“Ai Nakagawa!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Genu Levaita!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Karaki!”

  “Here, sir”

  “Canadena!”

  “Here, sir”!

  “Miri!”

  “Here, sir!”

  “Ioha Questingtank!”

  “Here, sir!” Ioha flinched, but roll calls used their full names. At least it didn’t include titles.

  The fourth year continued to the next group to shout another six names, and Ai led her party to a hastily erected table, from where they collected their grub and went searching for somewhere to eat.

  “Where should we dine, Sir Ioha Questingtank Protector Saint of Heimdall?” she whispered loud enough for all of them to hear.

  He groaned. His second name came with a certain amount of respect, and apart from their party, where knowing each other was an absolute need, his title came with a secret. “Under those trees,” he said and pointed at the treeline fencing off the field. Ai could tease him however much she liked. When he fell unconscious, she stayed with him and poured aura into his body long after she depleted her own reserves. The only one in danger had been her. Heimdall’s gifts might have given him a splitting headache for a full two days, but the god rather unsurprisingly never planned to hurt his own disciple. “Let’s plan for tomorrow while we eat.” In his eyes, she had become a hero.

  “What does a saint do?” Miri asked when they each found a spot to sit down. She knew he was one, but hadn’t been given an explanation since she got caught together with the other staff students when someone in the school administration failed to notice she was, in fact, part of one of the combat parties. She didn’t join the rest of them until just before the roll call.

  “It’s not something I do,” Ioha said. “More like something I am.”

  “And what exactly...”

  He already swallowed his bite anticipating the follow-up question. “I’m more than just contracted with my god. Call it being a representative, or, well, saint.” Ioha hesitated for a moment while he gathered his thoughts. “And I got some extra abilities.” He had. A separate divine aura, among other things. It was, mostly, utterly and ridiculously useless. A grand total of one ability was keyed to it. He could make things clean, very clean or idiotically clean hundreds of times each day. A masterclass aura for washing his hands. Ioha settled for mostly. Out here, the ability was a godsend, since he never suffered from sweaty or otherwise grimy clothes.

  “Extra abilities?”

  He bit his lower lip. “Some are improvements of old abilities, like a larger aura than I had before.”

  She gave him a sullen look. “Larger aura?”

  Ioha slapped himself mentally. Aura was a touchy subject for her. “Yeah. And a lot of new abilities as well, but I don’t understand what they do, and I need to train them all because even if I understand them, I’m awful at using them.” Being a saint also meant he understood some of his old abilities better now as well. Like the area taunt he used during the tournament, or the damaging one. That one was pretty much a disgusting cheat. Attack anyone else and start haemorrhaging. The actual damage was minimal, but Ioha could see how it was devastating for morale to untrained combatants. And there was the rotting intestines spell as well, which also turned out to be a penalising taunt. His ability there was too weak to use it with any effect, but that one had the potential to apply real damage to anyone refusing to attack him. “I have an area attack ability I can use to defend myself now,” he said. That one was what made the damaging taunt disgusting. Pick between bleeding or rotting innards where you are, or walk and stand knee-deep in a pool of razor blades.

  “So you’ve become powerful now?”

  He hadn’t, not yet. Ioha shook his head. “Almost every third year will walk right through me and not notice I was standing in their way.” It wasn’t entirely true, but close enough.

  Miri looked at him, and Ioha took the chance to down some more of his food. “Doesn’t sound like a big thing then.”

  Ioha stirred the remainder in his cup with the spork he bought in Isekai and licked it clean. “Potential,” he said. She deserved a decent answer. “Long term, I think I have a lot to gain.” It was the best answer he could give her. Looking at what he got, from one angle, he woke up with a sledgehammer on a rampage in his head and a full two years’ worth of training gained. From another, not a single ability improved more than what he could force by sheer willpower in a month. Well, divine cleaning apart, but that one kind of didn’t count. Ioha preferred to see it as two years of schooling gained over some horribly poor sleeping. “Oh,” he added. “I gained a second name. Those are important here, aren’t they?”

  Canadena snorted from the stone she sat on. “Real important! Remember how important Sir Ironsnake said it was?”

  He’d forgotten old Rede’s second name. “Yeah, yeah, just joking.”

  “No, it’s important,” Miri said. “It helps even in Isekai.”

  Ioha looked at Ai, but she shook her head. In Isekai, half of the residents from Wergaist pretended to be noble-born when they tried to fleece unsuspecting tourists. “Yeah, I guess it does,” he said instead of the sharp retort he had in his mouth. Miri was their mascot, and she adored her mother, and if her mother taught her knightage and nobility were important, he had no real reason to trample on her beliefs. Also, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Used wisely, your second name was an asset. There was a reason they were handed out sparingly in the first place, after all.

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  A bit further away, Genu silently emptied his own portion. His eyes sought Miri out from time to time, and Ioha grinned inwardly at the potential romance. He didn’t give it much hope, but the guy wasn’t sinking dead in the water yet.

  “Everyone finished?” Ai said more as an order to get ready than a real question.

  Ioha collected the utensils, prepared the fireworks and deliberately burned a little extra divine aura when he cast his almighty cleaning spell. A sparkling cascade of white and blue starlets rained down from the tree tops, and his party members made a show of looking very impressed. He pocketed his spork and walked away to the field kitchen. When he returned cups, plates and cutlery to a happy logistics crew, it was all very clean. Idiotically clean could wait until another meal.

  On his way back to pick up backpack and cloak he pondered on the last aspect of his sainthood. It was a secret from everyone else. A second name was handy. Sainthood could start a war, with him as the ultimate trophy. For the first time, he had an empty ability, or rather a set of empty abilities. They were keyed to his divine aura and had something to do with his command emblem, one that he hadn’t even received yet. It was important, Heimdall had said in his dream when everyone else believed him to be comatose, and those abilities were the reason a war could start over the right to control him, or rather, his emblem. Right now, he needed to take control of his new abilities and make them more powerful. Heimdall had been clear on that. If a war over him started, he should be the one starting it, and for that, he needed power. He grimaced, sped up across the field, picked up his backpack and rolled the cloak on top of it. After that, he made ready on the road.

  Their march resumed. Halfpoint lay two days behind them, and by evening they’d reach their destination and be assigned their mission. Walking for hours should have sapped both strength and morale, but Ai transferred all microscopic injuries associated with fatigue to herself and applied what Ioha now understood as regeneration rather than healing. Add him as a washing machine on two legs, and they’d arrive in both better condition and fresher than any decent fairness allowed.

  Both Isekai and Wergaist lay south of them, and by all rights someone should have faced them a day earlier with troops of some kind, but the local lord died without an heir almost a decade earlier, leaving the land in administrative chaos.

  Ioha looked around them as they walked. A warm spring day invited farmers onto their fields, and the road ahead and behind swallowed some groups of six and displayed others. The ever-present flat boredom slowly turned into, first, gentle slopes, and then steeper climbs. They climbed the foothills of the mountain range that marked the end of federation lands, and on the other side lay Remerrin, Karaki’s home. He wouldn’t get to visit since that counted as an invasion.

  More importantly, it didn’t look anything like chaos. People lived their lives, and the years must have turned without too much upheaval. They met the occasional oxcart and were in turn overtaken by a carriage heading in their direction. Farmers in the fields threw them interested looks, and a few gave them polite bows or waved. The children were big on the waving. During the day, crops changed as well as the landscape as they came closer to the mountains, and large wheat fields gave way to smaller patches with vegetables. Some of those fields looked familiar to Ioha, which proved they were hugely anachronistic.

  This was mostly because of Isekai, but Wergaist shared part of the responsibility as well. The latter openly gobbled up the richest farming lands by the border as soon as it was clear no heir would materialise and claim lordship. It all became clear, Ioha learned during his primer, because Lord Clevasti made certain that the claimant didn’t survive passing through Wergaist. As for the anachronism they passed through right now, Isekai was to blame. The foreign implementations that popped up from time to time around them weren’t from Wergaist; they were from Japan, or at least what the surviving inhabitants in a small village further south, which would one day become Isekai, decided Japan looked like historically. History didn’t feed you, and eventually new residents with knowledge of modern farming mixed with a new breed of locals, who were decently skilled at magic but wanted to pursue a life as farmers anyway.

  Ioha looked at a small road shrine they passed and chuckled. Isekai was the tourist trap and administrative capital of what was rapidly becoming a city-state a decade earlier. The local chaos quickly turned it into a grand duchy, with the controlled influx of people from Japan after the Nagoya gates stabilised. Now, magic greenhouses used persistent force fields to do the job of glass. As long as you didn’t touch the transparent walls and roofs, a building made of magic apparently worked just fine. It didn’t, Ioha grumpily admitted when he remembered their geeky teacher, really count as a house. If the solution was simple enough, it held up better.

  At the other side of a field, the roof of what looked suspiciously like a Japanese temple rose from a valley. Isekai invaded lands north of the town with the enthusiastic help of the locals and benevolent smiles from the bordering Remerrin kingdom on the other side of the mountains. Wergaist had a long history of deploying a competent military force, but Isekai did not. A neighbour not hell-bent on biannual raids and outright attempts at invasion was the better option. Peace was solid, with the occasional trader braving narrow mountain passes with a wagon or two.

  Further west, a mere few hours of walking away lay contested territory. Wergaist, Isekai and whatever local warlord held power at the moment jockeyed for power. Remerrin sent scouts to watch a power struggle that should just go on for infinity as far as they were concerned. Inside the remnants of the former domain lay the border zone they were headed for. It was the main reason none of the three primary stakeholders made any serious attempts at grabbing full power. With full power came the cost of keeping the border zone in check. As it was, they shared that cost, with the current excursion one such event.

  Then the road turned, and they walked westward. It didn’t really hug the mountainside, and there was even space for the occasional field to their right, but in general, a thin stretch of forest climbed up ever steeper slopes until the greenery vanished behind the crest.

  To his left Ioha noted yet another contraption where magic replaced technology, but apart from it clearly being a farming implementation, he had no idea about its use. He didn’t need to know what; it was enough with that. Knowledge from Earth mixed with local magic used in ways no one had thought of before changed this part of the world irrevocably. It also went a long way toward explaining to him why technology that should have been in place was conspicuously absent. Why build a heavy and dirty machine if you could solve it with clean magic? The answer lay in scaling, but you had to take a thoroughly automated society for granted to understand the limits of magic and, if he was honest, most residents from Earth probably didn’t understand anyway. Magic was the cheap cop out.

  A bit further ahead, one noble carried the proof of that slung from his belt. A gun. Not a chemical-explosives powered ballistic weapon, but a magic one. It had the precision of an eighteenth-century cavalry pistol with the reach of a twentieth-century sniper rifle. Every time it was fired, it cost the same as a night in an inn, dinner and breakfast included. An idiot weapon, and Ioha had greedily looked at one in Isekai when he returned from Gothenburg together with Ai. The horrendous price saved him from making an awful buy, even though he regretfully admitted it would have looked awesome and properly flamboyant hanging by the side of a cat.

  The sun fell lower in the sky, and they reached the campsite. For the first time, they wouldn’t sleep in barns because here the border zone began, and they needed to learn how to live in the open if they ever wanted to master how to act further in. Ioha had camped before, both with and without tents, but he had never camped where monsters roamed and the unreal competed with reality. Here was where magic was no longer something humans controlled.

  With a sigh, he sat down and popped open his status display. It had flashed twice in its dormant state earlier. Shit! Your jokes are crap, Heimdall! He’d gained another two points of divine cleaning.