Chapter 1
He awoke in excruciating pain, probably the worst pain he had ever felt in his life. The only thing that made the pain worse was the fact that he couldn’t move his body or open his eyes. All he could make out about his surroundings was that there were people who sounded like they were in about as much pain as he was and others moving around and making the sound of metal tools clinking together. He lays on what might have been the most uncomfortable bed he had been in since his time in Iraq, like a cot made out of sandpaper and rocks.
After lying in unending pain for what felt like an eternity, he was suddenly able to move his body, shooting up hard enough to nearly knock over his cot, which greatly exacerbated his excruciating headache and threw off the large white cloth which covered his body. He tried to say something but all his thoughts were coming out garbled and all he could manage was to moan loudly. A second later he felt acid rising up his esophagus. He leaned over the wooden poles which kept the cot up and vomited on the ground with enough force to make a loud SPLAT!
The sounds of clinking tools stopped almost completely, and a murmur of different hushed voices began. The man looked up, heaving, desparately trying to not throw up, and locked eyes with someone.
A woman, wearing a dirty, dull orange kirtle dress under a blood covered dark brown leather apron. Her hair was black and matted with dirt and blood, and her beautiful face was also completely splattered, the dark red ichor greatly accentuating her bright blue eyes, making them stick out like a blue moon in a blood-red sky. The tray of medical instruments she carried was, slowly, slipping out of her grasp. After a few seconds, her medical tools were scattered across the floor. She was stammering and pointing at him, causing the hushed murmur to become louder and more frantic. Finally, he was able to speak his mind, albeit very slowly.
“Oh God...my head, does anyone...have...pain meds? T-t-t-tylenol or s-something?”
That's weird, I feel like I sound…different?
The nurse began to slowly back up, alternating between pointing at him and turning to face the other people in the room.
“He-ee-he-he's alive! How is this possible?! I took the bullet out of his eye m'self!”
He was trying to focus, but the pain made it nearly impossible.
“Please...my head is...killing me.”
He said weakly. Another nurse left whoever she was attending to and grabbed the Baron’s hand.
“Baron? H-how are you still alive?! You were shot through the eye!”
She began to feel around his head, her breath becoming more ragged the longer she inspected his body. The Baron slowly blinked, his left eye was in extreme pain, but he could see out of it just fine.
“I don’t under...stand.”
The man felt for both his eyes, and found that he did indeed have two, undamaged eyes. He blinked at the nurse and realized something. His left eye could see detail from much farther away, and in much higher clarity, than his right.
“W-what do you mean I was...argh...shot through the eye?”
“Baron, you were shot through the eye in the last battle! I watched the life bleed out of you! I dug the bullet out of your...”
She trailed off as she focused on the man’s eyes. The man was mostly just confused.
What do you mean ‘shot through the eye?’ My eyes are fine. And…what was it she called me?
"...eye. You have...your eye..."
“Who is this...Baron?”
The nurse briefly lowered her head into her hands. Her shoulders heaved, and another medic came to comfort her.
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After a brief time of the medics barraging him with questions he wasn’t in the right headspace to answer, the Baron was taken to his private chambers, which turned out to be a rather large tent. From what he saw on his way to his tent, it looked like a war camp from the renaissance, or something along those lines. He wasn't exactly a scholar of european war camps.
Probably a long time before my own, in the very least.
“What the fuuuuuuuuuuck...”
He whispered to himself as he looked in a mirror.
“My height, my weight, my voice, my looks…everything is different.”
He was more than a head taller than he used to be. He had slicked back salt and pepper hair that ended in a short ponytail. He had a similarly colored medium length, cropped beard. If he were to guess his current age, he would say around mid fifties. He was also a great deal more muscular than he used to be.
His body felt in perfect, almost superhuman, physical condition. He felt incredible, like he could overcome any physical challenge, like his body had been perfectly sculped by God to be as strong and healthy as possible. Minus his pounding headache, which was still, slowly, fading. He decided to look around the room to see if there was anything to help him gain his bearings, opening a trunk full of letters and grabbing the first one he saw.
The script looked like German but when he read it, despite having taken just one year of French in highschool, he understood it perfectly.
Now that I think about it, everyone was speaking German earlier, but I understood it just fine. Wait, now that I think of it, I was speaking German too. Whatever, as long as I can read it that's all that matters.
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Sehr geehrter Baron Johan Bleichöder Von Bickenstadt,
I am requesting for the Klarwasser Mercenary Company to assist in putting down the rebels near Holenstadt’s capital city of Holensburg. Twelve miles west of Holensburg lies the third largest town, Baktenburg. Your job is to reconquer Baktenburg, alongside any other rebel held territory you come across, so that the Grand Imperial Army can focus on and concentrate its forces at the rebel held capital city of Holensburg.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Should you put down the remaining rebels in this area swiftly I will pay one hundred and fifty percent our previously discussed rate. I will also owe you a favor, within reason of course. Should you need to occupy or attack a town I ask you try to not burn it to the ground, but you may keep any and all goods you should find along the way, as is historical precedent for mercenary companies. I will anxiously await word of either your success in battle or your denial of my request.
Mit besten Grüßen,
Empress Samanta Schwarzen Reikspal.
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“Interesting, so in addition to being a Baron, I run a mercenary company? Why would a Baron run a mercenary company? Wouldn’t he just have an army?”
He muttered his thoughts out loud, hoping that would help him keep them in order.
Suddenly, he felt a torrent of memories filling his mind. In an incredibly painful process, which lasted at least six weeks as far as he was concerned, he remembered everything that happened leading up to the moment the Baron entered the battlefield personally, about a month's worth of memories flooding his brain all at once. After the process finished, he fell to his knees, vomiting profusely as his body desparately and unconciously tried to make the pain stop.
Apparently, having a lot of memories suddenly enter your mind at once is incredibly painful. It was not something he particularly wanted to feel again. Ever again. As soon as the events of the past couple of months finished coming back to him, the headache worsened significantly, causing him to collapse onto his cot.
After spending a few minutes recovering, the pain finally dulled to the point where he could process the memories he was just given.
There was currently a rebellion happening, launched by the Empress’s younger brother. For the life of him he just couldn’t quite remember the reason, but it was most likely more than just a power grab, he wasn't entire sure why, but he was certain about that. The Baron was a baron of a country known as The Empire, which he felt was a bit of a silly name, and a mercenary captain who was hired to assist the empress put down this rebellion. As far as he could tell, baron the highest rank of nobility in the Empire.
After a few minutes of processing all this new information and slowly recovering from his headache, he continued to investigate his new body.
First, he wanted to investigate his eyes, as that's where the lion's share of pain was located. The right one was blue, sort of a darker cobalt color. He looked closer at the left, the one he was told got destroyed, in the mirror and noticed some strangeness that he didn’t quite know what to think of. Like he had assumed, his left eye could see with much more clarity than his right, and it almost felt like it could see farther as well.
The pupil looked strange, kind of hawk-like in a way, and the color was wrong. A kind of yellow-orange that as far as he knew simply didn’t exist amongst humans. The higher quality of vision his left eye provided was making his brain go haywire, his depth perception was off and every time he looked at something new his eyes ached. He covered it with a long strip of cloth which he wrapped around his head, figuring that would probably help the pain and it was a good idea to hide his strange eye from others, and moved on to review the rest of his body in the mirror.
Like he found earlier, he was in amazing physical condition, almost inhumanly so. In his previous life he had spent the last two years dying of cancer, probably the result of carcinogens he inhaled in Iraq combined with a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. He was never the physically strongest man, and his cancer greatly exacerbated that. He got used to being weak, and getting weaker over time.
And now…
His current body looked almost like it was carved from marble by one of unfathomable skill, and his muscles felt about as sturdy as well. He might have been in even better shape than modern olympians. He felt, physically, extremely well, minus the now slight headache. He had never in his life felt as good as he did now, which almost made him uncomfortable. It was a feeling he was simply not used to feeling.
I should have worked out more.
Having completed his rudimentary physical examination, he sat down and started to go through the Baron’s things, mostly letters and documents about the state of the rebellion and his mercenary company ‘Klarwasser Mercenary Company’.
Apparently, the province the Baron rules over has a state militia, but he has his own, private military company which he sells to the highest bidder.
He was currently in the Imperial province of Holenstadt fighting the remnants of the prince’s supporters that rose up in Holenstadt, based out of the capital city Holensburg. Apparently two provinces had large revolts, Holenstadt, which seemed to be in the north of the Empire, and Leibenstadt, which seemed to be in the south. The lion's share of the professional state military was concentrated in Leibenstadt, so the revolt in Holenstadt was left to a few Imperial regiments and many different mercenary companies.
The rebels were only able to capture three medium sized pro-Imperial towns alongside the third largest city in the province, also pro-Imperial. At least in the beginning of the revolt, the rebels enjoyed widespread support from the regular people of Holenstadt. They were doing very well for a time, even picking up a few victories in the field and many successful guerilla ambushes in the dense forests and mountains of Holenstadt before the Baron’s forces stopped them in their tracks at the battle of Miejsce Winnicy, a distinctly non-German name which felt out of place to him.
Apparently, before their momentum was killed, they were an absolute nightmare to face, as at least half of the letters the Baron had were about how scary and effective the rebel's tactics were and casualty reports corroborating their effectiveness.
He, alongside his Lieutenants, were able to retake the three towns and were currently working on retaking the last remaining rebel controlled settlement in Holenstadt. The resistance in Holensburg had already collapsed under the weight of the mercenaries led by the Grand Imperial Army, as had dozens of other towns that raised the flag of rebellion. His company's job, alongside that of the other mercenary companies, was to mop up the smaller towns so the Grand Imperial Army could send the last of their forces to assist in Leibenstadt.
On the way to the city of Baktenburg, he was taking part in a small skirmish a couple of miles away where he was shot through the eye by one of the very rare rebels who managed to get their hands on a modern flintlock rifle, completely killing their momentum and allowing the rebels to regroup.
The Baron took in a deep breath and exhaled sharply, speaking out loud, mostly to himself.
“Ok, I think I have mostly regained my bearings, I know roughly what’s going on, now I just need to adapt to this world and assume the role of Baron Von Bickenstadt.”
He put on his clothes and armor, which looked to be a strange mix of vibrant and colorful floofy pants and sleeves of the Landsknecht and the beveled chestplate of a Spanish Conquistador plated in gold. Etched into his Cuirass looked like a ship docking at a harbor, the boat and the dock were extremely detailed, so much so that it seemed like a waste for a piece of armor meant for battle.
From what he could remember, the Baron was most proficient in a Polish style saber fencing and some sort of Wushu-esque one-handed broadsword form. A very strange combination of sword styles, though he was proficient in other styles and was in the very least adequate with other weapons such as spears, longswords, and the pole weapons, as well as being a crack shot with a gun.
it seemed this world was in a sort of late renaissance period of warfare, sort of. Battles were still mostly made up of melee and bow infantry with flintlock firearms mixed in, though firearms were very quickly beginning to overtake bows as recent manufacturing techniques had made producing firearms quicker and cheaper and it was becoming consensus that guns were the future of warfare. Aside from that, it would seem that they are in the early stages of industrialization, as he could vaguely remember some machines being powered by steam and proper factories beginning to pop up, though of course some places were more developed than others. It felt like a strange jumble of different time periods to him, but, well, this was a different world than the one he was from.
He strapped on his saber, which was inlaid beautifully with incredibly complex swirls of gold, silver, and jewels, as well as four pistols he had holstered on his hips and under his armpits. As he turned to leave, he felt some sort of compulsion to look at his desk. Sitting on a small purple velvet pillow was a golden ring, which he felt compelled to pick up.
The ring had two things carved into it: a large merchant vessel, and what seemed to be a some sort of chemistry set. He wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but he slipped the it onto his ring finger without really thinking about it. It just felt right. He stepped out of his tent and was immediately greeted by a young man who saluted him, slamming his fist onto his chest hard enough for a loud clang to ring out from his breastplate.