At the wall, Lucas learned that his relief would be short lived. The anxious guards at the gate told them that there appeared to be rioting breaking out in the city, or a slave revolt perhaps. They were not getting much news coming in, but fires had been started and Lucas could now see smoke rising into the sky.

“You said that you were surprised that this “Cult of the Land” would have such a hold,” Lucas said, looking out over the city from the top of the city wall. “From what I am seeing they are probably a good fraction of the population.”

Terrasin shook her head, “Impossible. I would wager that the Cult is behind all of this, but I would not believe that so many people would actually listen to their nonsense seriously.”

“What makes you say that?” Lucas doubted Lady Almistraus had any real contact with the lower classes, especially serfs and slaves. “Do you have some form of census that records religious beliefs?”

“No, there is nothing like that. I don’t even think it would be possible,” Terrasin turned her gaze back towards the fields, a fair few of which where now on fire as well. Lucas thought that was the logical thing for them to do anyway, though it was a pain in the ass overall. “Almost everyone here would have had family on the front lines, and as a border city, there are probably even cases of smaller demons getting inside and killing people. The Cult flourishes in the south, where demons are a far off thing, as opposed to here in Francinea, where they are a hard reality.”

Decent logic and good thinking, Lucas would agree with her assessment generally, but he could also think of dozens of examples where religion and rationality did not mix. However, he did not have the background to dispute what she was saying, and her theory that the Cult had fanned other flames in the city was probably correct.

Down below, the gate’s garrison was clashing with an unruly mob that had approached. As one might expect from this era’s thinking, they cut down the people without much hesitation. Lucas frowned, as unpleasant as it was, like slavery, he couldn’t judge and act on his world’s morality. Without non lethal ranged options like water hoses, rubber bullets, or pepper spray, engaging with an angry mob would be deadly for the guards. For that matter, staying here would likely be a mistake as well. The gate bordered a residential section of the city, where serfs would live and go out to work on the farms, which currently meant that they could face far more rioters than they could deal with.

Having volunteered in conditions where civil unrest was more than just a slight possibility, Lucas was aware that the current forces here were nowhere near enough. At the same time, he noted that he was avoiding thinking about this world more than he had to. Watching his mind avoid the issues around him and dodge away from anything that might elicit a strong emotional reaction was fascinating to him, though he knew even that fascination was a dodge!

“Fuck, I can’t let myself fall into that loop.” Lucas muttered shaking his head. Decades ago he had suffered from depression and as an avoidance mechanism he would become sucked into a infinite loop of observing his own reaction to things, or lack thereof in most cases at the time. “We should gather the garrison and leave towards the outer wall.”

Terrasin was surprised, “That would be quite dangerous, who knows what we would run into?”

“I agree with the Princess,” Volen immediately chimed in. “With the garrison door barred, we are safe here. They cannot tear down the stone with their bare hands after all.”

“But they can overwhelm the door.” Lucas was firm on this. “Swords and crossbows are effective, but the people using them are only men. Inside the garrison, they will eventually be crushed. Each soldier might take two or three with him, but there are far less soldiers than rioters. We would be far better served by linking up with the larger garrisons at the outer walls, where there are far more soldiers and far less people.”

Rather than wait and listen to their arguments, Lucas simply grabbed Terrasn and dragged her down the stairs, calling for the guard captain. He would have their fastest guards bar the doors behind them, then sprint to the next door and do the same, while they broke out of the gates interior door. If they were lucky, everyone would survive. If not, well, they did sign up to be a guard…

The gate had two portcullis, and a gap in between them. One of the garrisons doors opened into that gap, and with the portcullis on the city side closed, there was little the mob could do to stop the garrison from fleeing towards the outer wall.

Lucas eventually had to be partially supported by some of the guards, exhausted from both his wounds and just the general events that had occured since he had arrived in this world.

When they finally arrived at the outer wall garrison, Lucas collapsed on a bed in the barracks. Sure, biologists spent more time trekking in the field than many scientists, but even they were not used to being stabbed and slashed at! Well… Unless they were studying Australian wildlife, but if you were crazy enough to study that deathtrap you probably didn’t care at that point.

Terrasin sat down next to him on the bed, “Thank you again for stepping in front of me earlier.”

Lucas laughed slightly, “what I said before still holds true you know. Though admittedly the hypocrisy within the statement was laughable.”

“I disagree, it was a noble thing to do.”

“I killed a woman earlier, you know.” Lucas was not sure how he felt about that, but he did not want to die. “For that matter, the very phrase itself is sexist in a number of ways… But I am not a sociologist, and frankly, this world has bigger problems at the moment.”

Lucas sighed, “Well, whatever. I would prefer to have sat down and had a conversation discussing what their issues were, so really once we reached the point of fighting the time had long passed for a good solution.”

Looking up at Terrasin, Lucas frowned. “Irregardless, this is a problem. I originally planned to start my own company in my world, so I have a degree of confidence in my management skills. But I am not a politician, and clearly this city has problems. I saw many things I could do to help your farms produce food, and that is before we even start talking about medicine, but all of this will fall apart without a somewhat stable platform for me to work in.”

Terrasin chewed her lip, she seemed to be a bit more relaxed than she had been before. More the young woman she was and less the high class princess she was supposed to be. “I don’t know how much I can do. After the riots are put down, I can speak to Lady Versi, as she is related to the Duke, but overall everything lies in his hands.”

“Great. So I have to deal with that idiot again.”

Terrasin sighed, but did not correct him. They were quiet for a moment as she seemed to think.

“You know,” She finally broke the silence. “You are not what we expected, nothing like the Heroes from legends.”

“You did abduct me, you know.” Lucas was very clear on this point, “I had and have no obligation to do anything or be anything for you. I have decided to do what I can because I want to go home and I want to live in comfort and safety until I do, to a certain extent, you have probably ruined my plans for my life.”

“I did not mean to offend you,” Terrasin was quick to say. “I only meant to say that I am surprised. I do not think it is a bad thing, but I almost feel as if we were not ready for you.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas had no idea what she was talking about, hadn’t they been preparing to summon him for something like a thousand years?

“Before the third ritual, mankind was on the brink of victory.” Terrasin said as she looked off into space. “Had that ritual succeeded, what kind of world would be here now?”

“The very idea that you would still summon people after your ‘victory’ is borderline evil, you realize.” Lucas pointed this out, “Every person who has been summoned to this world likely had lives and families and dreams of their own. And every time that ritual is performed you have taken all that away from them.”

“I know. But you know as well as I that even at peace, the nations of this world would have done it regardless.”

“Fair enough,” Lucas admitted. “Please, continue.”

“If we had won, and finally achieved peace. That thousand years of growth might have left us in a position where your knowledge could be used to its fullest. Instead of getting only the barest crumbs of your wisdom, we would have had a feast. So it seems the failure of our ancestors has come back to haunt us.”

Terrasin seemed depressed, and despite his own state and general unpleasant attitude given the situation, Lucas sat up to comfort her. “If it is any consolation, given the level of technology and society I am seeing now, if that had occured I would likely be even more useless.”

“What do you mean?” Now it was Terrasin’s turn to wonder what Lucas was talking about.

“Although it is hard to say exactly, this world seems somewhere between six hundred to nine hundred years behind my own.” That was a very rough estimate considering his lack of knowledge about history, but he was fairly sure it was a decent guess. He had given himself three centuries of wiggle room after all… “If that is the case, a thousand years of peace might have placed you hundreds of years ahead of my knowledge, and I would be absolutely useless.”

Actually, that raised many questions about this worlds development, but considering he was still wondering how humans evolved on two separate worlds it was really a minor detail. Come to think about it, the sheer amount of shared flora and fauna between this world and his own was astounding, and highly confusing. But that would be a question for later as well.

The guard captain of this garrison came to inform Lucas that his private room was available for his use, the only private room in the barracks apparently, but Lucas told Terrasin to take it instead. It would probably be for the best if he could talk to the soldiers without having a noble hovering over his shoulder.

As night began to fall, the shuttered holes that served as windows displayed a dull orange glow in the fields where fires still burned. According to messenger pigeons that had been received, the riots had mostly been suppressed, but the fires were a much more dangerous concern. They were advised to stay where they were for now, which suited the injured and exhausted Lucas just fine.

Asking around, he found the soldiers to be stiff and formal around him until he ended up swearing at them until they stopped referring to him as “Lord Hero.” Apparently, the collar’s translation of swear words was quite entertaining, and Lucas had probably introduced a few new words into the worlds vocabulary with his last tirade, but at the very least, he was able to get some answers.

Apparently, Duke Are was not as popular or as effective as he would like Lucas to believe. Given his behavior earlier, Lucas was not very surprised. High taxes, brutal conscription practices, and magistrates that colluded with underworld loan sharks forced much of the population to various forms of slavery, from indentured servitude to serfdom. While the Duke and his court feasted, the populace starved, even though they could see and often worked in the fields filled with food that they could not touch.

While the outer guards were part of the army, and the guards of the second wall were drawn from the cities population, the inner wall guards and the patrolling guards were all from the Duke’s personal forces, and tales of their corruption were infamous.

In short, this entire city had been a powderkeg from the start, and Lucas’s arrival had been the steel that the flint of the Cult had struck against to set it off. The only question was what he could do about it, given that the Duke was in power, probably not much.

The next thought through his head made him groan, but he supposed he really did not have a choice. To make the best use of what Lucas was going to do, he not only needed the support of the population, but he needed the results of the efforts to be spread to the population. If it only flowed to the top the mortality rate would not decrease, nor would the birth rate increase. In other words, Duke Are had to go along with his entire untrustworthy court.

What the hell had Lucas done to deserve this mess?