The Slums.
“So it’s called A Thousand Tools…it must be a successor, then?”
“Mhm. Twenty arts weren’t enough to make the old monk’s concepts practical.”
“A Thousand Tools…A Thousand Tools…it’s less of a tongue twister than The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo. Of course, I liked that name, too. Cripple-gege’s satirical tryhard aesthetic was always fun. It might not have earned many fans, but...”
Another long evening coming to its close, Henry and Rose were riding through a deserted section of The Slums in the direction of Central City. With their pasts as duellists exposed, the two had shed their habit of silence and chatted openly for once, the disciple offering the praise and respect of one who’d followed the martial art's development from a vague concept to its practical formulation today.
Henry, focusing on Geno’s sister and his immediate surroundings, ignored a wall of pinging messages.
The many peculiarities about himself that he’d kept secret were being brought to light, and the quiet days of teenage anonymity were imploding in a spectacle of international intrigue. But before he acknowledged any of this, before he began the process of permanent adaptation, he’d spare a final few minutes to draw the curtain on one remaining aspect of his ordinary youth.
He slowed his horse to a canter when they neared the city at the centre of The Slums.
Arriving at Central gave an odd sensation. One moment, you were veering around potholes, twisting through the chaotic layout of the run-down shacks, and dodging bandits and rioters that lurked in the lawless alleyways. Next, you entered the long dawn shadow of the city, its immaculate, towering walls safeguarding the fragile luxuries of security, courtesy, and cleanliness from the outside threats eternally seeking to destroy them. Central greeted the visitor like a meadow in a thick jungle, a clearing where one could pause the habit of always checking around for snakes in the branches, for panthers stalking from behind. The transition had a whole-body substantiality. The spirit lifted at the sight of its sturdy walls; the muscles dropped a tension you'd forgotten they held. Even the nostrils relaxed as, relieved of their task blocking out the dust and fetid musk of unwashed paupers, they could breathe more freely.
The city’s occupants, the Clay-people of the Ibangua, had a rite of passage where teens on the cusp of adulthood were excommunicated from the city until completing enough of Nerin’s Trials to qualify for re-entry. One might recall that from the Senior Director's tale, his corrupt weapon-smuggling for The Empire stemming from a greed to have his Ibanmothe wife and half-caste children admitted. Due to this practice of banishment, they’d coined a word, lahmbal, describing their immense relief and happiness at returning back after braving The Slums and the savannah. The concept shared many overlaps with the ancient Greek nostos, relating to a return home from a perilous overseas adventure, although lahmbal carried more resentment.
Henry, around that age himself, finishing up his own ordeals in The Slums this week, had some of these feelings now.
At the gates to Central City up ahead, a lengthy queue of caravans were being processed, Ibangua who worked in the Slums seeking admittance after the rumours of revolt.
Henry ordered the platoon escorting him and Rose to go ahead. With military efficiency, at scattered points around the perimeter where the shacks stopped, the dispersed riders emerged in unison, swapping festival costumes for uniforms as they skipped to the front of the queue entering the gates.
He dismounted and extended a gentlemanly hand up to help Rose down.
The girl shook her head in refusal.
He kept his hand hovering until, eventually, she accepted it and jumped down, too.
The pair then loitered for a moment whose sombreness was partially alleviated by their festival outfits.
Henry gave a slight nod, his beetle antennae bouncing with the motion. “Well, Rose, I believe this is the end of the date.”
And not just the date. This would also be the conclusion of any further bizarre connection between them. He’d offered her a chance, and it hadn’t worked out. The romantic incompatibility was insurmountable.
Rose’s response was inscrutable, her avocado outfit accompanied by an oversized pair of novelty shades – a cool avocado.
But she’d understood. In this closing part of their evening, she’d finally grasped what her brother had meant with his taunts about her poor chances, the identity of the ‘insurmountable transgression’. While the rest of Saana had been freaking out over the debut of his avant-garde martial art, during what should have been a joyous occasion of celebration and triumph, they’d been conducting the dreary task of locating an owner for an NPC girl’s corpse.
The gesture hidden, Rose flicked a bitter glance towards Central City, where the romantic rival that’d beaten her awaited. “The end of the first date…”
Henry shrugged, having lost all hope in the second part of this evening.
Truthfully, it hadn’t been Rose’s face that’d flashed through his mind while making out with that chick yesterday. Despite all logic, the person that he’d taken a fancy to was his mortal adversary, the alpha-pleb.
His intentions to meet up with Silver and confess, however, had been complicated by Rose’s assassin guildmates spawncamping the alpha-pleb ever since the Doomreaver incident, preventing her return from Lake Hotferver. In exchange for Rose calling them off, Henry’d offered to take her out to explore this costumed festival, a date exclusively between the two of them. Meanwhile, Silver’d been travelling back unharassed.
Of course, circumventing that obstruction hadn't been his sole motive behind the offer; otherwise, he would have simply travelled to the alpha-pleb and dispatched the assassins himself. For one, he’d wanted to check whether Geno’s little sister had turned out alright and give the crush he'd never noticed a gentler closure. Selfishly, as with the previous gold-digger plans and the hijinks in Australia, since he’d assumed the Silver situation to be doomed, he’d explored his options. More selfishly, this date had been a way for him to test his romantic incompatibility with Silver from a different angle.
Henry, in this spirit of softening the unavoidable defeats, guessed that he should leave Geno's sister with some genial departing words.
The first idea to come to mind was to tell her to cheer up because, hey, life had much worse predicaments than rejection, like family getting murdered. But that seemed inappropriate.
After eliminating several horrendous alternatives, he had to resort to the sole avenue through which he could express some human sympathy, through humour.
“I'm not going to lie,” he said. “Rose, this date sucked. Still, I’ll trust you have enough common sense to not blame it flopping on any inadequacy on your part. With a 5.8 on the Supreme Scale of Personal Social Appeal, your romantic prospects elsewhere are fantastic.”
Rose, having only half heard him while adrift in her thoughts, exhaled slowly. The escaping breath caused her face to deflate into the desolation she’d been keeping composed beneath.
“Why can’t it be me?” She asked pitifully.
"What makes you think I know?" Henry shrugged helplessly. "My social IQ was too abysmal to figure out you had a crush. This...look, it’s pointless rummaging for reasons. The problem, ultimately, is that we’re having to ask why. Rose, I’m guessing you lack examples, but a healthy relationship isn’t supposed to be this difficult; it’s not filled with doubts, with grand efforts of reformation or proving. When you find it one day, you'll discover that genuine love flows past the troubles of its own momentum. It’s a state of effortless compulsion, of, most of the time, thoughtless tranquillity. If you’re wallowing in this introspective mode, dissecting with questions of why, how, what, then what you’re dealing with isn't love but a cadaver.”
He could’ve listed several critical issues: the stalking history, the fangirling, her brother, the fact he liked someone else. However, by his reckoning, love consisted of a total assessment, the murky sum of the positives weighed against the negatives. If the equation squared, one would soon find the nullifying excuses for some or all of these impediments. For Henry and Geno's sister, they didn’t. Therefore, no love.
He’d intended to settle everything there, but Rose had fixed an unblinking stare on him during his absurd reply, the girl looking past his equivocations to the ugly truth behind.
“They’re not real.” She attacked directly, the dismay in her voice replaced by a confrontational stubbornness.
Henry raised his palms in confusion, his costume's extra pair of beetle arms attached by string mirroring the gesture. ”Maybe not for you, but the problems are real enough for me, and, generally, it takes two. I did have a colleague whose sister attempted a one-sided relationship. She became a stalker. Sad.”
Rose refused to let him dodge this one. “They’re not real.”
"Yes, they are."
"They are not real."
Henry masked his rising frustration with an amused smile. “Did I ever say they were real?”
Rose pushed again. “Cripple-gege…they’re not real.”
Henry laughed at her ridiculous insistence. “They’re not real – I know. Check out my reformations. Saana’s been gamified more than ever by my gaudy cash-grabs. I sold out. I’m filthy rich.”
Rose, however, was no longer blind to his glaring incongruencies. “They’re not real, Cripple-gege. They’re characters in a videogame. They’re not people. It doesn’t matter what happens to them. You don't have to grieve for them. You don't owe them anything. They’re not real.”
Henry, his generosity taking a beating over this evening, was losing his patience. “I’m aware they’re not real, Rose, and never once have I demanded that any of you view them otherwise. My single tiny request has been that, in exchange for the use of my charitably discounted services, you simply have to control your more destructive impulses. Don’t steal. Don’t arson. Don’t vandalise. Don’t murder. Is any of this unreasonable to ask?”
Rose, catching the animosity with which he’d emphasised ‘murder’, burst into tears. “They’re not real! Cripple-gege, I...I...haven’t murdered anyone. They..they’re NOT real. They’re not real…"
Henry, where an ordinary teen might’ve been moved to sympathy by her waterworks, stood frozen, controlling himself as he waited for the passage of his initial reaction of profound revulsion at this murderous assassin’s disgusting blubbering.
In his heart, that was all Rose amounted to, a murderer.
Rationally, he understood that she wasn’t one. The NPCs that Rose assassinated in Saana were not people in almost any material or existential sense. As a participant in Project Aevitas, he grasped this fact better than the general public, Henry informed about the precise computational mechanisms by which game characters were generated. They were a type of philosophical zombie, an amalgam of simulated features produced in real-time without a coherent unity.
But his knowledge of their creation didn’t alter how he felt. The attachments in any person’s heart weren’t derived from a logical calculation about objective values. Emotions preceded advanced cognitive operations, being possessed by infants and animals; they arose through personal experience, through reciprocal interactions, through the excitation of the senses, through the sharing of sentimental memories. In this regard, Henry’s experiences with Saana’s inhabitants had been indistinguishably human. He’d built a stronger emotional affinity for some of these characters than he had his family members. The pain at losing his NPC friends had not been fundamentally discernible from the loss of his own mother. In certain respects, it’d been worse. He’d at least been able to prepare for his mother due to the slow process of her illness; with his NPC colleagues, he’d be hanging out with them having tea one day and the next he’d receive a clip of them getting their head sawn off. The nature of this type of death also mattered. Watching a friend having their head sawn off could be quite traumatising. It might warp and dement one’s outlook on the universe. It might induce an overhaul of priorities, the value of everything else in life being subordinated to the singular mission of preventing a repeat of that ordeal.
To Henry, the killing of the NPCs was not trivial.
If one had truly comprehended the significance of his position, then it should become readily apparent what romantic barrier had stood between him and Rose all along.
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Who had she been outside of this atypical week shadowing him in Suchi?
For most players, she was the Septic Rose, leader of the assassin guild, The Garden of The Grotesque. She was a stylish femme fatale, who spliced together thrilling videos of her exploits taking out high-difficulty targets. She was an inspiration to young ladies across the globe, proof that, in the year 2050, women could also rise to the pinnacle of gaming. In a small part, as had been revealed tonight, she was an ardent disciple of a strange duellist from yesteryear.
But for Henry, Rose was—before any other qualities, before any of their history—an assassin. For him, for whom the demise of her targets had been elevated beyond a mere concept, her job contained nothing cool or praiseworthy. Assassins were responsible for killing his generals, his trading partners, his assistants, his protégés, his drinking buddies; any appeal that might exist in the role as an abstraction vanished when you’d sat through the funeral of a target and listened to the widow wail in grief. Assassins were pure scum. Worse yet, Septic Rose conducted this horrendous trade for enjoyment; going further than murder, she flaunted the heinous act in front of the public, stylising her snuff films with editing and music.
Beneath his composed facade, Henry was already disgusted by duellists for the loose associations with killing, for their inaction in the presence of eternal suffering. What, then, could be his feelings towards someone like Rose, who went further and, actually, killed? When he looked at her, his only strong desire was to execute her as he’d executed the NPC practitioners of her vile craft.
Now, he wouldn’t be attempting to execute her. Again, as with Ramiro, rationally, he understood the crimes committed inside a videogame did not warrant real-world punishment. Acknowledging this, he was capable of restraining his hostility and behaving cordially, as he’d done with Rose this week, controlling himself well enough to even offer her his flawed but sincere advice.
However, he had a limit.
The problem might be likened to dealing with someone from a culture that eats dogs.
With the brain, it wasn’t difficult to resolve the issue. One’s revulsion, assessed according to its phenomenology, stemmed not from any unique sentient quality of canines but instead from the emotional affinity constructed from treating them as pseudo-family, from the hours of playing with them, of affectionately hugging them. In the identical way that a westerner could eat a cow without any sense of transgressing the sacredness those animals had acquired in Hinduism, people with no cultural relation to dogs as pets were capable of chowing down on them without guilt. If you ate the flesh of animals, it was silly to get angry that a moral exemption had not been made for the animal you cherished. An enlightened individual, comprehending the multiplicity of the issue, should be able to compartmentalise their disagreement, to treat dog-eaters cordially, to wish them success and happiness in domains unrelated to the table.
But, still, did any of that cerebral resolution apply to the heart? At the conclusion of these rationalisations, one might ask themselves, how strong would the desire have grown to kiss a girl who’d just eaten a plate of dog? What affection and sensuosity could you savour while transferring the flavour of man’s best friend to your own tongue?
Intimacy, love, this marked the limit, the barrier that the disgusted heart would not traverse, would not want to traverse.
That, roughly, approximated Henry’s troubles with Rose, although his concern was infinitely higher for people than dogs. Through this evening, he’d been fighting to overcome his hatred for her, he’d been relying on such mental tricks to re-envision her objectively, as a player of an adventure roleplaying game, a girl with a teenage crush, a cute date. Ultimately, however, when her lips drew near, he smelled the virtual odour in her mouth, the scent of his assassinated companions.
Romance was an impossibility. A videogame had made them incompatible.
He grabbed the blabbering girl’s shoulder and shook it firmly enough to dislodge her sunglasses. “Calm down. Listen, I’m not accusing you of killing people. My expectation isn’t for you or anyone to take on that burden. I understand why you can’t do that. I understand completely.”
Rose, specifically, he would never ask to adopt his perspective, knowing full well the struggle she’d been through. In fact, she had already once viewed the NPCs as people, she, like himself, having been trained in this mindset by her brother.
Geno was an ardent proponent of NPC personhood. Unbeknownst to Henry at the time, while training as a commander under the brother’s guidance, he’d simultaneously been placed through an intentional regime of intensive immersion to inculcate a sentimental attachment to the NPCs. Beyond mere instruction in tactical manoeuvring and campaign management, her brother, claiming the importance of a commander’s familiarity with the everyday minutia of soldiery, had encouraged him to interact on a personal basis with their troops, to scout with them, to eat with them, to camp with them, to have them teach him how to ride a mount and shoot a bow from the saddle, to go into battle alongside them. In the love triangle story Henry'd given to Silver, one of the male leads had been a nomadic warrior NPC; that character featured traits of himself and his problems, but it was also a composite of his first significant virtual buddies, a memorial of the young soldiers whose comradery had removed the blinding veil from his eyes.
As Geno’d rejoiced in reminding him tonight with Heavy-Finger’s grotesque portrait, what Henry’d eventually sprouted into was the outcome of those initial seeds planted in his brain.
Rose, the sister of this brother, had been subjected to this training long before Henry. For a while, it’d not been game characters that she’d assassinated. She’d been hunting down people, her brother sticking her on his political rivals. The therapy she’d undergone in recent years, much more than stalking, had been aimed at deprogramming her of this pathological belief, reconditioning her to distinguish between the real and the virtual.
Mistakenly, she’d assumed that Henry must have also liberated himself based off his violent schism with her brother and his reformations.
But no. Henry still regarded the NPCs as people. The conflict between him and her sibling had been over the best practice in light of that delusion.
To Geno, Saana presented an opportunity to relive the heights of humanity lost in modernity, the golden age of heroes and villains, of noble kings ruling nations and leading armies to war. Within this framework, the NPCs functioned to heighten the stakes, pawns who trembled before those amongst them who were most mighty. By learning to care about these virtual inhabitants as more than characters, Saana transformed from a mere videogame to a transcendent experience in which the significance of one’s every action was multiplied, a thrust of the arm extinguishing a life, a one-sentence command obliterating a city.
The suffering in the background didn't deter him because Geno, like Rose, was an old-money aristocrat, a living fossil of Nietzsche's master-morality in which good had been nothing but a synonym for noble. An extreme manifestation of this class's worst traits, her brother had inherited a love for domination unclouded by sympathies and morality. To him, other people, virtual or real, were pseudo-cattle, treated with tenderness not out of obligation to a sense of inherent human value but because the latest theory of herding demonstrated that kindness increased the milk yield, because one was forced to respect the property rights of other peasant-owners. When one did have the opportunity to tread on the neck of some poor fellow, one might not have grinned, but that was only because decorum regarded displays of exaggerated glee in poor taste, a sign that one had become like the uninhibited peasant smiling without restraint, a half-animal. Consequently, massacres of real people, assassinations of real people, these deeds, invoking no internal conflict, became an acceptable price of self-aggrandisement if one could escape the usual restrictions - like in the wild west of another universe.
How could Henry ever have agreed with this? He'd grown up miserably poor. His mother had died in her 30s of a treatable cancer because, envisioning no way to pay for the medical costs without ruining the family, she’d resigned herself to her end, telling no one until the visible disintegration of her body revealed the truth. For Henry, it was not admiration for the boot that his background had granted him, his loftiest aspiration wasn't to take a turn wearing it himself while another wretch licked it clean, the very existence of this arrangement offended him. He was an unironic humanist. To the extent that he’d come to view the NPCs of Saana rotting away in squalor as human-beings akin to himself, this ethos had transferred into the game.
The war with Rose's brother had been to settle whose deluded vision of a world inhabited by humans should prevail in this cycle. In their battle, Henry, the greater of the tyrants, had seized the position of tyranny and conducted its methods to win, but his antagonism to this role had never dwindled. He still knew his enemy. The motto, sic semper tyrannis, still chimed sweetly in his ears. No tears would wet his cheeks for the Julius Caesars, the Marie Antoinettes, or the Romanovs of history. His ambition had been to render as redundant as possible within the conditions of this cyclical universe the demonic role that assigned undue influence to monsters like Rose’s brother AND himself – billion of lives relying on the charity and madness of one teenager from another universe was an existential nightmare.
“Cripple-gege, YOU can’t view them as people!” Rose argued through her tears against his insanity. “They’re not real! Saana is a computer game. Saana is fiction. The ‘deaths’ of its NPCs are identical to the ‘deaths’ of movie characters. You are a regular kid playing a videogame. You’re chipping off numbers from a healthbar. They’re not real. Saana is fiction. You are a regular kid playing a…”
She began to ramble, regurgitating the lines not of her own formulation but drilled into her by her psychiatrist. Repeating such phrases to herself like a mantra had been part of her deprogramming, part of ridding herself of her brother’s toxic influence.
The things she killed were not people. To take satisfaction in the challenge of hunting virtual characters wasn’t crazy. It was fun. Stealth games had been a popular genre. By playing to this aspect of Saana, she did nothing different from billions of other gamers. It was preposterous to even call her innocent, for that would imply the possibility of a crime existing, when it could not. The issue was so unproblematic that she wasn’t compelled to quit the game. If she wanted to quit, the only sufficient justification should be her boredom, but she wasn’t bored - she loved hunting these fictional characters.
“Rose,” Henry repeated himself, “I’m not asking anyone to copy me, nor agree with me. I’m not telling you to change your mindset or faulting you for it. I do understand.”
Logically, he had no qualms with her actions – whether it be for the purpose of mental health or pure fun, there were no ethical issues with killing videogame characters. In his heart, however, her actions placed her in league with Ramiro, who, amongst his many insane reasons for eating children, committed his crime to affirm that the game had no psychological grip over him, The Saviour’s debauchery a counterproductive attempt to prove his freedom.
Rose shrieked. “You CAN’T! It’s too much! IT’S TOO MUCH! NO! NO..."
She exploded in hysterics, the panicked agitation returning from when she’d torn and stamped her brother's picture of the eye-gouged monk.
Her shrieking attracted the attention of those queuing to enter the city, wondering if someone had been murdered, the tone similar. But the sight of her avocado outfit made them dismiss her for an Offworlder drunk.
Henry, in her mad outburst, saw that Rose had caught another small glimpse of the mountain he carried inside him, and the madness.
Of course, if one followed his delusion to its logical conclusion, his role as The Tyrant had not been enviable. It was one thing to inflict the casualties of war in the manner that her brother had, with all the potent sensations of human annihilation channelled into the positive cause of inflating of one’s own grandiose stature. It was a totally different thing to endure these casualties in the way Henry had, to retain a sense of death's abhorrence, to care about people, yet to slaughter them anyway.
Properly perceived, his position doomed him, the human heart not designed to house such a massive contradiction. The analysis he’d conducted in The Overdream upon the psychological downfall of Karnon—the descent into madness of a former national hero, the great impulse to pervert and reframe one’s misdeed that’d resulted in this notion of expanding souls through suffering—this equally applied to Henry. Post-retirement, he stood now in the same limbo as the God concluding his struggles. Henry had reached the quiet period that comes after the mountain, when one’s thoughts were no longer occupied with the immediacy of the daily war. In this quiet hour of peace, his soul, left empty by the cessation of its usual climb, yearned desperately to refill itself, to reassume the intensity of existence it’d expanded to accommodate, to wrestle once again with its ‘Enemy-Bear’. However, there was nothing to return to, nor would any future struggle ever equal what he’d done. A portion of his grown soul could never be satisfied, its singular solace taken from reminiscing upon his heroic past. And that past included many detestable acts.
“It is too much,” he agreed. “That’s why I’ve quit the game. I had to retire before I go crazier. This duelling stuff, it’s many things, but it’s not a return. I’m also quitting this. Rose, do the same. Saana's not helping you.” Henry almost concluded his advice there, but he couldn’t help appending a final recommendation. “And if you can’t quit, at the very least, please, stop with the assassinations.”
Rose froze up in shock, staring at him hurtfully as if he’d used that last sentence to smack her in the mouth.
Henry sighed. “If you’re going to get mad, direct your hatred at the right person. Go on.” He assumed an open stance to let the assassin take the third free shot at him tonight. “Hurry up.”
The other assassins that shadowed him, like Loki, murdered his NPC compatriots to settle their personal grudges against him and screw with his head. If he could stop Rose from joining them, from killing even one of his friends, he would happily allow her to sink a dagger into him. It was an easy trade.
But, in this ludicrous offer, he’d been mistaken, his judgement clouded yet again by the mountain of death that subordinated all considerations to itself. Rose—who’d freed herself completely from the paradigm that attached personal meaning to this virtual violence, who wouldn’t have treated Henry this viciously regardless—had simply been hurt by the fact that, during her extreme outpouring of emotion, Henry’s thoughts had never once veered far from Saana, her human sadness less of a priority to him than the NPCs.
Rose, pained by his implied accusation, recognising the futility in arguing against a delusion so strong, resumed her earlier tears, her frustration and hopelessness flowing down her cheeks.
Henry, after a brief confusion, recognised his error.
But, demonic until the very end, his first reaction was relief that, on this occasion, no one would die on account of a petty grudge against himself, that, unlike Ramiro, she would not be resolving her trivial grievances tonight with the false catharsis of violence.
As this fear of his passed, and only perhaps because it could pass, he reverted to a normal mindset in which a teenager might empathise with another weeping after a tough rejection.
He separated from Geno's sister, taking a few steps towards his horse before spinning back around and thrusting a finger to point at the girl and her misery. “Remember this feeling, Rose. Don’t try to justify it later, don’t change it into something it isn’t, don’t search for a false explanation of kindness that dulls its sharp edge. That pain before you is the truth. This week, conscientious of your monstrous brother, I practised tolerance, I forced myself to perform what I calculated to be the appropriate motions of sympathy. Now, I realise my error. If you're going to find peace, it IS important to surround yourself with people who care about you, but it is just as important to recognise those who don’t and rid yourself of them. Fine. I admit it. They’re very real to me, and, because you murder them, you disgust me. Stop killing them."
Leaping back onto his mount, he galloped off towards the city gates ahead without glancing back at the hysterical girl.
He chose direct cruelty over the prolonged cruelty of further consolation.
Not doing this earlier, he’d realised, had been his critical failure in ignoring Rose’s presence this week, in this abominable date. If she were ever going to escape the monsters of her past, it was essential that she identify them accurately, that she not be misled by his limp, insincere gestures of charity. She may have needed help, but it’d never been appropriate for him to be the one offering it. He, too, was one of the monsters.
However, as Henry listened to the receding sound of her sobs, the response of his heart was much, much lighter than he would have expected.
For a second, his own motivations came into doubt. His departing cruelty might have been absolutely nothing but hatred.