Suchi, late at night.

Down a silent roadway, past the shacks of sleeping Slumdwellers, a horse-drawn wagon was rolling along at an inconspicuous pace. Its cargo was a mound of low-grade Tier-0 ores, which would have been the shabbiest sight if not for the young 'man' in the driver's seat.

"Today, the reins of this horse," Donkey Bro proclaimed to no one in particular. "Tomorrow, the reins of The Universe!"

-Battered Daisy: Clear.

-Donkey Bro: Roger.

While Donkey Bro helmed this delivery quest, the Offworlders of Team Friendship Forever, his minions, were scrambling around the perimeter, scouting for raids from the local bandits. Obviously, Donkey Bro could use to defeat any foe, but knowing which direction to target his destruction would make their annihilation that much quicker.

-Henry Flower: Missed one, Dan.

-Danontherightwing: My bad!

-Donkey Bro: You are forgiven. Continue your mission.

A few metres ahead of the wagon, the handsome Offworlder, Donkey Bro's lead minion, had been ranging ahead, scanning the ground for potholes. Behind him now, a neon disc lit up to mark one with enough depth to break the wagon's wheel.

As Donkey Bro expertly dodged the obstacle, he glanced back at the figure who'd created the marking.

In the wagon's flatbed, the ill-tempered, ugly Offworlder was crouching, a trail of Landworker energy channelling from his seashell necklace to the ore mound.

The Offworlder being behind Donkey Bro invoked memories of the day they'd met, when Donkey Bro, prior to the plague of consciousness, had watched the Offworlder eviscerate his former master and hack off his head with an axe. Their positions this night mirrored theirs back then, except now Donkey Bro was in the vulnerable seat of the dead cultist.

But Donkey Bro felt less queasy than feebler souls would in this situation. In addition to his ever-growing strength, he'd discovered after tolerating so much of the ugly Offworlder's unpleasant company in the mad monkey's jungle that they were quite soft-hearted. Of course, this trait merely accentuated their ugliness. Human or ungulate, a male should be as merciless as the world perpetually assailing them from all its cruel fronts.

"Hah!" Donkey Bro scoffed, the sound less satisfyingly biting than when produced with his donkey mouth. "Wipe your face clean of that dirty grin!"

"Quiet."

"Hah! On what grounds dare you to command me?! Because you freed me of the slavemaster's yoke? Neigh. All you removed was the joyful mural of unthought that'd masked these grey prison walls!"

"The shadow guy was one the one who fed you the funky apple."

"Existence, hideous existence!"

"Just shut up and drive."

Donkey Bro refused. "Too long have my kind remained mute while men brayed! I am The Voice that utters our agony! Only the thread of death can sew shut these truth-speaking lips."

-Brain Flea: Three Tier-2 NPCs, Fighter, Shaman, Arcanist.

-Henry Flower: Did they spot you?

-Brain Flea: I am the stalker in the night, seen when I want to be seen.

-Donkey Bro: Take them out!

-Henry Flower: Brian, withdraw. Dan, Donkey, left at the next alleyway. Everyone else, rotate.

-Donkey Bro: You dare override me! I, The Voice of Donkeykind, do not suffer orders—

You have been kicked from Team Turbonoobs.

Donkey Bro snapped around and threatened with a -engorged fist. "Insolent bald-skinned brat!"

Henry shrugged. "I warned you'd get the boot if you continued clogging up the comms. You'll get reinvited after turning left."

"Bravo, human! How courageous you are! So snidely you dangle this carrot before me, unaware that I'm about to claim that reckless hand, too! When the sun dawns on my day of reckoning, it will be your mocking..."

Despite his grumbling, Donkey Bro complied.

A gem of wisdom for the up-and-coming donkeys: never acquiesce without a struggle. Give the humans a hoof, and they'll take the whole leg.

A short while later, they reached their destination, a random shack. A Slumdweller, peeking through the window, emerged and led the wagon around the back, Donkey Bro advising his minions to disperse around the shack's perimeter to continue monitoring for danger.

The backyard was a dumpster heap, with the fence rotting and a lingering stench of cow urine. Donkey Bro would have commented on the sorry state, but, out of a sense of mutual shabbiness, he remained polite.

"A lovely yard! Add a bush of geraniums, and you'd have a garden fit to receive me after my Ascension to the stars!"

The Slumdweller gave him a puzzled frown.

"Ignore his delusions."

"Hah! The delusion is the false sense of security with which you wag that..."

Henry shook his head, having had enough of the donkey to last him another two decades. Telekinetically floating away the ores, he revealed a battery of Arcane Compressors that'd been buried in the flatbed beneath. From these, he ejected a pile of ores the colour of blueberry jam. The Metalworker tested a few samples, then nodded in approval.

Delivery #6810 complete. Visit any representative of The Empire to collect your reward of 427 Slum Points.

The Slum's edge, where the shacks met with the sun-scorched savannah, under the shade of a lone acacia.

A train of hunters were hauling a harvest of living monsters. Rhinoceros on carts screamed to be untied. Meercats hissed and gnawed at the bars of their cages. Pig-sized hamsters scratched at the shoulders of their captors, who happened to be mostly men.

The hunters were converging upon a single spot, a beacon of beauty and wrath, their goddess Artemis.

With a team of healers spamming Stamina-restoration abilities on her and a new bow that'd been commissioned by a follower to replace the one destroyed yesterday, she was rapidly firing off her death-bringing arrows at the catch being laid as offerings at her divine feet.

One shot gifted the long sleep through the brow of a porcupine with iridescent quills.

You have slain 7 out of 12 Glass-Bristle Porcupines for Faradt Gazda's Farm Cleanup.

Another entered the chest of a dog-sized lizard, which'd been bleeding out in a cage after its hunter had prepped it by lowering its HP to zero.

You have slain 1 out of 5 Western Kaymo Monitors for Gyik's Taxidermy.

Artemis killed and killed, racking up quest after quest. She never stopped, never missed, never lost focus on the larger target locked in her huntress's gaze.

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Beside her was a research team tasked with organising the transportation of the kills to their quest givers and devising efficient methods for boosting their goddess's Slum Points. One of them shuffled up from behind her with a honeydew-almond smoothie he'd mixed himself, pausing to catch his breath at the radiant flow of her tresses and the sweat running down her supple triceps.

"My goddess," he bleated, "those trash brats are wallowing at the bottom of the rankings. They cannot dream of matching your Olympian heights. Please, relax, take a break with this smoothie."

Artemis and Loki snorted in derision.

These brownnosers underestimated their enemy's capabilities. It wasn't their fault, though, for they had merely witnessed The Tyrant's performance in the simpleton's grounds of the duelling arena. His true terror could only be fathomed by one like Loki, one who'd commanded an opposing army and lost in disgrace.

The first harsh lesson one is given against The Tyrant is never to trust his lies.

An opposing company breaks and flees from their bunker, so one orders their troops to seize it. By doing so, one has fallen for the lie. One's soldiers are decimated because the bunker's posterior was built of fake material. So the next second, one halts the advance of another platoon about to repeat this error elsewhere on the battlefield. They stop, confused by one's indecision, the grumble beneath. An earthquake spell shatters the ground under them, dropping them to their demise. The lie had a second layer, one laments, failing to realise that this realisation is itself the third layer of seven. The remainder, though, will have to be observed as a ghost because, during the distraction of this thought, a kamikaze Cutthroat has sliced one's jugular.

Afterwards, stripped of rank and army, one reviews the loss in confusion. What kind of madman rests the fate of a battle on such an elaborate trick? Is The Tyrant unaware that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, that it is folly to sail a predetermined course through the capricious winds of war? Then one learns astoundingly that, in fact, there was no planning. That lie of The Tyrant's had been improvised - formulated in seconds and enacted in seconds. And, to one's horror, one recognises now the dozen earlier lies he'd presented but refrained from pulling the trigger on because one'd missed the bait.

Plunging deeper into the rabbit hole, one learns again that, no, some of those 'fruitless' lies had served their purpose, they'd nudged one into the position to fall for the final layer of what had actually been an eight-layered lie.

And, if one has the obsession to dive further, then The Tyrant would eventually show them the other eight-layered lies he'd had in play, and the nine-layered lies, and the ten-layered lies...

Loki would never slacken his efforts, would never succumb to another of The Tyrant's deceits.

In fact, quite the opposite. In this battlefield, where one lied not with soldiers but with gestures, personalities, motives, and backstories, it was he who'd woven the multi-layered deception. His adversary might have been permitted to peer through the layer of Artemis, but what of the second, the layer of Loki?

And what of the third?

Calm, everything unfolding according to his designs, he made Loki make Artemis spin around with irritation and fire an arrow, which shattered the smoothie glass before slipping into the nostril of a sand-coloured honey badger behind.

You have slain 4 out of 33 Suchanese Ratels for Pest Control #172.

"Have I made myself clear?!" Artemis shrieked, Loki's excessive arrogance bleeding through.

The beta orbiter's eyes sparkled. "Crystal, my queen!"

A Slum street, the smoke of a burning shack snaking across an amber, evening sky.

Diamond-Headed Viper Infestation complete. Visit any representative of The Empire to collect your reward of 3142 Slum Points.

The roadway was carpeted with a mass of thousands of Diamond-Headed Vipers. They were slithering away from a human chasing from behind, who, despite their shabbily-short legs, emitted a frightening, unapproachable aura of a much stronger entity. Whenever a gap in the shacks appeared on either side down which they might escape, they glimpsed other terrifying humans. And so they slithered forward.

-Battered Daisy: In position.

-Henry Flower: Donkey, 40 centimetres closer. Dan, you're almost up.

-Danontherightwing: I'm ready, Big Bro!

-Henry Flower: 5...4...3...

Amongst the Team Friendship Forever members herding these snakes, Handsome Dan had been running along a side-street, blocking off their escape. Guiding him was a neon-green line that Big Bro had drawn on the road using people magic. Big Bro'd been watching from the roofs.

As the countdown neared its end, Dan concentrated.

It was crunch time, bros. The turkey was about to be offloaded to him for the game-ending snap. Fumble this pass, and he'd be benchside for the rest of the season!

-Henry Flower: 1...go, Dan.

Now!

Dan broke into a sprint, his footsteps sticking exactly to the neon-line. When he reached a circle drawn in his path, without interrupting his pace, he glanced back, a ball of lightning striking him between the shoulders.

There was no danger. This was a buff, , which Big Bro had cast with a magic book.

The lightning ball expanded and spread around his body like a drop of water enveloping a pebble. A moment later, the surface of his acne-less skin was crackling with lightning bolts.

The neon-line curved around a corner up ahead. Dan skidded around it, the action kicking up a cloud of dust that was ignited by the thunder, then he charged down a narrow alleyway between two shacks.

-Henry Flower: Donkey, slow your pace.

-Donkey Bro: I have already debased myself by lowering—

-Henry Flower: Slower than that.

Dan, emerging out the other side of the alley, found himself confronting a huge wall of snakes with Donkey Bro herding them from behind! The sight of them almost made him poop his undies!

But the snakes were equally afraid. Terrified by his thunder shield, they refused to come closer. With Fashionable Bro standing on a roof to the snake's left, they couldn't go that way either, so instead they went down an alleyway leading to the street where Dan had been before but wasn't anymore. As they poured into the alleyway, its narrow confines caused the snakes to bunch up like spaghetti squeezing back into a can.

-Henry Flower: Abby, reveal. Andy, . Rose, ready up.

As the tail of the last snake slithered around the corner, Fashionable Bro's drum screeched through the air after them.

Boom!

Dan, the turkey still hot, raced into the alleyway.

There, Ninja Sis was standing in front of the snakes, her job having been to block their path by popping out of her invisibility. She was safe, though. Fashionable Bro had exploded his drum to give the snakes a 'stun effect'. They were frozen like a bunch of tots playing red-light, green-light.

Dan skirted around the stunned snakes to catch up with Ninja Sis while she summoned a ladder out of her Spatial Bracelet.

-Henry Flower: Rose, slam.

Suddenly, in the sky above Dan, a gorilla appeared, diving from the roof feet-first into the snake pile!

This actually wasn't a gorilla. It was Silent Sis.

Silent Sis landed in the middle of the snakes, punching the ground! Womp! At the point of impact, a sheet of wood that Big Bro had buried under the dirt broke in two. Boom! The whole structure collapsed in on itself, dropping Silent Sis and the snakes into the pit dug below!

-Henry Flower: Dan, .

-Danontherightwing: On it, Big Bro!

Dan, executing the last-second sneak side-step into the try-zone, sprinted over to Ninja Sis. Activating , his hand swelled to triple its size, big enough to wrap around a whole watermelon. With his inflated fingers, he grabbed the ladder that Ninja Sis had dropped into the pit and heaved it upwards with every ounce of might, a thousand-foot pass, from the right-wing all the way to the left.

The ladder went soaring!

Mission accomplished! The ball planted firmly on the grass!

-Henry Flower: Damn it, Dan! Quick, grab Abby's ankles and lower her into the pit. Cathy, her against the lightning damage.

Dan, wondering the cause of Big Bro's anger, span around, before spotting Silent Sis in her human form, staring up expressionlessly from the bottom of the snake pit.

-Zhangmei33: They aren't going to make it.

-Henry Flower: Since you're the newest member of Team Friendship Forever, you must sacrifice yourself for your seniors' training.

Dan clutched his thick hair. "I botched the pass!"

He'd thrown the ladder before she'd grabbed it!

-Zhangmei33: I'm climbing out.

-Henry Flower: Your therapist would diagnose this level of selfishness as antisocial. Be a team player.

-Zhangmei33: She wouldn't.

Before Dan could carry out Big Bro's plan, Silent Sis popped up beside him and sheathed two daggers in her belt. The pit behind her sang with a symphony of hisses as the stun faded.

Dan's eyebrows rocketing upwards, he leaned over the edge of the pit, all the snakes' heads fixing on him in a scary way.

The wall below was marked with a trail of tiny holes.

Silent Sis had used her daggers like pickaxes!

"Sick!"

"Hah! A simple feat!"

"As if!" Dan smiled at Donkey Bro's boast. Donkey Bro hadn't even owned hands until yesterday, so he still struggled with a knife and fork. This ninja stuff would be totally impossible for him.

-august rode in: H., how to deliver the slithering shipment?

-Henry Flower: You're behind the Carcassworker's shack.

Dan gasped, this day barraging him with one awe-inspiring shock after another.

-Danontherightwing: Did you plan that from the start, Big Bro? Two quests AT ONCE?!

-Henry Flower: Yeah, I'm kind of a genius at questing.

-Danontherightwing: Awesome!

"When the rein returns to my grip, I will synchronise ten quests."

-Henry Flower: Brian, say hello.

Behind Dan, Deadpan Bro knocked on the door of the shack, which was soon answered by an old grandma with an apron full of tools.

The number of snakes of astounded her. "Nerin's spear, where'd you find a year's supply of Diamies?"

Diamonds for Kigyono #1 complete. Visit any representative of The Empire to collect your reward of 726 Slum Points.

Diamonds for Kigyono #2 complete. Visit any representative of The Empire to collect your reward of 726 Slum Points.

Diamonds for Kigyono #3 complete. Visit any representative of The Empire to collect your reward of 726 Slum Points.

...

-Henry Flower: Move out, TFF. We've got potholes to fill in the County of Jakarta. Go South-West-West, 82. I've discovered a shortcut. Also, a band of thieves are roaming about, so be on guard and approach in formation.

Dan, nodding seriously like an action hero who'd heard a call for help, dashed out of the alleyway. "Last one there's a punctured ball!"

In the streets, Big Bro had drawn new neon lines for them to follow – Dan's was still green. They led to a nearby Village; on top of its wall, super high up, Big Bro was dangling down a rope for them to climb.

-Henry Flower: Dan, you're a tank, stay near Cathy to guard her.

-Danontherightwing: Right! Sorry, Big Bro!