Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9 - Chapter 7

The tale that follows is not from the time line we know—but it might have been, had the dice fallen differently...

One Full Henderson ver0.8

1.0 Hendersons

A derailment significant enough to prevent the party from reaching the intended ending.

The Empire possessed a vast territory, and so each of its borders were a potential front line. The lands that bordered it to the north were a particularly dangerous frontier.

Due to its proximity to the polar region, the merciless sea that bordered this frozen, almost unlivable land was home to ice floes all year round. Sweeping shoals and steep cliffs lined the shore, preventing the creation of any ports.

Port Schleswig, the sole open-sea port that the Empire possessed in this area, might have been in an ice-free region, but the angry waves, rough currents, and ice floes further out meant that it was dangerous to head out anytime other than the relatively short summer here.

Not only that, the northern peninsula—a forest-coated region in the continent’s northeast—jutted out into the water, making access to the open sea far more difficult. The narrow strait in between was populated by small islands and rock reefs, making passage across it incredibly dangerous. Trade didn’t flourish there.

The terrain wasn’t the only danger that plagued these waters. The locals’ vicious raids troubled the surroundings all through the year, but grew ever worse as the summer solstice approached.

It was these peoples of the polar region, the northern isles, and the peninsula who threatened the seas of the Empire’s northern reaches. The Imperial nobility had always seen these folk as simple barbarians.

The Imperials borrowed a phrase from the Orisons that grouped these northern realms—excepting the furthest isles—all together as Nifleyja. Roughly translating to “the gloomy isles,” the appellation was a subtle nod to the Empire’s willful ignorance of the region’s true nature—what more was there to know, besides that they were a dire place to live?

The Empire didn’t view this treatment as particularly derogatory. It was hardly untrue, after all, that the locals lived on loot and plunder; why not call them a pack of barbaric pirates? Their nations were forged through might alone. In fleeting moments of peace, some might have elected their kings, but more often than not their thrones were but gaming pieces, passed from neighbor to neighbor in bloody contests of succession. It was custom for the losers to accept defeat with grace in the moment and plot their next conquest when the moment passed and the dust had settled.

If you were to push a hard-line Imperialist to admit everything in their heads, they would no doubt say that the very culture of the northern sea-reavers, known as Niflings—people of the gloomy isles—was a rallying cry of More land! More wealth! In short: they were the enemy.

The nomenclature referred to a wide span of people and territory, but the people of the Empire cared little. In their eyes, any who sought to widen their territory through invasion were Niflings. A more measured observer might recognize a certain shared warlike spirit and bottomless desire to expand in Rhinian and Nifling alike, but the irony was lost on the average Imperial.

This hypothetical outside observer might similarly express some confusion that a state as cosmopolitan as the Empire would maintain such a xenophobic position, but the Empire was hardly the only melting pot—in this world or any other—that had embraced such an attitude first and foremost to serve its desire to consolidate power. No state, no matter its makeup, was any different in this matter. In the face of such profound imperatives, nearly any contradiction becomes easy to swallow.

So instead, consider how strange a sight it is, through your average Rhinian’s eyes: here are your neighbors, already busy with trade between the farming and fishing seasons, taking valuable time out of their year plundering each other. It was unfathomable! Stealing from the folks next door and selling their goods as your own—well, that was just unheard of, if they had the same flag and lived behind the same border! It was banditry, plain and simple.

Of course, there were some for whom this all made perfect sense. Warriors imbued with martial might often decided to “export” their services to lucky nations among them. The situation was only made all the more awful when you realized that they did not travel alone—they often brought their whole settlements or nations with them, with dreams of ever-growing gains. There could be nothing in worse taste. To top it off, although various strategic bases had their own high king or lesser king, these were merely the overseers of their discussions. The fact of the matter was that they had no power to control or call off a raid.

This brand of territorial expansion was integral to Nifling culture; it was bigger than law, bigger than politics—settler expansionism was what they did. While the high kings that led these campaigns would make nations in the isles or the peninsula and claim their hegemony, the individuals, the warriors that fought in them, would not allow anything to inhibit their ideals of independence and self-reliance.

Indeed, one such high king, having declared that his people should refrain from raiding their neighbors in order to open diplomatic channels with the Empire, was dubbed a coward by his people and killed in cold blood by his own brother. Such was history—no one person, no matter how great, could alter the course of such a singularly bloody legacy.

The endless succession of tribes and chiefs and high kings gathered at the gates, seeking to stake their claim despite all their predecessors proving little more than grist for the mill, was a perennial thorn in the Trialist Empire’s side.

A previous Emperor had squeezed as much as they could from their administration’s meager coffers to flood their naval budget, throwing envoy after envoy into the northlands’ waiting mouth in the hopes that one of them might eventually open peace negotiations and secure safe trade routes without appearing to threaten the power base of the extant leadership. Now, several Emperors later, the project continued, as it always had, poorly.

The fact of the matter was that these regions shared a continent—nothing more, nothing less.

The Empire had no interest in assimilating the isles directly into its holdings. Neither would it have been a long-term solution to welcome the northern rulers as nobles—no one could erase the fact that these people had willingly attacked Imperial ships. Under these circumstances, it was no surprise that the Empire had all but given up on the northern trade route.

It was nothing more than pure grit that saw the Niflings through. Survival in their lands demanded it. If that made you a pirate, so be it. No settled Rhinian farmer, comfortable in the care of their civil bureaucracy, could be expected to understand their way of life as anything but barbarism—but were you to make them eke out a living on the frigid coasts for but a year, they might begin to understand the appeal of such a mercenary philosophy. Compared to Rhine, the region was naught but a desolate wasteland, full of sheer cliffs. The isles (another land that Imperial subjects laughed at the sheer hilarity that people would choose to live there) were lush by comparison to Nifleyja. They lauded them as a fertile paradise.

Even in summer, the days were horrendously short. Winters were so cold that even the heart of the earth seemed to freeze. The land was barely fit for agriculture. The ice-cloaked mountains and the deep forests denied any attempt at cultivation.

The polar region was so barren that even one of the hardiest crops, buckwheat—interestingly, Imperials loved gruel made with barley, but called buckwheat gruel “inedible slop”—would refuse to yield an edible crop.

Such was the lot of the peoples of the polar region. Their land refused hearty survival, so it was no surprise that they would take to the seas to claim more fertile lands for themselves.

This tenacity in pursuit of their shared dream led to the invention of a vessel that bought them dominance over any Imperial incursion: the longship. With a low draft and a standard width from bow to stern, its structure was the culmination of generations of growing mastery of the known world’s fiercest waters. By sacrificing load space for sea readiness, they could cut across the surface with ease.

There was one such fleet forging across the icy strait, armed and loaded for bear. This fleet in particular consisted of eight longships and four knarrs—ships designed specifically for carrying away the loot. Equipped with both sails and oars, they could ride the waves at astounding speeds.

This fleet was manned by a melange of mensch and other races. A careful eye would have noticed the barrel-shaped cabins affixed to the bottoms of each ship’s hull and drawn along in tow. These cabins were designed to aid scouts and couriers blessed with the gifts of the sea-dwelling kiths. In the case of this particular ship, dozens of merfolk and selchies bode their time inside.

These cabins were no place to lounge. Their sole purpose was to house yet more booty and serve as mooring stations where the amphibious crew could stop and catch a breath without being taken by the waves.

The water was the remit of these races—although selchies could live on land too—and unlike mensch, they could easily see underwater, meaning they could spot a ship from miles away. In particular, selchies—a race that looked like a massive seal had sprouted two hind legs with a layer of loose skin from their necks down, covered in a slick fur coat that protected them from the water—could hunt at even the darkest depths of the sea. They were also blessed with fiendishly precise hearing. Their skin, which looked like a mensch cloak, made them appear fat from afar, but they had a similar skeletal structure to mensch.

One such selchie had opened his cloak-like skin and was grasping at a rope dangling off the side of the ship. Then, with a surprising agility for their weight—anyone needed some level of fat to protect them from freezing in the icy sea before you could count to thirty—he leaped up from the water onto the deck.

“Cap’n, incoming ships! Four of them!”

“Oho, very good!”

The selchie was talking to a huge, dark figure standing near the mast who replied with a mighty roar. The captain of this fleet was a brown bear callistian—known for making their homes in the deepest and most frigid of boreal forests. His gallant form weighed no less than thirteen hundred pounds, and his chain mail armor would be impossible for an average mensch to so much as carry.

“What manner of ship be they?” he bellowed.

“Merchant ships, by their clip and how low they sit in the water, Cap’n! No oars on them. I’d figure they’re Rhine-built.”

“Allll right!”

Otso the Red, the ringleader of this plundering excursion, let out a booming laugh that shook his immense frame.

“Set sail, ya bastards! Man the oars—full speed ahead!”

Otso’s booming voice, befitting his incredible size, reached the ears of every ship without the aid of magic or miracles. The rowdy sea dogs took their positions and heaved at their oars to launch the ships over the waves.

Every sea-dyed scalawag among them roared with laughter. The icy northern sea felt small beneath them. The thrill of battle and the chance to cut loose made them giants at heart.

Plunder; murder; eventual death—these men’s creed was to find joy in all of this. Then, after a splendorous death in battle, their souls would reach the lap of their chosen god. After a welcoming feast, they would be inducted into Eilifhalla, the eternal manor, and they would be blessed with the chance to join the happy fray, pitted against the armies of the other pantheons.

For those who suffered any other kind of death, their souls would be reborn upon the frozen purgatory-plain of Nifleyja. There was no fate more grim. A gruesome death at the end of a sword was far preferable, given the reward on the other side.

All the same, these were no sober ascetics sworn to the next world. These were folk of the flesh, here to sample the many happy turns of mortal life. They enjoyed the rush that came from striking down their foes, the weight of gold in their hold, and—if they were lucky—carnal pleasures with women. For the Niflings, these pillaging excursions were their heart and soul, the great joy to be wrung from this life.

Plunder was ingrained in their very souls. Even if, like today, their journey had begun with the aim of trade, they could not in good conscience say no to prey that no one would sorely miss.

The Niflings had some semblance of a conscience. A Rhinian ship hardly ever carried families, and that made them practically guilt-free raid prospects.

Imperials were renowned for their might on land, but out here in the open water, their strength paled in comparison. Precisely why wasn’t obvious—perhaps their ship-building technology was still in its infancy, or maybe they’d simply outsourced their shipping to the nations who made their home around the relatively calm Verdant Inner Sea.

Whatever the case, choosing to rely on sails out here in the north was a fatal mistake. Those who lived here knew that you needed proud muscles behind the oars and a sea breeze that would ruffle a valkyrie’s hair to truly dominate the water.

Guided by their selchie scout, the fleet sped away from their supply ships and cut across the water like an arrow. Their scouts had never steered them wrong. As long as they kept pushing on, they would be sure to run straight into their prey.

Small shapes began to appear on the gently curving horizon—Imperial sailboats, and not modest ones. Such short, stout vessels had clearly been built with gentle cruising in mind, with their two masts and broad sails. The sailors must have been just as soft. These ships were slow in a headwind; the Niflings would catch up to them in no time.

Even at a height disadvantage, a raiding party had a bounty of options when it came to taking another vessel. A nice ramming maneuver would get them screaming. Their sails would need to be rejiggered, and with the weight of their cargo slowing them, they would be as helpless as a suckling pig trussed for slaughter.

“Look—the Imperial flag! This ain’t our fellows’ booty, so show ’em no mercy! Full speed!”

With the cry of their captain, the pounding drumbeat rose to a frenzied pummeling of the skins. Their foes had no doubt spotted them by now. They needed to close in, denying them any window to turn tail and run.

“Sing a prayer for our unending glory! For our undying souls! Carried by the winds of battle, let our glorious song reach the ears of our great god and our battle god!”

With this cry, the poets and shamans began to chant—their booming voices and heavy melody rupturing the air. It was unthinkable to the gods of the Rhinian pantheon, but the war songs of the Nifling poets were petitions for miraculous intervention; a great force from below carried their boats yet faster, apace with the groans of the shamans.

In this part of the world, magic and miracles were as one. As long as they were used for the sake of battle, then the gods didn’t care—just as They minded little whether sacrifice came to them as pork or lamb, so long as it came from something that bled.

With the approaching clamor of battle, the Imperial fleet turned their prows in terror. But the wind was on the Niflings’ side. Their foes would not be able to outmaneuver the incoming fleet. The Niflings would reach their enemies, and their pledges to their gods would call up a rainbow bridge between the boats, leading the first wave of warriors onward. Enemy fire and magic would blunt and fizzle against them. The battle would be a purely martial clash, pitting these warriors against one another strength for strength.

It was almost time. Their prey was nearly within range. The scouts dived into the water. They were powerful warriors, and although they couldn’t rip through a ship’s hull—not that they’d want to when it would ruin the loot—they could head to the broadside portholes and use their harpoons and arrows to stop their enemies from manning the sails. It was the job of a Nifling scout to break their enemy’s spirit and block every escape route.

They had headed into the water before the battle began and were powered by the thrill of the fight; they never had the chance to notice that something was off. The first indication was a few splashes of something being thrown into the water—a huge earthen pot sank deep into the sea. In the next moment, the scouts could hear nothing anymore. They wouldn’t feel anything anymore either. A massive explosion eliminated the dozens of scouts lurking underwater in an instant, casting loose fragments into the air amid a pillar of sea spray.

“Th-The hell is going on?!” Otso roared. Something was clearly amiss, but he and his ships were still a few minutes away from reaching their target.

A few moments later, the corpses of his scouts bobbed up to the surface. Their bodies had been mutilated, their insides seeping out from holes all over their bodies. It was impossible to tell what exactly had caused this gruesome sight.

Of course, the huge explosion was at the root of it. Although Otso wasn’t to know, the pot that the Imperial side had thrown in the water was designed to explode after reaching a certain depth—the perfect tool to combat water-dwelling races.

The Empire called them “depth charges.”

Their cases were designed to help them sink quickly. Inside were bombs inscribed with magical tags. The fuses were connected to the ship, and so when the charges reached a certain depth, the fuse would come out and they would explode. A simple but effective design.

The sight of the explosion was all the more impressive through the water than out in open air. The hole that had momentarily opened in the sea filled quickly, causing the nearby waters to swell dangerously. It was similar to the ripple of a rock thrown into the river, but on a much grander scale. Unfortunately, the scouts had already left the safety of their boats. There had been no hope for them—the might of the explosion was enough to kill a sea serpent, a creature similar to a lesser drake.

“Captain! In the shadow of that fleeing ship... Look... Warships...”

“Grah...” Otso could but groan.

The situation turned from bad to worse. As the merchant ships continued their slow escape, three towed warships were cut loose. Their hulls had been coated in a potion of silence, which came with the added benefit of rendering them waterproof. Each pounding stroke of their oars came and went in silence. It was as if they were phantom ships; they surely looked the part. The alchemical treatment had stained them black as pitch, and they flew a black flag bearing the profile of a goddess in white.

“That’s... That’s...one of the Furies!”

“Th-The Grinning Fury! Tisiphone’s leading the vanguard!”

“The g-goddess of murder! There’s only one man who would dare raise that flag...”

The smiling goddess upon the lead ship’s flag wore a hair decoration that looked for all the world like a deadbolt—a blatant indicator of Her power. Feared as a Fury in the northern peninsula, the goddess carried a fearsome reputation even in the Rhinian pantheon that had spawned her. She was a bringer of vengeance, a companion to all who sought to buy peace of mind and rest for their weary soul with blood and fear.

Tisiphone wasn’t worshiped by many; most tried to keep their distance. The only time you would pray to Tisiphone was when you had lost something very dear to you.

There was only one absolute madman who would gladly raise Her flag.

This was the symbol of an adventurer who had appeared fifteen years ago, crushing every pirate that crossed his path, filling the bays with red blood. He was a ruthless man. Every attempt at parley, he met with grim, grinning silence. Once a high king had placed his crown at his feet, in a feeble motion of surrender, but the cold-blooded adventurer merely crushed it under his foot. This man who killed for honor, his hair dyed red with blood, was said to be cursed by the god of battle.

The Niflings knew him by many names, but the one they knew best was Erik of the Songless Sword.

The Niflings valued strength and valor regardless of who was fighting for whom. Their most valiant enemies earned a place of honor in their songs. This was simply their way. Some outsiders might have thought it odd that they would sing the praises of their prey and wonder what it would do to their morale, but such folk would fight all the harder to match the praise they offered.

But this slaughter machine had fought with such eye-diverting brutality that none of the Niflings dared pen songs about his conquests. His name—not his birth name, it was said, but one given in the language of the isles—had become a cursed thing, not fit for one’s own children.

Upon the prow, Erik shook his flowing, bloodstained, golden hair. His menacing smile, his cheeks flush with blood—he looked just as much a Fury in person: the worst nightmare of all Niflingkind.

He knew that mercy to his chosen prey meant a swift, honorable death in battle and a place in Eilifhalla, and so he denied them the chance. Those he fought, he would capture and execute in his own sweet time—a fate the people of Nifleyja would not have imposed upon their worst enemies. No matter how much gold they offered, the titles of kings they surrendered, Erik’s blade showed no mercy to the terrified warriors of the north.

Due to Erik’s handiwork, the northern sea had grown a lot smaller than it had once been. He haunted the Schleswig Peninsula, naturally, but sometimes he would be spotted at farther shores—even as far as the isles or the pole. Stories of his might had struck such fear into the Nifling clans that some had turned away from raiding entirely.

This nightmare, the man who’d broken the very traditions of the far north, stood right before their very eyes. The black ships were still in the distance, but as both sides sped toward one another, they were soon within beckoning distance. There was no chance of turning back now.

Otso the Red had earned his epithet from years of bloody battles—the gore so plentiful that it had managed to dye his black fur red—but even this battle-hardened warrior had not earned such a blood-soaked legacy as his enemy’s.

Erik’s stain went down soul-deep; he was it, and it was him, and anyone fool enough to aspire to such a terrible position had him to unseat.

“Captain! Your order?!”

“W-We can’t fall back! Push forward! Ain’t a body aboard who hasn’t lost loved ones to that blackhearted bastard! We ain’t got time to change course anyhow! ONWARD!”

Otso felt his morale vanish in an instant, but there was nothing for it at this point. It was said that Erik had the power to alter the winds to always give his own fleet a favorable breeze. In the face of that, Otso could do nothing but press on.

They would valiantly fight to win or be welcomed into Eilifhalla.

Pirates were strung up and executed without question in the Empire. This was almost as shameful as ending yourself by your own hand, whether by suicide or imbibing poison. They would dishonor their ancestors and fellows if they were forced into such a cowardly way out.

“We’ll bring an end to this bastard’s story TODAY!”

The callistian gripped his family axe in his hand as he steeled himself for battle.

[Tips] Raids are a common tradition among the tribes of the peninsular region and the boreal lands. The raids are chiefly for the joy of battle, but the plundered goods are collected and sold elsewhere. Achieving great military feats during these raids is a Nifling’s greatest joy.

These people might have had the misfortune of being born in such a frigid wasteland, but poverty and unhappiness is not cause enough to pardon such misdeeds.

“Admiral! The enemy aren’t pursuing the main fleet! They’re engaging with the support fleet!”

“Is that so?”

Rhine never ceased inventing; the specter of obsolescence hung over all their creations—but few quite so closely as the sailboats bought from the shipwrights of the Southern Sea. The supreme commander of the Imperial shipping fleet, a bird of prey siren, let out a mighty sigh.

The admiral was getting on in years now, but throughout his tenure his diligence had never ceased, despite the fact that his role was barely respected within the Empire. It was a splendid fact that he would later report that he had completed his task without losing a single ship against a fleet of eight enemy vessels. The admiral shook his head—he was letting the imagined eventual scenario grow into something bigger than it was. He had tasked his adventurer with protection while he sailed his ships safely out of danger. Semantically speaking he had completed the task, yes, but it would be arrogant of him to take all the credit. The admiral looked out at the surging waves as he let out a self-deprecating laugh, feeling the ache of his age—the same ache that had made flying too much of a chore for him.

It was approaching thirty years since he had first started serving the Emperor in the Imperial High Seas Fleet of Rhine—the grandeur of the name was always said with a touch of sarcasm as the navy was barely anything to write home about—and he wasn’t sure just how many times he had been a target of the Niflings’ plunder in all that time.

The first time had ended in a terrible loss. The pirates had sailed up the Rhine River, and the subsequent battle had left them with significant casualties—a superior officer and half of his fellow new recruits killed among them. He had believed that they had driven these barbarians out of Great Mother Rhine’s namesake, but during the next expedition to the northern sea an unexpected assault had led to a close-quarters battle. Half of the crew had perished in the time it took for reinforcements to arrive. They had been unable to sail back themselves, and their ships had been forced to be towed back by their backup.

Fortunately the admiral had never once faced the shame of being taken prisoner, but Rhine’s victories upon the high seas were painfully few and far between.

The Empire was no transient nation-state. It was a grand country whose history and traditions spanned five centuries! Disgrace was the only word to describe the utter despondency he felt at loss after loss against barbarians from a land where even the goats were too underfed to bother eating.

Constant losses led to increased funds from the Imperial coffers as the political administration attempted to solve the problem. They developed safe canals that would lead to the ocean and purchased ships from neighboring countries with experience in building reliable crafts, but it was a painful fact that this did nothing to put an end to the barbaric pirates and their raiding tradition.

It went without saying that the Empire would never lose to the people of some puny peninsula in a land battle. This was no shameless conceit born of empty arrogance; in the past, one of the region’s high kings had gathered together an army from the surrounding satellite states and raised a flag in rebellion. It had been easy for the Empire to exploit the distance involved to cut off their supplies and secure a sound victory. They had lined up thousands of heads along the shoreline as a symbol of their might.

Yet the sea was a different beast. It was too wide to properly fortify. Out here in the open water, these untenable raiders had an undeniable advantage.

These people had no central administration, no fixed habitat; they killed and looted as they pleased before heading to wherever home may be without looking back once. It was impossible to take preemptive measures against such impromptu violence.

These people of the sea were violent, sometimes not leaving a single witness or scrap of evidence behind, and the Empire was all but powerless. Rhine had claimed a few victories putting their magia to work on the waves, but the kind of steady, unwavering defense they needed escaped them. Wielding their full might was like using a battle-axe to swat a fly.

Funds and manpower had been channeled into building fortresses along the coastline, but the army couldn’t act as efficiently as it usually did. Their usual tactic of securing a base and the fact that they had to engage with lightning-fast ships meant that they were unused to the task at hand.

There were many who rallied against the northward incursions. What was there to gain from occupying that peninsula and the frigid polar region? The costs would skyrocket in securing the victory, and they would only get higher when it came to managing the damn place. The regular people would only see their taxes increase and their bellies empty as their money was funneled into a hopeless endeavor. There was no prospect of produce or crops to boost the Empire’s economy, no geopolitical gain from losing their buffer zone. The famished land would simply be a burden.

Even if Rhine chose to occupy the region, for the Niflings, raiding was part of their very culture—it would be a far, far more difficult conquest than any of the previous satellite states that came before it. Any who would be dispatched out here would view it as a demotion or even punishment—or maybe both. The nobles knew that they could easily be dispatched out to this icy hellscape, and so each and every one of them gave a firm no to the occupation of the peninsula.

A familiar expression came to the admiral: “Like a poisonous fish which has forced its way into the net.” Poisonous fish were naturally inedible for humanfolk, but there were larger sea creatures that enjoyed feasting upon them. The admiral, like other Imperial nobles, was strong with rhetoric but poor at putting complicated emotions to words—the somewhat contradictory nature of this whole business was hard to explain.

“But...Your Excellency... What is that?” the officer who delivered the report asked.

“What’s what?” the admiral replied with a moment of confusion. “Ah, you only just transferred over from the capital, that’s right. I suppose you hadn’t been debriefed beforehand.”

“I hadn’t, no...”

The rookie officer—the third son from a knight family who had joined the navy for the free room and board—was still learning the ropes. He was still shocked that the scene unfolding before him was nothing like the rumors in the capital had made out.

The support fleet that guarded the main fleet was made up of a mere three ships. While they were of the same design as the ones belonging to the raiders—specially designed for close combat—the enemy had more than double the number of ships. The Niflings’ fleet was composed of rowboats called karvi, which had sixteen men manning the oars and nine souls or so left free to occupy themselves with bleaker business, as well as two drakkar ships—larger “dragon” crafts, each needing thirty-six warm bodies to work the oars! What could the support fleet do against a force more than five times their number?

“It doesn’t seem logical to me. How can he choose to plunge headfirst into that nest of sea wolves? Is he mad?”

“A foolish question,” the admiral said with a sigh.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m saying that it’s foolish to judge whether Gallows-Mast Erich is sane by Berylin standards.”

The admiral looked out at the ship leading the charge, where the bold adventurer stood atop the wolf-shaped prow. The admiral and the adventurer had been working together for more than a decade now.

This strange fellow had come from the Empire’s western reaches to its northern tip to beat back the pirate threat upon the icy seas. In the eyes of any from the High Seas Fleet, the man was a singular oddity, plain and simple.

“What he’s doing is dispensing justice for all who live in northern Rhine,” the admiral went on. “Many’d call him a hero. He doesn’t balk at the raiders coming when the sowing and the harvest season’s passed, and he keeps the waterways safe for us.”

“A hero, you say?”

“Indeed. But a vengeful one, aye, that I’ll confess—but not without reason. Do you know just how many cantons these lootin’ bastards hit each year?”

The young mensch officer shook his head. Fifteen years ago, he had probably only just stopped suckling at his mother’s breast. But the admiral couldn’t credit all the lad’s ignorance to the folly of youth. The Rhinian government kept tight-lipped about the terrible state of its northern border—the shame of such an abject strategic failure would only be a political liability if it were better known. Only the locals knew the true state of the northern reaches, and they never felt the urge to raise a fuss about what was happening. Anyone would be ashamed to see their own territory be so viciously preyed upon.

“We’re looking at twenty, thirty, maybe more—all laid to waste. Their ships have a shallow draft, and as you can see they man their oars with quite the strength. Each and every man on board is a hardened fighter. It’s a culmination of their worst and most deadly vices. They will raid and plunder anywhere the water will take them.”

“Anywhere...? Do they sail upstream too?”

“That they do. Worse, their ships can be carried across land if need be. We’ve seen these folk sail up a lightly guarded river, cross overland to the next waterway over, and ride it south to raid where they oughtn’t be able to otherwise. They use the trees as cover; even dragon cavalry can’t spot them.”

“That’s terrible...”

The Niflings were feared for their combat power, but also for their versatility. They were known to temporarily abandon their plunder to haul their ships onto their shoulders and cross mountains. This ability to move as they pleased let them strike at nearly anything. No one knew exactly how many cantons had suffered at the hands of their rampages. Even Imperials who have lived long lives of peace quivered in fear at the possibility of a Nifling raid reaching their home.

“Their drakkar can house up to a hundred of them, surely?” the officer murmured. “And if they should send a fleet...”

“No, drakkar aren’t quite that large. But even forty or fifty of the bastards would be enough to raze your average canton to the ground. I’ve given my condolences personally at a number of them.”

That was why the man once known as Goldilocks Erich and now known as the Gallows-Mast or Erik of the Songless Sword had earned a reputation for righteous vengeance. Each of his battles was a small payback for the pain the innocent public had been made to bear.

“His vengeance isn’t his alone, though,” the admiral went on. “Each and every soul who serves under him has lost someone thanks to a Nifling raid. They’ve brought along every ounce of fury and resentment for these sea-demons that they could carry.”

This fleet of three warships—quite the large force for an adventuring group—and two supply ships (which were absent today) numbered three hundred souls. Every last one was owed a debt that could only be paid in blood, blood, blood. They came from every corner of northern Rhine, and the isles, and the far polar countries. They came from all manner of kith and culture. They even counted a few rogue Nifling folk among them, whose grudges against their own ran deeper than their love of the game.

Without rest, they gathered up the wicked men of the sea and ferried them straight to the execution stand. They stole their quarry’s ships and burned them to appease the souls of the Niflings’ victims. They sold their counterplunder and spent their earnings erecting memorials for the lost. They were called Fury’s Brood, and the people of the north respected them more than any knight or noble.

“They’ve been at it for fifteen years. It’s a fool’s errand to ask if they’re ‘in their right minds.’”

“They’re incredible...”

“They have to be. They couldn’t survive elsewhere. They’ve driven down our losses severely. The barbarians moan about the sea feeling ‘smaller’ these days, but that’s to be expected.”

“You’re rather informed, admiral. Are you close with old Gallows-Mast?”

The siren snapped his beak. In mensch terms, he was clucking his tongue.

It was an odd question. They had spent fifteen years working from the same base in Schleswig, so of course they knew one another. The admiral had even taken on some of Erich’s former crew, when they’d put their turn at the wheel of vengeance behind them.

When they met in the canteen, they would share a drink. On missions like today, the admiral would happily play decoy to rid the seas of a few more bloodthirsty pirates. It was a ridiculous prospect, really. Although the papers designated this as an “escort mission,” in truth the ships of the High Seas Fleet were nothing but bait to ensnare yet another group of pirates.

Despite being in his thirties, the gold-haired adventurer still had a young man’s mien. He’d held a cigarette in his smirking lips as he proposed the day’s mission, telling the admiral that his job had become all the more difficult, as nowadays it was more likely than not that the Niflings would run rather than fight upon seeing his flag.

In official documents, the success of this mission would be chalked up to the admiral’s own abilities. All Gallows-Mast would receive would be the spoils, the bounties, and a more fearsome reputation.

You couldn’t do this job without a lick of madness, but Erich was truly on a whole other level. If the admiral said that he was “friendly” with such a freak of nature, then his subordinates would probably start to keep their distance, thinking that the admiral was equally mad.

Over the years, the adventurer hadn’t just received some splatter—no, he had been immersed in blood. The gods of Nifleyja had laid every curse They knew upon the man. It was said that he couldn’t even sleep unless he rested his head upon the lap of a maiden.

All the same, he’d drawn in a whole league of followers, and they’d followed him across the open seas for almost every waking moment. Another curse the gods had struck him with was that armor would never keep him fully safe, but he hadn’t let it faze him. He entered each and every battle with his golden hair flowing free.

The admiral’s conversations with Erich when they shared a drink were at odds with the young man’s appearance in battle. He seemed so affable, so genteel; the admiral felt a lurching sickness in his stomach when he saw his blood-addled madness on the battlefield. He had decided that it would be best for his own mental state to avoid prying too deep into that man’s heart.

“He’s an adventurer with whom I work on jobs such as these. That’s all,” he eventually said.

“I see.”

“Look. They’re making contact.”

Being a bird of prey siren meant that the admiral’s eyesight almost went without compare. The ships were almost dots in the distance, but he could make out every detail. They were about to clash.

“You’ve received thalassurge training, right? Use a telescopic spell and look at him up there on the prow, boldly taking on the sea breeze.”

“I’m still just an amateur... I have so little mana that my master told me to give up on trying to become a magus... I’m a dropout, really.”

Despite his protestations, the new officer used his short staff to cast Farsight. The range of his spell only allowed him to barely see past the horizon, but he could easily make out the flag bearing the sign of the Fury.

As the admiral had said—the officer couldn’t believe the admiral could see this far without some kind of magic—upon the Fury’s Favor, the ship leading the fleet, was a wiry swordsman with his right foot upon its wolf-shaped prow.

He was dressed in Imperial tempered leather armor—rare to see here, as it made it almost impossible to swim. Despite the barrage of arrows coming his way, he seemed completely unbothered. There he was, standing without a helmet, his golden hair licked by the breeze, utterly at ease.

The officer wondered if this man truly was in his thirties. Erich wore a fanged smile, excited for the upcoming battle, and the officer would have pegged him as being barely in his twenties. He hardly seemed suited to all his blood-soaked epithets—the man didn’t have so much as a single scar. He couldn’t believe that a fellow with such feminine features and a waist-length golden fishtail braid could truly be as fearsome as they said.

In a moment, Erich’s blue eyes flashed with the fire of battle. Even through Farsight, the rookie officer felt a wave of terror at the sight.

Erich wasn’t normal. He functioned under a code of sorts, but it lay far beyond the comprehension of any normal man. To see as he saw for but a moment might unravel one’s mind...

The officer leaped back in surprise. All of a sudden the swordsman turned his face up to the heavens—and the officer was sure that Erich had just locked eyes with him! It wasn’t a trick of the light. As Erich batted away the next volley of arrows with his sword, the officer could make out the unmistakable movement of his lips—they said, “Hey.”

The officer didn’t want to believe it, but it didn’t stop there. From his birds’-eye view, he saw Erich waving his free hand at him! Although he was far from a magus, the officer was no complete novice at magic. He’d amended his spell with formulae for disguise and anonymity; anyone would have struggled to peer back through it. But there Erich was, smiling right back at him, as if he was telling him to watch the fight that was about to unfold closely. The officer squirmed, uncertain of what to do.

“It might be better for you to just pretend that he’s a creature from the time of myths and legends,” the admiral said.

“Wha...? You mean the Age of Gods?”

“That man isn’t emulating the adventurers of that bygone age—he’s become one. Don’t overthink it.”

The admiral’s keen eyesight had not failed to pick up on the little unspoken interaction. After confirming that they had made contact, he descended from the rear bridge. He didn’t need to see what was about to happen. It would take around thirty minutes for Erich’s group to finish off a group of that size. If they lasted longer than that, he would personally congratulate the pirates.

“That monster is making moves to eliminate the North Sea King by next summer. Engage him on his level and you’ll end up infected with his folly.”

“Th-The North Sea King?! He means to challenge a true dragon?!”

The officer had followed the admiral down, but found himself stopping in his tracks. The North Sea King made its home in the most fearsome waters of the north. There were few true dragons left in all creation, and this one had come by its longevity honestly. It was the master of all the drakes that lived in the sea, a gargantuan monster that disturbed the very currents in its wake. After the Niflings, it was one of the biggest reasons why Imperial ships could not reach the ocean sailing west from Schleswig.

Most with the means to consider such things feared the beast so much that they would sooner build a passage to the west than try to slay it. The thought had been convincing enough to warrant a speculative budget, but such a project would have eaten thirty to fifty years’ worth of the Imperial domestic product. At any rate, it was a fool’s errand to even think about taking down such a fearsome creature.

“Yes, he’s completely serious. He’s received permission from the local nobles and such, so it’s going ahead. It won’t be long before the common folk learn all about it.”

“E-Excuse me? A request for permission, not aid?”

“Indeed. After all, the seas are bound to get more violent than they already are. A responsible fellow makes sure anyone who could get caught in their wake knows what’s coming.”

The rookie officer’s brain was almost fried by all the unbelievable facts he had taken in. The admiral turned. “Are you coming, then?” he called out to the poor befuddled young man.

The officer shook his head. “I want to see the future legend’s battle. Do I have your permission to remain on the bridge?”

“It’s going to be a dull one.”

“I understand, but I still wish to watch.”

The admiral sighed. “Every year we lose another to that damn fool’s madness... Fine, you’re off duty for now. Do as you please.”

“Thank you so much, admiral!”

“I’ll be in my bunk. Don’t wake me until the signal light.”

They were far enough out that they weren’t at any risk of collateral damage, and so the admiral departed for his cabin, leaving behind the lad who wished to gaze upon the great monstrous contradiction of the North.

[Tips] The Imperial High Seas Fleet of Rhine earned its somewhat ostentatious title for the fact that the northern sea was connected to the ocean, despite countless difficulties barring them from open water. Various experiments, such as using ships imported from the Southern Sea and recruiting diverse races that were suited to life on the seas, led to their current state. They work hard, but many view their position as a demotion and act in keeping with it.

The fleet has over thirty warships, but such a grand number is hardly fit to protect the people of the Empire’s northernmost region. There are rumors that the new aeroships will be dispatched in their stead.

“Even if you survive, you won’t find paradise waiting for you.”

I wasn’t sure how many decades it had been since I last heard that quote—where was it from? I had vague memories of it once being an anime, but I wasn’t sure anymore—but something in my hazy memories told me that the TRPG, regardless of how compelling the hook and the setting were, would grind your average tabletop newbie into hamburger.

“A report!”

Wherever the quote came from, it was the truth. I was at fault. I’d felt the coils tightening around me at my last port of call; I hadn’t been able to see a way to untangle the convolutions of the plot I’d found myself in and still come out in one piece, but I had found a way out of the game entirely—just to throw myself back in to another one. Yes, I survived, but why did I expect anything even close to paradise? Of course the same problems would just crop up again in a different place—how could I have forgotten that?

Same shit, different day. People were the same everywhere you went—it was simply a matter of scale. I was a fool to think that moving from Ende Erde to the frosty reaches of the north would unstick me from this quagmire and return me to the days when I found some joy in this line of work.

“Situation?”

“Enemy vessels just under ten miles out. Eight of them! I believe they caught sight of the merchant ships!”

It was just my luck: my new base of operations was even bloodier than the last, and here I was, hauling pirates back to shore day in and day out. The God of Cycles and the God of Ordeals were cruel.

“Is that so? Very well, alert all ships. Same plan as always,” I said.

“Yessir!”

The seabird siren kicked off from the mast and flew off from the black ship.

“All righty, mates. You lot feeling that itch in your fingers, the fire in your bellies? Do you feel the Fury stirrin’? These raider punks are on a bit of a losin’ streak. They must be pretty damn hungry,” I said, my voice reaching everyone thanks to Voice Transfer. I heard cheers and laughter erupt from the cabins near me.

What in the world had turned me into a Viking hunter out here in the frostbitten rump of the Empire?

No—I needed to accept, even after all this time, that it was all my fault. To tell the truth, I had gotten sick of all the political scheming back in Marsheim, sucking me down, dragging me further and further from my ideal picture of an adventurer’s life. I was the one who’d made the decision to bail for good and start afresh with Margit.

Even more than a decade out, I was still certain that I’d had no other choice. The sticky, murky plot in Marsheim had grown to encompass the entire region. I was terrified that if I had put my foot back into that mess I would never be able to leave again. I’d had to nip the whole thing in the bud.

Could you blame me? I had finally managed to start a career as an adventurer! My dream one day was to save the entire world. I couldn’t be getting bogged down with a campaign that was stuck in one region for the rest of my life. If I didn’t do anything, then I would have been trapped forever. It lit a fire under my ass.

In the end, my old routine was simple, clear-cut, boring: wake up, hit the streets, cut down crooked folk like wheat, sleep with one eye open, do it all again tomorrow. The government signed off on everything—I kept the local lords feeling secure enough to keep their seditious rumblings to a minimum, after all. I thought I had played my part pretty well, but everyone burns out eventually, living like that.

For me, the tipping point had been realizing I’d put in all that work for naught. What was there to be proud of anymore?

I’d kept the local lords of Marsheim quiet, but not silent. In the end I could only delay their revolts momentarily, and when the Big One finally hit it took direct Imperial intervention to put it down. Apparently even now embers of sedition still burned in their small and shadowed corners of the region. Updates came every now and then from my old comrade. He always spared at least one line to gripe about how dire things had gotten.

In the end, Siegfried and Kaya had decided to stay in Ende Erde. I had told them about my plan to just shake myself free of it all, but it was their homeland. They’d told me that if there was a time to make a name for themselves, then this was it.

A party held together to serve a common goal. If that goal changed for some and not for others, it was only natural for their paths to diverge. I understood their resolve and they did mine—neither of us tried to force the matter.

It wasn’t just Siegfried’s letters that told me they were doing well—songs of their feats had reached these parts, and I was always happy to hear them. They’d become the subjects of all sorts of tales; romance stories involving Sieg and Kaya—the Catchpenny Scribbler must finally have got his claws into her for an interview—and lively action-comedies tended to curry the most favor. They weren’t quite the standard heroic fare that Siegfried wanted. I bet he was a bit bummed out by that.

My old comrade dreamed of being the kind of unflappable hero that everyone could look up to, but it was evident even from afar that his kind personality was too strong. People had latched on to his good character instead of his heroic deeds, which meant that his stories sometimes ended without a real resolution, with more focus put on the laughs than the glory. I felt for him. He was likable and a good guy, but maybe a little too easy to typecast as a lovable fool.

“Enough about Siegfried, what about you?” That’s probably what you’re wondering, right, dear reader? As you might have guessed, I’m in no position to be judgmental about my friend.

“Come on, give us another cheer,” I announced to everyone. “A Fury always smiles when dinner’s on the table!”

My subordinates all let out spirited cries.

I’d be lying if I said “I dunno, it just sorta happened.” Despite what certain cult classics of film and literature might tell you, you don’t become a dread privateer by accident. Every facet of this new life—the perpetual lurch and churn of life on the northern sea, the company I kept with the broken and the bloodthirsty, the bevy of curses laid on me by the store-brand Aesir from their comfortable seats in “Valhalla with the serial numbers filed off”—was a direct consequence of my own choices.

I didn’t have the time to enjoy my first trip to the seaside in this go at life. Instead, when we got to a fishing canton, we found it utterly ravaged by a recent pirate attack. The scene was so terrible that before we could hear the roar of the sea, we were greeted by the groans and cries of the ruined.

It really was an awful sight. The pirates had cut down anything that moved and stolen anything not nailed down, then razed the rest to the ground and gone home. A few stragglers had managed to hide for long enough to survive the attack. We found them with a sole pirate who had been left behind.

I supposed that the fool had been chasing after a little bit of “fun” and had taken a blade to the gut and his nethers for his trouble. He was bleeding out on the ground—most likely left behind as dead weight. That was his own folly. What ticked me off personally was that the moment the fool had laid eyes on the blade at my waist, he’d started begging me to fight him so he could die on his feet, with a sword in his hand. He’d said he wouldn’t be able to reach his paradise otherwise.

Well, I was young and rash back then and lost it, to put it bluntly. Granted, I doubt many would call me the calmest adventurer on the sea even now, but I don’t regret just leaving him to bleed out in the dirt.

I didn’t have any qualms with their creed that they lived as they pleased and would die as they pleased. Hell, my life wasn’t all that different. My world’s GM couldn’t give a damn about sensible encounter design or campaign planning, so I wasn’t going to make fun of a man’s life choices.

What I couldn’t abide by was causing harm to folks who lived on the straight and narrow. All’s fair in love and war; survive first and weigh your soul later; all that rot applied, but you needed to have some honor and humanity at the end of it all. In my eyes, nothing forgave the slaughter of innocents just to fill your own belly, no matter how daunting the prospect of cultivating your land is.

A poor man had handed out a ring for us to take. It’d belonged to his dead wife. He begged us to avenge her. We’d only just arrived in the north, but already the work was piling up.

It snowballed from there. The Empire and the local Adventurer’s Association wanted to bring an end to the raids—it seemed like a governmental task, but it was technically no different from dealing with bandits, so it didn’t impinge on the ancient oath barring adventurers from working for the government—and we ended up taking on a ton of retaliatory strike gigs. As we crushed pirate crew after pirate crew, we found ourselves in our current situation.

It was a cruel trick of fate. I had been so sick of being caught up in ties of obligation that I ran away, and here I was, caught up in them once more. I had chosen to live life by my own rules, so the world had decided to play the same game.

If you were to ask me if I was actually going on adventures, I wouldn’t be sure how to respond. Felling pirate strongholds, crushing groups of raiders, dredging up lost treasures from the sunken ships of famous Niflings of yore—they all seemed adventurer-y on paper, but if I had to be honest, this wasn’t quite what I had envisioned.

The root of the problem was that it felt entirely unheroic. The job was more hack and slash than my time back in Ende Erde. How could there be no singular revolt here despite an endless slog of bloody battles that wouldn’t even get a feature on the most late-night TV slot?

“Boss, we’ve dispatched the amphibious vanguard.”

“Good. Tell them to undo our mooring,” I said.

“Yessir.”

The one thing I couldn’t refute was that the job needed doing, so I had no one to complain to. As long as these pirates continued to lay waste to their neighbors and leave a trail of bloodshed behind, we needed to put them in their place. Although I had never been here before, I still had some ties to this place, albeit not direct ones. This was the homeland of my irreplaceable old chum—who had finally become a professor three years ago, tied for the youngest to ever earn their terminal degree, and the first tivisco to do so in the College’s history—so I wanted to do my part in bringing peace to the area, in my own way. They’d joined the College in the first place because they understood that the root of their homeland’s problems was infrastructural; the struggle would never end until trade could flow freely and safely through the region and a sustainable way of life could be wrung from the earth despite the long, brutal winter. I felt some obligation not to run away this time.

“As soon as we’re untethered we’ll be moving out, full speed,” I added.

“Yessir!”

I stood upon the prow of the ship. The enemy fleet’s scouts had been eliminated by our depth charge. Now we were plunging head-on into their befuddled ranks.

One, two... Oho, they had two big ol’ drakkar and six lesser longships. According to my siren subordinate, who had flown up and eyeballed their fleet, there were four supply ships too. This would be a more substantial fray than usual.

And it seems like I’ve got a little audience today. I may be getting on a little, but maybe I’ll give the youngster a show.

I felt the faint tickle of the mana from someone’s scrying spell, so I gave them a little wave before focusing on the job in front of me.

There were still three or so miles between us and the enemy; distance enough for me to bother with tessering over. Ever since I drew the ire of the great god and battle gods of the peninsula and had been “cursed” by them, it had the unexpected side effect of making my little parlor tricks far easier to use.

I warped over the enemy’s barrier and set about to clean up shop alone.

There were no fireworks or fanfare. I just blinked, and when I opened my eyes again I was there on the enemy side. If I were to reference one of those games back at the table, it would be like if someone dropped a tank on your front line while you were still checking your resources.

My subordinates had dealt with the scouts, but I was their leader—it was my job to make sure they suffered as few losses as possible. We had somehow earned the overblown title of Fury’s Brood; I was obliged to live up to it.

“Whuh?!”

“Where’d he come from?!”

Only my closest and dearest knew I could do this. Every other witness was dead—by my own hand or the gallows.

“Gyagh!”

“My hand! MY HAND!”

“Argh, I can’t see a thing...”

With Seafaring Warrior, I could fight on board any ship without worrying about getting tripped up by my own inexpert sea legs, and I tore through my foes. I singled out those spots that would disable and disarm: their eyes, their hands. It didn’t take long for the deck to spill over with blood. I’d make for a piss-poor privateer if I struggled with this sort of thing, y’know?

All the same, these guys weren’t pushovers. They had some sub-hero-class fighters, could launch miracles at me with a speed unseen in the Empire, and their general stats were damn high. There were always a couple of real monsters in the mix with a Nifling crew, and that meant I’d had to reach a monstrous level myself.

“Just...die!”

“Aha!” I responded.

I had cut too shallow into one of my eyeless foes. He leaped at me in a desperate lunge. An offhand spell of mine took me clear of the blow. Not bad. He must have realized what was coming and tilted his head just in time to save one eye. That took some guts, but you couldn’t be a pirate without them.

“Huh?! I went...through him?!”

By using my space-bending magic at the right time on a fixed location, I could displace my own image. The gods Themselves had cursed me, and in so doing bound my being ever more tightly to this plane. That meant that although my body phased out of existence thanks to my magic, I appeared to be precisely where I was before. It was an invincible dodge.

To tell the truth, I was pretty fond of it. It didn’t come with many drawbacks and the mana cost was a pittance, meaning that I could use it as many times as I liked in one turn. Yes, my curses were still a burden, but I could see through to their inner workings and bend their mechanics to my own ends. For my trouble, I’d been gifted the sort of overpowered technique you usually only saw in the hands of endgame death machines custom-made to suit the GM’s devilish whims.

“Well, points for effort,” I said.

“Gwah!”

I kicked the dazed pirate and knocked him into the rough waters of the northern sea. These pirates favored light armor—almost too light, to an Imperial soldier’s eyes—but even they couldn’t swim with scabbard and shield weighing them down. I could see bubbles as he tried to pull himself to the surface, but soon they disappeared.

Drowning wasn’t considered a “valiant death in battle,” so unfortunately the valkyries wouldn’t be seeing him off today. Sorry, fella. But it still beat death by hanging.

“Kill me! Please! Just kill me!”

“You’ll die. Just not today.”

I cleaned the blood off my sword, got my bearings with Farsight, and proceeded with the job. It was almost dull.

The Niflings’ little peanut-butter-and-chocolate, divine-and-arcane rainbow bridge trick meant that they often moved their ships into a single-line formation to create a makeshift landing dock and give their bridges the most possible surface area to connect.

Due to my handiwork, the head ship in the formation had stopped moving. Their ships broke formation as they tried to avoid a collision. My subordinates were capitalizing on the chaos to begin their counterattack.

From afar, I could see a ship explode. Our flagship had launched a torpedo at it, blowing a massive hole in its hull.

These weren’t the refined things used in the Second World War. Like our depth charges, they were simple ceramic pieces, waterproofed and filled with magically powered gas in the end to send them rocketing forward. They would speed off as soon as they were launched—hardly better than toys, compared to the sort of life-ending power you saw from my old world’s equivalents. It was the explosive spell formula worked into their business ends that elevated mine to the level of truly deadly weapons.

These makeshift torpedoes could only just reach a target a hundred meters away, and they were a nightmare to aim.

But these were Niflings we were talking about. They scorned arrows and projectile magic as the tools of cowards and so they would always draw into the appropriate range for close-quarters combat. That made our torpedoes all the more effective.

As long as you didn’t get caught up in the void left behind by the explosions, they were hugely effective. In fact, their modest yield meant that we could blow holes in their hulls and sink our foes on time and under budget.

It was a bit of a problem that we couldn’t capture sunk foes alive, nor could we loot their ships, but on paper we weren’t truly associated with the government, so it didn’t matter too much in the end. We were funded by everyone who wished to see peace and trade flourish in these waters, so unlike our foes, who had to fund their raids with the same loot they needed to carry home in one piece, we had less to worry about.

Not only that, we didn’t have to hold back for fear that we would be catching civilians in the cross fire.

“You’ve got to live and die by your own rules.” These mercenary’s words—hold on, how do I know that a mercenary said them?—came out of a realization that your life would impinge on others’. Because of that, your death would only have value if you found some logic in it.

We were on two very different sides. The logic of an Imperial would never make sense to a bunch of barbarians who did as they pleased. There might have been some good people or some valiant warriors among their number, but the opportunity cost was too high to seek them out.

“Oh, our aim’s good today.”

Two more torpedoes hit their marks—three ships started to sink. Adding together my one ship, we had already routed half of their fleet. Their morale and cohesion must have taken a big hit.

If it had been the Imperial army we were up against, it would have been over for them. The commanding officer responsible for them taking such damage so early in the game wouldn’t get off with a simple demotion.

But they weren’t Imperials—they were pirates with a completely different value system. They came for me despite the chaos unfurling around them, their alien terror at the prospect of a dishonorable death driving them forward.

Right, a bit more fun’s to be had, then.

We were planning to use these enemy ships as bait in our hunting of the North Sea King next summer, so it was a bit annoying that we’d ruined a fair few of them. I wanted to have at least one of their drakkar, preferably both. I decided to take the opportunity to secure one and conjured a light over my next target.

Believing my reliable subordinates would follow me, I activated a short-distance space-bending spell and dropped myself down onto what looked to be the mother ship.

Shouts that made me want to put my hands over my ears erupted as the pirates saw the man who just destroyed a boatload of their fellows appeared on deck out of thin air.

Among them was a callistian roaring that he wished to face me in battle. From the mystic aura of his axe and the flashy nature of his cloak and helmet, I assumed he was their captain.

“Erik of the Songless Sword! In the name of our battle god, the eldest son of our great god, and of my father—I challenge you in single combat!”

Today was my lucky day. If I defeated their leader, cleanup would be so much easier. Things are going my way.

“I am Otso, son of Perkunas! I pledge my honor as a warrior to—”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, I agree. I’m Erich, son of Johannes. Now, let’s hurry up and get started—I’m quite the busy man.”

This was quite the rude response, even for me—I could see Otso’s fur standing on end—but it was obvious how this whole thing went. My answer would always be the same; I knew the whole ritual by rote.

“Insolent wretch! How dare you sully a sacred duel!”

“All right, let’s do this already. Words are meaningless at this point.”

This was a one-on-one duel under the name of their great god. I was sure their pantheon had already invoked the Demand Duel miracle. If accepted, the miracle would prevent anyone from interfering and we would be forced into a pure duel, stripped of any buffs and debuffs. It was pretty metal—utterly mad, sure, but undeniably raw as hell. If the duel was rejected, then Demand Duel would afflict the coward with a debuff via a curse or the like. You had to go through the motions whatever the case, really.

The miracle was a way of halting your enemy’s forces momentarily, so I could tell that Otso meant to slow us down.

That wasn’t all either. A side effect meant that the loser had to answer to any demand made by the victor. It was a stupid bonus that flew in the face of conventional cause and effect, but I guess that was just how it went with miracles sometimes.

At any rate, I just needed to do my job. The tides had already turned. Even if I died here today, I’d done irreparable harm to their raiding infrastructure. They were stuck on a downward spiral.

This was just like what had happened with a certain ogre in the past. This lot had simply made too many enemies. The grudges against them covered the wide northern region and had fueled a growing faith in the Furies. It had taken only a single spark to bring a divine conflagration to the region.

They had created a land where many high-level priests had received divine messages from the Furies to enact vengeance against these pirates. I had merely been the kindling for the flame; my role was half complete. It didn’t really matter who took up the mantle next.

You are standing in a pool of oil created by your ancestors. All that remains is for the match to be struck and for you to burn out of existence. I’ll make sure to sweep away the cinders.

It was kind of an ironic situation. I had tried to become a singular hero, and for my efforts I’d created a situation where anyone could take my place as the figurehead of my operation. I could hand down my name to any fool rotting in my brig and retire to an island paradise to get old and fat, and Gallows-Mast Erich would still be out there, striking fear and awe in the hearts of men. My old comrade would bust a gut if he were here right now.

“Don’t fear,” I said. “It’s simply that your time has come.”

“GRAAAAH!”

Maybe it was my fault that these pirates had gathered under Otso. They’d needed a new leader to rally around after my rampage had cost them one of their high kings.

If I were still fifteen or sixteen, this fearsome warrior would have squashed me to a pulp. His axe swung in all directions like a tornado. Each time it hit the deck, he skillfully used the rebound to keep up the assault. Callistoi were not only blessed with some of the biggest bodies among humanfolk, and Otso in particular had honed his skills with his weapon, but he wasn’t quite monstrous enough. If I had to put him in Agrippinoid terms, he might not have been tickling at her ankles, but maybe he could just about grasp at her breast.

At any rate, he had played a bad move to take on someone who was going to be hunting a true dragon next summer.

I put some focus into my sword arm as I struck.

“Whuh?!”

My mighty swing cleft the axe-head from its vermilion handle, ruining it for good. It might have been imbued with his ancestors’ hopes and dreams, blessed by the gods, or forged with a primordial word of power at its heart, but it couldn’t compare to the starving might of my Craving Blade.

Otso’s axe had the power to draw weapons to it. It was a mighty weapon that could lure a cocky foe right to him and crush them before they even had time to cry uncle. However, not even the wildest of dogs could face up to a blade that had glutted itself on the blood of countless pirates and still moaned for more.

“What’s wrong? Did you think you were the only one borrowing the might of the divine?”

In my hand was my mystic blade, able to withstand a reality-crushing blow. It was good to trust your weapon, but you were obliged to look at your opponent’s weapon before lashing out too.

Well, that might be a bit unfair of me to say. A few seconds before the counterattack I used my magic to return Schutzwolfe to its scabbard and call forth my aching, desperate death dealer. I shouldn’t fault his immaturity for not seeing that.

My technique of securing the kill before my enemy knew what hit them was still unchanged.

I delivered a return cut, slicing through his right forearm—gauntlets were another “coward’s way out” in Nifling culture.

“Ngh...”

That wasn’t all. I summoned three blades and sent them, along with Schutzwolfe, through him, piercing his shoulders and knees. It was over.

“Raaaaah!”

Held in place in the air, the callistian roared, and the barrier enclosing our duel vanished. The gods of the north favored their own, but even They must have realized that this was his loss.

“You bastard! Kill me! How dare you do this to me?! Where is your pride as a warrior?!” Otso bellowed.

“My pride? Hah, funny joke.”

With the duel over, I sent my fleet of flying swords to cut down the dumbfounded onlookers. It was just as I had done earlier; my aim was to simply render them helpless.

In hindsight, maybe I’d overfed the Craving Blade. It had been howling in my ear due to the presence of an opponent worth cutting down, but now it was silent. In the past when I used another sword, it would screech at me that it would be happy to cut down anything, but now despite the presence of more foes to defeat, it was eerily quiet. The difference was so extreme that I wondered if it would start to be picky of its prey. It was like a cat who’d had its first taste of gourmet food. If it started to act up and refuse to come out unless it deemed the fight worthy of its time, I’d have cause for concern.

I returned the sword to its realm and retrieved Schutzwolfe from Otso’s right knee.

Ugh, could these pirates keep it down? Their war cries were loud, and their “sore loser” screams are even louder...

“Pride means nothing to someone whose blade swings in the name of the Fury,” I said. “Northern sea warrior? Hero of the choppy seas? Lord of the waves? Don’t make me laugh. You’re just bandits with swimming lessons.”

While I was getting in my messerspiel with Otso, my subordinates were getting through their own jobs.

The pirates strung up on the mast of the other drakkar were probably Margit’s handiwork. She had worked on techniques using her web, and had devised a way of efficiently nullifying groups of enemies. Seeing her continue to grow was a reminder for me to never grow lax.

I had to stop playing around and finish with cleanup. Two ships were making moves to flee. I wasn’t about to let them. I was going to devour them, along with the other supply ships.

“Ngh... R-Remember this, Erik!” Otso retorted. “You’ve stolen honorable deaths from all of us! Our souls will return to the sea and be reborn to haunt you again! We’ll come back...again and again to strike you down!”

“You what?”

This guy just couldn’t take a loss. Although Nifleyja myths did say that would happen. Fine, be my guest.

“Then come at me again. Callistoi grow quickly, no? It’ll take a decade for you to be ready for battle once again. I’ll be in my forties by then, but sure.”

“Wha...?”

“Try as many times as it’ll take. I’ll kill you every time. As long as pirates like you continue to rise up and ravage these seas, I’ll put you down until not a single soul wishes for murder anymore. Maybe I’ll be fifty or sixty; it doesn’t matter. As long as you desire to raid, plunder, and pillage, then I’ll appear before you and grant you a dishonorable death.”

I had run away once already. Not due to cowardice, it was due to... No, who was I fooling? Whatever the case, I had decided the situation in Marsheim was too hairy for me and had chosen to escape. I wouldn’t make the same compromise again—wherever I may end up, whatever may happen.

“I live by my own selfishness. I am prepared to die by untoward means. Although I seek vengeance, I understand that others will seek vengeance against me. I will always be ready.”

Now wait patiently until they come to tie you up, I thought.

I decided that the place for my soul would be amid a sea of adventure and murder. As long as I kept to these values, death would come for me one day.

My own culture didn’t care if I was killed in my sleep. If no one would take my life while my head was resting upon my pillow, then I would continue to fight on.

[Tips] The Furies are three sister gods in the Rhinian pantheon who seek revenge through death. Tisiphone was said to have been born from the mixing blood of two gods—one good and one bad—who slew one another in the same moment. There were other, similar gods who reigned over similar domains, but none have dared worship Tisiphone due to Her inauspicious nature. However, the people of the northern Empire had no choice but to beg for Her help, thanks to the northern raiders’ endless assault.

“Look at you, right back at it before we’ve even sighted land...” Margit said.

On her swaying hammock in the ship’s hold, I planted my face into Margit’s lap. A faint warmth started to seep into me. Her sweet voice and tender touch as she stroked my hair was filled with the same care and love as it always had.

The only difference could be found in the light of her eyes as she smiled. It wasn’t hugely different, but where they used to watch me, now it felt as if she were standing guard over me. Did I see anything reproachful in her eyes? Maybe that would have been reading too much into it...

All the same, Margit’s heart remained ever kind and unblemished in her love toward me. As she gave her lap for me to rest my head upon, I wondered if she would be able to fulfill the promise we made the day we left Konigstuhl—to kill me if I swayed in my desire to become the adventurer I dreamed of.

“I’m...a little tired,” I said.

“Of course you would be. A dozen ships in a single day is enough to tire anyone out,” she replied.

This was no good. My heart was flailing. A part of me had viewed Margit chasing me down in that despondent possible future as a desperate chase, but now a part of me started to see it as a kind of release, or near enough.

I couldn’t stand up proud in front of my subordinates or those who supported me like this, even though I was the one who started it all.

I was probably being punished for trying to simultaneously make preparations for our hunt for the North Sea King. Financial- and manpower-related preparations aside, we had to lay the groundwork, collect information, head to seaside cantons to tell them to watch the waves. The overwork had squeezed everything out of me, and it looked like tepid complaints had been in there too.

It was true that what I’d done was nothing short of backbreaking work, but I felt a rush of shame at how uncool I was being.

“I wonder when peace will return to the northern sea,” Margit said.

“We’ve been working for fifteen years, and still it goes on. I think we’ve got a long way to go.”

Elisa was currently dealing with her professorial examinations, but still excitedly told me, “Soon enough I’ll be able to come and aid you, Dear Brother!” Then there was Mika, who was going to join us next summer for the dragon hunt. I was pathetic right now—I couldn’t act like this in front of them. Then of course there was Celia, who was negotiating with the church to build a cenotaph in a place above the snow or a church of the Fury for our sake.

It didn’t matter that the task before me was huge. I might have wavered once, but I couldn’t remain so fragile of heart. Even if this wasn’t my ideal, I was still on track to become a great adventurer—one the world would remember forever, if I played my cards right.

Lady Agrippina’s work with the aeroships looked to be going smoothly enough to lend some aid in the not-too-distant future. It would make the hunt next year less overwhelming, but sadly it wouldn’t do much to lighten the rest of my load.

I was working on behalf of the people of the northern Empire, and I had chosen to raise the flag of a Fury—in the holy texts, She was depicted as a cold and vicious but beautiful woman—so I couldn’t half-ass this.

Our battles to come with the North Sea King risked causing tsunamis that would threaten not just the Schleswig Peninsula, but the whole northern inlet. The damage would be incalculable. Things had just begun to settle down for the people here, and trade was just beginning to flourish—I couldn’t bear to ruin everything again.

Mika’s headquarters were on that inlet. They were leading a team that was trying to rework the shallow seas so that ships with deeper hulls could sail westward. The islands and rocky reefs made it difficult to navigate and disrupted the currents, requiring even the smallest of crafts to have a guide from a sea-dwelling race leading the way. Mika was working on reforming the most dangerous points—I remained ever amazed at their skills—and daunting as it was, it would still be less costly in time and resources than the crazy idea of building a new canal that went through the Schleswig Peninsula.

My old chum had come back to their home with dreams of making it prosperous and safe. I didn’t want to do anything to ruin that for them. Defeating the North Sea King would mean reducing the number of lesser drakes that it spawned, further preserving the safety of these waters. It was a mission we couldn’t mess up.

The Rhinian government had first decided to build the aeroships because they wanted to liberate themselves from relying on canals and ports for trade, but after creating a whole fleet of mass-produced ships, they had come up against the stumbling block that the transport costs would far outweigh any profit. This massive oversight had meant that they were suddenly impatient to bring peace to the northern sea.

I could only nod my head. Despite my previous world’s jumbo jets, trains and ships still were far more efficient when it came to energy consumption. It would make no sense to waste all your budget sending your goods via aeroships just because it seemed cooler to only offer goods whose prices were too high to tempt any but the wealthiest merchants.

Lady Agrippina’s work never ended—after working on the aeroships, she had tried to step away from any and all public office work, but apparently that hadn’t panned out—and now she was also chief designer of sea transport ships that utilized arcane furnaces for propulsion. At any rate, she had revisited her work on aeroships and refined her blueprints to make them more efficient for diplomatic and wartime use, meaning that we now had backup that could scout ahead and provide us with support.

With the knowledge that they couldn’t be used for transport, the Empire were toying with opportunities to show off its mass-produced Theresea-class conquestships in a more martial display.

Incredibly, these could be mass-manufactured a whole ten years before they were scheduled to. Lady Agrippina had griped that they could have been used to clean up Ende Erde if things had fallen into place earlier, but now the first five ships were all outfitted with deadly, war-ready arcane cannons. They had become floating nightmares that could rain down terror at maximal efficiency.

I was hoping the people of Nifleyja would see this and decide to not raid anymore for at least half a century.

But who knew what the future held? I didn’t particularly want to see the rise of top secret government corsairs flying about... Even on Earth the prospect of long-lasting peace was always mercurial. There would always be bad actors—nations that lied, schemed and manipulated; another would-be empire with some new superweapon loomed around every corner.

“I feel like we’re on an endless cleanup mission,” I said.

“There are moments where we get jobs befitting an adventurer. A complaint won’t even shatter a single dragon scale, will it?”

“Yeah, you’re right... Wishing for too much can be suicidal.”

I pulled myself closer to Margit. The roaring of the waves outside mingled with her pulse and her breath.

I wasn’t sure if my past self on that day when we left Konigstuhl would be proud to see me as I was now, but Margit wasn’t wrong. This wasn’t the worst future I could envision for myself. After all, we had reached a point where if things went well, we could slay a true dragon—a feat fit for adventurers in the Age of Gods. If I turned my nose up at that, then the versions of me from more unfortunate futures would pelt me with rocks and rotten fruit from their place in the audience.

All the same, life never goes how you plan it...

[Tips] Erik of the Songless Sword is an adventurer who can be found in the Empire’s northern reaches and the polar region. He has earned fame for his obsession with the raiders of Nifleyja and his announcements that he will bring all who raid and plunder to an ignoble end.

Despite being a layman, he has assembled a unit of vengeful warriors and received favor from a Fury. While cursed by the gods of another pantheon and their shamans, this monster still stands undeterred on the chaotic seas of the north. Many theorize that he has been unofficially sanctified, but he firmly denies this.

Those close to him often see him looking across the sea to the Empire’s western reaches, but few know what exactly he left behind in Ende Erde.