Outrage of the Ancients

It was late at night by the time we reached Ravena. The drive had been far and it sure as shit hadn’t been helped by having to stop seven times to kill monsters. Well, for Dietrich to kill monsters, me and Mia weren’t quite at a Level where we could.

Checking into our hotel was thankfully easy, even this late, since we’d pre-booked. We’d also looked up a nearby shop where we could get scuba supplies, and even somewhere to get clothes for Dietrich.

Me and Mia could tough it out with our current outfits, wearing them for one or even two days at a time, using [Restoration of the Old] to clean them somewhat, even if the efficiency was terrible since our outfits were new … but he could only walk around as he was for so long.

[Modern Makeover] could compensate for his lacking wardrobe appearance-wise, but not the other issues that came from only having one set of clothing, and such a heavy outfit to boot.

Mia took one room, the single, while Dietrich and I shared a second. I figured it might go really badly if he was alone when someone needed something of him. I’d taught him modern etiquette using [Knowledge Transfer], but I wasn’t certain how complete that had been.

I finally looked at my phone at this point, and immediately felt horrible. Not because I’d missed an important message, not because I’d just learned that someone close to me had died, no, because of something entirely different.

I. Was. Famous. My dinky little YouTube hobby had blown up beyond all belief and all I could feel was guilt.

I felt like one of those asshole IRL streamers who convinced drunk people to do incredibly dangerous shit and legged it when something inevitably went wrong. Or something like that.

Either way, even though it wasn’t really true, it was too much like I was capitalizing on a disaster that had affected all of humanity.

But at the very least, it seemed like my message had gotten out, that was what really mattered. It might have almost gotten me arrested, and I was now likely on a billion watchlists, but in the end, things had mostly worked out.

There was a knock at the door.

Oh. My. God. If that was another cop, they’d be eating that dust ball right in about two seconds’ time!

I looked out through the peephole. Nothing there. I sighed. Kids, probably.

So I turned around and began to make my way back to my bed, when the knocking came again. Sighing once more, I turned around and crept back, waiting for a chance to rip open the door the next time someone knocked and scare the bejeezus out of the little shit.

And, indeed, the knock came when I was in position, so I whipped the door open and glared down … at something. Not human. Definitely not.

I’d have called it a garden gnome at first, but it clearly wasn’t. not once I started paying attention to literally any of the creature’s details.

It, no, they, were short, but I couldn’t really tell you whether they were male or female, or even if those were concepts that could be applied to whatever they were.

The top of the being’s pointy hat barely reached my hip, and its skin was all wrong … though “wrong” was obviously the wrong term. Inhuman would, perhaps, be a more fitting term. It was a pale color that might either be pale blue, light grey, or something similar that I didn’t have a name for. It was certainly a shade I wouldn’t have blinked twice at if I’d seen it on a mountainside somewhere. Overall, the more I thought about it, the more the skin reminded me of a cliff face, rocky but overall smooth.

The being was also wearing a uniform that looked old-fashioned, potentially belonging to a medieval official of some kind … but I had no idea what kind. I was a nerd with way too much time on my hands, but my focus had primarily been on reading about all kinds of things, not looking up pictures. Only the pointy hat that had first made me think “garden gnome” didn’t fit.

“Aren’t you going to ask what message he has?” Dietrich asked from behind me, suddenly making me acutely aware of just how long I’d been staring.

That seemed to have been the trigger for the next part of this being’s planned actions.

They bowed at the waist, practically folding in half as they did so.

“I am Septimus, seventh of the Untersberger Mandln, and I have a message for Tristan Vogt.”

“From Emperor Barbarossa?” I asked, stunned. I’d immediately recognized “Mandl” as a diminutive form of the German word for man, which wouldn’t have gotten me very far if it hadn’t been for the mention of the Untersberg. There were plenty of stories about that mountain, including one that claimed the Wild Hunt was stationed there.

But its dwarf-like inhabitants, one of whom stood before me and had just introduced himself by mentioning his full species name. And that connected him to Frederick Barbarossa, who was said to be sleeping under that mountain, waiting for when he was needed.

“Karl der Große, Emperor of the Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, has sent me to find him worthy advisors.”

… Or it could be the other emperor who was said to be waiting in the very same mountain.

50-50 chance to get it right, and I hadn’t.

Fuck. Just … fuck.

“I see,” I nodded at that, trying to move past my earlier misstep. “Are you telling me that I somehow qualify?”

Sure, it would have been a little presumptuous that he was referring to me instead of Dietrich normally, but he’d asked for me by name.

“The Untersbergern Mandln are gifted with magic. And mine says that you are the perfect guide to introduce him to the complexities of the modern world.”

Actually, I’d have expected a teacher or maybe an ambassador of some kind to be more qualified than me, [Legend’s Guide] or not, purely on the basis of life experience, but it seemed that my Class weighted in more heavily than I’d thought.

“While I’ve already found a sovereign to serve, I’d be willing to use my own magic to support the Emperor in a limited capacity,” I cautiously responded.

“Has the Emperor regained his old power already?” Dietrich called out from behind me.

“Not yet, but one of his Paladins has returned as is prophecized, and when the new order falls beneath the claws of monstrous invaders, it’ll be him who rallies the Frankish people.”

“The Frankish people being Germans and Frenchmen?” I asked.

The Mandl nodded.

Oh.

The relations between Germany and France had gotten quite a bit better in the latter half of the 20th century, but smashing together both those nations was still unlikely to go particularly well. At least it sounded like he’d wait for things to naturally end badly, rather than destabilizing things himself.

“And the Paladin, he wouldn’t happen to have been Ogier the Dane?” I asked.

I was overall familiar with Karl der Große, or Charlemagne as he was called in English. He was widely seen as the father of the German nation, its first version, at least.

But in addition to the various historical truths surrounding him, ranging from his efforts to create a working bureaucracy and organized military, there were also plenty of myths involving him.

The whole “will return in the greatest hour of need” thing, obviously, but you also had the mythos surrounding his twelve paladins, which were actually the origin of the term “Paladin”, which was, in turn, a derivative of the name “Palatine Hill”, which was where the rich and powerful had lived in ancient Rome.

It was a group that included the likes of Roland, who was the titular character of the “Chanson de Roland”, one of the oldest surviving French works of literature, an Archbishop sometimes portrayed as some kind of warrior-priest, and several others. I didn’t know the whole mythos by heart.

But I did remember Ogier, mostly because he was yet another individual who was supposed to return when he was needed, and he even had a legendary sword, Cortain.

The Mandl nodded again, produced a scroll, and handed it over. It couldn’t possibly have been any more cliche, a rolled piece of parchment held closed by a purple silk ribbon, with a blob of wax resting on the knot and the Karolusmonogramm, the seal of the Emperor, stamped in said way.

Sure, that could easily have been faked and purple stuff was cheap nowadays, but in his age, purple had been the single most expensive color in existence.

Slowly, cautiously, I took the scroll but didn’t look at it yet, turning around to look at Dietrich, who I’d noticed was now standing right behind me, looking down at the Mandl, amber eyes burning with intensity.

“Can you carry a message back to your Emperor?” he asked, and the Mandl immediately nodded.

“I am King Dietrich von Bern of the lineage of the Amelungs, returned after one and a half millennia of rest. Neither I nor the Vogt siblings have any intentions of subordinating ourselves to the Emperor, but considering the situation, working together is advised. Once we are finished here, we will visit your Emperor’s lodgings.”

The Mandl bowed deeply at that.

“I will convey that message.”

He snapped back up to a standing position and marched off, the sound of his footsteps vanishing the second he was out of sight.

“Well, that was weird,” I commented after a long moment of silence.

“I’ve seen weirder,” Dietrich shrugged. “Don’t dwell on it, sleep. We’ve got a busy day tomorrow. And I don’t think you should be sleep-deprived when operating underwater breathing gear.”

I just nodded and let myself collapse onto my bed.

“‘night,” I muttered and was asleep before I heard whether or not he responded.

***

Today, I learned just how efficient throwing money at a problem was.

Neither the captain of the boat we’d chartered nor the dive shop had been particularly hot on the idea of doing anything less than sheltering in place, but I’d wound up massively overpaying, and that had done the trick. And after Dietrich had converted some of his gold into Euros at a jewelry store, that hadn’t even been particularly painful.

But overall, it was weird.

A lot of people were doing the sensible thing after a worldshaking event had introduced monsters, and that was staying home after having spent all of yesterday buying every bit of supplies they could lay their hands on.

However, there were also a lot of people gleefully ignoring everything that had happened yesterday, and were out here as if nothing had changed.

Overall, Ravenna looked just like I’d expected a large-ish Italian coastal city to look, but with smaller crowds.

Still, admittedly, monsters seemed to be rare. All we wound up seeing on the way to the harbor was a single terrifying-looking seagull that Mia wound up hacking in half. In fact, it took her longer to get the blood off the blade than the fight had taken.

The small number of actual, tangible, problems probably made it easier to imagine that everything was a part of a hoax.

Anyway, we were currently on a small boat, speeding across the ocean, with a very perplexed but happy skipper following Dietrich’s directions while Mia and I were busy checking our diving gear.

We were only really rated for a dive depth of thirty meters or less, anything below that massively complicated what we’d have to do to avoid the bends, but Wittich had committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in full armor, which meant that his body, and therefore, his sword should be somewhere around there. And the water right next to a coast tended to be shallow, at least when compared to the actual open ocean.

I went through the checklist, using the memetic device “big women really are fun”. There was a PC version of that, several, in fact, but somehow, those never quite stuck. Eh, wasn’t like I ever actually said anything like that in front of everyone else.

So, first, the BCD, aka the Buoyancy Control Device, the vest that divers wore. You in- or deflated that control your buoyancy when in the water, achieving equilibrium with the downward pull of your weight belt. It was important to check that it had no leaks and could do what it was supposed to do, suddenly winding up with an uncontrollable a- or descent because the button got stuck in “inflation” mode or the whole affair popped underwater wasn’t great.

Then, you had to check the weights. First, did you bring them? Then, you made sure that you had enough of the lead blocks attached to the belt and that the whole thing fit smoothly under everything.

After that, you had all the releases. Were they properly closed, and could you get at them in case of an emergency?

Diving was, overall, safer than one might expect for a sport that involved going deeper underwater than most pools were long, but you still needed to be able to shuck your gear at a moment’s notice if something went wrong.

And then you had the all-important air. Could you get not only from both the primary regulator, but also the “octopus”, the secondary regulator used to share air … or in case the primary one got knocked free and you were having trouble finding it in time? Also, did the air smell funky in some way? And did the pressure gauge visibly dip from you taking a single breath.

Finally, you then had the final check. Got your fins, got your mask, look yourself up and down, do the same to your buddy, and then, you were ready.

Somehow, running my hands over the various bits and bobs felt stranger than everything that had happened recently. Or perhaps, it was precisely because of everything that had happened that I was feeling like this.

Carefully analyzing perfectly mundane equipment and machinery that would nevertheless seem like magic to the people of Dietrich’s time was something that felt shockingly normal in a decidedly abnormal time, and therefore … wasn’t. Normal. At all.

But that was how things were going right now. I could be doing something perfectly normal, like getting coffee, then turn a corner and run into a monster.

… Or see a guy who was fifty times as old as the nation I lived in. Either way, things were weird, and the transposition of normality somehow made it even worse.

It. Was. Freaky. And weird. But I supposed that described my entire life now.

Thankfully, it didn’t take too long for Dietrich to call the boat to stop.

Both Mia and I took that as our cue to go into the water, sitting on the boat’s raising before letting ourselves tip backwards, landing with huge splashes. Entry into the water was always disorienting in the first second before natural buoyancy took over, causing the feet to sink while the fully inflated vest kept the torso at the surface of the water, which naturally put your head right back above water.

“Are you alright?” Dietrich called from the boat.

I flashed him an “ok” sign, which was met with a confused look, so I pulled the regulator out of my mouth and called back “Fine.”

Generally, I just didn’t give thumbs-up while diving since that meant “go up” when underwater.

“We’re not going to need the rope,” Mia added from next to me as she pulled her head out of the water.

“Good luck,” Dietrich responded.

And with that, I put my hands on the BCD controls and began to deflate the vest, allowing the lead weights around my waist to pull me under and letting the water close above my head.

In an instant, the world went silent, all normal noise from seabirds to wind cutting out, but at the same time, new, distant, sounds became audible, carried far within the water. Boats, mostly, but also some kind of metallic creak from what was likely an old pier or something.

Likewise, the world went dark as the water diffused the light, and I could barely see a hundred meters to the side, where I’d been able to see for kilometers outside, but at the same time, the seemingly impenetrable barrier of the ocean’s surface was gone, allowing me a clear look at the ground. It wasn’t even that deep, only ten meters at the most.

And Mia had been right, the rope wouldn’t have done us any good.

The basic trick was to use a weighed-down end to create a central point from which to search from, slowly letting up more and more to increase the distance in stages. But with how rocky the ground was, any kind of rope would have gotten tangled in no time flat.

So we had to use a different kind of slowly expanding search. Basically, you went a bit in one direction, used the compass on the air gauge to turn ninety degrees, and went the same distance in that direction to, counting the number of kicks you’d done with your flippers to measure distance, until you’d completed a square.

And then, you proceeded to a slightly larger square, until eventually, you either found what you were looking for … or wound up way outside the search area. Or ran out of air.

Right now, “winding up outside the search area” meant getting more than, say, twenty meters away from the boat. After all, Dietrich had said we’d stopped right on top of the sword’s location. Between the motion of the waves and the boat drifting, therefore, its current location wasn’t an absolute indicator of being in the right spot, but it was still something to use as a reference point.

That was when the monotonous part began. Look around, count kicks, check compass, turn ninety degrees, rinse and repeat.

Until eventually, I spotted what I was looking for … somehow. A sword, resting on top of the rocks that covered the round. It had been over a millennium, it should have been overgrown with algae, not … not fine like this. Pristine leather covered the wooden frame of its sheath, looking like it hadn’t been in the water for even five minutes.

Overall, though, it made some small amount of sense that it’d be undamaged, after all, it had been made by a magical blacksmith of mythical proportions, but how come it was sitting out in the open like that?

I reached behind myself and rapped my ring against my air tank, producing a high-pitched ringing sound that Mia would have been able to hear even if she’d been three times as far from me as she actually was.

I heard a similar sound from the distance, Mia’s signal that she’d heard me, and barely ten seconds later, she was right next to me and I pointed at the sword.

Now, there were plenty of ways to lift stuff off the ocean floor, ranging from just, you know, grabbing it, to using winches on boats or attaching the salvage to a balloon of sorts that you’d then inflate with your regulator.

But swords were light enough that the “just grab it” option was feasible.

So I reached out for it, only to tumble backwards through the water in an undignified manner, reeling as a spectral figure emerged in front of me.

It was a man, in his early forties at the oldest, wearing an intricately made set of armor that reminded me of Dietrich’s, except this was even fancier. Pale, ethereal green light illuminated the undersea realm, and if it weren’t for the color, I could practically imagine he was still alive. That, and the fact that he was slightly transparent. I couldn’t outright see the rocks behind him, but his skull, seemingly the only bone he still possessed was quite visible beneath his ghostly face.

Holy shit. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

“My name is Wittich Wielandsson, and that is my blade, Mimmung.”

Yeah, figured that much out already.

“A long time ago, I served a king by the name of Dietrich, sovereign of Bern, and I was one of his oldest and closest confidants, until …” he sighed and hung his head. “Things happened, and I found myself on the opposite side of my king in a battle right here, above those very cliffs. I …”

He trailed off again, and I could scarcely image the anguish that was going on in his mind. I knew the myth of what had happened, but trying to picture what it had to have felt like for him … nope.

“… I know my king is back. Bring that sword to him, and tell him I’m sorry. If I could do it all again, I’d have hurled myself off these cliffs before those boys died, I …”

He broke down.

There was something extremely uncomfortable about watching strangers cry, at least when they were adults. With kids, it mostly woke protective instincts, with friends or family, you wanted to console them, but with complete and utter strangers, there was nothing to really do. Especially underwater, where we couldn’t even talk. It wasn’t like the diver signs, or actual sign language, were something that he would be able to understand.

Mia elbowed me at that, then tapped her temple before gesturing at me. What was she … oh, that was actually a great point.

Mentally reaching out towards my Skills, I looked for [Knowledge Transfer], searching for its cooldown. I’d used it last night, at like 4 am, so it should have become available at some point around now. I certainly hadn’t been able to use it when the boat had launched earlier.

And it turned out that I could use it. So that was what I did. Packaged everything I’d experienced the past twenty hours up in a single ball of knowledge and emotion, and gently pushed it towards him.

The specter’s eyes widened and he stopped shaking, staring at me … and vanished. The skull, that had been hovering where the image of the face had been, began to crumble away as it drifted towards the ocean floor, hitting the ground as little more than powder.

I … had I killed him? Or given him peace?

Mia elbowed me again and gestured at the sword. It and the sheath were still intact, but I could see how the leather was visibly darkening, as if it had been utterly immune to the touch of water previously but was now getting wet. Yeah, we needed to get it out of here before the centuries caught up fully.

Being closer, I grabbed Mimmung and looked back to her, where she was giving me a thumbs up. The dive sign for “go up”, which I flashed back at her.

So we went back up, waiting at a depth of five meters for a few minutes to prevent the bends. But after that, we could finally surface, and I held out Mimmung to Dietrich, keeping a hold of the sheath while offering him the hilt.

Slowly, almost reverently, he took the blade from my hands and stared down at it while Mia and I awkwardly pulled ourselves over the railing and flopped onto the deck in that awkward manner usually found in amateur divers.

Quickly, I managed to get off of the diving gear until I was just standing there in my wet suit, and approached Dietrich.

“We saw him down there.”

“Can you retrieve his body?” he asked. “I’d like to give him a proper burial.”

I hung my head. “No, sorry. We saw his ghost. I told him that you were back, and what you said about wishing to have done things differently, and then, he just … went away. But he told me to tell you he regrets it. Everything.”

Now it was Dietrich’s turn to look stricken.

“Everything about that situation was … there was no right answer, nothing anyone could have really done. And there were no winners in the end.”

Then, the corners of his mouth twitched upwards.

“But before that, we had some good times. You know, I should probably tell you the story about how we met. See, he wanted to test himself against me but we met on the road before he reached my castle and didn’t recognize me, and he also didn’t tell me what he was here for, so we just traveled together for days …”

***

We were at the marina for another hour or so, but after that, Mia and I were once again dressed in our street clothing, we’d bought something for Dietrich too, though he now had quite a collection of touristy “I heart Ravenna” shirts that were probably below his dignity, but at least it was something to wear.

So with that done, we were soon on the road back to Germany. Specifically, a mountain at the very south-eastern tip that was said to hold an ancient emperor. Should be … interesting.