Lake Hotferver. The Pain on The Plains Tournament for The Kingdom of South-East Asia and Oceania.
This was a premier event on The Slum's eclectic duelling calendar. Almost forty-five thousand contestants had leapt into the arena, where they wrestled in the style of the stubborn, poverty-stricken pioneers of Suchi. At no other time—stripped naked, forced to fight flesh against flesh—were the differences between men made more stark. Here, the brave imbibed the sweet wines of victory, and the meek drank dust and dagger.
The tournament already in full swing, at the most spectated match, the crowd had packed so tight that they continuously spilt into the ring.
"Go! Get in there, HF!"
"Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Rip him apart, *$^%! Rip off his %#!%& arm!"
"Bring home the bacon, you big bastard!"
In the one corner was a 6'8 behemoth of a Fighter, the adrenaline sweat making his bulging, ox muscles glowed in the moonlight. Against him was a foe with a less impressive build, a regular-sized teen twirling a dagger between his fingers.
Henry faced this behemoth with the caution of a matador awaiting the bull's charge. His senses were fully awakened. He listened over the crowd's crude din to the behemoth's breath, he felt the looseness of the soil under his bare toes.
The martial arts climb had prepared him for match-ups with large size differentials. Abhayan Hulk Wrestling had taught him the methods of giants, Jaguar Fang and Possum Pygmy Envenoming how to fight in miniature. In this scenario, his regular-sized avatar put him at a disadvantage. His reach was much shorter and, being the lighter of the two, he would have to concentrate during any grappling on preventing the opponent from making contact with the ground lest they establish the leverage to overpower him.
But these factors were irrelevant against the current opponent...
The behemoth gawked at the dagger flashing from finger to finger. "I'm scared, Big Bro."
...a noob.
Henry almost fumbling his weapon, he frowned at Dan's fellow meathead. "What did I say before? In public, when we have an audience, I'm 'HF'."
The meathead returned the blank gaze of a cow on opioids. "What are you talking about, Big Bro?"
Henry sought support from the other meatheads in the crowd, whom he'd gathered earlier for a special meeting about halting the contagion of Dan's silly nickname. An emergency need for direct intervention had arisen after he'd been addressed according to that abominable title by a total stranger, who had somehow been infected. Henry, he'd warned the meatheads, was nobody's 'Big Bro' - it didn't even make chronological sense; he was the same age as most of them. Henceforth, they were to refer to him by his duelling pseudonym, HF, the mysterious multi-style expert.
The other meatheads, having not understood what the big deal was, also gave him droopy bovine blinks.
"Chin up, Huge Bro!" The team captain pumped his fist in support. "Remember, you're never out of the stadium until you're in the carpark!"
The behemoth known as Huge Bro squinted with determination. "I'm coming, Big Bro!"
Bull-rushing forward, he raised his arm for an overhead stab.
Henry stepped inside of the strike.
He rammed the dagger into the meathead's right eyeball. Cranking the hilt of the weapon like a door-handle, he added to the meathead's forward momentum to toss him towards the perimeter of the ring four steps towards his back.
The flying boulder of muscle scattered a clump of spectators like plastic toy bowling pins.
No one announced the end of the duel, this tournament lacking officiators. Instead, victory was marked by the swearing of degenerate gamblers who always all-inned their meagre fortunes on the darkhorse.
"Hehehe." Henry tittered tauntingly. "Another noob bites the du—wait, wait, no, let me try another one." His eyebrows rocketed upwards in mockery. "Dinner's served, kids: 108 kgs of tenderised sirloin!"
"I got smoked!" The meathead sprang to his feet, then approached with his hand extended. "Good game, Big Bro!"
"HF," Henry corrected. "There will be no handshake until you use my proper name."
"Good game…HF Bro?"
"That'll do."
Accepting the shake and saying farewell, Henry left the ring, the crowd splitting to give him a wide berth due to the Spelltomes he equipped for self-defence.
"HF! HF!"
No sooner had he stepped out of the arena, though, his chosen pseudonym was screamed out - not by one of the meatheads, but by a sonorous, feminine voice.
A beauty soon emerged from the mob at a run.
Hers was a healthy figure. The reverberations of each stride earthquaked through a pair of melon breasts shielded by a thin cheetah-fur strip gripping them in a mesmerising dance that did not defy gravity but rather complimented it – thank you, gravity.
"Your signature!" The busty girl thrust a quill at him, the instrument trembling with the nerves of confronting her idol. "Can I have your signature? Please!"
"Sure." Henry was happy to spare a second for a fan. "Any paper I can sign?"
"Darn it!"
The girl slapped her head at her own stupidity. After a moment of racking her dumb brain, though, her face morphed into a look of vulnerable indecision, then her doll-eyes dropped down to her chest, returned to him, back to the chest, massive boobs, back to him, the girl wondering whether to offer him this amply-spaced canvas.
Henry smiled.
This was a spy, a classic honey trap.
But, retaining the bigger picture in mind, he wasn't going to let this opportunity slip him by.
"I've got the ink!" He produced a pot of ruby-encrusted Tier-5 ink and adjusted his angle to provide a clearer shot for the spectating crowd.
Let them believe that he, HF, that he, The Cripple, could also have female fans.
Gloating away, wetting the quill, he was startled when a warm gush splattered the skin of his chin and pectorals.
The spy's throat stretched back and opened like a mouth, a tongue of crimson spilling out and wagging at him to save her.
-Henry Flower: What the hell, dude?
-Zhangmei33: She's a spy, Cripple-gege. No one this ditzy could appreciate your talents.
Rose, having slit the spy's throat,
-Henry Flower: Firstly, I was aware, but decided to overlook that to build hype. Secondly, this an F- on your homework. Earthfriends conquer their opponents through hippy passivist tactics, sharing drugs and discussing past grievances and empathy.
-Zhangmei33: You're right, Cripple-gege. I apologise for being too weak to suppress old habits. Please excuse this impulsive fool.
Henry clicked his tongue at the wasted hype and moved on.
Until the next round, he went to the edge of the tourney grounds, to a hastily erected field of starter tents. Team Friendship Forever's was placed right at the front. The site had belonged to another group, who'd arrived hours earlier to reserve the spot, but they'd been convinced to forfeit it to him by the persuasive glimmer of gold.
Brian, painted purple and practising a tribal dance in front of a blazing fire, pointed out a herbal lotion that Cathy had left in a hammock for Henry.
"She logged out to urinate," the dancing friend explained.
Both of them had been eliminated; of the participating Team Friendship Forever members, only Henry and Dan were left.
The Pain on The Plains had a similar format to Henry's recruitment tournament. There was a preliminary stage, based off a Swiss-format, in which each round matched contestants with others whose win-loss record were identical, 2-0s against 2-0s, 1-1s against 1-1s, etc. Too many losses resulted in elimination, enough wins progression to the tournament's final stage, a stock-standard single-elim bracket.
Based on the attendance numbers at today's events, 14 victories were needed to advance, 3 losses to get the boot. Henry currently had a perfect 6-0 win record under his illustrious belt - what noob could defeat him?
"Cool." He chucked the lotion into the fire, the flames popping and flashing black.
He then grabbed two bottles of beer from a chilly bin and heaved his tired body onto his hammock. Sipping one, he balanced the other on his belly with the finesse of a middle-age father unwinding after a Sunday afternoon chore of beating up noobs.
Speak of the devils: a group of haggard, dirt-caked noobs passed by and eyed the rest of his bottles laying deliciously in the chilly bin amongst their bath of ice.
With a friendly smile, he closed the lid. "Winners only."
"*$%# your drinks, then."
"Mate, quiet...The Company..."
They fled, and Henry chuckled.
Indeed, if one made the effort, one could savour the sweet, selfish flavour of retirement wherever one went. More than a state of unemployment, retirement was a mindset of unemployment, the will to chill.
-Silver Wolf: How can you be focused on an amateur duelling tournament right now?
Across from him, Silver was sinking uneasily into a beanbag chair, holding his manuscript, of which she'd read less than twenty pages since the start of the tournament. Karnon's presence had been distracting her.
Through her sunglasses, she was piercing Henry with a glare of irritation. It was a more severe irritation than the previous one stemming from their petty literary rivalry.
-Henry Flower: If I concerned myself with everything that could go wrong in this poorly-balanced game, I'd never have a moment to relax.
-Silver Wolf: Henry, you have to know that this is NOT the time to fart around toying with kids. According to your Cripple stories, Karnon should be easy for you. So why haven't you dealt with him already? Why are you...
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While she ranted, Henry took a sip of his beer, relishing a quiet interplay of strawberry and molasses.
True, back in the day, he had killed much stronger enemies.
After conquering the globe with his guild and retiring from Saana II, he'd continued to log on a couple hours a week to continue the duelling climb. Since no players could defeat his fat stacks of Legendaries, he'd taken to duelling non-humans, beating up dragons and demons and stuff. For the emotionally-underdeveloped teen Henry, it'd been fairly entertaining.
Those later adventures were only known by readers who'd reached the last volumes of The Invincible Cripple Saga. At the time, he'd wanted to avoid alerting his guildmates of his continued playing, so he'd kept his actions on the down-low. That decision actually ended up being a major reason for his story reading like preposterous fan-fic, readers assuming he'd invented his enemies. An Abyssal Sleeper, for example, those Tier-14 space monstrosities that slumbered in black holes and dreamt the deaths of stars – the Zone Guardians weren't privy to their existence, let alone the average pleb.
As for Silver's insinuation that Karnon should be amongst the enemies Henry whacked, well, she was partially correct. Noobs mistook the God for being a benevolent deity due to his mission to expand souls by promoting laughter. Silver, however, was a semi-professional with a heavy investment in the game world and could therefore identify his actual moral position.
-Silver Wolf: ...shirking responsibility. Explain!
-Henry Flower: It's a new instalment, a new me. I've since adopted the ethos of Wu-wei.
-Silver Wolf: Inaction. Explain.
-Henry Flower: Yes, I suppose that's one way of translating Wu-wei, the ancient Chinese philosophy of doing nothing. Life is too complex for a single man to grasp, and he who attempts in his hubris to subdue the chaos of being often makes it worse. Thus, sometimes the wisest course of action happens to be no action.
Henry was being only half facetious.
The same, healthy instinct of regular folk to fix whatever issues spring up around them became disastrous after the acquisition of enough power. Power amplified the impact of your fixes, the successes and mistakes rippling out through the thousands, millions, billions under your care. These subjects, in turn, multiplied your problems by saddling you with theirs, and, due to the interconnectedness of their problems, resolving one often exacerbated others. Simultaneously, power could make it harder to see when your fixes were themselves the main problem; the sycophants lining up to spread your cheeks gave convincingly positive descriptions of your crap. To handle power, therefore, one had to become a sort of juggler, learning both when to act and when not to act, balancing compassion with callousness, guilt with indifference. The more power you had, the faster yet more accurately you needed to work your hands and not work them.
In some respect, his refusal to stop juggling was what had separated himself, The Tyrant, and Karnon. Henry didn't answer to anybody or anything but his own heart – except for the countless times when he did.
-Henry Flower: Those venerable sages of the middle kingdom were ahead of their era. To paraphrase Uncle Ben-fuzi, 'With great power comes great responsibility to, sometimes, do nothing.' Wu-wei.
Also, being a video game, Saana had mechanics to maintain a continuous challenge for the playerbase by filling power vacuums. Whatever bad guys you murked would inevitably be replaced by bigger, badder bad guys.
Trash game.
-Silver Wolf: Can you be serious, just once?
-Henry Flower: Listen, Silver, how am I supposed to beat a Tier-11 Lowgod? I didn't even have a Martial Class until Tuesday. Preposterous.
Level differences were another critical deterrent. He'd done his God-slaying near the end of Saana II, when a higher universal average level and interplanar travel made climbing Tiers much quicker than today. In the present, not halfway through this instalment, it was borderline impossible for him to surpass Karnon without accepting a Legendary class and risking permanent character death.
-Silver Wolf: That's another anomaly you haven't explained. Why stall with the Martial Class? The quest takes a few hours, max, and there's no downside. And why get one now? What's changed? Why's Karnon here? And this book…
"…weird," she muttered out loud. "Why can't you be normal?"
He shrugged helplessly. "That one's a Rank 7 Ultrapatrician plotline."
While considering whether to share more and assuage the wolf's whimpers, he was called up for the next match, summoned back to the climb.
Due to the trickster God's nefarious presence, Henry refrained from consuming his supreme power-limiting poison. Instead, he'd been utilising a consciously debilitated form designed for whenever he couldn't sacrifice his wits – the beer had been non-alcoholic swill. The downside was experiencing no challenge whatsoever against these noobs, but the frustrations of this were partially vented through his violent beatings of them. With his infant-toothed dagger, he pierced the heart of a 7-0 Shaman noob, stab-punched an 8-0 Earthfriend noob to the ring's limits and over, bored through the ear of a 9-0 Arcanist noob…
Partway through the preliminary stage, The Empire's troops marched a train of hog-tied monsters into the walled-off construction site for the finals.
Henry, through flaunting his expertise, gained two more members for his fan club.
Dan, despite the top-notch training thus far received, couldn't climb past 12 wins before being eliminated. Henry consoled the noob, telling him that he still had more room for growth, but, in a surprise twist, the meathead was proud of his pathetic top 4% finish – such were the low-expectations of plebs.
The Pain on The Plain's preliminaries were relaxed and eventless until what should have been Henry's 14th and last match before the final stage.
He arrived later than his opponent, who was squatting in the arena, meditating.
They made for an imposing figure, a strapping 6'3 lad with about 95 kg of lean, fighting muscle with every gram of unnecessary fat having been pruned from his avatar - this was a body custom-designed for optimal duelling. Notably, the opponent wore no Village bandana or other insignia, and his facial features were concealed by a cloth ninja mask with a skeleton's lower mouth over his own. The physique and the sinister disguise were in striking contrast with a Miracleworker's golden halo floating over his head.
When Henry set foot into the ring, the Miracleworker's eyes opened—panther-black—and fixed on him a look of recognition and respect but, also, zero fear.
-Zhangmei33: Isn't that guy from the arena, Cripple-gege? Which organisation is he an agent for?
-Henry Flower: Not a spy.
Karnon's mystery guest?
Henry sent a message.
-Henry Flower: Yo, did anyone abduct you and drop you off here? Blink twice if you're being blackmailed.
The Miracleworker was confused.
-SaNguiNe: Uh…no, senior. Master Mabuya brought me to this weird festival as part of Central's delegation. When I saw you signing up, I thought I'd participate for fun.
Henry nodded. There were plenty of Citydwellers in attendance as part of his Decline and Fall of The Slum Empire side scheme, whereby the rival player bases would be merged. Karnon could have then fudged the brackets to arrange this duel earlier to make him lose? However, statistically, not many players had the skill to achieve a clean 13-0 record.
Why would this Miracleworker make him lose? SaNguiNe was ranked much higher than Henry on Suchi's 1v1 ladder, claiming 3rd place in the entire zone. Because success in Tier-0 combat was determined almost exclusively by motor skills, this naturally meant that he was gifted in this realm, a 99.998th percentile body-blessed freak.
He, rank 1, and rank 2 were collectively known as The Silent Three. Like the med-school student who shuns friendship for studies, they eschewed all affiliation with The Slums. They resided in Central City, where they devoted themselves to nothing but preparing for the recruitment tournament. Their hermit training prevented outsiders tracking their progress.
At least, that'd been the case in the past. After The New Suchi Arena became the zone's premier duelling spot, these no-lifers had ended their silence to migrate there. Henry, impressed by their intelligence and upstanding moral character, had been offering them guidance. In return, despite being ranked higher than him, the three had treated him with the respect owed to a senior. For the most part, this was brown-nosing due to him being in the guild they were auditioning for. But he liked to believe that, possessing a little talent in the arena, they had also been clued in to his hidden expertise - real recognises real, patrician recognises patrician.
His gaze honed in on the young man's loincloth
Miracleworker, a Class that employs Divine Energy, '…tonight's mystery guest, a set of divine genitals.' – was Karnon going to expose this kid's privates?
-SaNguiNe: S-s-senior?
-Henry Flower: Gentleman's agreement: no ball shots.
-SaNguiNe: ...o-ok.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, can you beat him?
Henry, tentatively accepting events as coincidental, moved on to Rose's question, to the duel ahead.
Against this Miracleworker, he'd thus far fought 72 sparring matches and lost all but 5.
The atypical conditions of this tournament wouldn't improve those trash odds. SaNguiNe, a Miracleworker, relied on
So it would be Henry in the arena, with no space to kite, no abilities to outplay with, The Cripple against his long-standing nemesis: a motor-skill-blessed freak.
But was this not the very class of noob he'd been training so hard to defeat, the muscle patrician noob? How many decades had he poured into formulating a new, transcendent art of the mind? And what of the gold spent tricking these individuals into attending The New Suchi Arena, where he and his officiators collected data on their weaknesses, their quirks, the rhythm at which they breathed, the length of their arms, etc?
This Miracleworker had a reaction speed 63 milliseconds quicker than his own.
This tiny gap, were his efforts so far truly insufficient to complete the bridge by which he would cross it?
"In the end," he smirked, "I never lose. You, anonymous noob, should we start?"
The Miracleworker gave a thumbs up, and the duel began.
The crowd watched intently as they engaged in the subtle game of chess, testing and adjusting stances, thinking five, six steps ahead. SaNguiNe inched forward cautiously, his panther-black eyes searching for the gap through which he could close in for the take-down. Henry, meanwhile, assumed a Forbidden Knife-Boxing stance for 'out-boxing'. Using light, evasive footwork and weaker jabs and straights, he would maintain the distance from—
His back hit the dirt, his stomach was weighed down under the mass mounting him, his weapon arm was pinned by an elbow, and the fleshy underside of his jaw was perforated by a dagger that rammed up and into his soft palate.
Henry, caught off-guard, gurgled through a blood-filled mouth. "I concede."
And so The Cripple, history's greatest duellist, slayer of idols and gods, was beaten up by a noob. With these raw, unimproved martial arts, 63 milliseconds was indeed an insurmountable gap.
When the Miracleworker stood and offered the loser help to his feet, the spectators realised that the duel had ended.
"I'M RICH!" An all-in darkhorse degenerate praised the heavens. "I'M RICH!"
This one cry set off the cacophony as the more sensible degenerate gamblers, who'd lost their fortunes on the favourite, began to moan in lamentation, as the experts hurriedly discussed the identity of this newcomer, as the politically-savvy shared worries for whoever would dare to humiliate a member of The Company, and the ordinary people complained about the duel being short and anticlimactic.
Henry stood back up, brushing the dust from his butt. "GG."
-SaNguiNe: GG, senior. Re-match in the finals?
-Henry Flower: Sure, but you're going to lose that one.
Since The Empire had been prepping a stage and monsters for the finals, there should be more factors for Henry to exploit and tip the balance towards his strengths.
-Henry Flower: Someone muttered your name. Better run.
SaNguiNe glanced warily at the mob, before nodding curtly and rushing off. On the way out, the Miracleworker was showered with cheers and backslaps for crushing the cocky moneybags from The Company who, by most accounts, should not be participating in this amateur tournament.
Henry, oblivious to the crowd, watched his adversary depart and sank into a private universe of sadness, his head falling in shame. He sighed with a heavy and storied frustration, one imbued with all the resentment of The Cripple's years-long struggle to overcome his garbage reaction speed.
"I'm still too weak…" he muttered.
-Zhangmei33: I can always assassinate him?
-Henry Flower: Shh. I'm hamming up this tragic moment for the cameras.
He'd angled so that the side of his face was visible to the British Beast Tamer journalist who'd been spying this whole time in the crowd, the bard who'd unwittingly been chosen to sing the opening verses of his saga.
Managing the media, public relations - this, Henry'd learned from the errors of his youth, was a vital component to any successful climb. One shouldn't neglect the people; one shouldn't fight alone in the shadows.
The corner of his lips, wet with the bitter blood of defeat, rose into a villainous grin. "…I guess I will have to invent even more martial arts."
He gifted the next noob a thorough beating and advanced to the final stage with an imperfect 14-1 record.
Half a kilometre away from Lake Hotferver, where Karnon was scheming with a love triangle.
A Singaporean trio, two boys and a girl, from Merlion Village had ventured out alone.
One of the boys, who had an indecisive countenance, stole a glance at his despondent female friend dragging her feet beside him.
They'd managed to distract her during the marathon, but, afterwards, in the quieter atmosphere of the camping grounds, the troubles had returned. When he saw her being lured back to that old temptation, his heart screamed at him to grip her by the shoulders and shake her and shout. But he couldn't. Wouldn't that make him the same as him?
But perhaps he should be the same…
The indecisive boy suddenly realised how far they'd roamed from the event grounds. It was so distant behind them now that it seemed like a campfire burning in the dark.
"We should head back!" he called out. "What if we encounter a pack of Gutdevourers?"
Ahead of him, the last member of the trio had been leading the march, an A-4 sized piece of paper in the fingers that'd earlier that day held a bone-flute.
At the question and the apprehension in his friend's voice, the flute-player laughed. "Then we'll have our guts devoured! The tree stump!"
They stopped at a random tree stump embedded in the plains. A keen observer would deduce from the disturbed dirt that'd it'd been planted recently, and an even keener observer would realise the species of tree wasn't native to Suchi.
The flute-player leapt on top of the stump and lifted the paper to the sky, lining it up with the singular moon. As the moonlight struck the paper, the page, at first blank, began to glow with the passage that'd directed them to their current location. The letters became dislodged and, floating away from each other like pieces of over-watered alphabet soup, began to rearrange into the next clue.
"I don't trust this letter," complained the indecisive one. "I've never heard of this magic."
"Me either." The flute-player glanced at his depressed crush. "But we can't shy away from every risk."
The letters, faintly azure in colour, finished forming into an incomprehensibly-complex coded message.
'What do you get when you cross a rabbit and a frog?'
"A bunny ribbit!"
The answer to this horrific joke had been provided by none of the trio.
From a cavity in the tree stump, a glowing, blue-skinned frog leapt out and began to hop away from them at the speed of a sprinter. It'd been crowned with a rabbit-ear headband.
"A-bunny-ribbit!" the fleeing frog croaked as it was swallowed by the dark of night. "A-bunny-ribbit! A-bunny-ribbit! A-bunny-ribbit!"
The indecisive boy squinted. "Yeah...we're not chas—"
But his hand was seized by the flute-player, and then they were all racing once more across the plains in desperate pursuit.