The New Suchi Arena, the scenery changing along with The Tyrant’s changing heart.
Within half an hour of the declaration of his duelling workshop, a construction crew had arrived, laying the plot for the custom training facilities. The smiths, tanneries, and alchemists of the stadium and beyond were churning out standardised gear-kits for A Thousand Tools. Teams of Scholars meanwhile mass-reproduced the art’s manual of theories, advice, exercises; analysts who'd struggled with the old guide for The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo were pleased to find the ironic opaqueness absent in the latest book, The Tyrant simplifying the explanations for his most difficult concepts using the techniques of his literary enemies, the Neo-Neo-Minimalists.
While these preparations were unfolding in the background, The Tyrant himself jumped straight into the lessons. The young duellists of Suchi gathered before him in their thousands, and they awaited with bated breath for the wisdom synthesised after exploring hundreds of esoteric traditions of combat.
Staring at his obedient audience, he coughed, clearing the last of his reluctant silence from his throat. "We begin with a warning..."
A Thousand Tools, which’d taken himself years to formulate and master, would not yield immediate results for them either. He'd tried to streamline the learning process for non-hyper-hyper-hyper-geniuses. However, most trainees would still need to persist with his courses for at least two months before they could handle the basics well enough to defeat an equal-talent competitor. The advanced techniques, like Twenty Tools’ multi-weapon juggling, took as long as it took to study twenty different martial arts, anything but rudimentary swaps being impossible for the average player. Due to these learning difficulties, serious competitors aiming to place in the Winter Open would be smarter to ignore his teaching for now since such a drastic style switch would only mess with their existing habits. Even for those intent on challenging him specifically, analysis of his technique would worsen their odds, this being a game at which no one was going to beat him within a week.
Naturally, his warning dissuaded no one. Veteran duellists from around the globe were tuning in to local streams, wanting to steal his techniques, to find the chinks in The Cripple’s invincible armour. Ambitious amateurs, sharing the first produced copies of A Thousand Tool’s manual, skipped straight to the sub-volume on weapon-juggling and fumbled their way through the step-by-step instructions.
The Tyrant, shrugging, opened with an introduction to the cerebralised mindset of his art.
The strategy, at its core, was straightforward: try to get more tools than your opponent. More attack options, spell-cooldowns, more consumables, more anything – it’s through this More, through the advantage of the excess, that one obtains the ability to strategise and subdue an otherwise stronger enemy. The philosophy of his art mirrored that of his post-maximalist masterpiece no one had read, the ultimate goal being, wherever one was, to reject the complacent mediocrity of the Enough and always push for more of that beautiful More. In martial arts, the more tools you had over the opponent, the greater your chance of a strategic victory. If you had a thousand more tools, you’d probably win.
The rest of the work building upon this simple ideal—almost all of the work, really—was A Thousand Tools. His duelling methodology solved the practical difficulties of conducting this cerebralised tool-gathering exercise while ducking a club.
There were ways to get more tools before a duel, such as he once had by acquiring Legendaries, by altering the landscape, by conditioning your hands to hold more tools by training in dozens of martial arts, by refining your tools through practise and tailoring your tools for an opponent, by inventing new tools, and so on.
And there were ways to get more tools within a duel. You could increase your tools through minimising tool-wastage and utilising multiplicative tool-combos. You could reduce the enemy’s tools through nullification, reversal, theft, and baiting. Exchange by mathematical exchange, you could labour at trading some of your tools for a greater number of theirs. You could capitalise on the temporary moments of tool-surplus that rose across the shifting course of duelling space-time as the tool-differential between enemy and self was altered by the refreshing of cooldowns and the contraction of distances. To facilitate the necessary mental calculations, the trainees would learn to identify the gaps of calm inside the duel where you could survey your tools and optimise the next strategic sequences of tool usages. As importantly, they would learn to identify the rest of the duel where you couldn’t strategise and would have to rely on whatever tools were on hand. At some point, even the loftiest-minded duellist just had to fight. However, if you’d prepared well, in that moment of returning to the body’s lone struggle, hopefully you’d have more tools to swing than your enemy, countering their neanderthal club with a cluster of atom bombs.
In short, get more tools.
To demonstrate his philosophy of Get More Tools in practice, he put on a show of unarmed sparring matches centred around melee combat's 'basic rule of parity', whatever that was. His old rival Mrtyu joined him for a test dummy. In their first round, fighting simply with boxing, The Tyrant got demolished. In their second, by adding a kicking technique to his repertoire, he balanced things a little, reducing how much he got demolished.
For the next twenty minutes, round by round against the more physically-talented duellist, The Tyrant rapidly expanded in this way, recreating his journey to acquire more tools for his crippled body. After each loss, he added the components of different martial arts, ones with better range management, with better grappling and dodging, with athletic excellence, with careful map management. Throughout, a demon of multi-tasking, he gave a running commentary on his algebraic mindset, explaining the utilities of each addition, the creative options opened up for him, those of Mrtyu’s he was eliminating. When he added Nine Fists, the peak of melee arts, which weaponised the whole physical canvas, he used the excess tools of his elbows and knees to contort through stances that simultaneously nullified Mrtyu’s attacks while slipping his own in, thereby enabling The Tyrant to achieve a respectable loss. Finally, he seized victory by pushing beyond Nine Fists, synthesising the greatest parts of dozens of martial arts into A Thousand Tool’s immaculately-complex official method of bare-handed fighting, losing that match, then, in the final one, slipping Mrtyu a reflex-slowing poison without the officiator noticing.
Was this underhanded tactic a moral defeat? The Tyrant examined this important question in the aftermath.
"According to the Official Ethical Code of A Thousand Tools," he explained in a flat tone, standing victoriously before a purple-in-the-face Mrtyu and holding up the eighth volume of his training manual, on the moral nuances of the arena, "No, I did win that duel, unfair and unsquare. If you're to become a student of my next-level school, you will be encouraged to search for all imaginative possibilities in your noble quest to Get More Tools. Any Thousand Tools duellist will not be constrained by the borders of the ring, by outdated moral conventions that restrict the beauty of their creative 1v1 expression. Of course," he held up a hand of caution, "if you get caught cheating, you should accept your ban with grace while petitioning for a change of the biased ruleset. Alternatively, following in my own example, you might try building a network of stadiums in which you can freely implement your superior, pro-cheating duelling agenda." He glanced at the match officiator—the lady freezing up, definitely unwilling to reverse the result against him—and then The Tyrant gave the smug smile of a lawyer who'd proven their irrefutable case through facts and logic. "Do not limit yourselves, children of tomorrow. Anything can be a tool, and, armed with enough of them, the future is boundless. So get more. Get More Tools."
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
The listening trainees couldn’t tell if he was pulling their leg, unable to believe that Saana’s stickler-of-a-Tyrant would advocate cheating with his own tournament looming. A few vets familiar with his comedic Cripple career told their baffled friends, no, the kid was only half-joking.
After the exhibition matches with Mrtyu, The Tyrant had everyone practise his methods for themselves.
One might have expected something impossibly complex. However—having since comprehended the limits of non-hyper-hyper-hyper-geniuses—he had them start with simple dagger-wrestling. He made everyone pair up and copy a series of elementary grapples. While the crowd were in a bend, he explained how the Get More Tools principle adjusted with each hold, how the ability to use the dagger fluctuated with the angles, with grips, with relative positions shifting across the duel’s twenty-five-dimensional structure.
Now, his explanations for these basic grapples were impossibly complex. Since The Tyrant wanted to impart all his knowledge by the end of the week and his supposed retirement from public life, he spoke not simply to the noobs of today but to the experts that a minority of them would become over the years ahead.
"...we can see, through a simple third-knee-QUACH transposition of the contrastrikal foot, we've added upon the dual counterruptivities of the DIHS and the hip-fixed KC-Spoil, the dominant mechanism this time being not, as you might have guessed, any direct structural rebalancement BUT an amplification of the cumulative neurosensory burden due to a roughly 4.1% increase in the activation of those tricky proprioceptors," he was reeling off this jargon while squatting behind a volunteer, hugging their waist and holding one of their feet as they stabbed him in the head repeatedly while another assistant healed him. "A negligible increase in of itself. HOWEVER, after the next sexy step, a minor oscillatory augmentation of the foot-transposition in contrasync with his second sub-pulse pattern..." The Tyrant shook the held foot, and, although none watching noticed, one of the stabs aimed at his eyeball stabbed his cheek instead, "Voila, we've increased the CRM beyond his Coin-Threshold, achieving that coveted Q-to-Q Tool Condensation! That's right, my children, it's another tool in your hand! You're welcome. Now, I'll give a less vague explanation in Toolspeak." Telling the volunteer to pause their stabbing of him, he released them and began gesturing his hands rapidly through the shapes of highly-expressive finger signs. "Liptan stoofak sig-vranst bish-flit-mid-swit-punctif..."
The mad Tyrant had plunged to a depth of duelling knowledge beyond any previous human conception, a depth at which all conventional forms of communication proved inadequate to express the 1v1's multi-dimensional combat grammar. Thus, he'd invented a new anatomo-martial language, which the geeks of the future would have to decipher with the assistance of A Thousand Tools’ Official Toolspeak Dictionary and Grammar Companion. As of yet, no one could follow this signed theorycrafting, nor the 'English' parts. However, the imitating trainees, told to blindly copy his poses, were at least able to feel the critical meaning of Get More Tools in the fluctuating efficacy of their stabbing daggers.
The lessons continued for hours and hours in this fashion. The Tyrant mixed demonstration duels, easy exercises, advanced theory lectures, and fun little entertainment breaks where he reviewed highlights from his duelling series The Way of Fighting Alone.
For the advanced techniques like his timber-swarm, he sparred higher-level members from The Company’s Suchi-branch. Unlike this week’s Tier-0 matches against Suchi’s amateurs, these apex geniuses, their combat levels much higher than his, got smashed in a way that wasn’t close to close. The Tyrant simply 100-to-0 comboed each with an unbreakable chains of attacks. Evidently, most of A Thousand Tools' functionality had been suppressed in his lower-level duels.
In a public first in Saana III, he also broadcast his own POV to explain the art's Peopleworker-based system of markings and timers for tracking optimal fight-areas and other miscellaneous information. Anyone viewing this perspective learned that he was, truly, a neurological mutant, the footage being a seizure-inducing mess, his gaze spasmodically jerking around the map lit up with Bullet-Hell-game-dense neon indicators.
Thus, the first day of his workshop progressed.
As the in-game sun rose and fell and fell and rose, the stadium’s arenas and the rows between them became choked with thousands of students, all beating up their practice partners, all receiving the nourishing knowledge of cerebral duelling. Elite members of the Clay-people and The Church joined in to monitor the Offworlder gathering, to steal some tips. Even the goat-herding Goddess Nerin hovered in the sky on her flying spear - despite her ancient years and faster God-senses, she still watched intensely, The Tyrant’s invincibility enabling his research to by-pass the many chokepoints of death.
Outside the stadium, in the dilapidated Village arenas of The Slums, behind the pristine walls of Central City, the scene was the same. Everyone in Suchi became unified for a moment as they followed along with this free duelling workshop put on by history’s greatest.
Elsewhere around Saana, too. Would-be challengers for the tournament ahead—duellists wrestling in the office queues for tickets to Suchi, a lucky few shanking their partners on the decks of sailing boats—were also sweating hard at practice.
Many with no interest in the arena tuned in as well. Some were attracted by the latest spectacle in the game. Others—reawakened by The Tyrant’s morning announcement of retiring—hoped he’d slip in some insights from his real trade.
Strangely, throughout the impromptu workshop, The Tyrant-turned-teacher continued to accept challengers. During some of the breaks he spared his exhausted trainees, he churned through the queue of duellists who wished to fight him one-v-one. There was no shortage of bold hopefuls, some wanting to learn a private lesson, some to ply him with fanboy questions, some to try kill him for vengeance, and some simply to test him, to check for themselves what’d been the big fuss about the flat-faced teen. Regardless of their reason for seeking him out, he gave each challenger, famous or a first-timer, their moment to shine on stage while he pummelled them.
Most trainees were perplexed by these interruptions. They couldn’t fathom that this, more than the promotion of a martial art, more than the pride of climbing to the arena’s summit again, had been The Tyrant’s own selfish motive for the tournament. Here, in the ring, the troubled youth sought to offload a fraction of his pent-up woes through the spiritual purification of one-v-one videogame violence.
Amongst the challengers queued for their bruising was a similarly spirited young man, clad in a suit of gilded knight armour, armed with a golden zweihander.
“Heavenly Father,” the figure was muttering over his weapon, preparing it for the battle ahead. “In these times immersed in shadow, I beg of you to light for me the way to truth...”
It was the Golden Roleplayer himself, Justinian The Great!
Despite the knight's solitary assault on The Trading Post during yesterday's riots, he’d been saved from blacklisting and allowed to enter this stadium to join the challengers. Why? Because, like with a jester mocking the king, no one took this Village idiot seriously.
And now the knight was here to duel him, to duel...Him!
“...please,” Justinian begged the heavens, “please most gracious and most wise, allow this blade to cut between the ambiguities of wrong and right, to slice in the direction of your noble will...”