A simple duel.
Mrtyu, sword and shield raised, approached The Cripple with caution, remembering their bewilderingly complex fights from the past.
However, if this vet were anticipating one of those convoluted scrambles, he would be mistaken.
Henry, although the path had been circuitous, had eventually reached the base of base combat. Armed with a simple heart, a simple mind, a simple soul, a simple sword, he’d gazed beyond Maya’s illusory veil of complexity and false meanings with which man shrouded the basic push and pull of his muscles.
Thus, Henry held his honest position. He adjusted to his enemy’s advance with the minimality of an oak shedding one yellowed leaf, the subtlety of a daisy pivoting towards the dawn horizon.
Mrtyu opened with a test—
Henry, darting past the sword blade, slipped his thrust through the opponent’s shield—
Mrtyu, moving much faster, switched to a grapple, bringing him down, whipping out a dagger, and stabbing him in the head until he conceded.
“HF eliminated! Mrtyu wins! -1, +76.”
0-1, first point to the veteran named Death.
Henry, the point of his foe’s weapon yanked from his jaw sheathed in the blood of his tongue, flicked his chin to Suchi’s summery sky and composed a simple, minimalist poem lamenting his defeat. “Poor chrysanthemum! In bloom before your season, you wilt in the sun.”
Around the arena, a pained groan sounded from the audience. Analysts sighed. Duellists slumped their shoulders. Even the spies swore. Everywhere could be heard foul curses at The Tyrant’s bizarre sense of humour, at his scrooging on the revelation of his innovations.
One Touch One – they’d already watched him throw dozens of bouts the same way with this ill-fitting style. They’d hoped, with his rival returning, that he might finally change tactics, demonstrating a secret, hyper-complex advancement of the art. Alas, no, he’d tried exchanging simple sword-strokes and, being a cripple, lost instantly again. Mrtyu, random Suchi amateur #3780, there’d been no difference. No, for their epic duelling history, this psycho didn't give a single, simple shit.
One duellist tore at the frustration sticking to her hair like lice. “Please, Tyrant! Please! Show us the real stuff!”
Others mirrored her grief, distressed wails ripping from the mass like children on a cruise ship sinking into lava.
Henry, getting back up and drinking a Stamina-restoring milkshake beside Mrtyu, listened to their complaints, and his heart was moved to change. “Mortimer, it seems they want me to change things up. Very well, for match two, I will tap into the secret path of Change.”
The crowd groaned, that being a segue for Adaptive Wound Cycling. The Tyrant’s ‘invented’ version, 'Changing Damage Ovalling', consisted of just switching between poking with a spear and running away to heal if he received even the slightest damage, dragging the duel out until the time expired or his opponent forfeited in annoyance.
But Mrtyu, getting into position for the next fight, examined The Cripple’s changed-up tactics with a serious eye, studying his change of weaponry to a shield and spear and his warm-up for a completely different style from before, the switch seamless.
The vet wouldn’t be lured into complacency by the first win or the crowd’s dismissal.
All rivals of the multi-tooled false fool knew that he played a long game within and across duels. A single match was only ever one puzzle piece, The Cripple willing to discard a couple early for the purpose of testing, prodding, of distracting, misleading, exhausting, adapting, showboating. This oracular duellist fought always ahead according to the series, according to the series of series, his vision fixed on the duel consisting of all duels.
Mrtyu—who’d once been the ultimate opponent at the conclusion of The Cripple's marathon series, his style deconstructed down to quirks and tendencies he’d not himself recognised—would never underestimate this monster of the long play.
Recognising Adaptive Wound Cycling, he made his own adaptations, resummoning his spear.
Henry—before Mrtyu’s spear had even finished materialising—having anticipated this adaptation and counter-adapting to it, caught a replacement spear, his original traded for one that was half-a-foot shorter, his warm-ups becoming palpably nimbler.
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The second round began with the pair circling each other, ducking behind shields and statues as they prodded for each other’s tender organs.
Mrtyu, pressuring The Cripple into a corner, snagged his foot with a
“HF eliminated! Mrtyu wins! -1, +148.”
0-2, another tragic defeat.
The spectators grieved once again, with sighs and groans, with pinched brows and tongues flapping their discontent.
Mrtyu glanced with confusion, from The Cripple flat on his ass on the grass on the adjacent sub-map, to the crowd screaming in frustration.
He was being toyed with, he finally realised.
The veteran duellist lowered his spear, the tip falling heavy with disappointment. “What series are you playing now, Cripple?”
Henry kicked his feet and leapt upright. “I’m not playing anything. I’m just unsure if I want to demonstrate any more of my martial art yet.”
“To win the tournament?” Mrtyu asked, his voice carrying a hint of disbelief and repulsion.
The veteran supposed many duellists refused to publicly exhibit their techniques before a major event in order to prevent their opponents devising counters. It would be logical to place The Cripple amongst them, given his deceptive past, his opaque manual for The Strategy.
However, Mrtyu, having studied The Cripple closer than perhaps anyone else, believed him to be someone parallel to these ordinary concerns, a fairly sincere figure whose greatest interest had been in the overall health of the scene. His notion of ‘Heaven’s Gates’ had always contained a subtle invitation, a yearning to be joined at the lonely heights.
Mrtyu would have imagined this trait to have grown with time and maturity. After years of solitary research, the next step would be dissemination, the joy of spreading one’s discoveries and immortalising them in the collective conscious. Wasn’t this the very purpose of this grandiose stadium, of the tournament ahead?
Maybe he’d been wrong. He supposed the kid was, still, a seventeen year old.
Henry read this play of thoughts on Mrtyu’s confused face, able to understand it as a fellow veteran on the other side of his career.
This former rival was at some level correct, a part of Henry once maturing into these motives. The duelling purist in him longed for the arena that’d given him a joyful purpose to blossom and bestow these same benefits to the generation of youngsters succeeding him.
However, what Mrtyu, a mere duellist, could not grasp was the other half of Henry's veterancy, his second post-duelling career having given him additional interests that had to be reconciled with the first.
When the Henry of today looked at A Thousand Tools, he didn’t see only the upheaval of the duelling scene, rising to a new, more complex, more varied, more thrilling height, the bright-faced youth built like him getting their chance in the arena sun.
He saw the art also as his teacher Tael Heavy-Fingers had. Twenty Tools, A Thousand Tools, these were the uncomfortable fusion between a man’s small ambition to master himself by growing stronger and the grander conflict to survive within a universe of chaos and bloodshed. He felt the tension Heavy-Fingers must have felt in teaching an Offworlder his art, what was, once the layers were peeled back, still ultimately just a method for killing more efficiently.
In A Thousand Tools, Henry observed how he himself had used this refined ‘art’ to slaughter dozens this week, and how not all those who would later be slaughtered by his imitators would be cannibals, bandits, and weapon-smugglers. Some of them would be good...NPCs. The next thousands of thousands of litres to stain his fingers, that’s what he saw.
For he who’d become a tyrant—who'd been conditioned to a hyper-consciousness of his every action as his smallest gestures and follies rippled out across the network of billions for which he'd taken responsibility—A Thousand Tools could no longer be exempted from the morbid calculus. On the positive side stood the number of lives saved by the murders averted through increased converts to this sterile realm of the arena. On the minus were the extra casualties next instalment and those after, when The Cycle erased his duelling infrastructure and returned the improved combatants to the lawless first-state. Whether the sums squared, that depended how far you gazed into the future, and one of Henry's problems was that he tended to gaze ahead far too far.
Thus, debuting this martial art had not been a trivial choice for him. Internally, in the background of his mock research 'inventing' arts, he'd been flopping back and forth over its release. Had Karnon not ultimately made the decision for him last night, he might have allowed this research to die in obscurity, burying it in an unmarked grave.
Of course, with the art exposed, he could no longer hide anything. Analysts, having witnessed the possibility proven, would eventually reverse engineer its methods. Still, not even 24 hours having passed since his outing, it was hard not to return to his indecisive clowning. As always, a heart entrenched with depth of his own in the battlefield would take a long, long time to crawl back out and accept the changed landscape of peace.
But, now, in the confusion of Mrtyu, this old rival meeting him for the first time in years and unable to recognise him anymore, in the despondence and irritation of the crowd, Henry was seeing that other crucial part. There it was, another mirror of his absurdity, the magnified image of his wrinkled yet smooth features made flat from clinging to a fiction he must discard.
Mrtyu scrunched his face with irritation. “I get that this is a side-hobby for you, but, please—if you ever held any respect for the 1v1, at any point—please drop some of this silliness.”
Henry thought it over a while longer, then sighed, choosing to drop his silliness and take yet another difficult step downwards. “You're right...” He tried a silliness that was more in line with the objective significance of his virtual concerns. "You're right. Can I really call myself The Invincible Cripple if witnessing the tools was enough to beat me? Fine, then. If you insist, I'll beat you up properly."
Entering their third match, he stopped fooling around.