Alexios stood, brushed himself off, and drew the Gedara sword. The deafening shriek of the blade against the scabbard terrified the young ravens from a nearby beech tree, and the weapon’s green markings gleamed so brightly in the sun that Alexios was forced to look away.
“You can’t do shit without a lot of practice,” Dionysios said. “But you also need to practice the right way. To practice for years without improving or making a difference is a waste of fucking time.”
“But how can I know if what I’m doing is making a difference?”
“Read, talk, listen, practice, evaluate, repeat,” Dionysios said. “That’s how you master any skill. To read without practicing is useless. To practice without reading is useless. To work alone is useless.”
“Alright, thanks, self-help guru. Do you also think I should clean my room?” Alexios added with an odd nasally voice: “We need to do something to help all these poor young men!”
Photo swung his blade at Alexios, who deflected the blow. Dionysios’s wrist was so strong, however, that he twisted Gedara right out of Alexios’s hands—flinging it onto the dirt, where it clanged.
“Shit,” Alexios said. “Rolling attack didn’t go so well, I guess.”
You are fighting a Master Swordsman, the voice said. Even if you fail, you still gain experience.
Hey, weird disembodied voice, how’s it going? Haven’t heard from you in awhile. Almost forgot I was inside a game.
No answer.
Dionysios pointed with his sword to Gedara. “Pick it up.”
Alexios did as he was told.
“Don’t waste time with fancy moves,” Dionysios said. “Stabbing your opponent is also a bad idea. The sword has a tendency to get stuck. And if you have to spend even a moment pulling it back out, you’re dead. So it’s better to slice. Go for the arteries. That sort of shit.”
Intellect, Education, and Swordfighting Progress Bars are all increasing, the voice said. Keep him talking.
“The voice approves of what you’re telling me,” Alexios said.
Dionysios laughed. “Yeah, it thinks I’m pretty smart. You need to be if you’re going to last as long as I have.”
“So keep telling me more about the farr,” Alexios said.
“I already talked about it. It basically means luck. It’s a sort of luck and energy combined. You have to turn your luck way the fuck up.”
“Great. How do I do that?”
Dionysios looked around. “I don’t see any rabbits’ feet. We might be out of luck. Get it?”
“Come on,” Alexios said.
“Alright. The thing about being a superhero is that in the real world, nobody ever does anything alone. Lone gunmen, vigilantes, we all know what happens to them. If they try to do any dangerous shit by themselves, they get killed quick. As workers our only power lies in each other.”
“But I’m still waiting for some practical advice. All you’ve done so far is talk about abstractions.”
“Fair enough. You want to learn how to kick ass. You want to learn how to fly. Here’s how you do it. Remember how I said everything in the universe is connected? Well, there’s a shitload of energy in the universe, right?”
“Hang on, I think I know where this is going,” Alexios said. “‘All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.’”
“Yeah, exactly. Really well put. Were you quoting someone?”
“A comedian.”
“That’s another contradiction, actually—matter and energy are two aspects of the same fucking shit. Like, take an apple, for instance. If you could convert all the matter in an apple into energy, you’d have an explosion big enough to blow up an entire continent.”
“That’s some apple.”
“That’s every apple. That energy is also inside you. The trick is—you have to perform like this inner alchemy to funnel some of it into your muscles and your brain.”
“Alright. Inner alchemy.”
“Basically, you either do it or you don’t. But once you start doing it, it just sort of becomes second nature. As a worker, you grow your power by helping other workers.”
“But how do I start?”
Dionysios tossed his sword on the ground and adopted a kind of Kung Fu battle pose. “Keep hanging out with me.”
Alexios threw his sword in the dust and mimicked his teacher.
You are only an Apprentice Brawler (4/10), the voice said. Be careful.
“When you practice enough,” Dionysios said, “no one will be able to stop you. Arrows, swords, kicks, punches—entire armies will be powerless. But only an immortal can kill an immortal. For the most part. Subjective dice rolls are an inherent part of existence.”
“If you guys are so powerful, how come there’s so few of you?”
“The cliché is mostly true: power corrupts. If you spend too much time kicking ass on your own, it can get to your head. You start getting distant from the people making your daily bread. Before you know it, you’ve become a parasite on the workers and peasants—you’ve become an enemy of history.”
“Are there any Zhayedan warriors fighting on the emperor’s side?” Alexios said.
“Even one is too much, and plenty of motherfuckers have sold out. Since they’re exploiters, they can only recharge their farr by preying on workers and by individualistically improving themselves. It isn't as powerful as helping workers—as collective action—but it's easier.”
“So then why would an immortal switch sides?”
“Abolishing exploitation is still pretty hard, even when you’ve got magic power.”
“I always hated cape shit.”
“Superhero movies are just cop movies with an extra step,” Dionysios said. “But what we’re doing here is a little different.”
He jumped back, kicked off the tree trunk behind him, and swung his leg around at Alexios—who raised his arms to block. Nonetheless, Dionysios’s kick felt like being struck by a baseball bat. Alexios was knocked to the ground.
You have taken 5 damage, the voice said. 95/100 health remains.
“Fuck!” Alexios clutched the side of his head. “That fucking hurts!”
Dionysios helped him up and brushed the dirt off his clothes. “Sorry, I’ll try not to show off so much.”
“It’s hard to see how getting the shit kicked out of me is the path to enlightenment.”
“There’s no enlightenment. There’s always more to learn. You never stop learning. Sometimes I have to wonder if the battle ever ends.”
He sparred with Alexios, but Alexios was too slow and inexperienced. Again and again Dionysios knocked him down.
“You're doing fine.” Dionysios lifted Alexios up for the fifth time.
Alexios was drenched in sweat and covered in dirt and bruises. His stamina would start running low soon. “I’m not sure I can do this all day.”
“It takes a lifetime to learn.”
“I don’t think we have a lifetime. Weren’t you planning to rescue Herakleia today?”
Dionysios shrugged. “If we can.”
“If we do that, I’ll get killed.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Isn’t there a shortcut?” Alexios said. “When we flew out of that ant cave, you touched me and I felt like…I don’t even know. It was amazing.”
Dionysios squared his shoulders, flexed his muscles, and said, with a strong Austrian accent: “It feels like I am coming!”
Alexios laughed. “Yeah, it kind of does.”
“I suppose I can spare you a little energy. It’ll work for a little while, but if you waste your time and don’t help workers, it’ll vanish. Don’t let the farr fade.”
“Does helping workers mean killing people?”
“There’s no war but class war,” Dionysios said. “The rich kill the poor all the time via structural violence—landlords throwing single moms out of their homes, private hospitals denying medical care, debt driving people to suicide, the ruling class denying people a proper education. So why aren’t the poor allowed to fight back? There’s way more of us than there are of them.”
“But Dionysios, come on, it’s not that simple. You don’t have to be so preachy—”
“Business cannot profit except by extracting the surplus labor of workers,” Dionysios said. “It’s a scientific fact. And any business owner who refrains from extracting the maximum surplus labor will be outcompeted by other business owners due to market imperatives. The same goes for any exploiters versus any exploited people—emperors versus slaves or feudal lords versus peasants. The former exploits the labor of the latter, just as a vampire lives on the blood of living beings.”
“But vampires aren’t real. I can’t believe I have to listen to this political—”
Dionysios seized Alexios’s hands in his stony grip and glared into his eyes. Alexios gasped and trembled—lightning was surging through his body. Every muscle was vibrating, a ringing filled his ears, and blinding light was everywhere, almost like he was standing on the sun’s surface.
Farr is at 50/100, the voice said.
Dionysios released Alexios and stepped back. Alexios could see again, but everything was more colorful than before. The infinity contained within the weeds brushing his feet through his sandals was almost unbearable. An intense, everlasting joy radiated from everything, as though the world was singing an endless song full of patterns and improvisations, one which never got old. Anything was possible. The only constant was change. Everything was connected and contradicted itself and would always be changing.
Education Progress Bar increasing, the voice said. Gain 10 more XP to level up to Educated Apprentice (4/10).
Alexios wanted to learn more. He could have sat back against a nearby cypress and spent days contemplating a blade of grass. A cosmic perspective filled his mind.
Nothing really matters, he thought. So Do What Thou Wilt.
But because he was now connected to the universe, he felt the pain and suffering in Romanía and lands beyond—the plight of millions working harder than draft animals all their lives. Alexios could either help or harm this great mass of humanity. As Dionysios had said, you were either the exploiter or the exploited, the villain or the hero. Alexios would either profit from the workers’ misery or join them in seeking universal human liberation. To refuse to take sides meant aiding the oppressor.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
All my life I’ve wanted to be free, he thought. I’ve spent my life in classrooms or in front of screens, bored out of my mind, furious when corporations ruin my favorite games or movies, militantly apolitical, convinced I was missing out on all the amazing stuff everyone was doing on social media, yearning for something more. Adventure and romance. Love. But what kind of person would I be if my pleasure came at others’ expense?
Alexios felt like he was in a Russian novel. This time he was hit by a musket ball on a Napoleonic battlefield, sprawling on the grass amid thousands of broken bodies and shattered cannons, contemplating the clouds unfurling in the blue sky. How had he never noticed it before?
It’s as simple as that.
His inner voice boomed like it belonged to a wizard, a wandering holy fool in a peasant’s gray smock with a huge beard whirling in the wind.
I dedicate my life to adventure and romance—the greatest adventure and romance of all: freeing the poor from the rich!
Alexios threw his head back and laughed, clutching his belt with both hands. He had almost thought something simplistic like: live, laugh, love.
These thoughts flew through his mind in an instant. Among many benefits, the farr could slow one’s perception of time.
Dionysios asked Alexios why he was laughing, but Alexios was already running forward and darting up the cypresses. He leaped back and forth from trunk to trunk, branch to branch, stumbling a little, until he reached the treetops swaying in the wind. Then he lifted his arms, soared into the air, and was flying for a moment in view of the guards patrolling the battlements on the Land Walls. Beyond their gleaming helmets and spears thousands of red rooftops and white marble porticoes and statues shone. The City’s peninsula stretched into a deep blue sea covered with sails tacking in the cool billowing wind, all too beautiful to believe.
He crashed back down to the field, laughing in the dust.
Dionysios joined him, and they continued sparring both with and without their swords. Teacher and student also began reading the manual together, helping each other comprehend the characters. (Dionysios even let Alexios take the manual for safekeeping.) Alexios leveled up from Educated Novice to Apprentice, and invested his experience points in his Seran reading ability. In his past life he had studied Chinese, always thinking the writing system fascinating. He loved its almost prehistoric complexity. The symbols were a link to the distant past, descended from signs painted upon turtle shells which ancient shamans had then burst open with fire in order to divine the future. He learned here that the Seran word for immortal—xian—also meant god. The character was drawn as a person standing beside a mountain. It literally meant mountain person, one who dwells among mountaintops, almost like an Olympian divinity.
They ran faster than Alexios had ever run, jumped higher than he had ever jumped, fought harder than he had ever fought, grinding for Acrobatic and Swordfighting XP, growing their knowledge and wisdom. The conversation and sparring that day overthrew the slave master in Alexios’s mind. Before, Alexios had been a wanderer in the dark; now he could see. Such was the power of dialectics, symbolized by the Seran taijitu whirl which everyone knew: the unity of opposites. This was everywhere, from the negatively charged electrons spinning around positively charged protons which made up almost all matter in the universe to the lack of matter in the universe itself, the fact that almost everything was emptiness: an emptiness nonetheless frothing with quantum foam, vacuum fluctuations, and electromagnetic energy which consisted of waves and particles at the same time, dark matter, the ripples of gravity generated by singularities clashing billions of light years away, points of density that were infinite yet constrained.
It was enough to make Alexios’s mind burst. He leveled up in Education once more, becoming an Intermediate, and this was a joyous revelation, to learn such forbidden knowledge. But even with this new worldview—as well as the divine farr surging through his veins like electricity—the student was no match for the master. Many times Dionysios knocked Alexios down.
“Nobody becomes a master on day one.” Dionysios helped him up once more. “That’d be too easy!”
“I really need a training montage,” Alexios said.
“You kind of just had one,” Dionysios said.
By now they had been sparring for hours. Their swords were burning bright enough to cast shadows. The heat radiating from the aerolith metal could sear flesh even from a distance.
Exhausted, sore, and drenched with sweat, teacher and student returned to the City for lunch. Alexios mentioned that his farr was almost drained.
“You need to replenish it,” Dionysios said, as they walked back along the Mese. “You have to keep that inner combustion going. Sustain the nuclear chain reaction.”
“How do I do that?”
“You have to help workers, remember?”
“But I haven’t seen you help any workers since we met!”
“What the fuck do you think you are?”
“Me? I’m a worker? Nah, I’m just a student.”
“Did you work part-time? Outside the game, I mean?”
“Yeah, I worked as a dishwasher in the summers. I’ve also been a lifeguard. Right now I’m at a dog kennel on weekday afternoons. It’s awful. Like, actually they treat the dogs pretty well, but the dogs have no idea what’s going on and they think their owners have abandoned them. I call it Dogschwitz.”
“That sounds politically correct. How are the owners?”
“She pays me what she owes on time. She’s polite but I don’t know, kind of annoying. She does this thing where she talks to you like the dogs are talking to you. She’ll hold up a little dog and be like: ‘She says she wants to go for a walk!’ That might not seem like a big problem, but she does it all the time.”
Dionysios laughed.
“I don’t know,” Alexios said. “It could be worse. At the first job I ever had at one of these local family friendly organic green community restaurants, the owner stole from me after my first two days—”
“Just remember: even when business owners are polite and pay you on time, they’re still stealing your surplus value. They’re all parasites. Every one of ‘em. And just like parasites, like leeches, they want you feeling numb when they suck your blood. It’s our job to build a world where everyone can be free of that shit—where the people who do the work call the shots.”
“Although you’re inside a board game as you say that. Checkmate, immortal master.”
“Don’t give me any of that quippy dialogue. Now listen. Back where we come from, business and settler-colonialism and imperialism and landlordism is all so strong, it almost seems unbreakable. I know it must have seemed like that in other places before they had their own revolutions. Before revolution happens, it looks impossible. After it happens, it looks inevitable. But still, the bad guys have a lot of money and a lot of guns. It’s like, what’s the difference between a mafioso and a business owner?”
Alexios shrugged. “The accent?”
“Bingo! But back where we come from, one guy with a machine gun can kill hundreds of people. Here, it doesn’t work like that. The best weapons are swords and bows and arrows, and they just don’t cause the same kind of carnage. I mean, make no mistake, trained soldiers are fucking dangerous, but the situation for the people here isn’t completely hopeless. They aren’t trapped in ideological prison, either. An hour of church a week—which a lot of Christians don’t even get—that’s nothing compared to gorging yourself at the trough of propaganda via television or whatever they’re using these days—”
“We use phones,” Alexios said.
“You mean telephones? Like, you call people and listen, or what?”
“They’re like miniature computers that also function as phones,” Alexios said. “They’re all connected, so you can talk to people all over the world instantly.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Yeah, but people mostly just use them to look at cat pictures and argue with strangers.”
Dionysios laughed. “Everything’s a double-edged sword.”
“Older people still melt their brains with TVs,” Alexios said. “Younger people use phones.”
“Then the situation is pretty much the same as when I left, I guess. Workers, settlers in the imperial core, they’re bribed by the spoils of empire—cheap consumer goods, cheap land, and plenty of opportunity, comparatively speaking. They don’t want to think about the hidden cost of all that shit. That’s why they get angry when you try to propagandize them. They got brainwashed, yes, but they also brainwashed themselves.”
“They’re too busy having brunch.”
“Yeah. Here, though, things are different. The slaves, workers, women, children, and free farmers—the ‘simple believers’ who make up the underclass—they aren’t literate, and class consciousness isn’t nearly as developed, but they aren’t as brainwashed, either. They mostly just use things they themselves make. Feudalism isn’t really a thing in Romanía right now, so the underclass owns its land here and mostly just pays taxes straight to the state. It’s a different mode of production than in Western Europe. So it’s easier to radicalize people—all across Romanía.”
“There’s no feudal lords?”
“The rich and powerful all depend on the state. The dynatoi—the generals, bureaucrats, and priests—get their money straight from the imperial coffers, not directly from peasants like European landlords. If the dynatoi have titles, those usually revert to the state when they die. So their position is actually a lot more precarious than the landlords in Western Europe, who have been running the show there since they destroyed the Western Roman Empire a few hundred years ago. Romanía’s mode of production is still ancient and not really that different from the Roman Republic. You could even call Byzantium a republic, like the Athenian slave republic. But the thing is, the ancient mode of production depends on conquest to acquire shitloads of slaves to do all the work. Romans today aren’t doing a lot of conquering anymore. They’re mostly getting their asses kicked.”
Alexios and Dionysios had grabbed some more gyros and were eating in the Forum of Arkadios, the first big square when you were working your way along the Mese from the Golden Gate to the Milion. Teacher and student were still in the outskirts, which meant that the roads branching off from the main thoroughfare were narrow and dark and led between apartment buildings of rotting wood or crumbling stone which were so tall and unwieldy that they were almost leaning against one another. The area here was also full of beggars. Not since Alexios had visited Washington D.C. had he seen so many homeless people in one place. Churches were feeding them, however, and people seemed more charitable than in the old world. Many were handing the homeless people money or buying them food from vendors. Sometimes the homeless people thanked them; other times they snatched the gifts without acknowledgment.
One pillar in the forum was topped by a thin, bearded wretch wearing nothing but a loincloth. He was standing on a wooden platform, bowing on his hands and knees, and praying.
“Speaking of the farr,” Alexios said. “I’m all out, remember? I’ve only got a few percentage points.”
“Really? I’m charged all the way back up. Want me to give you another boost?”
“How did you get so much? All you’ve been doing is walking and talking since we stopped training.”
“Like I said, I’m busy radicalizing a fellow worker. Even doing little shit like this charges you right the fuck up. If you can get people around here to unionize, you’ll be shooting lightning bolts out of your ass.”
“Seriously?”
“Almost. But unions are also something that mostly just happens in the future—although the Romans still do have the old collegia, the ancient version of feudal guilds. Like I said, classes generally aren’t as developed now as they will be later. The underclass can still band together though. In some ways it’s actually harder to accomplish. In the modern world, there’s more than enough stuff for everyone. The problem is that it’s monopolized by the rich. Here in the past, one issue is that there isn’t actually enough stuff to go around. If the Roman underclass managed to overthrow the government, they would still need to give up their surplus to maintain an army to protect themselves from the Latins and the Turks. The ruling class here also doesn’t extract nearly as much of a surplus as in modernity. A modern coffee farmer from, like, Guatemala is getting a penny for every two-dollar cup of coffee you buy at a café—he’s losing the other dollar and ninety-nine cents to imperialist middlemen—while feudal peasants keep about half the value they produce. So even if you win in Romanía, you’re basically right back where you started.”
“Does that mean there’s no hope?”
“As long as you’re alive, there’s still hope. If we take over, we can collectively develop the forces of production so that everyone has everything they need.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“A lot can go wrong. Dr. Frankenstein basically has to keep his monster under control. Back when I was in Trapezous—uh, Trebizond, I tried to get the guy in charge there to do some of this stuff, but I’m not sure he understood. Maybe he deliberately misunderstood.”
“What’s Trebizond?”
“A nice place. Far from here. Famous for its beauties. Sympathetic to the uprisings. A lot of refugees were heading out there last time I visited. An awful sight. People who lost everything, who have seen things they can’t believe. That’s probably where we’ll find the uprising once we rescue Herakleia.”
“We can’t defeat the emperor and destroy the empire while we’re here, though,” Alexios said. “That would be too simple.”
“Hey, we can give it a try if you want, but I figure we should do one thing at a time. Nikephoros isn’t just some schmuck. You don’t stage a coup without some brains. And in this day and age, you usually need some brawn, too.”
Having finished their lunches, they returned to the City’s heart. Stopping inside their inn, they learned that Diaresso and Gontran were still asleep.
“Tired motherfuckers,” Dionysios said.
He grabbed a change of clothes from his bag and declared he was going to the baths, but Alexios had no extra clothes—he was still wearing the clothing Dionysios had loaned him at his house—so he had to run outside and buy some before he could wash up. Since his haggling skill was low, he wound up paying too much.
Together Alexios and Dionysios entered the Baths of Zeuxippos. This was a massive brick structure situated between the Hippodrome and the Great Palace. Once inside they washed and scrubbed among hundreds of others, lathering themselves amid the rising hot steam and the constant echoing splashing running water. By the time they had finished, and the teacher and student were dropping off their dirty clothes with a laundrywoman who worked for the inn, Alexios felt refreshed, and his stamina was greatly replenished. The voice told him that to reach 100/100 Stamina, he needed to drink a caffeinated drink—like Dionysios’s rare Seran cha—after getting a decent night’s sleep and having a full, healthy meal. Even then, if he’d worked too hard the day before, his stamina could never fill up entirely. As he aged, it would likewise decline regardless of what he did, as would his intelligence, his ability to learn new things or change his habits.
Still, Alexios had never known that he could adapt to a place like this. The City was becoming as comfortable and even as predictable as the farmlands he had left in Abydos. For a little while he was tempted to abandon their current quest and settle here, or at least to explore the City like a tourist. It was an open-ended world, wasn’t it? Didn’t that mean there was no need for him to risk his neck?
The sight of the Great Palace stopped him. Who could even say what was happening to Herakleia inside? But what did he care? He had never even met her. Supposedly she was the leader of the uprising, but people would get along without her, wouldn’t they? They could find another leader, maybe someone better.
A long time ago he’d read a short story. It was about someone who visited the most beautiful city in the world. Everything there was perfect and everyone was happy. The city seemed too good to be true—so much so that the visitor wanted to stay forever. But then a guide took the visitor to a wretched house hidden in the city’s depths. Inside the house was a closet, and inside the closet was a child being tortured. “This is the price we pay for having such a beautiful city,” the guide said. “Because of a deal we made with the devil, so long as we torture this innocent child, we can live in peace and prosperity. Do you still want to live with us?” The traveler felt bad, but said that he accepted the price of so much happiness. “Everyone who comes here feels the same and acts the same,” the guide said. That was how the story ended.
Alexios shook his head. He could have settled here in the City, maybe even started a family. Knowing how to read could take him far in a time and place like this. But he was uninterested in becoming another cog in a machine powered by human suffering. Romanía was nothing without exploitation.
“So when do we free Herakleia?” he asked Dionysios.
Dionysios patted his back. “I thought you’d never ask. Let’s wake up those lazy motherfuckers and get out of here.”