Dietrich

The question of "who's going to go" was swiftly answered by Charlemagne.

Fionn, Merlin, and Arthur, who were the most likely to know something relevant to the situation at hand, Dietrich himself, to pad out the combat strength of the group, and finally, Tristan, who'd either know or swiftly be able to learn whatever language was spoken here, assuming it wasn't one either of the others knew.

"Should we take a car?" Tristan asked, sounding surprisingly keyed up.

Fionn shook his head. "I don't think the locals are familiar with modern technology. Let's try to avoid scaring them on our very first meeting."

Arthur sighed.

"How about we just go? It's not that far."

And with that, he began to march off, clearly expecting everyone to just follow.

Dietrich sighed, but decided against summoning his horse, instead just walking after him. There were far too many present who, perhaps rightfully, felt themselves deserving of a leadership role, and therefore acted as though they had said role, which tended to then clash rather badly with everyone else with the exact same opinion.

This wasn't going to end well … but the disaster was unlikely to happen right now, of all times.

And after literally five minutes of walking, albeit five minutes at the pace of Level 90+ individuals boosted by several marching speed increasing Skills cast upon the army, the village came into view.

It was … well, it was a village, much like one of the countless he'd seen back in his day, but ever so slightly off, in a way that it took him nearly a full minute to put together what the issues were.

The pallisade walls were built in a way equally conducive to keeping the inhabitants in as it was to keeping creatures out. In fact, unless he was very mistaken, the gates even had an option for being barred from the outside.

As for the people … from a distance, he might be wrong, but they did not seem entirely human.

Sure, they looked like the various people he'd met in the past, the people he was currently surrounded by, yet … oddly beautiful?

No, not oddly, unnaturally so.

Granted, it might still be a trick of the light, but with every step he took closer, the more his certainty grew.

Their tallness, the oddly "airbrushed" appearance, the odd grace with which they moved … these weren't humans, they were the fair folk.

Dietrich glanced to his right.

While there might be issues due to their nature as, well, faries, right now, he largely found himself concerned with Fionn, the Irishman seeming perpetually torn between crossing his arms in front of his chest, a nonthreatening posture that made for a poor basis for attack, and resting his hand on the pommel of his sword, which would be far more advantageous if a fight started, but also signal an intent to be the likely cause of such a fight.

And he was already this tense?

This may go even worse than he'd initially feared.

The inhabitants slipped out of view as they walked down the final hill, the pallisade wall blocking their sightlines.

And, as it turned out, he'd been wrong about the place merely being lockable from the outside, because it was locked, a comparatively thin length of wood barring the gates. Nothing that would withstand a genuine effort to breach it, never mind an attack with the proper tools, such as siege equipment, but enough to deter casual breakout attempts.

That fit disturbingly well with the fact that Fomorians kept slaves. An individual wishing to escape would be kept back by the bar that was presently in place, while a mass uprising would have required far more to contain than could reasonably be spent on a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.

Hell.

When they got within fifty or so meters of the gate, a "small," well-hidden door next to the main gate flew open, revealing a room on the other end that may not even be directly linked to the inside, and a Fomorian burst out, glaring at them.

The Fomorian was, well, a Fomorian, though one of the more distorted variants. Three meters tall, two piggy little eyes gleaming between rolls of fat, a third eye that seemed to blaze with anger, three times the size of the others, burned on its chin, while a third arm waved around behind it, seeming to originate from the base of the skull or thereabouts.

"Oh, did those idiots really lose to the cattle?" the man? groaned, not using a language Dietrich understood yet inexplicably understandable, fireballs manifesting in each hand … only to be blown to bits in an instant, obliterated so quickly and thoroughly that Dietrich wasn't entirely sure who'd landed the killing blow, it, quite literally, could have been any of them, between the magic attacks from Merlin, Fionn and Tristan, as well as Arthur's and his own Sword Arts … the enemy had practically disintegrated.

Dietrich took a moment to look over the mess with [Slayer of Myths] to make sure there wasn't anything more going to be required to keep this guy in the ground.

There wasn't.

"He's dead," he said flatly. "Any objections to opening the gates?"

When none materialized, he marched over and pulled out the stick keeping them shut. Tried to, at any rate.

Pulling on it resulted in nothing happening; pulling harder didn't work, checking for nails or anything else that may be holding it in place, but there was nothing there …

"They have Skills," Dietrich groaned, drawing Mimung and cleaving it straight down the middle. Chances were the damn thing could simply not be moved by anyone save the one who'd placed it, or, perhaps, anyone who could was not a Fomorian. Either way, as annoying as the Skill was, well, had been, it clearly was far from absolute.

And then, he yanked open the twin doors of the main gate in a single, smooth pull … which had the unfortunate side effect of creating a small gust of wind that dragged an utterly disgusting stench of filth out of the inside of the walls.

Dietrich wrinkled his nose. It was on par with what most modern humans thought the Middle Ages had been like, though in reality, things had been much less bad, simply because no one would be willing to live like that … willingly.

For all that things like serfdom were equated to slavery in the modern day, they'd never been this bad.

"I think we're probably going to need to speak Gaelic here," Fionn said, turning to Tristan. "Can you teach it to everyone who doesn't already speak it?"

In lieu of a reply, the young man simply triggered his Skill, and just like that, Dietrich knew a new language.

Granted, it was a basic understanding, but when Fionn called into the village that their Fomorian master/jailer had been killed, he understood most of it.

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For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then … then the people began to creep back out of their houses, where they had likely fled into after hearing the noise of the Fomorian outside getting blown to pieces.

They moved … well, they moved like beaten dogs, hesitating every couple of steps, as though waiting for approval, or at least a lack of a whip cracking down upon them, flinching at small noises as though expecting them to herald a beating, and above all, staring at the humans standing in the gateway as though they were five meters tall, horned, and breathed fire … or something along those lines, apprehension mixing with fear, fear of them being worse than the Fomorian they had killed, hope, fear of said hope falling apart and plunging them into ever deeper pits of despair …

Slavery was something that had been mentioned in the abstract in the past; at the time, he'd listened and half-heartedly agreed with the condemnation of the practice, but he hadn't really thought about it all that much.

Sapient beings were capable of all sorts of cruelty, and he'd simply filed it away with some of the other examples of such things he'd actually seen himself, and that had been the end of things.

This was … well, it certainly felt worse.

"You're humans," one older man observed, tone disbelieving, though "old" did a piss-poor job of adequately describing his appearance.

None of the usual frailty or general senescence that normally accompanied that descriptor was seen, yet it was possible to see the weight of years weighing on the man nevertheless.

How long had these people been here? How long had they been under the boot of the Fo- …

A flash of recognition appeared on the elder's face, a burst of rage that cracked open the facade of sadness and made him burst out in a manner that likely would have gotten him killed had he done it in front of a Fomorian.

"YOU! You basta- …"

Oh, hell, where they going to have a problem? What could the Irishman even have done? They'd been here all of thirty seconds, and they'd been in sight of each other for the entire time; it was quite literally impossible for something to have happened.

"You're Aillen's father, aren't you?" Fionn cut in, his tone colder than Dietrich had ever heard from him. "They say that if the first time your child hears the word 'no' isn't from you, you have failed as a parent. How many times had you disciplined that hellspawn of yours before he started burning down human villages?"

Oh, so this was an old story. Millennia old.

Damn, he groaned internally. Do I really have to be the reasonable one here?

It wasn't as though that had ever gone well.

Oh, sure, playing peacemaker was his default stance, but. Every. Single. Time. he'd been unable to maintain it.

It hadn't worked at Laurin's kingdom, it hadn't worked with the Burgundians, it hadn't worked during the massacre at Etzel's castle. He'd tried to stay calm and mediate … and then something would finally affect him in a way that set him off, and then things generally went to hell in a handbasket. Granted, there'd always been a reason for that, be it mass murder or poisoned food, but that hardly made the result any less chaotic.

Also …

Before Dietrich could ask the question he'd just thought of, Tristan voiced the exact same one.

"Did this world change since all that happened? Because this place is connected to England now, not Eire," the young man said, using a term Dietrich belatedly remembered was a very old name for Ireland, which Fionn had used once or twice before sticking to using the modern term from then on out.

"They move us," the elderly fae replied, shooting a glare at Fionn while those surrounding him cringed, seemingly anticipating harsh punishment, something the man himself seemed to have forgotten as a possibility in his rage.

"I'll tell the army what happened," Fionn offered and leaped, a sudden burst of wind beginning to carry him off in the direction they'd all come from.

A bit flashy for the situation at hand, judging by how many of the surrounding fae flinched back, but at the same time, perhaps him leaving as quickly as possible was for the best.

"How well do you know the area?" Dietrich asked, trying to, once again, move on from the awkwardness.

"Not well," the man admitted.

"They probably don't want anyone learning enough about their surroundings to plan a proper escape," Tristan observed.

That was probably the reason, Dietrich agreed. On the other hand …

"Would you be able to tell us where you came from, relative to here?" he asked, which prompted a younger fae to start to mutely draw a basic, and that did mean basic, map into the mud with a stick.

***

Tristan

While Dietrich tried to get as much information as possible from the fae, with Merlin throwing in questions of his own when he missed something, I found myself wandering off, surreptitiously withdrawing from the situation so I could look around … and immediately regretted it.

Because, as bad as things had looked near the gate, the people poking their heads out to stare at the "newcomers" were the hopeful ones. The ones willing to believe there was something better out there, and try to reach and/or make it happen, depending on the exact nature of the "something better."

But this seeing people this beaten down, this devoid of hope ... it broke my heart, then welded the pieces back together with hellfire.

Slavery.

Full-on, large-scale, slavery.

I mean … was there anything that needed to be said about it that hadn't already been said a hundred thousand times before?

Slavery sucks, mike drop, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Actually … no, that wasn't all there had to be said.

See, while slavery was awful for the slaves (no shit, Sherlock), and an emotional and ethical argument based on that really should be all that was needed to begin its abolition, there was also a very basic, utilitarian, practically sociopathic in its lack of empathy, argument against slavery that held water entirely separate from any kind of emotion.

Slavery is bad for the slaver too because it ruins technological progress.

Now, that sounded paradoxical, especially when one considered how the invention of the cotton gin, despite having been built to end slavery by reducing the need for labor, had actually increased the demand for slaves to produce all the cotton that could now be processed, but it was still true.

When people could use slaves to do a job, why would they work to create technology to make said job easier? I mean, treating a sapient being as property already involved/required seeing said being as, well, property; was it really so unlikely that they'd not give a shit about their well-being in general?

There "was no need" to improve things, when "things are already fine as-is" and, well, that was likely a large reason for how the Fomorians had wound up with a millennia-old empire still faffing around in the Middle Ages.

Hell, during the time of the Roman Empire, an Egyptian engineer had invented the Aeolipile, a primitive steam engine that absolutely nothing had been done with because, well, why do anything with it? After all, the people who'd have benefitted from mechanical "labor" were the slaves …

For all the awfulness of slavery, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't even benefit anyone. Mind you, even if it did benefit people, that wouldn't justify it, but it didn't, and that made things all the worse.

Hell, just look at the southern US, which had grown rich of slave-powered agriculture while the north had built factories and diversified its economy, and when slavery had been abolished after the Civil War, it had never recovered.

Granted, that was a gross oversimplification, but the point still stood. Slavery hurt everyone, even those it was supposedly "supporting," making all the human misery and despair utterly and depressingly pointless.

Fuck fucking slavery and anyone who condoned it with a rusty pipe covered in chilli oil.

Okay.

Rant over.

I took a deep breath, held it for a couple of moments, and then exhaled as I tried to return to my original train of thought. What had I been thinking about again … right.

My point was that these backwards troglodytes had, thankfully, screwed themselves over rather thoroughly, if what I'd seen could be seen as representative of the empire as a whole.

Plus, this could go a hell of a lot further than their treatment of their slaves. If the Fomorian sense of superiority went deep enough, we might be able to do a lot of damage before they even registered us as a threat …

***

Drake

He glared at the Skill description hanging in the air before him.

Why wouldn't this damn thing just work?

Sea of Dimensions

This Skill allows the user to teleport to a different body of water through the Sea of Dimensions, by traveling an equivalent distance through the turbulent chaos of that place, with the direction not mattering.

Furthermore, you may also cross into other dimensions, as long as you have sufficient knowledge of the target; however, this requires a considerably greater distance to be traveled, with the exact amount becoming known once the travel is initiated.

This Skill can be activated once a week.

It sounded straightforward … but if it were even a fraction as simple as it appeared, it would have worked already.

At first, he'd tried to use the Skill to move into the dimension that had just been "unblocked" by the System, but that had failed, most likely due to a lack of scouting information, perhaps even a lack of an ocean he could deposit his battleship in.

So he had decided to, in the end, try something else, namely, waste it to simply try and teleport to the other side of England, rather than sailing around, purely to prove that it could work, to establish a basic understanding he could leverage to make the Skill work towards an end he could not reach via mundane means … or so he'd planned.

Yet even that failed, since it would have, you know, required him to actually get the damn thing to work in any way.

Which, thus far, had proven frustratingly elusive.

But eventually, [Sea of Dimensions] would submit. And then, the Wisconsin would finally get to join the fight.

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