“He IS cheating!”
“HF, you prick!”
“Message the devs!”
But while the crowd went insane, by the arena side, Rose trembled, forgetting her task to watch for intruders, as her whole being was absorbed by Cripple-gege’s dance, by the future, present, and past converging into this one exhilarating bout.
Like the spectators at the base of the temple shouting complaints, she, too, was bearing witness to this preposterous duel. She also saw this teen inexplicably using a swarm of material one might find around a construction site to evade the king and his frenzied sword.
She saw how, with this bizarre tool of his, he upturned the rules of the mage versus melee pairing. How he continuously dodged dozens of close-range attacks that would have clipped and killed the greatest of duellists, attacks that she herself, despite her innate talents, would never have survived. Four or five strikes you might get away with on lucky occasions. However, unlike in a fable or anime, here, where one had to conduct everything with the limitations of the human anatomy, there was no such thing as avoiding every single attack. At some point in a fight, you had to take a hit. To be the best was merely to deal out more wounds on average than you received.
And that was the rule on even ground, without juggling the simultaneous demands of spell-casting. That was without having to somehow squeeze in between dodging thrusts a spare half-second to identify the randomised constellation locations and move to grab them with your naked, weaponless fist. Hence, a mage, once caught, always lost.
What was being pulled off here should be impossible.
This was unprecedented. It went against the convention established again and again across tens of millions of duels without a single exception. The most sensible, rational explanation was the one being tossed by the raging crowd: HF, this impudent teen, was a cheater flaunting his game-breaking dodge-hack.
Once upon a time, Rose had also been consumed by this same blind, ‘rational' disbelief and frustration.
After her first duel with The Cripple, when he’d defeated her by flaying all the meat off her skeleton out on the tundra, Septic Rose had set upon the mission of gaining vengeance by jumping him wherever he dared to show his smug face.
In the pursuit of killing this clown, she utilised all the skills of her assassin trade. She expended more time and soul hunting him than she had for any of her previous targets. She studied his base art, Twenty Tools. She memorised his exhausting array of items and drew demented flowcharts for their myriad combinations. She reviewed hundreds of hours of footage. She listened again and again to his obnoxious victory speeches in case some vital vulnerability might be secreted away within the trashtalk.
Each time she believed she’d plucked the fatal weakness out of the puzzle of The Cripple, she tracked him down to challenge him again. And each time, she was killed in a new, inventive, confusing, stupid way – ripped into little meat pieces by a glass-shard typhoon in a desert, devoured by a monastery where she jumped him, the monastery itself transforming into a chthonic dragon, harpooned by a gang of mermaids at the bottom of the ocean, afflicted with hallucination-inducing brainworms, abandoned in a Plane of pure, endless whiteness and forced to delete her character to return.
Dozens of times, she was made to eat defeat. Eventually, having scrutinised the minutia of his methods, she was forced to swallow the bitter truth congealing in her bloody mouth. The Cripple’s boasts had some substance. His cheat items were indeed tools, instruments used for and subordinate to the fulfillment of a more varied, more advanced, more cerebral style of duelling. It was true that their game-breaking power was employed to generate an ‘excess against the pesky rule of parity with which an underappreciated komodo ninja warrior could time-efficiently demonstrate its strategic vision.’
If one had comprehended that vision, it soon became evident that their duels had been unnaturally fair. The Cripple, rather than being a simple cheater, exercised constant moderation. He used just enough cheats to rebalance the field, to bring his opponents through The Gates From Hell to Heaven, but never so many cheats that they’d fared no chance – that was, as long as they’d been willing to learn the proper way to duel.
The proper way: although Rose had never been certain about this fact, she believed that this was the proper way. The Cripple, forced by the deficiencies of his reflexes to seek an alternate path, seemed to have discovered the as-of-yet-unlocked potential in Saana’s combat system. He'd found what lay beyond the distant horizon, the endpoint after every skill had been exhaustively mastered. One day, all high-level 1v1s might resemble the odd spectacle of duelling The Cripple, with phases, set-ups, twists, with internal progression, with ‘strategy’.
Although none of the other top duellists back then would admit it, many of them like herself had also perceived this possibility. Secretly, they’d studied The Strategy. They’d tested its techniques, they’d experimented with incorporating them into their own, some even smurfed to train under The Cripple when he started a random passivist cult while actually conquering the planet, and all had failed miserably.
Rose was no exception. For years, she’d tried without success to replicate The Strategy.
Battle was too fast and chaotic. The plan formulated in one second would be rendered pointless a second later by shifts in positioning or cooldowns resetting. In the time required to consciously comprehend your opponent’s next step, they’d already carried it out, plus four more. Thinking about your own actions during a fight was an even worse trap, abstract thought being like a self-inflicted poison that retarded your movements, sapping you of your flow, your grace. A duel favoured the quick, the simple, the brutal. And there were only so many times one could defy this principle, only so many stabbings one could tolerate, before one chose to stop resisting the established bodily law.
Gradually, the duellists gave up on The Strategy. It was pure nonsense, they told themselves. After all, The Cripple, the proposer of this cerebral prophecy, had himself not been able to execute upon his own ideas without the crutch of his ‘tools’. In the absence of these Legendaries, there was no solid proof behind anything he’d suggested.
Thus, when The Cripple retired, vanishing as abruptly as he’d appeared, he retired also his peculiar brand of duel, this other way of fighting alone.
Today, Saana’s 1v1 scene was grander in almost every conceivable respect - fans, fame, money, venues, publicity, resources, participant pool. However, whenever the old guard who’d had the indignity of being swindled by The Cripple’s tricks met up, whenever they shared their grumbles about this villainous cheater from the lawless past, there was always a quiet trace of something contrary in the air, a point buried deep within their complaints. Their tone reminded Rose of her grandfather gathering with his war buddies and speaking at a hush about the revolution. As they relived the horrors, a strange touch of fondness sometimes snuck into their voices, a nostalgia, a hunger. Everyone who’d been there was in agreement that the present, this golden age of peace and wealth, was best, and none of them would express any explicit desire to return. Nevertheless, a part of their heart remained where it’d been fullest, back in those frontier-times of the past when villains had still stalked the land.
And now that villain had returned!
Others might not yet, but, Rose, the most faithful of Cripple-gege’s disciples, had recognised this figure back once again to give the doubters the pummelling they deserved and secretly longed for, to imprint the proof of his invincible supremacy upon them with his multi-tool-wielding fists.
She was recognising everything! She recognised in this duel The Strategy that’d been, what it had gone through during his hiatus, and what it had finally become.
This timber tornado contraption, for one small example, was not, fundamentally, a new idea. She'd met its embryonic form once before.
The mage always lost once caught, demolished the second they stopped to spell-cast – this rule, as it existed today, had been the same back then. Consequently, there were no real mages at the top of the 1v1, every player of a magic class forced into hybrid melee roles, like the Arcanist’s Proximicanist spec.
In one esoteric text, however, The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo, it’d been asserted that this situation wasn’t hopeless. Mages, wanting to stand in place and cast, needed to prioritise the exact opposite of this impulse. They should invest all their training into mobility so they could generate excessive temporal-spatial opportunities for immobility. The ideal mage, to have the luxury of retiring as a relaxed, ponderous wizard, must first go through the youthful ordeal of becoming a sprightly parkour fiend, a hurdle jumper, a leopard leaping chasms and springing into trees.
As part of the regime of movement training, they should naturally master Landworker and Constructionist magic for manipulating terrain and applying ladders. While clunky, this would enable them to more flexibly traverse the duel’s vertical dimension. With enough skill, these tools should be usable in emergencies to block an attack when caught, buying a second to escape or complete a critical spell.
This old theory, which'd once only existed in the pages of his confusing manual, was on display now in this wooden tornado, its pieces of timber opening up that space for Cripple-gege to cast by disrupting his foe’s swings and confounding his advances.
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But the true marvel here was not in conceiving of this tool as an idea but what it must have taken to birth into actuality.
Countless dreamy-eyed mages had imagined their own versions of these methods that might allow them to thwart a bulldozing brute. But all who’d attempted to construct it had found themselves foiled by some or other obstacle. The control magic, designed only to help builders transport materials around a job site, was so slow that it needed to be directed in advance. The telekinetic link was fragile, breaking upon immediate physical or spell contact, making it trivial for the enemy to interrupt. The additional cognitive burden of controlling such a confusing mess caused the caster to blunder repeatedly in more fundamental, basic areas, missing spells, getting caught…
Eventually, every mage tossed in the magical towel and joined the rest picking up a boring spear.
Their problem was being like an ancient person who’d grasped that the moon was a solid object and deduced, therefore, the possibility of walking along its surface, but who, after a couple attempts to reach the thing by climbing trees and mountains, finding the task impossible, dismissed it as fantasy. From such a primitive starting position, it was not possible to ascertain the logical, material steps that would one day bridge us to the moon. Before that simple idea could be achieved, humanity had to first master rocket propulsion, lightweight plastics and metal, civil institutions for global cooperation and shipping, and thousands of steps preceding these. Likewise, before this wood swarm could be made to fly, an incomprehensible heap of preparatory research had to be done in advance.
Rose could only guess at its constituent parts: at this wood swarm’s foundation was the Earth Shaman techniques of Dancing Stone Architecture. These, she’d observed Cripple-gege demonstrate a fraction of as he’d trolled kids at the arena by throwing planks at them. However, even contrasted with Dancing Stone Architecture properly executed, this derived technique was about as similar as a jetski is to a sailboat. The original art, built for a war setting in which the caster’s primary duty was supportive terrain manipulation, had to be redesigned into a sleeker shape for a secondary function within a 1v1. The number of controlled pieces were reduced. Their possible combinations were set according to a limited but functional scheme. The martial material going into this tighter frame had to be gutted and replaced with a lighter composite, a mixture of other styles, some of which Rose could identify from the brief time shadowing him. This close-range avoidance routine seemed to be derived from Bloodriver Stalling Shield, the mage art for stationary casting in rigid military formations. Cripple-gege was using the same tactics, such as blocking the lines of attack as he reached for constellations or using false spells to misdirect his opponent’s attacks, except he’d substituted out the shield for the wood swarm. To overcome the limitation of the wood itself being unable to exert any force but its weight when repelling the enemy, Cripple-gege was adding his own by thrusting against the ends of beams with his knees, hips, stomach, elbows, a technique perhaps achieved by his training in Nine Fists, which’d taught him to utilise the entire canvas of the body as a weapon.
Simultaneous with all this, visually, Rose had a unique insight being in an official game group with Cripple-gege from during their duo matches. He, using
And THAT was the miracle on display in this swarm! It was what'd been necessary to give life to it or any of the other complex tools! Each was a synthesis of the rest evolving together reciprocally across hundreds or thousands of steps, the brainchildren of a person studious, resilient, and arrogant enough to infuse into themselves, as one might the total breadth of human life, the total depths of human death!
And for birthing this monumental feat, only one figure had been capable!
That must've been the tragedy that'd befallen Cripple-gege after his retirement from duelling. While adventuring in other ranges, he’d glimpsed back and found the plebs stagnating at the base of that mountain he’d already climbed, clueless as to how to follow the path he’d pioneered. In time, he’d come to know his mistake: it was not enough to simply show these savages a polaroid of him smiling on the moon. Embarrassed by the state of his fellow man, Cripple-gege accepted the messianic burden once again. He would have to put in the hard labour himself to forge for the incapable and lazy the path upwards. Thus, he invented, refined, upgraded, and simplified his Strategy such that it could be executed even by those not blessed with his peerless tools.
To watch him now was to behold his achievements! Here was the culmination of his thankless labour transforming his ephemeral theories into a tangible, practical reality! Before their undeserving eyes, the returned Cripple was showcasing The Strategy! Or whatever it’d mutated into. As proof of its efficacy, in place of his old Legendaries, he used standard abilities and items that would at some point be available to everyone on the common market! With these ordinary tools, made rare only by the rare genius wielding them, he was demolishing his opponent! The beating dealt was so excessive that the slobbering spectators had quickly forgotten the true imbalance here, that the one on stage with the material advantage was not the teen they accused of cheating but their king with
That was, it might've taken millennia IF The Cripple, in all his benevolence, wasn’t building the bridge to the future for them now, wasn’t placing his refined tools into their ape-like palms and inviting them to begin the divine ascent, to join him in his lonely spot in the sky. Beneath the heavens, he may have been unrivalled, but whosoever dared to take the climb, perhaps they could sneak a shot into his invincible heart!
Rose—along with a few others espying this duel in this amateur tournament—felt the rising urge to accept the invitation, to break from the dull stasis of the present, to strive up the bloody path onward, to once more cross minds and daggers with this villain of yore.
“You Company dog!”
“You repugnant deceiver!”
“You cheater!”
“You cur!”
“It’s not fair!”
“Let him free!”
“You devil!”
“You rascal!”
“Can’t somebody stop this disgraceful display? Intervene! Help the king!”
The chorus below was lamenting with tears, with sorrow and pain for their suffering lord, their misfortunate ruler abused and harassed by this Company scoundrel who cheated his sword.
On stage, Ramiro kept up his bestial storm. His claw of steel pursued his prey without cease. Like a drunk who crashes, tumbles, reels through an aisle of shattered glass, he rampaged in thirst of blood unshamed.
When a fence intruded, landing clean between them, he screeched in rage, “#&*@ing wood!” and swiped to give the hindrance his hate for the teen.
The fence bisected, Ramiro, irate, his murder switched to the swarm. So, hacking the vexing wood, the beast king evolved to a lumberjack.
With Ramiro distracted, the teen got a break to unload his magic with freedom. He flung to careen two spells at the King’s shield-less gut, and he blasted a bolt at the King’s
“POT! NAL! LIT! Ka! MAN! Met! YUM! PENK..."
Ramiro’s stalwart sword, these spells ignored, hacked and hewed the lumber swarm. As a dolphin splits a school of fish, his blade invaded the swirling mass. Against its swipes, the timber troops—their speed constrained by their non-combative roots and rigid form perfected to defend the teen but not themselves—received his sword like a phalanx flanked by a cavalry charge, their mass made to break, their structure splintered. Their controlling magic severed, the battered beams then dropped in droves like heads of wheat caressed by reaping scythe.
As the first wood was felled, those held back in reserve, like the drones of a hive at the dead scent of kin, converged in a swarm to try stinging the King. They flew at his face; they assaulted his shins; they boxed at his ears.
And, to each of these wasps, the King gave stabs and swats. He fragged the fences, splintered stakes and boxes to shards and dust.
“NAM! Vat! Tuk! CAN!”
HF paced to outrace the demise of his swarm. Like a cheap acupuncturist, he placed carelessly fast his spell-needles’ injections to maximise harm. Thighs, butt, armpits, or groin – if a spot of skin showed up, he stabbed it with cruelty, attacked without tact.
A surprise stab back from the client, he side-stepped.
And he continued the course of—“RUK!”—stabs unremorsed.
But the wounds Ramiro’s sword dealt out began to hurt the swarm. While myriad pieces floated still, their flight lost form and speed. Its logs were bleeding strength and breaking down. Its ranks no fight soon could further mount than wounded troops who ran the rout, than a ground giraffe with three fine legs, but one that’s snapped, who therefore kicks up futile dirt while lions approach its child.
Unwilling to watch the grotesque step ahead, the banquet feast of their guardless son, the whirlwind closed its injured eyes, its troops retreated inside the Spatial Bracelet of the soon devoured teen.
With the timber trounced, defeated, escaping as motes, the King’s next swing manoeuvred to molest HF’s exposed waist. His weapon, instilled with its owner’s hateful hunger pangs, which emerged whenever he trapped the orphaned young, hoped to grope the belly flesh, the spinal bone, to chomp the tender kidneys and teenage guts. And as Ramiro’s sword tried glut on meat, in the millisecond, millimetre gap between its perverted feast of pubescent flesh, a cluster of lights condensed to solid form.
Shing!
His killing blow was suddenly stopped…
…What is this?!
…Could it be?
The edge of his sword, lit up with fatal harm, reclined at peace on a thin bed of metal, millimetres thick, but forged of superior Tier 5-2 steel, and draped across the teen’s undamaged hip…
HF, a random rapier in hand, had parried…
Alas, the swarm retired, he’d been forced to pick the weirdest device yet from his zany tool kit: a sword.
A sword - in circumstances rare and strange, this, too, could become a duellist’s tool.