“So, where were you?” Mia asked while the medic was putting a cast on her arm. Normally, a complex break like this would have required a trip to the emergency room, X-ray, and potential surgery, but a few rather painful prods had forced all the shards back into place, magic had conjured the cast directly onto her arm, and some kind of diagnostic Skill had allowed the medic to keep track of the goings-on in her shattered limb.

It’d heal in a couple of months normally, though certain Skills wielded by the Untersberg’s chief physician could apparently speed that up by quite a bit. She’d thankfully never had the dubious pleasure of winding up in the infirmary back home.

“Do you want to head back to the fortress, go to the army’s position, or head-on with me?” Dietrich asked. “I think I know what’s going on here.”

“Go with you,” Mia replied. “After we drop Mr. Papadopoulos off wherever you kidnapped him from.”

Papadopoulos laughed at that, apparently having understood her. It was only then that Mia realized that she’d switched to the Greek Tristan had taught her while the medic had been taking care of her arm. Whoops.

“Wouldn’t it be faster if we go straight to the source?” he asked, looking at Dietrich. “Assuming you can make sure neither of us gets hurt?”

Dietrich just nodded, and so did Mia. Even with one arm in a cast, a couple of Skills of hers could still be used. For example, a projected blade only required a tiny twitch of her right hand.

Granted, Dietrich had to save his sword copying for the immortal head, wherever it may be, so he’d have no real way of preventing regeneration himself, but she did. She only needed one hand to summon and throw fireballs.

“Come on,” he announced and hurried ahead, only to slow down for the two people who couldn’t treat the literal swamp they were getting into as solid ground.

Two minutes and half a dozen dead hydras later, they were standing on a hill overlooking … something.

A reeking pool of sludge in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by dozens of snakes. The ones heading towards it were normal, the ones heading out of it … those had extra heads. Only one, usually, but there were several three-headed ones as well, and even a single one of the five-headed bastards.

Like a tar pit, but infinitely worse. Not simply a sticky mess that lured in one victim after another, but a toxic lake of liquid death that somehow transformed regular snakes into monsters straight out of Ancient Greek legend.

It was a black void, the only thing visible inside it was a large boulder that lay a the center of the pool, and only the top ten centimeters or so, because everything else was below the surface of the “water.” The instant it became submerged, it might as well have stopped existing.

“The boulder Heracles buried the hydra’s final head beneath …” Papadopoulos breathed with a mixture of fear, reverence, and disgust.

“Most likely,” Dietrich replied. “The only question is how we get at it. I can kill it if I hit it, but I can’t see where I’m throwing my sword. And we only have one shot at it.”

He glanced down at his watch, then glanced over at Mia.

“Can you lift that rock with one of your spells?”

“Maybe …” she eyed the boulder. “Depends on how big it is. What are you thinking?”

“The System’s ‘day’ resets at 10 in the morning, which is in two minutes. I can basically summon Excalibur twice.”

Then, he eyed the pond. “That pit is around two meters deep. Assuming the boulder doesn’t get unusually wide under the water, that’s around … somewhere in the neighborhood of ten tons.”

“Too heavy,” Mia immediately replied. “But if you [Grand Slash] at it, I can keep the ‘water’ back for a few seconds and you’ll have a clean shot at the head if it’s anywhere near the surface.”

“That works,” Dietrich said. “Ready?”

Mia nodded, a vicious grin creeping onto her face.

“Ready.”

Mimung flashed from its sheath and unleashed a broad wedge of energy that slammed into the boulder like a meteor, not simply cutting but obliterating it and sending all the water bursting away from the center as though fleeing an explosion.

And at the center of the “crater” left in the liquid as Mia strained to hold it back using [Hydrokinesis], there lay the head of an immense snake.

There was nothing natural about this thing, not just in the sense of it being a creature of magic but in that all it took to tell it was a monster was a single look. A bullet-shaped head covered in forest green scales, venomous neon eyes that looked like the stereotypical radioactive sludge from a kid’s cartoon that glared up at them with hate, still alive after literal millennia, countless backwards-facing spines, spikes, or horns that somehow transitioned into some manner of fins halfway through …

It was a terrible sight. Majestic as well, but also one that would haunt her. That stare … something lay in it that went beyond mere magic. Not just beyond what she could do, or what Tristan could, but beyond even what she thought Fionn was capable of, and he was, well, Fionn.

She stared at it, only dimly aware of the strain of the water she was holding back, her mana pool dropping precipitously. A single moment stretching into eternity until it was abruptly cut off when Excalibur, or rather, a temporary copy, suddenly appeared in the hydra’s eye, sinking in up to the hilt.

Mia sagged, and let the water collapse back over the now-dead skull.

“Do you think the water can still transform snakes?” Papadopoulos asked.

Dietrich shrugged. “It won’t matter after we’ve cleaned it all up.”

He was already pulling out his phone to presumably dial Tristan with his left hand while walking down the hill, towards the remaining snakes, sword still in his right.

“Mia, would you please cauterize the stumps?” he called back before slashing the first snake apart.

***

Merlin

Barely six hours had passed since the hydra’s final head had been slain, but that was all the time he’d needed to gather the others and get a handle on things. Or at least as much of a handle as he could possibly get, because the return of the hydra’s regeneration had merely been the herald of more chaos to come.

It was impressive that all it took to gather people which had previously been scattered across the continent was six hours.

What was more impressive was that this would have been possible even without magic.

Modern technology … to be honest, it might as well be magic, and it still left him baffled when modern humans marvelled at simple parlor tricks, simply because they did not come out of their little boxes of copper wires and glass screens.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

They all sat around the round table in the Untersberg’s throne room. No one had made it that way, not Arthur and certainly not Merlin either, it had just come out that way, which he found somewhat amusing.

Not everyone was here, the Fianna was currently battling its way through elementals in Brazil, though its leader was here, Ogier was somewhere in Iceland to put down a walking volcano, and Admiral Drake was rather hard to access with portals, but otherwise, all were present.

The German emperor sat on the opposite side from Merlin, as close to sitting at the head of the table as he could get in the current setup, Dietrich von Bern on one side, with the Vogt twins next to him, while Arthur was sitting on the other side … a table like this needed a certain number of people sitting at it, otherwise it just looked ridiculous, them all clustered on one side like that …

Fionn, meanwhile, stood next to him, to give his part of the “presentation.”

Merlin waved his hand to conjure several images into the air between them. The globe, an image of a dragon, and a swirling ball of energy.

“A great danger is comi- …”

He broke off as young Tristan let out a snort of laughter. Merlin glared.

“… sorry.”

“In the modern world, dramatic declarations like that are seen as cliche and don’t carry much weight anymore,” Fionn explained.

Merlin sighed.

“As I was trying to say, we’re all likely going to be in even more danger, going forward. It was not obvious in the previous waves, at least not overly so, but magic is returning to this world beyond what is granted by the System.”

Tristan raised a hand when Merlin paused.

“Yes?”

“That’s why Mia and Dietrich found themselves fighting the hydra’s descendants earlier?”

Merlin nodded. “Exactly. Ancient artifacts activate on their own and monsters that are yet to be entirely slain may manage to rise once more. It should be possible to predict much of this, but not everything.”

“Do you predict more people gaining or being born with magical potential?” Tristan asked, again.

“Most likely,” Merlin replied. Being free-thinking and intelligent was a good thing in a court mage, as well as magic users in general. And while insatiable curiosity was normally good because it allowed on to gather all kinds of beyond useful information, right now, it was getting on his nerves … which Tristan seemed to have realized, considering how he was now shrinking in his seat.

“The world has changed and will continue to change well after this year has ended, whether that change is for good or ill is up to us to decide!”

This time, it was Tristan’s sister who sniggered. She caught herself after less than a second, but still, apparently, no one respected grand declarations anymore.

“Right now, so far, I’ve found four points of interest,” Fionn announced. “One under Glastonbury Tor, which is the portal that Arthur found. It is still securely sealed and will stay that way, barring another … accident, but becoming more stable every month.

“The second is in the center of the Atlantic, which we will have extreme difficulty exploring as things stand at the moment.

“The third is some manner of spatial anomaly in western Africa, somewhere in the desert. Nothing has truly happened yet, but it will.

“And finally, something is happening on America’s West Coast. I don’t know what, and I don’t know when it will end, but it is happening.”

Somehow, that, no one laughed at.

“There aren’t very many other myths surrounding people returning in their nation’s greatest hour of need that might be triggered by this returning magic, but they do exist,” Merlin added. “For example, we believe that the goings-on in Africa may be related to a mythical city by the name of Zerzura.”

***

Adrar Plateau, Mauritania

The lost metropolis, the white city, the oasis of little birds. Zerzura.

It was nothing like the bustling trade center he’d known from centuries ago. No, it was quiet as a tomb, not a single other human to be seen. And the birds were gone too. Friendly parrots that could practically hold conversations, adorable sparrows that were as tame as any pet, even the magpies had been polite, returning dropped coins to their owners rather than flying off with them.

And where previously he’d seen the white marble used in the construction as a sign of prosperity, a glorious construction from marble said to have been quarried from the far North, sold by Phonecian traders thousands of years ago, said to possess magical properties. Yet the only magic the stone seemed to possess was trapping him here, in this city, doomed never to leave.

Now, the buildings reminded him of old bones, the fleshless carcass of some titanic beast that had succumbed to age or illness and slowly been consumed by the desert.

It had just been him and the desert winds in this town for … for three months. At least. Attempting to leave had, quite simply, failed, once he’d gotten far enough, he simply found himself walking back towards the city, turning away once more at that point simply resulted in an endless game of spinning in place, every other step taking him back towards his point of origin. The only way to avoid that? Just standing there, stopping in place.

Three months without food or water had been rough, but not unbearable. Pure force of will had allowed him to literally uncripple himself as a child, and the magic of the voice had chosen to empower him in ways that let him use his innate ability to even greater heights. He could keep going for quite some time, but was slowly losing the will to continue.

What was even the point?

Waking up in this bubble and wandering around until he starved to death?

No. Nothing would stop him, nothing would contain him, nothing would prevent him from doing what he had gone into stasis in this city of magic for.

Or so he’d claimed on the very first day. Months of attempting to leave and failing had tempered that fire.

He was trapped.

Until today, when he awoke to a sky that held clouds for the very first time since he had ended his centuries-long vigil.

Something had clearly gone horribly wrong, some manner of unspeakable disaster had struck his beloved Mali, if not the world as a whole.

He’d fought warlords, evil sorcerers, even his own body had betrayed him at first.

Whatever was out there today, he would face it head on.

***

United States of America

A young man was sleeping fitfully, twisting and turning in his bed, the blanket long since shed onto the ground, now he was some how starting to tear into the mattress below as his mind was flooded by images of long-past battles.

He was a man clad in furs, hands wrapped around a wooden shaft topped with a flintstone spearhead while snow fell from the sky, facing off against a titanic beast towering above him, curved tusks longer than he was tall threatening to sweep him off his feet with crush force, a trunk the size of many a tree trumpeting out the beast’s fury. Even partially fallen into a pitfall trap, hindlegs trapped, a dozen spears already sticking up from its back, it remained a threat so he lunged …

… but the scene shifted, transforming, placing him atop the deck of a ship, a trireme though he had no earthly idea how he knew that term, landing ashore while a city was being sieged in the distance, a fortified island towards which a bridge was ceaselessly being built under constant fire …

And then it was gone. Again. Replaced.

Then it was snowing once more, more heavily this time, but he was somewhere in the mountains, surrounded by soldiers clad in armor just like him, more tusked beasts milling around. Elephants, not mammoths, looking more than a little unhappy at the cold.

And at the front stood a man, tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in impressive armor, staring at the cliff face they’d have to somehow pass through, if they wanted to proceed.

“If we cannot find a way, we’ll make one,” the man growled, glaring ahead, then turned back to face his men. “Build fires, and fetch vinegar from the supply train. This mountain will submit to us!”

As to how that went … he had a distant memory of learning about the outcome in history class, however, the vision changed again, leaving him in a muddy field, in solid armor plating, a massive shield on his left arm, an identical shield hefted by every one of his fellows, while a man with a crimson cape held a speech from atop a white horse, beneath a golden eagle held aloft by the standard bearer.

“And so, men of Rome, will you follow me into this battle? Cowards may die many times before their deaths, the brave die but once! Onwards …”

It was a different language than the first one he’d heard, but one he somehow clearly understood nevertheless.

The next couple of visions arrived and vanished in an instant, a brief flash of him stabbing a crucified man, swiftly followed by him crossing swords with another man in a grassy field, both of them clad in heavy armor.

In an instant, the world around him was replaced by a series of thunderous explosions he only belatedly recognized as cannon fire while he was screaming himself hoarse, shouting profanity at the approaching blue-coated cavalry.

“Come and see how a Marshal of France dies!”

As always, he did not find out how it ended.

Another change in scenery, a new environment. A military camp, rain drizzling down, making the already miserable conditions worse. He was standing atop a crate, staring down at the soldiers as this time, it was him holding a speech.

“And if you put the letter ’S’ in front of Hitler, then you’ll know what I think of the man!”

A round of chuckles followed that, but that scene too was swept away, replaced by the beige walls and ceiling of the barracks as the young man launched himself across the room as he woke, strength he had not possessed when he’d gone to sleep turning what was meant to be him simply sitting up in his bed into a wild leap across the room.

[Class Shift: Born Soldier Lv. 27 -> Specter of War]

[Specter of War Lv. 27 -> Specter of War Lv. 73]

[Skill gained: Thunderous Glare]

[Skill gained: Lead by Example]

[Skill gained: Offensive Momentum]

[Skill gained: I Live Until I Die]

[Skill gained: …