The Overdream, Riverbank Cabin, an autumn evening, the log-cabin now resting in the corner of a sprawling town with enough facilities to service thousands.
In a manufacturing district on the adjacent side of the river, a glass-domed workshop glowed in the night. The air inside the building smelled of sawn timber and cured leathers, and cluttering the floor were the prototypes of desks, chairs, beds, and other pieces of interior design.
Henry, kneeling in a hot-tub crafted from a Hermit Goliath shell, was sanding down a bump.
A week had passed since his return to The Overdream. He'd been emulating roughly the amount of time available for his Fleshbag self before the tournament, without The Cap, to consider complying with Karnon. Since the younger Henry would never have devoted the entire period to this issue, he'd multi-tasked by also cobbling together furniture for his homestead.
He'd achieved many insights in the allotted time.
For one, he'd identified the main tell by which The Saviour had recognised him. In the end, the exposing incident happened to just be him killing the wagon-driving cannibal, Donkey Bro's former owner. Amongst the random family that'd witnessed the deed, the little boy, impressed by Henry's moves, had uploaded a clip to the forums. The clip had received no attention due to the mundanity of murder in The Slums, but it had been found by The Empire's spies. From there, Ramiro, having confirmed Henry's location at the time, could connect him to both the prior meeting with Senior Director Okai Van and the subsequent anomalies surrounding the lengthy monster king tutorial. The footage also showed that Henry hadn't yet obtained the Earthfriend class, linking him with both the cure of the Vampire-Moth curse and Karnon's appearance.
As for the spoiled assassination plot and Karnon's replacement of it, Henry'd managed to crack the code of the pantsing prank, revealing a surprise twist finale featuring Donkey Bro's
That revelation eventually led to the rather terrifying conclusion that Karnon had been planning this from the beginning. Knowing the futility of Henry's original plan, the God had been preparing to change it from their first meeting by weaving clues into all their prior interactions, from the moon-painting prank with Mindobeli and Bes, to the cooking-competition prank with Svanto. Even pretending to be hoodwinked into marriage seemed to be a part of the ploy, the whirlwind princess being coded into the pantsing prank via the exploding wind sphere.
But, of all the startling epiphanies, the biggest was the be—
Scheduled Reminder: Time's up. Final answer, yes or no?
The notification caused him to freeze, his sanding coming to an abrupt halt.
"No," he answered firmly, to the universe and himself.
The research hadn't swayed his initial decision: he would not be joining hands with a Trickster God. There'd been barely enough time to decipher Karnon's elaborate scheme, let alone the motives behind it or any potential traps. On such an unknown factor, Henry would never risk Suchi, himself, or his donkey companion.
For both peace of mind and personal interest, he intended to continue investigating this issue in his spare hours during this Overdream session, pausing the development of his farm, his planetary explorations, and his selective breeding of the Nature Energy Grass. Nevertheless, the final answer would have to be his current no. His Digital self may not have been time-restricted, but the Fleshbag was, and their decisions regarding matters this grave couldn't be witnessed to contradict.
"Well, back to work then."
Laying down a sanding tool, Henry climbed out of the hot tub. He approached a storage chest at the entrance to the workshop, grabbed it, and tore open a space-rift. An instant later, he and the chest were standing in the frigid, wind-battered Togavian highland, amidst rolling hills of naked boulders and hardy grasses.
This had been the grounds where he'd completed his last duelling practice session for Togavian Tulipsinging a week before. The next martial art had also coincidentally originated here, although Henry supposed back then the Maalundi Maelstrom had yet to appear.
At a thought, the scenery around him mutated. The icy wind ceased to bite his cheeks. An overcast sky opened up, and the sun's rays baked the terrain 19 degrees warmer. Short, mediterranean shrubs reclaimed the bare slopes, and a not immediately apparent emptiness was filled in with the sounds of wildlife, of goats, squirrels, birds, and clicking insects.
The area should have been closer to this two millennia earlier, in the era of The Laughing Sons.
The Laughing Sons were a sect of Togavian hooligans that'd terrorised the region during its occupation by The Maalundi Empire. Their founder, Tuure Lamin, a.k.a. The Laughing Man, was himself a foreigner, a Maalundi God tasked with managing the occupying force. Enigmatically, The Laughing Man recruited his Sons from the indigenous populace, forming them into a mix of private guard and comedy troupe, which he personally schooled in trickery, debauchery, cheating, wastefulness, and other anti-virtues. There were many contradictory tales about Tuure Lamin's motives, such as the Sons being his illegitimate spawn. According to Henry's recent investigations, though, the Sons were merely key Togavian figures, children of indigenous nobility and promising stars, whom The Laughing Man kept within killing distance as a deterrent against insurrections. The teachings in mischief were for Lamin's self-amusement.
As part of a suite of silly customs taught to his Sons, The Laughing Man created a martial art, which he ironically labelled 'The Combat System'. This was a comedic fighting style driven by an ethos of defeating a target in the most convoluted, drawn-out, tricky, humiliating, and laughable ways conceivable. A wildly impractical art, it sacrificed functionality for more entertaining bullying.
Henry'd initially scheduled The Combat System for near the end of his martial climb. The delay wasn't due to its impracticality, but rather because, beneath the humorous facade, the art represented one of the steepest peaks of combat, one he'd have preferred to scale when better equipped. He pushed it forward now in order to understand Karnon.
The Trickster God, a two millennia-old Togavian, had been a Laughing Son himself. His stint in the sect could be considered his origin story. The first mention of him in the historical record corresponded with him being recruited into The Sons as an orphan child. The other Sons were his siblings and uncles through adolescence, and The Laughing Man was a sort of father figure, from whom Karnon inherited many of his strange mannerisms. Finally, Karnon's entrance into adulthood and onto the global stage occurred when, having absorbed the lessons of the parent, he assassinated The Laughing Man in spectacular fashion and liberated his homeland from Maalundi's foreign dominion.
Henry wondered whether he might himself—by walking in the blue buffoon's footsteps, by becoming himself a fusion of warrior and clown—find the shreds of reason sprinkled in the madness.
Without a hint of laughter, he plunked down his chest on the dirt of old Togavi, cracked the lid, and inspected the contents. Staring back at him was an array of goofy gag contraptions. A potion vial of concentrated urine, an inflatable balloon clone of himself, a foam dagger…
Professor Sining Fenda of Medrisha (648 – 624 B.P.) in The Fingernails of Maalundi: Translations of Lost Manuscripts Discovered in The Empire's Former Colonies, Primarily from Modern Karnonia, Ejapipilu, and Xanyan:
Scholar Rhuav Tshem resided in Kawneeg city, the ruins of which now moulder in the Verlies province of Togavi West. In addition to his public teaching job, Tshem was himself an infamous scallywag who operated covertly under the nom de farce His Royal Poop. In the 199th year of Emperor Seekubaa's reign, 8 years prior to Lord Karnon's liberation of the Togavian Isles, Scholar Tshem was captured infecting his regional grain supply with a hallucinogenic bacterium. For this crime, a judge condemned him to a life-long sentence of home confinement. The Scholar came in his isolation to appreciate the warning contained in the miscreant's maxim,
"The wolf who eats the last lamb is greeted next spring by hills of endless green.
Allow your victims today a tiny bit of reprieve, that they may continue being your victims tomorrow,"
and he was beset with a profound regret at being caught. The torments of boredom drove him to refuge in the tales of ancient and contemporaneous degeneracy. His favourite subjects were Togavi's foremost delinquents, The Laughing Sons. Scholar Tshem collected brief accounts of the twenty-four most disreputable members, and he penned a poem for each celebrating their absurd devotion to tomfoolery.
The compendium resulting from his enterprise was entitled The Twenty-Four Paragons of Pious Mischief.
Given the deceptive habits of The Sons and the author himself, the double-speak of the era, and the chronological distance between him and his subjects, it can be assumed that many elements of the stories are apocryphal or fictitious. Nevertheless, the manuscript is honest in expressing the bizarre zeitgeist of Maalundi-controlled Togavi.
An excerpt from The Twenty-Four Paragons of Pious Mischief by His Royal Poop (2355 – 2271 B.P.):
Paragon One – Stealing Five Fruit from His Majesty Before Being Gifted The Sixth – Tuure Lamin, Viceroy of Togavi, The Laughing Man
Glorious Seekubaa is a ruler both virtuous and adroit. Under his command, the unified Maalundi have tamed the northern snows and fended off the false Mother in the east. His citizens love him as a father and worship him as one who's already Ascended to the Cosmos. Seekubaa, however, remembers always that he is but one man. Thus, he fosters loyalty from his commanders and ministers by binding their lineages to his through the shrewd practice of betrothals and adoptions. As the late Grey Queen once said, "Why watch my back? Anyone with the proximity to thrust a dagger would also pierce themselves."
In Seekubaa's 63rd reign year, an advisor presented the Emperor with a candidate husband for his 9th daughter. "Glorious King of Kings, give Princess Saara to the rising hero of The 6th Infantry, Brigadier Lamin. Although he is of lowly origins, he has proven an equal nobility of soul and character. The eastern front against The All-Mother's horde is fierce and blood-strewn. Its armies are ruthless. Our men are dwarfed like infants before its hulking demons and pig-men. Our slain are raised by its necromancers, and the soldiers go mad as they cleave the rotting heads of their brothers. In this landscape of carnage and horror, Brigadier Lamin, whom they call The Laughing Man, is unbroken. With calm and intelligence and eternal cheer, he guides his troops through glorious victories and hard defeats. So much adoration have the soldiers for him that by marrying your Saara to Lamin, it will be equal to her marrying them, and, to quote Shield-Saint Haanyi, 'Through the soldiers, to the nation.'"
Seekubaa's third son, then a general in the army, corroborated this praise. "During the calamitous first Istana offensive, Brigadier Lamin's troops were amongst the heavy hit, half their number perishing. But, by the miracle of his resolute example, not one of his men afterwards feigned plague or absconded to the plains or mountains. They distributed themselves throughout the vanguard for the second offensive, and they staunchly led newcomers into Istana's deadly maze. Brigadier Lamin himself was in the van, where he reaped five hundred lives with his halberd. He is unlike others—including myself, and I know, wisest patriarch, you would not fault my prudence—who command remotely from the rear. I have heard him through the ears of my own troops. Wherever the soil is most red-moistened, that's where the clash of metal and the scream of spells become muted beneath his thunderous roar. Lamin's laughter motivates those sobbing on death's door to pick up their weapons and entrails to re-enter the fray. The enemy, who has no trace of fear in their lifeless gaze, is given oblivion when they will not break. I dare say that if I possessed half the Brigadier's heart or a fifth his brain, The Mother's falsehoods about The Cycle would be disproved tomorrow by a noose around its neck. For Lamin to join our family, we should be honoured."
The insistence of Glorious Seekubaa's third son convinced the Emperor to invite the young man to the palace. Seekubaa, however, retained a scepticism about the Brigadier's common origins and therefore forbade him from meeting Princess Saara until after a thorough vetting. For two decades, Seekubaa tested Lamin while mentoring him in court manners during visits between deployments. According to the Emperor's final judgement, the Brigadier would indeed make a suitable groom, Lamin being a gregarious fellow with a talent in battle, a sharp wit, and a pleasant laugh that carried traces of the magical. When Lamin had risen to the rank of General, the Emperor accepted him for a son-in-law. Nine-months after the wedding with Princess Saara, Glorious Seekubaa was presented with a laughing baby grandson along with three more newborns from other daughters of the Emperor that Lamin had been courting in secret.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Glorious Seekubaa wanted to execute the libidinous fiend, but, to his astonishment, his daughters begged mercy on threat of suicide. Their entreaties were joined by a fifth daughter, who gave birth during the investigation, and Seekubaa's third son, who'd orchestrated the petition to bring his indiscriminate lover Lamin to the palace. The Emperor, in tears at the destruction of his family, exiled his devil of a son-in-law to the edge of his domains.
And here in sun-kissed Togavi, Viceroy Lamin has continued to sow his mischievous seeds.
His Royal Poop says,
"The Emperor watched Lamin to deduce
If with the Princess he could reproduce.
He surpassed expectations:
Five babes for the nation!
And the third Prince, he did also seduce."
Henry first familiarised himself with The Combat System's many categories of 'combat-gag'.
A Silly Spell was an ability used humorously but ineffectively, like
The performance of these combat-gags shared elements with stage magic, a warrior-clown exploiting misdirection, distraction, and delays. A distinguishing difference between magic tricks, however, was that the party you were attempting to dupe was simultaneously trying to kill you. This hostility factor tended to reduce their compliance and shake up the regular rules.
For the combat-clown wishing to practise their art without dying, genius and idiocy were no longer separated by a fine line, but rather genius became a prerequisite for idiocy. To execute one of these gags that made a farce of fighting required, paradoxically, an experienced, proficient, and exhaustive comprehension of the mechanics of combat. One had to read how the adversary interpreted set-ups, the myriad of responses available to them, and the chances of each being chosen. One needed a stoic, imperturbable mindset to continue prank-planning after being punched in the mouth. And so on.
In short, to pants an enemy, one must first have grasped the meaning of putting pants on.
Henry believed the genius-idiocy paradox could best be illustrated through an analytic dissection of the Ruined Socks gag, i.e. tricking an opponent to step into a puddle of diluted horse dung.
What might seem, superficially, like a mistake by the enemy was usually the byproduct of a calculated manipulation, their choice being predetermined by the elimination of less humiliating alternatives. A set-up punch can be dodged, blocked, or parried. But what if the set-up punch's fist component was substituted with a fire-breathing dragon? Then, obviously, only dodging remains - dodging into the foul puddle.
Shifting to a second, deeper layer in the implementation of Ruined Socks, as one might detect from the above scenario, manipulating an opponent's choices often relied on abusing an advantage (e.g., possessing a fire-breathing dragon). Here, one encountered the stumbling block of The Rule of Parity: when both participants in a fight had the same, limited number of resources (e.g., two fists, no dragons), then the resources put to use by either combatant created a gap or could be nullified by the opponent's resources (e.g., the right-fist, to mime a dragon convincingly enough to spook, must no longer be defending against the enemy's left-jab to the nose). The Laughing Sons overcame the parity conundrum by just not being equal. Be a higher level, have more abilities, own better equipment - this was the simplest path to manipulation, recommended to all novice practitioners of The Combat System. By possessing a top-Tier, impervious helmet, one could merely ignore any left-jabs to the nose and mime their set-up dragon-punch in peace. Henry himself had once succeeded through this method with his Legendaries items. If, however, a warrior-clown was truly crazy and insisted on ignoring this invaluable advice, insisted on conducting manipulations in an even field, then they had but a single remaining option: master the four-dimensional structure of combat, in which resources fluctuated in their utilisability across time and space, and sneak in manipulations within spatio-temporal disparity windows (e.g., dodge a bunch of attacks and, between the misses, mime the spooky dragon).
Now, descending to Ruined Socks's third layer, the mastery of spatio...
Paragon Four – Saving His Home Through Dice - Penny-Pinching Npias
The fourth Son was Penny-Pinching Npias, who inherited a dukedom at age 14 after his parents were recalled to The Cycle. Npias's father had instructed his eldest son from birth in the arts of governance and politics so that he could succeed the old Duke in the caretaking of their people. But the eldest son was eaten by a bear. The next successor, Npias, was a frivolous, bratty teen, who loathed the peasantry and, during his rule, wasted the taxes collected from them entertaining his chums with gambling and drink. The teen's spendthrift habits quickly devoured the treasury.
In one spring of Npias's disastrous reign, he received a memorandum of notification that Maalundi envoys would be visiting. Rumours of his ineptitude had leaked, and they wanted to verify the truth of these sensational claims in case the teenage ruler should be replaced. By all rights, Npias should have been. Without him purchasing metal to mend broken harvest tools, his wheat fields had turned fallow. Without imports of lumber, his buildings had rotted and crumbled. Without coin or food for payment, his soldiers had quit for mercenary missions abroad.
The teenage ruler was sobered by the letter. Although still unconcerned with the peasantry, he wanted to retain his estate. The meagre profits he'd been collecting sustained the expenses of his wasteful hobbies. Before the envoy's visit, thus, he needed to subdue his vices and rebuild this land of his. But Npias was a dyed-in-the-wool degenerate; the spring flowers and calves and foals instilled him with the miraculous sense of change and hope, so he wagered his remaining fortune.
Penniless, the teenage Duke roamed his domain and observed the monuments erected by his ancestors disintegrating around him. His castle's granary had been ransacked, and its engraved stones had been stolen, leaving a pile of bare, weed-infested earth. On the way out of town, a mob of plague-stricken peasants beat Npias and mugged him of his horse, sandals, and toga. Naked and despairing, the Duke squatted on the corner of the potholed road in misery. "I will be executed," Npias wept, "or, worse, demoted to a peasant."
Thinking that never again would he taste that sweet life to which his noble tastebuds had been conditioned, he sobbed into his hands. Such a quantity of tears did he shed that some of the blood from the mob's beating was washed away. Through his blurry, sobbing vision, his purified palms gave him a fleeting sense that his recent troubles may have been an illusion, but flipping his hands around showed the soiled underside.
A brilliant idea struck Npias!
Straightening up, he threatened his wife crying beside him on pain of death to summon her handsome lovers and their most healthy-looking relatives. While the startled woman obeyed, the Duke appropriated a riding horse from a farmer. Riding this mount hard, he hunted down his chums in neighbouring territories and offered to forgive parts of what they owed him in exchange for construction materials, basic goods, clothing, and artwork. During these visits, he stopped by the local dens of sin and, between a few games of dice for luck, recruited the top scammers, cheaters, and bed-wenches who'd emptied his pockets in the past.
The Maalundi envoys, when they arrived at the port, were awed by a picturesque view of the duchy's capital. The exteriors of the buildings were in pristine condition, as though brand new. Every citizen, from the dockworkers to the manager of the art gallery, was handsome and uniformly beaming. After the envoys' first day of touring with the teenage Duke, they retired to a tavern for rest and a smidgen of nocturnal entertainment. At the crack of dawn the next morning, the envoys awoke Npias to inform him that they'd witnessed enough of his fine realm and would be returning to the capital to quell the nasty rumours. Thus, they departed, fleeing gambling debts and drunken marriage-proposals accumulated overnight, never inspecting the duchy's soiled underside, the other 99% that hadn't been patched over.
Many people believe that Penny-Pinching Npias's fortune came from his sincere commitment to mischief. His loyalty to the ignoble ideal moved the Cosmos itself to fool the envoys and keep him in the seat of power.
His Royal Poop says,
"In danger for making a shamble
Of the realm he'd neglected to gamble,
Npias fixed up his mess
By doing just what he knew best:
He summoned his buddies to gamble."
Use of the most complicated combat-gags was conditional on traits unique to the opponent, such as their style, competencies, weaknesses, and habits. A vital skill for any warrior-clown therefore was reading and preparing for the enemy.
The majority of The Laughing Sons had been too lazy to bother with prep. Instead, they'd utilised general tricks that worked on anyone while brute-forcing the more specialised gags regardless of their success or failure. One exception, though, had been the 7th Laughing Son, Penny-Pinching Npias.
An irredeemable gambler, Npias was motivated by an urge to rig bets with the other Sons about which combat-gags they could pull off in a fight. For the art's 223 stock combat-gags, the gambler tabulated all instances in which they'd ever been attempted, along with information on the victims, ranging from their martial art to the dialect of Togavi they spoke. Then, having independently invented the field of statistics to cheat at other bets, he calculated which variables influenced the likelihood of a gag succeeding. He identified combat-gags performable universally from those that were situational, gags effective against certain Martial Classes but not others, gags demanding specialised talents like juggling and those that could be done by a paralysed gecko. Using this knowledge, he formulated predictive models, allowing him to input a target's features and spit out estimations of gag success. His models may have been imprecise due to the noisy nature of combat, but they bought him enough of an edge to win more bets than he lost. Npias's secrets were only revealed to the other Sons after his passing, the geriatric gambler bragging in his diaries about how he'd duped them.
Henry decided to develop Npias's predictive research for a different reason. His supreme martial art, A Thousand Tools, as part of its shift towards a cerebral style of duelling, would contain a formalised system of pre-fight scouting in which one pin-pointed the exploitable traits of the enemy, including which tools they would be most susceptible to. In this regard, improving Npias's methods was a kind of dry run for the finale. To the extent that Henry could predict what combat-gags would land, he should be able to do the same for non-nonsense techniques.
Thus, he practised the ways of Penny-Pinching Npias, spying on his replicas as they fought and divining the embarassments awaiting them in the future.
To go beyond the gambler, Henry drew from his studies in many previous martial arts. War-Priest Kemenrang's Death Training experiments with their staggering number of participants highlighted exploitable traits Npias had never fathomed, while Starhunting provided superior methods for scouting. From Henry's own obsession with time-efficiency, he refined predictive models suited to limited amounts of data gatherable within observation periods of varying lengths, from days to seconds. And there was opposition-research techniques stolen from Saana League's analysts, Henry having access to their data because, as The Tyrant, he was the League's main financial backer. Multiple lifetimes' worth of hard-fought insights were consumed, digested, and metamorphosised into forecasts for farts.
Normal people would probably consider it a crime against humanity to devote this priceless trove of resources and knowledge to the refinement of bad jokes. For Henry, the eternal climber, this was also still the case.
Paragon Twelve – Drinking Venom on Behalf of His Sisters - Tshuaj The Alchemist
Although well-to-do today, the 12th Son, Tshuaj The Alchemist, is of common birth, his family being serfs who'd belonged to a cruel lord. The lord's sons were especially evil. Their favourite hobby was to descend on the serf villages and have their way with Tshuaj's sisters and the other destitute maidens.
Little Tshuaj, who had a precocious talent in tinctures and poultices, concocted a solution. Blending make-up and scents to transform himself into a pretty lady, he pretended to be a foreign witch visiting on a charity mission. When the lord's lustful lads next raided the village, the disguised Tshuaj acted appalled. Refusing to allow this wickedness, he offered himself, a beautiful foreign noblewoman, in sacrifice. His only rule was that each of them would begin their lovemaking with a foot massage. If any of the lord's sons could endure his technique for twelve breaths, they could do as they pleased, but if they lost, they would have to leave for the night. The lord's sons, curious and persuaded by the naive witch, agreed.
Tshuaj's weapon was a special massage ointment. Within seconds of it being rubbed into the soles, each of the sons succumbed. The pleasure was so great, however, that none of them were incensed by the deception and they departed whistling merry songs.
The subsequent evening, the sons returned to Tshuaj's village, bringing with them their excited friends from other noble families, and they begged the witch to test them again. Once more, charitable Tshuaj polluted his fingers for the sake of the serf maidens.
The massages continued for several weeks. Although no man could defeat the witch's challenge, no man was unsatisfied. Even the lord himself joined in after hearing whispers of her talents, and they say he left her care having shed half his tired years.
Then one remarkable day, every man whose foot had been touched died in unison, all within the same hour. Such was the precision with which Tshuaj The Alchemist had calibrated the dosages of poison laced in the ointment for each victim.
A hunting party was formed to locate the pretty murderess, but their search failed. Eventually, news reached the ears of Viceroy Lamin, who, with his own knack for the naughty, was able to connect the dots back to the young Alchemist. Recognising a bit of himself in the boy, Lamin promoted Tshuaj to the rank of Marquis and adopted him as one of his Laughing Sons.
His Royal Poop says,
"There once was a beautiful witch,
Whose foot-rubs could make the boys twitch.
After one evening of love,
Their souls fly above.
And no one can track down the $*%&."