The best of five between Mrtyu and The Tyrant, match 3, the teen genius down two points.
For the third clash on their comeback card, The Cripple played to his slippery strengths. He hurled his spells and spiked his spears; he sprayed his prey from safe and far away. His foe, up close, a killer fierce, with flustered pace, did race to chase him while he darted through the statued stage and stalled and stalled and stalled—and stalled—with his weapon haul. And stalled.
In certain fraught and pained respects, their spat turned cruel like last night’s duel.
Though Mrtyu’d studied the footaged style, the storm raged so much worse in person. His arms could not forever swing without that blue God’s flouting blessing. His rationed slashes had to slay through the silly slew of renewing tools.
Poor Mrtyu—poor, miserable Death—he was missing most Ramiro’s wealth of buffed-up health, the crutch that’d tanked the attacks returned through the teen’s supremely clean defence.
The vet’s best-aimed stab? Voided, vanquished, made vain and painless by a Spellshield.
A grapple to
With futile flailing, the poor vet fell feet-first, a sweet lamb into a meat-grinder cranked quick by the sick, cackling Cripple, whose crazed tools butter-churned his bleating guts.
Death’s curtains closed with a sudden crunch.
The Cripple, in gorilla form, caught, swung,
And bashed Mort’s body against a statue,
His broken bones moaning defeat as they shattered and his organs erupted into a mist of smashed gore.
“Mrtyu Eliminated! HF wins! -0, +1.”
2-1, a point on the board for The Cripple.
Mrtyu, thoroughly beaten, lay in a crumpled pile between the feet of his teenage opponent and the statue into which he’d been gorilla-hurled, the older duellist struggling to regain his bearings after going through whatever the fuck that'd been.
His eyes flared with the all-body pain of that last blow and the shock that, in their final exchange, when he’d finally managed to close in—after the torture of simply catching up to his opponent while being pelted by spell-fire and stabbed with spears, the other summoned weapons operating covertly in the background to cut off viable approaches—after by-passing all of that, he’d been totally out-grappled, The Cripple, somewhere in the baffling mess, twisting him into a pretzel before
That was a new experience for Mrtyu. In his whole career, he’d never been out-grappled by an opponent in the same weight class - not by any number of other physical mutants, let alone the Cripple. His mind and body were racing through the final seconds, trying to determine in the rapid shuffling of their limbs where exactly he’d been subdued, but it was impossible, the grappling sequence having vanished entirely amidst the more attention-grabbing weapon and spell-usage. Try as he might, he couldn’t even find a stable point to begin figuring out how he'd lost. The Cripple had somehow applied his obscure techniques even to the grapple.
Unable to move, Mrtyu’s spinal column amongst his shattered bones, he flicked his gaze to the flat-faced teen, who’d dropped his transformation to signal for a medic.
The veteran’s lips cracked open, the blood pooling in his mouth spilling down his jaw and wetting his neck, the frothy mixture gurgling as it was churned by a joyous dose of laughter.
“GOOD!” he shouted against his body's dying weakness. “This...this is how it should have been. I have walked through Heaven’s Gates...and pass now...into the splendour of The Beyond.”
Henry winced at the disgusting gargle. “Don’t celebrate prematurely. You've signed up for another two beatings.”
By the side of the arena, the crowd had been shouting and clapping, excited chatter stirring amongst them as they also struggled to dissect various anomalous sequences. During this third duel, those who’d left because of his clowning in the first two returned. The online audience was also ramping up, duellists around the globe hungry for any possible morsel of A Thousand Tools, this technique of the future.
But the two old rivals at the centre of this growing interest perceived only each other. Following the match, as they replenished their health and Stamina, they each retreated to their own version of the zone.
A repaired Mrtyu, deaf to the advice of his apprentice Whitefrog by the side, paced back and forth with agitation, his limbs restlessly rehearsing counters.
Henry, meanwhile, with features perfectly composed, performed a rapid weapon-juggling warm-up, adding another tool every few seconds, his mind skipping the next match—already won—to prepare for the decisive fifth.
As they entered match four, neither even mentioned changing from this god cemetery map, the long-time rivals arriving at a silent pact not to disrupt the story unfolding directly between their two blood-matured bodies.
Mrtyu, Death’s former scythe-swinger, and the invincibly-crippled teen, both fought this duel with changed tactics, with changed minds, with rhythms changed.
Mrtyu, wanting to not quickly lose once again, restrained his stance. His shield raised high, his gaze cautious, his spear prodded at the juggled tools. Shifting his pace, he tried testing their gaps, limits, adaptive speed, with thrusts twisting—abrupt pauses—with five-beat combos, fourteen-, one-.
In turn, The Cripple, to cockblock Mort’s spearpoint study, withheld his tools, using his foe’s fear to commit to create distance and disengage. Swords sheathed, shields stored, he switched purely to spell-kiting, to a slow harass. With Earthfriend heals, his health pool would stay full and guarantee his win.
The vet, responding in kind, switched, too, bursting forward with a sudden pounce to clip the weaponless teen mid-spell with a blink-quick swing of his sword to the throat—with eyes gazing ahead ten steps, The Cripple countered the aggressive turn by advancing to catch Mrtyu with a surprise poke from a rapier caught—but the vet narrowly shield-blocked it, his bone-thin arms responding fast to stop the swordtip that the gored stomach of a less quick duellist would have eaten.
The fight soon evolved into an odd-paced back-and-forth game of mortal tag. They chased, fled, chased, they fled, chased, fled, the pair trading roles of prey and pred.
Neither committing, the duel dragged on, a long, extended ballet testing speed, stamina, their limb-wisdom, spatial genius, and fortitude. A free masterclass, received the duel’s crowd, a priceless lesson by the rival pair on evasion, on map-movement, on how far legs well-stretched could leap.
Their match utilised the god-statues’ precise lay-out and anatomies; each dead god’s shape, their height, bulk, lengths, formed unique possibilities. Curves limited attack angles, clusters slowed, spaces welcomed sprints. Fertile obstacles, this graveyard gave, a playground to prove one’s speed of foot.
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Mrt manoeuvred with map-knowledge from team-coaching for Saana League, from his practice against the young pros he’d buried on this graveyard map. His brain bulged with this map’s secrets, the prize spots searched out by Pravah’s staff, their support bolstering the vet’s freak skills, the muscular grace with which he’d reigned. A tiger sleek in its home jungle, his thin limbs flowed, from a covert stalk through dense-packed grass, to prey-pouncing with an abrupt burst of violent haste.
Still, only a fool dismissed The Cripple, as much a mutant, an arena beast, a frightening player who’d smashed countless, who’d once, this Indian tiger, tamed. A brilliant kiter in days by-gone, his quick mind reading the quickest paths, he’d zipped ‘round duels while spam-firing Legendaries and poison darts.
What’s more, the years since, the styles since trained, had made more fierce his mutant skills. No longer could a poor foe wait for him to blunder, for a classic trip. With arts mastered from the Icedancers and the Freerunners of Nilke’s streets, the teen’s body had shed some of its crippledness, its clumsy flaws. All his styles helped in strange, weird ways, synthesising demonically. Heavy Finger’s, the Twenty Tool juggle, freed up his hands for a massive aid. It imparted a unique option to climb obstacles safe from risk, The Cripple able to chimp-swing while covered by his weapon swarm. Something always at reach, a shield, a sword, a spear, an axe, a halberd, with the constant hive of tools summoned, he switched too darn fast to ever be caught off-guard.
The watching duellists, like out-run Mrt, were dissecting his movement skills, some searching for his break-point faults, others hoping to hijack the arts. But like The Saviour on stage last night, like trapped Loki in the monster-maze, the crowd soon perceived the bleak truth: at range, the kid reigned invincible. A small chance lay only in close-quarters, at the point The Saviour had flailed and failed, in Luck gifting you one-shot that the wound-baiting Cripple hadn’t planned.
Mrtyu, knowing this from past matches, stalled merely for his ideal chance. His best shot came in the duel’s fourth minute, the vet worn-down and on verge of death.
He committed with a Flame-form
But The Cripple—now versed in close-range styles,
Muscles sculpted by the arduous years—
Bicycle-kicked and clipped Death’s ears,
His old friend launched to the sky’s exile, the skeleton-thin opponent flying off stage and landing on the applauding hands of the crowd.
“Mrtyu Eliminated! HF wins! -0, +1.”
2-2.
The intermission before the final, decisive duel was much shorter.
Henry'd intentionally ended the dragged-out fourth without an injury in order to grant Mrtyu no time to mentally recover. In the brief break, with his opponent prepped for the finale, he continued with his interrupted warm-ups from after the third match. He collected no Earthfriend charges except for one Fauna to boost his Strength with
Along with the sweat that began to bead and drip from his pumping muscles, the last hesitancies weighing down his fretting mind were excreted. Out and out, these trivialities flowed from him, spilling, evaporating, forgotten. They wanted to see what 'The Cripple', 'The Tyrant', or whatever other silly nickname could do after all these years? Fine. Henry, the uncomplicated reality of a body between such convoluted ideas, would let them take a glimpse at the extent of himself.
The observing crowd looked on with astonishment, as his weapons poured out in greater and greater number, flowing in faster and faster arrangement, the pace accelerating well beyond that from last night’s duel with Ramiro, when he’d been limited by the simultaneous need to maintain his timber-defences and spell-casting.
Across from him, a woozy Mrtyu, his cloth-armour drenched with sweat and blood, his eyes dizzy after the minutes in the swarm, watched The Cripple, who bore no signs of the same fatigue, juggling his weapons at a blinding speed, his surroundings pulsating with the lights of summoning and desummoning. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, but the older duellist had a sense of gazing at a mirage, the quick-shifting complexity of the weapons like a school of fish writhing in a patterned dance to distract a predator. Yet, in a strange juxtaposition, within this dizzying array, The Cripple himself was moving slow, letting most of the weapons disintegrate untouched, testing the handles of a few as a rose-gardener might sample from a selection of buds on a bush before deciding which to cut for a prize bouquet.
Mrtyu—although the resemblance was faint, no closer than a child to its great-grandfather, than a bountiful ear of wheat to its meagre grass ancestor—felt a vague recognition of this contradictory element. It seemed to be the failed sword-style from their first match.
“One Touch One,” he pointed out.
Henry, strolling around inside his juggled weapons, simply nodded.
This was his advancement of that style obsessed with the preposterous goal of finishing all battles in one strike, a synthesis of its extreme of simplicity with Tael Heavy-Finger’s own preposterous extreme of complexity, the one united with the many, a humble home that a vagrant soul returns to with a totally changed vision after adventuring through foreign lands.
Mrtyu, groaning tiredly, finished off a piece of recovery food and tottered over to his starting position. “You better not end this with another joke.”
Henry shook his head. “In life, the end is always the same; all that changes is which of the thousand paths we choose to reach it by.” He twirled a hand of indication at the weapons blinking rapidly around him, the hammers, the axes, the spears, any of them capable of producing a one-shot kill. “Yours will be the sword.”
Their last fight began, The Cripple inviting his foe to cross simple blows, to test the limits of man’s flesh.
His young limbs warmed up, he fought without a magic crutch.
Juggling Twenty Tools, he blocked and dodged the plenty of Mrtyu’s hailstorm hits. His foe’s flailing sword vanished inside the dazzling swarm—a war-store of spasming weapons, a steel-storm of points, edges, shield-rims scored, handles blood-drenched—of the star-speckled lights from the tools summoned quick to fight by the teen’s fingers versed in the monk’s twinkling testament.
Amidst this complex swarm, The Cripple moved with simple grace, pliant as a petal, his footsteps quiet as snow.
Their clashing weapons gleamed with sweat, blood, and Suchi’s smiling sun above. Their footwork flattened the grass growing short throughout the cemetery of fallen gods who watched lifeless grey.
Mrtyu, already tired out by their first four bouts, felt his nimble limbs grow slow. With each swipe and thrust blocked, repelled, side-stepped, and ducked, it seemed as though the teen were attaching a puppet string to his arms and legs. Gradually, his movements sank, succumbing to a scheme, a rhythmic flow contrived by his foe still yet to strike, who watched calm as Death - sure his triumph will arrive on Time’s passing breath.
The Cripple, defending, waited for Wenshun’s One Touch, the simple movement within life’s complex illusion.
There!
Through Mrt’s lamb-soft stomach and out the man’s shoulder, he made the thrust of defiance. His caught sword stabbed high, a crimson middle finger flicked at the blue, spying, cloudless sky.
So soils, cracked and dry,
Grow wet with welcome moisture—
Young flowers who bloom
In such rainbow profusion,
Will you forget the land’s old hue?
“Mrtyu eliminated! HF wins! -0, +1.”
Henry had finished crouched at Mrtyu’s waist, his sword buried hilt-deep into the belly flesh with its tip protruding out the top of the guy, like a skewer through a cube of meat. He desummoned the weapon, whose solid form dissolved into lights along with the others falling from the air around them. From the hole in Mrtyu’s stomach left after the sword’s removal, a fountain of blood gushed forth, dyeing a small grassy patch of the cemetery map the beautiful damp red of victory.
3-2 to The Cripple, their rematch after half a decade ending once again in his invincible conquest over death.
Henry stood up and patted his old rival’s shoulder, the one without an exit wound. “I’d say good game, but that was far too easy. You truly have fallen off.”
“Rude punk.” Mrtyu grinned, his eyes beaming as they went blank and his character passed out.
After this short series between The Tyrant and the ancient enemy from his duelling side-hobby, the crowd broke into a frenzy to discuss these latest additions for their dissection of A Thousand Tools. Meanwhile, the two duellists healed up and retreated along with the other masked Qi Master to a private marquee to share a drink and reminisce.
The spectators were pleasantly surprised at what followed.
As if The Tyrant had resolved some private issue through the scrap, perhaps through that paradoxical healing young men occasionally take from violence before age teaches those who survive of its folly, he didn’t return to his earlier jest.
Instead, when he re-emerged, in the serious, brusque, scale-defying fashion more characteristic of The Tyrant of Saana, he announced a departing gift from himself to his fans in celebration of his retirement. With his old rival's gracious assistance, for the rest of the week up until that tournament he’d still be clean-sweeping, they would be hosting a small duelling workshop, a crash course sharing some of the insights from his research into this field. They began immediately.