The execution grounds, a group of eight convicts arming themselves for their daring escape from The Company's chains.

"Tamfa, catch! Tolgy!"

"LATT!"

The convict squatting at the pile of smuggled weapons, an Arcanist, looked up at the familiar chant of a spell.

A tunnel of fire was streaking over the banquet table, aimed directly at him, the caster seeking to interfere with his distribution. The Arcanist, not stopping, continuing according to a mapped out plan, picked up—the came to an almost immediate halt, having been cast too short. Its doorway flung open.

He expected to see The Defiant Flame, the not-so-secret leader of The Company's local chapter, emerge from the Shaman ability. Instead, the masked executioner who'd been bickering with Lord Karnon popped out, tapped another Spelltome on his chest, shouted "VEEK!", and vanished.

The Arcanist couldn't recognise the last—a splash sounded to his rear, a voice.

"PI!"

Globules of magical energy condensed and glittered around the Arcanist, before being sucked into his chest, passing through him to the person crouched behind. He felt a pressure on his crotch, which'd been squeezed by five massive black fingers. He broke free by diving fo—another hand clutched the back of his shirt, and the weapon pile and the water-soaked pavement retreated from his reach, both sinking away from him.

He'd been thrown.

"Bullet-time!" the Arcanist shouted. "NOW!"

The expanding, slowed-down distance revealed the one who'd hurled him: a gorilla standing in the midst of his comrades, standing guard over the weapons necessary for their salvation.

This beast, spinning through the body-hurl that'd launched him, was using the same rotation to grab the shaft of a spear being retrieved by an unknown Fighter and tear it from the man's unexpectant grip with ease.

The disarmed Fighter, bullet-time burned, countered with a slap to the gorilla's shoulder. His dispossessed fingers emitted a crackling noise of snapping twigs – .

But the targeted shoulder shrank away, the executioner having cancelled his bestial form to return to the slimmer human, and the slap sailed off to sweep the empty breeze. An elbow followed to the Fighter's jaw, a kick to the crook of his knee, a palm-strike to the jaw again, a gentle shove to the ribs, and the executioner stepped aside.

A female Bowman had teleported behind the executioner. To get him away from the smuggled weapons, she walloped him with an . Her foot, glowing grey with the mysterious magic of time-space, missed as he'd stepped aside.

The Fighter's body took the hit and levitated away. In its flight, it parted and passed through a cluster of sparkling lights.

Around the site of the fight, multiple luminescent shapes were condensing, the constellation of them connected by ropes of light flowing from the executioner's Spatial Bracelet.

The Arcanist, still flying, wondered why this Offworlder was summoning so many weapons.

A sudden thought gave him a fright that their plight might be about to worsen with the entrance of more combatants, The Company's reinforcements. However, when he tried to search for additional threats, the sole other enemy visible, The Defiant Flame, appeared to be sneaking off with her strange rapier towards the exit, sneaking off during the diversion laid by the masked figure perishing in her place. Her sword must be an artefact, the Arcanist deduced - Offworlders, as immortals, would prioritise such a prize over their replenishable lives.

So what, then, was the purpose of this sacrificed executioner bringing out multiple weapons? A mistaken expulsion? From panic? No. For that, he had been carrying himself far too steady in the havoc. A distraction, then? A source of the extra confusion the Arcanist was experiencing now?

He watched the executioner jab with the butt of his spear. The Bowwoman, her kicking leg raised, leaving only one for support, received the blow to her chest.

Between the Bowwoman and the Fighter floating in opposite directions, the executioner then made an odd choice to throw his weapon in the air. In perhaps an instance of mocking, self-induced vulnerability, he slapped his belly, a taunting declaration that they'd need more than a God's blessing to contend with the best, and he roared.

"NGAM!"

The flower-monster from earlier, its corpse battered against an execution post by that water-producing artefact's wave, expelled a stream of shiny grey ichor that resembled molten lead. The discharge was absorbed by the masked figure's palm; he shot out a glowing arrow of bloody red.

Tamfa, to whom the Arcanist had given a dagger first due to being the strongest amongst them, had been silently gesturing through the figures of a Cutthroat stealth ability. The blood arrow entered Tamfa's abdomen, and his face contorted in horror, his mouth falling ajar, babbling through the nightmarish visions invading and muddling his head.

For the Arcanist, from the preceding sequence of actions, from their threading and timing, something was forming into recognition. In the Senior Director's exsanguination, in the brewing of the poisoned tea, this executioner had exhibited the same uncanny quality. His navigation of the steps of those actions had been disturbingly smooth. Now, too. While the Arcanist's comrades floundered, this masked Offworlder was operating with a calm and precision unbelonging to a brawl. Just as he'd ground herbs for poisons or surgically sliced veins, in combat, he also followed a recipe memorised by heart.

The weapons about to arrive were no mistake. These were also part of the executioner's manifold instruments of death.

It was over, the Arcanist realised at once. Karnon had tricked them with the worst cruelty of all: hope. As with Ga and the Ishpiyosh twins preceding them, resist as he and his comrades might, whoever this monster was, this 'protégé', would still be killing them.

He wouldn't even bother watching Tolgy's attempt.

Averting his gaze to the heavens, he swore at the Gods and the sick games they forced them to play for their amusement.

"Bastards."

Henry caught his spear, delivered a prod to the Bowwoman attempting a recovery roll and tipped her off-balance, sending her down with a splash in the flood-water.

Spinning the weapon, he poked at the belly of a Crusader charging with a short-sword. The Crusader lurched away, avoided skewering themselves. Henry flicked the spear-butt backwards at the Cutthroat's hand. Striking the fingers of the babbling—the Cutthroat retained his grip on his dagger, the having faded prematurely due to The Trickster God's pesky blessing,

Henry, between these two armed assailants, between two breaths, javelined his spear away. It flew towards the hole Karnon had shattered in the roof, and out.

Before the spear finished its exit, Henry reached back with the no-look smoothness of a mechanic expecting a wrench from a well-trained assistant. He was not let down. A cluster of disc-shaped lights finished forming behind him and dropped a shield into his clasp.

He seized this invaluable piece of defensive equipment, used it to smack the Cutthroat in the mouth, before ramming it into the Crusader's—the Crusader stole it, stole the disintegrating motes. Stomach exposed, the Crusader took a heel to the belly and stumbled back.

Henry lifted his arms in prayer to the sun, received a halberd from its rays, and whacked the Cutthroat in—the Cutthroat dodged. Henry's first swing missed and arrived in a superb position for the next. Putting more muscle into this one, he heaved the halberd at a new entrant to the melee, the sweet skull of a second, less experienced Fighter attempting to dive past him to the smuggled weapons.

Fighter #2's eyes bulged in terror, and the flakes of metal in his flesh unique to the class, glowing from the activation of , expanded to cover every square inch in a protective film.

This move was totally redundant. The Fighter already had a spell-shield from a Miracleworker lurking in the backdrop.

Before the halberd struck, it broke apart, showering Fighter #2's sweet skull in harmless motes. The man's heroically leaping form was instead buffeted away from the weapons by a wave rising out of the flood-waters and walloping him.

Henry caught a new spear, his eyes pulsing with Waterworker harpoons.

This last water-manipulation technique arose from one of the later martial arts that he'd rushed a preliminary study of in preparation for Karnon's acceleration, a style for pirates.

Caramel, circling back into position, felt a chill run down her spine. Outside of the melee, she had a much clearer view of the cycle of weapons condensing from the shining threads spewing out of her guildmate's Spatial Bracelet.

As he'd switched the halberd for a more nimble spear, at that exact moment, a hatchet had materialised behind him, floating around waist height, only to disintegrate and disappear.

This hatchet was one of several discarded weapons. Henry, for every single one grabbed thus far, had been summoning an extra two or three that were instantly returned to his inventory. Their removal likely corresponded with cancelled plans - defences against enemy attacks never delivered, stabs whose windows of opportunity had closed-up in the second-by-second evolution of the fight.

"What the heck…" she muttered.

She tried her best to track her guildmate's head twisting through the light-show, bobbing, his eyes sweeping, updating, reconfiguring…cheating.

He had to be cheating with a Legendary, Caramel realised. So many swaps so rapidly, each one's placement anticipated 3-seconds in advance due to the summoning lag…it shouldn't be humanly possible. You'd have to be a mutant. You'd have to—

Then again, Henry was a mutant…and he did seem to have been secretly studying dozens of martial arts…

Henry spear-batted Fighter #2's greedy fingers reaching for the smuggled weapons.

The Crusader charged from—Henry performed four quick steps, putting an execution post between them. During the same movement, he spear-whacked Fighter #2 across the knu—the man tried to steal the spear that disintegrated. Henry chose a shield over a sword and rammed its rim into the Crusader's armpit, obstructing a downward thrust and knocking the man back.

Exchanging the shield for a double-sided spear, Henry advanced upon the Cutthroat, keeping him flustered. The twin points of this weapon, flicking and darting like a lizard's tongue, smacked the Cutthroat's spell-hand to disrupt an ability, before delivering a series of feints.

The Cutthroat, despite being disoriented after the , managed to defend himself intelligently. His training took over, and his dagger-hand and free-hand both tracked the path of Henry's feints, ready to intercept the real stab.

(Of course, if this convict or any of the others had truly been thinking intelligently, they would have recognised that Henry was Tier-0 and couldn't therefore the Tier 5-2 weapons he'd been cycling through, meaning there would never be a 'real' stab. He might as well have been poking them with a broom.)

The Cutthroat intelligently intercepted a stomach stab, a heart stab, a stomach stab.

Henry broke the pattern, switched to a reverse grip, jabbed—the spear turned into a massive, beast-slaying sabre for killing giants, the jab into a heavy downward swing.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The Cutthroat dodged. The Bowwoman, her neck in the beheading path of the arc, rolled aside with more splashing.

Henry, cancelling a spear-swap, span and reverse-swung the sabre to eviscerate the Crusader trying to stick to his back.

The Crusader's belly, luckily, was protected by his own spell-shield, repelling the cut.

Henry discarded the unwieldy sabre. He ducked a high grab from the glowing Crusader, flipped past a second grab and a disintegrating dagger, kicked the man in the mouth.

Having flipped towards a spear instead of a shield or halberd, he landed upon the Bowwoman and used her face as a step to redirect his trajectory at the Cutthroat. His spear stabbed fast at the man's nose, at the man's stomach. Heart, heart, nose, stomach, followed. Stomach, stomach. Heart, heart, nose, stomach.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: So this is the art, eh?

-Percy Maynard Brady: Absolutely not. This is regular Twenty Tools. All my abilities do zero damage against this bullcrap blessing, so I'm just relying on the durability of these 5-2 weapons to parry theirs. I'm still level 20. The recruitment tournament, remember?

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Ah…right…WHAT?! ARE YOU SUI—

-Percy Maynard Brady: Shh. Focus. You're almost up. Don't forget Karnon.

Leading up to the last stomach stab, Henry'd cocked his arms back slightly more. The Cutthroat, although not consciously recognising the previous sequence from his own basic training, reacted instinctively.

The Cutthroat used the opening to – the point of the spear pierced a puff of smoke.

He materialised behind Henry - the point of a short-sword erupted from his chest.

The Cutthroat's face grimaced in agony. The Crusader who'd accidentally gored his friend through the heart frowned.

"Die, you slippery cunt!" Fighter #2 attacked at the exact same moment, having finally retrieved a weapon from the smuggled pile.

Their slash to Henry's noggin was blocked by the boss of a materialising shield.

Simultaneous to this, without any noise, Fighter #1—whose spear had been javelined through the roof and who'd bounced off an execution post following the Bowwoman's levitating kick—arrived with a new spear and silently sank it into Henry's side, up through the kidneys and the rest of the viscera.

Their stab was stopped by Henry's flimsy Tier-0 armour. The replacement spear—one of Henry's that'd 'accidentally' not been desummoned—was beyond their level to empower, Karnon's stat blessing unable to change this limitation.

Poof!

The bunched-up convicts and Henry wedged between them vanished in a thick cloud of indigo-azure Arcaneworker smoke.

The next instant, a chilly cone of ice wind erupted from the smoke's side. Its blast caught the Bowwoman on the fringes and a Shaman behind her, covering both in a layer of frost, freezing them.

This spell coincided with a second one, cast elsewhere in the execution grounds.

"SKO!"

From precisely the opposite end of the smoke cloud to the frozen two, a Miracleworker stumbled out in a panicked retreat and bumped into an opening door of flame.

Caramel grabbed the Miracleworker by the shoulder, moved them slightly to adjust their alignment. She drove her rapier into their abdomen, a spark of lightning crackling down to the fine point of the blade.

The tip sank through the Miracleworker's shirt, into the soft flesh of their stomach, and then the weapon with its uniquely extensible blade—enlarged once as it'd pierced The Wolf Emperor's massive brain, shrunken as it'd once jack-hammered into The Redeemer's—expanded to its maximum diameter of two metres.

The stabbed Miracleworker went pop like an over-inflated tire, exploding in a shower of organs and meat and bone, every part of them shredded except the now disembodied limbs.

The Ortheerian rapier Worldpiercer didn't stop with its destruction there. Its growing blade invaded the swirling smoke, seeking the lives of those being lined up inside and the two frozen on the opposite end.

Henry appeared safely away from the fight. a he'd cast at the very start catching up with the Arcanist he'd gorilla-thrown and swapping their positions.

Not easing his guard in case Karnon had extra stunts in store, he sprinted towards a wall near the Arcanist's initial landing point. In anticipation of the God's interference with the executions, a tiny crack had been bored at the wall's base, a few centimetres wide, just enough to slip through using his cloak's elemental transformation.

Rushing towards this secret exit, his contribution done, he risked a glance back to observe whether the set-up had worked.

He saw a gore-smattered Caramel shoving the giant rapier into the smoke, out of which flew the arm of Fighter #2 clutching the sword procured too late. Next, the top half of the Crusader's head launched out of the top of the cloud with a trail of cerebrospinal fluid and flapping pink-grey shreds of brain. The ascent of this skull crossed the descent of a door-sized metal disc, falling into the smoke.

BONG!

A gong clangoured.

BOOOOOOOOOONG!

The pitch droned on.

Henry felt his teeth shaking in his gums, and the metallic segments of his armour, the daggers at his waist, also began to vibrate, each piece chiming like a tuning fork.

In this moment of distraction, a dead chicken collided with Henry's head, slapping him in the cheek of his mask.

All Civilian cooldowns have been refreshed by The Holy Chicken of Labour and Motivation!

This refreshed the Arcaneworker cooldown from employing the , the smoke cloud.

Henry's next step sank lower than the previous ones, his body weight depressing a pressure-activated switch.

You have used Karnon's Mystery Gift #44536. Any extra Arcane Traps used within the next 10 minutes will be ineffective.

Hundreds of translucent cables that'd been buried in the flood-water were suddenly raised up, including those the Togavian Merchant had tripped on during his failed escape. Some of these cables snapped. The released tension pulled out dozens of small gongs that'd been hidden around them, inside of plants, under floor tiles, in the corpse of the flower-monster. The mini-gongs, arranged to face the smoke cloud, reflected the emitted reverberations of the larger one inside, concentrating the sound waves, amplifying them.

Henry, sighing, dove for the crack in the wall ahead, his body sublimating into a gust of wind.

As he slipped through, he took one last glimpse behind. The ice covering the frozen Shaman and Bowwoman was shattering, and Fighter #1 was sprinting from the smoke, grasping their bleeding ears. A confused Caramel stared at the rapier flying away from her - the sword, continuing its extension after striking the hidden gong, had shot backwards, ripping out of her grip.

-Percy Maynard Brady: DESUMMON IT!

Before he could confirm whether his guildmate obeyed in time, he was outside.

He emerged in an empty clearing, left between the perimeter of the Trading Post and the surrounding slums.

Facing him was a long wall of dilapidated shacks, marking where the civility he'd strived to install in this hellhole had reached its allotted limit. Between the run-down shacks, along their roofs, platoons from his guild had been roaming on patrol. These figures, not detecting him due to the cloak's transformation, stood now staring through him at the Trading Post, confused at the cacophony of the gongs—not just one—ringing throughout all throughout the complex—in the armoury, in the offices where he'd met with the Senior Director, in the shopping area, in the clinic—the racket rising louder and louder, and louder.

Fff.

The ringing came to an abrupt end, ending in a puff as quiet and innocuous as the blowing of an eyelash from a fingertip.

There was none of the catastrophic explosion that Henry'd predicted.

Still, this prank wasn't to conclude on an anti-climactic note.

Right beneath him was additional steam-engine hiss, and the air became a mixture of red dust and red droplets. Spreading from the crack he'd escaped through, a trench fanned out in the dirt ahead, running about a metre deep and ten long. The trench had been carved by a high-pressure mist blast that'd come and gone in a blink. Henry's incorporeal wind form had been clipped at the bottom, chopping off half his health.`

He checked Caramel's health in their group interface. She was dead.

The shacks and the patrols ahead had been given a new paint job. The gap in the wall continued to leak the red mist.

Hundreds of faraway shrieks arrived from the Trading Post's entrance, converging upon Henry like—

He floated away, ditching this catastrophe, ditching any further entanglement in the miseries of this dump.

Wu-wei.

As he gained some distance, it became evident that, while the execution ground's exterior remained undamaged, its glass roof had been stained red by the bodies detonated inside. A jet of the same mist, their aerosolised blood, was pluming out of the roof-hole shattered by Karnon's departure, spurting out in pulses as if from a severed main artery.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Fucking cunt made me drop it…

-Percy Maynard Brady: It's gone. Concentrate on the clean-up. I'm out. Fuck this trash game.

He changed his status to be offline.

He moved onwards, and this soon brought the source of the shrieks into view. At the Trading Post's front, a drenched crowd was fleeing from the chokepoint that'd been the entrance gate. A few brave souls were rushing in to assist the survivors moaning and evaporating amongst the ground strewn with limbs and organs and fragments of wagons and the mutilated carcasses of livestock and departing soul-lights. He observed amongst many sights a medic moving against the tide being intercepted by a man screaming for help. The man was cradling a boy of thirteen or so and the boy was unconscious and he had no legs and his mid-section was being cupped by the man to prevent any more of the entrails spilling out. The medic checked the boy and gave a hopeless look but the screaming man continued obstructing his path and begging and the medic shoved him aside. The screaming man toppled backwards and over and his fall knocked out some of the boy's intestines and made them poke out of his bottom half like a glistening moist tongue lapping at the dirt. The man shovelled the dirt-caked intestines back inside the abdominal cavity and while holding them firm in place he tried to get upright using only his legs and elbows. The balancing act caused him to flail around in the dirt and the blood-drenched dust was churned up by his struggle. His futile gymnastics persisted for a while even after his arms were liberated of their burden by the dead boy disintegrating into lights that glittered sorrowfully skywards. The medic meanwhile was probing a woman in her 50s laid out prone and she was hyperventilating like a fish on the deck of a boat and naked after the blast had stripped her of her dignity and the yellow fat from inside of her belly was seeping out a gash—

Henry travelled onwards with the breeze, weightless and invisible.

He passed the Company's guard perimeter. Most of them were players, the guild's NPC soldiers being stationed during emergencies inside of the Trading Post fortress as a last line of defence. These players were silent as they communicated amongst each other through private channels, as they tried to puzzle out what they were witnessing exactly.

At a great distance, the hole in the dome-roof of the execution grounds was shown to be merely one opened up by The Trickster God. Throughout the Trading Post complex, multiple jets were spurting out, each stretching tall as the Achievement Pillars dotting The Slum's skies. Through mischievous manipulation of the wind currents, the red mist was being shaped into a picture from last night's prank: a chubby figure of The Saviour with his face buried under the Pope's divine robes. This mural, upon completion, began rotating for everyone to admire from any angle.

The desecrated sky exploded with laughter.

"HOHOHO! BEHOLD, THE COCKBLOCKED KING! HOHOHOHOHOHOHO…"

Beyond the guard permitter, Henry navigated through a crowd of chatty players emerging from their Villages and climbing up on shacks for a less obstructed view. Reactions were mixed. In their hearts, some sensed in this bloody portent an ominous message, although it was uncertain whether it was directed at their leader on his knees, the Pope getting fellated, or The Company providing the paint. Most were laughing at the prank.

Henry travelled on through the laughter. He opened the chat for the regional chapter of the guild—everyone inside had died, a couple thousand—and closed it, repeating his commitment to staying out of this mess. He had retired. Wu-wei. Wu-wei.

In the spirit of Wu-wei, he floated on until the wailing became inaudible, then a bit further still.

Ducking down an alleyway into a sector of Ibanmothe dwellings, he reformed in the backyard of an abode whose occupant had fashioned a sunshade from a tattered square of undyed cloth. When he'd last visited The Slums, before The Empire, this canopy, no matter how ragged, would have been stolen once the owner left for work. From a distant street, he continued to hear Villagers laughing.

Henry stood for a while in the shade, alone with the small guilt at choosing to keep his use of The Cap hidden over implementing adequate precautions against this disaster he'd predicted in the extra years of deliberation. He stood also alone with the much larger mountain of guilt, the routes to which had been flung open for the migration of so many new additions.

He sighed.

Then, resuming the task of moving on, he brought out a small pocket mirror to inspect himself. A little mess had been left up and down his back by the Cutthroat's heart-goring. Henry, desummoning his helmet and upper body armour, found that it'd seeped through to stick to the hairs at the base of his neck. His shoulder was also stained where Karnon had wiped the residue of the woman's leg on him. This stain hadn't been shaped into anything significant beyond the ordinary shape of a bloodstain.

He summoned a bucket to clean himself. As he was about to use some magic to fill it, however, he hesitated at the memory of the God mockingly washing his hands earlier, at the suspicion that this aftermath quietude might be a cue for another prank.

A seagull perched on top of a nearby shack was staring at him. It wasn't blue.

There was nothing else.

Even though it seemed to be safe, Henry stood motionless, gazing into the bottom of the empty bucket.

His ear twitched suddenly at a rare sound in Suchi: the pitter-patter of rain. He glanced in the alleyway, where a bar of sunlight was glittering bloodily through the first drops of a shower.

He rubbed his eyes, rechecked. But it hadn't been a hallucination. It was raining blood.

Karnon's mural did have to descend somehow, he supposed. However, the God would have to dilute or add to the volume to produce this quantity.

Henry watched the shower intensify into a full-blown downpour, the rain drumming on the shack roofs growing thicker and more resonant. The dust in the street became slick and dark, bringing out the soil's colouration more sharply.

In Suchi, there were many stories explaining how the local clay soils had obtained their distinctive red hue. Among the Slumdwellers, whispered between children prone to fantasy and others who'd yet to develop their sense of self-preservation, the onus was placed on The Church. These holy men, it was claimed, these bringers of clouds to Suchi's empty blue heavens, performed their miracle with the help of the vast stores of that liquid they siphoned from their flock through their vampiric extraction rituals. The rain was actually blood. While their trick couldn't be detected at first, eventually, after it'd rested long enough in the sediment, the truth revealed itself in the colour of the land.

Was this rumour correct? It was impossible to say. Henry, who'd always stayed out of Suchi's politics, had never had a public opinion on the matter.

While his mind stirred with pointless thoughts of Saana's trash lore, a door attached to the backyard creaked open, and a girl around the age of the boy he'd just watched die stepped out, attracted by the unfamiliar noise.

The girl gave him—masked, shirtless, holding a bucket—a cautious glance, as children should when encountering Offworlders in the backstreets. This fear, however, was countered by her curiosity about the rain. She'd only ever seen the phenomenon from afar, during the migrations when their caste was forced out of the region and the Ibangua emerged from the big city to farm.

Curiosity winning, the girl nodded a wary greeting at him, then, walking in a wide arc around him, approached the alleyway. She extended her hand out to—her arm was yanked back, the Offworlder leaping at her.

She stared up at his mask, frozen in terror, stared up at his eyes.

Henry shook his head. "It's not water."