First, the shockwaves of the duel rippled across The Slums.
A street decorated for the festival, immediately afterwards.
The Villagers, witnessing the miserable death of their king in The Company mutt’s remorseless arms, began to wail and shout in grief and rage.
In the restaurants, a racket erupted of shattering jugs and bowls and splintering tables. Parties stormed into the open streets, swearing at the sky for vengeance; a few loners skulked off in the direction of the temple, daggers at their hips. At an ice-cream stall, a drunk woman threw down her melted cone and, kneeling in the sticky mess, shed a river of ugly tears; rubbing the back of this inconsolable woman, her girlfriend vowed to beat up that devil HF. Onto a shack’s roof leapt a wolf roleplayer, who howled a lament to the moons, their cries soon joined by the bestial roars and clucks of other animal roleplayers.
At a fried hyena leg stall, a t-rex seized a cross-dressing Disney princess by the collar. “What did you say, you mangy traitor?!”
The cross-dresser, noticing many hostiles stares, refused to repeat that it seemed their king had lost despite the advantage. “Nothing.”
“I’ll show you who has the advantage!” shouted the t-rex.
The two, breaking into a brawl of fists and daggers, stumbled into a wok of boiling oil, their costumes igniting on fire. The NPC running the stall sighed, unsummoned their wares, and crept away.
Everywhere, the Villagers were caught in the throes of despair. Try as they might to deny it, they had witnessed the reality of Karnon’s accursed blessing. King Ramiro, assisted to a ridiculous degree against The Tyrant’s arrogant brat, had still gotten the crap beaten out of him.
Their leader’s humiliating loss gave them a stinging reminder of their wretched state. In their weakness, their poverty, their irrelevance, the Villagers had always at least been able to take refuge in the fantasy of what might’ve happened had the lucky golden shoe fallen on their feet instead. What if they'd not begun their journey in this lowly slum? What if they weren’t suppressed at every attempt to grow by The Church incinerating their work? Then, perhaps, they might’ve rivalled the power of The City from which they were barred, of The Company flourishing a short distance across the sea. Couldn’t their Empire have amounted to something more than a name?
But tonight’s fight had demonstrated that, even when all the cards were stacked in their own favour, they were still destined to lose. The gap between them and their enemy would never be bridged. Their misery was inescapable. Their misery was genetic.
In the midst of the mourning mass, a gold-clad Crusader wore a smile of knowing that’d never left his lips. (Justinian, using the freedom of roleplay, retconned the gesture’s meaning after Sir Henry reversed his dismembered arm into a win.)
“Indeed,” he declared, “it is not by appealing to the boons of false gods that we shall be delivered from His shadowy clutches.”
A stranger beside him nodded in dejection. “We’re never beating The Tyrant…”
“Have courage yet, good sir,” Justinian replied. “Place your dark and twisted doubts in the lord’s care, and he will light for you the straight path to grace.”
And, praise the lord, the helping hand of a god suddenly lit their path!
News broke out that The Company’s Trading Posts had all been hit by a medley of disasters, leaving them in a vulnerable state. Justinian joined a mob of riotous Villagers, tens of thousands of bloodthirsty brothers and sisters pouring out of the festival’s concerts to march, meet, and eject His legion from their shores.
Elsewhere in The Slums, the third story of a community bathhouse.
A group of half-naked customers were gathered around a projection of HF being escorted safely through the crowd by a platoon.
“Pompous mutt,” one swore.
“Always the same ending…”
“Like to see them block my arrow if I was there. Straight into his eyeball, it’d go.”
“Fucking cheating scum.”
When they heard about the forming mob, the raging customers summoned their weapons and stormed out to join the angry tide. The masseuse NPCs, in the way of the Ibanmothe, packed up their belongings and left in the opposite direction.
In the emptying room, London Tremor remained, his skin flushed with a rosy afterglow as if he’d finished a divine session of sweet lovemaking.
It’d come completely out of left field, but what a marvellous duel that’d been! HF had dragged the poor king through an exhaustive exhibition of his avant-garde techniques. The bombastic complexity of the swarming timber and weaponry, the delicate simplicity of sword and spell, the exploitation of the arena grounds as the advanced plays coagulated into the final, most simple scene of two blood-soaked men wrestling out one’s death…it was beautiful.
The match had confirmed what London’d sensed on that night when the pillar had toppled. The old order was collapsing to usher in the brilliant future. As HF had declared to the drooling horde, the next level had arrived. It had descended upon them with the force of an avalanche, and those who loitered in the ways of the past would be buried in the rubble of their forgotten age.
London almost wanted to weep.
But while HF may have been retiring victoriously from the crowd for the evening, London Tremor, the troubadour entrusted to trumpet his spectacular tale, was only starting his own battle.
Over the course of the duel, exponentially more players had tuned into the broadcast, the viewer count spiking at the very finale at over thirty-one million. Thirty-one million - across the globe, news networks, top guilds, and every fan of Saana League would be hustling to solve the mysteries of this teen and his martial art, clawing for every hard-to-procure morsel of information available.
And the search of this starved mass would bring them all to the table of the fastest journo with the scoop: London Tremor, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2050, Channel 5 News’s latest full-time hire.
After a few minor edits to incorporate this unexpected duel, his articles would be ready for release.
Showtime!
But in the intern's jubilation, he hadn’t noticed the glow in his eyes, another more veteran journalist having hijacked his gaze and, soon, his story.
-Oliver Spears: London Lad, I want everything you’ve got on this…duellist. Don’t try getting clever with me again.
The New Suchi Arena, the firefighters having isolated and extinguished the burning segment of wall.
At the arena-ground HF kept reserved for himself, two dozen youths from Suchi’s top 100 duellists were hanging out. They’d been watching ever since the leak of the teen and the mute girl's disguised participation in the duos tournament. As such, they’d caught the thrilling match against Ramiro from the beginning, being able to savour every play employed by their mysterious training partner to dismantle the king.
Amongst the admiring group was the wrestler SaNguiNe, spectating in a conflicted mood.
To his eyes, the fight was...astounding. No proper duellist could root for anyone but the teen putting on a dominant performance against the precarious odds.
But SaNguiNe couldn't bring himself to side with HF completely, having yet to purge some of the resentment from the previous night at Lake Hotferver, when he’d learned the girl he’d been pining after was a dude. More than that revelation, which wasn’t too astonishing in virtual reality, he’d been pained to learn the insincerity of ‘Artemis’, merely one of several personas the guy portraying her would go on to demonstrate during the bout with HF, with whom he seemed to have a historic connection. And, despite everything, more than anything else, that historic connection was the sore point, SaNguiNe’s silly heart aching with jealousy.
Those were his strange and petty feelings as a young person in this bewildering era. As a duellist, HF’s bout with Artemis had dealt him a second blow. In Suchi’s insular community, SaNguiNe had been treated like a living god after rising to the top three, trainees begging to spar with him, fangirls writing him fawning letters, guild recruiters plying him with expensive gifts. While he’d put on the airs of humbleness, he had bought a little into the image of himself as a genius destined for glory. Artemis and HF’s battle, however, with its secretive style-switching and HF’s final play of guiding the Earth Golem’s spear into the pillar, had reminded SaNguiNe of the paltry size of this city and himself. A gigantic chasm remained between himself and the true geniuses of the arena.
For these reasons, part of him wanted HF to slip up against Ramiro, to lose.
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As the match progressed without failure, it deepened SaNguiNe’s sense of smallness. And yet, paradoxically, it also began to liberate him from his resentment. Whatever HF’s true identity might be, it became clear that he was the greatest duellist ever, a veteran reigning in a league entirely of his own. SaNguiNe, a fledgeling in the first weeks of his personal journey, could hardly feel sore about losing to such a monster. Past a certain point, it became a privilege.
After the match’s bloody conclusion, the duellists silently watched HF's departure through the restless mob, their tongues unable to locate the starting point for expressing their complex emotions of awe, hope, confusion, exhaustion, alertness, envy, inspiration, and an obscure emotion deeper than all of these.
SaNguiNe spoke first, turning to his more knowledgeable teammate Y-A-III, who’d converted to an Earthfriend to imitate and study HF’s methods. “Which arts are needed for the weapon juggling technique?”
At this question, the rest of the group snapped to Y-A-III. While many of HF’s advanced techniques weren’t implementable with their Tier-0 characters, the most dazzling of the lot seemed technically usable right now. In fact, with so few abilities available at their level, it could be an unbeatable advantage.
Y-A-III, clueless where to start, ran chronologically down the list of martial arts HF had exhibited this week, checking one at a time which had features that might help. Jaguar Fang - a duellist needed to retain control while grappling…Herdswoman’s Spear - the two-pointed spear art was built around strange, synchronous rhythms that might be valuable for weapon rotations…School of Nine Fists – practice in prediction, in using the entire body…
As he was about to venture into the second day, he stopped.
“…all of them?" the studious duellist muttered. "I think it’s the core technique…to pull it off, you might have to master…everything.”
He was silenced by another wave of shock, finding himself dwarfed by a glimpse of the titanic effort under HF’s casual charade.
Most of the others reacted with despondence, instantly throwing in the towel at such an arduous task and hoping that HF would release a simplified guide or something.
SaNguiNe, however, the breadth of the chasm identified, still a little resentful, chose to try leap it anyway. The wrestler jogged off from the group to the stadium’s armoury to purchase a set of arms.
He wasn’t the sole trainee with this idea. A long line had formed, and the storehouses were quickly emptied, furnaces firing up to meet the surge in demand.
While the rest of The Slums were building up to a riot, this pocket of civility became home to the sparkling sight of star-seeking youths struggling to juggle swords and shields and spears and even bows from their inventory.
A Village on the outskirts of The Soiree, the site of a pick-up Lionball tournament attended by a couple hundred meatheads and a random string quartet providing free ambience after no one turned up to their official concert.
Lionball was the most popular sport amongst Australasian Villagers if one excluded the arena, a variant of Aussie Rules football with minor rule modifications, like each player being allowed to stab the opposition with a baby Many-Toothed Lion fang. Tonight, the meathead enthusiasts of this sport, bored with the festival’s music, had gathered for a round of friendly matches.
Like elsewhere, their games had been interrupted by the duel between King Ramiro and the teenager with his high-tech fighting style. Following their leader’s defeat, testosterone-thick grunts called out to unite with the mobs and correct the unfair outcome manipulated by the cheating teen – cheaters died, that was another rule in Lionball.
And the meatheads might’ve done just that had there not been a few voices of contradiction, some Kiwi bros arguing in favour of the teen. To this minority disputation, the others listened openly. None of them were particularly informed about duelling or slum politics and they’d merely gleaned their tentative positions from the heated communications flying around The Slums.
“Go on, Dan,” encouraged the Kiwi bros’ team captain. “You’re on Big Bro’s team; you must be able to size his boots best. Tell us the truth as you know it.”
In unison, the hundreds of meatheads switched their attention to a young bro with dashing good looks.
Dan, scanning the audience of bros, gave them a handsome nod. “Bros, is Big Bro, the type of person to cheat? The conclusion I must draw after a week under his tutelage, during which he’s resorted repeatedly to unscrupulous tactics, is that, yes, he is the type to cheat and to do so without any qualms. HOWEVER! According to the same period of observation, Big Bro also had no incentive for tricks tonight. Why? Big Bro has won tons of duels. One more should be easy.”
A meathead, he hadn’t paid attention to the bewildering technical nature of Henry’s style or the unique challenges against
Dan was not alone in his ignorant bliss.
Another meathead, rubbing his muscular jaw, chimed in with the most solid piece of counter-evidence any of them could muster. “King Ramiro’s a king, I’ve heard. It would stand to reason that he’s also won tons of fights."
The listening meatheads murmured in agreement - a king should have defeated several enemies to earn his title.
Dan countered the bro’s expert rebuttal by raising one finger to indicate that his case had not reached its decisive climax. “In addition to Big Bro’s many victories, I've had the privilege to admire the aftermath of him slaying a huge—” He stopped himself, Big Bro having forbidden him from sharing the boar event. “The complete details of the feat I’m forbidden to release, but Big Bro probably wouldn’t mind me sharing one in his defence. The monster I saw him kill was about, oh, this big.”
Handsomely, he paced out the rough length of the giant boar.
With each step he took, the spectators’ gawking eyes widened further in amazement. As meatheads, their estimation of power was trapped in the paradigm of ‘bigger equals stronger’, their understanding of Saana’s mechanics being too murky and primordial to account for the extra factor of magic.
Once Dan finished striding out the giant boar’s length from snout to tail, he threw his baby-lion-tooth dagger vertically to mark the height, which was far too high for him to reach...even on his tippy-toes.
"Whoa..."
"Oh...my...god..."
"Nice...."
"Noice..."
The stunned meatheads agreed unanimously that, compared with such an enormous adversary, a fight against an average-sized human would be significantly easier and therefore no foul play could be assumed.
Satisfied, they decided against joining the rioters and returned to their ball games.
An alleyway at the back of an abandoned slum theatre.
The surrounding streets were alive with festival-goers waving their Village flags and singing war-songs as they prepared to restore King Ramiro’s lost honour. If only this fanatic lot had taken a chance to peek through the open backdoor of the theatre their mass passed, they would find their Saviour’s honour right there, in an oozing pile of gnawed limbs and torsos and pretty heads. But, blind and deaf, they marched on.
The Channel 5 News team who’d been tracking The Hog remained in the alleyway around the hole through which Karnon disguised as Ramiro disguised as The Hog had vanished minutes earlier. Hearing of the spectacular duel, they’d all tuned in to the broadcast, where their target had magically reappeared.
Since then, Channel 5’s higher-ups were pinging the team with orders to drop their current work at once to investigate the hidden expert. This was an awfully-timed request for Suchi’s branch, who’d spent the last 36 hours sleeplessly researching The Trading Post incident and then hunting Ramiro who was, apparently, a child cannibal. And yet, after that insane match, they felt their tiredness and complaints melting. Their investigative fervour was being given a second wind by the most exciting story yet to land in Suchi.
Before they leapt into action, however, the team were paused. They awaited the first order from their branch manager, Oliver having frozen in a statuesque pose.
Was he busy researching duel techniques already? Or had his brain shut down after his hog-hunt's derailing? None of them could tell.
Oliver Spears, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049, was doing neither.
Although he'd seen the duel through London Tremor’s eyes, he'd perceived a series of drastically different sights from the intern and everyone else.
The silent conversation between Ramiro and this kid…the silent conflict, on this day when Ramiro’d happened to be fired…the final frustrated gesture of the teen ripping off his mask, swearing at his adversary to go on and expose his identity…
The complexity of the teen’s techniques…a degree of speed and control and micro-management and prediction and multi-tasking that would seem totally impossible on first glance...and that would, on deeper analysis, prove to indeed be impossible...for most…
An atypical seriousness to the teen’s actions…both the before the fight, in the way he’d handled the dead NPC’s mutilated pieces as if he might a real corpse…and during the fight, the unsmiling kid comporting himself not like a duellist in a match but like an assassin tasked with the elimination of his empire's mortal enemy…
In the inconsistent duality of expression, when the kid stripped off his mask and swore at the cannibal versus the match’s end when he’d grinned at the camera to diffuse the unwanted attention from himself before giving up…giving up, finally, on the long charade…
In all of this, Oliver had been gripped by an overpowering deja vu. The face articulating these contradictory appearances, the false one of disarming jest, the honest one utterly devoid of humour - this was not Oliver’s first glimpse of this face.
It was, quite literally, not his first glimpse. He’d crossed paths with this hidden duellist expert very recently – in fact, only about a week earlier, at the interview with Alex Wong that’d gotten him excommunicated to this place.
During that interview, a minor incident had occurred when someone accidentally walked in mid-filming to bring The Company’s not-so-secret leader a coffee from a nearby bookcafe. That random intruder? This kid, this duellist.
Oliver was now reviewing the interview in his Mental Library. Again and again, he replayed this encounter that’d escaped his overly-concentrated vision. In this footage, he finally made the discovery for whose purpose Karnon must've orchestrated this goose-chase, he caught the confession he’d missed that day.
Alex Wong and the kid had shared a brief glance, barely a second in duration, yet long enough to admit to their every sin.
The one, Alex Wong, wore an ironic grin, his teeth flashing at the pleasure of a private joke in this interview where Oliver Spears was about to break the charade and out him as The Company’s shadow leader. The other, this kid, showed none of the embarrassment expected from an underling interrupting a broadcast, nor the deference owed to his superior. Instead, he looked directly into the eyes of his boss, Saana’s indomitable Tyrant, and replied with a searing judgement of irritation, of boredom, of disdain, of disgust, of warning.
The kid, the more serious of the two, could not find as Alex Wong had the same humour in the risky private joke being pulled on the journalist by his friend, by his partner – by his other half.
Alex Wong was not The Tyrant.
Oliver had been duped.
The journalist reconnected with London Tremor in the bathhouse, this intern who must’ve picked up his disobedient streak from the arrogance of investigating this hidden ‘duellist’.
-Oliver Spears: London Lad, I want everything you’ve got on this…duellist. Don’t try getting clever with me again.
London Tremor: You read my draft earlier.
The short-sighted rookie was quick to fib, still clinging to his trivial tale. But Oliver, on further reflection, realised he could make use of this hype.
-Oliver Spears: Are we not on the same team? Here’s the deal: you let me run a fact check on your material, and I promise you a full hour on the main broadcast starting, say, twenty-five minutes from now. I’ll help you arrange the script by then. That’ll be a full hour of only you, Clever Trevor, alone with your piece and the camera, not a peep from my porcelain mug.
An hour, that's about what he'd need to prepare the much more significant story, the one that was already beginning to flow from Oliver's soul.
-London Tremor: Twenty-five minutes isn’t much time…
No, it wasn't, but Oliver didn't care about the quality of the intern's opening act.
-Oliver Spears: Twenty-five minutes is all the time we have, lad. We’re now racing against the rest of the world.