The New Suchi Arena, Henry about to fight an 11-year-old kid.

Next up for a meet-and-greet with The Tyrant's fists was a juvenile Arcanist. With a haughty glare, the boy stepped onto the ring, decked in preppy wizard robes instead of the standard-issue arena gear. These clothes of his were purely aesthetic. They were woven of a thick black cloth that would usually be unbearable in Suchi’s climate, but a butler accompanying the Arcanist was beating a hand-fan to cool his cheeks while a hired chef chain-fed him fruit slushies.

Both his staff members held back embarrassed expressions. They'd warned their young master against this confrontation. Alas, refusing to listen, he'd marched onto the stage, fearless and young.

The boy himself understood their doubts. Like many players his age, he considered himself a hero in waiting, one destined for gloried feats and gilded fame. The difference, however, was that, unlike the average delusional peon spawn, he had all the means to carry out his dreams. The financial means, that was. He was fantastically rich. The best mentors, the best equipment, the best training, the best support staff – he could buy them all. Then—also buying the best brush and the best calligrapher to wield it—he would draw his name forever amongst Saana's stars.

And what was his name, one might wonder, he, the new hero of this tale?

The boy, glanced around himself, scanning the thousands in the crowd with that exact question on their lips. His desire to answer their curiosity, he held back. It was not time yet to end all the mystery, this being merely the opening of his journey.

While this rich kid was working himself up in some fantasy of grandeur, The Tyrant of Saana, opposite him on stage—towelling off the entrails of his previous challenger, a fangirl—was in a different type of egotistical headspace.

One eye closed, Henry'd been jotting a note in his Mental Library, writing an entry in a new therapeutic journal.

The suggestion had come straight from his shrink.

During the morning session, amongst many things, they'd discussed these challenges. Henry'd informed the guy, who didn’t play Saana, about the global significance of the event. He'd also done his best to explain the logic of his own personal involvement in the affair, the self-therapy in these low-stake matches, each purging some of the sinisterness that video-game combat had acquired for him.

Throughout the challenges, to rid himself of not only the morbidity but the inflated meaning in general, he’d been focusing on each duel as it existed in the limited sense specific to each challenger confronting him. Against Justinian yesterday, the duel vented some annoyance and, maybe, broke the kid’s delusions. In contrast, against his old rival Mrtyu, that duel had just been a nostalgic catch-up and a chance to reflect on his legacy from this hobby. The dozens of other 1v1s he'd faced had their own microscopic narratives, from giving trainees dry technical pointers, to his last match, allowing a bubbly fangirl to meet her gaming idol face-to-face.

And within this specificity had lain much of the arena's original charm to him. For a duellist, every fight was sui generis, a one-off event whose meaning was born during and lasted only as long as the minutes of struggle between you and them. Every opponent represented a novel opportunity to learn something, to test, to prove, to refine, to debut, to share, to celebrate, to relish. You went in with a plan of the fight ahead, but you could never fully predict where the story between you two would finish up.

It was that type of innocent romanticism that Henry'd hoped to recapture.

The shrink had held back their opinion, perhaps not understanding due to the sheer oddity of Henry’s case, perhaps preferring ‘the client’ to reach the conclusion himself. The guy had asked him what he’d thought about this genius therapy plan after a day of trying it out. Henry’d had no solid answer. Honestly, when he looked at any fixes, they all felt utterly pointless against the magnitude of the problem. He might compare the task to trying to get rid of a whole beach by shovelling it into the ocean with your bare hands; no matter how much sand you managed to dump in the water in one day, when you woke up the next, the tide would’ve washed it all back onto the shore, erasing any trace of your labour. Except, it was maybe worse than that. He couldn't always tell whether he was the bare-handed idiot, the endless tide, or the sand being transferred aimlessly back and forth.

The therapist, struggling to grasp the logic, had set a task for him to journal the challenge process and show him tomorrow.

So, yeah, that’s what Henry was doing now. While cleaning a fangirl’s splattered viscera from his face, he scribbled down random feelings and lessons, his disgusts and pleasures, his moments of moral growth.

Finishing up that entry, he turned his gaze to the next challenger, to the Arcanist kid in impractically-hot wizard robes.

Analysing the potential therapeutic value, he decided to give this brat one duel, seeing nothing to be gained from more. Most of Henry’s petty grudge against roleplayers had already been vented yesterday while kicking that golden can of shit. What’s more, he had a bit of soft spot for kids. The flashbacks while beating them up were particularly unsettling.

In his feelings diary, he set the mental health goal for this next challenge as desensitisation through disorienting hyper-absurdity.

Henry, opening his closed eye and tossing his fan-smeared rag to an assistant off-stage, addressed his next young victim. “Unless you can argue a case for more, I’m allocating you one (1) beating. Swap the robes. I'm not reimbursing them when they get ruined.”

The Arcanist boy scoffed at the mere suggestion of accepting another’s financial aid, his laughter containing the clear jingle of carelessly spilt coins. “No, that won’t be necessary, Tyrant or whatever you’re calling yourself. I’m not here to ‘duel’. Listen, we’re going to stop this silly workshop business and you’re going to become my private mage tutor. Name your salary.”

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Two days ago, the boy had been in Volefa, studying for the entrance examinations to the region’s mage academies, plagued by the instructions of one frustratingly-incompetent tutor after another. After witnessing this teen’s spell-bound duel with the local ruffian slumlord, he’d realised that no one else was fit to teach him the ways of the wizard arts. At first, he’d planned to sail over on his private ship. However, growing impatient, he’d transferred quicker through character deletion.

Around the ring, a few scattered spectators chuckled between their pants at the ludicrosity of trying to buy The Tyrant’s time. Most were too worn out to care. Their funny bones had yet to repair after dozens of breakages.

“For private lessons,” Henry answered matter-of-factly, instantly capitalising on this duel's left-of-field financial angle, “my consultation fee per in-game hour is 9.5-quintillion NZD or, preferably, the equal amount in a more stable currency. No gold. No commie credits. I won’t give any military advice or brand endorsements.”

“Done!” The young Arcanist clapped his hands and gestured for the exit. “Let’s go, Tyrant!”

The boy, happy to have made the deal so easily, was about to walk off the stage with his new tutor. However, his butler stopped him, whispering into his ear what that figure translated into - the fee for one in-game hour exceeded his yearly pocket money, multiple times over.

The rich kid Arcanist snapped back around, screaming indignantly. “Ridiculous! What’s with this absurd salary? Are you mocking me? ME?!"

The boy couldn’t believe this kiwi teenager would dare to look down on him, this hooligan who at first sight had the obvious stink of the slum on him - the unkempt dress and styling, the grime-smeared demeanour.

Henry, who was ready to quit this stupid workshop on the spot for the right price, sighed at the embarrassing squalor of this so-called ‘rich kid’. “I'm not mocking you in the slightest. Although I did apply a 20% surcharge for the roleplaying plus 10% for you being Australian,” the rude brat, from his accent and penal-colony rudeness, hailed from that desert nation, “it’s still a fair consulting fee. You have to factor in the opportunity cost for a man of my financial stature, along with me being the foremost expert at practically everything. Why, in just one hour, I could sketch you a personalised life restructuring plan that’d allow you to obtain your highest potential in whatever field. What’s that worth? Can one even put a price tag on the full actualisation of themself? Others might say no. Me, I’m offering it for the affordable ask of 9.5-quintillion NZD. Per in-game hour." Henry gestured towards the crowd, extending the offer to any rich idiots amongst them. "Really, guys, when you all think about it, this duelling workshop and these challenges I’ve been giving for free are an incredible act of charity on my part. Each wasted minute here testifies to the unrivalled magnitude of my selflessness and my eternal commitment to the enlightenment value of a universal, unpaywalled humanism. You should all be thanking me. Let's hear it, together everyone, 'Thank you, O Kindest Tyrant! We love you and your charitable spirit! We love your charitable hand! We love your charitable eyebrows!'"

Henry finished with a nod, marking a note in his therapy journal about the emotional gains of sarcastic tangents.

A trainee tiredly shouted back. "Fuck off!"

"Kid, run away already!" another groaned. "He's about to murder you. He hates roleplayers."

Henry paused, suddenly thunderstruck by the morning's second genius epiphany, then he pointed with command to a staff member managing the challenger queue. “Start a fast lane. Those with cash can skip to the front. Half a quint per five-minute beating, up to a maximum of three beatings. Fuck charity; fuck humanism. We’re in the brighter, fairer age of free-flowing capital. Of Pay-to-Lose!"

He sighed, annoyed at his short-sightedness for not thinking of this brilliant scheme sooner. Too focused on his quest for this feelings crap, he'd lost sight of the actual, substantial gains hidden in these challenges. By taking the lunch money from Saana’s rich kids, he could benefit from these beatings both materially AND spiritually. Every duel would transform into an additional fixture for his new monument-building project, another pond for his avant-garde pony farm, an extra tarpit for his avant-garde supervillain lair. Moreover, even limited to his asinine therapeutic effort to re-find happiness through videogame duelling, wouldn’t he increase his pleasure by beating up more of these irritating bourgeois silk-pants? This was win-win-win.

Once again, the rational free market had achieved the maximal benefit in every conceivable metric. Greed, truly, was the greatest good.

The pricing scheme he'd set, like for his 'consulting fee', was intentionally ridiculous, Henry once more just bored and taking the piss. Nevertheless, to his and the rest of the audience's surprise, representatives of several wealthy organisations immediately pushed through the crowd to sign up with his organising team.

They were thinking that any chance to kill The Tyrant would be worth it, and the queue had become so long that none of the new applicants would get to face him, their only opportunity being a lucky match-up in the weekend tournament.

Henry, observing this weird turn of events, gave a pleasantly-surprised shrug - duels truly sometimes did lead in unexpected directions. "Oh, wow. Nice."

If any doofuses wanted to subsidise his project costs, that was TOTALLY cool with him.

Nice.

The rich kid Arcanist, meanwhile, was staring at the competing applicants with horror, the lot of them willing—and capable—of affording the fees that he could not. In an instant, the boy's mind and identity were disintegrating as if he’d glimpsed Cthulu’s maddening face, as if he’d glimpsed his own unwashed face in the mirror of a bathroom…in the mirror of a public bathroom.

“N-no…,” he stammered, “that can’t be…that would make you…some videogame player...richer than me…richer than my dad. This…this cannot be!” The boy shrieked, clutching his collapsing head. “I’M the richest! I’M the best!”

He had come here to steal the day, to show these gaming cretins their place by making the best of them join his grovelling staff. Instead, he’d met a monster with even more staff, with even more…money.

“This is MY game!" the boy shrieked. "MY story! You’re supposed to teach me magic! I’m going to master the world of wizardry! I'm going to conquer the planet!”

Henry approached the despairing eleven year old, who was finally recognising, like many developmentally-stunted Australians, his own minor placement in the uncaring universe. The childish main-character syndrome, the infantile illusion of an invincible destiny, a sour dose of reality curing this juvenile mania would have to be the boy's own therapeutic gain from this duel.

With the sympathy and mercy of one older in years, Henry joined him, as one who’d already been matured by the confrontation with life’s grim truths. (This was a purely simulated sympathy, Henry himself clearly being Saana's main character, its richest, its best, its most handsome). Then he extended a hand—warm and consoling as the invisible hand of the market—and halved the poor boy's sorrows and body with a caught halberd, splitting his skull, his torso, and his preppy wizard robes.

Thus the boy was hacked down, his name never heard, his story finished before it began.

To the kid's scattering soul, Henry cast a final word of consolation. “You might wish you were the richest and—therefore—the best, but a fair, meritocratic, non-violent system of resource allocation has determined otherwise. For any further complaints, I recommend petitioning the rational consumer in aggregate and their hard-earned dollars.” Wiping the boy's smashed brainmeat from his weapon onto the dirt, he jotted another note in his therapeutic journal and yelled at the queue organiser. "Next customer, please!"