The fort had been dry and safe, with walls protecting them from the wind. While far too small to offer the entire raid rooms for the nights, Ioha still kept it as a good memory. A week earlier, he left it with a guard of honour. The raid was to return south, eradicate whatever remnants of the breakthrough they could find, prepare a southern fort at the crossroads, man the main camp and relieve Nanami, so she could return to her patrols from the eastern camp. After that, they would disband to allow the adventurers to return to Isekai and enjoy their riches – there were enough federation soldiers to create a garrison.

  Ioha sighed. With two forts straddling the ridge, reinstating the old trade route must have been tempting, but the road still passed frighteningly close to the crossing over zone. Any trade had to be done across the eastern pass, which was inferior in every way apart from not killing merchants trying to use it. That was, Ioha guessed, always a plus. He sighed once more.

  He was no longer part of that raid. Once more his past caught up with him, and, with the help of Verina, René objectively made the best possible use of her aptitude sphere. Not that it made Ioha any happier. There were four persons in the entire raid with masterclass abilities in trading, assessment, and negotiations. Derina, Harvali, Meneki and Ioha. And that was a lie. Derina’s abilities reached grand master class, and for that very reason, he was immediately disqualified since the interested parties decided that Remerrin, Isekai and the federation should be equally represented for the political and economic side of their venture.

  Thus, it was that Ioha found himself escorting a king's ransom, or rather ten kings' ransoms, with an honour guard strong enough to lay waste to a weak domain. There would be months before he had an opportunity to gain strength in a border zone again.

  Yesterday they had arrived at the first of their important stops.

  “Protector Saint of Heimdall, are you ready?” Harvali asked.

  “Drop that saint shit, or you’ll have a shining Valkyrie climbing up your arse throwing spears!”

  “Yes, Protector Saint of Heimdall, as you wish Protector Saint of Heimdall.”

  He couldn’t throw up a battle standard here just to sodomise his senior. “Harvali, damn it!”

  The surrounding whiteness almost blinded him. Remerrin was big on marble, and this being a royal holy place meant there was lots of it. As in absolutely hysterically lots of it. Where the eye wanted trees, there were columns, where it wanted a pond, there were shallow white basins, and where it wanted to rest on refined architecture, there was a humongous white bunker that made its best to make Spellsword Academy look inviting.

  Since this was an Important Place, with a capital I and all, there were loads of people milling around, which could have broken up the monotony. If they hadn’t all been clad in white, that is. Ioha was no exception. He wore garments so shiny white his cleaning spells would have made them dirty.

  “You look the part,” a voice commented in his head.

  “Shut it, Heimdall!”

  “Is that the way my foremost disciple is supposed to speak?”

  “I’m your foremost disciple because I speak this way.”

  “True.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “I don’t know. I never had a saint before.”

  “You know you suck?”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t. Know, not suck, I mean. Maybe I do, suck, not know, that is.”

  Ioha shook his head. A lazy fart, who tried to steal some sleep in a temple, got himself a slovenly god, who didn’t care too much about what happened to his one and only saint. It was, he grudgingly admitted, a fair exchange.

  There was a procession. Ioha was supposed to lead it, with both Harvali’s party tagging along and Meneki’s finest marching as if they had any idea what was going on. Ioha glared at the marble bunker, gripped his sandals with his toes, and scuffled forward. Dignity didn’t marry too large sandals very well.

  As soon as he took his first steps, fanfares blared, and people stopped milling and began staring instead. Some sadistic demon of a mage filled the air with magic confetti, all white of course, and Ioha had to brave the increasingly uneven ground on his way to the massive marble hellhole towering ahead of him. Honour guard and Meneki’s finest marched behind him and did absolutely nothing to mitigate his feeling of discomfort.

  Enormous gates, made of white marble, what else, opened by magic, and Ioha led his too merry and too white band inside. The interior bore some resemblance with one of the cathedrals you visited on a holiday back home, with swirling and shining decorations in different shades of white substituting for windows. Ioha shuffled up the aisle, desperately trying to shake magic confetti from his sandals, until he reached the central altar.

  The place was packed.

  A small group of what Ioha guessed were the local clergy waited for him to piously submit to their theatricals, so they could display the divine glory they couldn’t manifest themselves. Ioha recognised their kind from back home. He almost never attended church back in Sweden, and he wasn’t about to take up a bad habit here. I’m so not playing their games!

  “The gods have blessed Us with Their presence so We in turn may offer You Our Holy Truth,” was not what they said. It took a lot longer and was a lot more boring, but in essence that was precisely what they meant. “We present to you the saint to be. Let us pray together and bestow upon him holy sainthood.”

  The hell you will! So that was their game. In history, it would read that the priests of Remerrin made him a saint. Screw you! Battle standard. Host of defence. Battle-hymn. Razor-storm. Inferno. He threw in an overdose of fireworks as an extra tip to the waiters in white. No chance he’d treat them with the respect they had just denied him.

  “Heimdall, have some fun, will you?”

  “With what inhibitions applied?”

  “Screw inhibitions!”

  “As you wish.”

  Ioha’s world flared white, and he opened his display. You sick bastard, he thought, and grinned. A new divine ability, most likely useless in reality, since it would wreak havoc with any kind of game balance if there was any underlying power in it. He received it at exactly one hundred points from the start. Ioha cast it. Deity manifest.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Above them, inside the domed monstrosity, one Valkyrie balanced on his battle standard with eight of her companions circling around her and filling the air with songs of glorious battle. From the ceiling, Heimdall slowly walked down from Himingbjorg across Bifrost to meet his saint.

  Around the altar, five priests frantically exchanged stares between them. Then one gathered some courage. “See, we have summoned a god to walk among us!”

  I wouldn’t have done that. Ioha shot the bravest of the priests a smirk. “You might regret making that statement,” Ioha mumbled. He had no idea what kind of prank Heimdall planned to play on them all.

  After descending the glittering span, Heimdall leaned over Ioha. “And this is where we screw them over?”

  Ioha returned a pained look. You’re having way too much fun. “I am but your humble disciple. My god would choose his own path,” Ioha added, loud enough for the priests to hear. Then he realised the entire place had been pumped full of voice magic, and that everyone seated probably heard as well.

  “Humble?” Heimdall managed to both sneer and offer him a benign smile at the same time. “We’ll see about that. Why has my saint called upon my presence here?”

  You arse! How to crawl out of this next level of crap? “It seems the Remerrin clergy were of the mind they had the right to summon a god. I merely asked for your presence to offer them an opportunity to change their ways.” Any more of this and I’m going to puke.

  “Cretins, my saint says you place yourself above the gods. Is this true?”

  All five made a great show of prostrating themselves. “Of course not!” began the oldest of them. “We have done no such thing.”

  “Cretins, I hear you claiming my saint is lying. Is this true?”

  You really are an evil bastard! Well, Heimdall was his bastard. And you picked me back then, so I guess I’m your bastard as well. The saint title would indicate exactly that.

  Around and above him, the Valkyries shimmered and darkened. They stopped singing and no longer stared outward in a circle, but had their eyes set on the priests. This was Heimdall’s doing. Ioha had no way to actively direct what they did. They simply sang and threw spears at monsters. The air around them grew colder as darkness radiated from the heavenly host Heimdall had just taken control over.

  “We wouldn’t say he is lying, but rather that he has misunderstood…”

  Heimdall clapped his hands, and what Ioha would describe as a hologram appeared in the air. It came with sound effects. It came with one priest clearly stating they had summoned a god.

  “What exactly did my saint misunderstand?”

  “We didn’t mean it in that…”

  “Does that,” Heimdall pointed above Ioha’s battle standard, “look like anything you could summon?”

  “No, but…”

  “Do you believe anyone here would survive the wrath of my divine warriors?”

  There was a lot of screaming, and the interior flooded with light when the assembly scrambled to get out before the female warriors started flicking spears left and right.

  ***

  “Was that so smart?”

  “Was what so smart?” Ioha grabbed a piece of bread and spread vegetable paste from a bowl on it.

  “Aggravating the high clergy,” Harvali said and copied Ioha’s action.

  “The shitheads in the bunker?”

  “Sir Questingtank, I’m still unfamiliar with this bunker word of yours, but I understand it has a defensive connotation. I do, however, understand that you shouldn’t refer to high-ranking officials as shitheads,” Harvali complained and took a bite.

  “Anthony Clevasti?”

  The piece of bread made a hasty retreat down Harvali’s throat. “That shithead isn’t a high-ranking official.”

  Fair enough. He had a point. “Look, a shithead is one no matter his or her position, OK?” Ioha threw half of his bread into his mouth and enjoyed the taste.

  “You’re truly not a noble.”

  “Told you I’m not doing that crap. Got a problem?” Ioha said after he swallowed.

  Harvali shook his head. “Nobility can’t be applied to you outworlders.”

  That wasn’t really true, but as far as Ioha was concerned, nobility back home were people perpetually stuck in a dung heap, with a pitchfork in their hands waiting to be allowed entry into the third millennium.

  They ate in silence from that point on. Harvali didn’t look angry or disappointed, but rather thoughtful. The chef had made a decent work with their food, and Ioha appreciated the ambience of what could best be described as a restaurant. Several doors opened and closed on people going in or out, proving that the place served a different purpose as well. The steady stream of people walking through the eating area in one direction or another was less disturbing than he expected.

  After a while, Ioha noticed a pattern where a substantial portion of the tables were occupied by groups coming out of one of the rooms at the end of the hall. Doing business of some kind, and then they celebrated whatever results had been the outcome.

  Two of the adjacent tables seated Harvali’s party and Meneki plus officers respectively. Despite fighting for their lives together, they didn’t mesh well. The federation represented Wergaist to some degree, as well as the by now defunct domain that had raided Remerrin too often for that. A party from the federation capital led by a knight wasn’t just a gathering of adventurers. While the latter were a nuisance, they mostly represented the Isekai madness and were surprisingly useful if you needed a small armed group for a shorter mission. A uniform group of heavily armoured foot soldiers, on the other hand, were definitely a military unit from the federation. Thus, it was that Ioha had dinner between an uneasy alliance turned truce. In the end, he had enough and waved Meneki over.

  The grizzled commander looked up, pointed at himself, rose and switched tables. “You had a question, Saint Questingtank?”

  Ioha chewed his meat and swallowed. “Actually no. I just felt a lack of balance.”

  “Balance?”

  “Look, I’m from Isekai, or Sweden, actually. My current role seems to be a saint, but I’m not part of the federation and, as you might have noticed earlier, not of Remerrin.”

  Meneki grimaced when Ioha reminded him of the debacle the day before. Twelve hours of aura extended force march allowed Harvali’s party, Meneki together with less than a dozen of his men, and Ioha to arrive in the capital before uncontrolled news caught up with them. It was that knowledge that made Ioha return what he hoped was a nasty grin to Meneki. Sooner rather than later, the capital would blow up with the news of what had happened at the royal holy grounds.

  “So, if both commanders escorting me sit at the same table, it makes me look neutral.” He flashed Meneki another grin just for good measure. “We wouldn’t want the saviour of Remerrin to look like an enemy, would we?”

  “Saviour of Remerrin, you cocky little…”

  This was not the time to allow Meneki to gain ground. “You begged Rede for help and had me dragged into a situation where I couldn’t keep my secret. Now you’re complaining? Seems a bit ungrateful to me.”

  Meneki slowly shook his head. “The king already knows. Someone sent birds.”

  Someone probably did. Before he learned magic theory, Ioha expected powerful people to magic messages over great distances. It might be possible, in theory. Someone with range at the same numbers as Ai’s self-healing. That still limited the possibility to so few people, you could likely gather them together in his old shared room with Karaki. And have space to spare.

  “Jokes apart,” Ioha began. “Starting tomorrow, things will become very hectic. I need to set up the trade, but I’m clueless how things are done here. Meneki, you promised Rede you’ll help me to the best of your abilities. I’m going to hold you to that promise.”