The New Suchi Arena, the exhausted crowd yawning as The Tyrant chopped a rich kid in half with a halberd.
Off-stage, in the challenger queue, a familiar friend from the media had been spying on the matches.
“Hmm, yes, I believe this finisher comes from the repertoire of The King’s Harem,” said London Tremor, seeming to converse with either himself or his Grey Wolf companion. “For any first-timers, that’s a halberd style from the courtesans of Murdnon. It’s distinguished by…"
While he rambled, the chat of a stream overlay scrolled by his vision.
-t4ilofnothing: He didn’t wait for the duel to start…
-Proudhorny: Capitalist dogs. May they tear out each other’s throats and suffocate upon the blood.
-thecomicjesture: Zlabopped!
-LeeYoungestJun: Can someone lend me cash for the fast lane? I’m short 0.49 Quintillion.
-MMTea: Zlabopped!
-AND0VEIRA: @t4ilofnothing, you’re gonna dictate rules to The Tyrant? Build your own stadium, broke pleb.
-dizrezpekt: London, mate, stfu, no one asked for your amateur opinion.
London Tremor gulped down the hurt from the last message insulting him. “The Tyrant has claimed previously that the halberd ranks in the top six deadliest weapons, below the dagger, shield, short-sword, spear, and hyper-genius wit.”
Following the challenge of the rich kid came a trainee Bowman seeking advice. This duel played out without any fuss or showmanship, The Tyrant commenting on their form while exchanging arrows.
As the intern was narrating this match, a tattooed passer-by rudely interrupted him, jumping in front of him and finger-waving gang signs.
“Ay, English Isles Boyz in the chat!” the intruder shouted. “We rappin’ smack ‘ere from the streets of Sweet Lucy, from my nan’s VR-unit in Bristol. Burnt Cocoa Village, rep it! You lizards best get some charred smoothness down your gizzards before this brit tit gets digested." He pointed directly at the intern. "‘Eez about to get slammed. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrraphic!”
London, saying nothing, muted the obnoxious hooligan and stood on his tippy-toes to glance over them.
Although he tried his hardest to ignore these blows, his chest was aching. Each scathing remark from his viewers, each muted gesture flung in his face - each tore anew an unhealed wound on his heart.
How nasty was this gash dealt to him by the past days of failure.
The exclusive story that’d landed in his lap, the story of a hidden expert plotting a revolutionary cataclysm to topple the arena’s pillars, the story that should have brought the intern renown, respect, and permanent employment…it’d ended in nothing but his humiliation.
Like a noob throwing a best-of-three 2-0, he'd been blindsided twice on that night of The Soiree.
First defeat: despite spying so intensely on HF, he’d never worked out that his ‘unknown expert’ was actually The Cripple. An already notorious duellist of the past, he would've been identifiable to any non-amateur after accumulating London’s hours and hours of footage. The intern had practically held a magnifying glass upon his weird humour and distinctively-crap reaction speed.
The second, greater defeat had struck while London had been fumbling to fill this glaring omission in his reporting during his live TV segment. Oliver, hijacking the show, had revealed the much more blatant identity he'd missed. ‘HF’ ‘The Oracle’, ‘The Cripple’, this was just The Tyrant. Obviously. Who else in Saana had the astronomical brainpower necessary to memorise dozens of hyper-complex martial arts? A wealthy member of The Company, a local of the real-life country where they were otherwise inexplicably headquartered, the owner of a random bookstore attached to their in-game palace…every clue announced that this teen was obviously—obviously—The Tyrant.
Yet London had caught none of it. Snide and smug, he’d been so busy gloating over the diamond in his palm that he’d neglected the rest of the open mine sparkling around him.
His obliviousness had made him a laughing stock wherever he went now. Trainees at this stadium flung trashtalk whenever they recognised him. Viewers were joining his commentary stream to spam his chat with abusive zingers. It was relentless - everywhere, always, forever.
And these jests had since grown worse when it'd been found that he'd shared a private forum group alongside The Tyrant. All the tips from 'Bob From San Francisco' and Suchi’s other amateur experts had come directly from the teen spying back on him. The Company’s very own leader, spoofing ring-IDs, had been drip-feeding him info in a bizarre multi-layered joke. London, deaf to the snickers in his shadow, had been guided with just enough direction to arrive in front of the truth but without ever turning to face it.
Thus, the intern had been made an arse; thus, while reaching for the top, he'd fallen. The wings whisking him up to the sunny heights of journalistic glory and secure employment had disintegrated, and, pathetically, he’d plummeted back to the earth, where he lay now like a damp rag splattered in the dirt.
He wished he could log offline and weep for a week. Alas, Channel 5 had ordered him to continue streaming the workshop. Management wanted him to retain the viewership attracted by his proximity to The Tyrant, by his flying too close to the unseen sun - never mind that most tuning in were doing so solely to burn him, too.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
London—the muted hooligan still gesticulating in his face—received a message from another familiar friend from the media.
-Oliver Spears: Your match is soon, London Lad? Here’s the plan. You’re going to taunt him into giving at least a best of three. Ask him for an interview while calling him ‘Mr Lee’. That’ll piss him off enough. In the first round, play the fight normal. Second, you’ll stall with pure evasion until I have a chance to snatch the mic. I want you to really frustrate him. Don’t stop running. Make the dog chew his ankle until he kills it.
London, following a previous instruction, didn’t reply to Oliver, the message coming through a channel silent to his viewers.
The guy was actually right next to him, close enough to hear him giggling, to sniff his unwashed odour. With a hood pulled over his head, he'd been stroking his ginger beard while one shut eye scribbled notes in his Mental Library. His quiet laughter suggested he'd just invented a piece of extra spicy slander - perhaps an article on illicit shadow funds inspired by The Tyrant opening up his challenges to those willing to pay.
In contrast to London's own sunken state, Oliver had been standing oddly upbeat this morning, his face flushed with a radiant, cherubic glow.
Spears, since hijacking the TV spot to out The Tyrant, had been sacked from his job only to be rehired less than a day later. Behind this rapid career change had been a minor scandal. Both the journalist’s initial demotion to Suchi and his ultimate dismissal turned out to have been ordered by a corrupt executive suppressing The Tyrant's identity leak. Strangely, this infiltrator appeared to be a spy from a rival guild to The Company. Channel 5, releasing a public apology, had fired the executive and reinstated Spears, electing him to a brand new, higher role, 'Chief of Global Investigations'. Thus, he'd been freed, allowed once more to scour the virtual planet in his eternal quest to expose its perverts.
Oliver himself denied this entire narrative. He continued to blame The Tyrant, asserting the teen was a puppet master controlling the Company, their rivals, and Saana’s corrupt news media. Since his reinstatement, he’d been spamming slander pieces accusing the teen of child cannibalism, linking him with Suchi’s vampiric church and Ramiro The Hog.
London found the whole thing embarrassingly shameless. By his reckoning, his colleague’s plans had been as much a flop as his own. Revealing The Tyrant’s real-life identity had simultaneously exposed the humiliating fact that Spears had fallen for the ruse worse than anyone else during his obsessive mission to expose Alex Wong as The Company’s covert leader. What’s more, the true Tyrant seemed to be emerging from the attacks unscathed. Just look at him now, on stage, instructing the masses with his duelling techniques while the world vacuumed up his back catalogue of avant-garde doorstoppers, symphonies, etc. It was hard to understand why the teen had even bothered with anonymity.
Nevertheless, on Spears' end, the intern had observed nothing but smugness. Absent was the humility owed to the public and one's own sense of journalistic integrity after being proven so mistaken. Instead, the guy had been in an ecstatic mood. Joining London this morning, he'd waltzed into this stadium with the pomp of a victor, of a king looming over the corpse of an enemy general slain by his own hand. It seemed that, in the theft of The Tyrant's anonymity, he’d also committed a second, psychic theft stealing the rest of the teen's possessions; this massive venue, the millions sailing for the tournament, the trainees sweating in this duelling workshop, all had been subordinated by him, becoming emanations of Oliver Spears, Gaming Journalist of The Year 2049.
London would have ignored the egomaniac, having all but given up on him morally. However, King Oliver's latest commands were about to force him into a ridiculous situation.
In a couple of minutes, at the peak of London's own humiliation—for which he lacked whatever brain gene converted this into positivity—he was about to duel The Tyrant. Yes, right after playing a key role in the exposure of ‘HF’, the intern had been made to sign up to fight him one on one, in front of millions, with weapons.
For hours on end, he'd been commentating on The Tyrant brutalising challengers who'd done him no more severe insult than roleplay in his presence or inquire about his main career. So, for himself, for someone who'd really fucked this teen over, who'd inadvertently tossed a grenade into the quiet of his personal life...well...
London stared hollowly past the gang-signing hooligan, who'd continued leaping in front of him and free-styling about the forthcoming beating.
And why? Why must he subject himself to this ordeal? Because of karma? Because each person's crimes should be corrected by a divine punishment? No, if this world operated with such tit-for-tat cruelty, one could at least take some solace in the existence of a coherent ruling logic. No, London Tremor had signed up because Oliver Spears, rewarded for his meanness with a promotion, thought—like with those NPC orphans the other night—that the intern getting butchered would make for a cute article.
How oppressive...how mortifying…how embarrassing…
London prayed that the workshop would resume before his summons, that a blue-tinged tornado might smash through the stadium wall and fling him alongside the laughing debris to another game zone.
Alas, neither salvation came. An officiator soon called him from the list, his soul and body freezing at the death-cold sound of his username.
-Oliver Spears: Quick with it, lad, before he suspects something. Remember, this freak thinks multiple times faster than the rest of us. Every extra second you give him, he's picturing another half-dozen sick methods of torturing you.
London Tremor hesitated a moment longer, his muscles locked in rebellion, his stomach churning.
If these were to be his final minutes, then he wished it known by the universe—by anyone out there who might care for the plight of an ant—that he'd not gone to this fate willingly. He, like all of his sorrowful rank, was a mere subordinate, a slave to higher, callous authorities that ordered him to leap through one deranged hoop after another as they held forever hostage that promise of a steady, salaried career.
The intern, accepting the lot of his unpaid caste, gave one of The Tyrant’s tired sighs. "Off we go, Scotia. Off we go, boy..."
He trudged towards the stage to meet his ruin, his wolf companion trotting beside him, loyal and oblivious. Spears meanwhile abandoned them, slinking off to hide amongst the spectators like a tiger in the reeds awaiting its chance to pounce.
Each reluctant step forward accelerated the flood of insults from his chatters. His viewership spiked as voyeurs piled in for the first-person POV of his destruction.
-Dilara222: GL, noob.
-Kum Bocha: Spread wide, LT. It’s time to join The King’s Harem.
-YueK38: @restorangel No, they don’t qualify as a sandwich. That’s absurd.
-thecomicjesture: Zlabop incoming.
Those in the crowd who recognised him split aside. The way they divided made him feel like a coffin being borne through a sea of mourners to the grave. With grins of fond farewell, they sent him off. They patted his shoulders, and in their brief touch he felt an onward thrust, a giddy anticipation for whatever avant-garde hell awaited his corpse bestowed to The Tyrant's vindictive hands.