A duel between The Gates, between The Second Sage and his mysterious apprentice.

While they set up for the match, Henry continued to study his opponent carefully. She gathered her Charges, the roleplayer swapping from a 3-Flora/2-Fauna opener to 2-Flora/3-Fauna. To the expert eye, this little shift betrayed a drastic change in tactics. It suggested she’d forfeit any notion of inflicting any lasting damage via spells due to him out-healing them. On her end, because his piddling arrows dealt almost nothing either, she’d merely had to worry about spell-shielding any missiles that couldn’t be blocked or dodged while staying mobile with her Cheetah form. Her extra Fauna also unlocked the possibility of a surprise melee kill - her sole realistic victory condition in the first minute.

But that wasn’t really what he was watching for, Henry examining much more closely her roleplayed speech, the pauses of meaning between the flow of rehearsed sentences, the twitchings of intent between her acted expressions.

There was something off about this crazy lass – and not just the mad aesthetic. Her body language was stifled by a trace of hidden deliberation beyond that appropriate to roleplaying, which she seemed to be half-arsing. It was a duplicitous phoniness that Henry’d seen most often in the movements of assassins.

Was she an assassin, sent here today to kill him?

Several clues suggested that she was not part of this creed.

Her bio listed this mystic act as ongoing for years, and, none of his enemies, including the hardcore psychotics like Loki, possessed the patience for such a lengthy assignment without any apparent pay-off.

A spy could’ve stolen this Third Gate persona after paying the original to delete her character, but that trick could also be eliminated. The speed with which she’d delivered her mystical gibberish defied imitation. Her pace matched Justinian’s, a ‘skill’ restricted to those who’d served a lengthy term in their roleplay, thoroughly saturating their brains in it.

Lastly, on a much simpler, human level, Henry detected none of the proper feeling in her. A quiet, distrustful frigidity lingered permanently on the features of all who'd faced the summit’s cold breeze. She didn’t have it.

Still, for now, he would treat her like she was an assassin. This was simply not a week to be relaxing one’s vigilance around quirky-seeming Earthfriends.

Part of him resisted fighting her at all, for a friendly bout or otherwise. However, if any 'funny' business awaited him in this weird saga, he’d rather confront it now than later, when his focus would be too much on the duels of the tournament.

He’d already notified his soldier guards dotted around the arena to enter their highest alert.

Henry—stowing away these thoughts—armed himself with a simple shortbow and picked a starting spot near the centre of the map. The archery of Small-Island Shooting excelled in the mid-range, and he would thus be maintaining a close proximity throughout their duel.

His adversary, adjusting to this, bunkered behind a 7-metre-long children’s slide. The stairwell leading up to its top was quite thick, and her whole body could be concealed while spellcasting between peeks to fire.

Finally, as the officiator was about to count them down, the roleplayer became over-focused on the combat. Caught up in the details of the match, she made the epic RP blunder of repeating her previous dirt-collecting speech verbatim, without variation.

"My friends, has this soil not our world’s humble taste?!” she cried with dirt in her teeth, before snorting a repeated dose. “Has this soil not our world’s fecund..."

In the crowd, almost no one was able to follow the meaning of this speech, nor the pair's whole conversation before it. Sadly, The Third Gate had spoken in mystic riddles, and The Tyrant as always was too mean, unpersonable, tiny-hearted, misanthropic, and sadistic to give coherent explanations. The spectators thus had no clear regard for what was happening beyond a vague notion of a trial.

However, the roleplayers, when they observed The Third Gate’s repeated speech, that, they did understand - the pain and the struggle of roleplaying under pressure. They judged her severe blunder with a complicated mix of disapproval and sympathy. In her embarrassment, they remembered their own moments of re-usage, accidental or intentional, during periods of tiredness, laziness, and theft of their rehearsal time by their office job.

So, they thought, the very best of them, their RP Joan of Arc, also had her hours of weakness.

The Third Gate, hiding a wince as she noticed her mistake halfway through, performed the whole speech as if it were intentional. Then, finishing it up, she made a quick excuse so she wouldn't have to keep dividing her attention with RP.

She shouted across the arena to Him. "To You, Sovereign of Separation, we will grant no words of gratitude for this second chance, nor to The Beyond that has arranged it, that bedazzles You with Your own blinding hubris. Our words of gratitude from here on will be expressed in avoiding Your error. Now, we humble ourselves before the mute demands of Absolute Purpose. Now, we go into The Silence of Duty. Now, we become the taciturn vessel through which The Disunited Heavens enact their Apocalyptic Longing. Let this victory be our words of gratitude!"

The roleplayers in the crowd, listening on, lamented again. This lazy band-aid of hers had been delivered far too plainly, lacking the true heights of mystic crypticness.

With her saying no more, the duel began.

The Third Gate rushed to collect Celestial Charges and flung a flashing medley of and .

Henry—indifferent to whether she roleplayed or not—jogged at a relaxed pace while firing back. His shots arced humbly across the playground and through the incoming fluorescence. The tips of his arrows glittered only with the sun in their steel, without any additional - at their level, to draw blood once as he’d stipulated for this first minute trial, the raw mechanical force from his bowstring was sufficient against any target except armour.

He didn’t bother taking cover. Finding a bench, he jumped onto it for an elevated angle, and, standing in place, he ducked and shuffled to avoid hits to his vitals. While her spell spam pelted him, he alternated heals and bowshots to try to clip her head darting from out from behind the slide. The heals he collected were more than sufficient to mend the damage received, even when exposed like this. Due to Saana’s balancing around group combat and focus fire tactics, mage specs when solo rarely managed to kill healers, and his opponent would need to catch him out with a long-preparation nuke.

Because neither were at any significant risk, their trading spells and arrows looked utterly pointless. But, in The Strategy and the different forms it'd evolved to in each of them, most actions served some higher function, including these kinds of non-committal openers.

The two were quietly feeling each other out. With each missile, they prodded at their adversary's capabilities, their reaction speed, their rhythm, their accuracy.

A student of The Strategy would already have researched these values and memorised them in abstract - X milliseconds, X out of Y hits at Z range, etc. To be utilised in the live speed of a duel, though, one had to convert those figures into a more substantial, physical state, to acquire a feeling for the timings and distances. This solidification could only truly be finalised in the middle of the fight. One had to tweak and tune the bodily senses to fit the gathered data, laying down a foundation of the flesh upon which any higher, complex schemes would later be enacted. Any misjudgements at the start here, and the rest to follow—no matter how intricate in its architecture—would collapse pathetically, like a cathedral built on sand.

Henry, rapidly gathering info on his end, was immediately impressed.

This dirt-caked student of his adapted well. From both PLH and himself, she’d inherited their flexibility, a comfort with the unconventional.

This dumb exchange actually made for a moderate disruption from Saana’s standard flow of combat. His shots zipped at her without any prior warnings from the game’s telegraphing visual effects, without any cooldowns, the rhythm of their bombardment wild and capricious. Most players, conditioned to a greater regularity, would have grown too flustered to fire back accurately. Their aim would be knocked astray by a creeping jitter of the muscles, by a nauseating flood of adrenaline released whenever one violated the body’s ingrained habits.

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In the whole of Saana, Henry and his hippy bud had been some of the few players to break from this shackle to its regularity. At the game's very highest level, after truly absorbing its contrived, structured mechanics, one ceased to be restrained by them and could, in fact, utilise them to draw a picture of fighting far more fluid and naturalistic than even IRL combat. One could finally begin—as Henry’d put it in his Cripple days—to ‘strategise’.

This roleplayer girl, through their arts and whatever adventuring she'd done using them, had arrived at that same rare gift.

Ten and a half seconds into this exchange, Henry, getting a sense of her rhythm, synced a shot right as her hand popped out to fire.

His arrow, about to nick her wrist, was repelled by a spellshield’s last-instant glow.

The Third Gate, sensing the closure to this lull, realising her current position’s inadequacy, into a Cheetah and sprinted away.

The Earthfriend granted her what was functionally a 3-second immunity to his arrows, which lacked the strength to break them. The spell having a 12-second cooldown, the alteration between its protection and non-protection would be the main determinant in this phase's tempo.

During her current grace window, she covered the full distance of a stretch of open ground between the slide and a much larger playground fort complex near the map’s centreline.

Henry—in the method of a Small-Island Shooting rapid-fire feint technique—had been gripping multiple arrows. Two of these, he sent off teasingly. One after the other tapped her shielded feline rump, warning her against attempting these sprints later without protection.

Straight after these joke shots, having hoped to lower her guard through them, he aimed a third as she continued to the opposite side of the fort and the wore off. This playground obstacle’s base consisted of the tube slide he’d shoved Justinian into the other day. A knee-height air gap passed beneath this tube, through which his opponent’s legs could be seen, thickening and lengthening in the metamorphosis back from a Cheetah to a human.

He shot again.

When the arrow was about to strike, her legs abruptly jumped, vanishing as she pulled her knees into her chest.

A clever lass, she’d kept her ears peeled for the snap of his bow.

Henry’d foreseen two options: attempt a few more shots at her scuttling feet or climb the fort to oust her before she did the same and established a defensible position.

A twist on number one seemed more interesting to him.

In addition to his Flora Charges, he’d reserved two Faunas for pure mobility, to prevent her getting complacent Cheetah sprinting about. Cheating now by breaking his own rules, he burned the first of these into a Silverback. While his hand morphed and grew, it continued to grip the bow.

For this next sick trick, he would snipe her as a gorilla archer.

Saana didn’t have any secret school of ancient ape Legolases. Henry’d tried this technique a few times this week for a bored laugh. Now, however, what’d been a joke seemed to have its first-ever practical use.

The one bow gripped in his gorilla palm was joined by a second, spare bow, both held at once – yes, two bows. He'd called this The Two-Stringed Bowape; Sun and Moon Pinned in Timeless Eclipse, Twice.

He spent his remaining Fauna on , and, as his arms rippled red with bestial might, he drew the double-pinched strings.

A first arrow, he aligned with the opponent’s feet trotting unsuspecting beneath the playground fort. He fired and, the moment the string of the spare bow twanged, he desummoned it.

With the second bow and arrow still prepped, he fixed his grip, fixed his aim, and shot again.

The first missile passed beneath her leaping legs to pierce the dirt behind.

The second, heading—perfectly on target—for the meat of her left calf in descent, pinged off the face of a shield dropped suddenly to intercept the shot.

A spectacular flub.

From the costumed spectators watching behind Henry, laughter interlaced with claps and taunts assailed him. Throughout his scheming, they’d been shouting at The Third Gate a play-by-play of his movements. At an abrupt and unified warning to spellshield, she—who couldn't due to the cooldown—had resorted to an alternative.

Henry, denied again by these rat-hearted snitches, growled a low gorilla grumble.

This bloody crowd. They never assisted him like that. Where were his tip-offs? Not once did they show him this same owed kindness. So much charity, so much undeserved humanism, he’d given them by hosting this free duelling workshop, yet they always collaborated against him as if he were a villain or a cheater.

How ungrateful…

Later, he might pay audience plants to call out for him.

Dropping form and regathering Charges, he noted down The Third Gate’s absurd thinking speed and foresight. Listening out for the crowd wasn't hard. But, since her shields were tied to her wrists to let them hang loose during spell casting, she must have detached one immediately after the first arrow jump.

Impressed again, he circled the fort structure for a safe approach, and she reappeared at its highest point, a central watchtower. While he climbed, she spammed a volley of , their flashing beams chewing through a spellshield and burning a couple holes in his shoulders. An arrow, lobbed back, deflected with a clang from her ducking helmet.

The spam persisted as he hitched himself up and crossed onto a precariously thin bridge to the watchtower.

At the tower’s entrance, the girl prodded with a one-handed spear to knock him off the bridge. However, being an Earthfriend, unused to handling weapons, her spear technique sucked hyena scrotum, and Henry easily dipped past the weapon’s swaying tip and fired.

His arrow, skimming over the brim of her shield lowered to cover her thighs, dead centre on her throat, pinged off another spellshield.

The Third Gate, before this spell’s expiration, hurled herself out a window of the fort. Upon landing, not wanting to risk open ground, she rolled under the base of the obstacle, back through the gap through which he’d previously tried the ape-snipe.

Henry, descending from right above her on the other side, fired another shot that missed when she reversed her roll.

The Third Gate, jogging backwards and dodging further arrows, vanished behind a climbing wall straddling one of the map’s edges.

In of itself, this landmark provided poor coverage, being a measly four metres wide. Its value derived from its location forming a triangle with the slide where she’d bunkered at the match start and the fort they’d contested. The wall could be used to juke back and forth between them. Depending on which end he approached from, she would sprint to the opposite obstacle, restarting her evasive routine. This triple circuit was often exploited by duellists stalling until their cooldowns reset – or, in this case, until the clock ran out on this arrow-dodging trial.

Henry pursued her from the wall’s fort-facing side, her escape back to the slide offering less protection. Presently, his opponent was out of sight behind the obstacle. He’d thus been listening to her footsteps, which came to an abrupt stop.

He kept his pace unchanged to feign at missing this move. His bow drawn, he charged blindly around the corner.

On the other side, The Third Gate had halted with a hand held aloft, her fingers pulsing with the celestial sparkles of a 5-Celestial-Charge .

He appeared.

She fired. He fired.

Her shot, targeting his face, struck and destroyed his spellshield, and his shot, careening for her leg, bounced off her own spellshield, its cooldown refreshed by only half a second.

The Third Gate, with another three-second immunity window, began to while running backwards.

Cheetah sprinting off again would have been the most logical follow up. Instead, her eyes bulged from their sockets and her body shrank. Her dirt-caked skin and her armour morphed into a Chameleon Monkey’s green scales. Her lizard mouth, pointed at the eyeslot of his helmet, glowed with the preparatory energy of a , charging up to fatally pierce his skull and brain defenceless after her previous attack removed his spellshield.

Unfortunately for her, this sneaky little stab had been guaranteed to fail, even against Henry with his infamously awful reflexes.

At its very quickest, the whole sequence took one full second to execute from the start of the to the end of the . In the chaos of the open world fights she was accustomed to, that was fast enough to catch many an enemy out. Against Fauna Earthfriends, due to them having such a variety of forms, one needed extra time to determine what precisely they were doing before responding. For those challenged in the reaction speed department, a one-second surprise could be impossible to defend.

In the highly-specific context of these Tier-0 matches, however, that same one-second initiation became prohibitively long. The attack options available to these duellists were far too few. An Earthfriend after the week and change that Henry’d spent would have observed and practised themselves hundreds of attempts at this exact combo. At their current distance, her choice to shapeshift into a Chameleon Monkey had telegraphed the rest of it to him, and it gave him a generous window to select between several familiar counters.

Not breaking his stride, Henry made a minuscule tilt of his head, and the darting tongue bounced harmlessly off his helmet’s crown.

His follow up hit her swift. Desummoning his bow, he jumped at her, caught her in the middle of dropping her transformation, popped her spellshield with a dagger thrust, and slammed her into the climbing wall she’d used for cover.

Then, hiding a sigh of relief in a chuckle, he jogged away to prepare for the next phase.

The Third Gate, rattled by the collision, had fallen and landed on her human arse.

A mild sting pulsed on her neck, a wet warmth. She reached for it. The fingers of her glove came back with a spot of blood from her self-mending carotid.

She gazed at the stain, confused about its origins.

The culprit could be found resting on a tuft of grass beside her.

An arrow.

It couldn’t have been fired during that sequence, his bow having been discarded.

He’d stabbed her with it using his fist, she realised, as his laughter travelled from across the other side of the wall.

“Didn’t say anywhere in the TOS that it had to be shot!” Henry assumed a new position in front of the playground fort and replenished his Earthfriend Charges. “Stage one: a resounding victory – for me, The Second Gate, Your Doorway Granddaddy.”

That sequence had taken less than a minute. He fired a couple of friendly arrows at his opponent when she ran from behind the climbing wall to an obstacle for the next trial. The chick—totally ignoring his harassment, neglecting to return any mystic banter after fully immersing in the duel—held a shield in front of her face and resurveyed the landmarks while reassessing her plans.

As for Henry’s own assessment of this deformed grandchild:

She was one-hundred-billion-percent un-bloody-trustworthy. This sneaky squirrel had definitely hidden some extra tools in the nest.

But what those were wasn’t clear to him yet. Unfortunately, in The Strategy she’d picked up from him, one was always concealing things, the art inherently deceptive.

How obnoxious, he thought, facing his own tricks for the first time and sympathising with his old enemies.

While distracting her with his last arrows, he re-directed his guards around the perimeter of the arena, covering up a few vulnerabilities.