Karnon, for the next part of his showcase of stolen Legendaries, rattled two pendants. Each contained an amber-encased thumb severed from the same unlucky individual.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Should I try grab them back?

-Percy Maynard Brady: You'll only humiliate yourself. For now, pretend they're his. He's omitted locally-sourced items to prevent our eavesdropper from linking them to me.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Oh. Smart. So what are these pendants, again?

-Percy Maynard Brady: Swindler's Left and Right Thumbs. Variations C through F - for position swapping with the donkey.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Ah…

While he answered her questions, Henry's gaze never once left the shirt that didn't belong amongst the others.

His lengthy Overdream investigation had anticipated the possibility of The Trickster God resorting to bribery. Henry'd narrowed down a list of candidate items that might've been offered, each of which corresponded to different configurations of Karnon's motivations, his main target in 'helping' with the assassination, his perspective of Henry in terms of what would persuade him, his chosen strategy, etc.

The most probable bribe would be any piece of The Syncretist's set. This would fit well with the assumption that Henry, like prior owners of The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, was driven by a maniacal lust for immortality. Consequently, the risks of feeding Ramiro a horde of mind-slaves would be trivial compared with extending his life.

That reading, however, would have been wildly incorrect. Henry wasn't particularly afraid of his own death. A reality of life before retirement had been the constant premonition—rational or not—that he would get killed in return for his actions. Where others might have prioritised alleviating that paranoia, he'd simply accepted it. At any moment, he could get snuffed out like a bug - OK. So what? Not every individual in the universe was owed a sense of maximum safety or happiness. Sometimes, to ensure these very things for others, you volunteered to forfeit them for yourself. Fine. That's part of not being a baby. No, The Cap for him was a source of free time to forget these responsibilities, to selfishly tinker on his hobbies, to rest. He did enjoy that, did want more, but his greed wasn't strong enough to start gambling lives with malevolent deities. Ultimately, it was also OK for him to have a limit on the number of fanny-packs he could sew.

There were four other major reasons that would coincide with offering Syncretist pieces, some reflecting a more charitable reading than that, some more sinister. The same was true of the other Legendaries he'd predicted, all of variable accuracy and effectiveness.

This shirt in front of Henry, this item he hadn't seen in a long, long while, this one indicated that The Trickster God had sized him up perfectly.

Henry leaned over the banquet table and grabbed it.

Tunic of Naphu The Immerser

STR: 1| VIT: 1| TECH: 1 | mCOM:1| mAFF:1

Ability: Sink! Drown! Summon water from The Third Aquatic Plane. Quantity varies by Waterworker level. Toggle.

Level Restriction: None (Scaling)

Material: Dragon Scale

Weight: 184 grams

Restrictions: Waterworker Primary (Ineligible)

'Woven by Naphu who attempted to drown the universe.'

The dragon-scales felt as Henry recalled, softer than lambskin but, if one ran the teeth of a saw against them, impossible to scratch. Putting his eye close to the sapphire button in the collar revealed a liquid interior sloshing around.

Switching to a ring identity to spoof a Waterworker Primary, he held the artefact out, away from the table and himself. Pinching the sapphire button, he rotated it a quarter revolution clockwise, then back into its original position.

A rush of noise filled his ears, and his and Caramel's chair and themselves inside were shoved against the banquet table by a jet of water torrenting out of the base of the shirt like out of a fire hydrant. A spreading wave, battering past the convicts, uprooted several garden plants and piled them against the execution ground's walls.

Once the water had settled soon after, the volume produced in the fraction of a second he'd activated the item had covered the pavement of the grounds in a shin-height, crystal-clear layer.

Henry swapped back to the Alchemist ID that his guildmate had been messaging.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Sneaky bastard. When did you find a path through The Maelstrom?

Caramel recognised the shirt, too. But not from the morning's presentation about the assassination, which it hadn't been a component of. Instead, this item and several others from The Immerser set had been collected by their guild years ago...back in Saana II.

Initially, Henry, after acquiring the set's headpiece in his duelling climb, had dismissed its worth. Aquatic environments had a niche value in a 1v1. The slower tempo was also kind of boring.

Later, however, after Alex's challenge to conquer the globe, The Immerser set's geopolitical utility had become apparent to Henry for the founding of their base. He organised his inner circle to search dungeons for additional set components. During Operation Phantom Limbs, their alliance used them to install a series of lakes throughout the remote desert and steppe territory they'd previously conquered, and these lakes were then connected together to form a canal bisecting the game's western continent. Through the nourishing waters of this canal, their barren, arid domain was transformed into a fertile, productive powerhouse, one governing a new shipping route in a dominant position between the world's two halves. Most people were attracted by the flashier elements of the Operation, the false fragmentation and spreading of their alliance, the naval attacks, the wars, but all of these were mere offshoots of the canal, designed to facilitate its enactment. At the centre of everything had been these mundane water-producing items, at the centre of their old empire now lost beyond the unpassable walls of The Maelstrom and time.

-Percy Maynard Brady: I never got past it. But a lot of these old things have been redistributed since then.

That was a white lie. It was true that, in the passage of however many tens of thousands of years had occurred in-game since the previous instalment, several of the artefacts he'd amassed back then had reappeared in the current historical timeline, some in possession of various deities, some returning to himself. This shirt, however, unlike the other items laid out, wasn't his.

Its current owner was Karnon.

Henry studied the God, who was snickering away to trick the other party monitoring them. His mockery was directed at the predictability of The Tyrant - as an inveterate pen-pusher, the calculator of bodies, of course, he'd been enticed by the most boring of the presented baubles.

But Henry and Karnon's real thoughts were focused on an entirely different matter: their painting trip to the moon.

After the Overdream investigation, a question without any concrete answer had been the purpose of the prank Karnon had orchestrated on the first day in Suchi, assuming it, like the superficially innocuous pantsing, had encoded points of more profound significance.

Henry's first inclination had been to concentrate on The Maelstrom, which the moon had been orbiting over when they arrived on it, and its connection between Karnon and Bes, the painter abducted along for the trip. Both of them had been the primary victims of the anomaly's manifestation, Togavi on its western fringes, Besalaada on its east. Their cooperation might suggest an emphasis on a common burden, woe, enmity surrounding The Maelstrom.

Or, the prank's hidden purpose might have related to the 'they' Karnon had alluded to when they were on the moon, the potential creators of The Maelstrom. This undefined group seemed to have a relationship to the Imbahalaala, Karnon miming back then a death by heart attack characteristic to those monsters. And earlier that day, Henry'd encountered a sentient individual of this otherwise mindless species – The Great Black One. Perhaps the code was there, Karnon providing information, providing a warning.

Or the focus could be on Princess Pateela, the God's newly-wed whirlwind wife, a 'Southern Wind Elemental', whose northern analogue might've been involved in The Maelstrom's creation. Or Sarff, whose skeleton they'd visited at the outset and who'd apparently conceived of the moon-painting prank.

Or the key figure might have been none of this cast with their conspicuous connections to The Maelstrom. It might've been Henry.

Although it was much murkier from the viewpoint of Saana's current instalment, didn't he also have his link to the anomaly? Its walls, after all, surrounded the desert heartlands of the long, long dead empire he'd once built with his friends. Up there on the moon, that'd been his own preoccupation. Henry, searching and finding no remnants of it, had reminisced about his bygone childhood before the mountains had been flattened, a time that'd been simultaneously more innocent and horrific. The evocation of these memories that he'd assumed private might not have been incidental. Karnon may have planned that.

Here, one must plunge to the bottom-most depths of Henry's own madness. What if—just possibly—the God knew not only who he was, but who he'd been? What if the globe-trotting adventures of this trickster, transporting him to their guild's former domains, had brought him into contact with the relics like this shirt that they'd left behind in the desert of the past? What if the God, rummaging through the organs of Henry's history, had reciprocated the same invasive procedures of psychobiography and mapped out the strange evolutions of his life?

Exploring that line of questioning deep enough, one might discover a potential reason that Karnon—although once doubtlessly mad and unpredictable—could become 'Karnon The Reliable'. One might illustrate a way by which this absurd trickster figure could have transcended the conclusions of Deitological Thematic Induction Modelling and the hundreds of other methods for dissecting and conforming a person's character to fit within a predictable box, a way by which one might transcend even The Cycle.

Exploring that line of questioning deep enough, one might get baited and lose everything.

Henry, staring at the shirt that'd fed the lake of his former capital, used the ring to switch back to his default identity.

Clean Up The Slums! has been upgraded to Clean Up The Slums! (Legendary)

Quest Title: Clean Up The Slums! (Legendary)

Description: The mission to liberate Suchi's oppressed citizens from Ramiro's clutches grows more assured. Karnon The Azure wants to support your faction with the incentive of an ancient artefact. The offer seems highly trustworthy. Clean up The Slums!

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Rewards: Tunic of Naphu The Immerser

Terrifying, he thought. This deceptive devil had managed to conceal every important detail surrounding the assassination...

Maintaining a straight face, Henry pretended to evaluate the proposal from the perspective of the merely nascent suspicions he would have had without The Cap. Alarm and paranoia mingled over the calculations that nevertheless ticked on, the tyrannical cogs of his mind unable to be disrupted. In these drought-stricken lands, where freshwater was a scarce commodity monopolised by The Church, such an artefact could be a game-changer. With tactful use, it could restore a swathe of the region's barren interior to productive soils, capable of sustaining fields, forests, and pasture. The fruits of these would support the concentration of people, and a chance from that at the communal project of civilisation, the stable state in which we can aspire to higher goals than filling the stomach and evading daggers. A new home could be created for the landless masses in the slums of Suchi and Kanaru's other city-states, numbering in the tens of millions...

But for the older Henry, who'd sunken two decades into preparations, the feelings resonating inside of him were much more elaborate.

The presentation of his old shirt, the confirmation of Karnon's chosen strategy, eliminated thousands of hypothesised potentialities, narrowing the remaining field. What lay ahead was rising out of the mist of the future, its faint outline becoming discernible, palpable, assaultable.

The God's strategy for convincing him: he'd been insane, true, but he wasn't anymore – he, like Henry, had finally understood this unfathomable thing that everyone called 'The Cycle' and had broken free from its manipulations. As for why Karnon might genuinely want to assist with a random assassination, this motive, for a sane person, wasn't complicated in the slightest if you could just figure out the real identity of Henry's target.

This gave a small cause for celebration. The remaining paths had not excluded all the positive potentialities, Karnon perhaps, in line with his claims, merely tinkering with the prelude, merely improving the procedures of murder. This fact, however, wasn't for Henry an untainted source of relief. If the situation had been confirmed hopeless today, then he could accept his defeat and begin the process of moving on. As it was, though, nothing was definitive, he still had his role to play, his correct or incorrect choice to make.

This shirt was also most likely the final major clue. Karnon, after skirting the restrictions imposed upon him by his Zone Guardian status, had finished drawing the entirety of the situation in cryptic collage. It remained for Henry alone to connect the dots, as he already had. With the disturbing fact of his old belonging's appearance, he'd have been prompted to reassess the moon-painting, to finally understand what The Trickster God had once meant with his preposterous declaration that they had the same heart, to finally recognise the 'Enemy-Bear' that'd been hiding in the open this whole time.

The puzzle set, the two of them would probably not meet again directly until the recruitment tournament, close to the assassination date. Henry would cling to his refusal, insisting on training and ignoring everything, while, with his weak resolve, investigating anyway. Karnon, with his customary mischief, would lurk in the background, continuing to manipulate the players in position against their knowledge and will.

Between now and their reunion, there would also be chaos. Its precise nature wasn't yet defined, but there would be chaos, the preferred state of Karnon's operations. If The Trickster God was to pull-off this herculean charade against the 'Enemy-Bear', assuming one existed, then Henry's situation had to unfortunately get worse for a while, the 'mentor' and 'protégé' having to be re-established as unambiguous enemies. And, if the charade itself was a charade, then it would get worse permanently.

It was significant, too, that the final clues had been packed into this one encounter, rather than delivered piecemeal over the rest of the week. That indicated the chaos would be upon them soon. Today or tomorrow, Henry guessed. Much to his Fleshbag's half's despair, he would likely be exposed as The Tyrant.

These were his convoluted reflections upon the manifold futures opening and closing. A much simpler part of him, contained in the present, grieved. In a few minutes, a lot of people were about to die. The optimal move for Karnon on this chosen path was to initiate their return to public hostility with an act of terrorism.

Henry, swapping back to the Alchemist ID, placed the shirt on the table among the others in a gesture of rejection.

From his immediate, non-Overdream, clueless perspective, the math wasn't working out.

Against most other Legendary classes, even with Karnon's meddling, eliminating Ramiro before he sowed too much destruction might not have been hard. However, the Worker of The Loyal Heart Henry'd initially planned to give The Saviour had a nuisance ability, , allowing the player to swap their mind into a slave's, from whose body they would reincarnate if their original body died in the duration. This made it one of the safer Classes in terms of avoiding the Legendary perma-death penalty. To finish off Ramiro, Henry would've had to play a kind of whack-a-mole and destroy both the actual body and whoever he was inhabiting before the transfer could be repeated. had a 3-second cooldown, instant cast time, 100-metre cast range, and a 480-metre leash range with the puppet once applied. These combined made for an extremely tight kill-window. It would have been a challenging fight in ordinary circumstances - had to be if the guy was going to accept the bait. Adding Karnon and his inexhaustible inventory of deceptions might make it impossible.

In simple numerical terms, ignoring any other metrics but death, Henry'd originally anticipated between 6,700 and 93,400 casualties. In exchange, at the lower bound, he would prevent approximately 45,000 unnecessary deaths in the future flat, a failure, and, at the highest bound, in which he achieved the miracle of saving this garbage hellhole, he'd prevent 607,000 per real-life month henceforth. The expected return was quite favourable.

With Karnon spicing things up, though, 93,400 was more like the lowest possible number of casualties. It could easily climb into the millions - hundreds of millions in the most paranoid scenario of the incident being used to destroy The Company. The prospect of this magical water-producing shirt, which might add 74,000 prevented deaths per month to the prior best-case outcome, didn't negate the extra risk. There was also zero guarantee a trickster deity would fulfil the deal.

"I'm not interested," Henry concluded his assessment.

Karnon, tossing aside a pair of giant bat-wings, signalled for him to wait. He swept Henry, Caramel, and the convicts with a grave look, pre-empting a final offer that might be the decisive factor in altering the calculus of death.

The God curled the fingers of one hand into the shape of a tube. With the other hand, only its middle finger extended, he moved it towards the tube and inserted it knuckle deep.

Karnon—pausing and gesturing for the audience to pay closer attention—withdrew his finger and repeated the inserting motion.

In. Out.

Caramel rubbed the few hairs on her ugly avatar's chin.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: What word is he signing now?

-Percy Maynard Brady: A penis entering a vagina.

Henry raised a palm to signal for this azure crackpot to stop. "There are too many lives on the line to be joking about this."

"I'm not joking." Karnon, desummoning the Legendaries, pulled a rooster out of his beard and tried to poke it to make it cluck. The bird, however, had suffocated, so he ended up tossing it away. "I take my pranks very seriously."

"Fine. Then I'll give you a serious verdict." Henry eyed with suspicion the rooster's corpse floating in the floodwater, towards the convicts. "Karnon, of all today's evidence, your inability to behave yourself for even a minute has been the most convincing."

"Wow." Karnon feigned surprised. "That's the aspect that aligns with your values?"

"Yes, I'm thoroughly, thoroughly convinced that my decision to cancel was the correct one. The Suchi plan is dead. I'm not resuscitating it. I'm not interested in this 'prank' or any others. That's my final answer. Lock it in. You may now proceed to fuck off."

Henry allowed himself to get a bit riled up, the expected alarm of being presented the shirt converting into rage.

Karnon, rather than laughing, furrowed his azure eyebrows at an epiphany. "Oh. You weren't interested in the pranks? Then why'd you apply to be my protégé? That's incongruent. My mistake. Hah…well, then we'll strike the usual deal: in exchange for the mindslave army prank, I'll grant you a Prank Break for... let's see…"

"No. Fuck off."

"Slow the squirrel, Executioner T. I might be able to squeeze you a discount rate on this one. Hmm…what duration for the Prank Break…" The God produced a stolen abacus and, mocking Henry's earlier internal calculations, began flicking beads back and forth aimlessly. "Hmm…carry the jape…number of casualties...divide by audience size…for this one, Executioner T, I can afford to trade you a Prank Break lasting approximately...WHAT?! 'Forever'? That can't be right." Karnon frantically recounted his beads. "No, the Prankculus is accurate. 'Forever'. Hmm...well, if that's what the math is saying, then I guess, for this one act of minor mischief, you'll get a Prank Break lasting forever. Deal?"

The God paused on a wicked smile, letting the set-up for the joke linger until bitten.

Henry—knowing that, far at the end of madness, this promise might not be a joke at all—grabbed a wine flagon off the banquet table and pitched it.

Karnon received the flying object to his face, his nose and cheek crumpling in like paper-mache. Not like – he'd replaced himself with the puppet from earlier.

The flagon-missile ripped off the puppet's head, and its momentum proceeded to strip off the entire paper-mache flesh. Exposed beneath was a wooden skeleton. In its centre, like a baby snug in the womb, an azure-haired man was curled up, holding a quivering sheet of paper from which he'd narrated Karnon's last words promising to cease pranking.

Henry recognised the figure as Merchant Ga - the real one, who'd spent the boat ride to Suchi chirping in his ear about an easy scheme to strike it rich. Unlike Karnon's dramatic parody before, this smuggler displayed actual signs congruent with incarceration in a Company cell for the week, or a fifth of a year by the reckoning of the NPCs' condensed, accelerated lifespans. A jovial, overly-optimistic personality that'd motivated him to confide in Henry during the voyage had been dismantled by the protracted wait for his execution; replacing it was something skittish and rat-like. The Merchant's gaze darting around the execution grounds—catching Caramel, the chained smugglers, the corpse of the lotus-monster, the exit passage—evaluated the environment with none of the higher, extraneous judgements of man, only observing as a trapped animal whose sole fixation is its immediate survival.

The Togavian, unable to find the patron God who'd promised his release, bolted. He ran for the exit gate. His fleeing legs sloshed about, each stride having to be hauled out and over the floodwater.

An aimed at the back of his skull zipped over his head, which dipped suddenly as the Merchant tripped.

He landed face first with a splash. As he raised his drenched body, he glanced at the object that'd snagged him—a leg ending half-way up the thigh in a bouquet of bone, fat, and muscle—then back at a shower of spell-spears pop-popping in explosions of rainbow-confetti. He unpried his foot. He continued his desperate scramble.

He went down twice more, stumbling on other objects in his path buried beneath the water. After each fall, though, he rose and continued on, blind to the comedy of coincidence, blind to his snapped ankle.

A moment later, he disappeared through the exit gate, blind to the fact that this 'exit' fed directly into the Trading Post's main keep, whose labyrinthine passageways were crammed with soldiers on high alert.

Henry released his Spelltome with a sigh. Caramel gave him a nod of confirmation.

Thus perished one of the minor but central cast members in the drama unfolding upon this wretched land - slain out of sight, but still added to the mountain.

8 convicts left.

Beside Henry and Caramel, Karnon was kneeling in the floodwater, washing his hands after hurling the dismembered leg into the Merchant's pointless path. "A son of my nation, a seed of my tree, a worshipper - nevertheless, because you insisted on sweet Ga's execution, Executioner T, I let you execute him, just after enlargening his Soul a bit. Such is the extent of my loyalty to you, my protégé, my brother with a common heart."

Henry didn't miss the God parodying his cleansing tic. "I do not derive any pleasure in killing."

"And yet you kill so much. Isn't this a contradiction?"

"Well, it might be a pleasure to kill you."

Karnon stood up and flung his fingers dry. "The executions have put you in a sour mood. Let's retry later when you're more emotionally receptive."

"No. Fuck off."

"When your mood's sour like this, there's an uplifting motto I acquired from the older Offworlders." Karnon reached over to Henry and wiped the residue of leg-juice on his shoulder. "'Live. Laugh. Love.' Isn't that a gorgeous philosophy? Try it some time, Executioner T. Live! Laugh! Love!"

The God, giving an affectionate smile to his protégé, took a deep, preparatory squat and spread his arms like the wings of the spaceship they'd ridden to the moon. The next instant, he was above them all, his antlers puncturing a glass pane in the dome roof as he rocketed into the heavens.

His departing form flashed those beneath, Karnon going commando under the ex-wife's skirt he'd adorned.

"My blessing to you, sad saplings! Hohoho! !"

From out of the shrinking block of pixelation, a beam of magical light shone out.

Below in the execution grounds, as though a cloud had parted to reveal the tucked away sun, a shower of golden rays shimmered through the shards of falling glass and bathed the row of despairing convicts in a soul-expanding light of hope. Bruises from the convicts' rough-handling began to heal, their health restored and the poison weakening them purged. Their arms sprung forward, the tension holding them behind their backs releasing as the chains-turned-worms around their limbs and throats wriggled off.

One of the convicts had been staring silently at a treasure chest in front of him, transformed out of the floating rooster's corpse. This man had actually recognised this chest earlier when Karnon had shown it with the pun about weapon-smuggling - it was an actual smuggler's tool. The instant the convict's bindings broke, operating fast and without any hesitation, he bent down and, not opening the lid, pressed a hidden mechanism on its side. Light streamed out of the device, forming into a pile.

"Tamfa, catch!" He grabbed a dagger from the condensing armament, tossed it to a comrade two posts to his left. "Tolgy!" He sent a short-sword right.

Another convicted joined the one distributing weapons, seizing a spear for himself.

Off to the side, Henry and Caramel had been missed by the 'blessing' and its massive, unbalanced Stat-boosting effect. Nevertheless, in their shared vision, sprang up conveying Henry's instructions: timers, landing points, a single red line, passing straight through the lined-up row of convicts.

-Percy Maynard Brady: You've got one shot before I'm out.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Easy! I've been practising.

Caramel excitedly drew the rapier Worldpiercer from its scabbard, happy for the chance to test it.

Henry—knowing it was going to be far from easy—activated a to propel himself into position. "LATT!"