The northern edge of The Slums, The New Suchi Arena.
Finally, the massive stadium’s purpose had been revealed. Its benefactor was none other than The Cripple, better known as The Tyrant, who’d built the venue for his secret duelling research into the formulation of A Thousand Tools, his ground-breaking, pillar-toppling martial art. As expected of The Tyrant, his duelling side-hobby had also been conducted with his distinctive blend of shadow and grandeur.
The site, stretching kilometres to fit its one-hundred arenas, now formed an unofficial border. To the south were The Slums; to the north, The Company’s city in development for the Winter Open Invitational. Builders and planners from the organisation had already demarcated the plots of additional stadiums, to host the tournament’s other events and, in the meantime, serve as training grounds for the millions flocking this week to stop His tyrannical, every-format sweep.
But more than outside the huge venue, the inside was a hive of human activity. Attendance by trainees had swelled to its maximum, everyone having logged on who’d qualified to enter the venue via a top 10% placement on Suchi’s duelling ladder. Many—no longer hiding their jobs as reporters, high-level arena junkies, Saana League analysts, and enemy spies—stood in the open with binoculars, their sights firmly fixed upon one sub-arena while they waited their turn in the sand with Him.
Him! Unbelievably, The Tyrant, crusadingintheshadows himself, had popped up at the arena for practice mere hours after announcing his retirement and issuing his gauntleted challenge to the globe. Here was the man who manifested myth, The Thousand-Epitheted Hydra, using his myriad skills to beat up the trash, Tier-0 trainees of Suchi.
Or get beaten up. For some bizarre reason, The Tyrant had immediately resumed his daily habit of joke practice. Not acknowledging that his avant-garde art had been outed, he avoided showing the synthesised techniques with which he'd destroyed Ramiro by dodging a thousand insta-kill cuts, and instead he fought the noobs with his latest ‘invented’ styles, even if this resulted in him losing matches. That's right, most shockingly, plebs who’d only played for weeks were getting the priceless privilege of defeating The Tyrant one v one, spearing The Tyrant’s empire-bearing shoulders, caving The Tyrant’s genius skull.
As if today marked no difference from yesterday, The Tyrant, seemingly oblivious to the thousands staring at him in game and millions out of it, continued to give his personal duelling tips to those he pummelled and those who pummelled him.
For duellists who requested that he flaunt his real wares, that he teach the secret of the weapon-juggling they’d been failing to replicate for hours, he feigned ignorance. When they tried to demonstrate the technique against him, he pretended it was not himself they were imitating, he praised this new avant-garde streak in Suchi’s youth—"Wow! Your inventiveness surpasses my own! Nice, there is some hope for the next generation."—and then he just stabbed through their uncoordinated mess with a spear.
In the middle of his clowning, some challengers refused to entertain both his duelling charade and the greater one of him being a duellist. They asked for exclusive interviews with The Tyrant, for special favours, for apologies, for duels to the death. Happy to let them run their mouths, The Tyrant dismantled one after another using a number of joke arts, like The Laughing Son’s Combat System or a smithing ‘martial’ art, for which he squatted in imitation of a dwarf and chain-threw miniature anvils.
But, despite this weird act, it wasn’t as if The Tyrant were making a serious effort to hide his identity.
While he duelled, lectured, and humiliated players in one arena, his eyes were constantly aglow, flicking to the arenas adjacent to his. In those, he’d cleared out of duelling trainees to make room for Suchi’s top duos, 3v3-teams, and 6v6s. These he was simultaneously controlling as he practised for the extra categories he’d promised to win, the multi-tasking effort barely impacting his fraudulent duelling performance, the teams—chosen by The Tyrant himself—executing his strategies without any complaints of a lack of fun or poor roleplay-congruence.
Or, for a greater testament to his identity, a battalion had been guarding him of elite, ash-grey-uniformed Chayokan soldiers, patrolling and intercepting would-be assassins.
No, The Tyrant didn't seem to be hiding anything. One could only suppose he was pulling off one of his patented multi-layered avant-garde schemes. Maybe his absurdity functioned to prove how little last night’s scandal could touch one of his towering stature? Or could it be a declaration of his invincibility in the face of any task beneath the heavens? Watch, ye unwashed plebs, as The Tyrant-Cripple-Flower juggles multiple disguises as effortlessly as he’d juggled weapons and battles, as effortlessly as he would juggle fifteen plus tournaments next weekend.
Since his appearance, several players appearing in person had replied to his challenge for the Winter Open with their own, promising they would meet The Tyrant in the arena. Some spoke on behalf of the guilds and professional organisations sailing to Suchi. Others spoke for themselves, lone wolves ready to test their talents against history’s best.
Two more such challengers were arriving, his guard perimeter blocking a duo of masked Qi Masters, the pair drenched red in gore, having come directly from the grounds outside where duellists were scrapping to qualify for entrance.
One of the duo was a tall fellow with slender limbs of tight, knotty muscle. Waiting for the ongoing duel to conclude, the man removed his mask. Revealed was a face matured beyond its real age in its early 30s by emaciation. His flesh clung to the bones of his skull, like a corpse baked dry in the desert sun or an ascetic monk who'd starved themselves to death after refusing to consume anything except the divine will of their god.
Henry, spotting the emaciated newcomer, discarded a halberd he'd been hefting. He finished his opponent quick by
"Tonkatownfunk eliminated! HF wins! -0, +0."
Dropping the beast transformation, Henry ordered the teams he’d been controlling in the neighbouring arenas to train alone for a while. Then, with a surprised smile, he jumped off the stage and squeezed through his guards to meet the old Qi Master, many years having passed since their last duel.
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“Morty, you fallen-off son of a bitch!” Henry thrust out a hand of greeting. “What’s up, brother? You out for vengeance, too?”
Thousands of heads amongst the spectators snapped towards the Qi Master, the crowd recognising him for many different reasons.
A few long-time fans of duelling would know the emaciated duellist at a glance. It was Mrtyu. In Saana II, for a while, he’d reigned as the indisputable number one, an apex duelling of terrifying physical talent, once possessing the singular, insurmountable dominance of the translation of his Sanskrit mononym. Mrtyu: Death.
Alternatively, Saana League supernerds might recognise him from his second career, as a coach for the Indian team Pravah.
Most here, however, recognised him from The Way of Fighting Alone series, which they’d watched last night after The Tyrant’s unexpected duelling return. Mrtyu had been the series’ end boss. The Invincible Cripple, for his final cheat of a feat, had cheated death itself, giving it such a ruthless beating with his Legendaries that it’d vanished afterwards into the abyss of irrelevance. The finale had been quite poetic if one could look past The Cripple’s obnoxious weeb-parody aesthetic.
Mrtyu, standing in Suchi half-a-decade later, having immediately quit his job and deleted his character to respawn after the duel with Ramiro, saw this judgement in the stares of the crowd. However, he’d been cast from the same monomaniacal mould as Henry, a climber with nothing but his mountain in view.
Indifferent, Mrtyu returned The Cripple’s friendly handshake, the two’s forearms flexing their hardest with masculine tension. “Just paying my respects to the dead Tyrant and The Cripple who sprang from his coffin.”
“The Invincible Cripple,” Henry corrected.
“For now,” Mrtyu countered, flicking his head back with laughter and dodging a dagger stab to his chin while unsheathing his own weapon.
For now - this wasn’t an arrogant boast. The veteran duellist knew that, once the rest of the world picked up these advanced techniques, Henry would be surpassed due to his physical limitations, neither of them able to contend with the latest batch of freaks who excelled in both the cerebral and bodily aspects of the arena.
Henry counter-countered with an invincible laugh, Mrtyu’s counter-stab harmlessly deflected by dozens of spell-shields activated on his body by the Chayokan guards. “You forget my greatest strength.” He grabbed and stopped the wrist of a Cutthroat popping up behind to execute the duellist while messaging the others to stop. “Outskilled or not, I’ll always have my backup - the backup of my cheats.”
Mrtyu grimaced, a painful flashback hitting him as he slipped out of the entanglement of guards, a dagger falling from his punctured stomach.
However, the two were merely playing, no serious animosity existing between them.
What the public didn't know was that Mrtyu had continued chasing the strategic path Henry’d discovered. Like many of The Cripple’s rivals, he’d anonymously attended the bootcamps set up for Operation Phantom Limbs, where Henry’d trained a bunch of passivism-preaching duellist terrorists. While the rest eventually gave up, Mrtyu had soldiered on with the mission alone. His dropping in the rankings had been due to insisting on experimenting with a variety of arts. In this latest instalment, his joining Saana League as a coach had been part of the same mission, the guy hoping to gain more resources, more talented test-dummies.
Henry—who’d also himself given up before The Cap—felt a little sorry for nullifying the hard work of this much more committed duellist. “How many styles did you learn?”
“In-depth? Sixteen.”
Henry laughed, his sympathy evaporating. “Oh, you weren’t even close."
Shrugging, he turned and extended a hand to the second Qi Master, a shorter, younger Indian fellow, who returned his shake with too much respect to dare retaliating if there’d been another cheap blindside.
“Did you quit as well?” Henry asked in peace. “Waiving your contract penalty is impossible for me. I’ve, really, stepped down from The Company. These guards,” he gestured at the security detail, “are a favour from my ex-guildmates.”
The person addressed was Whitefrog, a martial prodigy and a core member of Mrtyu’s pro-team. Henry’d met the lad in real-life this week, sparring him at the HQ’s VR gym. By skipping here with a Tier-0 character, the kid would be unable to relevel before the tournament, in which the pros would participate, too, the event following the regular Saana League season. The pros would all be travelling on specialised galley ships, decked with training facilities.
Whitefrog, glancing around at the thousands of people staring at them, signalled for Henry to open his private messages.
-Whitefrog: I’m still on the team, Senior. They think it’s worth me skipping to learn the weapon-juggling. For next season.
Team Pravah’s analysts had already deduced, correctly, that this Twenty-Tools-derived technique was designed for the Forsaken Master Qi Master spec, which could perform the swaps much easier due to their Basic Attack
Henry replied with a cold sneer. “Presumptuous to think I’d teach you. However, it’s smart to skip. You wouldn’t want to be humiliated alongside the others when I win the 6v6 – all three of them.”
-Whitefrog: You’re right, Senior. Fifteen tournaments; fifteen victories assured. GG;EZ.
There was no sarcasm, the kid showing immense deference after witnessing last night’s match and checking out Henry's Saana II duelling series.
While the young and even younger duellist were chatting, the older Mrtyu had been inspecting the massive stadium and all the fresh blood gathered to learn The Cripple’s techniques.
The veteran duellist had mixed feelings about the art’s completion. It gladdened him that it’d been finished, Saana finally able to catch up to those mystical matches of the past. On the other hand, his joy couldn't help being tainted a little by the sting of being beaten to the chase - beaten again.
But, when he beheld the size of this stadium—with its thousands of participants, its facilities, its careful layout—the soreness in his heart began to fade fast.
Mrtyu didn’t possess the ability to imagine on this scale, to formulate an idea of this intricacy and project it into reality. Just giving up his solo ways to coach had been a leap into foreign territory for him. In the end, he'd been a mere grunt, a muscle that swung a sword. It’d taken a high-minded dweeb with no respect for the norms of their field to usher them through ‘Heaven’s Gates’.
“Cripple,” said Mrtyu, wanting to bleed out the last litres of his resentment, "what do you say to a rematch? Full series royale. Best of ten.”
A spectator eavesdropping in the crowd swore. “Oh, shit! It’s on! Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeematch!”
A sudden stir rang through the spectators. It was upon them, a historical duel, a rematch for slights past! Two former titans clashing once again, each with swords sharpened in the secrecy of their silent years. Had Mrtyu been hiding his own avant-garde technique? Had old man Death found the chink in the young Cripple’s invincible armour? Or would history repeat itself with another embarrassing defeat?
“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
“Fuck him up, Mrtyu! Break his spine!”
“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Many others joined in the howling, their spirits rising in anticipation for the ferocious bloodbath that would resolve these mortal foes’ immortal grudge.
Henry groaned at the crowd’s excessive excitement, walking calmly through the guards. "Unfortunately, Mortimer, I'm going to refuse your offer. I've renounced my violent youth, having long grown bored of these extended back and forths with Death." He, The Invincible Cripple, jumped back up on the arena stage and yawned. “You'll have to settle for a quick best of five. The results will get embarrassingly monotonous after that, and I don’t want to bury you so deep you take another half-decade to climb out of the grave."