“Catch him, Artemis!"
"We're doomed! This Reality Denialist is going to win!"
"Get the pinkskin, zug zug! For the horde!"
“My Queen, cancel this sham of a duel and declare our Goddess the victor! Meow!”
The crowd despaired as their Grecian Championess failed to catch the rude Scholar zoomy-zoom-zooming around the arena.
Up on the viewing platform for The Kingdom of South-East Asia and Oceania's royalty, the Dukes were maintaining their composure. Outwardly, they joked with their guests about the odd spectacle. In their private channel, though, the debate was heated.
Should they assassinate the cocky teen and risk inciting the power behind him's wrath? Now or afterwards?
Or they could lodge a formal complaint with The Company. Since he was just a low-ranking member, his superiors should be willing to discipline him on their behalf. But for what crime exactly? Participating in an amateur tournament wasn't illegal, nor was mocking them. The Company didn't acknowledge The Empire’s claim to legitimacy.
In the middle of this drama, Queen Suhita sat silent on her driftwood throne. Her jaw was clenched in a pageant princess smile, her fingers clutched her throne's arms, and she exuded the unassailable aura of a patient in a dentist's chair undergoing a root canal without anaesthesia.
This insolent, lippy, impertinent, audacious, ugly-faced guy's antics, the Queen seethed, could not be left unpunished. Each breath he continued to take was an abominable affront to her Kingdom and, worse, herself.
Wanting to preserve face, she rose discreetly from her throne as though needing to tinkle and retreated to the marquee tent behind her.
As soon as she passed through the curtains, she unleashed her royal wrath.
“Ramiiiiiroooooooooo, I won't do it, I won't do it, I won't do it! I’m NOT inviting that annoying guy to my hunting party! You can’t force—you’re leaving?"
King Ramiro was hovering beside a back exit, savouring the last quarter-inch of a cigarillo.
“I’ve seen enough,” the King replied.
“Enough?”
“Enough to know which enemy to worry about.” Ramiro flashed an ironic smile. “Berbahaya’s snuck in here with his delegation. I'll be paying him a visit.”
“Berbahaya?” Queen Suhita was a little startled, this being the first appearance of The Pope at one of their events. “Should I be there?”
“Another time. For now, stay put, continue being the people’s anchor.”
Queen Suhita weighed the foreboding news while King Ramiro finished his disguise with a mask. He made a strange choice, a grotesque, saggy-faced ogre head with beady eyes, multiple chins, and gaping nasal passages that stretched below the wearer’s mouth.
“Don’t worry about 'HF'. I'll join you at The Grand Hunt.”
“Really?"
King Ramiro took a final drag before discarding his cigarillo. "We'll nab us a big one, and all this silliness will be forgotten.”
As he departed, Queen Suhita laughed confidently behind him, no longer needing to concern herself with this rude guy. He wouldn't dare flap his gangrenous gums in front of The Saviour!
But in her amused reaction was a touch of darkness. She was a bit unsettled, perhaps due to The Pope's presence, perhaps due to her last sight of The King - the smoke rising out of the grotesque mask's holes had given her the brief impression of him burning from inside out, his organs cooking beneath the skin.
Forgetting her unease in laughter, she returned outside to spectate the rest of the match.
Down in the arena, Henry was Nilkan Freerunning away from Ex-Spy Bro.
He climbed the side of a hill, vaulting part-way up over a chest-height barricade. At the mound’s summit, he launched himself into the air like a bat.
“Get back here, you roach!” L0ndgren, a male persona of Hugo’s who’d interned as a thief-catcher for The Sacred Library of Medrisha, leapt after him.
Shortly following their passage, the mound’s summit was collapsed in by the slamming fist of a Baboon Clubber aerial dropping on the site like a comet.
Another savannah beast flew high above them, an enormous Oasis Albatross, which flapped its truck-length wings. Mini-whirlwinds generated by this action tore up the floor of the arena, choking the air with dust, and the resulting gale-force currents flung five other Baboons around the area in unpredictable directions.
When the two duellists had jumped, they'd been picked up on the edge of a tornado, both being sling-shotted across the arena.
Henry struck the ground first. He landed on his shoulder. His body rolled awkwardly across the dirt, his limbs flailing like wet spaghetti in front of a high-power fan. At first glance, his ragdolling seemed haphazard. The scrutinising eye, however, could detect subtle signs of control.
He tumbled over a random plank of wood, and his muscles dropped the laxness of the Nilkan thief to become heavy and obstinate like a boulder against the wind.
L0ndgren landed near the tumbling Cripple, sprinting forward—he stopped.
Henry sprang upright and used the plank to shield-bash nothing.
"Denied." Loki, temporarily replacing the L0ndgren persona, wagged his finger arrogantly.
An airborne snake that would have sunk its fangs into the spy's neck flew through the gap between them.
In a rather unorthodox move, the duplicitous Tyrant had adopted a Togavian Tulipsinging stance. The warrior-bard's shield had been substituted with the plank, and the flying instrument with the flying serpe—Loki dove away from a rain of razor-sharp feathers from the Oasis Albatross.
“Dude!” Henry called back, running away from the failed engagement. “Why are you running away?”
As he fled, the boos pouring down on him from the crowd grew louder.
“Why are you booing?" He protested. "'Dude' was general neutral! Non-English speakers can confirm through their translations! I respect your virtual—AAAAHHH!!!”
He shrank back as a
The audience cursed the gods of fate.
Once more, Henry'd used his goading the revolting plebs and his bumbling luck to conceal the duel's true complexity.
Although the two of them had transitioned to the monster maze, his Mental GQ advantage over Ex-Spy Bro was hard to capitalise on. Many of the arena’s traps lacked the sophistication to distinguish between them out-right, and only when they tussled, when the extra cognitive demand of combat was added to the mix, did his superiority manifest. It was over this minor gap therefore that they'd fought. Henry tried to bait engagements during temporary, unexpected Gates. Ex-Spy Bro, in turn, sought to disrupt and catch him on either side of The Gates, before their formation or after their elapse.
In this covert game of cat and mouse, both continuously adapted to the shifting circumstances using style-switches. Henry connected his arts and managed the overall strategy with The War-Priest’s Duty, whose Death Training monster puzzles shared qualities with the current format. Ex-Spy Bro, conversely, juggled his personas using his main Loki identity, whose Illusionist class fulfilled a supportive role in large-scale battles by weaving tricks inside tricks to bedazzle enemies.
The Clubber-Albatross-Snake Gate had been their fifth failed clash so far. At none of their meetings had either dealt any meaningful damage. Henry was forced to back away twice by screwing up manoeuvres. Ex-Spy Bro'd withdrawn early from the other three, exercising caution because the earlier Shadow Panther mauling had left him one solid shot from death.
On another level, Henry was monitoring his opponent's performance across each encounter. Initially, it increased - the transitions between personas became markedly smoother through adaptation to the tempo of style-switching. This improvement was counteracted, though, by a gradual degradation from cognitive exhaustion, Ex-Spy Bro being less accustomed to the rationing of mental effort necessary for duels of this complexity and length.
That there was the komodo's tactic against larger prey: nip a few times with the bacteria-riddled mouth, follow them on the fringes while the wounds fester, then, after they pass out, gobble on their guts.
Henry—having worn down his adversary enough, having delayed until the ‘Queen’ had returned to the platform—set up the match-ending Gate.
First, to block Ex-Spy Bro behind him, he created space by collecting a pride of lions on his tail. He then feinted for a Six-Way Monster Gate, charged instead into a field littered with the fragments of toppled pillars.
As the lions dropped away behind him, a chained mammoth that’d broken the pillars detected his approach. The creature rose upright on its hind-legs and trumpeted a threat to add his bones to the crushed litter.
Henry's goal lay beyond the giant monster. Behind it was one remaining stone pillar in the field’s corner out of its chain-range. The structure was as tall as a telephone pole and quintuple the thickness. This structure would yield an unassailable defensive position from which he could safely stall until the duel’s end.
He could see Ex-Spy Bro already cutting across the mammoth's territory. His opponent, trying to out-run him, had switched to the persona of an autistic savant scout who'd once destroyed a rising Irish PVE guild by two-timing with its main tank and raid leader.
Fiona, the savant, glided over the top of the fragmented rubble, each stride placed as precisely as solder on a circuit board.
“I’m one step ahead," she stated with a trace of confusion in her monotone.
The savant meant this literally, being exactly one step ahead of The Cripple’s maximum pace and uncertain why he, also knowing this, insisted on racing her. Loki meant that tauntingly; Hugo meant nothing.
“You could trip,” Henry replied to his multi-minded foe.
“I won't."
“What if I take a shortcut under the mammoth?"
“I factored that in."
“And the mongooses?”
“I factored those in, too.”
Henry's feet squelched passing through a pool of crimson. This mess had been spilt by an earlier contestant who'd thought they could run around the outskirts of the solitary mammoth.
Alerted by the vibrations of the two duellists' footsteps, emerging from burrows hidden amongst the rubble, a number of furry monsters began to pop out all around them.
A Parani Eusocial Mongoose dwarfed its real-life counterpart. As large as a tiger, it developed a stout, muscular build on its preferred diet of wildebeest. Alone, it was a formidable hunter. Here, there were almost two hundred of them, a full hive having been captured by The Empire’s poachers.
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There was a last trick to this area still to come into play. A contestant regretting entering this trap would be dismayed by their path forward being blocked by a trench too wide to traverse and too deep to escape. To the right was the edge of the arena. Turning left, one reached a seemingly-vacant field that housed a Tier-2 50-man Earth Golem with an unevadeable AOE spell that insta-gibbed any player their level. Combine these with the densest arrangement of the muscular mongooses positioned at the rear, any who entered were completely boxed in. And the mongooses continued multiplying.
This being the stage for their duel's final act, Henry and Ex-Spy Bro raced against each other and the swarming monsters for that one standing pillar, which would soon be like a lighthouse jutting out from a turbulent ocean of fur and fangs. One of them would climb it; one of them would die.
Henry, with the mongooses closing in on him, side-stepped one's bite, blocked a claw-swipe with another’s chain, nudged one into an
The giant beast reared again on its hind-legs. Its profile blotted out the sky to cast Henry in shadow. Motes of energy being vacuumed into the toes of its forelimbs, the mammoth slammed back down with a bone-shaking thud.
From the impact point of each foot, two metre-high waves of dirt fanned out at the speed of a sprinter.
Henry high-jumped over both in one motion, narrowly clearing the second's crest. Four mongooses chasing him were unable to do the same. The waves dragged the creatures into their undertow, pulling them into the earth and shredding them like ripe tomatoes in a blender.
He rolled under a tusk swipe, planted a foot against the mammoth’s ankle, and kicked off to reverse his direction. The instant he’d propelled away, every hair around the mammoth’s body stabbed out like a needle, each one the length of a forearm and harder than steel.
Henry had 14 seconds before that defensive mechanism refreshed its cooldown. The mammoth tried to wallop him with the same leg, and he slipped under its lifted limb, passed under its belly, and emerged out the other side through the gap between its hind legs.
The pillar came into view, along with Ex-Spy Bro leading a herd of mongooses.
Henry, having bungled four movements just then, calculated his opponent to be much more than a step ahead now.
The race had been decisively lost.
Oh well.
He did a sudden 180 and began to scramble up the mammoth’s ass, the monster trumpeting in annoyance. Ex-Spy Bro could have the dumb pillar; Henry would stand on this big-boned beast, bull-riding it and jumping on occasion to avoid the
What a lol-inducing victory he'd achieved. The crowd would go bald pulling their hair as they were forced to watch him hop up and down for the remaining minutes, while he pretended to be inventing a brand-new, ultraspecific Mammoth-Riding art on the spot.
Call him The Mammoth Rider!
"Fools!” He nervously gripped a lock of hair tight to brace against the mammoth’s rump shaking to dislodge him. “This was a classic Xanatos Gambit. I, The Oracle, The Mammoth Rider, foresaw the dual paths of your defeat—"
Fiona, having predicted this and shifted direction, arrived at the mammoth and grabbed at the trash-talking Cripple’s ank—
Henry span rapidly and delivered a dropkick to Ex-Spy Bro’s soft sku—
Loki, replacing the savant, stepped back. The Tyrant dropped before him and received his dagger in the ch—
Henry parried with his dagger, wasting Ex-Spy Bro's—
The stab had been an
The second dagger sank into Henry's forearm, wasting Ex-Spy Bro's Stamina.
Both of them began a rapid exchange beside the raging mammoth. Henry performed a three-style chain, starting in Nine Fists, baiting into Forbidden Knife-Boxing, and finishing with a Hardman Handaxe throw to try to impale Ex-Spy Bro on the mammoth's
"Die, scum!"
The goddess's eyes burning with hatred, she shoved this useless man back under the mammoth.
One of Henry's arms, going under a stamping foot, was flattened like an egg beneath a steamroller.
The audience leapt out of their seats and split their lungs in celebration.
"Die, scum!"
"Die, scum! Die! Die! Get fucked and die!"
Beneath the mammoth's belly, Henry rolled away from a fatal stomp to his head. Caked in dust and blood, the earth quaking with such violence to shatter the fragile bones of his ear-drums, he didn't immediately rush back out in case Ex-Spy Bro was waiting to attack him.
However, his opponent chose the safer bet. Ex-Spy Bro slipped through an increasingly slim gap in the mongoose encirclement, his target being the lone pillar. That exchange had left Henry with the lower health pool. Thus, Ex-Spy Bro could steal his prior method of stalling until victory.
Henry continued to observe the mongooses converging on his opponent, who had a significant chance of dying right now.
Some of the monsters collected around the pillar's base to obstruct him; others closed in from the back and side. Ex-Spy Bro adopted the Water Tiger persona, and he deftly slipped one, two, three, then used the shoulder of a fourth as a platform to launch himself skywards.
The mongooses collided at the pillar's base, amassing into a small hill, scrambling on top of their kin to boost their jumps higher.
And they clawed at the air beneath Ex-Spy Bro's out-of-reach feet.
Drat.
Upon on the pillar, Hugo, safe, glanced down at the swarming beasts, their bulky builds making them too heavy to climb after him. A few snapped their fangs trying to chew through the pillar. Their clustering beneath would cut off any subsequent approach by The Tyrant.
What a nightmare, he thought.
Accounting for his opponent's myriad styles, calculating paths through the monsters, unpacking the nested Gate set-ups, and all while swapping from mask to mask - the combined demands of this 'duel' had given him a throbbing headache. Another round of that and the system would have force-logged him to prevent an aneurism.
Win or lose, he was just happy to have a break to catch his breath.
Expecting another twist in this convoluted gambit, he watched The Tyrant rolling about in the dust under the mammoth. Soon, his adversary was stumbling away from the giant beast, sprinting at such a 'nervous' pace that he tripped on a chain, drawing the attention from several mongooses. A section of the swarm broke off after him as The Tyrant fled towards the Earth Golem field adjacent to this one.
Hugo was able to roughly sketch the manoeuvre, at a conceptual level. However, when he studied the writhing configuration of monsters, there were no apparent paths for a viable execution.
It seemed this one was beyond his limits.
-Artemis8492: Is that possible?
Henry looked back, his eyes popping at the mongooses chasing him, his gaze lining up a shot at Ex-Spy Bro silently hanging off the pillar.
-Henry Flower: Depends, really.
In the vacant field ahead, a chain lay uncoiled on the ground. It seemed to be attached to no monster, but, on closer inspection, its end connected to a plum-sized cage of metal containing a lone pebble.
The mongooses pursuing Henry were tugged back by the limits of their leashes. He, in his frightened haste, pretended not to notice their withdrawal and charged ahead.
Sensing him, the pebble began to rattle in its cage. An invisible hand seemed to lift it, and it slowly levitated to the height of a man’s waist. Particles of clay around its perimeter also rose, forming a mist of blood-red dust, which the pebble then inhaled. The mist congealed into a humanoid form, a boy made of earth, with a pair of hands, arms, legs, and eyes that glared murderously at the intruding human.
Henry cringed as if he’d forgotten about the Golem. Spinning around, he sprinted right back towards the much less dangerous mongooses.
The crowd, meanwhile, was going wild. Their cheers, at first sinking at his surviving the stomping, had risen higher at his panicked run and, with this fatal blunder, they crescendoed.
Amidst their taunting, Henry frantically hop-scotched through a tangle of bloody chains and intestines and organs from mongooses that’d been within the Golem's spell range. Behind him, the creature was bending down at the waist and extending a finger to the soil.
The Golem, like a child waking their slumbering father, prodded the earth.
Nothing appeared to happen.
Henry, a split-second away from the mongoose-mammoth trap, hopped over a 'random' skeleton and thereby 'accidentally' skipped the Golem's deadly spell.
A mongoose attacked him.
“Fucking hell, give me a break!” He angled away.
The mongoose’s claw, missing, descended in front of his chest and slapped the soil, the claw’s tip scraping the edge of the Golem’s field.
The mongoose shivered, exploded.
Henry, splattered in gore, had no moment to recover as a dozen other muscled furballs rushed him, and he messaged Ex-Spy Bro again.
-Henry Flower: For some, it is possible.
Seeing no escape, he swore in defeat as the mongooses pounced on him like a gang of cats upon a cornered mouse.
But incongruent with his distraught expression as he vanished beneath the pile, his breath was calm, dipping deeply down to the lowest point of an exhalation. He emptied his lungs; he emptied his mind.
For this last play, he would wield one of the tools acquired from his latest Overdream session, that one whittled by those extinct, monster-hunting hermits who in a bygone era had stalked the very plains where this duel was taking place.
One of the great enigmas of the Starhunters was how they’d managed to survive not just their colossal prey but the armies of minions these creatures often guarded themselves with. Not a few martial arts included techniques for this purpose - one example was The Art of Sword and Shield’s sub-mode Against The Many that Henry’d employed against the minions of Kabit The Green. None, however, could match the effectiveness of the Starhunters, who in solitude endured their impossible battles for hours and days.
The answer to what'd distinguished the hermits turned out to be nothing mystical. Henry'd deduced it by tracing the art's history, to its progenitor styles Floating Leaf and Motionless Knife, the two Odayakan forms. Through a culture of obsessive dedication, through the torturous ‘hobby’ of Stretching that forced one to immerse within the minutia of the minutia, the parents of the first Starhunter had been single-minded machines, of scouting and butchering respectively. Their child, following in the parents' image and inheriting their same fastidiousness, had in turn made himself a single-minded machine of the hunt.
The difference was just perfection.
As Henry inhaled, as the oxygen of the new breath diffused into his veins to spread throughout his brain and body, every part touched was repurposed for the crucial hunt, for this microscopic fragment of the hunt.
The pupils accustomed to tracking the lines of books glanced from beast to beast, absorbing the ever-shifting layout of claws and fangs. The ears that others wasted on gossip tuned in to the padding of paws around him and the rattling of chains being pulled taught for lunges. Neuronal networks for filtering out the nuisance noises of daily life erased the mongooses too far to pose a threat. Other brain systems for predicting sequences of narratives in stories instead mapped out the orders in which he and the remainder would act. The muscles that laboured on his farmstead loosened up for the delicate dance with death, and the pieces that served no function in this fraction of a moment were shut off, his sense of smell, his emotion, his distracting inner chatter.
In the audience, Silver Wolf had been propping her chin up on Henry’s manuscript. While spectating him toying with the Greek girl and the crowd, she’d sunken back into the semi-perpetual state of confusion that’d been afflicting her lately.
It was hard to reconcile the Henry before her with the one she knew.
There’d been many clues in retrospect that he had other things going on: the unexplained absences from his bookstore, his utter indifference to her growing celebrity, and a general air of secrecy. To be honest, though, she'd never felt moved to investigate his background. For her, Henry was like a weird English teacher - one might attend their classes daily, one might be fond of them, yet one might also never contemplate the separate personal life they had outside of school hours.
Her writing buddy was an insular, stoic individual. Although a member of their writing circle, he stayed aloof of them all, offering his pretentious feedback on their stories and nothing else. He rarely attended the meetings hosted at his bookstore. He shunned the after events. He was a comfortable presence in the background, who produced no sound except page turns and the occasional yawn or sigh. That was supposed to be the sum of him.
For that same figure to be The Cripple, this trash-talking Cutthroat who’d once shaken up Saana’s duelling scene using his underhanded tactics, an adventurer in Uncle Peace’s Merry Band, a slayer of Gods...the difference was too stark.
In her efforts to resolve the discrepancies, dozens of questions had been popping up. Loudest amongst them were the two she’d been unable to berate him with yet, why and which?
Why had he gone to such extreme lengths to preserve his anonymity? What was he hiding from?
And which of them was real? By all accounts, it should be this one before her now, the slippery duellist, who moved more freely within his skin and who, in this single evening, had exhibited more emotion than in the all the months combined she’d known him. However, when she reflected on the peculiar novel her writing buddy had penned, she couldn’t shake the sense that this conclusion was off. The apathetic recluse might be closer to the truth.
Henry had much to explain.
Getting caught up in his match, she gasped a little when the rabid mongooses piled on him.
“Heavens!”
“Aww man, Big Bro got eaten!”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Silver turned to the source of that last screech. The Chinese girl who had a crush on Henry was tearing at her hair with the anguish of a young woman being informed her fiancé had drowned at sea.
“Together on the plains," the girl babbled, "under the stars, the romance of the hunt, that was supposed to be ME! Noooooooooooooooooooo!”
Silver, not fully understanding, frowned at the over-the-top response. Losing wasn’t a big deal; this was just a du—she noticed an abrupt shift in the faces of the crowd around them, their elation at Henry’s loss being snuffed out in an instant.
Glancing back at the arena, she saw a scratched-up figure stumbling out of the mongoose pile, miraculously alive.
Henry, sprinting away, pretended to be too shocked to pretend that'd been intentional for his audience. His eyes were glassy with a thousand-yard stare, as though he’d been spat out of the earth's bowels after a surprise tour of hell given by Lucifer—
A mongoose charged him from the front.
Between his disbelief at surviving and this new assault, it was conceivably impossible for him to be monitoring what was happening in the adjacent Earth Golem field, where a hippopotamus-sized spear of stone was solidifying above the creature.
Henry checked behind him, the mongooses squirming to untangle themselves. One had already broken free, was closer than the beast ahead.
He was pincered.
The rear mongoose attacked first, bolting forward.
Entering Bullet-Time, Henry jumped over the slashing claws.
The monster ahead leapt, its mouth widening to snatch him out of the air.
Henry, driven by raw instinct, jammed his leg in the creature’s mouth, not having time to calculate that this would still be a fatal wound with his current health.
But, yet again, even with the assistance of slow-mo, he botched the manoeuvre.
His foot missed the mark, planting on the creature’s nose, and the biting mongoose reangled its mouth to tear out his organs through his crotch, and Henry completed his taunt to Ex-Spy Bro.
-Henry Flower: Depends, really. For some, it is possible. But only if you're the greatest of all time.
The mongoose’s eyelids locked shut in a spasm of nervous overload. Its teeth lost their glow, and everything below the creature’s neck vanished as it was obliterated by a massive red object blurring past.
Thus, Henry dodged the Earth Golem’s
Across the arena, Hugo was staring down impassively at the base of the structure, smashed by the impact.
All around the venue, thousands of voices groaned in grief as their championess's refuge fell, dropping her into the mongoose swarm like a sacrificial lamb into a pool of piranhas.