After crossing paths with the Channel 5 journalist that Henry's naïve self would have mistaken for a spy, he led Rose in losing anyone tracking them in The Slum's labyrinth. Along the way, they swapped outfits, purchasing several spares from local sellers in case of later spy encounters.

Now, the pair were strolling through the festival hand-in-hand, glimpsing in on performances to check if any took their fancy (not yet), inspecting the knock-off knick-knacks and counterfeit curios being offered by dodgy dealers, sampling snack foods. Henry—in the casual, rebellious fashion one would expect in a teenage date—was sipping from a beer he hadn’t even inspected for poison.

“Big bro...what kind of meat do you think that is? Pork? I...I can't place it.”

Rose, having reframed her question for a second time without response, used the blunt end of a shish kebab to prod his shoulder.

Henry pretended not to have been distracted by pointing at a flute-player dancing on top of a stall. “I was captivated by the traditional Indonesian melody.”

Externally, Henry still unfortunately needed to put on some affectations of paranoia. His non-digitally-augmented self, no matter the strength of his resolve, had a long while left before he could completely suppress the intrusion of his old priorities and habits.

Internally, however, Henry was chilling. He'd been listening to Rose the entire time, the forest farm exercise enabling him to relax during their stroll through The Slums.

In many respects, this dump, although not as aesthetically pleasing, was also a type of forest farm or sand mandala, an ephemeral creation suffused with the spirit of annihilation.

At the start of every month, the Slumdwellers and Villagers set up their shacks here anew. Each inhabitant was like the individual Buddhist monks arranging the grains in their section of the mandala. Through tireless labour, they built up their businesses and crafts, they established connectivities between themselves through these festivals, and the combined exertion transformed The Slums into a network of chaotic, dense, elaborate design. Then, the end of the month arrived and any evidence of their work that couldn’t be hauled away on a cart was purged in the roaring fires of The Cleansing, the ground being cleared for the next pointless repetition.

This temporary quality had been one of the subtler barriers in Henry’s ability to appreciate The Slums. Whatever minor beauties he might encounter were contaminated by the forecast of destruction. But after forest farming, he was able to shift his fixation away from the misfortunate destiny and other negativities, able to savour the trifling joys of the present: the creative costumes of the festivalgoers, the effort of the amateur performers, the company of his cute companion.

Work was still required, but his senses were moving closer to a state of sane balance. Instead of the beggars in rags, he absorbed the sight of Rose in a full-body piranha suit - she’d begrudgingly exchanged her gown for this at his paranoid insistence. Instead of the screams of distant muggings, he trained his ear upon the staccato of her nervous questions and answers. Instead of the dryness of this barren climate that caused so much desperation, he felt the moist sweat of Rose’s palm in his. Instead of the sweet iron flavour of blood on the tongue of some tonight, he bathed his own in the tang of lipstick transferred to the shish kebab they'd been sharing. Instead of the noxious amalgamation of booze from festivalgoers blending with the odour of poverty and death, he filled his nostrils with the mixture of a non-floral, amber perfume she’d worn to seem more mature and that other new scent that’d struck them.

Rose paused with annoyance, having mistaken his cause of distraction. “Big bro, can you smell that?”

“Hmm?” Henry tested the air again, inhaling another blast of the wonderful savoury, meaty aroma. “Oh…”

The delicious scent lured them into a dinky tent restaurant with six tables crammed together and enough customers for twice that, groups of strangers happily sharing in the spirit of community.

At the corner of one table, an eye-catching guy had been chatting up a drunken girl. He had a posture like a lion fixing a gazelle in place, his paw almost finishing its crawled ambush up her bare thigh into the shadow of her skirt. Unlike the other patrons, whose masks sat on their laps or dangled from their necks while they ate, this skirt-chaser hadn't brought one at all. His features were left bare this evening, including the bearded lips tickling his prey’s ear with words of disarmament.

This unmasked fellow, noticing Henry enter in a dorky fisherman outfit along with his human-sized catch, separated from the drunken girl and stared at the two blankly.

“I’m not tailing you,” the guy stated. “You came in after me.”

The drunk girl, feeling his hand withdraw from the pounce, glared with annoyance at the intruders. “Who are these people, Hugo? Friends or enem—”

She shut up when the point of a thrown dagger sank into a patch of wall beside her throat, missing her jugular by a few centimetres.

Rose was frowning mildly at the guy, but this expression of intense anger had been covered by the upper brim of her piranha suit. “If you’re trying to arrange a double date or something, you’ve lost your mind. Fuck off, 'Hugo'. This is my night, you weaselly piece of...”

Henry, while Rose spewed abuse, checked suspiciously around and behind them for any signs of an assisting spy team.

This bearded womaniser they'd run into was Loki, in his ‘real’ form, ‘Hugo’.

At today’s team training with Byzantium, the spy had stunned everyone by turning up transmogrified out of the Artemis form and into an ordinary British dude named Hugo. This was, ostensibly, the spy’s actual, real-life appearance and identity, the self after discarding all masks. Nevertheless, he'd continued to behave quite peculiarly by enacting an exaggerated, cliché image of masculinity, showboating when he killed players and chatting up the Village’s single and non-single ladies.

This stereotypical behaviour hinted at a watershed event in Hugo’s (ironic) identity crisis. Since being (falsely) ejected from Asatru, he’d been experimenting with one mask after another to test which felt most natural on the skin of his face. In the process of this internal exploration, it was dawning on (the fake) Hugo that the most comfortable disguises were those that least fit his anatomical contours. Could it be...could he be...a she? This looming epiphany repulsed and terrified the spy, clashing with his ex-(current)-guild’s internal culture of warrior traditionalism. Thus, he’d resorted, this evening, to acting hyper-masculine out of a last-ditch rebellion against the pronouncements of his (fabricated) inner nature. Soon, however, the (fake) battle would finish in defeat, the spy accepting the severing of his attachments to Asatru (that made him dangerously untrustworthy) along with the rest of his former life as a man. ‘Hugo’, finally recognised as a mask no less deceptive than ‘Loki’, would slip away to reveal the authentic Artemisian soul residing beneath.

It was a stirring (parodical) story of self-discovery.

But, in all probability, for all Loki's layers of lies, his claim now to not be following Henry and Rose was honest. The spy had enough intelligence to minimise suspicion-rousing coincidences when pulling off such a convoluted charade, which would unravel upon too much scrutiny. He would have actually just been out here hitting on chicks in a show of pathetic (fake) denial. Such was the extent of his commitment, the spy maintaining his dissimulation 24/7, even when alone, to fool any counteroperatives monitoring him.

Not that this made their meeting a mere coincidence. The tantalising aroma that’d lured Rose and Henry from the streets was coming from a solitary plate on one of the other tables. Whoever’d been eating the dish had left behind a pile of cylindrical, twig-like bones in a blood-red sauce. These bones were bacula i.e. the penile bones that some animals possessed. By their size, they must have belonged to a large creature – a bear, maybe. This was a peculiar food given that Suchi had no bears and they had entered a shellfish restaurant.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Here was a clue from another of the night’s prowlers, another trickster figure. Through juxtaposition, the metaphorical overlap was being highlighted between Loki's game of masks and the elusive ‘Enemy-Bear’.

Henry, acting from the less informed position, resisted the temptation to collect the out-of-place leftovers for investigation, to be baited into Karnon's next prank.

Focusing, he returned his attention away from the periphery of his vision to Loki in its centre. ‘Hugo’ was giving himself and Rose a doubtful yet inquisitive look at the mention of a double-date, implying a single date. The veteran spy, knowing their shared history, having studied The Tyrant’s psychology in depth during past missions (and the current one), figured out the problem immediately.

“You’re both wrong,” Rose snorted in exaggerated derision, refuting both Loki and the internalisation of her brother’s taunting. “Don’t project your low IQ inability to distinguish one person from another totally unrelated person onto big bro. He operates on a higher plane of cognition than you simpletons. That’s why he won; that’s why you lost.”

Loki flicked Henry a second meaningful look.

Henry, ignoring the insinuation, ignoring Karnon’s bait, squeezed Rose’s hand to go. “I’ve lost my appetite. Let’s go find it.”

Making an exit, the two of them briefly split apart in an evasive manoeuvre in case Loki’s Asatru crew had been monitoring them. When they reconnected, Henry’d exchanged costumes for one of Blurm from 2044’s hit movie Blurm 2: The Blurmback.

Draping his magenta Blurm arm around Rose’s shoulder, Henry showed deference but not too much for the brotherly taboo by inquiring about Vancouver and the less insane members of her household. His ridiculous Blurm outfit disarming her a bit, she answered with a few mumbled sentences, defusing part of the tension. In turn, he commiserated with his own family problems, like having so many cousins and uncles and nieces crammed in the same building that he’d leapt at the first opportunity to move out alone. Rose thought a big family sounded fun. Henry told her the grass was always greener.

But Loki’s judgement hadn’t been wrong.

In Suchi, some romantic impediments between them might’ve already been visible, like her stalking him or her being a fan, both of which involved lop-sided power dynamics antagonistic to the formation of a healthy relationship. However, the events in this dump were a mere fraction of their lives up until now. This'd been an atypical week in which both, vacationing from their personal histories, had lounged about beating up Tier-0 newbies. From outside of Suchi, more ominous problems dangled over head.

Her brother, Geno, was the most blatant obstacle. The guy, among other offences, had, six months ago after rejecting the reformation plans, spearheaded the defection of a quarter of The Company and turned the Western continent into a bloodbath. For this, Henry hated him. Not at the level of a dispute between players in a videogame, Henry—this action touching up the mountain that constituted his interior, growing the damned thing taller—hated her brother personally, murderously.

From the game perspective, the odds were stacked against them.

But if Henry could put aside these sources of incompatibility, all of which’d occurred inside a virtual MMORPG, then Rose seemed to him like a decent enough match. Behind the stalking was a zealous habit of pursuing goals that mirrored his own psychotic drive to climb. Most women when confronted with not the theory but the reality of this obsessive character trait, the hours and years of absence, could at best tolerate the tendency. Rose, however, seemed to adore it. And she was talented and ambitious, too, having striven far enough to fulfil the impossible criteria Henry'd set for his gold-digger tournament. At the same time, her familial wealth and celebrity status resolved any issues on that gold-digger front. With her, Henry didn't have to worry about being pursued only for his riches, nor having his personhood swallowed by the dehumanising magnitude of his public persona. Tonight, Karnon would be exposing him as The Tyrant – in the fallout of that, Rose’s opinion wouldn’t change because, already aware, she’d liked him both before and after.

Analysed objectively, according to the material conditions unspoiled by digital taint, this would probably be the best shot the universe would ever give him at a half authentic love.

Alas, when he sized up the conflicting factors, weighing the pros against the cons, the balance wasn’t squaring for him. This analysis was insufficient to get him past his virtual phantoms. That's why he'd insisted on spending this date pursuing Rose’s interests over his own as she'd planned. Whatever hope existed, it would have to be found elsewhere, in the gap between the pessimistic conclusion of his mind and their two bodies, in the gap left by what he didn’t know about this girl - which, admittedly, was plenty; Henry barely understood himself, let alone anyone else.

The pair conversed in parallel with their inner worries, and their chatter carried them past many troubled streets, past the medley of concerts and circuses and magic shows.

Due to careless event planning, The Empire's venues for The Soiree had been packed too closely. Consequently, the sound of their performances and crowds bled over into each other, quiet orchestral movements being ruined by laughter from adjacent comedies. For the foot traffic in the street, the effect was one of a shifting discordance, the clashing noise levels constantly fluctuating in volume as the differential movements between venues drew some nearer and others away.

One sensitive to noise might have an urge to mute the cacophony. Henry, however, by resisting this impulse, was being rewarded with rare harmonies. Here, a poem of triumph was reframed by a sad crescendo; there, an actor’s screamed challenge was intensified by a sudden break in a dance track. By staying in it, these fleeting gems of synchrony were popping up in the interstitial positions the two of them momentarily occupied by.

Within this in-between space, Henry sensed a romantic opportunity.

“Are you still into grindcore?” he asked.

Rose blinked in panic. “You…remember that…big bro?”

“Of course,” he replied, adding a tone of indignance at the possibility of him forgetting such an important detail about her. “Your montages were part of my study material before our first duel. I can still recall the enemy order in your fourth vid, A Fresh Bouquet of Maggots. Jirou8, Ag0nY, Tortilla…”

Back then, their duelling scene had been so small and underdeveloped that everyone edited their own footage, as Henry had in his series The Way of Fighting Alone. In Rose’s videos, she’d always added abrasive grind tracks, coupling her elegant beheadings and delicate disembowelments with a percussive wall of blast beats and pig squeals.

Oddly, years later, this niche musical interest of hers had led to a minor revival of the genre, one almost exclusively driven by women. A bunch of her fans had taken to imitating Rose’s assassin image, the uncomfortable marriage of the grotesque and feminine beauty that was embodied in her music taste and the other half of her username, Septic Rose. It was like a punky, Marquis de Sade-type deal. Henry supposed this contingent of female Roboboomers were embracing the rotten in rebellion against their parents, society, and the age. His schoolfriend Abigail happened to be one of them – she’d joined Rose’s fan guild The Garden of The Grotesque and styled herself Battered Daisy. Within their revelling in disgust, some of Rose's extreme followers had started grind bands.

The whole phenomenon was a strange testament to the era, to Saana’s whacky cultural penetration. In a game with 200 million players and rising, individual quirks could explode into artistic trends.

Henry, with his own duelling exploits, hadn’t been close to as influential due to a combination of him quitting duelling before the game became huge and his ironic weeb try-hard cheater aesthetic being super lame. His main living legacy had been a random lunatic who’d stolen his old username and who was pretending to be him while running the passivist cult made for Operation Phantom Limbs. This imposter had bothered Henry a bit but not too much, such a dumb conclusion having seemed a fitting retirement for The Cripple. That was, before Henry came up with the current, superior ending of synthesising a revolutionary martial art to win a noob tournament only to then quit in pursuit of cutting-edge fanny-pack design – the plebs might not understand this prioritisation, but from the lonely altitude of the summit, there was no difference between these two mountains, both were equally easy.

"...and DogEZ. That's the whole list. So, are you still into the grind?"

Flooded with these fragmentary reminiscences, Henry supposed this added another to the tally of Geno’s sister's pluses: the shared reservoir of memories.

Rose gave no response, having frozen between the reluctance to lie and her hesistancy to answer in the affirmative. She was obviously aware of her romantic position, and she didn't want to introduce additional weirdness that might worsen her case.

“It’s not a test,” Henry assured her, rubbing this anxiety out of her shoulder. “I’m not probing at anything deeper - non-crazy people also blast obnoxious music for catharsis, and I can think of many worse alternatives. My reason for asking is because of that squealing." He gestured in the direction of one ugly noise amongst ugly noises. "Do you want to check out the show? You can teach me the appeal.”

Rose’s panic dissipated over several seconds, and she eventually nodded in agreement.

The two innocent-eyed teens followed the squealing and grunts to a Village hosting a concert. An R-18 event, they snuck in through one of many holes in its unmaintained walls.

They should not have done this.

Inside, they were met by a gruesome display. The band, carrying out some kind of avant-garde performance, were exploiting the fact of being in a virtual game world to mutilate each other, showering the stage and the audience with their limbs and guts while the crowd spammed heals at them to sustain the gory gift-giving.

Henry’s attempt to plunge into the vileness in search of its hidden beauty had been mistaken.

The pair quickly bounced, Rose tomato-red with embarrassment, Henry silent with flashbacks.

To lighten the mood, they stopped in for dinner at an amateur comedy club. However, before they could be served—as if Suchi itself were intent that the proximity of violence in its streets never be forgotten—an argument between a comic and a heckler grew out of control, a hundred-man brawl erupted, and the venue caught on fire, the dishes they'd ordered being consumed by the flame.

Henry, surprised but unsurprised, snuck them out of this second disaster and moved them on to try yet again.