A bustling slum street with an unused shack theatre.

Like any other streets around The Soiree in The Slums, this one was decked out with all the evening appeals: rambunctious partygoers, live music, vendors selling any type of snack one might be craving. The keen-eyed, however, might notice a couple anomalies in this particular street, certain figures strolling in a circuit, a pair of drunkards lying in the road who kicked too soberly at a thief trying to peel off their shoes.

Inside a restaurant along this street, in a booth curtained off for privacy, Oliver Spears, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049, sat alone. Spread before him were several untouched dishes of wildebeest sirloin, a bowl of fried scorpion stingers, and gator-fat-fried yams. Beneath the mask of his costume, he was scowling.

-Oliver Spears: No, no, no, Clever Trevor, put it back on, you spineless cunt. Let’s watch this tournament together. In fact, why don’t we have Garry order two dozen extra kebabs, we’ll cancel my pointless distraction, and we’ll all gather with you for this unmissable show while giving each other a round of sloppy, brotherly handjobs? One moment, lad. We’ll have to tally how many of the staff will be wanting to join us. I’m not sure if the usual amount of lubricant I carry around for my personal pleasure of being fucked in the arse by interns who don’t know their place will suffice. Then again, maybe these litres of spit you’ve showered in my face will...

He would have loved to berate the intern further, but another team member had notified him that Ramiro’s soon-to-be victim had drawn near. Telling Clever Trevor to get his head out of the clouds, not telling him yet that he was fired in order to keep the intern's back entrance shot from the bathhouse, Oliver resumed his management of the operation.

His frustrations were soon forgotten in his work. Manoeuvring his team and rapidly switching between them like a broadcast director through cameras, Oliver captured a couple of excellent images of the NPC girl and her cargo-laden donkey making their final turns through The Slums. Some stealth was required, the girl exhibiting the caution of any Slumdweller transporting goods. But Oliver had outfinessed the elusive Tyrant to film him with his trousers around his ankles and his Wong on display; stalking a prey on this current level was too easy - beneath his skills, really.

As the girl arrived at the theatre, Oliver jumped into the perspective of a subordinate slumped in fake drunkenness in front of a shop a few building downs from her. He had a momentary picture of the restaurant across the street in which he himself was sitting right now, then the team member shielded their gaze with a book and used the body of a partner beside them to obstruct line-of-sight from the theatre to their listening ear, which began to glow buttercup-yellow.

At Oliver’s command, the subordinate Boost-augmented their hearing. As if tuning an analogue radio, they searched through the 3-D space of the surrounding music and festival noise. Locating the point at the entrance to the theatre, they amplified the girl’s hand rapping on wood, the nervous breathing of the donkey, the thud of approaching footsteps inside, the creaking open of the door.

“Mister!” greeted the girl.

“First to arrive, Master Seamstress,” answered a male voice. “The cast will be rolling in soon...I hope.”

“Will they be long? I could make the size adjustments myself, if...”

“That's unnecessary. We have crew with the skills for minor alterations.”

-Oliver Spears: Fascinating. He gives the victim an opportunity to escape, thereby relieving his guilt with the excuse that they brought their doom upon themselves. The Hog has a fragment of a heart. What a kind pervert.

“It’d be no hassle, mister," replied the girl. "No charge. Thanks to you, the rest of my evening’s free!”

“Children’s evenings should be free - as they sleep.”

“Nonsense! Young enough to eat; young enough to work, and, as they also say, night or day, our cloudless sky provides enough light to labour at any hour.”

The team member whose ears Oliver was using messaged him in astonishment.

-Walt Whitwoman: That voice…Ramiro?

-Oliver Spears: Who else could our porker have been? My sword of truth’s too sharp to waste felling any but the top swine.

That’s right. In a mere week, Oliver Spears had cracked the biggest case this degenerate slum had ever seen, taking down the king at the top.

The royal execution would be swift. The investigation was practically complete, Oliver having collated tear-jerking biographies of each of the five orphan hands, written up a series of damning reports on Ramiro’s gluttonous habits, edited together all the footage except for what they were about to get into a 50-minute special, and even begun drafting follow-up articles hypothesising the links from this one cannibalistic pervert to The Tyrant. Once they collected this last incriminating morsel, Oliver’s story would be served hot and ready on the public table, faster than The Saviour could log off and wind a noose around his fat, hog-tied neck.

-geitzeist: Mask on.

Oliver received that notification from a team member strolling down the street. Their task had been to snap a shot of Ramiro if he’d dared to welcome the NPC girl with his chubby face, Oliver sensing that the pervert had escalated, in the latter phase of his cannibal career, to revealing his identity to the children before their murder – adding titillation through risk, a helping of spice to perk up the meal. It seemed, however, that El Salvador was acting more cautious tonight. Fine. Given the practical difficulties of eating while wearing one, the mask would have to come off eventually.

-Walt Whitwoman: The Saviour of The Slums roleplays as a serial killer…Jesus...

-Oliver Spears: Keep it to yourself for now, lass. If it leaks, you lose your job, too.

“OK...bring in the donkey,” said the male voice, pretending to acquiesce to the girl's insistence at helping further. “I won't be offended. It's more hygienic than the drunks around here.”

“Hah! In we go, Barna. Stop it. Come on!”

The donkey, its nose more sensitive to the strange odours inside the theatre, bucked and whined as the girl dragged it in.

The Heroes and Villains tournament, the 2v2 quarterfinals.

The crowd were cheering at the Earthfriend duo who’d been dazzling them this evening as the pair climbed up the steps to the arena stage. New fans excitedly awaited the next surgical manoeuvre by which the duo's latest foe would be assassinated; gamblers hurled encouragements or insults depending on their side of the wager. A cameraman was climbing up backwards in front of the duo, pestering them with unanswered questions until, tripping on a severed arm, he tumbled back down to the bottom of the temple. The two didn’t pause to let him catch up, continuing their ceaseless climb towards their planned defeat.

-Henry Flower: Don’t fret. I’ll tell you the Charge-configuration before the final skirmish. Probably enough Floras for a shield plus either two or three .

Henry’d outlined the plan for a 1% loss 1 second before the match-timer ran out, the finale being him getting stabbed while gorilla-wrestling the two opponents as Rose healed him. Such a precise margin of defeat would be impossible in ordinary circumstances, but Henry was extraordinary: the greatest duellist of all time.

-Zhangmei33: But I want to take the last blow…

-Henry Flower: Nope. A gentleman doesn’t let his date eat a sword on his behalf.

Although Henry insisted on acting otherwise, on resisting until the agreed-upon duration of their date expired, it was clear to both of them that whatever seeds of romance might've been floating in the air wouldn't land soon enough after the disruption from the brother’s grotesque note.

Henry was barely paying attention to Rose, his mind lost in thoughts about the slaughtered sect, Rose’s hysterical outburst, and, oddly, his supreme martial art, A Thousand Tools.

Preparations for the next match, in which he would have to once again utilise the skills cultivated during training for this art, along with the portrait of Heavy-Finger’s mutilated visage, had both reminded Henry of the tail-end of his conversation with Rose's brother yesterday morning before his flight to Australia. After he'd confirmed her therapy stuff to be a scam, he'd severed the call mid-sentence when the creep had begun to segue into commenting on A Thousand Tools. Even if little had been said, the entirety of the guy's opinion could be extracted from his condescending tone: what Henry was doing in Suchi with this martial arts stuff was fixing Twenty Tools in a pathetic apology to Heavy-Fingers, a redemption for the sect’s slaughter.

Admittedly, him inventing a ‘supreme’ martial art had been a bizarre decision. Given his morbid seriousness, the scheme made no rational sense without an extra underlying motive at the strength of what Rose’s brother had assumed.

For the Henry of today, after the decades in The Overdream, there was some accuracy in this narrative of apology and redemption.

The decades of researching and formulating A Thousand Tools had strengthened the bond in him with Twenty Tools and Heavy-Fingers. His understanding of the old monk had grown in many respects. In sparing himself years to learn the handling of each tool, he’d come to appreciate the rich, unique beauty contained within all of them, the will, the genius, the history, the love. Through the ordeals and adventures in training for each art, he’d expanded his awareness of the world. That was, both the world outside of him, which he’d been exposed to at greater depth, variety, and colour, and the world inside of him, whose physical limits he’d bumped against repeatedly, broken down, and expanded. He recognised how a tradition one invested decades of effort into could become a sort of child or a grandchild, and he’d felt the geriatric sublimity of nurturing it with the intention of one day passing it on for others to improve still. Consequently, it was true that he had derived much joy and satisfaction in the view of his art as a continuation of the monk’s.

However, none of that functioned as an apology. In fact, Henry wasn't sure if one could apologise to a ghost. If there was a method of forgiveness for the trespass of death, it certainly wasn't to be found in a post-hoc, sentimental reuptaking of the torch. That was pure delusion. One would be atoning not to the person but a facile phantom of them lingering in the memory. To ever expect forgiveness from dead people was deeply insulting. He believed that, if others were going to be martyred on your behalf, the least you should return to them was the courtesy of not using cerebral tricks like 'utility', ‘sacrifice’, ‘destiny’, or 'mission' to white-wash over the ugly truth of bitterness, pain, reluctance, hatred, loneliness, and terror experienced at the end. Man owed his unhappy ghosts the right to haunt him.

And, of course, at a more obvious, less crazy level, this sentimental importance for him of Twenty Tools had arisen after acquiring The Cap, after his decision to create the martial art. Perhaps the desire of reviving Heavy-Finger’s efforts had existed in a weaker form at the outset, but if it had, it’d been invisible to Henry himself in the cloudy pool of motivations. A Thousand Tools was a funny joke on Alex, their bet being won in hilarity by a martial art from out of nowhere. A Thousand Tools was a better send-off for The Cripple, who’d returned to slap the anti-fans one last time with a proof of concept for his unappreciated 1v1 innovations. A Thousand Tools was a cure for his boredom, the manifestation of his Post-Maximalist tendencies to over-intellectualise his hobbies. A Thousand Tools, its arts sampled from across the globe, was a means to cover the trail he’d left during his mad, sleep-deprived search for The Cap that’d returned his lost ability to dream. Henry could equally assess his creation of the style through any of these narratives, each telling a slightly different but nevertheless true account of his own life, pronouncing at different volumes the qualities and values mixed around inside of him...

Henry, contemplating these dull matters of himself while climbing the steps of this imitation Borobudur, was struck by a powerful sense of irony. In a strange synchronicity with his recent self-examination, the layout of the original temple and this replica on which he was about to fight adhered to the design of a mandala, the object his forest farm had been based on, a highly-detailed geometric shape representing various ideas in eastern religions from a map of the cosmos to a symbol of universal order. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung had posited that mandalas could be innate to the psyche of man. He'd believed the desire to create these artworks arose spontaneously during periods of stress and transformation as a semi-conscious method for re-evaluating, re-arranging, and re-integrating one’s disorganised inner contents into a new, stable totality. Whether or not that theory had merit, Henry seemed to have acted accordingly by building the mandala of his forest farm. This exercise in detachment had given him the space to assess and clarify his feelings about A Thousand Tools and other parts of himself, to recompose himself for the challenges ahead.

The fact this arena stage was a fake version of the Borobudur, the fact its steps were strewn with tacky statues of ‘Queen’ Suhita and gore, both those brought up thoughts of other ironies in passing.

At the top of the temple, an officiator had been waiting for them, along with cameramen and a couple rich players who’d paid for front row seats around the stage’s perimeter. Unseen through the obstacles of the arena were their opponents on the adjacent side.

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

Henry, before this final match, turned for a moment to inspect the crowd that’d been shouting encouragements at their back throughout this competition. Below him in the semi-dark of night stretched the roaring sea of spectators, clumps of their packed mass illuminated by the glow of giant screens broadcasting the bouts in their midst. From his present height, even if they hadn’t been masked, their faces would have been unreadable, the features a blur. The whole audience formed an amorphous mass of coloured ovals and flesh-toned limbs. The way the Villagers all stood facing in the same direction impressed upon him the uniformity of purpose and identity they’d acquired while living in this slum, a comradery that he couldn’t himself tap into – or perhaps, more honestly, that he was unwilling to.

In response to his glance, many fledgeling fans in the crowd cheered. Their volume had grown successively louder and more enthusiastic over the course of the tournament, each victory recruiting additional converts to Henry and Rose's side. In the arena, the mob was both fickle yet generous in its love.

Henry, in the manner of a duellist before his people, lifted an arm in salute to whoever'd gifted him their support tonight. After a short delay, as if an invisible string tethered their limbs, a few in the crowd copied the action and raised their arms back.

Henry, chasing a whim, exhaling a pained breath, curled his salute into a fist. Not only did those already imitating him change in turn, but hundreds, seeming to recognise the game of mimesis, joined in, the tether between him and them multiplying.

Rotating his fist, he raised a middle finger. At a roar of laughter, the spectators mirrored the rude gesture back.

To his rear, Rose was admiring the scene of Henry in disguise toying with the crowd after his long hiatus.

To her, despite her own madness, his posture was by no means flawless; his muscles contained an obvious haggardness, the scarred tissue weighed down by the heavy blood of a heavy heart. Coexisting with this, however, was an irrefutable strength. Like a zombie getting back to his feet after a thousandth strike, he possessed an extra, magical force that seemed to keep his body animated when it should by all accounts have collapsed.

This right here was how The Cripple met his enemies, debilitated but unflinching, maimed but invincible in the knowledge that his victory was ultimately assured.

She borrowed some of his resolve.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, do you know what like I most about you?

Henry, although hearing the message clearly, didn't answer, freezing for a moment, breaking.

With his guards never rebuilt after the lack of opportunity to regather his wits, the affectionate tone of her question and the adoration of the crowd imitating him were joining together for a dual assault against his exposed core, both amplifying the nausea he’d been contending with throughout this tournament and the rest of the date. The feeling was rising like a bout of thick vomit out of his stomach and choking up his throat. Afflicted by the burning discomfort invading his mouth, he could give no authentic response to Rose that would be anything but inhuman.

He was trying his best, but the incompatibility between them was too much...

Yesterday, during his heart-to-heart with the patrician beauty, he’d articulated his problems in terms of being age-worn. He was an adult returning to kindergarten without the ability to relate to the infantile concerns of his peers, a teenager with a bastard son. He’d been alienated by time and circumstance. But this explanation had been a partial deception, a euphemistic reframing of his feelings to make them more passive and abstract than they truly were.

Truly, what he felt for everyone here—for the crowd, for the competitors, for his school 'friends' out there somewhere, for his date beside him—was something more akin to horror, hatred, or disgust.

Especially disgust. Being around these people made him sick.

Rationally, Henry couldn’t fault these players for their mindset. The universe, for both themselves and the natives of Saana, was much less miserable being occupied by these festivalgoers, these spectators, these thrusters of daggers for fun and glory. Nevertheless, the uncomfortable reality remained that, in his own heart, he was not one of them and therefore they disgusted him. After what he'd experienced, there could be nothing admirable in the act of stabbing someone, only immense shame and sadness. Long ago, as ‘The Cripple’, he may have perceived the world in lighter shades seen by these blissful drones, but his eyes over these past years had adjusted to noticing the unsettling shapes around them in the dark.

The mass of youths being guided now by his movements through the invisible tether numbered in the thousands, a figure well beyond how many significant relationships the average person formed in the sum of their brief lives. It was a big number. Yet this mass here wouldn't constitute 1% of some of the armies he'd controlled with much higher precision, at much higher stakes. As a comparative fraction, it became tinier still when contrasted against the number of soldiers who'd died under and against him throughout the span of his career as a commander. In single manoeuvres, he’d killed more soldiers than the entire audience gathered for this event - a huge, breathing, dreaming clump of humanity massacred in less time than any one of the matches they were cheering for.

And the battlefield casualties were dwarfed by the losses off of the battlefield, the horizon-surpassing ocean of bodies generated by his punitive laws, his mishandled famines, his uncured plagues, his unsettled factional in-fighting. Tens of millions.

To Henry's eyes, death was visible everywhere. In its ghoulish presence, behaving as carelessly as these kids were now, getting hammered at a festival with friends, going on teenage dates, competing in these sanitised displays of violence, what feeling could any of this invoke but horror and disgust?

That disgust might offer yet another explanation for the creation of A Thousand Tools, another story about himself. Duelling, this hobby over which he’d once reigned supreme, had not been spared the contamination of the passing years. Throughout this week in Suchi training for his little recruitment tournament, a quiet unease and guilt had been gnawing at him for his mocking re-enactment of killing. Dampening this feeling may have been the purpose of reviving Heavy-Finger’s art, of reviving the corpse of The Cripple—who was, to be clear, dead—for one last saga. To anyone else, the demands of this project may have appeared absurd, the centuries of intensive research and impossible training. But to Henry, who was accustomed to the sacrifice of lifetimes, it was easier than the 'simpler', more direct approach of participating in this community of earnest duellists alongside his childhood pals. The mask of this former self obsessed too much with the dry technicalities of single combat to envision the larger context in which fighting was embedded...this satirical try-hard with his love-hate relationship to the 1v1 community through which the Henry of today could conveniently act like them while despising them...The Cripple was a thin protective layer on his skin against his disgust. He could don The Cripple’s dead flesh like a dog-owner wrapping their hand in a pet waste bag. Just as the coverage of the latter enabled one to tolerate the warm, squishy sensation of picking up the animal's fresh #&$*, so too was he enabled to tolerate the warm, squishy sensation of immersing a dagger into a person’s hot organs. To endeavour in the ring without the ironic charade, to participate alongside these dull-gazed duellists in thrusting for fun and friendship, this was to touch the thing barehanded while giggling with the disgusting naivety of a child.

It was disgusting. Everyone here was disgusting, especially himself.

A shack theatre, cheers from a distant crowd carrying over on the night’s wind.

“On second thought," said the male voice inside, "this mantis outfit, you can take it back. You won’t need to repay me.”

“Hehe,” the girl giggled in embarrassment. “Well, it wasn’t one of my finest creations…”

At the back entrance, Oliver, through a Channel 5 Cutthroat who’d stuck up to the door, was eavesdropping on the conversation between the pig and his wee truffle. Without any Boost-amplification, the pair’s voices snaked out through gaps left in the theatre’s shoddily-constructed planking. Oliver, listening so intensely that he could envision the two inside, could hear the critical moment crawling forward, could taste it on his tongue.

“No,” countered the male voice, “the craftsmanship’s not the problem.”

“What is it then, your grace?”

The conversation came to a stop, the girl having accidentally let slip that she’d recognised the real identity of this humble ‘theatre director’, for which reason she’d agreed to follow him alone.

A match was struck.

The end of a cigarillo sizzled in the flame.

“Oustanding.” Ramiro laughed. “Such a smart girl. If only you’d been smart enough to stay away from crime.”

“Pardon me, your grace?”

“A license to sell goods at The Soiree, you didn’t have one." He exhaled. "I checked.”

“Your grace, no one…”

“You should have bought a license.”

Oliver, in his booth, mirrored the resigned yet smug smile of the lips he’d heard uttering that last sentence.

One curiosity in the found footage of ‘The Hog’ is that he seemed to have been spotted immediately after several murders without the game’s incriminating floating red name. How was this possible? The assignment of a criminal status wasn’t based on any universal system of justice in Saana but upon the laws set by the Peopleworkers governing an area, who used their Class’s powers to establish both the rules in their domain and whom they should apply to. A child killer who happened to be the ruler would have no barrier sanctifying their disgraceful habit, especially in a place where everyone was guilty of some crime.

Ramiro sighed. "For the charges of operating a business without a license, I, Ramiro, Sovereign of The Kingdom of South America, under the full endorsement of The Empire of The People, hereby sentence you to death.”

As that beautiful decree rang clear in Oliver’s ear, this scumbag outing himself without any ambiguity, the journalist catching him began to stir with a similar spike of adrenal ecstasy to that no doubt coursing through the saviour.

-Oliver Spears: Louder.

-alfiedavis: On it.

He had his listening subordinate amplify the volume of the scuffle.

The girl’s screaming was already muffled by a hand wrapped around her mouth, Ramiro grabbing her at the outset of his sentence. A scampering of donkey hooves across the dusty floor was cut short by a crunch as its skull caved in from a blow; with a thud, the dead beast hit the ground. The muffled screams hanging over the slain animal’s instantaneous demise were joined by a scuttling like from rats in the roof of an old house – the nails of the girl’s pretty hands that’d sewn the costumes scratching in futility at her captor.

-alfiedavis: What a fucking creep. Ollie, how long till we bust in?

-Oliver Spears: Not yet, not yet. I want to catch our piggie at his messiest, and he won’t start rolling in the mud until afterwards.

-alfiedavis: Afterwards…wait…

-Oliver Spears: Shh, lad. It’s only an NPC.

Indeed, most tragically, Oliver knew that if they barged in now, Ramiro’s actions would be as meaningless as the killing of an NPC. No matter how strong a case might be described with words, his audience would never apprehend the delicious abhorrence beyond that point. They would dismiss The Saviour as a mere nutjob or an idiot who’d risked his throne for the creepy NPC-killing hobby from before his success. That’s why it was essential for them, as journalists, as conveyors of the truth, to preserve not just the killing of the girl but the nature of her killing. The full, perverse extent of her and the other children's murders would not assume a tangible until afterwards. It could be captured only in the divine moment when Ramiro went beyond the limits of common reason, when he removed his grotesque pig costume to show the more monstrous aspect beneath, when the false saviour would use his lips to cast a prayer of reverse transubstantiation upon the digital body and blood of this NPC and transform her into the corporeal bread and wine made from the little girl that’d scratched and screamed before he ate her.

Tragically, she had to die. But her spirit could rest easy. Oliver Spears, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049, would do her story justice.

The sounds of struggle ceased, Ramiro knocking the young tailor out with a paralysis potion, keeping her alive until her body could be magically converted to not evaporate when he did kill her. A splash followed as he dumped her slack form into a cauldron of embalming chemicals.

The Heroes and Villains tournament.

With death firmly in his eye, Henry stood frozen at the top of the temple, flaunting a middle finger to the disgusting crowd imitating his disgusting self.

He understood, logically, that holding such a misanthropic sentiment for these spectators on account of this virtual world was both crazy and pointless after his retirement, and he had no expectation for others to adopt his insanity.

Still, the disgust clung to his heart.

He was disgusted by these Villagers partying at festivals while people were murdered around them. He was disgusted at himself for choosing to employ his resources to promote the spread of this disgusting ignorance through the arena.

He was disgusted at himself doubly for now, in search of peace and love, entertaining Alex’s disgusting suggestion of using the arena upon himself to become like this disgusting lot. He was disgusted at the corpses being sweated out of him and replaced with these duellists. He was disgusted by the self-lobotomy that that would allow him to not merely adorn The Cripple’s rotting flesh but to stitch it to his skin until no apparent distinction remained between him and his undead past when he’d also been a member of this disgusting mass.

He was disgusted at his yearning to inflict upon himself the same eye-gouging as Heavy Fingers’ so that he could retake his place in the blind horde who neither saw nor wept at the disgusting horrors in his disgusted gaze.

Swallowing his disgust back into his stomach, Henry unfroze himself.

Resisting his disgust, he switched his hateful middle finger thrust at the crowd, transforming his blood-soaked fist into a friendly wave of greeting. The tether had grown stronger, and even more of the blind spectators waved back.

Vertigo seized him, as if he were trapped in a plane nosediving toward the mass, about to crash and splatter them all, the collision merging their crushed organs into one disgusting, inseparable pile of meat. Still, ignoring the disgust commanding him to pull back, he urged his arm to continue waving, to dive onwards, to be obliterated and scattered back into the happy collective.

An unrecognised duellist from yesteryear on the kind of quirky dates teenagers have in 2050, Henry re-read Rose’s ignored message asking him to guess what she liked about him.

-Henry Flower: No idea...bank balance?

-Zhangmei33: Pfft. No! Cripple-gege, what I like most about you is your strength.

-Henry Flower: Hmm…my deadlift is actually statistically average. I train mostly cardio.

Rose blinked with disbelief, unable to tell if he was pulling her leg.

-Zhangmei33: Not that strength. I meant the one inside. Regardless of the enemy, regardless of the number of defeats, Cripple-gege always returns eventually to take the final win. You might have added it yourself as a joke, but I think the invincible part of your nickname has always been deserved. Really. Unrivalled under the heavens; invincible beneath the sun!

-Henry Flower: The Invincible Cripple…yep, that’s me.

Replying so, Henry winced through the pain, guilt, horror, disgust.

But no. What she confused for strength was weakness, the extra vulnerability he had that’d made each defeat infinitely more painful, the desperation of a cornered rodent forced by the fight for survival to draw from every mad reserve available in its tiny, mortal form. Invincibility…the sole reason he’d been able to endure this far had been because he was one of the few here still beholden to the all-motivating terror of death.

Throughout his silly game of copycat with the crowd, he’d had a mild hallucination pulsing in and out of his vision, a sense that hidden amongst the masked spectators could be the foul-mouthed monk and some of his other companions who'd been banished to the mountain by Henry’s negligence. As he waved at the crowd, their ghosts among them waved back, too, distinguishing themselves by a subtle difference in their waving from the greeting he was giving and being returned by most.

It took a while for him to identify what exactly was different about the waving dead. What he would have expected and deserved from them was hostility, a wave of insult or a wave of promise signalling that, even if he refused to see them anymore, they would always see him back.

But their response had been even more heart-breakingly disgusting; they were waving farewell.

Henry, tears of disgust streaming unseen behind the mask of his own costume, waved on to them. He waved and waved to the point of absurdity, waving until his spectres had vanished and it was him alone with his date and the jubilant crowd counting down to the next exciting match.

“…5!”

“…4!”

“STOP, MATE! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!”

The count-down was interrupted when, in a comical twist, the opposing duo of Jesus and the pig superhero began wrestling and stabbing each other.