influence … if you survive

It was an interesting spread. A similar starter highest-Level option to mine, the same actor and modern human Classes I’d also ben offered, and a variant on a “legend class”. The only difference was the sword class, which looked damn impressive, but made sense in hindsight. She used swordsmanship to distract herself from the burdens of life, just losing herself in it and its practice.

Would she pick it, or [Legend’s Apprentice]?

“I mean, it’s an easy decision, isn’t it?” she asked. “[Legend’s Apprentice].”

“Would others in this age be able to figure out how to get a Class?” Dietrich asked.

“No, but I think we can fix that,” I grinned pulling out my phone.

“Can your picture-making light send knowledge too?” Dietrich asked, causing me to pause.

“Actually, I just got a Skill for sharing information. Can I use it on you?” I asked and he nodded.

So I tried to use it and … failed. Apparently, I needed skin-to-skin contact, so I reached out and tapped the back of his hand. From there, it was smooth sailing. All I needed to do was will it to happen and it did.

Instinctively, I knew that [Knowledge Transfer] had a cooldown of six hours and there was a limit as to how much information I could send. So what did I want to send?

It was easy, really. This was called the “information age” for a reason, and the sheer interconnectivity of the modern world would likely be the thing that was the hardest for Dietrich to grasp. So I taught him what a phone was, what it could do, and the seemingly limitless amount of information it could pull on.

The ancient king’s eyes went wide as I pulled my hand away, and he missed a step, stumbling past me before catching himself. Then, he turned around and stared at the small box of metal and plastic in my hand.

“That … I’d have given half my kingdom’s wealth for just one of those. If I tell you the direction and distance of a target, can you find it on the map … app?”

Dietrich stumbled over the unfamiliar phrase, but otherwise, he seemed to have handled the flood of information about as well as could be expected.

“Yep, I’ll do that in a sec,” I said, holding up my phone and opening YouTube, then I clicked on “make a short”. Normally, I didn’t make shorts, I only uploaded properly filmed and edited videos of our choreography, but this was how I’d reach the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time.

“If anyone’s checking their phone in the middle of this chaos, please watch to the end of this video, then prepare because this is dangerous as hell. We just got attacked by monster wolves, I’ll show you the picture in a pinned comment.

“Basically, the System dropped a bunch of monsters onto Earth, like it said in the message, but you can get powers too by verbally asking for ‘Class Selection’. Then you can pick something that fits who you are, but you need to go for something that can help you.”

Then I angled the phone to the side so that Dietrich was caught on video.

“Also, there’s magic around now, this a legendary king from German mythology who’s come back and …”

The time ran out. I uploaded it anyway. No time to refine it.

“Good idea,” Dietrich said, then pointed off to the side. “Three swords are close together, 200 kilometers that way.”

So I opened Pocket Earth, and turned to face the direction he’d indicated. Then, I used the function of “tap the screen in two spots and the phone will tell you how far they’re apart”, pulling my fingers further apart until the distance matched. From there, I could look for the nearest major city, Achen. I now switched to Google Maps to get a proper route calculated. Once we were there, we’d be able to narrow it down.

Five minutes after that, we reached the car.

“Would you like to sit in the back with Tristan so we can discuss whatever you need to, or do you want to sit in the front?” Mia asked.

“You’re driving, then?” Dietrich asked.

“Yeah, Tristan’s smart and all, but he keeps drifting off into his thoughts and I’m not dying because he got an idea while behind the wheel,” she announced. It was true … but did she really have to tell that to him?

Dietrich laughed. “I’ve known people like that.”

Then, he grew a little morose, as if recalling something painful. I was pretty sure I knew what he was thinking.

Eventually, he decided to sit in the back, though he almost ripped the door off its hinges before figuring out how car doors worked.

And then, together, we were off, going into a new, chaotic, and dangerous land.