The concept of murder had fascinated Ramiro since childhood. His father liked to tell him macabre stories about the American Indians - Aztec mothers selling their kids for sacrifices during droughts, Yanomami youths caving in the skulls of the elderly too slow to keep up with the tribe. More than the graphicness of these tales, he'd always been curious about how the killing sounded so commonplace. He'd wondered what special quality these savages possessed that enabled them to regularly commit an act so forbidden to himself.
The release of Saana, with its hyper-realism, had presented him a chance to simulate and explore his interest.
This serial killer role would, ironically, prove to be an effective means for liberating him from the shackles of being an NPC.
Stalking the streets gave an unsettling glimpse of the misery for those dwelling in the slums and the scraps of happiness they salvaged within it. When he infiltrated their shacks, from the fighting back to the pathetic offerings of their worthless possessions, their reactions didn't feel fake. They had the distinctive taste of reality.
Not that anyone would believe him should his nocturnal experiments be revealed, but, following his metamorphosis, there'd been genuine human empathy in his campaign to unify The Slums. He'd sincerely come to relate to the Slumdwellers' suffering and felt he could provide them with a better life than their then-subjugators.
That he had continued to murder a handful on occasion didn't negate this. Morally, he recognised the contradiction, and, logically, he was aware of the risks to the goal of a unified slum, his prestige, his finances. However, at the end of the day, he was a human, the rare creature in whom dwelled many competing voices, whose loftiest resolves sometimes caved to debased pleasures. And, make no mistake, killing was a pleasure.
That'd been the Indians' secret, he'd deduced. Taking a life didn't have to feel bad. Guilt was really an anomaly with modern man, a mental diaper he put on himself that made him fester in the stink of his own $*$#. By identifying and shedding the synthetic devices of infantilising civility, by learning to evacuate one's natural urges in a healthy, adult manner, killing people became deeply gratifying. It was very much worth risking everything to pursue.
Crazy?
The Tyrant would understand this. After all, he'd been through the same metamorphosis.
Ramiro'd noticed their psychological kinship when, deciding to fix The Slums, he'd researched the guy's history and methods, as most newcomers to Saana's politics did.
The Tyrant in Saana II had the mindset of an ordinary commander. He'd coordinated his armies as though playing a real-time strategy game, rapidly trading troops for numerical victories. His alliance, once they'd usurped the global throne, were careless like their predecessors, their empire collapsing due to lazy management, corruption, in-fighting.
Over the years, though, The Tyrant had matured, had transformed.
His military operations became more serious. The logistical support systems, the training, the infrastructure, the transport, were made more complex and efficient. Campaigns he might've fought in the past were solved instead through diplomacy, blackmail, assassinations. In war, he avoided player-preferred pitched battles in favour of protracted, objective-based assaults against enemy objectives, and his army compositions were revised to utilise the quicker-to-replenish players in sacrificial manoeuvres.
These adjustments were minuscule compared with the political reformations.
Internally, he'd imposed rigorous disciplinary measures on his guild. Most player-ran organisations operated with the laxity of a frat-house, members obtaining their positions through nepotistic connections and bound to no genuine restrictions – even when official rules existed, friends forgave friends. The Company, in comparison, was run like a fusion of a corporation and a military government. There were various departments, hierarchies of officially-defined duties, systematised methods for vetting applicants including their tournaments. Their code of conduct mandated that members almost behave with the restraint of real-life, and infractions as minor as bribe-taking were punished with instant expulsion. To avoid friendship-favours, an internal affairs division was constantly catching and purging offenders. The worst malefactors became practice targets for the guild's assassins, who between missions honed their art tracking the blacklisted across their new characters.
Externally, The Company adopted a working philosophy of neo-medievalism, whereby NPCs subjects and factions were treated as though they were actual people from the middle-ages. This cynical theory posited that the NPCs, due to differing conditions of Saana from the real-world, could never be governed with modern, gentler laws and would instead be more responsive to older societal technologies. This meant, on the one hand, The Company respected established cultures and refrained from random, excessive killing. On the other, they respected corrupt dynasties and, when they did kill, the act was carried with the more gruesome methods of feudal-ages – in public, with cruel and unusual tortures, the criminal's mutilated body utilised as a neon signboard advertising the extent of the sovereign's power.
Beginning with this basic foundation, The Company seemed to at least try to shift their domains towards the more peaceful state of modernity. They continually tinkered with their management, using a maniacal evidence-based governance ethos to trial ideas in selected colonies and evaluate progress by surveyed metrics. In a quest to optimise performance indicators, their political machinery had pillaged and fused into itself the tactics from a hundred -isms, from Taoism to mercantilism. This constant plundering and evolution made them unrecognisable, incomprehensible.
So-called experts held that many of these latter advances served simply to benefit The Company. In an adaptation of the Anglo-American tradition of imperialism, the aesthetics of advancing trade and humanitarian development were merely efforts to expand their sphere of exploitation, the rearrangement of the world politico-economic system with themselves at its locus. From an opaque central position, they could then, in addition to their overt military domination, subjugate enemies through the alternative weaponry of monopoly capital: unpayable loans, lop-sided treaties, domestic subsidies, tariffs, boycotts, trade sanctions, embargoes, etc.
Ramiro—who'd sat on a similar throne, who'd achieved his rise to power by adapting The Tyrant's techniques to The Slums, and who'd regularly borrowed the language of Marxism in castigating The Company for their avarice—knew these criticisms to be unfounded. The Company's actions contradicted a pragmatic goal of maximum gain. They had funded many ventures whose profits would never be returned to themselves. The colonies where they conducted their governance experiments had been built in barren, undesirable land. In line with them using their military predominately in defence, they'd refrained from conquering countless territories they could have occupied and profited from with impunity – this included The Slums. Ramiro, in his brief governorship of Suchi, had made himself a multi-millionaire by selling titles and partnering with sponsors; by his estimation, The Tyrant, who had at his disposal a much larger machine of wealth generation, had personally forfeited hundreds of millions, if not billions.
This shadowy despot that was the subject of so much public condemnation seemed to have an infinitely greedier goal than the accumulation of objects. The strange and evolving drama of his guild was, in fact, him chasing the priceless chimaera: a better future for the world.
A better future for the world of a game.
Wasn't that comical? Somewhere between his start and now, The Tyrant had actually transformed from a warmonger into a saviour. For one so far gone in their metamorphosis, material fortunes were insignificant against the billion lives he'd been deluded enough to both create and care about, against paying off the karmic debt for his countless atrocities before and after his metamorphosis.
Ramiro understood this brother in madness perfectly. Both of them had sunk so deep into this virtual universe that they made decisions counter to their material interests, The Tyrant suppressing his organisation for the thrill of saving lives, Ramiro risking his for the thrill of taking them. Both of them, awakened from their NPC stupor by the warm blood splashing against their face, had risen to Saana's most vibrant plane, immersing themselves in an experience that, in both sainthood and demonism, transcended anything available in the boring 'real' world. For the metamorphosised, it was worth it.
An Alex Wong could never understand this.
That simpleton wasn't in their class. Looking at the man today, one saw the same person from yesteryear: a carefree social gamer for whom the primary purpose of any event was hanging out with friends or settling a grudge with enemies. Whether on the battlefield, at a celebrity gala, or on TV making a public wager, 'Mayonnaise' remained always upbeat. The way he carried himself was far too light and healthy, showing none of the organal damage caused by the conflagration between The Tyrant's multiplied internal contradictions. He so effortlessly held his head high because it contained nothing to weigh it down. He was an NPC.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
But this masked fellow in the clip hacking through a wagon driver's neck…
Ramiro rewound the footage.
Witness in the sequence a metamorphosised individual in action. At the beginning, the masked figure has realised the wagon-driver is not directing him towards the tutorial grounds. Spurred by this anomaly, he taps into his expansive information network and cleverly deduces the driver might be a cultist of The Primordial Path luring him into a sacrifice. Here, a pseudo-NPC, having detected the threat, jumps straight to the attack. But he doesn't. Giving the cultist, a person, a chance, requiring further proof before committing an irreversible act, he leaps upon the guy and lifts his shirt to check for The Path's characteristic scarification.
'Hey!'
The metamorphosised individual finds the scars, yet he's still not content. Giving this person a second chance, he drives a small filet knife into their throat. If he's attacking without justification, his own flashing name will confirm, then he can back out, apologise, deescalate. But his suspicion wasn't wrong. There is no name. This wagon-driver was about to try to kill him. Maybe, he should run away then? But, no, this wagon-driver had likely murdered before and, if set free, might murder again. For the greater good, they must be stopped. And in Suchi, where there is no state-supported prison complex for life sentences or moral correction, 'stopping' means death. The masked figure, having judged and found this man guilty, accepts the next role of executioner. Drawing a girthier dagger, he begins to stab into the wagon-driver's stomach.
'Stop! Please!'
He doesn't stop. Committed to fulfilling the sentence, he carves up the criminal's belly. Coldy, he stabs away, ignoring the punches to his head and the moans of pain, talking in a calm manner to assuage the family observing in horror.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
'I'm defending myself. This guy was about to kill me. Check the Assailant's Penalty.'
'He's lying!'
His words seem dispassionate, procedural, but this is as much a mask as the one hiding his facial features. He would now have you believe that it's merely an NPC he's killing, that this action has no deeper significance beyond the deletion of a row in a computerised database, that his arm is frantically stabbing to maximise a damage rotation. However, his eyes staring through the mask reveal the truth: I'm stabbing a person.
This has long ceased to be a game. His metamorphosised eyes announce clearly that he is stabbing this person in the exact same fashion that, if the conditions of the external world mirrored this abominable one, he might stab you. There is no difference.
What struck Ramiro is that these eyes, awoken from the NPC stupor, contained no trace of joy. It was one thing to kill as he himself did, after liberating his mind from the strictures of modernity and rediscovering the equal sides of boredom and beauty to death that'd been common sense to savage man. But the killer in this clip is not free. He is the prototypical 21st-century man, bound still to taboo, the former cannibal made herbivorous by the societal technologies of surveillance, manners, education, legality, and policing. Even in the absence of external coercion, his mind alone must answer to the self-perpetuating, self-punishing program of moral austerity that forbids the tasting of all life's sweetest poisons. Yet, in a deranged contradiction, with these mental oppressions intact, he still, pinching his nose, takes a swig from the chalice. The flavour he refuses to acquire disgusts him, yet, still, he forces himself to consume it. For an NPC, a non-person transformed into a person, he is subordinating his own soul-deep aversion to killing out of an obligation to the higher level of moral duty in which—as all those privileged by sovereignty in Saana were made aware—some of those people that one kills are better off dead.
Not NPCs - people. This speed of his stabbing is revealed to be an attempt to hasten the end of this agony, but it is simply the agony of the person being killed that he's ending, his own being retained and cherished with the hubris of a martyr. The saint maintains his sanctimonious posture of selflessness right until the final mercy blow, the first two of which he nervously $&#*$ up.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
'You've only got yourself to blame, dude. No matter what you're missing in life, there are plenty of ways to fill the void without joining a cult of murderous cannibals. In the next cycle, consider taking up fishing or a team sport.'
And after sending off their soul with this casual banter, he turns to the family spectating his deed, and he finishes with a flippant laugh.
'Hahaha. I guess we should find out what prizes we won today?'
Don't be fooled by this laughter or these words. The truth is uttered by the 21st-century-man eyes, sad and guilty as though you've just caught him holding a pillow over his sick mother's moaning face.
It was the jarring mixing of these two elements, the flippancy of acknowledging this game-world's virtuality and the enacted sobriety of not truly feeling it so, that marked the final confession. This teenager is trying to keep himself in check. He has no delusion about the path that his metamorphosis has set him upon. Critically, though, despite fearing the destruction of the self ahead, he has rejected the easy exits. He does not kill without love. He does not love without killing. He does not learn the love in killing. No, he both kills and he loves separately yet together. In a discordant, two-fold existence, he chooses to stand right where he is, vigilantly staring at his feet and mocking their will to progress further down this path of doom.
Wasn't this perverse balancing act also precisely the function of Alex Wong? Why had an NPC been elected the face of The Company, this machine of saintly humanitarianism? It was to remind all observing that Saana wasn't reality. Alex Wong was a jester's mask nailed to the skull of another trying to offset their pathological severity, a straight-jacket. Yet, again, ultimately, the mask-wearer still remained where he was; despite holding the keys to sanity, he chose to stay locked screaming in the madhouse.
Ramiro, well before the confirmation of the three-way meeting organised by Karnon, had recognised his foe when this footage crossed his desk. These apologetic eyes worn by a murderer belonged to someone equally lost as himself.
This was The Tyrant.
Once one entertained this possibility, other puzzle pieces smoothly slotted into place.
The Tyrant could be The Cripple. The latter's cult's shenanigans during Operation Phantom Limbs did help The Tyrant's war efforts, and the cult's island base in present-day Togavi happened to be a convenient location for sailing between the main battlefronts. The Cripple tracking down so many artefacts might be consistent with him sharing The Tyrant's cognitive gifts.
Digging into this 'Henry Flower' identity revealed several junctures between the duellist and the commander. His translator role provided cover for the constant travels, collecting materials for his martial research, moving between battlefields. There was The Cripple fanfiction, written by himself about himself. His bookcafe was conveniently attached to The Company's in-game headquarters. While he might be a New Zealander who spoke a different language from both personas, he was officially a linguist, a hobbyist of tongues, and The Company's real-world headquarters happened to be in his native country, not Alex Wong's.
The dual identity explained their smuggling ring's exposure. The Cripple arrived here to build a stadium for researching and polishing his techniques. Senior Director Okai Van, at Ramiro's suggestion, broke protocol to meet this odd duellist, inadvertently also meeting The Tyrant, who, having no humour, would have launched an immediate investigation into this corruption.
The Tyrant's presence solved several anomalies during the vampire moth debacle: the massive funding to complete the cure; The Church, his ally, being notified when Ramiro obstructed the cure; and the protégé's peculiar reaction to Karnon selecting him - flat, tired, hostile.
The whole WBAE opening for business to crush Ramiro for his mistreatment of his subjects, that too began to make sense.
Atusa trotted back into the room, her bare feet padding along the hardened floors. "Bath's ready when you are."
Ramiro smiled. "Thank you, my love. I'll wait for you to finish."
"Have you figured out his connection yet?"
"Not quite yet."
Atusa, zipping around the chamber with the methodologicality of a worker bee, transferred all the furniture into storage chests except his mirror. She then piled up all the soiled furs and began to chant syllables for a fire spell.
Ramiro took a small pleasure at her care for the possessions. She had no clue about their forthcoming annihilation.
It'd been several days since he'd realised their enemy was The Tyrant, but he'd not warned her or any of the others.
His comrades were NPCs, too. At the realisation of this figure's direct involvement, they would lie face down on the ground and apologise and plead for The Tyrant's mercy while their mouths filled with dirt.
That their situation might not be hopeless, he wouldn't have been able to convince them.
They wouldn't be assured when he pointed out The Tyrant's operation being riddled with peculiarities: him commissioning the stadium without his guild's reduced prices, him having The Slums handle the Earthfriend cure, him operating afterwards on his lonesome through various personas without external aid. The Empire had been against The Tyrant, true, but maybe not The Company.
Karnon was also an X-factor. Ramiro wouldn't be tricked by this prankster deity claiming The Tyrant as his disciple. While an Alex Wong might be amused by the God's antics, The Tyrant, if one understood him properly, would be horrified, his awakened vision open to all death in the background of this careless God's hijinks. These two were unambiguous enemies, each searching for the first opportunity to snuff the other.
Through these gaps of uncertainty, The Empire might've been able to wriggle out their survival. If they stayed composed and waited, Karnon could win it for them. Maybe, The Tyrant would destroy himself.
Ramiro's back was struck by a wave of warmth as Atusa threw a curtain of flame on the furs. The aroma of her organs packed inside starting to sizzle filled his nostrils with tantalising memories, and he felt his blood rising. He glanced again at his nude reflection. The glow of the fire flickered around his warthog body, chubby yet firm, grotesque yet erotic, man-like yet bestial.
But, actually, even if the situation had been hopeless, he hadn't planned on backing down.
There had never been any cashing out by selling their assets or evacuating to another region to start again. These were lies to keep his pathetic NPC allies placated. He and this castle made of sand and driftwood, built by himself alone on the shore between the rising tide and the unwelcoming land, they were inseparable. He could no more remove himself from it or it from himself as he could his heart from his chest. They had entered the world together; therefore, they should exit it together.
Crazy?
The Tyrant would understand him. Did understand him.
This whole time, this guy had been mumbling back to him in the private language of the metamorphosised. In Dr Iskander's childish provocation, in the clues intentionally dropped about his own identity, in the poorly-hidden visits to an evil deity and the materials being amassed for undergoing its ascension ritual, in purposefully delaying the punishment by The Company for the arms-theft, this sneaky teen had been delivering a quiet proposal.
Ramiro was going to die. That part was inevitable - he was against The Tyrant. But, in The Tyrant's magnanimous grace, a choice would be given about the nature of his execution. He could die anonymously like this thug in the streets, ambushed and dispatched in seconds, or he could die in front of the whole world, beautifully.
Ramiro, as he continued to stare between his reflection and his brother in madness—the two of them communicating through the commonality of their decrepit souls—finally received the answer to his previous question.
What had been the significance of flying abroad? The Tyrant—spooked by the intrusion last night from other powerful parties, The Pope and Karnon having overheard their whispering—had chickened out. Mobilising his Company, fleeing his country, this was him transferring the reins from his madman's fingers.
The proposal had been withdrawn.
It was a shame. In these familiar eyes, he'd believed he'd found a kindred soul who, although resisting their inclinations, would never give them up completely. Once awoken to the higher potentials of this freer universe within the universe, it should be impossible to desire a return to the stasis of sleep.
But no. This kid was just a scared little *#&.
"A shame..." Ramiro's voice disappeared in the roar of Atusa's cleansing flames. "It would have been beautiful."
The Trading Post execution grounds.
"NO, BROTHER, NO! THERE ARE BETTER PATHS TO SALVATION! GIVE HIM UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO MEDICINE, EMPLOYMENT, EDUCATION, AND HOUSING!"
Henry, cutting the Senior Director's throat, moved quickly around the man, working the knife to sever other arteries and hasten the bleeding.
He then rejoined Caramel and observed the process in silence while ignoring the mockery from the disguised God, who'd just paraphrased a line he'd said in private with Justinian yesterday.
Several streams of red poured out from the Senior Director's wounds. As they flowed out onto the sandpit, they were absorbed without leaving any mark or stain, the sand forever spotless and white. Shortly after the blood stopped reaching his brain, the man, kept conscious by the ritual's magical life-support, was walloped by a sense of suffocation. The Senior Director, having attended similar executions of others in these very grounds, had observed how at this point they frantically gasped and clamoured for oxygen. In a last gesture of defiance, he gritted his teeth and willed his muscles to stay motionless.
Until the very end, he would tremble, but he wouldn't break.
After a few minutes, the man's lips corpse-blue and his eye bulging with pure hate, his veins finished their weeping.
Henry squatted in front of the sandpit, his hand hovering over the magical formation, whose arcane linework radiated a tingling heat at his palm. "O ye Innumerable Ones, prevent not his journey; but permit it. Let him go into the negation of existence. He forgot the ancient foe; let the example of his neglect remind us."
Plunging his arm into the sand, he performed a swiping motion, destroying a section of runes and disrupting the ritual formation.
At the sound of clattering metal, he glanced up to see the execution post empty, its chains hanging limply. A wife's handkerchief floated to the base.
A cloud of sparkling lights that'd been a former husband, not sparing Henry another second, flew upwards. As they passed through the glass roof, they paused for a moment, taking one last glance at the slums, the city dominating its centre, and the sea on which their family was sailing away from the local hell. Finally, they gave in to the sky's cruel call.
Henry slapped his palms to brush off the sand residue. "Oh yeah, Caramel, I didn't propose to that chick again."
Caramel was surprised by him discussing the topic after his earlier refusal and now in Karnon's presence. "Why the change of heart?"
Henry shrugged. "Just realised seventeen's a bit young for something as serious as marriage. Hahaha."
Laughing, he desummoned his knife and priest-robes and replaced them with his multi-Spelltome battle attire before Karnon's next catastrophic prank. Simultaneously, still committed to his choices until their derailment, he pulled out his Alchemy supplies and brewed a mass-poison for the remaining thirteen to die.