The Slums. A community bathhouse in a shack, the building’s third story where stressed-out customers could get a soothing massage while watching the river of costumed festival-goers flowing in the street below.
London Tremor, intern for Channel 5 news, was seated facing outside while a masseuse NPC worked magic on the tension in his neck.
“We can go lower,” pointed out the masseuse who'd been rubbing the same spot for twelve minutes.
“No, no,” replied the intern. “This is sublime.”
London would have liked to accept the offer, but he’d been assigned to monitor an alleyway across the street, a task for which he couldn’t budge.
The environment around him in this bathhouse was relaxed, other patrons in the same room groaning and sighing as their backs were slapped and kneaded. Internally, however, he was being pinged with messages from Channel 5’s Pig-Hunting Enthusiast Club.
-Oliver Spears: Mandy love, any squeals in the sky?
-mandy50385: Rooftops clear.
-London Tremor: Back entrance clear, too.
-geitzeist: God, how much longer must I eat these kebabs?
-Oliver Spears: Until you can talk Turkish, lad. Terrance, Louis, rotate.
-AdmiralPoplar: Vendor’s passing the sax concert.
-Oliver Spears: Drop vision, enjoy the groove. Doesn’t seem like The Hog'll be unearthing his truffle in the open. Theatre, it is!
Finally, after days scouring The Slums, the Channel 5 team were about to nab their swine.
Oliver’s ‘pig’ had turned out to be a serial killer: some dude who wore an ugly mask, called ‘The Hog’. After the many false positives one would expect at a masquerade, the team found their target sweet-talking a ten-year-old costume-vendor NPC. Convincing the girl that he was a director in need of outfits for a play, The Hog had arranged for her to deliver the purchases to a small, fifteen-seat shack theatre - across the street from London Tremor’s position, at the end of the alleyway he was monitoring. The venue had been left unoccupied after its original troupe’s last-minute promotion to a larger stage, and, at the deserted site, The Hog planned on killing the girl, carrying out the deed with only a thin wall of dilapidated wood separating him and his victim from the bustling festival crowd.
The news team were preparing to apprehend the killer. Oliver had been directing members to rotate through surveillance points, having some track the costume-vendor in transit, having others, like London Tremor, spy on the theatre.
It might seem exciting, but the identification of their pig had left the department disappointed. Given Oliver’s secrecy and how hard he’d slavedriven them, they’d expected his investigation to centre on a much bigger scandal. Serial-killer roleplayers were a dime a dozen in Suchi, a minor novelty that couldn't captivate the attention of the locals for an hour. This Hog guy's body count wasn't even in the top 100. The journalists had been grieving for their wasted effort, grieving for Oliver gone insane by his relegation to their branch, and grieving for themselves in a similar plight, stuck in this slum forgotten by the real news.
London Tremor was in a cheerier mood than the rest of his peers. With the curtains closing on this trifling episode, he would soon be free to resume the interrupted investigation of HF!
As the masseuse kneaded out a kink at the base of his skull, the intern spotted The Hog in the crowd below, identifying the ugly mask from an image circulated amongst the team.
Following previous instructions, he messaged his manager, informing him the moment the target turned his back and entered the alleyway. At that exact instant, his eyes ignited with two telegraphing glows, one from him activating Bullet-Time, the second from Oliver borrowing his vision.
The intern and his manager studied the form of this serial-killer player, ‘The Hog’, moving in slow motion towards the theatre.
-Oliver Spears: Monitor the neck. If he glances back, you glance down.
-London Tremor: Got it.
-Oliver Spears: Isn’t that sexy, Clever Trevor? This oinker looks like he’s worked up a raging appetite.
London Tremor shivered at a creepy tone in Oliver’s voice. From the intern’s perspective, nothing about the figure suggested sexiness or hunger. His stride did stand out – muscular and bold. The walk, almost a strut, resembled the arena’s best trainees before an important match, those duellists who, after proper conditioning, had learned to take all the nervous energy that ran uncontrolled through the anxious bodies of novices and distribute it correctly to each limb about to duel. Or, in this case, each limb about to kill an NPC kid. London Tremor guessed this roleplayer was no virgin to this pastime.
An extra sense of déjà vu was nudging at the intern, but, unable to identify its source, he dismissed it.
The Hog, brimming with self-assurance, never glanced around to check for observers. Striding on, he unlocked the theatre’s back door and relocked it upon entering. A moment later, a thin bar of light shone from under the doorframe.
-Oliver Spears: Lights on, eh? Kinky. ¡Qué delicioso!
London Tremor’s eyes lost their glow, Oliver switching perspective to another journalist. The intern felt a burden slip away.
“Nice.” The masseuse detected the change through their fingers.
"Mm." London Tremor grunted back in agreement.
With that, his part in this pig-hunt was pretty much finished. He had to wait around to film if the serial killer roleplayer escaped out this back entrance – journalists with higher-level characters were being stationed around the alleyway to intercept him. After that, London could log off, HF being MIA tonight. A couple members of the fangroup had attended the 1v1 tournament in case the mysterious teen repeated his feats from the Plains Day, but nothing had happened, the competition concluding without any monumental pillars being toppled. London Tremor would use this downtime to catch up on his missing sleep.
Ding!
The chime of a high-priority alert sounded in his ear.
He checked the HF fangroup, a new post being made by a member at the Heroes versus Villains event. Sticking around after the 1v1 tourney, they’d found the weird silent girl who hovered around the teen participating in the 2s after an axe-blow put a split in her costume’s mask. Her partner, also an Earthfriend, seemed to be HF, although he'd concealed his presence by adopting an undebuted martial art. He and his partner were skilled enough that the bookies were slating them to win.
HF was at the tournament, thought London Tremor, but in the wrong format...interesting...
He connected to the fangroup member’s livestream and aimed his palm at a patch of floor ahead. A projection shot out, invisible to the masseuse NPC.
The one filming had pushed their way to the edge of a competitor seating area. The centre of their vision held an Earthfriend pair in strange, Asian outfits, one seated dejectedly, the other looming over them while applying a quick-dry paste to their mask.
HF’s height and build were familiar to London Tremor under the layers of costume. What wasn’t familiar was a tenderness in the repairing action, the teen fixing the crack in a slow, delicate manner, like a brother applying a bandage to a younger sibling’s scraped cheek.
The intern found this tenderness at extreme odds with his previous observations.
At the stadium, beneath the mocking façade, HF seemed to be an exacting, disciplined, loveless figure. After both victories and defeats, he bantered in accordance with the drama of fragile egos that often accompanied these outcomes. However, on closer examination, his chatter rarely lasted longer than the time necessary for his cooldowns to reset and the next duellist, the next practise dummy, to ready up for their beating. He was a machine handling objects on a conveyor belt. Tirelessly, he churned through his opponents, examining the particulars of each, snipping and sawing off the lessons they could grant him, sending them along. HF wasn’t much warmer during practice with his schoolfriends, from what London Tremor had spied. He seemed to reluctantly hang out with them as he vacillated between the roles of callous drill instructor and disinterested substitute teacher secretly doing a side-job while the class watched a documentary.
The image London Tremor had built up of HF placed him in the same class as Oliver. Both were psychopaths incapable of genuine feeling outside their expertise. The duellist in his mind had neither the time nor interest for the distraction of human relations. A modern monk, every one of his waking moments—besides the brief public demonstrations of this past week, a fraction of the preceding years of research—should have been devoted to the perfection of his craft.
London Tremor had a passing thought that maybe he’d been wrong in this cold assessment. Maybe, even these singularly-willed monsters had their off-hours in which they conducted ordinary activities like go on dates with the girlfriends who diligently hovered by their side until they took a break. Maybe, one could never arrive at the totality of another human being from the fragments observed.
Then, it occurred to him that HF’s idea of a ‘date’ seemed to be a duos tournament, allowing him to multi-task practise and romance.
Freaks...
Infected by the psychopathic freaks around him, London Tremor began to wonder if he should search previous 2v2 events that HF might’ve secretly entered.
Captivated by the arena, the intern didn’t manage to cancel the streaming feed fast enough when his eyes glowed again, Oliver checking back in.
-Oliver Spears: What the #&$* are you watching during my investigation?
London Tremor sighed in the way that HF often did, with profound resignation.
He switched from voice chat to text, Oliver dressing him down with a wall of expletives. Thankfully, the abuse was brief, his boss having to refocus as the NPC girl arrived to drop off the costumes for the show.
The Heroes versus Villains tournament.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, my arrogance is to blame. The modest receive victory, the prideful defeat…
At the base of the gore-strewn Borobudur, Henry and Rose were in the penned waiting area after finishing another round. He'd been repairing the damage taken by her mask after she’d tripped on a boot. She sat in a gesture of self-contrition like a student at their first time outside a principal’s office, her knees knocking together, her fists clenched, and her honey-hued eyes blinking at him with remorse.
Henry might've found her childish sorrow adorable if her features beneath the mask weren’t plastered in a second mask of sticky crimson that’d gushed out before the wound had healed. Both of them, like the rest of the competitors, were in a horrendous physical state. Their outfits were stained, splattered, and tattered - although, from the happy spirits of most here, you could be fooled into assuming they’d only been tussling in mud mixed from the local red clay.
Henry didn’t want to spoil the mood by mentioning a certain blue-haired trickster, so he hadn’t explained to Rose that her tripping had probably been an act of God.
-Henry Flower: Takes two to bungle; a faster reaction speed would have let me shield that. But, if anything, this is great. With the quarter-finals next, a mishap beforehand will add believability to the epic throw.
They’d agreed to lose the next round to pop and deflate the accumulating attention.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege…do we have to throw? What if we…didn't...
-Henry Flower: The Komodo forgoes a thousand killing blows while the venom saps the water buffalo’s might. Be patient. We still have a week to lay low before I steal the big prize: first place in my own recruitment tournament.
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-Zhangmei33: Right…right...
After fixing the mask, the two continued spectating the other 2v2 matches. Amongst these was a bout determining their opponents in the next round. The victors ended up being a double-Fighter duo, one costumed as Captain Goodvibes, an ancient Australian pig superhero, the other as Jesus - just Jesus. The latter contestant had gone the full blasphemous length of transmogrifying himself into the Christian saviour, and, after several close rounds, he looked rougher than the depiction in Mel Gibson’s The Passion, his white robes drenched red.
During one match, a Crusader seated in a row ahead of them turned around, gesturing at Rose’s repaired mask to indicate he'd recognised her. Henry motioned for the noob to swivel back around while sending an invite to their group chat.
-Henry Flower: ?
-Zhangmei33: ?
-Ahristian Aamos: It’s The Oracle! Can you share your gift? I would never have predicted seeing you in the 2s.
One might recognise the Crusader’s username from The Pain on The Plains evening. The second-highest-ranked duellist in the kingdom behind Justinian, he was the fellow who’d been Mutambi-Death-Grappled by Henry and fed to a Many-Toothed Lion. Tonight, the kid had placed first in the 1v1 and was now participating in the 3s. He’d also become a regular at Henry’s oversized practise stadium.
-Henry Flower: ??
-Zhangmei33: ??
-Ahristian Aamos: Well, given that you’ve banned everything but the 1s, I’d assumed you were hostile to these group formats.
At this point, the ownership of the New Suchi Arena was an open secret amongst the top players.
-Henry Flower: ???
-Zhangmei33: ???
-Ahristian Aamos: Hah! Does this mean we’ll get 2s soon? What about 3s? Come on, dude. I'm begging.
-Henry Flower: ?
Henry group-kicked the Crusader, who responded with a chuckle out loud.
"Hah!"
Rose had been angered by the Crusader acting too friendly.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, give the command and I’ll decapitate that impertinent wretch.
-Henry Flower: No. Stop solving minor annoyances with violence.
-Zhangmei33: This is no minor annoyance! These noobs wouldn’t even have their crappy 3v3s without your assistance. After your benevolent support, they should be following you around and polishing your holy footsteps!
-Henry Flower: Nah, it's fine. I've got enough annoying followers already.
Henry was disgusted.
In Rose's kiss-arse praise, she wasn’t referring to his period as The Cripple, which’d left no discernible impact, nor the stadium, but rather his work as The Tyrant.
In his guild’s reformation plans, they’d promoted the arena, constructing stadiums, sponsoring Saana League, making performance in 1v1, 2v2s, 3v3s, and 6v6s official judgement categories for The Company’s recruitment. In the past, the game’s professional scene had consisted of a couple dozen 6v6 teams. Now, every format had international stars raking in the cash. The ability of these Slum tournaments to exist on their present scale was a downstream effect of the ecosystem they’d built.
But she was partially mistaken. Aside from finances, he'd made no direct contributions to the modern state of the arena, that operation being conducted by Alex via their puppet-guild Flaming Sun. The beaver-head was an ardent lover of this hobby, having once been a trainee in the former, humbler pro-scene. Henry, despite his Cripple background, had less obvious motivations for supporting the initiative.
To him, the arena was an outlet for sating the instincts he'd seen elsewhere manifest in more perverse, soul-devouring forms. In an RPG, total peace was a pipedream, one of the drawcards of this genre being the satisfaction of the primal death drive, and so the sole choice had to be at the level of what forms violence should take. On the one hand, there were spectators and fraternal duellists, digital tourists who interpreted the meaning of dagger thrusts as simply glory and defeat. On the other were lunatics like Ramiro, Rose’s brother, Loki, and himself, madmen who imbued their dagger thrusts with higher spiritual meanings of life and death. By Henry’s calculation, the first option produced less misery, segregating the players and conditioning them to only maim themselves. Therefore, he chose the arena.
The distinction between Alex and Henry on this issue contained the underlying logic in the beaver-head's bet with Henry in his own recruitment tournament. Alex believed that the cure for his sombre mindset was to bear witness to the fruits of their reformations while hanging out with his casual schoolfriends. Henry could undergo the same reformation himself. He could sweat out the sinister memories of dagger thrusts stored in his muscles and refill himself with light-hearted fun. Framed another way, The Tyrant might return back to The Cripple he'd once been.
The beaver-head’s plan was well-intentioned but naïve. Alex—at his core, a social gamer whose schemes boiled down to playful interactions between friends and former friends—couldn’t fully comprehend Henry’s affliction. Alex heard the constant complaints, the myriad of justifications for abandoning ‘the forest farm’. He was deaf, however, to the unutterable other part that made the prospect of moving on painful, nauseating, and guilt-inducing.
Rose tugged his arm.
-Zhangmei33: Wait. If this noob could ID me from that…Cripple-gege, what if we get disqualified?
They had, after all, cheated by purchasing their entry spots.
To this question, Henry, flirting as he had been during this competition with Alex's theory, testing whether his nausea could be overcome for the sake of love, resisted his first instinct to snap back at Rose that he was utterly indifferent to being kicked from this pointless event, her question being especially stupid when they intended on losing the next round anyway. Going further still, he resisted the ironic shield of answering that an anticlimactic elimination for a fraudulent entry would add to the hilarity of The Cripple’s Return. Both easy-outs denied, he searched inside himself for the normal teenager buried beneath the mountain, for the human with the capacity to understand why one would be sincerely invested in the outcome of an amateur tournament, with the capacity to empathise with his fretting date.
It seemed that she, too, had pinned her last hopes on this duos competition at the juncture between their duellist interest, hoping for a miracle from the past. Dismayed by the absence of any noticeable improvement as the tournament's end fast approached, she wanted to buy more time by delaying longer.
-Henry Flower: Hmm...that would indeed be disappointing. But it's not in our control now. All we can do is give our best until whatever happens happens – albeit, our best while losing. Here’s a compromise: we’ll aim for the narrowest of defeats. By 1% health, 1 second before the timer runs out. Then, again, that would require quadruple the precision of winning…and last match…
As he commiserated with the girl in the juvenile language of the arena, his insides bellowed back at him with another bout of retaliatory nausea. Sweat beading in his costume remoistened the dried patches of blood on his outfit, reawakening his consciousness of their soiled presence on his arms and torso.
-Zhangmei33: I won’t misstep this time, Cripple-gege…
His nostrils puckered at the refreshed odour of organs, and his ears ached with the squishing and slapping of nearby bodies drowning in the auditory swamp of laughter and applause.
-Henry Flower: OK, I’ll trust you.
He sighed, expelling the suffocating air so he could take a rest.
But he wouldn't be given an opportunity to rest.
Rose snapped around suddenly, catching an object flying at them from the audience.
The object in her grip, a stone, had been lobbed at a harmless speed, and tied to it was a rolled-up sheet of book-sized paper. Rose, shooting to her feet, couldn’t spot the messenger before they merged with the throng. She untied the paper and handed it to Henry.
Henry, at an intuition about the identity of the sender, took care to position the note away from Rose’s view as he unfolded it.
Inside was a copy of a pencilled portrait of a man’s screaming face. The figure’s eyeballs had been gouged out, and from the blood-filled hollows were sprouting two flowers. Due to the image having been traced from actual footage, the details of the man’s tortured features were quite realistic, from the fine wrinkles contorting in hatred to the shreds of eyeball spilling out of along with the dark liquid pouring from the dagger-#*$&ed sockets. The flowers—a rose in one hollow, a chrysanthemum in the other, the crisp petals of both tainted with a black mould—these were a creative addition to the original image, as was a caption quoting Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables - 'He who does not weep, does not see.'
Henry, his usual daytime guards lowered by his efforts during this date to surmount his romantic incompatibility, was walloped with the worst bout of nausea yet.
All the hands of the mountain that begged him nightly for mercy reached towards him. They gripped his wrists and ankles, latched desperately to his knees, elbows, and throat. Stationary in his chair, he could not evade their clutches by climbing on, and the swarm of hands engulfed him. One of these hands stroking his cheek with hateful affection, its owner whispered into his ear to wake them from their endless sleep by laying himself and his pretty date upon their grave and $&#*—
Henry, blinking, recomposed himself.
Unfortunately, in the seconds he’d been zoned out, Rose had snuck a peek at the note. Now, she was a statue. Having recognised both the mutilated face and her brother’s handwriting, she was rapidly connecting the dots.
Henry sighed. Her big brother really was a *&#@…
-Henry Flower: Yep. It was him that destroyed the sect. He had the courtesy to inform me when he quit.
The pictured man with his eyes gouged out had been the foul-mouthed monk, Henry’s former teacher: Tael Heavy-Fingers, whose epithet ‘Heavy-Fingers’ arose from the shared affliction of a body too cumbersome for the mind; Tael Heavy-Fingers, who’d first attempted to create a cerebral, logical path for cripples like themselves to survive the universe’s chaos with his art, Twenty Tools, the predecessor to Henry’s A Thousand Tools; Tael Heavy-Fingers, who’d ultimately failed in his lofty ambitions and received a dog’s death.
It’d been a mystery for years who’d massacred Heavy-Fingers and the others Henry’d trained with back then. All that could be deduced was the depth of enmity from the perpetrator, who’d used the blood of the slain to write The Cripple’s plagiarised catchphrase, ‘天下無双’ or ‘Unrivalled Under The Heavens’, at the foot of the temple. The lettering hadn’t been small, and, due to the quirk of corpses in Saana evaporating, the killer had to have intentionally delayed death in order to collect sufficient quantities of painting material – a procedure akin to the execution of the Senior Director.
The unsolved case had been one of the guilts weighing upon Henry’s mind. He’d blamed himself for having so much hubris and carelessness that he’d accumulated too many enemies to identify the perpetrator.
Rose’s brother, Simon, Genocidelol or ‘Geno’, had managed to keep it a secret through the year they’d re-allied in this instalment, hiding any signs of outward hostility. He'd revealed the truth six months ago, when he'd led the defectors in splitting from The Company. To provoke Henry into war, the brother, along with leaking his real-life identity, sent him the hours-long recording he’d preserved for a memento. With the marvels of virtual recording, one could relive the whole procedure through the culprit's perspective as he visited the remote jungle-canopy temple alone. Taking a few of the youngest disciples hostage, he had the rest chain themselves with the promise they’d be freed after he’d finished ransacking the sect’s library. Once they’d been immobilised, he proceeded to place one disciple after another in a tub-sized bucket and slit their arteries, extracting the viscous paint for his forthcoming artwork. The picture Henry was holding now corresponded to an image from near the slaughter’s end, the rest of Heavy-Finger’s undrawn body beneath the head bathing in the overflowing bucket, Rose’s brother having gouged out the man’s eyes to punish him for splashing his clothes while resisting this immersion.
One might think the sect members foolish for not fighting back earlier, for immobilising themselves. But Geno had out-levelled them too much. With the perverse gap in strength that can be created between individuals in this game world, there comes a cruel point where resistance is rendered genuinely futile, and the only chance of salvation for the weaker party remains in grovelling to their superior.
Geno, prone to the same silence as his sister, hadn’t spoken much throughout the massacre except to give his orders and a cryptic response to Heavy-Fingers questioning his motives. The bigger the baby, the more bodily fluids spilled during its birth; their baby was huge – that was his demented answer. One could analyse that line in many ways, Henry being 'their baby' as both had trained him, Heavy-Fingers in duelling, Geno in war. However, upon close scrutiny, it became evident that the brother's motives weren’t high-minded. While he'd bled each of the sect’s teachers and trainees, while he'd passionately jackhammered his dagger into Heavy-Finger’s eyeballs, you could feel an unnerving sense that, emotionally, it wasn’t them undergoing the mutilation, his victims being mere avatars for the one connected to them through the excruciating bonds that develop in the hours spent together striving for the same goal. Geno was venting upon them the fury he held for Henry, the arrogant student who'd had the conceit to surpass him.
Henry, not averting his gaze now from the maimed face of the dead monk, had been contemplating the Victor Hugo quote, ‘He who does not weep, does not see.’ It conveyed several messages. At one level, Rose’s brother was taunting him for blissfully dating and duelling while feigning obliviousness to the blatant misery around him. At another, it was a reminder to Henry of one of the formative lessons taught to him during his apprenticeship under the brother – by forming enough of an emotional attachment to the soldiers to weep for them, one was motivated to see more of the battlefield, to absorb its lessons faster, to struggle harder, to sacrifice. At another still, the brother was making a crass negation of the quote, Tael’s ghastly visage showing that—anatomically-speaking—people could weep AND not see, the ability to cry being retained after the loss of the eyeballs.
Beside Henry, Rose’d been quiet in her own contemplation.
When she’d spoken to her creep of a brother the other day in their family garden, he’d declared with the utmost confidence that her prospects were hopeless. ‘Some transgressions are insurmountable, unforgivable’, he’d said. What, she was worrying, if the transgression he’d been referring to had been this? What if this, not her romantic rival, was the cause of Henry’s withdrawal, the root of the struggle he’d been trying to hide tonight as he forced himself forward again and again only to smash into an invisible wall? Was this act of her brother’s the unforgivable wall between them?
Lurching forward in a panic, she ripped the cursed drawing from his grip and began frantically tearing it.
Henry, half-dazed, studied the girl's meltdown from a point of detachment. With the crazed, instinct-deep hysteria of an arachnophobe destroying a spider they couldn't flee, she ripped away. She ripped the page into pieces so small and numerous they rained down uncontrollably from her blurring hands, ripping the dwindling remainder until one last centimetre-thick square fumbled through her fingers. Not satisfied, she glared at the shreds at her feet and began stomping them into the red dust.
The competitors around them watched with confusion.
In the crowd, a spy was gawking in plain sight, her brother ordering them to capture everything.
Henry shook his head.
-Henry Flower: I would never judge you on his account.
After all, he himself had allied with her brother while having some awareness of his sadistic, abusive side. Who was worse? The one who chose to affiliate with a fiend? Or the one who simply had this connection made for them by being born under the same roof with the same coloured eyes? Henry believed people should be judged by their own decisions.
Rose continued with her tantrum, blasting a few larger sheds with
-Zhangmei33: That’s right. Cripple-gege’s logical; Cripple-gege’s strong.
Henry sighed again, reclining back in his seat with her and trying to catch his breath.
But, again, an opportunity to rest would not be granted to him. As Heavy-Fingers had once said, the blood and the chaos were already upon him.
“Arjuna and Duryodhana versus Captain Goodvibes and Jesus of Nazareth! To the stage, brave comrades! Spears out!” An announcer summoned them for their next match.
A roar arose from the crowd who'd witnessed none of Rose's meltdown, imploring them to go up on stage. The baffled competitors awkwardly clapped along.
-Henry Flower: Should we ditch? I'll drop the pocket smoke, and we can stealth out of here.
-Zhangmei33: No, Cripple-gege. I don't want to hide. Let's go. Let's lose in style!
Henry, wishing she'd answered differently because this next match was the one that would expose his identity to the world, sighed internally.
-Henry Flower: Sure. Let's lose in style.
And so the pair, these two tainted flowers, climbed one last time up the temple’s bloody steps to meet the peculiar double-Fighter duo of Jesus and a pig.