Somehow, I only got my reward for the events at Ravenna once we were well-clear of the city, but I did get it.

[Legend’s Guide Lv. 5 -> Legend’s Guide Lv. 7]

[Skill Boost Gained]

[Skill gained: Arcane Core]

I sighed. If I hadn’t known how to access proper descriptions, I would have been at a complete loss of what to do with that.

But since I did know how to do that, it was a matter of seconds to look at what seemed to be a magic Skill.

Arcane Core

Gain the ability to use and sense magic, thereby acquiring the necessary resources to learn from your legend even if their abilities require magic or other forms of arcane energy

Okay, not what I expected. It was theoretically awesome, but not in my current situation.

If I were trying to wrangle Sun Wukong through modern China in a way that doesn’t see cities reduced to ruin the instant someone threatens him or accidentally gets between him and his food, this Skill might have let me learn his transformations, his countless unnamed but potent spells, maybe even first form of immortality.

If I’d found Merlin in his tree and woken him, I could have probably learned his spells.

And so on.

But Dietrich was just a badass warrior, no magic to be found. Eh, maybe I’d find someone else to teach me, maybe I wouldn’t, but either way, I sure as shit wouldn’t be able to get any use out of it anytime soon.

However, as for the Skill Boost, I knew exactly what to do with it.

[Skill boosted: Modern Makeover]

Number of transformable outfits increases to three, choose which outfit reverts when re-applying the Skill

In other words, I could now give each of us a new outfit simultaneously, something I immediately shared with the others.

“That should come in handy for making a good first impression,” Dietrich said while Mia just nodded along.

“By the way, what did you do with your Skill Boosts?” I asked him.

“Those are what you used to get at the descriptions, right?” he asked.

“Yep,” I nodded.

“I didn’t get any.”

“Not a single one?” I frowned.

Dietrich just shook his head.

“How many Skills did you get?"

“Fifty-one, one for each Level,” Dietrich said.

“Do they all sound the same in terms of theme, or do they escalate slowly starting basic and get more impressive from there? And they’re all marked as ‘Skill gained’, not ‘Skill boosted’ or something like that?” I pressed further. I felt like I was onto something. Not something I’d share with the world, this was private to Dietrich, but something that I felt was important.

“They’re all Skills, but one is labled as being an ‘Ascendant Capstone’. It was the last one I got,” Dietrich explained.

“Let me guess, it fundamentally puts you beyond normal people in some way?” I asked.

Dietrich nodded slowly.

“It’s called [History’s Heart] and it protects me from indiscriminate attacks as long as I hold a position in history. It also uses something called a ‘nuclear warhead’ as something that won’t work because it’s too impersonal, or using more than a thousand people in personal combat. ”

… Mia nearly crashed the car after that statement, though she managed to regain control before anything happened.

“What’s a nuclear warhead?”

“A city-destroying bomb,” Mia explained. It can be dropped from flying machines called airplanes and once it has destroyed a city, it poisons everything about it. The soil and water become tainted, any living being that survives the first impact gets sick and dies and the dust thrown into the air can create a new winter.”

Dietrich winced.

“So what I’m hearing is that at some point, everyone who’s at a high enough Level is going to become immune to having raw numbers thrown at them,” I grimaced. “Let’s keep that a secret before someone decides that killing people who are about to hit that point is a good idea.”

“What makes you so sure that everyone gets a power like that?” Mia asked.

“Because it’s a special type of Skill,” I explained. “It’s not just a part of Dietrich’s Class, it’s special in some way. There are also probably regular Capstone Skills, but it sounds like people who start at a high Level instead of starting out able to chose their own Class get a bunch of Skills thrown at them instead of being able to direct their growth.”

“I think I’m happy with that,” Dietrich shrugged. “I like my Skills. What I don’t like is the sound of those ‘bombs’. Do you have any other weapons like that?”

Oh boy … the next [Knowledge Transfer] was going to horrify him.

***

Two more monster attacks and six hours of driving later, we were sitting on a bench at an Autobahn rest stop with burgers, fries, and soda.

A cool trick I’d figured out earlier involved [Modern Makeover], which I was now using to transform extremely comfortable clothing, pajames in this case, into something that I could reasonably wear anywhere. And the amount of fabric I had didn’t really matter, at least visually. I could turn a short-sleeved shirt and shorts into a full three-piece suit and it would look just fine, despite how thin the material had to have been stretched.

I could feel how fragile it was, and wouldn’t try this with armor or something like that, but I’d been in too many situations that were far too hot for the clothing the dress code demanded. The Skill was perfect for something like that.

“Your Skill should have come off cooldown by now, shouldn’t it?” Dietrich asked, looking up from the phone I’d given him, nearly making me choke on my coke. It was weird how well he’d adapted to the weirdness of modern vocabulary already. Well, the modern weirdness.

I nodded. “WMDs, right?”

“Yes …” he said cautiously. We’d talked about this before, and while he didn’t know much about them, he knew enough to know how devastating they could be. And how horrifying.

So I triggered [Knowledge Transfer]. And for the first time, I saw fear on his face. I’d seen him emotional before, I’d seen him angry when fighting monsters, but this was the first time I’d seen him scared.

Then, a burst of rage flashed across his face, which slowly faded into what … it might have been acceptance, or he might have just gotten control over his expressions.

“We’ll talk later.”

Yeah, definitely control.

“How long do you think it’ll take for people to become WMDs themselves?” Mia wondered.

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“I am a weapon of mass destruction,” Dietrich threw in. “You … give it six months. Between my tutelage and the System, you’ll grow quickly.”

“And knowing Tristan, he’ll turn his cleaning Skill into a WMD or something,” Mia added.

“Actually ...” I cut myself off there. I already knew how to do that, namely, use the marbles of compressed dust as weapons instead of as a convenient method of disposal, but with some really toxic dust. You know, something from Chornobyl or the like.

However, that sort of thing worked best as a surprise, and I really didn’t want to explain all about how I’d commit an act of terror in a semi-public setting. Because, quite frankly, that was what use of strategic weapons was. An act of terror, pointless for any other purpose since it absolutely destroyed anything that one might have wanted to preserve, including the very land itself.

“So, we’re going to the mountain, but how are we going to find the Emperor?” Dietrich asked. “According to the internet, it’s a fully natural mountain without anything proper construction on it.”

“I guess now is as good a time as any to read the scroll,” I shrugged and pulled said piece of parchment out of my backpack, which had been resting next to my legs the entire time.

I placed it on the table and slowly, carefully, reached out to either end of the cord keeping it tied together and puled, watching the wax of the seal slowly crumble beneath the force exerted until the ancient pattern fully broke, releasing the silk beneath. And once I’d fully removed the silk cord, I carefully unfurled the parchment.

It was, well, parchment, but it was so well made that I could have easily assumed that it was merely yellowed paper, covered in meticulous but old-fashioned writing, with letters in a style that I assumed to be Carolingian minuscule. I knew that had been the official style during his reign, but I had no idea what it actually looked like. Still, these looked close to what I’d imagined it to have looked like.

“God, this is long,” I sighed as my eyes flashed over it. At least two thousand words, if not more, all neatly packed onto a surprisingly long roll of parchment, that ran nearly half the width of the table when fully unfurled.

As I read it, I occasionally commented under my breath.

“… Come to the Untersberg … entrance obvious … searching for capable administrators and leaders ... bringing on other qualified individuals will be rewarded … comprehensive benefits package … okay, who the hell wrote this?” I finally exclaimed. I could buy that the medieval emperor had magically learned modern German the same way Dietrich had, but that phrasing … woof.

“Sounds to me like he got someone to write it for him. Some marketing schmuck, maybe,” Mia suggested.

“I think it has to have been magic. Something to create an embodiment of the economical and employment Zeitgeist,” Dietrich suggested.

“That’s gotta be it,” Mia agreed. “I don’t think a marketing schmuck would use parchment.”

I nodded. Beneath the combination of old-fashioned phrasing and modern marketing speak lay one simple, unified message: join me, I’ll change the world and you won’t be the poorer for it if you help me

In me, specifically, he was looking for a guide, but he also needed someone to serve as a castellan for his castle, who could take care of everything while he was out, which would likely be a lot. Historically speaking, he’d always been out touring his empire, running the area around where he was at any given point himself while using emissaries to control distant nobility and making sure they didn’t do anything too crazy or treasonous.

I wouldn’t join him, of course, but I’d be more than willing to help him a little in exchange for support for Mia, Dietrich and myself. As for what shape that support would take … I genuinely didn’t know. We’d have to see what he had and what he could do.

Probably some kind of vast arsenal of ancient stuff and bureaucracy as a superpower, based on what I knew and how thorough the scroll had been. He’d also put out something like five times the proclamations on logistics and law as the next five following rules combined. I might be mixing stuff up here, but it was still a huge difference, I knew that.

“So, we’re done here, right?” I asked.

“Yep,” Mia nodded, crumpling up her burger’s wrapper, something Dietrich carefully observed and then mimicked. I had to hold back a laugh, but thankfully managed it.

***

We managed to drive most of the way to our goal, but unfortunately, it was a mountain, not a city with well-maintained roads, and the instructions on the invitation specified a hiking path being the way to the main entrance, so we wound up leaving the car behind. Dietrich whistled for his magical horse, we put the heaviest stuff on its back, and then set off on foot.

“So, tell me more about these other Ancients,” Dietrich asked.

“Well, we got Karl der Große, who created the basis for modern France and Germany, codified language and many laws, set up a disciplined army whose strength lay in ironclad logistics and discipline, preserved ancient works of literature and is hated by schoolchildren everywhere.”

“Oh God, not this again,” Mia sighed, even as Dietrich asked “What did he do?”

“Basically, he declared that Latin would stay as it is, to allow modern languages to evolve while the old language remained in its current form. Therefore, he is responsible for Latin being taught at modern schools, Latin is almost everyone’s least favorite subject, so as kids, the moment we heard about that, we hated him for that.

“It doesn’t make sense, because otherwise we’d have wound up learning French like Mia did, which is even harder, but, you know, emotions and rationality rarely go together.”

Dietrich wound up laughing. “You know, sometimes, you really remind me of Hildebrand.”

“Oh?” Mia and I asked nigh-simultaneously.

“Mia, you’re probably one of the best sword fighters of your age, you’re always alert and don’t miss any threats and Tristan, you … well, you have an endless wealth of knowledge and use it to figure things out.”

“Thank you,” I said, though I was also painfully aware of what he hadn’t said. Mainly, the fact that when I was “figuring things out”, I was almost completely unaware of my surroundings and that was not only stupid but also dangerous.

“Righ, so basically, Karl der Große, or Carolus Magnus Rex, as he was called in Latin, is ambitious and competent. He’s no outstanding strategist or the like, but he’s smart and knows how to use his advantages to win. When going to war, he focussed on creating a disciplined, well-equipped army with a fully worked out logistics plan that could just stomp most enemies into the ground.

“He’s pretty religious, though, and there are million different things about the modern world that are probably going to make him blow a gasket. And when he deals with pagans, it’s pretty bad. Sacred trees and groves burned, Saxon clergy executed … I hope he and the modern world don’t come to blows.”

“And that man you mentioned when the dwarf was talking to us, Olgier?” Dietrich asked.

“Ogier the Dane was one of his paladins. Basically, an exemplar knight, strong, enduring, loyal,” I briefly summed up. “I don’t know much about him.”

There was a lull in the conversation as we navigated a trickier part of the path, before we were able to divert some of my attention to talking again.

“The other Ancients the internet seems to confirm are Fionn Mac Cumail and Genghis Khan,” Mia added, motioning for me to explain more.

“Basically Fionn Mac Cumail is an Irish national hero who ate a salmon that, depending on the story you hear, either contained all the knowledge in the world, or all that knowledge and quite a bit of magic as well. He’s an actual hero, though, someone deserving of all the implications of the title, unlike, say, Theseus or Jason,” I explained, briefly going into some of the specific stories I remembered.

“And Genghis Khan is basically a walking war crime,” Mia explained. “I think we’re going to be at war within before the end of the week.”

She flashed me a dirty look when I shook my head.

“You don’t think so?”

“He did a ton of bad shit, but western historians focus on that exclusively,” I explained. “Way I see it, he’s not or main problem. Ultimately, he’s a pragmatist. He’s not going to pick a fight with the entire world with monsters knocking on the door, and he’s honestly one of the most tolerant leaders I’ve ever heard of when it comes to stuff like equality and religion.

“He built his empire on equality regardless of race or religion, valued scholars, hell, he even gave more rights to Mongolian women, letting them divorce abusive husbands and the like. He’s not going to go on a religious crusade or do anything like that. If we don’t piss him off, we should be fine for now.”

“And if we do?” Dietrich asked.

“The Khwarezemid Empire killed a group of his ambassadors. He sent one more delegation to give the Shah one last chance to make it right. When that group was also killed, he practically erased the empire, killing to the tune of four million people in the process,” I stated flatly.

That drew a wince not only from Dietrich but also Mia, who clearly hadn’t known any exact numbers.

“Like I said, don’t piss him off, don’t betray him, or there’ll be literal hell to pay. But I think if we can wrangle something like a mutual aid pact out of him, we should be fine.”

“And if he lies?” Dietrich asked.

“Then he’d be ruining his credibility, and he won’t do that. He’s, above all, a pragmatist. Even the most biased historical accounts can agree on that. He slaughtered the aristocracy of conquered tribes because they would have plotted, but regular tribesmen were treated the same as his people basically the second after he’d won. He’d adopt orphans from conquered tribes as his brothers and gave them to his mother to raise.

“But when he conquered the Tatars, there were too many to safely integrate, so he decided on the arbitrary selection criteria of ‘men taller than a wagon’s axle’ and executed them all.”

“Like I said, savage,” Mia said.

I just shrugged. “And if he’d been European, we’d still have wound up calling him Temudjin the Great.”

“Wait, what?” Dietrich asked.

“Genghis Khan is a title that roughly translates to ‘ruler of all’,” I explained. “And I’m not saying that he’s a good person or anything like that, but I do think we can trust that he’s not going to go ape for no reason, and that we can trust any promises he makes in public.”

“I can work with anyone if I have to, as long as they’re trustworthy,” Dietrich nodded sagely. “And from what I’ve heard, he’d probably be easier to work with than most of my allies.”

“As long as you don’t get him mad at you,” Mia noted.

“As long as I don’t get him mad at me,” Dietrich confirmed.

“Honestly, I feel like once we’ve established ourselves, it wouldn’t be the dumbest idea to reach out to hi- …” I stopped talking when I saw the entrance to Charlemagne’s mountain fortress and my jaw dropped.

The scroll had been right, the entrance had been impossible to miss. Just a massive stone door carved into the side of the mountain, with the soil that had previously covered it having been blown away by some arcane force. Now, it was covering the floor before it as hard-packed dirt, creating a path that was visibly of a different color than the surrounding rocks.

“I feel like we’re about to enter the Mines of Moria,” Mia said.

“Yeah, but Dietrich can kill a Balrog if one jumps out at us,” I added.

“Balrog?” he asked.

“Big ass monster with a flaming whip,” I said.

“I’ve killed giants before,” Dietrich noted.

“Exactly.”