The KL Disco, a Dionysian mass of thriving, jiving bodies.

A premier event, The County of Kuala Lumpur’s monthly disco dance attracted thousands. The County’s Villages coordinated to welcome the horde of masked dancers by redecorating their humble shack abodes into a massive dance club. You could dance anywhere - dance in the streets, dance on creaky rooves, dance on other dancers. If you were friendly with the guards, you could dance on the Arcaneworker speakers propagating the dancing dance beat of talented Moose-Step Jazz Fusionists. If you danced with impressive skill or in impressive attire, wandering touts would invite you and your dance partner to climb on raised stages and dance before the crowd. When you tired of all this dancing after dancing too much, roaming staff offered refreshments and Alchemical pick-me-ups to revive the undying will to dance.

In the year 2050, dancing was a popular pastime for the kids, who often used it to escape their digital lethargy. With more interest in the activity, Suchi’s player community had even developed its own style, the ‘shack shuffle’. This wasn’t a shuffle but a variation of the Moose Hop currently captivating Europe. The original, a fusion of Lindy Hop and animal mimicry that mixed swinging, twirling, and wing-flapping, had in The Slums been made more intimate and sensuous by the Latin American community led by King Ramiro, and more acrobatic by virtual reality removing physical danger.

A few enthusiasts took their shack shuffling seriously. But, as had also been the case in the history of dance, the majority here were merely in attendance to party, to let their inner chimpanzee loose. Here, they could scream and shout with the tribe, could attract a mate through the most direct method of rubbing their bodies together and seeing if the friction stirred up enough primal heat.

Amongst those driven by that last ambition, Henry was out cutting the rug with Rose, the music reverberating through his skeleton at a volume that would have burst real eardrums, his vision streaking with the colours of costumes flying past and blurry speckles from his mild inebriation. His dance partner, dressed like himself as an emerald-green alien, was treading along the starry sky while he swung her vertically.

Rose glided over a breakdancing Buddha-imitator. Henry lowered her down into a gap between two other dancers. As her feet alighted, they tapped out a quick six-step sequence in sync with triplets being blasted by a brass section. Henry released her and did an old-timey twirl while slapping his forearms together like seal flippers – a classic move from the Moose Hop repertoire. In the half bar of separation, a man-sized lobster fell between them, its abdomen gushing a crimson ichor as Mozart jackhammered a knife into its belly. Over these brawling figures, Rose shot Henry a flirty glance, fluttering her glittery alien eyelashes. At his nod, she boosted herself off Mozart’s coat-tailed tail bone and flipped. Henry plucked her out of the air by the waist and promenaded them away from the commotion, retreating them into the rhythm of the dance.

Finally, after the aborted attempts at the grindcore concert and the comedy club, they'd found a fun date activity not beset by disaster. Chatting with Rose, Henry'd discovered that she’d recently developed an interest in dancing but hadn’t had much opportunity to practice. Henry, his heart stirred by the pathetic mental image of Geno’s sister silently doing the twist in her room, brought her here to try the real deal. Obviously, his dancing background wasn’t much better – a pinch of pizzazz from Tangye Opera Shapeshifting and a couple dozen poses from an upcoming Performer-class art focused on slow, micromuscular control.

Starting off, many stumbles sprouted up from the gap between their two alien experiences and the style of these Villagers, which was wilder, more social, less inhibited, less lonesome. Both, however, their histories granting them a certain bodily confidence, quickly rushed past the barricades through their willingness to embarrass themselves, learning as they danced and dancing as they learned, adapting themselves to the mass and adapting themselves to each other.

Henry’s first encounter with Rose had been as an enemy in duelling, one of the rivals he’d sought to overcome. The property that’d placed her in this position manifested itself openly once she'd donned her dancing shoes. Despite her tendency to stalkerly silence, her body—over which she had a rare, born talent—articulated the missing expressivity in the fluid and graceful and dexterous nimbleness of movement. Henry, the Cripple who’d attempted to defeat this trait that he didn’t possess through his hyper-cerebral duelling style, had eventually acquired from this very struggle part of the enemy's bodily comfort for himself. Nevertheless, he remained at his core a creature of palsied abstraction, his psyche able to redirect only so much of its energy into his muscles.

In some settings, like the 1v1, this fundamental discrepancy between them came constantly into clash. Dancing, however, was a cooperative arena. Through the common goal of harmony, their oppositions were resolved into complementarities. Henry, with his outbound consciousness, analysed the patterns of moves in others, dissected them, digested them, combined them, suggested them. Rose, meanwhile, brought his ideas into being through her physical exertion, shoving them past the many frictions in the process of translating clumsy abstraction into practical action. Henry, always studying, navigated himself and his dancing partner without collision through the puzzle of the shifting crowd. Rose, through reminders of swaying hips and straddling limbs, prevented him from escaping too far outside, from neglecting the base reality of themselves as human bodies, from forgetting that, ultimately, the calculations of the mind existed for no other reason than carving out a safe spot in life to dance.

The track closed out on a trumpeted crescendo, the two of them finishing with a dramatic dip.

A follow-up song soon marched in to replace it. Henry and Rose, however, stayed frozen in the breath of the interlude, locked in their last pose, her body draped across his arm, the flashes and shadows for the next light show dancing on across their panting faces.

Henry was studying the thin brown ring in her eyes that separated the honey-orange interior of her irises from the whites. Suddenly, her weight became heavier under him, Rose relaxing in a gesture of physical surrender. Tandem with this shift, her bottom lip retracted into her mouth, only to dart back out an instant later. Its brief withdrawal left the lip a crescent mark at its top, a vulnerable patch where the layer of lipstick had been stripped by the teeth, exposing the naked pink flesh beneath.

At the appearance of this naked crescent, Henry heard a distant call from inside of him. At first, the call was inaudibly quiet, like the voice of a prisoner in an adjacent cell known to be muttering but muted by the intervening layers of concrete. But when Henry pressed his ear to the cold wall, when he focused hard upon the rapturous crescent and the way it glistened with a moist coating of saliva, he managed to make out the message. Within him had arisen a primordial command: he must seize control of this denuded patch of lip, he must spread its coverage until the world had been enveloped.

A preliminary response to the order was made first by his hand. Slowly, it inched towards the crescent with the silly intention of smearing it, the pad of his thumb already tingling with the anticipated sensation of contact, the plump, soft wetness.

Henry supposed—considering his hermetic tendencies and poverty of romantic experience—he should be racked with anxiety. But, as one might have glossed from him hitting on that chick yesterday and eventually making out with her, he didn’t possess much shyness with women.

A kiss? For one like himself who'd awakened to the much grander gestures possible between two bodies, this little act became quite unremarkable. He may have been a novice in love, but he’d already swum down and acclimatised to the body’s most sensuous, most high-pressure depths. His plunge had simply been taken according to a parallel path to romance. The corporeal drama of merging bodies: the cautious push and pull across the closing distance, the passionate play of limbs meeting and entwining, the hot, breathy energy rising as the carnal union stoked up into a frenzy, the eventual ascendance to that climactic summit when, in a brief vision of nirvana, the illusion of the self was shattered and the shards of individuality were recalled by the cosmic oneness…the average person would only ever have these euphoric moments lured out of the body by a lover’s caress. But each of them, in equal intensity and measure, could be summoned by an enemy’s death, by the strange, intimate way some people you killed sobbed into your neck after you'd stabbed them.

Henry’s thumb was abruptly knocked off trajectory by the nauseating comparison. His hand passed Rose’s mouth, grabbed a crooked alien-antennae on her headband, and straightened out a kink in the wire within.

-Henry Flower: Wow! I’ll need to catch my breath after that one. At my age, it’s hard to party non-stop.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, should I fetch some drinks?

-Henry Flower: Please.

The two had been communicating via message due to the deafening music.

Rose rushed off in the hopes of quickly resuming where they’d left off. Henry rested on a seat made from the piled-up rubble of an Achievement Pillar some drunk had toppled.

Amidst the dancing throng was a giant teddy bear drunkenly swaying back and forth on its lonesome with a mug of beer. Henry used motes of Scholar energy to air-scribble the Mandarin word for ‘username’, aimed in its direction.

For half a minute, the teddy bear continued to groove alone, showing no outward signs of noticing. Then, stopping abruptly, it poured its drink out on the ground and, writing with the soaked dirt on its beer mug, lobbed the object over. The bear vanished before Henry caught the projectile.

With Henry's digitally-expanded awareness, he identified the throwing gait of the teddy bear as belonging to a spy playing one of his new disciples at The New Suchi Arena. The username written on the mug wasn’t theirs but their boss’s. ‘Snow’.

He opened a line of communication.

-Snow: Humiliating not to have made the duelling connection. Then again, the shadow barely resembles the crippled figure casting it.

The player messaging Henry was a part of the old guard, a now-retired duellist who’d been on the list of pummellings. Like Henry, however, this 1v1ing was secondary to his main career as a spymaster of the Chinese guild Heaven’s Mountain, the once top dogs that Alex’d orchestrated the Flattening Mountains scheme to destroy.

-Henry Flower: Up for sharing dirty secrets? I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on in Togavi if you tell me who banished Oliver Spears to the same zone with me. Alex denies any involvement.

Henry was aware of the nearby presence of the journalist who hated his guts, having fed the guy info for the Oliver Speared phase of the plan to save Suchi. What hadn’t been clear was whether Spear’s materialisation in this zone around the same time as himself had been coincidental or planned. Henry could envision the beaver-head arranging it for an extra laugh.

Nothing peculiar distinguished Oliver from the hundreds of other proximal enemies Henry could be worried about, but the journalist had been raised to the forefront of his consciousness at this moment because, amongst the ‘spies’ searching for him, he’d noticed a different member of the Channel 5 team, London Tremor. This intern, an unwitting participant in The Return of The Cripple, had been absent from the arena yesterday and today. Henry figured seeing him now that Oliver must have reassigned him to an important scoop, one they were on the hunt for tonight. Whatever that was precisely, whether it might pertain to himself, he (to maintain the appearance of not being a time-defying digital cyborg who’d deduced Ramiro’s cannibal hobby had to pretend he) didn’t know.

-Snow: Spears’ demotion? Haha. That one was me! I calculated he was spiralling a bit close to the real you after the interview stunt, so I threatened to have our brands pull contracts from the network unless there was retribution.

-Henry Flower: Oh? I'm surprised you'd care for me that much.

-Snow: The Tyrant's privacy is of my utmost priority.

For convoluted reasons, Henry’s enemies pro-actively attempted to prevent the exposure of his real identity. Those who’d been informed by Rose’s brother during his defection had shortly after been contacted by Alex. The beaver-head threatened escalation if the leak spread further to the public – the gist was that, regardless of the culprit, all of them would be stripped from the semi-covert, rodent-like existence in the game that The Company had been allowing them. This warning had been backed up by Henry's swift annihilation of their rebellion.

In truth, however, Alex’s threats had been a bluff. Henry, when agreeing to join the beaver-head in reconquering the planet, had given one single stipulation. If anyone but himself leaked his identity to the public, if the paparazzi and the other nuisances intruded into his real life, he would quit this trash game on the spot. Basically, exposure was a free ticket to retirement. Alex had therefore taken many extreme precautions to prevent Henry being granted this release, including the last-ditch bluff that ended up hoodwinking the enemy into obstructing their own salvation.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

But none of this background mattered anymore. Henry'd finished conquering Saana, run out the 18-month term of his employment contract, and retired. Oliver, 2049’s Gaming Journalist of The Year, had been banished to Suchi for nothing. His career had been made victim to a lag in the revelation of an obsolete agreement.

-Henry Flower: Well, the explanation for the operation in Togavi is similarly mundane. As Alex claimed, the azure menace stole a Legendary. During The Trading Post massacre.

-Snow: Another Ortheerian sword?

Henry didn’t answer.

-Snow: Hahaha. This is fun, Cripple. Trade me more secrets. What trick are you pulling on Geno’s septic little sis? Name your price.

-Henry Flower: An explanation for Loki's behaviour.

-Snow: Beats me, ‘Jormungandr’. I’ve never understood those viking nutjobs and their apocalyptic fairytales.

Here, the spymaster was lying, making a calculated decision not to spoil Loki’s game.

-Henry Flower: And I haven’t the foggiest why his sister’s here.

-Snow: Another! What’s up with the enormous stadium? You might be ‘The Cripple’, but…well.

-Henry Flower: That one, you can have as a freebie for preserving my identity. Behind the stadium is a sorrowful tale of a genius too genius for his era. Aeons ago, in a distant instalment, he, the world's greatest duellist, stumbled upon a pair of mysterious gates, pried them open, and ventured through. Unfortunately, no one else had the courage to follow him. Turns out, he'd skipped too many steps. Extra preliminary work was necessary before the unenlightened could even recognise what the gates had opened upon. First, the greatest duellist needed to upgrade Saana's underdeveloped 1v1 scene. But to do that, he first had to bolster its participation rate and the training industry around it. But to do THAT, he first had to erect stadiums to house the extra duelling infrastructure. But to do that, he first had to build roads and shipping networks for the collection and conveyance of constructions materials to the sites where the stadiums would be built. But to do that, he first had to conquer the world to establish those transportation routes...the preamble’s quite dull. Now, however, with the foundations of the biggest stadium on the planet finally laid, we can resume where he'd once left off, starting here with The Cripple’s highly-anticipated return from the other side of the gates, where he's been lonesomely waiting for a challenger in duelling heaven.

Laughter had erupted over the line, Henry’s interlocutor understanding the full irony in that dumb reframing of his life. Their call ended there, on this rather amicable note that failed to capture the fact the guy had orchestrated two of the failed hitjobs in Suchi so far.

"Try again!" Henry, having been touching a Spelltome to boost his Tech stat and stealth detection range, tossed the beer mug at a panther sneaking up from his side.

The creature, an assassin from a different spy team, rolled away from the projectile and slinked back into the anonymity of the mob.

A returning Rose blinked in confusion, her under-levelled character unable to see through the target’s invisibility. Henry notified her of the spies’ presence. She proceeded to get a bit worked up in annoyance at the impertinence of these third parties constantly invading their privacy. He resisted pointing out the hypocrisies of her being both a stalker and an assassin.

-Henry Flower: Forget about them. You’ll achieve more shouting at the weeds in your garden. Before we get our boogey back on, what outfits should we swap to?.

-Zhangmei33: Actually, Cripple-gege…instead of dancing…another idea has come to me…

Rose, seated beside him while they rehydrated, quaffed a gulp of her beverage. Her head then craned down and away from him nervously as if she were about to take the bold leap of asking to go somewhere more private.

-Zhangmei33: At the bar, a couple were chatting…a tournament...superheroes versus villains…

-Henry Flower: What’s the appeal of a duelling tournament? You’ve been watching me demolish noobs for a week straight.

-Zhangmei33: Uhh…not exactly…Cripple-gege…I was wondering if you…other than the 1v1…

-Henry Flower: Other than the 1v1?

Henry drew a blank. What else could there be of interest than the 1v1?

Rose blinked bashfully, her mind’s eye flooding with sensuous visions of the two of them.

-Zhangmei33: What about…the…2v2?

-Henry Flower: Oh, you want to compete in the duos tournament?

Rose nodded.

Henry—despite a mild disgust at the prospect of wanting to be burdened in the arena by reliance on another person—looked up the information on the competition. Unfortunately, it seemed they’d missed the sign-ups, the event already being underway.

Rose pushed back with a stammered suggestion that, since participation was anonymous due to the costumes, they could bribe a pair to trade their place. She then addressed several other concerns, like Henry’s aversion to too much attention, which could be mitigated by them throwing in the quarter-finals. Evidently, she’d put a lot of forethought into her request, considering the duos tournament when planning their date but omitting it due to its daringness – that was until the dance floor had boosted her confidence.

Henry couldn’t understand her insistence, couldn't understand a fangirl's heart. Nevertheless, he examined her request from the perspective of tackling the romantic incompatibility.

Extrapolating the current path of this disco to the end of their date, he couldn’t envision them advancing beyond their barriers. Whenever he accessed his inner emotions, he felt sort of like he was jitterbugging in a cemetery. They were dancing on graves, and continuing a few more numbers would only add to the annoyance of the dead in the soil. As for the arena, it felt, in a certain respect, more obscene, due perhaps to its closer proximity to the issue. Instead of merely foxtrotting above the dead, they were exhuming the skeletons and puppeteering them to groove along. (An absurd image. Yet, if you'd believe it, this uncomfortable confrontation, this macabre-into-comical transformation, might be a legitimate fix. That hypothesis actually underpinned Alex’s scheme to rope Henry into this recruitment tournament, having him lighten up by revisiting his ironic beginnings.)

For romance, no hope for a miracle was apparent to Henry in either path. Then, reevaluating from the goal of simply lessening defeat, the superior choice probably became the arena. Rose seemed like she’d get more joy from the prospect, and its sentimental connection to their duelling past would provide a chance for a minor closure.

(Within the broader knowledge of his Overdream investigations, these two options had different yet identical outcomes. This dinky duos tourney would be what ended up exposing him, the instigating incident for the ensuing phase of chaos. But, even if Henry tried to avoid the dangers of this one path, the second or any extras he might conceive would all be woven to terminate at the same destination. This next part was inevitable.)

Choosing not to delay destiny any further, he acquiesced. Leaving the drugs, the music, and the hormones, the two of them migrated through the packed streets to the tournament.

The Heroes Versus Villains event was hosted at the headquarters of the Kingdom, the replica Borobudur temple where Byzantium had convened earlier in the week on the night Henry’d butchered the cannibal cult. The knock-off monument had been readied for a ball scheduled later with a gaudy makeover. Its imitation-stone wood had been dyed with a taffy-pink wash, and its multi-levelled terraces were lined with glowing-neon glass statues of Queen Suhita. The decoration made for an unsettling, hallucinatory contrast with the competition presently being held on it. While the costumed combatants hacked each other apart, rivers of their conjoining blood trickled down the temple’s taffy-pink steps, as if a mass human sacrifice were being carried out before a tacky sweet 16 party.

The pair arrived to spectators booing Superman squeezing Darth Vader in a neck crank. This match, a semi-quarters bout in the 1v1 event, was being held on the temple’s uppermost platform and showcased to the audience via projectors. Simultaneously, on the temple’s lower levels, duo teams were scrapping it out for the 2v2’s preliminaries.

The first obstacle that might’ve barred their entrance was bypassed smoothly. As luck would have it, an Earthfriend couple who’d qualified for the bracket stage were willing to sell their positions. The couple also gave over their costumes: colourful Indonesian-style topeng or masked dancing garb. One Earthfriend had entered as the protagonist from a 2039 theatrical retelling of the Mahabharata epic, the other as its antagonist.

A minor snag arose from the original couple both being men. Henry, the romantic problems already being stacked too high, opted against transmogrifying his date into a dude and just decided to retailor her outfit to hide her ladybits. Hopefully, no observative spectators would notice the contestant shedding 40% of his body mass.

Before their matches began, Henry found a quiet place in the backroom of a shack haberdashery, where they retreated from the chaos of the crowds while adjusting their costumes.

“Stop squirming!” Henry, needle in hand, slapped a thigh he’d been trying to sew the altered leggings around. “I can’t react fast enough; you’ll get stabbed. Calm down. It’s only a noob tournament.”

“It’s hard, big bro. My heart,” a beaming, fidgety Rose pressed her palms poetically to her chest, "it feels so full it might explode. To team up with the master in his dojo, to feature in a chapter in the latest epic saga, isn’t this a girl’s wildest dream come true?”

Henry—reflecting on the fact that The Cripple’s fanbase was 98% men, a proportion that, after accounting for surveying errors, could well be close to 100%, Rose maybe being his single female fan—nodded in complete agreement. “In most circumstances, this level of excitement to duel alongside me would be expected and neurotypical for the average girl. Still, you should try to be casual. This is supposed to be a date, not fanservice.”

Rose shook her head. “You said not to act anymore, big bro. A happiness of this magnitude can’t be contained. Big bro, before the heaviness of sleep lifts from this humble dreamer’s eyes, could you grant her one last wish?”

“What now?” Henry sighed.

“Big bro, this one time, could you show…it?”

It being the supreme martial art he'd obviously been developing.

“Nope.”

“0.00001%, big bro? A teaser for the plebs, a sneak preview to foreshado—”

“Nope.” Henry refused outright, the proper form of A Thousand Tools being too attention grabbing.

But, in the spirit of romantic compromise, he met her request part way.

-Henry Flower: If you want, you can pick a style that hasn’t been ‘invented’ yet. I was planning on using something new regardless to minimise the odds of recognition.

-Zhangmei33: But how can I pick what I don't know? Why did we switch to private message, Cripple-gege?

-Henry Flower: Because even the existence of the list you’re about to be sent must never be revealed in the open. Not a whisper of a whisper. Swear to a vow of silence.

-Zhangmei33: I would die before telling another living soul.

-Henry Flower: You don’t have to go that far. Just swear by the sacred oath.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege…isn't all that stuff a joke?

-Henry Flower: Not for you, it isn’t. Demonstrate the strength of your conviction. Do it.

Rose blinked.

-Zhangmei33: I swear by Achilles, by Guan Yu, by Sasuke, by The Invincible Cripple, making these venerable warrior legends my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgement, this oath and…

After the toll of self-humiliation had been paid, Henry messaged her a list of his 84 martial arts. He didn't share the information outside of mental communication to avoid it ending up in the manipulative hands of a certain trickster deity.

The moment he sent the list, he felt Rose revert to a statue, the girl devouring the information, identifying each art’s purpose in his journey, and connecting the dots between them. Due to her stalking/fangirling, she was one of the few players who’d completed enough rereadings of The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo’s documentation to grasp the serious ambitions behind The Cripple’s comic weeb façade.

Henry, expecting more, kept his sewing needle away. This was a wise choice. Soon, Rose’s legs began to tremble, a quake spreading and amplifying through her trunk and limbs with the suffusion of his art’s seismic shifts, with her consolidating recognition of the shape of duelling to come. Having been sewing from her rear, he leaned forward and around to see her with clenched, shaking fists and tears rolling down her cheeks.

Her reaction was a bit over the top, he thought. It was only a one-in-a-billion revolutionary martial art…

“Awesome.” Rose used a fist to wipe her eyes. “Awesome…big bro, to confess the truth, at times even I had my doubts, but now…big bro…big bro’s really back!” She punched the air. “Awesome!”

Henry—who was the opposite of back, The Return of The Cripple being planned to end on the comical career change to professional fanny-pack design—winced.

Shoot. That's right, Rose would react quite poorly to his retirement...

Oh well. Can't please everybody. On the bright side, his wild unpopularity meant that not many other super fans existed to be let down by his second retirement.

He stuffed a square of fabric into her hand and reminded her to mask any outward signs. After all, it was essential—for the sake of the saga, which was very important—to keep safe this precious, top-secret info about the supreme martial art.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, did you succeed? Does the mountain reach all the way to heaven? Did you build the golden bridge for crossing the chasm between—

-Henry Flower: No more revelations.

-Zhangmei33: Can you tell me the art's name? The initials?

-Henry Flower: ITKQTYK. Immobile Tongue, Keeping Questions To Yourself Kick.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, there are an alarming number of Earthfriend styles here. Was the supreme path hidden in the despicable ways of these hippy roleplayers? Is that why you betrayed our noble Cutthroat origins and became a degenerate Earthfriend?

-Henry Flower: Pick a style already or the offer’s cancelled. Obviously, not Twenty Tools.

Rose, attempting to recompose herself, re-read the list. As one item immediately popped out to her, her mood turned reticent with the preparation for another audacious request.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, if you do Sacred Weaponsmaking, could you...between matches…you know.

Henry, figuring out that she wanted him to use this smithing art to design her a custom dagger, was struck by a series of images of his handiwork sawing into necks, severing spinal cords, eviscerating bowels.

-Henry Flower: No. You’ve already maxed out your wishes.

-Zhangmei33: Aww. Then…what about The All-Mother’s Duty?

-Henry Flower: What's making that one stand out to you?

It was peculiar that, of all the amazing arts ahead, she would select this outdated, cobweb-riddled style from the game’s trash lore.

Rose answered that her guild chat had been in a heated debate the other day over power rankings for which of Saana III’s NPCs would be the most challenging to assassinate. A member in Nilke had stubbornly argued for The All-Mother, claiming the historical figure to have been more powerful than The God-Emperor everyone else judged number one.

-Henry Flower: Living, non-Cosmic, the toughest would be her killer, Karnon. It’s not even close. Don’t be fooled. To pull pranks while someone’s trying to murk you, you have to be astronomically better than them. The Gods are all acutely aware of the gap. They’re just hoping he’ll slip up one time while screwing with them.

-Zhangmei33: Really? What about non-living? Still him?

-Henry Flower: Non-living, no. It’s probably The Redeemer.

Henry’d needed artificial assistance to kill that monkey god during the tutorial, and that was with The Redeemer being downlevelled after his reincarnation and made senile by old age. Historically, in the monkey’s first life, he’d never been beaten in combat. His end had been dealt by his own hand, a suicide of despair when, limited by there being merely one of himself, he couldn’t prevent the dismantlement of his empire on multiple fronts.

-Zhangmei33: The Redeemer?

-Henry Flower: An ancient figure long converted into dust. Anyway, The All-Mother’s Duty, I’d be happy to show you it, but that was more of a meta-level study to learn approaches for synthesising the other arts, her style being the fusion of 573. At Tier-0, without access to those extra skills, it’s nothing extraordinary.

-Zhangmei33: How about White Mouse Stalking? From Saana II, right?

Henry sighed internally, the White Mouse Stalkers being a cabal of Earthfriend assassins.

Again and again…it always circled back to assassination…

-Henry Flower: Fine…