The Heroes and Villains Tournament, a strange scene unfolding at the summit of the bloody temple.
After an awkward chase of Jesus fleeing from his pig companion who'd been seized by a momentary bloodthirst, the two friends fell into a tangle on the temple’s highest platform. Wrestling away, friend smashed friend's skull into the ground, friend leveraged and broke friend's bones, friend rent friend's flesh with the stroke of the dagger. Whatever human comradery had existed between them was extinguished as these two men reduced each other to grunting, bleeding apes. The audience meanwhile cheered on their self-debasement, all consideration for the ongoing competition forgotten in the delirious extravaganza of fraternal violence.
Henry and Rose stood at the starting positions they’d assumed for the match, dumbfounded. Their careful plans to lose in style had been ruined by the enemy team killing themselves.
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege...I promise I didn’t bribe them to throw…maybe fate is intent on us progressing to the next round…
-Henry Flower: This isn't fate. Fate’s sense of humour isn’t quite this bizarre.
Henry wasn’t blind to the omens.
Although he’d spent this date doing his best to concentrate on the matters between him and Rose, he hadn’t missed Karnon’s background presence. He'd noticed The God organising all the chance encounters with enemy spies, making Rose trip and expose herself, and so on. Every event, image, word, and thought carried the foul foretaste of another ‘prank’, a series of mischievous contrivances. Henry'd hoped he might complete this evening on a quiet, private note of loss, a teen, having done his best, losing and being allowed to grieve his loss. The God behind him, however, rejected such a boring closure. In response to his silly attempt to deny the finale, the finale would be brought to him, the spotlight and the bombasticity.
The scuffle between their opponents was the culmination, the zany introduction of tonight’s mystery guest whose startling appearance would sprinkle a dash of soul-expanding spice over their sad show.
Henry resealed the heart he'd left exposed this evening.
Uh-oh! You have recently engaged in combat. If you log out within the next 14 minutes and 59 seconds, your avatar will remain in place. Penalties for dying continue to apply.
He groaned, a self-healing wound ejecting an arrow from his shoulder. A nuisance archer in the crowd had arced a shot into him.
Escaping this encounter would take more effort than that...
The wrestling opponents finished each other off, Jesus ramming his dagger through the pig’s temple, the pig using his own weapon to disembowel Jesus. In a pool of blood and organs, they gave each other a few last slaps, before falling into a motionless embrace like two lovers passing out from exhaustion.
As death laid its black palm over their eyes, their bodies disappeared in a shadow that descended on the entire tournament venue. All the Lightstone fixtures used to illuminate the stage and its surroundings fizzled out at once. The competitors and the audience were immersed into a semi-darkness, lit only by the rays of the two moons in the stars above and the tacky neon-statues of Queen Suhita, which, along with the screens in the crowd continuing to broadcast, had been exempted from the snuffing out.
Sinister music followed. A staccato string-section melody entered, along with a bassline gliding between the sharp, cut-up notes - the opening of a song amplified over from a neighbouring concert. In the second bar repeating the first, the voice of a solitary guitar crept its way through the strings and bass, sneaking out from between them like a prowler emerging from The Slum’s dark alleyways; seasoned in this craft, the prowler was hostile, armed, and ready as always to kill or be killed.
With a flash and crash, a fork of lightning ripped across the sky above, hammering the gong of the heavens and bellowing the announcement of the royal entrance.
The two Fighters disintegrated. The patch at the top of the temple on which they’d been rolling cracked opened. From out of the crevasse, a golden light shone forth, growing more intense as, rising through the cloud of the duo’s soul-motes, rising into the ominous music, a glowing figure slowly emerged.
The top of his head was encircled by Jesus’s severed intestines that’d fallen into the crack and formed a sort of crown of guts. A pig-like ogre mask disguised his face, its eyeballs beady and black, its nostrils elongated, and its multiple chins drooping. The man seemed to be a blasphemous fusion of the pig and the saviour who’d died to summon him. His chest was soaked red, soaked with the lifeblood of a beheaded girl’s body being carried in one arm, the corpse missing its hands along with a foot. The girl's detached head dangled by the hair from one of his bloody fists.
The crowd cheered and oohed. A scattered applause arose for The Empire outdoing themselves with this surprise event. So many inexplicable technical feats. How had they knocked out the lights? With what magic had they summoned the thunder? Who was the expert craftsman that'd sculpted so realistic a corpse prop? Amazing. Simply amazing!
“What’s this?” the match announcer’s voice boomed through the venue. “I’ve been notified that Captain Goodvibes and Jesus of Nazareth want to make a last-second substitution, tagging out for their pal, The Hog. Unconventional? Perhaps. Against the tournament rules? Certainly. But what rule is mightier than the rule of the people? Comrades...will we allow it?”
A unanimous cheer responded, and democracy won.
The masked figure holding the dead girl's pieces surveyed the sea of clapping spectators. It took him a while to get his bearings, the transition far too abrupt from what he’d been doing in private to this stage in front of thousands.
Despite the welcome fit for a king, none of these people—his people—seemed to have recognised him yet. He supposed, however, that it was merely a matter of time. The journalists that’d barged in appeared to have uncovered his…habits. That part had been real.
Not only had he been deposed today, but his reputation would also be ruined with a public outing.
What an over-the-top send-off…
On a lower platform of the arena stage, he caught a costumed contestant staring back at him in a different manner from everyone else. Their gaze was impassive yet judgemental, calculative yet emotional, controlled yet hostile.
These conflicted eyes were familiar to him. They were the eyes of a twenty-first-century man trapped in a two-fold existence, the eyes of one who denounced the metamorphosis after having undergone it further than any of them.
The Saviour flashed a smile at The Tyrant, his teeth visible through the elongated nostrils of the ogre mask, and he laughed at the absurdity of this meeting.
Through the bout of laughter, Henry and Ramiro didn’t break their stares. Most of the spectators were misled by the context of this masked festival, the gaudy taffy-pink and neon makeover of the arena stage, the spectacle of the competition, and the fact of being inside a virtual game-world. But the shared gaze between the two of them communicated the mutual understanding of what’d transpired.
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Henry, sizing up the laughing king, recognised the death in the man’s body, in the tension and gravity that settles upon oneself after killing. He recognised the death in the girl’s body, whose components, which defied Saana’s usual sanitisation procedures by continuing to exist, had been dismembered with a superfluity of meaning, the hacksaw having operated upon her with too much attention, too much delicacy. Her skin was discoloured green, an oddity that many spectators mistook for a failure to replicate the authentic hue of flesh, but which Henry recognised from the preserved corpses he’d quietly destroyed after wiping out that cannibal cult. And Henry, through that last recognition, recognised the telltale distribution the girl's blood had made on her murderer, stickying up his greedy fingers, splashing a buffet bib down his shirt collar, and staining his laughing chin and teeth.
-Zhangmei33: Xun?
-Henry Flower: Mhm.
And while his date recognised a part of it, this body of an NPC preserved by a demonic videogame ritual, Henry recognised a chatty and proud girl who three hours earlier had sold them a couple’s costume of an angler and a fish, one of the many minor figures one encounters in an evening but doesn't notice.
He could look away all he wanted, he could pretend to recognise none of it, but his feigned ignorance would not cleanse those around him of the mark of death.
-Zhangmei33: Do you know who this freak is?
-Henry Flower: That’s The Saviour of The Slums. He kills children, I guess.
Without The Cap, Henry couldn’t have yet identified this specific ‘Hog’ persona of Ramiro’s. Nevertheless, contextually, a finite list of mystery guests might’ve been invited to disrupt this date, and the previous duo of Jesus and the pig had Ramiro’s Fighter Martial Class along with the saviour connection. Moreover, this guy seemed to have been interrupted while eating this girl. Henry had suspected The Empire’s leader of that perversion - on top of the general sadism, he’d been clued in by a subtle terror from the orphans when he’d impersonated The Saviour on his first day in Suchi and, later, from the hit being put out on The Primordial Path that he himself had fulfilled on the donkey's behalf.
That Ramiro would be a cannibal was a bit perplexing. Unlike media portrayals like Hannibal Lecter, the typical cannibal in modern times wasn’t an amoral genius but someone with severe schizophrenia or a profound intellectual disability, a nutjob who might equally consume their own faeces. These types weren't normally cognitively equipped for running an organisation of The Empire’s complexity.
If one had much longer to investigate, the origins of his pastime would be found hidden in that modern-times caveat. The Saviour was a history nerd - The Empire drew its aesthetic from 20th century Latin American revolutionary socialism, and its leaders had all chosen the names of past royalty, Ramiro taking his own from ‘Ramiro of Asturias’, a Spanish royal from the Reconquista. Another of his topics of interest happened to be Native American tribes, some of whom had cultural practices of cannibalism. The virtual world of Saana must've been an opportunity for hands-on research; like a palaeontologist who studies Neanderthals through the exercise of recreating a flint into a hand-axe, Ramiro had mimicked the ancient tribal procedures of killing and corpse-eating. With enough repetitions, he would have discovered the uncomfortable truth: the current social taboos dissuading both murder and cannibalism were very flexible, and, with the right shift in mindset, these sins could be not only tolerated but enthusiastically enjoyed. The range of human possibility was wide. One’s disgust and guilt for these actions might be partly innate, but they were also partly a learned choice, the underlying sensation redirectable into other channels of emotional interpretation. Through a transformation of the cultural context, the guilty murderer could become the valiant warrior, the disgusted cannibal the victorious chieftain absorbing his defeated enemy’s mana. Some historic people had even eaten their loved ones out of respect.
There were obviously other issues with the freak, but Henry had a limit to his interest in the whys of murder.
His own learned choice was to judge all of these as disgusting. In Saana, you could be stabbed to death because of a tangentially-related vendetta, because weak-willed bitches wanted outlets for their childhood trauma, or because of an intellectual curiosity. Life here often received an insult beyond being cheap; it was made comically trivial.
One might say this trivialisation of suffering formed the greatest offence of them all, but, no, the stabbing itself was always supraordinate to these facile narratives explaining the stabbing.
-Zhangmei33: …OK. But why’s he here?
-Henry Flower: The Company took over The Empire today. Sacked him. A certain Trickster God, not content with such a soul-shrinking termination, must have organised a more dramatic alternative.
-Zhangmei33: OH! Is Karnon why I tripped? Did he throw the boot in my way? Prick!
-Henry Flower: Maybe. Anyway, what’s next in this date? An activity that’d clean this mess off would be lovely. I own a couple bathhouses in Central City.
-Zhangmei33: Aren’t we going to beat this creep up?
-Henry Flower: You wouldn’t be beating anyone – that golden glow is
-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, look, he’s trying to contact you.
Ramiro was twisting his wrist with its Spatial Bracelet back and forth as if he were emphasising an e-assistant. The gesture caused the girl’s head dangling from the same arm to swing back and forth, the extra momentum expelling some of the blood yet to drain from her cranial veins.
“Mak hang belen!” Henry turned and snapped in Malay at a Duke among the VIPs lining the stage.
Disguising himself through a foreign language, he argued away, pointing out the unfairness of this substitute being a Tier-3 Fighter based on the metallic flecks in his hand. Two Tier-0s could not win this match-up. They would get one shot. This competition was rigged. The Duke—clueless about this event—shrugged away helplessly.
Somewhere, a Trickster God cut the dramatic music and turned the lights back on, enhancing the abrupt ruining of the ominous mood.
While the crowd tuned into this debate, Henry simultaneously made contact with the child-eater.
-Ramiro: Bob from San Francisco…Master Brady…Dr Iskander…The Oracle…The Cripple…if we peel away all these false masks, what would be the face beneath? A teenager’s or a tyrant’s?
-Henry Flower: Karnon clue you into that?
-Ramiro: No…well, not that I’m aware of. The official story was hardly persuasive. Alex Wong shows none of the burden of us saviour figures. You, I saw the way you killed a wagon-driver. Very Tyrant-esque. Did you know about me?
Ramiro indicated a special sense of ‘know’ by raising the girl’s sections a few inches in presentation. The spectators cheered as they mistook this for a dramatic taunt.
-Henry Flower: Initially, I’d just assumed you were the typical risk-seeking egoist who enjoys sacrificing others for their self-aggrandising delusions.
At the accusation of delusion, Ramiro was spurred into a moment of contemplation. He used the elevation of the temple to survey the crowd again, the sights and sounds of the festival beyond them, and the rest of The Slums beyond that, crammed into this worthless stretch of land around Central City, bordered on one side by the WBAE, one by the sea, and the other two by the parched savannah.
This’d been his empire, and he its king and saviour...was that a delusion? Ugly and paltry as The Slums might’ve been, it'd been no small feat to conquer. He'd poured into the task the effort of an emperor. Let anyone else try to arrange this heap of sand, driftwood, criminals, and beggars into a united, productive organisation of millions, one capable of tempting The Company’s wrath.
-Ramiro: Delusional or not, my efforts to fix this place were earnest. Can you believe that?
-Henry Flower: Sure. But, past a certain point, we forfeit the right to be judged according to anything but our worst actions.
-Ramiro: The Tyrant's more pragmatic than this.
-Henry Flower: That is pragmatic. No individual amounts to enough to tolerate such sins. You are not essential to the world. You can always be replaced by someone without your faults.
-Ramiro: You include yourself.
-Henry Flower: I'm only one teen.
-Ramiro: Please. Save this modesty for others. You know full well that none of the puritans were willing or capable of cleaning up this arsehole. For fear of staining their sweet-scented robes, they allow the garbage to pile up in the streets around them. They ignore their brothers and sisters wallowing in their abdicated filth. They wait and wait for the chaste path of salvation that will never come. The duty of cleaning up the filth can fall to none other than those like you and me.
-Henry Flower: Don't put me in the same category as you.
-Ramiro: Every true saint is an ogre. It takes a deviant who does not shrink before the filth but fills his mouth with the filth and is nourished by the filth and loves its filthy taste.
-Henry Flower: Even if this were true at some point in the process, that doesn't make it perpetually true. What about now, Ramiro? Are you still essential? Has the credit carried forward? Did you pick up enough pieces of trash this morning to be owed the lives of a couple children in repayment?
-Ramiro: No, Tyrant. What we are owed are ALL their lives.
The two paused on that psychotic note, Ramiro returning for a while to soak in the sight of his stolen subjects, Henry keeping the Duke tilted by using an imperious tone befitting of the guy having technically been made his employee by the takeover.