Today had been a new day, and that did not make a lick of difference to my mood. Actually, no, that was a lie. I felt worse. Yesterday had been a matter of alternating between using Skills, watching and waiting with bated breath as the matters outside went on, and praying to a deity I was pretty sure I didn’t even believe in.

Today, I’d been vital for about five seconds, when I’d used [Restoration of the Old] to fully remove all formerly undead bodies and anything they’d left behind from the fortress. Beyond that, I’d almost completely been superfluous until the evening. That wasn’t to say that I’d done nothing, outside of lunch, I’d basically never sat still, but I hadn’t achieved much, that was the point. I’d felt superfluous.

Today had been clean-up. That meant digging graves, gathering corpses, and organizing memorials. Because there had been losses on the side of the mountain’s defenders. Sixteen of them. Sixteen people had died, all without me knowing or even having met them. Literally. Not only had I not recognized a single name when I’d learned them, but when their portraits had been lined up against one wall, veiled in black, I’d also come to realize that I hadn’t so much as crossed paths with a single one of them.

I didn’t know them, and was barely touched by their deaths. And somehow, that was worse. No, not somehow, it was actually pretty clear why it did, in fact, make me feel even worse.

People were dead, I didn’t feel bad because I hadn’t known them, but people had died. I should feel horrible about that, and the fact that I didn’t had set off an annoying little voice of self-doubt and doomsaying that was now constantly calling me a sociopath. It was wrong, of course, but I couldn’t rationalize that voice into silence. I’d tried and failed for, honestly, more times than I could count.

The least I could do was shut up and not mess around in a memorial. Because that was all we could really do. Hold a memorial. Because where there were bodies, they’d been so thoroughly contaminated by rot and disease that they needed to be considered an active biohazard and were kept in an NCBR containment unit Reinhart had arranged for.

Charlemagne was the first one to hold a speech, a generic “duty, honor and ultimate sacrifice,” one I knew from countless books and movies, but coming from him, it somehow sounded more than just genuine, it was actually moving. Or maybe, it was the fact that I’d been involved in the events that had led to the deaths. Probably a combination of the two.

Once the emperor was done, individual eulogies were given by those who’d actually known the dead.

I barely heard either. I was tired. So damn tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally.

After the last eulogy had been held, an unseen Mandl carved the names of the dead into the wall using magic, to be remembered as long as this fortress stood. It was one of the walls of the absolutely gigantic main entrance corridor, written in a fairly small font; I could cover a capital letter with my thumb if I wanted to. And yet, honestly … we’d probably wind up covering the full length of the corridor, both sides, before all was said and done.

Then we had dinner, which had been turned into a wake.

For the duration of the memorial, I also suspended my other big “task” for today. Practicing [Piercing Gaze].

It was a Skill that allowed me to see where someone’s loyalties lay. A semi-vital skill for a diplomat like myself. It’d let me identify enemy agents in my own ranks and people with skewed priorities amongst whichever group was across the table from me.

And using it had been incredibly interesting.

People were … weird. Paradoxical. It was hard to put into words what the Skill told me.

Most of the individuals I scanned were, in many ways, selfish, yet also not. Simply put, their primary drive, their motivation, their everything was something that was simultaneously themselves, yet beyond that. Something along the lines of “I’m the most important thing to me, but my family is a part of me.”

A lot of the cops and military reservists had primary loyalties that surrounded their immediate colleagues, their squad, their precinct, and so on, with family and friends their secondary concern, then, finally, justice and/or patriotism beyond that.

Which was slightly weird since they were here, in the eye of the storm.

Actually, no, “eye of the storm” was exactly the wrong thing to call this. Because this wasn’t the sole safe point in a storm but the most dangerous point in it by any measure.

The point was that they’d chosen to come here, where all hell was guaranteed to break loose at least five more times as the System’s Challenges came around. I’d expected them to be paragons of humanity, selfless heroes to at least a certain degree, not people this … normal.

Although I had no earthly idea whether these people were normal, the population of the mountain was hardly a good sample group.

People were still really freaking weird.

Reinhart, in particular, was … not what I expected. His core motivation seemed to be “I’m number one for me, but I have to be able to live with myself.” Basically, when push came to shove, he’d not abandon us; he’d do what was needed of him, and he’d certainly never run off and leave someone to die.

Which, fair enough, was a perfectly reasonable yardstick to measure your decisions by, but definitely not what I’d imagined I’d see when scanning him.

I’d also, of course, used [Piercing Gaze] on the emperor. He loved three things equally. His personal legend, his empire, and his God. No surprises there.

During the wake, I stayed in a corner, trying not to get in people’s way. I hadn’t really been in danger; it felt wrong to rub shoulders with those who had risked everything and actually known those who had died.

Eventually, Mia and Dietrich stumbled into the dining hall, finally back from hunting monsters that would have been troublesome for the Bundeswehr to handle.

I quite deliberately avoided scanning Mia. I didn’t actually want to know, but I did check on Dietrich.

First priority, staying true to himself and his self-image. Be regal, be a hero, save people, basically.

Second, not betraying the memory of his friends. Not unexpected.

And thirdly, us. Meaning, me and my sister. That was … suddenly, I wanted to be able to see into my own heart, see what was going on. Because in that moment, it had clicked, at least I thought it had. The way I saw him. A new father, a parent, the first person I’d truly felt safe with since, well, me and Mia had become orphans. Fuck.

Did his loyalty mean that he felt the same, er, the opposite, uh, no the, um … honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how to phrase it, it was simply that I wanted to know if his loyalty to us was about simply seeing us as companions like the friends he’d lost, or were we becoming the children he’d never had? How would I know? I sure as shit couldn’t ask. Or even ... honestly, any slip-ups here could do so much damage. What about Mia, how did she feel?

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I … honestly, I checked. To her, the two of us were the most important thing, us against the world, followed by Dietrich and her ambitions. Primarily, matching Dietrich in swordsmanship.

I glared down at my own hand, willing the Skill to activate, trying to force it to trigger. I was no stranger to tying my train of thought into knots when I confused myself, but right now, I was more frazzled than I’d ever been. Or seen. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to say, and my inner voice was oh so helpfully providing me with seemingly infinite suggestions for how to make this whole affair a thousand times worse.

So I did what any reasonable person would have done in my position. Ran like all the demons of hell were chasing me, returning to my room to hyperventilate, if it came down to it. Though it didn’t. I just wound up almost punching the wall, redirecting my fist to plow into my pillow at the last second before I began to run in circles, muttering “fuck” on a loop.

Eventually, I managed to calm down and parked my ass at the large table and chair I’d gotten this morning, so I could work somewhere in private.

There were reports I still needed to review because it took time for them to reach me. The ones I’d had this morning had been entirely too little to go on.

As for what they were about, it was simply about how the undead were being dealt with elsewhere. It was bad, but nowhere near as nasty as I’d expected. Basically, the exact same things I’d learned this morning, except I’d dismissed the information then, assuming it to be incorrect.

Modern media portrayed zombies and undead in general as the ultimate apex predator, capable of killing and thereby reproducing with a simple bite or scratch. Put one zombie in a crowd, and the infection would ripple out like some bizarrely fucked up Mexican wave, and so on.

However, they were also so slow that a brisk walk could outpace them, should slow down in cold weather, rot and/or mummify in hotter climates, and just overall die to the elements in short order. And even when they were superhumanly strong, base undead were just plain terrible fighters.

Zombies being unstoppable was a trope, nothing more, and most of the undead today’s humanity was facing were a lot weaker than even that since they were not infectious. Well actually, they were, but only in the sense that any injuries they inflicted were filthy as fuck and would require professional treatment, not in the “if they kill you, you become them” sense.

Throw in the fact that you only needed a sledgehammer, any one of a dozen power tools, a car, or even a reasonably heavy piece of furniture to kill one, and, well, regular undead were perfectly beatable.

The people who lived near graveyards were screwed, as was anyone who found themselves face to face with any kind of boss, or those who got swarmed, but otherwise … not apocalyptic in terms of raw numbers.

A ton of people had died, in Germany, those were 1 million dead and counting, but a third of the nation was already clear thanks to the mountain, and all known bosses had to be dead for Dietrich and Mia to be back.

It had certainly felt like the world was ending here, seeing those millions of walking corpses, and I doubted there were many civilians who felt safe, but we were still here, still kicking, and based on the reports I probably shouldn’t have but Hofmann had sent me anyway, the infrastructure damage wasn’t too terrible either.

Overall, global casualties … I’d have to make a guess. I mean, Germany had lost one-eightieth of its population, that same fraction of the current world population came out to roughly a hundred million, twenty million more than the Second World War had killed if one counted even indirect civilian deaths through famine and disease. A staggering number by any reconning. Yet I’d expected to wake up to an Earth whose population had been cut in half.

Though I had no real numbers outside of the nation on whose soil I currently resided. There were plenty of cultures whose burial rituals did not leave behind bodies to be reanimated, and what about active war zones? Had they gotten worse as the innumerable dead rose from the grave, or had the sheer number of guns shredded the zombies the instant the first rotting finger so much as twitched?

Both, probably. Lesser undead got obliterated; Bosses tore through anything short of tanks with ease, and aircraft reigned supreme.

I sighed. The idiom “not my circus, not my monkeys” fit, though its flippancy sure as shit didn’t feel appropriate.

The point was, I couldn’t really do much to influence anything, though I might wind up loaning out Dietrich, Mia, and Ogier to clean up if they were willing.

Either way, there was very little I could still do today, so I got ready to go to sleep.

Today had been rough; tomorrow would be an entirely different kind of challenging, and even though, objectively, I had done my part, I still felt like I’d achieved nothing at all.

Though based on the voice I heard when I let myself fall into my bed, the System disagreed.

[Global Ambassador of Myth Lv. 17 -> Global Ambassador of Myth Lv. 19]

[Skill Boost gained]

[Skill gained: Diplomatic Immunity]

What had I done to earn that? Based on the fact that I’d gotten the Levels as I turned in for the day, I assumed it was a reward for everything that I’d done today, with the thing I was gaining Levels for only having “ended” when I went to bed.

But I didn’t know, because the timing of Level gains was still a Book with Sevel Seals, as far as I was concerned.

So what had I done today? I’d prepared for tomorrow, which would be a diplomatic mess, and I’d practiced with a Skill that would be essential for a diplomatic meeting, [Piercing Gaze].

… Aaaaand I was awake again. Fully awake.

I groaned and dragged my palm down my face. I guessed that tomorrow, it’d have to be coffee propping me up, rather than the good night’s sleep I’d planned on getting.

Still, my choices were A. lie in bed and stare at the ceiling until I fell asleep or B. do something productive until I felt tired again. I chose B, especially since not dealing with the Level up would just keep me up longer.

So, step one, find out what the new Skill actually did.

[Diplomatic Immunity].

The basic idea behind it was pretty self-explanatory, but there were a ton of different ways that idea could manifest, so reading the description was pretty much mandatory if I didn’t want to get myself killed by accident.

Diplomatic Immunity

You gain extreme resistance to unprovoked attacks, and complete immunity to the first lethal attack in a fight you did not initiate (deliberate provocation for a fight counts as innitiation). The resistance persists for the rest of the fight but falls off over time. Retaliating beyond the bounds of self-defense will void this protection

So basically what it said on the tin. If I didn’t pick a fight, I’d be heavily insulated from damage and even get one “get out of jail free card” in the form of negating a single lethal blow. I could even fight my way out of trouble without losing that protection, but I wouldn’t be able to drive the boot in if I started winning.

A duty to retreat, then. The German law on self-defense didn’t have something like that; it relied instead on a rule that self-defense needed to be proportional to the severity of the situation, but I’d watched enough American TV shows to be familiar with the concept.

Which just left the question of what precisely constituted “deliberate provocation.” A simple disagreement at the negotiating table didn’t; I was sure about that, and something like “hit me if you dare” definitely did, but what about the things between those two extremes?

An insult or cussword slipping out, would that be enough to potentially get me killed?

I sighed. Something to try out, I guessed. Maybe I could find something to tease Mia about until she elbowed me and see what happened. Either way, I didn’t intend to be rude during negotiations, and this new information just reinforced that need for politeness.

As for the Skill Boost, the decision came down to a choice between three options. [Knowledge Transfer], which still formed the core of my utility here, [Diplomatic Immunity] for obvious reasons, and [Piercing Gaze] for its sheer utility. I had no idea what the upgrade would be for any of those, but they were sure to be good.

After a few minutes, though, I settled on [Piercing Gaze]. Whatever its upgrade would be, I’d need it tomorrow. So I applied the Boost and immediately read the upgrade.

Your gaze may also pierce the veil of veracity, differentiating truth from lie, although self-delusion may result in false positives

Perfect. Truth-telling would be the real MVP in tomorrow. Speaking of … the meeting would actually be today, judging by the clock on the bedside table. It was after midnight … and I was still wide awake. Scheibenkleister.

I groaned, flipped my pillow, and tried to get back to sleep. Unsuccessfully.

But eventually, something must have worked, because I did wake up the next morning, instead of shuffling through the corridors like a bleary-eyed zombie operating on zero sleep. No pun intended.