Outrage of the Ancients

Drake

Never in all his years on the sea had he had such a terrible headache, and quite frankly, his current state went well beyond even the hangover after every post-raid celebration he’d ever had put together.

But honestly, Francis Drake did not regret a single thing. Because now, he was fully ready to act his rank in the modern world, though he’d still have to recover from shoving so much information into his brain and then prove that he’d retained said information.

His Skills seemed to have, in part, been set up to create a new navy from scratch. Magically teaching people everything they needed to know to fulfill any role for any rank below his own was just the start.

He could use [Full Restoration] to, once a year, bring any ship he wanted to full battle readiness, albeit only once a year, and then upgrade it to modern standards using [Instant Overhaul]. Perhaps a nice battleship.

They didn’t make them anymore, the design having largely been overhauled by modern smart munitions, but that wasn’t quite as effective as it had been. Weapons that could track and unerringly strike modern ships and airplanes would likely struggle with the exotic abilities of monsters, not to mention the sheer cost of it all … “dumb” guns might be shorter-ranged and overall weaker, but could be reloaded far more quickly and munitions would be vastly easier to source.

Maybe he could find one from the Second World War? Raise it from the ocean floor, overhaul it, find people with the right Classes to stuff all sorts of magical explosives inside the shells … oh, the possibilities were endless.

But this world was a strange one. Especially the changes to the British government. Not serving the queen, well, king, anymore was strange, though Drake had to admit that he was more than a little gleeful at knowing how much power the aristocracy had lost. No more aristo idiots who were formally and legally subordinated to him but nevertheless felt like he should obey them due to their social standing, no more confusion in the line of command, just his authority backed by the admiralty, and a fleet to lead to victory.

At least once he was done with all these ridiculous tests that he’d been sent by the Brittania Royal Navy College to prove he’d actually learned from his Skills.

An alarm began to blare.

“Monster ahead! All hands to battle stations!”

Oh … wonderful. Drake sighed. It was a distraction, something to do that wasn’t an inane test, but he also needed to get this done. Once the monster was dispatched, he’d have to get right back to it.

Nevertheless, he swiftly hurried onto the bridge, managing to do so without tripping over a single one of those infernal thresholds. It seemed like he’d finally adapted to modern life.

This was going to be an interesting one, he could feel it in his bones. Drake might not have been entirely happy having Skills like [Devil’s Luck] and [Black Magic Intuition], they were far too reminiscent of those old accusations of him having made a deal with the devil or some other malevolent force. But they worked perfectly.

As he hurried through the cramped corridors, his other magic powers began to flare to life. Ones that had been harder to figure out since they weren’t just “fire and forget”, as some of the sailors called the simpler Skills.

No, abilities like [Current Sense] needed to be understood and practiced with. At first, it had merely done what its description claimed, letting him sense undersea currents. But with a little practice, it had also let him sense disturbances in the water below, like when a large monster was tearing through it.

And [A Closer Look] let him, well, get a closer look at anything he could perceive. Activation was simple, but staying on target wasn’t, it was just too easy to have the target the Skill showed him keep changing as new things caught his attention.

So when he sensed something scything through the water towards the ship, he immediately saw it in his mind’s eye, alongside one of those descriptors that the System liked to provide.

Megalodon (evolved great white shark) Lv. 13

It was huge, with a maw large enough for a man to walk in standing fully upright, not even having to stoop in the slightest. And Drake didn’t like the look of those teeth either.

But now he was on the bridge properly, and sat down in the observer’s chair that had been added just for him mere hours ago.

“The contact vanished from radar!” the operator snapped, making everyone on the bridge wince.

“It’s continuing straight towards the hull,” Drake informed everyone before fixing Smith with a stare. “Permission to use Skills?”

That was something that they’d agreed on earlier. His Skills were hugely impactful, but could also disrupt other plans. For example, using [Escape] allowed him to yank the ship out of the path of an incoming attack, but it would also play merry hell with any planned actions or already set up lines of attack, altering firing arcs and so on.

So unless it was an emergency, he’d ask for permission. Gladly. After all, Smith wasn’t being an ass about it, and while Drake might have been an Admiral, a ship’s captain was in charge of his vessel.

“Permission granted.”

[Chain of Command] was the first Skill he triggered, allowing everyone else to immediately know and understand when he triggered follow-up Skills.

[Shared Intelligence] put the monster back on everyone’s screens, by projecting his own knowledge onto them. [Sling of David] to strengthen them based on the level difference, for all the good it would do considering his own personal power. And finally, in the split second before impact, [Escape].

The shark flashed past, breaching the surface of the water and flying almost ten meters into the air before it began to fall back down, but the Defiant’s bow gun had already started tracking it by that point, chattering to life, pumping shot after shot into the monster, blasting apart flesh and ripping the cartilage beneath.

That gun was practically offensive to him on a deeply personal level. It was a weapon that could have ripped apart a warship of his age with a few shots, which it could fire within a handful of seconds. With the Defiant’s maneuverability, it could have sunk the Spanish Armada on its own, at least assuming sufficient munitions were present.

And yet, it was considered a popgun, a peashooter, a weapon of little concern, almost superfluous in a modern warship’s arsenal. Where were the rows upon rows of weapons, the gundecks and heavy ships of the line that unleashed hell upon the enemies of the crown amidst plumes of fire and smoke?

The shark splashed into the water trailing blood and guts, swiftly vanishing into the depths.

“It’s back on radar, two hundred meters deep,” the radar operator reported.

“So the shark is invisible on its final approach,” Smith surmised, sighing.

“It’s coming up from behind us.”

“How long until the helicopter is ready?” Drake asked. The infernally noisy machine was the Defiant’s primary anti-submarine weapon, capable of more easily targetting the shark where the missiles would have to be manually guided in, which would have been incredibly difficult against something as fast as the shark. Against the slow-ish krakens, that had been doable, against this thing, not so much.

“Too long.”

“Brace for impact,” Drake ordered, [Chain of Command] carrying the order to every corner of the ship. And then, he activated [Instantaneous Reinforcements: Fireship].

A small frigate from his era, a wooden-hulled sailing ship stuffed to the brim with gunpowder, appeared out of nowhere, manifesting right in the path of the shark. And boom.

The Defiant shuddered under the impact of the shockwave, and if it had been an older ship, some of the rigging and sails would have likely caught fire, but the ship was overall fine. And with his warning, the crew damn well better be too.

But that had been a fairly close call, all things considered. Too fast for their usual tactics against monsters, too far removed from the usual targets of modern weaponry for automation to kick in, and smart enough to stay out of the bow gun’s arc of fire. Granted, there were hard limits as to how much damage fangs alone would have been able to do to the Defiant’s hull, but this had still very nearly been the first attack that actually landed properly.

Drake grinned. This was getting interesting.

***

Temujin wasn’t entirely sure whether to praise his descendants’ wisdom or shake his head at their foolishness.

He was now the de facto Mongolian head of state, something that would soon become a full truth, free of any qualifiers or modifiers. They’d put him in charge.

On one hand, that was fantastic. He was not in a position to use his powers to their greatest potential, save Mongolia from the monstrous invaders, and potentially expand once again.

On the other hand … he was almost eight hundred years old. His knowledge was outdated, his myth might have been exaggerated, and they just plain didn’t know him. This could have gone terribly wrong.

But as long as their naivety remained limited to this situation, and they didn’t blindly believe everyone, it’d be fine.

He took a moment to stretch in his new office, marveling at the office he’d received, then rose and marched back out of the room.

His [Remote Administration] now covered the entirety of Mongolia, so it had become practically useless for anything but the most surface-level information, but it did tell him that the monsters were concentrated in Ulaanbaatar. An attempted decapitation strike that had turned into a drawn-out siege and would soon die out in its entirety barring reinforcements.

But no one knew whether or not reinforcements were going to be coming. After all, the first wave had appeared out of nowhere, who was to say the reinforcements wouldn’t arrive the same way?

Not to mention that there were not insignificant issues coming from China. Apparently, all it would take was one of his people putting one foot across the border and a nuclear response would follow.

That had seemed like an overreaction … until he’d gotten a look at the relevant history books. Namely, the fact that they claimed that he’d killed 40 million Chinese during his invasion. Now, things had been bloody back then, but 40 million? That seemed excessive. Historical propaganda, or had the officials responsible for the Chinese census been as incompetent as their military?

Either way, he and his rule were being looked upon in askance and threatened with violence. And how he responded would likely color international reception of him. In his age, information was a sluggish thing, moving through anything larger than a single camp at a speed that made snails seem fast by comparison.

Except gossip. Gossip could outspeed even an arrow in flight, distortion in the process until even the most mundane of issues would be blown vastly out of proportion in less than a day.

The people directly on his borders needed to know and fear him, and their neighbors, in turn, would learn of him and his horde, but they wouldn’t fight him directly. He could sweep across the world nation by nation, conquering them one by one, establishing Mongol rule, distributing scholars and other learned men across his empire to spread innovations, prove to those who behaved the benefits of cooperation while using the inevitable idiot who rebelled as an example of what not to do.

But not in this new world. A message he sent to the Chinese could reach the other side of the world in less time than it took him to reach the toilet.

So, his reply was simple.

“I believe humanity currently has a far bigger problem than internal squabbles. I have no intentions of attacking you, or anyone else for that matter, for every human who dies is one less who can fight the foes created by the System.”

It would only make them more paranoid, of course, and they’d send saboteurs. And then, he could make an example of. In a way that made their fates look horrific but appropriate while somehow not making him look overly savage. If he couldn’t come up with a trick like that in time, he was sure someone else would. He might be in charge, but he was hardly the only person who could use their head and innovate.

Besides, if China really did try to attack him, that would be bad. For them, that was.

His [Heart of the Horde] was something called an Ascendant Capstone and it kept him safe from any attack that was sufficiently “impersonal”, which included this so-called “nuclear weaponry”, the pinnacle of human ingenuity. No one, and that truly meant no one save him, knew about this power. He’d kept it a secret for a reason.

If someone tried to kill him using something like nuclear weaponry, all they’d be doing was giving him an ironclad justification to go after them. His only worries were the collateral damage that would happen if they attacked while he was in a city, and the fact that the attack might come before he was finished defeating the monsters.

Today’s world was a world ripe for his rule. All he had to do was once again make the offers that had made him a khan in the first place. Equality, opportunities for advancement based on merit rather than parentage, and social security for those who were injured serving the cause, as well as the families of those who died doing the same.

Nothing made a man fight harder than knowing that no matter what, his loved ones would be safe and cared for.

For now, though, he’d have to limit himself to making improvements in Mongolia.