Auckland, New Zealand. 11 a.m. A petting zoo, noisy children riding in circles on ponies and running their grimy, unwashed fingers through the wool of sheep.
In the corner of an animal pen, Henry and Cathy were having a conversation over ice tea while the screaming preschoolers of their families spread chaos.
Around this time, Karnon should have been starting Operation Pudding Throne. Henry'd dodged The Trickster God's capture through the unbeatable method of not being logged on.
The interruption wouldn't affect his training significantly. After the previous two lengthy days, he'd burnt through his excess log-in quota accumulated while on holiday. For the rest of the week, his playtime was capped at a daily limit of 12 hours.
To maximise his use of this break, he'd chosen to tick off a quick item from a list he'd compiled of frivolous post-retirement activities: visiting a petting zoo. Simultaneously, he'd brought along a herd of nieces and nephews he'd neglected to maintain contact with since moving out of his grandma's house. Cathy, learning of his designs, had invited herself and her siblings. Their other friends were still asleep after the late night.
"...the psychic advantages of everyone having trust in the system," Cathy's lecture continued, "are invisible but essential. Have you zoned out?"
"Nope. Systemic and holistic, invisible but essential." Nodding, he sipped his tea.
Although the motion seemed outwardly calm, his body was riddled with signs of tenseness. His gaze, especially, was darting around Cathy's face, from her flapping gums to her chubby cheeks.
Five freckles on her nasal bridge...the right central incisor was a quarter of a millimetre longer than the left...
For the past ten minutes, his friend had been chewing out his ear for undermining the democratic process last night by purchasing votes. He'd endured her rant by Stretching his body language observations – a technique from Vigilant Eye, a cousin to Floating Leaf for Odayakan Peopleworkers.
"...Professor Garner is one of Australia's most respected social scientists. She backs up her ideas with rigorous computer simulations. I've toured her facilities, which are very impressive."
"I believe her lab coordinated with a project for our company."
"Did they?! Isn't that serendipitous?! Are you..."
A slight indent on the arch of Cathy's right eyebrow where it'd been nicked by the razor this morning...not much upper lip movement when she—
Bah!
In a fit of agitation, he rushed through a series of actions. He estimated the range and angle of a parakeet chirping in a cage, acknowledged the wave of a nephew riding a pony, checked the latest messages on his e-assistant. His spies had confirmed that Karnon had popped by Suchi briefly before teleporting to Svanto's palace in Murdnon.
Cathy, familiar with these outbursts of his, simply smiled. They would have been fixed ages ago if he'd just taken the tonic she'd gifted him for calming nerves. "That's the guilt of your conscience..."
He resorted to his favourite internal activity, thinking about his conquests.
Unfortunately for Henry, while his geriatric Digital self may have developed ungodly tolerance for boredom, his current Fleshbag self continued to be an impatient 17-year-old teen. The low-resolution, second-hand experience of Floating Leaf was insufficient to convey its benefits to the real world. A similar limitation applied to his other martial arts - Fleshbag him couldn't deflect arrows with the blade of a sword nor switch between hundreds of emotion-based battle modes.
However, that didn't preclude Fleshbag him from obtaining part of these skills. At the end of the martial art conquest, Digital Henry would distil the information he'd gained over his training into a form that could be studied in a realistic time-frame. Fleshbag Henry achieving the same degree of mastery would clearly be impossible, but the path laid by his digital twin would be quicker to travel.
"...a self-inflicted punishment for..."
Actually, to be more precise, Fleshbag Henry had already benefited a little. Exercising in his company's VR gym this morning, he'd noticed a drastic improvement to his fighting abilities from the previous day. Part of this was him acclimatising back into the rhythm of 1v1 duelling after abandoning it for new pursuits. A more significant contribution, though, was from yesterday's practice at his stadium. One minor but consequential detail was that the actions he took in-game yet outside of The Overdream were seared with regular fidelity into his Fleshbag memory. Thus, those periods could function as a point of intensive information transfer between his two selves, the Digital mentoring the Flesh.
"...easy to fix..."
On the topic of his two selves, he had to admit to the oddity in observing their divergence.
The experience had been giving Fleshbag Henry a peculiar feeling akin to watching your astronaut twin launching off on a spaceship to explore the endless cosmos while you remained planetside. There was blend of joy, sorrow, and a bit of jealousy.
Of course, the two weren't that separate. In certain respects, the Digital was a projection of his future, a maturer him who'd been given years to accumulate and ponder experiences, to come to grips with the demons of his youth. In others, though, it followed its own, unique trajectory.
"...democratic..."
Would He of The Flesh ever go mad in the snow? Unlikely. When Digital him had fought that Pelican Griffon to distract it from devouring the Flying Crab flock, he'd broken a Floating Leaf prohibition against interfering with nature. Digital Henry, over the decades that the flock had been nesting at his farm, had developed too sentimental an attachment to let them perish. In contrast, the He on whose flesh this November sun shone would not have made the same compromise, not for a group of bizarre winged crabs that existed only in a digital dream.
"...freedom, Henry..."
The discrepancy didn't alarm him, however. While he might not feel the attachment himself, he could at least trace out the process by which his digital elder had arrived at his decision. He wondered, though, whether there would come a day when he'd grown so distant that he struggled to understand him, too.
"...That's the boundless spirit of childhood..."
Bored with that rumination, he covertly used his e-assisstant to message his archnemesis, Silver Wolf.
'Has my favourite author left Chayoka yet? If not, a manuscript for my latest story should have been delivered to the bookstore for your pleasure.'
The sole perk of his enemy's intrusion into his writing circle was the ability to use her for feedback on his casual-targeted stories. He, having grown up on a fine cuisine of classical novels, had always been out of touch with the tastes of 2050's borderline-illiterate youth. Silver, conversely, was beloved by the plebs – she was essentially the alpha pleb. Thus, he could collect valuable insight through her on how his fictions would be received by duller minds.
"...All they know is fun, and..."
After his first session in The Overdream, he'd sent her book number one from a tetralogy he'd penned to enact revenge against her and the critics who'd trashed his previous writing as unrelatable, preposterous, and convoluted. While planning it, he'd invested multiple digital months studying the popular trends. The final product was the ultimate pleb-bait, a story that ticked every cliché box and fulfilled every unrealistic wish.
"...fun..."
'Be gentle in your criticisms,' he added smugly. 'It's a rough draft, cobbled together hastily over a week.'
But the story was already perfect – at least to the extent that pleb-targetted light fiction could be. Fleshbag Henry had skimmed it earlier, and the sappy, predictable paragraphs had given him the urge to gouge out his eyeballs. By his estimation, this indicated that it was precisely what the masses would love. The game system had confirmed by marking the story a miracle.
"...we are never too old for fun..."
His expression became dark, a storm of bitterness settling between his brows.
Saana's quality assessment system wasn't much better than the game's trash userbase. Of all his amazing creations during the first Overdream session, only that casual-orientated series had received the miracle designation. Did that make any sense? What's more, he'd been dealt a similar humiliation for the latest leg of his literary conquest, where he'd ventured out from the ancient Near East to the classical styles of South Asia, China, and the Mediterranean. Despite him ascending to god-level writing, his third session had yielded a measly five miracles, not even enough to break into Tier-6. Most obscenely, the system had totally overlooked his impeccable homages to early court-era Sanskrit epic poetry, the original language of which he'd painstakingly learned by fiddling with in-game transla—
The inner rant was cut several thousand words short by his vibrating e-assistant.
-Silver Wolf (Sydney, Australia): Are you busy?
'I'm hanging out with your sister,' he replied.
-Silver Wolf: What sis...you're going to send something rude, aren't you?
'Oh? But the familial resemblance is uncanny.'
Pretending to stretch, he zoomed his e-assistant's camera in on a wonky-eyed cow that'd been chewing grass 27 metres north-north-west. The next moment, a notification informed him that the delivery of the photo had failed due to him being blocked.
"Hah," he laughed, amused by his own joke. Maybe he should cancel his scheduled climb of comedy. What would be the purpose when he'd already ascended to hilarity's peak?
"...fun isn't a laughing matter, Henry. It's a human need, as vital as rest, love, nutrition..."
A minute later, his e-assistant began vibrating with a voice call from none other than the noob Shaman he'd just wrecked. It seemed that the wolf was a masochist, addicted to his verbal lashings.
"...although I'm very proud of you for expressing your emotions more—please, go ahead."
Henry shook his wrist to answer. "Yo, Silver, yesterday, while battling a gargantuan pelican-griffon hybrid, I was reminded of you."
No reply came, Silver Wolf not being in the mood to bite the bait of his childish joke set-up.
"Why? Because the creature was obese."
She decided to put it all on the table. "You're The Cripple."
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"The Invincible Cripple," he corrected. "Don't omit the invincible part; it's an important component of my legacy."
"How could you keep such a massive secret from me?"
"What do you mean?" Henry was confused. Although he had published his Cripple adventures under an anonymous pen name, Silver Wolf, as had been established earlier, was the editor of his pleb stories, his pleb whisperer. "Do you have Alzheimer's? You're the pleb whisperer for my underrated, death-defying saga."
"I thought it was fanfiction. It reads like really bad fanfiction."
He sighed in embarrassment. "The sloppy prose was unavoidable, Silver. It would have been irresponsible to assign too many hours to this casual writing side-conquest. Even my pettiness has its limits; there's only so far I'd go for revenge against my critics and you." Before acquiring The Cap.
"The plots are ludicrous."
"Saana is a fantasy game, you alphanoob. Once you progress beyond the starting zones, it becomes fantastical."
"My dungeon team is one of the highest rated in the world."
"Noob is relative. Everyone's a noob from my lofty vantage point."
Silver Wolf paused, realising she couldn't refute that line of condescending insults anymore. "If it is your vantage point, then why write in the third-person?"
He scowled as though a hairy bug had flown into his mouth. "Silver, you writer of swill, as I've tried to emphasise repeatedly, third-person is objectively the best POV. It has infinitely more narrative flexibility, allowing for greater irony, suspense, and characterisation. Now, an exception could be made for first-person stream of consciousness, but the experimental nature of this—"
She interrupted his rant with her own. "Whenever we've discussed editing, you also talk about 'The Cripple' in the third-person. In the last volume, I advocated reducing the number of Abyssal Demons in the run-up to the final conflict, remember? 210 pages was excessive. You ranted, though, about needing to establish that he would be fatigued afterwards so as to justify the subsequent use of The Elixir of Everytime against...you get the point."
"Against The Thumb of Al'kawnfatah, Seducer of Universes." Henry was growing tired of repeating himself. "Again, Silver, once the characters are committed to the page, they're no longer us, they're supposed to take on a unique identity of their own. Even when based on actual people, they must be freed by the author from the grey bondages of fact to flourish in the vibrant hyper-colouration of fiction. Hence, third-per—"
"You're The Cripple."
He yawned. "And?"
His e-assistant went silent. Silver Wolf was at a loss for how to continue without sounding crazy. Since the moon vanishing incident, she'd been re-reading his stories, and something about them had made her uneasy. She'd called to vent that feeling.
Cathy nudged him. "The Cripple?"
"The Invincible Cripple. It's ancient history," he smiled slyly, "a secret identity I'd assumed back in Saana II when I reigned as the undisputed greatest duellist of all time, famous for defeating my enemies with my wits and my tools. I was basically Batman."
"Uncle, what does cripple mean?" A niece of his had appeared with her shoelaces spilling out in a noodly-tangle.
"Brilliant question, Suzy," he praised, squatting to fix her laces. "'Cripple' means to debilitate. For example, if I were to snap these puny legs of yours, that would be crippling them."
"Your legs aren't broken. Why are you a cripple?"
"Why?" He considered answering the child honestly, but the truth would be too harsh for her innocent eardrums. "My innumerable fans gave me that epithet in acknowledgement of how every enemy I faced was crippled by fear. Unfortunately, my fanbase is international, so they were unaware of the proper English suffix for forming agent nouns. A better phrasing of the title would be The Invincible Crippler, the one who does the crippling, invincibly."
"I don't get it."
"Of course not, you can't even tie your own laces yet." He patted her head like a poodle. "Ask Uncle again in a decade, when age has made the walls of your heart a few millimetres thicker."
Cathy, who'd been weighing this revelation against Alex Wong's scheme to rope her friend into a duelling tournament, had an epiphany. "Is that why you never get eliminated in team practise?"
"Exactly. I'm super good, and have always been." Henry nodded. "Yes, the INVINCIBLE Cripple. Cathy, Suzy, Little Liu, it should go without saying, but this information is top secret, so lips sealed."
Latched to his leg in silence throughout this conversation had been a toddler wearing sunglasses and a cowboy hat. Henry'd brought Alex's mute son along to train him in the ways of friendship – a fun sidequest to further spice up this mundane petting zoo visit. The sunglasses and cowboy hat were a disguise to dodge the paparazzi that hounded his family; the clinging was him being a weird child.
When Suzy made to return to playing with the other kids, Henry had her take Little Liu for the next socialisation rep. For this one, he armed the mute child with a load of snacks dumped out of a daycare bag into Little Liu's cowboy hat. "Build relationships by fostering nutritional dependency. Fighting!"
While Little Liu was dragged away, Cathy suppressed her desire to lecture Henry for that atrociously age-inappropriate sequence. This concern had to be sidelined until the more pressing issue had been cleared from the air.
"So, Henry, tell me, the young lady who called earlier, what's her name?"
"That was my mortal enemy, authoress of accessible tales, Silver Wolf." He'd somehow used the word 'accessible' in a derogative sense.
"I'm still here."
"Accessible, NORMIE—"
"Don't be rude!" Cathy bent at the waist to speak into his e-assistant. "Hello, I loved the one about rescuing the village elder from the barbarians..."
While they exchanged banal introductions, Henry grumbled internally about the injustice of the world and gave Cathy's little brother Tim a juice box. If meritocracy existed, would Silver's beginner rescue quest have been rated higher than his own epic dive into The Plane of The Dying Suns to retrieve the planet's stolen core? Ridiculous.
"How cute!" Cathy clapped in joy. "What's your GPA? Do you have any familial history of mental illness?"
"What?"
Henry sighed. "She's interrogating you as a prospective match. Cathy, please, stop, that would be immoral. With the vast mental chasm separating her, scribbler of entry-level pop lit, and me, the artist at the end-game, it would be frankly exploitative of me. Like a doctor with three PhDs dating an invalid who'd received a brain transplant from an amoeba."
Silver had hung up part-way through his insult, so he sent a reminder to edit his manuscript to her e-mail. She'd already blocked him again on her friend's list.
Just she wait, though. If his archnemesis were buttpained now, imagine how she would react after bearing witness to his ultimate pleb-bait, which dominated hers in every accessible aspect.
Revenge would be his! Popular fiction – already conquered. Good game, extremely EZ.
Gloating in this way, he failed to dodge a punch to his shoulder.
Cathy was glaring. "Stop being so obnoxiously judgemental! You're going to die alone!"
"Wrong," he corrected. "With the filthy size of my financial portfolio, I can afford to be picky." He jogged after a nephew that'd been waddling around, scooped them up, placed them on a hay bale, and began changing their diaper. "No, Catherine, it's a matter of principle. There are certain acts that a moral man cannot commit under any circumstances. Would you date a role-player, for example?" He shuddered at a recollection of those black years. What had Digital Henry been thinking? "Impossible. Well, I feel the same way about noobs – as viscerally repulsed as I am by this soiled bum." He reached for the wet wipes. "Besides, I'm a busy guy, with a world to police, fields to master. Where in my packed schedule am I supposed to squeeze in dati..."
His voice trailed off at a sudden realisation. In the past, he'd never had the time for romance, but that was no longer true now that he was retired and owned a hyperbolic time chamber.
In the middle of the pen, Little Liu was being flocked by a herd of greedy children.
Henry cringed. "I forgot to factor in the gold-diggers!"
"You—"
"Not the kids." Henry frustratedly yeeted the dirty diaper into a waste bin. "I'm talking about my predicament, about the inevitable horde of gold-diggers who will soon be clawing for my fortune."
This was an unanticipated downside of his martial arts conquest, one that would manifest after becoming an international celebrity as both The Cripple and The Tyrant. Due to the nasty public reputation of The Tyrant, the only people who would be attracted to him would be unscrupulous, power-hungry gold-diggers. There may be exceptions, but he didn't have the ability spot them amongst the gold-digging crowd – his Social IQ was too low for a task of that difficulty.
The climb had blinded both Fleshbag and Digital Henry. Neither of them had ever once considered glancing beyond the mountains to the romantic ruin awaiting on the other side.
Should he cancel the martial arts conquest? It wasn't too late.
In this tense moment, when the fate of this saga balanced on a knife's edge, he was suddenly saved by the obvious solution.
"How could I have missed it? Hah." He laughed at his immaturity.
It'd been sitting there in plain sight all along, demanding of him but one simple requirement: that he shed his petty, irrational prejudice.
Yes, a global Bachelor-style tournament to sift through MILLIONS of gold-diggers for the ideal girlfriend!
With his wealth, his resources, his fame, and his smarts, he could no doubt attract a massive horde of gold-digging girlfriend applicants. In quantities so large, statistically, some of them would have to be exceptional, the sum of their other qualities dwarfing that single moral failing. The winner would be a one in a million gold-digger, a gold-digger with an otherwise golden heart.
The more he meditated on this idea, the more he was convinced of its genius. His guild's infrastructure could be used for organising the event - they had stadiums in every Starting Zone, connections with advertisers, a talent agency for celebrity hosts. By delegating the early stages of selection to judges, he could minimise his personal workload to nothing. In fact, by scouting love through a competition, he would save months or even years that ordinary folk had to squander vetting their partners through the process of courtship.
There was literally nothing wrong with this plan.
When he bounced the idea off Cathy, she clutched the cross around her neck and began moralising about violent video games and misogyny.
"That..."
But he ignored every word of the sermon because he understood that his view would be incomprehensible to her. Not everyone could possess a heart as charitable as himself, a humanist. Let the petty people toss their stones with scorn; his hand would stay motionless. Gold-digger? Who was he to speak such venom, to reduce a fellow human being—a fellow wanderer lost in this unfathomably complex universe—to this single facet? Was he without sin? Definitely not. No, he would gaze beyond the skin to see the beautiful whole. His judges would size-up the totality of each contestant's soul, which, in all of us, is composed of parts both debase and divine.
Little Liu, being mobbed by a pack of candy-diggers, gave Henry an uncomfortable glance until the uncle flicked a thumbs up reassuring the child of the golden future shimmering ahead of them both.
"That's the spirit, Little Liu! Do not be ashamed to utilise your advantages! This is charity, and you are a humanist, too!"
Indeed, if there was one lesson that Henry'd learned in his 17 long years of life, it was that money could solve any issue. So why fault another for seeking it?
Several real-life hours later. In-game. Suchi, The New Suchi Arena.
At the 3x3 arena that'd been reserved for auction, several fandoms had gathered to cheer for their heroes who'd won a slot today.
On the sub-map Hamlet, London Tremor, intern for Channel 5 News, was backing away along the precarious roof of a church. From the ground, where it'd been tossed down moments earlier, his Grey Wolf Scotia barked in frustration.
London Tremor had taken a defensive posture, abandoning his primary weapon of a bow for a shield and a spear. His teenage opponent, meanwhile, strolled towards him with the lazy, disarming swagger of a professional scammer, a knife in their right hand, their gauntleted-left storing five Flora charges to spell-shield any attacks while closing in.
With his Grey Wolf effectively eliminated, London Tremor saw his loss speeding towards him. Skill difference aside, he hadn't practised enough close-combat, his Beast Tamer class lacking a melee Basic Attack aside from
Both his skin and his Grey Wolf's glowed a primordial brown. This signalled the activation of
He needed to stretch out the defeat. Otherwise, this duel would make for a disappointing opening to his upcoming gonzo article on Suchi's Tier-0 duelling scene.
He'd chosen his teenage opponent, the moneybags who'd rented this 3x3 arena, for the article's focal point.
The news of them tossing out fat-stacks of gold at last night's Pitfighting Event to insult Artemis had spread throughout Suchi's newbie playerbase. Then, there was the staggering number of martial arts under their belt – 20 by London Tremor's current count, with another 7 being added today.
London Tremor felt he was being attracted to a magnet for mystery, and where there was mystery, there was a story.
Already, he'd unearthed gold by digging into the teen's background. The username Henry Flower turned up in his news station's database as a member of Flaming Sun. A Scholar with a speciality in languages, they operated a nameless book-cafe in The Company's World Palace. This establishment was notable both for paying top-dollar for new Tomes of Rapid Language Absorption and for being the base of Stratford-on-Saana, the game's premier writing circle - more mysteries.
Whichever investigator had created the profile had rated the teen as a low-ranking Flaming Sun member. The rationale had been that their contribution to the guild was insufficient. Aside from rare, sporadic trips to ancient ruins for translation work, they did nothing but sit in their book-cafe. The investigator had guessed that the teen had obtained their membership through nepotism or bribery.
But London Tremor now knew this assessment to be dead wrong. From what he'd witnessed, the teen could not be a small fry. They seemed to be a secret weapon, someone who'd been evading public attention to conduct a global survey of Saana's martial arts. For what purpose? He—
"This issue that's distracting you," the teen addressed him in an ominous tone, "let it sleep for now."
London Tremor startled. Did this guy just read his—his leg collapsed under him as his foot slipped on a broken roof tile.
An instant later, the teen was snickering inside his shield, their eyes glowing with bullet-time, their left fist jabbing him in the jaw of his helmet.
London Tremor's head snapped back.
He felt a foreign object inside his mouth, and a sticky warmth flowed down his throat where the knife had entered.
"London Tremor eliminated! HF wins! -3, 0."