A stadium, after a duel, heads snapping around to gawk at a splattering mist of blood.
“Holy shit,” swore London Tremor, his vision flooding with a wall of stream chat.
He rubbed his eyes in case this crazy homeless bitch had smeared dirt in them, too.
But no.
Around him, a thousand voices were crying out a similar shock, and he turned to watch a rippling wave of astonishment spreading through the stadium. Beyond the gathered crowd, wherever the trainees slumped half-dead with exhaustion, in the arenas, in the stands, they were revived. Head after head, pulled by the pivoting of the rest and the noise that followed, glanced over. Together, they realised whose cloud of soul-motes were glittering in defeat on stage.
No, their vision was not deceiving them. This roleplayer had just killed The Tyrant.
That was new.
Tens of thousands suddenly burst into laughter.
“Holy shit,” London Tremor repeated. “Holy shit…”
He hadn’t even expected her win...his previous commentary had been pure hype-building…
Amidst the surprised and cackling audience, faster thinkers than the intern turned their thoughts to the next logical point, skipping the minor significance of The Tyrant's first major loss, to the real reason his death meant anything in a game where players could simply reincarnate.
It was always assumed that he, Saana’s wealthiest figure by a long shot, carried some number of Legendaries on him that would drop on death – hence his extreme precautions, hence a full battalion of Company soldiers shadowing him despite his claims to retirement. At least one item had already been confirmed, the ID-spoofing ring. The question was whether there were any others. And how many exactly? And were any of them truly broken? Some of his old Cripple artefacts could summon natural disasters or castle-smashing demons.
What's more, items dropped in the order of their value, the highest first. Thus, the most powerful artefact sitting in his secretive pockets, the most destructive, the most-globe-shaking, the most irreplaceable - that's what his corpse had just coughed up.
These quick-witted spectators fixed their attention on the scattering lights of his exploded body. In the gory mist, a flash of silver sparkled, the shine glittering from a gemstone amulet, one shaped like a star.
For those in the know, that glimpse was enough.
Veterans instantly recognised this item: an Amulet of The Vilified One.
A recurring support Legendary from the ultra-late-game of previous instalments, these amulets were used to offset the main risk of picking a Legendary Class, its permadeath. Instead of your character getting deleted after one mistake, you could die an extra 15 times.
In and of themselves, they did nothing, but, when paired with a Legendary Class, if you could find one...
A Legendary player without one would be like a one-off nuke. After blowing up a kingdom or two, they'd succumb to the combined forces organised in retaliation. Saana itself fought against you. The game, discarding its usual impartiality, directly distributed assassination quests. Most perished within weeks, erased after a brief taste of power, of infamy, of legend.
The Amulets' extra deaths changed the whole dynamic. The Legendary player, given the space to learn from multiple failures, to grow into the full potential of the role, transformed into a world boss. A one-man empire, they'd sweep over continents like a plague, subjugating capital after capital. If they were intelligent, they'd preserve the NPC inhabitants of the conquered territories and force them to offer worship and the God Energy that fuelled a Legendary Class's power, their might growing exponentially. Executed well, the wielder could take months of coordinated global resistance to stop. Maybe years.
In the right circumstances, what dangled at the end of that chain shining before them was a chance at absolute domination, a chance at playing god.
These were devastating items when they fell into the hands of a normal player. As for in the hand of The Tyrant of Saana, confirmed to be carrying one for some reason…well...
On stage, The Third Gate, prophetess of the apocalypse and so on, hiding her smirk, cancelled her monster form and plucked the amulet from the air. Desummoning her helmet for a better finishing pose, she showed the crowd the bored confidence of one who’d glimpsed at destiny and could no longer be surprised. With this look of mystical arrogance, she inspected the item’s contours and colour as one might an ordinary blade of grass.
“Behold,” she declared, spitting on The Cripple's grave with the RP he mysteriously detested now, “the final star that twinkles out before the endless dawn! Behold the crack of light that sparkles through the opening Ga—”
The roleplayer froze.
The edge of a dagger was pressed against the flesh of her throat.
“Don’t speak! Don’t move! Don’t desummon it!” growled a Company Cutthroat, stepping from a puff of smoke behind her.
The Third Gate had expected a comedic reaction to her scam, The Cripple from the manuals she'd studied congratulating her for pulling a fast one. However, some years had passed since then, and the treatment she would receive was not to be so friendly.
As this one soldier from his guard teleported next to her, so did fifty more, positioned in advance. A dozen spearmen, taking up the surrounding ground space, aimed their weapons at her to create a razor-pointed cage. On top of the map’s playground obstacles, archers drew their bows and mages prepped spells.
Supportive troops sprinted in after them, assembling fortifications and laying out traps blocking any potential escape.
While this platoon and a second working backup covered the roleplayer, others faced any outward threats. They'd drawn their weapons upon the crowd in case of any assistance from co-conspirators or opportunists. A stern voice, projected throughout the stadium, bellowed a brusque series of orders. Everyone was to discard their weapons, to stop any movement, and to remain silent as a precaution against Spellcasting.
Within three seconds of the order, a volley of arrows fanned out from the stage, mowing down stragglers and players caught in fits of laughter. Due to the level gap between the guards and the trainees, those struck burst like jelly-filled balloons.
The Third Gate—watching the mass getting mown down in the corner of her eye, watching those who fled from the attacks get likewise snuffed by subsequent volleys—gulped, and her larynx scraped against the harsh edge of the blade to her throat.
London Tremor, amidst the mass being shepherded and culled, had given his wolf a sudden command to freeze, themselves and the crowd holding their best statue poses. A spell zipping towards him almost made him duck in a panic. But it struck a neighbour, whose wet splatter licked the bare skin of the intern’s neck and forearms. He didn’t even risk turning to inspect the aftermath.
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He continued to watch as HF soon returned. The teen leapt back on stage after accepting a de-levelling penalty and insta-respawning at an adjacent Reincarnation Monument, which was inaccessible to the rest of them and purpose-built for such an emergency. Troops guarding the site escorted him over.
The teen wagged a warning finger at the roleplayer. “Nope! Read the TOS. I’m not staking Legendaries on these joke matches. For that prize, you’ve got to beat me properly, along with the empire.”
Preparing for a harder fight, he’d swapped to his Tier-5 Spelltome setup. Like some haloed god, his body shone as bright as a lighthouse bulb. Multiple layers of protective spells were being cast onto him in succession by his battalion’s coordinating healers, leaving no gap of vulnerability. In one of the teen's glowing hands appeared a coin-sized box of metal; popping its lid with a finger, he raised it to his nose and inhaled a pinkish gas. At once, a jolt of electricity seemed to course through him, his step quickening and his whole body—freed of a sagging weight—bouncing and rocking like someone swept up by the ecstasy of hearing their favourite song for the first time in decades. With one closed eye, meanwhile, he’d plunged into his Mental Library, re-reading the roleplayer's profile for extra information. His other eye spasmodically scanned the stadium, devouring any signs of threat and repairing holes in his troops’ defences.
London Tremor felt the dampening hairs of his neck prickle at the rapidity of the teen’s gaze. The movement, witnessed hundreds of times in his duels, stuck out to him now as much more unsettling. It was quick, inhumanly so. It reminded him of a scuttling cockroach, of a snake’s flicking tongue.
HF strolled up to the roleplayer, stopping a metre and a half short of her. A spear materialised in his hand. He used its tip to poke through the enclosure of guards and, reaching for the amulet, threaded its chain. Before snatching it away, the teen requested her verbal permission.
The item’s ownership had been transferred by his death. Simply taking it would inflict a theft penalty that would cause him to drop additional Legendaries if he died again. Of course, this was still mostly a formality, any of his guards able to kill her and seize it on his behalf.
The roleplayer agreed. HF, thanking her, hooked back the amulet and stored it in his Spatial Bracelet before any in the crowd could inspect it further.
In a gesture London couldn't understand, the teen—with a threat to blacklist her permanently—commanded her to flash her username. The roleplayer blinked with awkward hesitation, then the jarringly-out-of-character words ‘FuzzyGirl35’ shone above her head.
A few spectators who laughed at this were shot, HF’s purpose evidently not being humiliation.
Whatever he’d sought, he didn’t seem to be content.
“Listen,” the teen said, “I’m not trying to be a sore loser. For catching me out, you have my Cripple-felt respect - this was hilarious. Good job, kid. Little pleases us old men more than the rugrats outgrowing us and scamming us back. It’s only then that we can go to the grave content, can sleep without any further worries. Really, I am proud of you. Stretch even taller! Rifle the pockets of the loftier targets beyond! With that said, I’ll be needing to check something. If I’m wrong, I apologise in advance, and you can contact my staff for an outfit reimbursement.”
Before that last sentence had been completed, an order given telepathically, his guards constraining the roleplayer moved in sync and rewarded her for today’s surprise win. The spearmen thrust, and their weapons, like the spikes of an enclosing iron maiden, impaled her from every side. The Cutthroat with his dagger at her throat grabbed her by the dreadlocks and sawed through her neck.
Her low-level body and armour offered their attacks no more resistance than tissue to a chainsaw. In a flash, she’d been torn asunder, and her punctured, beheaded form disintegrated into a cluster of lights.
Indignant roleplayers cried foul from the audience, and they were shot, too.
HF, after executing the hobo, continued to monitor her soul-motes. A hard stare tracked them as they—sensing their lack of invitation to remain and chat and giggle about this quirky Gates past and the shared art—floated towards the stadium’s towering walls, off to a distant respawn point.
The teen, discovering something in the trajectory of their flight, gave a queer laugh, one tinged with embarrassment and disappointment. His wary gaze flickered a few seconds longer about him. Then, offering no explanation, he stood down his guards, told the silent crowd they were free to mock and gossip, and called up his next challenger.
London didn’t move at first.
The audience around him, those not killed, were similarly slow to reanimate. The most bold-hearted tested their luck by allowing their shoulders to relax and, finding the movement safe, liberated one muscle group after another.
An awkward chuckle rang out here and there.
The costumed Virtual Realists crept towards each other to whisper about their prophetess’s unjust—and real—execution.
A reluctant challenger stepped on stage, caught between the two fears of fighting HF and refusing him.
The clash of steel resounded in the distance from trainees restarting their duels.
The intern stayed motionless a while longer, studying HF chatting with his soldiers in their native tongue. The teen seemed to be telling them a joke to ease their tension, a bout of laughter following. Despite their laughter, at his order to disperse, the guards returned to their positions with the drilled rapidity of their emergence, and their eyes continued to survey the masses of trainees with hostile suspicion.
London felt woozy.
His mind, drained by the endless night yet also energised by the duel abruptly stopped in HF’s gory finish, leapt in the strangest of directions. A collage of nauseous sensations groped him. The crunch of their marching boots, the swirling severity fanning across the land, the vertiginous heights of fortifications rising, the heat of the flames consuming their interior, the hysterical shrieks of apocalypse, the sweetish reek of open human entrails…
That last carnal stench was especially vivid, the intern’s nostrils puckering. Drawn by the realness of the odour, he glanced down.
Beside him, being stepped past by the dispersing feet of others, a pile of shredded torso lay in the dirt. Its deflated strings of gut spilt across a network of overlapping bootprints while their shiny pink wetness seeped into the tarnished earth’s accepting red.
It took the intern a second to mentally connect this mess to his shot neighbour. Minutes earlier, this meat had spoken to him. It’d told him The Third Gate’s name when he’d first wondered out loud.
Right, London Tremor thought, the flood of nausea putting him into a sober mood and correcting him of an error he’d made these few days hanging out in this stadium, in this weird, funny little window of Saana.
Duelling—as ‘The Cripple’ himself, as ‘HF’, often repeated—was nothing but a side hobby.
The intern, rising on his toes, looked over the crowd and across the stadium to check if Oliver had been logged on. He soon spotted the incarcerated journalist rotting in his cell. Spears, delighting at the show, was bent backwards in an open-mouthed, gleam-toothed cackle.
London was eventually pulled from his trance by his chat's irritated spam. Apologising, he focused back on The Tyrant and the next challenger.
When he remembered Scotia, The Grey Wolf still holding its ordered pose, he released the pet and fed it a treat for obedience. To his disgust, the wolf switched afterwards to the tastier snack of his neighbour’s spilt offal.
Although this one sleep-deprived intern continued to feel out of sorts for a while, the rest of the stadium regathered themselves quickly. Nothing endured in a videogame, not shock, not anything.
A duellist in a later challenge asked The Tyrant what evil, globe-dominating Legendary Class he would pick.
The teen, looking at them with more contempt than usual, explained matter-of-factly how stupid that would be. One, he’d retired. Two, if you were in the camp who dismissed his retirement as a sham, then you recognised that He already controlled the planet. What further did he stand to gain? What, alternatively, might he lose from Saana spamming quests against him? Do the algebra. Nope. The amulets—he carried multiple—were lightweight inventory padding. They buffered against the theft of Tier-0 Legendaries that were less technically valuable but more useful to him due to his current level. Their potential loss meant almost nothing at this stage of the game since the Legendary Classes available to the rest of them were weak enough to be spawncamped through a thousand deaths by the Zone Guardians or, you know, his global military.
Saana's news networks had already gathered their panels for their broadcasts. Duellists and item experts were heatedly discussing the incident over slow-mo replays of The Tyrant getting smoked. Hearing his dismissal of the amulet, most would go on to corroborate his dry explanation, the analysis making total sense. The hype then migrated to speculation on his other artefacts and the identity of The Third Gate. Staff in office backrooms rushing to investigate the latter lost their minds watching lore recaps.
The Tyrant, saying no more and moving on, resumed his workshop and its usual exhausting pace.
The atmosphere amongst the trainees soon rose to a newer, brighter note than before. Between the gruelling drills and tool-crammed lectures, they gossiped about that random kill, about the crazy wench who’d proven The Tyrant’s mortality by drawing first blood. Perhaps, his victory in these tournaments ahead wasn’t so assured. A whole world had set sail for Suchi’s shores. Who knew what hidden freak might trip him up next? Or maybe the next lucky dog would be one of them, pouring their diligent sweat into the arena sand.
But as this normalcy reclaimed the masses, a minority of observers continued pondering the dropped amulet vanishing in the marching chaos of affairs. Some fantasised about how they might put it to use if they could somehow acquire it. Others questioned whether playing a god genuinely held no appeal to this figure finishing up the last touches on his research into a supreme art for solitary combat, for ‘duelling’.