A seventh-floor apartment.

After the press conference, Henry returned to the quiet of his apartment, to the converted storage space where he’d dwelled like a mad-king locked in his castle’s throneroom, like an ogre in a musty cave. This would be the last time he visited, Henry leaving his headquarters for good.

In a small ritual of farewell, he spent an hour packing up his possessions. With the help of Alex and the hidden spy-master member of their trio, Elmer, he stuffed his books into cardboard boxes, he taped up paintings, sculptures, and the other random crafts with which he’d passed the hours of his insomniac nights.

Despite the scandal stirring outside around the Winter Open’s relocation and Henry’s issued challenge, the three of them packed in relative silence. Together, they'd conquered a planet twice, defeated tens of millions in battle, overthrown kingdoms through revolt and poison, raised an empire from sand and sea. Compared with these adventures, a quirky weekend tournament did not constitute a remarkable event. The trio's thoughts were mostly occupied with his retirement.

Henry, re-examining his artworks, much like the convoluted story he’d written for the girl, he could admit—now with commitment to moving on—the presence of the mountain that’d ultimately stood between them. Sorted chronologically, his creative efforts showed the gradual intrusion of his obsessive delirium. These past hobbies had also been made subordinate, reduced from their former childhood significance to distraction and self-therapy, mere breaths taken between the steps upwards. By the end, at the peak of his madness, the works became...strange.

That covert dominance perhaps applied to his entire teenage crush as well. He couldn’t be sure. The empathy for the NPCs he’d found attractive in her might’ve been nothing more than the mountain demanding to be loved.

He couldn’t be sure, nor would he try too deeply to be sure – moving on meant also discarding this intensive psychoanalysis steeped in the language of his delusion.

While Henry was stripping the bedding from his mattress, the spy-master Elmer gave him a curious look at it, sitting on the floor without a bedframe.

“Firmer sleep-support?” the spy-master asked.

The paltry mattress lying on the bare ground made for a strange juxtaposition with the rest of the loft apartment, which, in the course of Henry’s living there, had been fully-decked out with equipment for his compulsive hobbies, from an exercise suite to a woodcrafting studio.

Henry—having moved on—gave a silent shrug.

“Stubbornness." The beaver-head was lounging on a sofa while meting out instructions to contractors for the hyped-up event. “Our boy Hen couldn’t concede that his stay wasn’t temporary. Same charade as this packing-up nonsense. Guys like us never retire. He’ll be sneaking back in two weeks. Card or no Card.”

"By the way, what is this 'card'?” Elmer had been excluded from that matter, the hand-over ritual at the conference confusing him as much as the audience.

Alex shrugged.

Henry changed the topic. “You sailing to Suchi, mate?”

In the mass migration of challengers flocking into the little zone would be many of his guildmates, excited as everyone else to scrap with The Crippled Tyrant.

But the spy-master wouldn’t be attending. “Like my idol, I’m singularly focused on the grander arena.”

By ‘I’m’, he meant his current spy persona.

Elmer had grown bored after months of managing their spy-network in the background. He was now taking a ‘holiday’, volunteering for a personal assignment to infiltrate their main rival. Stationed in Aion Laisije, the zone dedicated to The Company’s sanctioned intra-guild battles, he’d been playing a rookie commander, Henry giving him a few pointers.

Henry’d also given him a piece of The Syncretist’s Armament for that assignment, The Ring of a Thousand Bodies. Since finding The Cap, he wanted to get it back to enhance The Overdream, although this request wasn’t urgent given Hannes needing to do further experiments before the time-dilation could be extended.

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After packing up his artwork, Henry left the remainder for the movers to handle. For the most part, he just hadn’t wanted them snooping through his private belongings after becoming an overnight celebrity. Enough people were already rummaging through his personal life; his friends and family had been harassed by reporters after Oliver doxxed him, and, apparently, a school-teacher who’d despised him had already done an interview, revealing The Tyrant of Saana’s crazy academic record. Henry would rather not later hear of a mover spilling the beans on The Tyrant’s fever-dream carvings and sweat-stained bedsheets. They would have to make do with sharing his favourite seaweed-flavoured snacks.

Finished, leaving, he paused at the door before shutting off the lights to give his den a departing glance.

The sight of the boxes and the empty furniture didn’t stir anything palpable inside him beyond the usual pain of retirement. This had been merely a portal to Saana, he supposed, a place for him to play with efficiency, close to his colleagues, barred from any interruptions from the rest of life.

“Guess you won’t tell us where you’re off to.” Alex’s voice choked with more open sentiment, despite his earlier banter about his friend's inability to quit.

Henry thought a while, before answering honestly to press his commitment. “Rest of the week, until the tournament, I’ll be zipping back and forth between the city catching up with family and hiding out at Kara’s new pony farm, where I’m staying now. After that, I’ll continue the disrupted travel plans. Start somewhere without any reporters. Maybe Antarctica. Chill with the penguins. Trek to the South Pole. Nothing like months of snow to clear a stuffy head.”

He was joking about the last part, his digital half’s Floating Leaf winter misadventure teaching him the folly in sensory deprivation therapy, at least while paired with hyper-mindfulness.

“Little Liu might want to ride ponies,” said Alex.

“He’s welcome to come, if he wants. Got horses, too.”

Alex, heavier than the weight-limit of a pony, nodded.

Henry stepped out with his friends, shutting the door behind them. Bon voyage.

Slowly, they strolled down the hallway outside, Henry peeking in on the company’s storage rooms on the same floor, the dim spaces crammed mass-grave-dense with retired hardware and office furniture longing for people to use them again.

Alex, trying to lift the mood, snapped his fingers. “Oh, yeah! How’d your date with Simon’s sis end? Is papa getting a Legendary? Another sword, please. I know you’re hoarding them.”

He’d sent someone to spy after the abrupt cancellation of Henry’s speed-dating plan, being pleased to find him on a date with his original nominee, Geno’s sister, and hoping he’d score the promised reward.

Henry, shaking his head, grimaced very slightly. “Rose was a firm no.”

“And Silver Wolf?” asked Elmer, who’d dispatched the guards escorting him to Central City.

Henry laughed pathetically. “I was a firm no.”

His companions were confused, unable to understand why he would be rejected - especially after the revelation of his identity as The Tyrant, an ultra-rich, ultra-accomplished genius.

One should know that, through his exposure, Henry'd transformed into one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet. At their level, top players were basically rockstars, with flocks of groupies competing to hook up with them in-game and out. Saana's verisimilitude produced an odd quirk whereby their combat skills seemed to trigger the strength-obsessed chimp part of the brain, causing many fans to fall madly in love with them. Even for a person as socially-stunted as their monomaniacal guildmate, it would be dating on easy mode.

“Excessive fame...” guessed Elmer.

“Is she in an enemy guild?” asked Alex.

They did have plenty of enemies, many of whom would also be flocking to Suchi.

Henry shrugged. He'd moved on.

Alex brought up the Winter Open’s schedule on his e-assistant. “Since that’s a flop, we can squeeze in the original gold-digger tournament plan.”

Henry was getting irritated. “Stop, man. Let me just wallow alone for a while in a boring, ordinary teenage rejection. Not every life problem needs to be solved with a spectacular tournament."

Besides, the whole gold-digger-tournament-speed-dating-psychotic-campus-philandering saga had obviously been a joke, an absurd, highly-self-aware, highly-ironic piss-take allowing him to vent some of his despair at the perhaps more absurd fact that, of all the girls in the world he might have picked who would have viewed his filthy wealth between neutrality and a fantastic plus, the one he did pick would be totally turned off by his filthy wealth because it'd been acquired via mass-murder in a videogame.

How unlucky, how tragic...

However, in the end, hadn’t something good could come out of that romantic travesty? Henry could always fly back to Aus and try again with that ginger hottie who, her heart's defences eventually succumbing to his expertly-managed siege, had smooched him with unrestrained passion - gg ez lol.

Probably not, he thought on further reflection. Based on how she’d reacted to Alex’s television appearance without recognising Little Liu, she seemed to loathe The Tyrant, too - the actual Tyrant.

How doubly tragically unlucky...

To imagine, not one but two burgeoning Australian teenage writers would happen to both despise Him...what were the odds?

As Henry and his comrades hopped on the elevator to take their last ride together, down to the ground floor of this sky-scraping castle bought with the spoils of their adventures, he gave another pathetic laugh that echoed along the emptying hallway.