Outrage of the Ancients

“So, how do we get this open?” Dietrich asked, rapping his knuckles against the massive stone gate. It sounded like he’d just smacked solid rock, without any hollows or non-stone materials underneath. Just a massive slab that looked impossible to move. Dietrich could probably break it, but that couldn’t possibly be the intended method of entry, could it?

“Let me try something,” I suggested, stepping in front of the immense door that practically looked like it had been painted onto the stone, and declared “Mellon!”

“Seriously?” Mia asked, exasperated.

I shrugged. “I figured it was worth a try.”

“Try what?” Dietrich asked.

“There’s a famous story that has a gate just like that, and I just used the password,” I explained.

“Do we try anything else, or just start knocking until someone comes?” Mia suggested, but Dietrich shook his head.

“The sound won’t carry with a door like that.”

I took this as my cue to pull out the scroll again. Skimming over it didn’t reveal anything relevant, sadly. The paragraph describing the path to entry talked about how to find the path and then locate the door, but that was it. Was the door supposed to have been open when the invitees arrived and just … wasn’t?

“Hello, I’m here with an invitation from the emperor,” I called out, raising the scroll above my head. Nothing happened. Worth a try, I guess.

“Do we just walk around out here until another monster shows up?” Mia suggested and I was about to answer when I heard something coming from deep inside. “Or we just wait, period.”

The sounds got louder and louder, until they were clearly recognizable as footsteps until it sounded like a literal giant was stamping his feet right on the other side of the rock wall.

I noticed Dietrich and Mia exchanging glances next to me. Was this about to turn into a fight?

That was when the giant stone doors began to grind open, pulled inward by a force I could only describe as inhuman to reveal … a man. He was a very large man, granted, standing two meters tall at least and exuding an aura of strength that was above even Dietrich. Not in actual power, just … he looked strong, like someone who bench-pressed dump trucks.

The armored giant stopped, surprised, and looked us up and down. This time, I was pretty sure that showing the scroll would actually do something.

“My name is Tristan Vogt, I was invited by the Emperor, my companions are Dietrich von Bern, a king from the line of Ammelungs, and my sister, Mia Vogt.”

“Ogier Danske, last paladin of Karl der Große,” the giant introduced himself. Yeah, I should have realized that before, it had been kinda obvious. As had been the fact that he was unlikely to refer to himself as “the Dane.” “Danske” basically meant the same thing, but it sounded much better, coming from him.

“So, you’re one of the people the Mandln invited?” he asked, looking around as he did so. “They are all out at the moment, searching for candidates at the moment, so I’ll lead you to the Emperor.”

With that, he turned around, clearly expecting us to follow. Which we did, of course.

The corridor beyond was built to the same scale as the doors had been, not quite to the point of, say, the Mines of Moria, but overall pretty big. Maybe more comparable to an old church, with high, vaulting ceilings, but it was also very utilitarian and dirty, with dust almost everywhere. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the ancient armory we’d found, but still quite noticeable.

Every few meters, I saw regular-sized doors set into the doors, but we didn’t enter any of them, continuing straight for around a hundred meters, where we reached a slightly more normal-sized gate. Still huge, mind you, reminding me of a church gate not only in size but also in design, but not as ridiculous as the main entrance.

Ogier pushed it open and loudly proclaimed “My Emperor, the first of your messages has found a recipient. May I introduce Tristan Vogt and his companions?”

Both Mia and I cringed at that, but Dietrich didn’t seem to mind being dismissed like that.

The throne room, and the chamber we found ourselves in could be nothing else, was smaller than I’d expected, but nevertheless a big fucking room.

Ceilings taller than the corridor outside, with magical lights shimmering in the middle of crystal chandeliers that threw the illumination all throughout the chamber, multiple columns that seemed more decorative than anything else lined either side of where we were standing, decorated with countless images of Charlemagne’s triumphs, framing the far side of the room, around ten meters away, and what was there. A throne elevated by six steps, with a man wearing rich and expensive but slightly dusty clothing atop said throne.

I honestly wouldn’t have recognized him as Charlemagne based on his pictures, and if I’d passed him on the street, I certainly wouldn’t have thought “Hey, that guy looks a lot like that old emperor”, but seeing him in the here and now, even without the context of the invitation or the myth, there was no doubt about his identity.

Drawing deeply on [Innate Etiquette], I stepped forward and bowed deeply and properly despite never having done more than a mocking facsimile to make fun of someone else’s spectacular pratfall or cover for one of my own.

“My name is Tristan Vogt, and my Class is that of [Legend’s Guide]. It’s given me the ability to directly transfer my knowledge to others and clean and repair old construction with a snap of my fingers. While I already serve a sovereign, I would be more than willing to restore this fortress to its old glory and share my experience of the modern world.”

I straightened after saying that. That old-timey formal speak was a bit of a mindfuck, but it felt appropriate. And [Innate Etiquette] had insisted that I wasn’t allowed to start cleaning without permission, coming in and wielding strange magic could have easily wound up going badly. No, it would have gone badly. And my motivations for offering to clean were hardly selfless, I just wanted more ammo.

“However, the details of that will have to be discussed with Dietrich, King of Bern.”

This was his fight now.

***

“I’m seeking an alliance with my fellow sovereign,” Dietrich began. “This is a new world, one that neither of us is comfortable in yet, but one we need to live in.”

“It’s also one that will not last long under the current circumstances,” Karl der Große responded. “I plan on filling the void the government leaves behind. What about you?”

“That’s something to be decided when we see what the world looks like at that point,” Dietrich announced. “For now, I’d like to ask for a place to rest for the night, for me and my companions.”

To be quite honest, he would be more than comfortable with the man in front of him taking the reigns, as long as he was as competent as history claimed.

Dietrich himself hadn’t been the best king. Not bad, mind you, just not … outstanding. Extraordinary as an administrator in any way. He’d been comfortably competent in his role, and done it diligently, but his primary achievements had been made as an adventurer.

He’d fought giants, trolls, ogres, and dwarves to protect his people, and while the dragon had been a case of self-defense, after all, the stupid beast had attacked him first, if his people had needed him to take on its kind, he would have.

For their sake. If the administrator was competent, then he’d be happy serving as the blade that culled the unnatural beasts that predated on innocents.

Dietrich would be fine not being a king again. Especially since ruling this “Germany” wasn’t his by right. If it had been, that’d have been another story. But it wasn’t, and this would hardly be the first time he’d worked under another sovereign. His time at Etzel’s court, for example, had been among the happiest of his life.

“I can agree to an alliance,” Karl der Große nodded. “The guest bedchambers are open to you, as is the library, provided that the books are treated respectfully. Beyond that, How open would you be to working with me Ogier to hunt down these new ‘monsters’?”

“Of course. Though I’ll have to talk to him about the specifics. Targeted hunts or broad expeditions, and similar issues.”

That had been the plan from the beginning. Find the magical weapons wielded by him and his comrades, and then go kill some monsters with the twins. Train Mia until she was his equal while Tristan grew into his role as diplomat and guide, allowing Dietrich to avoid all the pitfalls that came from living in a world completely and utterly foreign to him.

Doing so from this ancient fortress, with the backing of a revered emperor, that would simply make things easier.

“Feel free,” Karl replied.

Ogier took this as his chance to reenter the conversation.

“I was heading out to clear the local area. Would you and your apprentice like to join me?”

Dietrich glanced at Mia, who nodded. So that was how they’d be spending the evening.

“With your permission, Your Imperial Majesty, would you allow us to retrieve some gear to facilitate modern technology? Primarily, a source of power and modern compact libraries?” Tristan asked.

“How compact?” Karl asked.

“A hundred books stored in a device that can be held in a single hand,” Tristan offered.

“If you have something like that, please, retrieve it.”

The sheer wonder in the other sovereign’s voice made Dietrich almost laugh. It was incredible how much of a difference [Knowledge Transfer] had made. Alien as much of modern technology still was, he understood what Tristan was referring to and how it worked. To Karl, it might as well have been magic.

After a brief conversation later, the three monster hunters left the fortress, leaving only a young man of the modern age and an ancient emperor of impossible power.

***

“So, what was that thing you did outside the doors?” Karl der Große asked me, and I felt like dying, fervently wishing the ground would just swallow me whole.

“There’s a famous story about a door like that, and that was the password. The riddle was ‘speak friend and enter’, and the solution turned out to simply be the elvish word for ‘friend’,” I explained as I followed him to the side of the room, where a table was waiting. Everything was dusty, but there was a very conspicuous clean circle around the stone furniture. Another part of the myth, the way Charlemagne’s beard was supposed to have grown around the table he’d slept at.

I also finally took this as my cue to snap my fingers and trigger [Restoration of the Old].

This time, a visible ripple of power washed out, carrying away the dust like a wave of water, leaving behind not only clean but also fully repaired stone, making everything gleam like new and continuing seemingly forever … until it bounced off the far wall and came rushing back towards my palm, where it condensed into another marble of dust. It was larger than the old one, though, closer to a “shooter” marble, the big kind you threw at the smaller ones, than what you’d normally picture based on the word “marble”.

After looking at it for a brief second, I palmed it and slipped it into a jacket pocket.

Karl whirled as he saw the effect, then calmed down almost instantly when he realized that it had just been my cleaning ability.

“Can you use that on the rest of the fortress?” he asked.

I mentally checked and noticed the cooldown was currently sitting pretty at one hour. Nowhere close to the maximum, but still high.

“If I spread out the uses,” I said. “I’ll do it as it becomes available again.”

“So that’s what you’ve dedicated your life to, leading ancient legends?” the emperor asked, sitting down while he motioned for me to do the same.

“Actually, I wanted to become an entertainer,” I said, gesturing to where my sword, the legendary blade Nagelring that was utterly wasted on me, hung. “I learned how to use swords on a stage, not in a fight. And in my spare time, I study folklore and history.”

“Does folklore include myths and stories, or just oral tradition?” he asked, turning in his as if to talk to a servant or the like, only to realize that there was no one there.

“Oral tradition doesn’t really exist anymore,” I told him. “When I’m not reading for pleasure, I’m reading the old works that form the basis of modern storytelling ideas. Lord of the Rings, Journey to the West, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata is on my reading list, Aesop’s Fable, and so on.”

“I’ve only heard about the Fables.”

“Lord of the Rings is only a hundred years old, and the others are Chinese and Indian, respectively,” I explained, and suddenly, the ancient emperor, founder of the nation I’d been born in, looked like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Tell. Me. Everything.”

And suddenly, I remembered a few more anecdotes about his life. For one, how he’d had people read the ancient stories to him in the bath, and just in general, that the Carolingian Renaissance hadn’t just been about creating proper writing styles and reforming scholarly work on a country-wide scale. He’d also been the one to commission the copying and recreation of the works of antiquity, ancient even in his day.

Me telling him about what I’d read had been like dangling a raw steak in front of a starving tiger.

So I told him the story of the monkey born from a rock that had spent a thousand years absorbing the energy from the heaven and the earth, eventually becoming the king of monkeys and styling himself the Handsome Monkey King, how he gained his true name, that roughly translated as “Monkey Awakens to Emptiness”, his time at as the keeper of the heavenly horses, his fury at realizing how low that position was in the hierarchy and declaring himself the Great Sage Equalling Heaven.

Then there’d been the chaos that followed, him becoming an immortal several times over, to the point where even the impossibly powerful Samadhi Fire only managed to burn out the impurities in his body, granting him yet another form of immortality.

But there was so much more to the story.

Sun Wukong’s loss to the Budha himself, him being sealed under a mountain for five hundred years, and then, finally, the journey itself, which was an allegory for enlightenment. Countless monsters, ranging from the truly depraved to those who were merely former members of the heavenly court, returned to the earth and having become some manner of beast.

And his companions, a former heavenly marshall, and a general, a young dragon who’d transformed himself into a horse, and a monk who’d become so pure that any monster who ate him would become immortal, which was the reason why they were attacked so often.

At some point, I felt [Knowledge Transfer] come off cooldown, so I switched topics and told him about it. Despite having lived centuries ago and having been old enough to be my grandfather at the time of his death, he was looking excited to the point where it made me a little uncomfortable.

But engaging the Skill was doable regardless of my mental state, so that was what I did, though I focussed more on information technology over connectivity. Databases and the like. It might have seemed like an odd focus as “the first thing to tell a time traveler”, but, well, we referred to the modern era as the “information age” all the time. And unlike Dietrich, I could tell that the man in front of me would be more curious about information storage and sharing over things like social media.

Karl der Große stared at me for a second. Then two. And then, voice full of wonder, he finally asked “Do you have your phone on you right now?”

“Yes, but I don’t have a signal right now,” I explained. “We’re too deep underground.”

Even as I began to offer alternatives to walking into the nearest town and finding an internet cafe, another voice echoed in my ears.

[Legend’s Guide Lv. 7 -> Legend’s Guide Lv. 8]

[Skill boost gained]

[Skill boosted: Knowledge Transfer]

The choice of what to boost had been obvious. If I was going to be working with not one but three ancients, this Skill would be my bread and butter, and I really did need to start getting that cooldown lower.

Can now gain knowledge from target when transferring, requires consent, choice of gained knowledge rests with the target

Well, that upgrade would have been nice to have five seconds ago, but it should be great going forward.

Knowledge was a thing that wasn’t lessened by being shared. It could lose value, true, and secrets were secrets no more once they were spread far and wide, but sharing information with someone else didn’t remove it from your own memories.

Right now, the charges for [Knowledge Transfer] were few and far between, even if I adjusted my sleep cycle to not lose out on too much time overnight, but eventually, I’d be able to not just transfer information to time-displaced legends and gain knowledge in exchange, but also gather countless bits of wisdom in my own head by trading with modern people.

I could learn a language in a split-second, teach a professor a new language, and become a master of every STEM field … a true polyglot. No, that wasn’t right.

Actually, no, I wanted to be a polyglot too, but the word I’d been looking for was poly-math.

Though I forced myself to banish my daydreams and focussed on the situation at hand, and the centuries-old emperor I was talking to.

Whenever [Restoration of the Old] came off cooldown, I found my way into a new room and cleaned that, until I found the library and the location of the conversation switched to that. There were still no refreshments or people to provide them, which I could tell was tripping up Charlemagne something fierce, but that was largely fine.

Eventually, the monster-hunting team returned not only heavily laden with food, drink, and the basics of an electrical setup like a generator, satellite phone, and cheap laptop, but also covered in monster blood.

Me and Mia worked together to find a well-ventilated room to set up the generator in, then actually put it in there. Thankfully, the instruction manual had been good, because running outside to watch an instructional video at every stumbling block would have taken forever. And Mia was an engineering student, so she was more than capable of setting up a basic machine. My job was mostly to hand her whatever tools she needed.

Though I did dip out a few more times to clean more rooms. It had gotten to the point where I’d gotten so many of the dust projectiles that I was starting to worry about accidentally crushing them in my jacket pocket. It wouldn’t be too bad if that happened, most of the dust would stay there and I’d be able to fix everything with a literal snap of my fingers, but it would still have been a mess.

So I put most of them on the bedside table in the guest room that had been made available once some of the Mandln had returned. Apparently, finding candidates hadn’t been the issue, it had lain with finding ones who didn’t immediately go after them with broomsticks or the like.

Apparently, they would now be producing a grand feast for everyone, but I wound up begging off, being too tired. Though Karl would probably spend that entire even with his nose pressed up to the screen of the laptop, onto which Mia had downloaded a whole lot of history books.

And that now left me lying here, in a bed that had doubtlessly been top-of-the-line luxury in its day, but was practically lumpy compared to the mattress in mine and Mia’s apartment. Though on the road here, Mia had joked that [Restoration of the Old] should work just fine on my room, after all, it was such a mess that it qualified as an archeological dig site.

However, that wasn’t what was keeping me up.

No, there was something about the whole monster issue that was making my mind spin in circles, endlessly reminding me of how weird it was how many monsters we’d encountered.

Now if only I could actually figure out what my subconscious mind seemed to have put together hours ago ...