Suchi, the open savannah, a hot morning.

The Hotferver Commemorative Marathon!

Monsters were fleeing from a stampede of this land's deadliest herd, the plains having been overrun by thousands of Villagers. Dressed in skimpy loincloths, they stomped up clouds of clay dust, and the red particles were glued and caked to their hides by their pouring sweat.

Never was there a moment to rest. Any runner who dared to hide from the sun in the shade of the rare tree was heaved to their feet by their comrades and goaded on with taunts and Village chants. To linger was to be apprehended by the 'chasers'. These consisted of The Empire's veteran Earthfriends, Village Heads and Returnees, who stalked in the rear shapeshifted into the local beasts, goring the slowest runners on elephant tusks and popping their skulls between cheetah fangs. The stragglers fought back, but, out-levelled and armed with only blunt baby-lion-tooth daggers, they all soon fell prey, their Village bandanas being stripped from their brutalised bodies.

What was the meaning behind this madness?

In this zone's opening months, during the period of severe drought, the Suchi gangs had ordered scouts to brave the monster-infested savannah for sources of water with which to quench their thirst. After countless failed expeditions, a Vietnamese player by the name of Hotferver discovered one of the first watering holes, 40-kilometres north-east of Suchi City. In time, many fierce gang wars would be waged over this spot, Hotferver Lake; legend had it that, following one particularly bloody battle, its water level rose an index-finger higher.

Then, years later, during The Empire's campaign to unify The Slums, the hero Hotferver, whose courage had conquered the thirst (for a few gangs), was tragically struck down in real-life. Having accidentally gotten his girlfriend pregnant, he was forced to quit and sell his VR unit for baby supplies.

Today, the memory of this fallen soul, one of Suchi's most stubborn sons, was celebrated monthly through the recreation of his monster-riddled race through the plains. The stampede was headed to Lake Hotferver, where the evening's Plains Day community event would be hosted.

Henry was observing the marathon from a safe distance, seated on the roof of a wagon pulled by a train of eight camels.

Team practice had come and gone; so too had Silver's introduction. Despite her minimum-wage heliophobic guard disguise, she had integrated without much hassle, his school friends and the other inhabitants of The Slums being accustomed to freaks. On Henry's end, the alpha pleb's arrival was unremarkable. In life, there are special, cherished friends with whim whom one instantly picks up the old threads no matter how long apart, even almost a century. The same is true for enemies.

As for this marathon—which reduced The Empire's expenditure on transporting the Villagers to the Plains Day camping grounds—he'd allowed himself to be eliminated at the start. Engineering a defeat convincing enough to fool Cathy had been a breeze. One of the chasers, a spy, had jumped at the opportunity to take down him, The Tyrant.

Thus, while Henry's pals panted and huffed and puffed, he basked in the warm bliss of retirement.

Presently, he was engaged in the deliciously frivolous activity of sketching. From his vantage point atop his wagon, he'd been drawing the contestants racing through this bleak countryside, capturing them as he had the beasts of his Overdream world during his Floating Leaf scouting. His current subject was Justinian The Roleplay-Addicted, who wore a heroically mulish expression as he struggled under the weight and heat of his golden armour.

"There's a jarring tonal shift in this passage about the dilapidated tent," said Silver.

She was riding on the roof, too, still engrossed by his ultimate pleb-bait.

"It's a point of emphasis for Low-Tier Patricians and above. The corresponding plotline can't be understood by you High-Tier Plebs."

"Stuck-up twat..." she mumbled, although her eyes continued to be glued to the page, "pretentious scales..."

Henry chuckled condescendingly. Although he teased the alpha pleb, according to The Official 7-Point Pleb-Patrician Grading Scale he'd designed while researching for the ultimate pleb-bait, she was actually a Rank 5 Mid-Tier Patrician in literature.

"Big bro, can you draw one of me?" asked Rose, her face uncomfortably close to his notebook, watching him sketch in fascination.

She had been wedged between them, also sketching while practising Floating Leaf's technique of Stretching. Henry'd assigned her this task to quieten her down because whatever persona she'd chosen was a bit obnoxious, constantly pestering him for his attention.

"No," he replied charitably. "Retrain your focus."

Having Rose imitate him, he directed her through a progressive magnification Stretch, drawing a patch of grass, a single plant, a single blade, a beetle hidden under a bend of the blade, a grain of pollen on the tip of the beetle's antenna...

Due to this annoying company, Henry had to pencil his sketches with amateur lines that hid his digitally-acquired skills. As with dulling his combat abilities via the Supreme Poison, this was a necessity because only a couple real-life weeks could have feasibly been allocated to Floating Leaf if he were to also learn 83 other styles. That period was too short for him to have advanced far in the drawing climb.

With that said, 'amateur' was relative. A noob might mistake him for having talent because his freak information processing ability and mountains of climbing experience had always given him a studying speed advantage. For example, by his 10th birthday, he'd mastered 14 different fields to a semi-professional standard, i.e. Rank 4 Low-Tier Patrician, which was what Henry considered an amateur. By age 13, having deduced the universal method to all climbs, he could achieve a respectable professional standard, or Rank 5 Mid-Tier Patrician, in any non-athletic domain within two months. And if one scrutinised the timelines of his Saana adventures, they'd learn that he'd become The Cripple and The Tyrant—the world's greatest duellist and commander respectively, a.k.a. Rank 7 Ultrapatrician—within the same year.

Having obtained The Cap, he'd pushed beyond Rank 7, beyond humanity's limit, in every individual martial art. In public, though, he downgraded his performance to be no higher than Rank 4 in each style - impressive but not, if one were a climb-addicted hypergenius, impossible.

Further proof of his inhuman smarts, you demand? Well, if you insist. While sketching, discussing his pleb-bait edits with Silver, instructing Rose, and gloating, he'd been juggling a fifth task: writing a story in his Mental Library.

The inspiration had sprung from an odd spectacle at the start of the marathon. While sardine-packed with his buddies, he'd glimpsed a young trio in their early 20s: a bawling girl, a boy playing a bone-flute in a failed attempt to cheer her up, and a third boy wanting to offer a similar comfort but frozen in indecision. "I'm not going back!" she'd been yelling, "He's crazy if he thinks I will!" Her words, ringing falsely, were evidently meant for a lover who was neither of the two by her side. With the backdrop of the indifferent crowd, everyone dressed in their loincloths, including the trio, Henry'd been moved by a strange mixture of intimacy and isolation and absurdity. He'd tried to think of a sensible explanation for the confounding scene. In his search, he conjured many backstories between the weeping girl and her companions. A love quadrilateral...two boys and a third in the background...all of them in their prime, expending their youthful manliness in pursuit of one lady…a simple tragedy about love blinding people and tricking them into investing their energy into low-yield endeavours…

Usually, Henry wouldn't have spared any further thought on this trash plot. However, perhaps due to Silver's presence invoking his competitive drive, he'd suddenly been claimed by the artistic impulse, the obligation to take the ephemeral thumping of his heart and chisel it into marble. Hence, he'd ditched his mates and quit the race to write.

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How sublime was this, the laid-back life of the retiree? Henry mused, transposing Justinian's heroic haggardness into a tear-jerking stanza for the character based off the bawling girl.

Through Nomad Sabre's emotional control techniques, he'd sustained his initial intimate-isolated-absurd sentiment even now, and, with the gusto of a Tulipsinger, the lines flowed out of him with the resistanceless regularity of waves lapping against a shoreline. Since he'd been reading Tang Dynasty literature as of late, he was composing in the style of the Mountains and Streams school of the painter-poet Wang Wei, adapting its terse, bucolic verse to extended prose-poetry. Paired with his sketches, it—

Although they were less than an hour's ride from Suchi, because of the region's aridness and the NPCs being limited in their daily travels due to a shorter sleep-wake cycle, the land they passed was quickly returned to nature. The chants of the runners echoed unanswered as they crossed gorges carved by dried-up streams. Herds of wildebeest and cranky loner rhinos kept miles of grass between them, and, atop buttes that jutted out of the barren plains, eagles eyed the smallest and sickliest runners.

Inside the mouth of a distant cave, Henry spotted the pinkish-rose eyes of a giant scorpion that someone careless had left alive with Sentient Bloodlust, and fresh drag marks of a giraffe it'd hauled inside its den.

Lady Kittykat's father broke from the pack of Byzantines to run towards Henry's wagon. In his arms, he carried his daughter who, beet-red, was on the verge of passing out from heatstroke.

"Big Bro, mind if she rests with you guys?"

"Release me, Sir Dad..." The child begged. "The holy warriors needs our courage…the monsters that stalk the desert…"

Henry trained his literary serenity upon the pair. "And what would you have me lend next? My gold? My labour? My life? It's not my responsibility to clean up after you negligently permitted a minor to participate in an age-inappropriate marath—"

He was interrupted by a book thumping down on the crown of his head.

"Ignore him; he's joking." Silver climbed down onto the bed of the wagon and extended her arms to receive the exhausted kid. "Up you come."

Lady Kittykat resisted. "All hands are needed…march onwards to the promised land…onwards, Byzantium…onwards!"

"You can guard the supplies with me."

"OK."

Henry, who hadn't been joking, grumbled while the child was being stored in his wagon, his private property. The average ignoramus could be forgiven, but the alpha pleb was aware of his identity: The Invincible Cripple, greatest duellist of all time, and author of the ultimate pleb bait, which would soon become a best seller. How many records must he shatter before earning a modicum of respect?

"Big bro, it's no hassle," Rose offered to kill her. "The girls will string a leash of steel around her neck and end her bark forever."

This wasn't the first time this real-life evening she'd offered to order a hit.

"Don't spoil my mood further." Henry, inhaling and directing Rose to mirror him, focused his gaze upon the sun-swept savannah. "The leaf heeds not the city, nor the creatures in its trees of stone." He shamelessly copy-pasted the child assistance episode into his story, having the flute-playing beta orbiter demonstrate his sociability by carrying an ill toddler five kilometres. "See only the wild, feel only the wild, think only the wild, be only the wild..."

Many of the landforms he sketched were familiar without him having ever seen them directly.

In the game's previous instalment, this region had been a key territory during The War of Heavenly Mountains against his main rival, the borders of whose former empire wasn't far from here. They were presently 216 kilometres south-west of what'd been a major enemy port, near the modern city-state of Thiimina.

Back then, the climate had been less arid. The Parani Barrens had been a vast plain fertile enough to support fields that touched the horizons. At an unknown point between then and now, things had changed. The blood-coloured clay was a new addition, an alien sediment a few metres deep that'd been laid across the continent's bottom half like a crimson skirt, covering the scars of war but leaving visible the outlines of the fractured toes and broken knees.

There was some excitement around mid-day when a quarter of the marathoners were killed by a cloud of wasps. Henry, still in story-writing mode, converted this incident into a climactic scene in which, after a friend picked up during the journey's bandana had been stolen by a group of villainous chasers, the trio coordinated with an alliance of Villages to seek revenge. To overcome their level and gear disadvantage, hundreds of them swarmed each chaser, stinging away with their grotesque baby-lion fangs. During the bloodshed, the indecisive beta orbiter pushed beyond his self-imposed limits. As the character danced with abandon to the frantic drumbeat of the world, he momentarily forgot his troubles, the unnamed 'he' who owned his crush's heart; love, he fancied, perhaps that was also possible for someone like himself.

In the afternoon, the Byzantines were blocked by a rival village while crossing an earthen bridge over a canyon. The chasers caught them, they fought, and they lost. The Byzantines took their elimination in stride, and, after a rousing speech by the golden Crusader, they continued the rest of the run at a relaxed jog.

For a late lunch, they broke bread with a hermit residing on a hill that had once been a fortress, Brian ornamenting the meal with a pile of crabs he'd harvested that morning. Walker ate with Team Friendship Forever, using this as an excuse to probe Silver's identity.

Lake Hotferver.

With the setting sun on their backs, the runners were welcomed to their journey's end by the revelry sounding from a camping grounds.

Thousands of tents of fur and cloth dyed in Village colours were pitched on the plains, and the Villagers who'd preceded wandered about enjoying the festivities of horse riding, sculpting, weaving, and livestock exhibitions. Bodies of colossal monsters peaked over the crest of the tents, the carcasses having been dragged in by hunting parties for rendering. Supervising the site was a brand-new tower of fortified clay, down the walls of which hung banners of blue and white. 'Lake' Hotferver in the centre of all this made for a pitiful sight, a watering hole so shallow that a child could wade to its centre without wetting their knees.

Henry, glancing at the watering hole, saw the actual lake it'd once been. Few now would know or care, but, in Saana II, the Vietnamese player Hotferver after whom this race was named had led a small guild with a garrison on the lake's shore. It was a sad attempt to recapture the site that'd obsessively driven him to run his marathon. The guy couldn't have been happy with the puddle that'd awaited him. His forces had surrendered to Henry's without resistance.

At the finish line, the delirious runners were being awarded beer and Slum Points - despite the latter's loss in monetary value, they continued to serve the arbitrary function of ranking Villages.

Justinian, fourth-fifths dead, gathered Byzantium for a celebratory speech.

He needed both arms to point his zweihander at the camping grounds. "After crossing the desert of the demons, behold, holy warriors, the promised oasis! I notice in some hearts a wrath towards the Lord for our defeat. Pour this mistaken fury onto the soil, and let it evaporate and be forgotten like your daily sweat. By his grace and wisdom, he has granted each of you the superior gift. Each other! Tonight, we rejoice as victors. Through honest cheer, we will fire solid these bonds of strife and clay, that they may hold us tight together in the dark hours ahead." The Crusader tried to direct a troubled gaze at the sunset but, in his exhaustion, the expression was closer to someone checking the wetness of a fart. "He watches us from the shadows, waiting for the light to flicker and to allow the unseen infiltration of His agents. Be on guard, Knights of Byzantium, keep raised your shields of protection, be temperate this eve in your imbibition of hoppy elixirs…"

On top of the wagon, Silver poked Henry. "Does the roleplayer guy ever stop?"

"Nope."

"Insane."

"Mhm."

Henry sketched a recumbent Villager being goaded by a veteran ("Is that you, Hotferver? I almost mistook you for a corpse. Where's your spirit, my man?"). This transformed into the conclusion of his story's first section, the trio splayed out on their backs, their breaths panting, the thrill of their journey slowly cooling as it dissipated into the soil beneath. In the second section, with the changes that'd been wrought on them by the run, they would now confront the old problem, the ominous 'he' who'd yet to show his face and who waited for them inside the camping grounds.

Meanwhile at The Living Fortress, The Southern Wind Hypnobirthing Studio.

All around the studio, expectant tornado mothers and their husbands were performing a breathing exercise. Their internal breezes span at a meditative pace while circulating incense smoke.

An instructor tornado rustled a wind-chime. "Mums and dads, let's descend from Eye of The Storm back to Summer Stillness. Three, two, one. Good...good work. We'll take a five-minute rest before the next set."

Amongst the parents waking from their trance, a bubble-gum pink tornado was stretching while the azure wind-palms of her husband cradled her wind-belly.

"Honey," Princess Pateela nudged him. "You can wake up."

"nnnnngGGUGH!" he replied. "nnnnngGGUGH!"

Karnon was snoring.

In sleep, he had lowered the psychological guards maintained during this arduous transition to normal family life. The polished shoes and turtleneck sweaters spinning inside him were carried on a limp, miserable breeze with barely the strength to stir the hairs of a horse.

At the tired state of her laughter-loving husband, the Princess felt a sudden a pang of guilt. She was like the poacher who's caged a songbird and regrets the sorrowful note that infects its once uplifting melodies. To tame some creatures was to violate both them and oneself. Maybe she'd been mistaken.

"Fine," she acquiesced, nudging him again. "You can stop pretending. One prank, but make it a small one."

The mischievous cackle, the idiotic quip she expected to follow didn't. Instead, upon her touching him, his azure winds came untangled. The clothes that'd been spinning inside dropped and clattered off the floor.

A fake tornado, to mask his escape while she meditated...that was why he'd agreed to attend the class...

The Princess—her bubble-gum pink winds shifting to ruby-red as the attention of the other couples was drawn to her, abandoned—stared down at a snoring toad.

"nnnnngGGUGH!"