Flaming Sun HQ, a conference room crowded with hundreds of journalists awaiting The Tyrant’s arrival.
Many tuning in were hoping to find The Company in a dispirited, or at least, disoriented mood after last night’s surprise spearing by Oliver. However, at the table now, before the jostling journalists, Alex Wong—his years-long charade with The Tyrant having been unmasked, the truth of the pair’s conspiracy fished out from the shadow, and the beaver-head revealed to be a mere a puppet—showed not a single sign of disturbance. The lines of his mullet had been gelled perfectly straight. His suit was impeccable, his gaze imperious and amused. This morning’s clownish grin contained an extra hint of smugness, a small acknowledgement to some other secret which, in the event of its exposure, would also give him happiness.
How irksomely obnoxious this duo were. After pulling the wool over the world’s eyes, didn’t they at least owe their duped victims the pleasure of seeing them wriggle in shame? Alas, as with The Company’s enemies after their global conquests, today’s audience would receive nothing of the sort. They would be given only the sublime, invincible grin of victory; while it might sometimes waver, it could never be broken.
In the fashion befitting of the genuine Tyrant, the man of the hour arrived without announcement or pomp. He emerged unnoticed from the crowd of reporters, his plain teenage bearing compared with his stooge’s attracting no significant attention.
The journalists spotting him yelled and directed their cameras to pore over the inches of The Tyrant’s flesh, zooming in on The Tyrant’s hair, The Tyrant’s nose, the Tyrant’s choice of shades, The Tyrant’s cheekbones. His physical features were identical to his avatar’s. However, unlike in last night’s footage or the other clips of him in-game, a stylist had tidied up his appearance to make him more presentable. In a hard to define way, while his original outfit seemed more in character, this drastic change was in character, too.
The older directors of Flaming Sun, who were meeting him for the first time, leapt to their feet to shake the hand of their young leader. They shoved their beaming, ingratiating faces extra close, hoping to form an impression and earn his future favour.
Meanwhile, the members of his guild’s inner circle, aware of his immense disdain for such grovelling in regards to matters of The Company, were more subdued. They nodded. They waved.
Even for them, his closest companions, they couldn’t be sure how he would handle his exposure. They were often baffled by his plans, obscured in their deceptive web of layers, ending in goals they only half understood.
Take, for example, the schism in their guild half a year ago. Geno’s defection had caught most of them off guard, but, within an hour, they were already being briefed about war plans. While the rest of them had falsely assumed Geno to be a member of the guild’s four leaders, the three actual leaders had long anticipated the betrayal. It'd been explained that they'd known of the risk from day one and that they'd encouraged the incident to flush out the internal rats who would oppose the reformations.
Now, with this latest debacle, who knew what their supreme leader might do? He might retaliate by ordering Channel 5’s destruction. He might laugh it off. He might shrug with indifference. He might pretend to grieve as this step of his grand scheme unfolded.
Alex, not so clueless, didn’t hold back. Giving an exaggerated welcome, he stood up with the stiff, humble mannerisms of a butler and pulled out the empty chair next to him - an over-the-top prop throne of fake gold and velvet. He bowed and twirled his hand.
“Your royal highness."
The Tyrant, flat-faced, slid into Alex’s original chair, and Alex Wong jumped into the mock throne, agreeing to accept the burden for one last hour.
The Tyrant removed his glasses. He swept his tired gaze over the cameras, at however many people were condensed within their lenses, at the journalists waiting to analyse and dissect the first sentence from him, speaking now in the searing white lights of this conference room.
For years, he’d lurked in the dark like a rodent, scuttling through holes and musty recesses. He’d always anticipated, on the day he’d inevitably be dragged from his hiding place, that, after becoming a nocturnal creature, he might squeal and flail in the scorching brightness of the open.
However, the sight of these people gawking at him, at Him, seemed to spur no nerves, no shame, no irritation, no hatred, no sadness, no curiosity, no joy, no pride. If he felt anything, it was merely confusion. The reasons they cared about this, his brain could answer, but his heart, unable to latch to them, remained unmoved and contemptuous.
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The Tyrant snapped his head to Alex Wong. “Did you not prepare an over-the-top presentation?”
Alex’s face blanched. “I thought you would start us off with a parody speech...”
“Nope.”
“Dude, I don’t have anything for this part. Can you improvise one? I need this to be more epic.”
The Tyrant scrunched his face in distaste, then turned back to the cameras. “I won’t deny it. I’m ‘The Tyrant’.” Grabbing a water bottle in front of him, he undid the cap and leaned back comfortably in his chair. “If you have any questions, raise your hands, one at a time, no shouting. I won’t give up any specific commanding methods or future plans for The Company’s operations.”
As he skipped immediately to the Q&A, an abrupt torrent of shouts exploded, but the room soon fell whisper-quiet after he had security thin the herd by a third, The Tyrant singling out people who’d yelled out of turn and ejecting them. Thus, they were given their first taste of one crucial difference between The Tyrant and his puppet. The real one possessed a much shorter fuse for disruption and disobedience, accustomed as he was to the prompt Yes-sirs essential for his occupation.
“Why the big charade of anonymity?” asked the first journalist. “The unmasked Tyrant looks nonplussed.”
“Am I? I might just also be excellent at masking my crushing despondence." The Tyrant winked. “I can’t be too certain, to be honest. The anonymity’s something that’s evolved over the years. As a kid, I used to think it was cool to have hidden identities. Like, being Blurm or something. As a teen, after Flattening Mountains, after all the attention Alex and the rest here have gotten, I saw the fragility of privacy; it occurred to me that you can lose the ability to vanish in a crowd, to walk around a city without harassment, to go to the supermarket looking like trash and have not even the cashier remember. Then, with The Company, anonymity acquired a practical value. Now, I’ll need a constant guard assignment because tens of millions of players want to kill my character. But even outside of the game - when you get to numbers of haters this large, basic math tells you that the whackjob minority present in any group multiplies to several thousand who’d kill you in real life. The regular price of too much success.” Laughing, he pointed at another journalist.
“Malc—”
“Nobody cares who you are,” The Tyrant interrupted. “They want my answers. Ask the question.”
The journalist’s face turned to scorn. “Speaking of success, how do you think someone so young achieved it?”
“Efficient time-use.” The Tyrant pointed at another.
“For both Mr Lee and Mr Wong, how do you two split your duties? Company versus Flaming Sun?”
The Tyrant shook his head. “Directly, my primary focus has been on war. However, for any domain where the final outcome might be someone getting killed, I’ve also had ultimate discretion. Basically, any part of nation-building—coups, judicial systems, hospitals, espionage, infrastructure, transport, diplomacy—that’s been me, The Tyrant. Alex manages most everything else - staff, player recruitment, real-life finances—"
“Don’t undersell me,” Alex interjected. “I do some of the killing. I kill with the ladies.”
"He does that for both guilds," continued The Tyrant, not acknowledging the crass joke. "Neither of us handle the PVE division, which is exclusively Ashoka's purview."
A moustachioed Indian kid scrolling on a tablet raised a hand without glancing up.
The same journalist had a follow up. “Mr Lee, that’s quite a broad umbrella, isn’t it? From war to transport?”
The Tyrant shrugged. “In the long term, you have to reckon everything by bodies. A soldier can be lost through field manoeuvres, through shoddy equipment, through defection, through sunken ship, through death in infancy by disease. The health of an army is the health of its nation, and vice versa.”
“How did the two Tyrants meet?” asked another.
“I imagine Alex wants to answer this one."
Indeed, Alex Wong, having prepared materials for this specific question months in advance, gave a slideshow presentation detailing his Digital Justice Club scheme, his scouring of the globe for hidden talent. In his search for a commander with no prior guild affiliations, he’d fixed his eye on an anonymous player at the time dominating the ladders of multiple pre-virtual RTS games. Eventually, he triangulated The Tyrant's real-life identity and location from clips of LAN-events and a cluster of other non-gaming anomalies. From there, Alex Wong had transferred to his school and swindled The Tyrant into joining his gaming club. He'd then, after the introduction via duelling, arranged him to be taught commanding by Genocidelol and surrounded him with the other recruited talents.
The presentation was embarrassingly corny, with Alex Wong hiring digital artists to create dramatic scenes, such as the instigating event for the revenge plot, when he’d been kicked from Heaven’s Mountain’s arena team. Alex voice-acted the dialogue himself. The whole thing would have dragged on longer than a feature-length film had The Tyrant, growing impatient, not insisted on skipping through.
But, from what snippets were shown, the audience, their perception of Mayonnaise plummeting after last nights’ revelation, had some of the lost esteem restored. They realised that he was terrifying in his own way, although he seemed to waste his talents on the pettiest goals. They were able to pin to the grandiose braggart this other aspect of The Company, represented by its bombastic half of Flaming Sun, which, perhaps, was no less significant than The Tyrant’s darker domain.
Alex Wong had also, clearly, been carrying his own secrets. In a strange mishmash of their dual roles, while Alex Wong had portrayed the public face, most of his actual day-to-day doings had been conducted in the background, invisible to the player-base. The Tyrant, meanwhile, had operated anonymously, but his military work had been the much more overt of the two, every player beholding his campaigns and castles.