-Ramiro: How much of my vision will you retain?
-Henry Flower: No idea. I have the wisdom to delegate the aftermath. Peace is not the job of an ogre.
-Ramiro: What are your plans for The Church?
-Henry Flower: Chocolates and a bouquet for helping to dispose of you.
Ramiro gave a curious glance at the kid arguing away with the Duke, using his multi-tasking skills from war to juggle their conversations with ease.
He couldn’t discern whether that reply had been a calculated deception or ignorant. He’d assumed from the lack of prior investment in the West Bank Autonomous Exclave that The Tyrant had grasped the full complexities of Suchi’s political situation. However, maybe he was genuinely naïve, a kid who happened to have the power to steal their domain on a whim after they offended him by plotting to invade his unused strip of land. If so, how miserable...
Feeling petty, Ramiro decided not to spoil. The Company could learn for themselves what happens to the goats who get too greedy.
Henry, being tossed a third conversation to juggle, received an alarmed message.
-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Henry, we have a problem. Many problems…
With impeccable timing, Caramel informed him that all their Trading Posts in both The Slums and Central City had been hit at once by a medley of ‘natural’ disasters: a swarm of mole-rats, a cluster of mini-earthquakes, a lightning strike, an invasion of sentient vines, a horde of elemental golems, and more.
The stakes were rising.
It wasn’t hard to guess Karnon’s purpose in orchestrating these attacks. Distributed around those sites had been the materials that Henry’d ordered in for the ritual to obtain the Worker of The Loyal Heart, i.e. the mind-enslaving Legendary Class initially intended for Ramiro. Those materials had just been stolen. Despite Henry’s repeated refusals, The Trickster God—not one to respect such a humdrum idea as consent—would be giving this child-eating freak the ability to enslave the masses.
Henry’s scheme devised in a moment of impulse and weakness would march on without him. He, like the thousands he’d volunteered to die on behalf of his calculus, had no further say in whether the matter would happen or not. His and their control had been reduced to the small set of options in their direct perimeter within the destined struggle. The soils of this parched land would be wetted. All that could be decided now was with what quantity of blood and whose.
Based on the resignation in Ramiro’s demeanour, Henry concluded the freak had yet to be made aware of the gift about to mischievously fall into his lap.
He replied to Caramel, telling her about the probable thefts and giving her Ramiro’s current location. Standard protocol with enemies acquiring Legendary classes was to kill them as soon as they completed the acquisition ritual, permakilling their character and removing the threat.
He had no further reaction, the news not even interrupting his argument with the Duke. After all, he wasn’t surprised. In his paranoia, he’d been operating under the assumption of catastrophe. It was always in the face of mass death that he’d chosen to leave the rest to his guild, that he, the retiree, had resumed the disgusting role of an ordinary teenager on an ordinary date.
-Henry Flower: Well, Ramiro, if you’ve got nothing more interesting to add, I’m bouncing. For your own wellbeing, consider not eating any more kids in the future. Get therapy or something. A vasectomy.
-Ramiro: Aren’t you going to attack me? For this?
Ramiro, confused, gestured to present the dead girl’s pieces again.
He’d been anticipating The Tyrant to act upon the murderous hate smouldering in his gaze. Everything around them indicated that this was the grand showdown Karnon had been orchestrating. Staged at the Heroes and Villains tournament, The Tyrant of Saana would duel The Saviour of The Slums, these two ogres scrapping it out man-to-man with their alter-egos of The Cripple and The Hog.
The proper battle The Tyrant had first been setting up with the Worker of The Loyal Heart would have been more exciting. However, if that plan were cancelled, Ramiro would accept the consolation of directly beating up this kid who'd robbed his throne.
-Henry Flower: No. I don't care for symbolic 'fights'. These immaterial contests of egos are irrelevant to me.
Henry did understand Karnon's attempt to set up a match between him and this freak, but the logic was faulty.
Had he become murderously angry at Ramiro? Yes, actually. Henry was, indeed, side-eyeing this scum as if he were holding the corpse of an actual flesh-and-blood kid he'd dismembered and partially eaten.
The error was in the assumption that this murderous rage would translate into a desire to duel Ramiro. This showed a wild underestimation of Henry’s madness. In the real world, would you ever seek retribution against a murderer by challenging them to a match of Street Fighter? Henry felt the same way about duelling. The mere suggestion that this painless, neutered imitation of combat might annul the crime of death was insulting. Although the disgust of cross-contamination resided in his muscles, not one fibre of his being yearned to seek justice in the utterly symbolic gesture of 'killing' or ‘assassinating’ someone’s videogame character. Henry assassinated people. He assassinated people. The only satisfactory response for him would be tracking Ramiro down to wherever he lay in his VR unit in Argentina and slitting his windpipe. Would Henry be doing this, however? No. Unlike this freak, he had the self-control to abstain from his deranged inclinations; plus, theirs was an era of omnipresent surveillance.
And, in the absence of a chance to kill this guy, a virtual simulation of the act wasn't a substitute. A duel - Karnon might as well have set them up to thumb-wrestle. Ridiculous. Only death can repay death.
Across from Henry with these murderous thoughts, Ramiro was returning another curious look.
Based on Ramiro's understanding from the immature conversation they'd had when this kid had called him as 'Dr Iskander' after the vampire-moth incident, based on the planned battle, The Tyrant should have leapt at this opportunity. He'd been willing to sacrifice tens or hundreds of thousands of Slumdwellers just to ensure Ramiro's saviour image was thoroughly ruined. That would have been a contest of egos.
What was he missing here? He was missing something...
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-Ramiro: Are you certain? Our farcical friend seemed confident when he gave his blessing. He assured me there was an answer you’d desperately want to make during the fight. The question itself, he didn’t explain. What's the question?
“Anjing!” Henry vented his rage, swearing at an offer by the Duke to compensate his loss with Slumpoints.
Back to this fucking question again. At the most obvious level, this was Karnon asking, yet again, whether he’d be cancelling or continuing the initial plan to save this cannibal-riddled shithole.
But behind that question was a deeper one, a question that’d sprung up since Henry's arrival in Suchi in multiple such dichotomies: The retirement philosophy of Wu-Wei versus one’s duty to intervene…the masks versus the authentic self…the boredom versus the climb…the schoolfriends versus the comrades of The Company…the stadium versus the rotting shacks outside…the clay versus the sand…The City versus The Slum…The Church versus The Empire…the roleplayer versus Him…the sanity needed for the future versus the guilt from the past…the stalker-fan versus the alpha-pleb…the teenage romance versus the incompatibility…The Enemy-Bear versus The Hero…the noisy detachment versus the unutterable love…the mind versus the body…the digital rationality versus the visceral disgust…Septic Rose versus himself...the dagger that assassinated for fun versus the dagger that assassinated to assassinate…the happy blindness of Alex Wong versus the unhappy awareness of Rose's brother...The Cripple versus The Tyrant…
Every one of these was a manifestation of a single fundamental question, a question that infiltrated and subsumed every aspect of Henry’s warped being. Up until a week ago, it'd been a question beyond his capacity to even ask himself in any form except through these indirect flirtations - such was the extent of his internal domination, a guttural resistance springing up from inside of him at any hint of moving on, the 'disgust'.
However, this had been a long week. Over its course, he’d witnessed the habits of these last years assert themselves in him plotting another assassination within a day of arriving at this forsaken slum, he’d had this tendency to resolve solutions through violence hijacked and exploited by Karnon for the God’s own cryptic purposes, he’d heard the clock ticking out the closing hours of his real-life anonymity with which he'd been able to compartmentalise from his morbid duties, and he—in the midst of this, at a tiny, personal level—had been reminded of a romance that’d been stopped in its tracks by who he’d chosen to be and he'd tried to cling to it and he'd failed. (And, secretly, this week had been much more than a week. Through The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, in the over a century of pondering, Henry'd approached the question at various levels of proximity, through the meditative nature explorations of Floating Leaf, through agonising self-flagellations and experiments in mortality with The Death Training, through the solitary slaughter of the largest of monsters in Starhunting, through the dissection of his own madness in the dissection of the madness of The Laughing Man and his clown of a son, and finally through the mandala exercise in detachment from his forest farm.) The forces of resistance were converging to test his adamancy, and his conviction was breaking. Now, he was confronting that question at the heart of everything about himself:
In his life as a kind of ‘climber’, he’d conquered many mountains, yet one mountain still remained, the mountain accumulated through his conquests of the others, the mountain he climbed every night but never managed to summit. Was it time to flatten the fucking thing?
Henry was being asked by Karnon to prove whether he was in or out on this world through this fight - a prelude to the more significant one in the distance.
As with any matter of The Trickster God, the answer would be hidden inside of an action simultaneously subtle yet dramatic. It would come down to which method Henry used to win over Karnon's accursed blessing. Yesterday, he'd been barely able to scratch the convicts with the buff, forcing himself to evade and parry every single one of their attacks while relying on Caramel using Worldpiercer. Now, however, he was alone. Alone, he could only defeat this freak by going beyond the discrete methods of combat he’d been using in Suchi.
What he chose to sacrifice and what he chose not to sacrifice would be his answer to the God. It would establish what path to take forward, what purpose to continue hiding within this convoluted saga, what rhyme to twist in the final verses, what he was willing to lose. It would be his answer to the mountain.
And, although still hidden from Henry without The Cap, Karnon through this fight would be answering the question about himself. The God would prove that, as had been alluded to with the presentation of the water artefact, whether he’d liberated himself from The Cycle, whether he remained a mindless agent working for the maximisation of soul-expanding chaos.
-Henry Flower: We can skip the ‘fight’. This is my answer to that poorly-$&#*ing-programmed NPC.
In a burst of exasperation at the Duke, he told the guy to invite the other competitors up if they wanted a spectacle. Bring them all up for the bloodbath. He then signalled to Rose that he was finished chatting with The Saviour, finished with this joke of a competition, and finished with the $&#*ing mountain.
He washed his hands clean of all of it.
Henry and Rose span around in unison, abandoning their starting positions for the match and strolling towards the stairway they’d ascended minutes earlier. The crowd’s reaction was mixed, some convinced a group by Henry’s arguing that a bloodbath would be more exciting, others booing. Regardless, he sensed they’d been calmed enough to avoid being mobbed as would have happened had he ditched immediately.
Behind him, however, Ramiro with the corpse of the mutilated girl—and Karnon through them—was shaking his head in a firm denial of this pathetic attempt to abscond.
-Ramiro: We will be fighting. Our friend did promise me a prize if I win, but, to be frank, stabbing you in front of the people you stole from me is prize enough. The rest is a bonus.
Ramiro began to move forward, wondering whether he needed a greater provocation.
Henry, meanwhile, faltered in his next step, his rising foot falling back down as an epiphany gave him pause, disrupting his calculated game.
A prize - this wasn’t the mind-enslaving Class, which Karnon would be gifting regardless. Ramiro was referring to what would be reaped in the event of Henry’s failure in the fight.
Henry, among many things, was the supreme cheat magnet, a collector of priceless and powerful curios. As one might recall, he carried several dozen Legendary items, not in order to use them but because they, individually, were deemed by Saana’s system to have a higher gold value than his Cap and the other Syncretist pieces and would therefore drop first when he died – you would have to kill him forty times in a row before making him lose what he cared about. Currently, his most valuable of these disposable Legendaries was an Amulet of The Vilified One - that was, the same the item worn by the senile monkey God he’d killed during the tutorial, an item that’d allowed The Redeemer to reincarnate once after death. Saana’s supreme cheat magnet was holding three of these.
The amulets’ effect was different for players due to them already having immortality in most circumstances. Instead, the items partially nullified the permadeath condition when acquiring the God Body of a Legendary Class, granting the player fifteen reincarnation opportunities before their character’s deletion. The amulets were complimentary in this sense. They mitigated the risks of the choice, letting the player recover from their mistakes and learn how to properly wield the might of a God.
Dropping these amulets would normally be a non-issue for Henry because Legendary Classes were almost impossible to acquire. However, Ramiro was about to receive one for free. What’s more, the specific Class had its own in-built reincarnation ability in the form of
But Henry’s sudden pause wasn’t the result of that epiphany. The amulet combination had been one of the first doomsday scenarios he’d calculated. He would have tried disposing of the pesky artefacts, but he’d anticipated Karnon would steal them the instant they left his inventory. Denying The Trickster God his chaos was not so simple.
No, with all these doom-laden possibilities already weighing upon his mind during their conversation, it was a different epiphany that’d caught him off-guard now.
This, if he hadn’t already figured it out after decades in The Overdream, would have been the precise moment when he solved the grand mystery to which Karnon had been alluding so heavily, when he connected all the pieces of the collage into a clear picture of exactly why this lunatic God would rationally join his assassination plan.