Hail to the pharmaceutical miracles of 2050, which gifted Henry his longest sleep in years, clocking in a jealousy-inspiring, applause-evoking seven hours.

Getting up around sunset, he checked the evening news. The world continued to rotate, the degenerate gamers to analyse him getting smoked by a raving hobo.

A whimpering mosquito of trouble had reached The Slums. Frantic spam messages from Alex, marked top priority, had been demanding he log on. The beaver-head, apparently arriving in the zone, had organised a gaudy parade that’d marched him to the duelling stadium where he wanted Henry to meet in person. They were supposed to exchange scripted trashtalk to build hype for the tournament, for the epic match anticipated between them sometime near the finale. Alex's message chain ended in a meltdown, the procession reaching the venue with a no-show. Henry replied he’d been napping, but, in apology, they could rig a show match at the final workshop tomorrow. He promised to give his best bud a pity victory, crowning him the second immortal figure to slay Him - only this time in a serious, no-holds-barred match.

The promise was a lie. Henry would trounce him, venting some of his frustration at Alex moving the tournament to his zone.

Ignoring that for now, having enjoyed his well-earned rest and greedy for more, Henry logged on for an even longer sleep.

Once again, he entered The Overdream, jumping into the concluding session of his martial research.

***

The Left-Hand Nobility.

Every genuine act of progress is an act of violence and transgression, every innovator a transgressor. The genius, as part of his striving into the unknown, must look at what the masses consecrate most holy and, declaring it deficient, declaring himself capable of holier, spit upon it and them.

Those who disagree with the above deserved to be spat upon, as also anyone who, worse, agreed.

But the need to transgress is sometimes true. As a condition of living at the highest strata of any field, one often forfeits what most could not. Until you obtain your godhood—which you won’t until you’ve succeeded—you simply cannot have it all. Your attention is finite. Your fingers are numbered. Your hours are numbered. This quest for human perfection demands you to prioritise, to favour AND to neglect, and the glory-seeker, whether acknowledging it or not, obliges. What others hold too dear to sacrifice, you toss away and spit upon without a thought. Health, happiness, family, love, law – these are the initiatory debris to scrap, and if you’re still saddled with them, you’ve barely begun.

For those journeying up the slope, the only genuine difficulty and guilt start later. The real blockade is when, for the sake of the goal, one must sacrifice the virtues of the goal itself, when a priest, for example, must question the flawed letters of his bible, when the teacher must give up on the unteachable child. These are the climber's true transgressions.

For some such of these higher transgressions, the resolution may be difficult but quite possible. One of a young athlete’s core creeds is tirelessness. They wage an internal war against the urge for rest. With fanatical repetition, they push their bodies to operate beyond exhaustion. The cried signals of their damaged muscles, they numb their brain to and convert to joy. ‘I will never rest,’ they make their mantra, ‘this haggard pain testifies to my success.’ But, at some point, the athlete must rest. This truce with the enemy they do eventually mature into signing, after enough injuries ruin their long-term capacity to defeat rest, after the coach keeps removing them from the field to endure the punishment of artificial rest. All is resolved once integrated into the more expansive moral mathematics of rest avoidance.

In some pursuits, however, with some flavours of transgression, there is no such happy compact. Certain sacrifices violate your principles at their most fundamental level. They assault you. They allure. They accumulate across encounters, like lead amassing in the kidneys and the brain, gradually dementing your judgement. Every time you extend your hand to shake their sinister fist, you must ask yourself, ‘Am I still doing this for the reasons I began or has this transgression reconditioned my soul? Has what was once my means become my end?’

And such is often the end. Nevertheless, those who aspire to unreached heights accept this danger, and they spit down upon those who shy from it.

Henry, while building his empire, had almost made a career of stockpiling edgy, hard-to-reconcile transgressions – within a videogame. Forget spitting rudely at people, he’d committed bribery, theft, espionage, blackmail, war crimes, demonic summonings. Whatever wasn’t listed on his own rap sheet could be readily found amongst those of his allies.

Amongst the many he’d defiled, he'd even spat upon himself. All of these dark dealings betrayed the fundamental ethics that’d driven him, a humanist of delusional proportions, trying to extend his principles to a videogame universe. Killing people to stop people getting killed could, from certain perspectives, be considered hypocritical. Nevertheless, having calculated their service to his higher goals, he’d accepted the hypocrisy, understanding that contradictions were part of the realities of a life upon which one merely attempts to impose moral order and congruency.

Hell, even that, the imposition of moral order, he detested and spat upon, upon this whole arrogant assumption in the background that any one person has the capacity or right to decide the difficult choice for the supposed sake of the collective. 'Benevolent dictators', he spat upon this nonsense myth, and he spat upon the power seekers and out-of-touch utopians who peddled it. Upon ALL human leadership, Henry spat. Give him the A.I. regimes of present-day Europe. Give him the quasi-human 20th-century constitutional democracies that wheezed forward in his own country. No king is kinder than the system. Even in the decrepit forms of the latter, their legalistic bureaucracies—mistaken by simpletons as a pure negative—had expanded, curbed, augmented, and coordinated billions of naked, murderous apes into the civility of the modern age, had granted these apes the very half-educated reasoning by which they flung their silly critiques against it. Not a single one of these apes, when bestowed a crown, would have tolerated a fraction of this shit-flinging, and upon all who still searched for such an ape, Henry, from his imperial throne, spat.

"But," one spit-slimed cretin steps forward to represent the people's neglected voice, "you're The Tyrant. You founded a global empire through brute, militant force. You're quite possibly the last person in the world qualified to denounce autocracy."

Upon such drivel, Henry spat. Was this the real-world world? No, it was a videogame world. There is no hypocrisy or contradiction in a videogame. 'The Tyrant' is only a nickname in a videogame. The resolution you seek is, like a normal person, to adopt different moral standards for reality and a videogame.

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And for any content with that sane and highest of answers, he encouraged them to progress to the next section break while spitting upon them, too.

But, no, he just simultaneously recognised that these human-less, tyrant-less successors to the feudal ape were an artificial aberration, involving a complex of transgressions against mankind's base instincts. Before anyone gets to enjoy the freedom from his buffoonish brother, he or (more typically) his ancestors must be prepared through a preliminary of absolute, tyrannical subjugation.

You have to learn to tolerate being spat in the face daily by the flawed, indifferent, abstract machinery of the modern state. You must accept the spit of filing for permits before modifying your house, the spit of paying taxes for services you'll never use, the spit of allowing rapists—your rapist—to dodge jail due to a lack of sufficient evidence. That degree of tolerance is acquired only after a vigorous societal reconditioning by various, progressive forms of violence. The armies of antagonistic political structures must be extinguished. Internal dissidents must be executed or later, as one softens the technique, imprisoned. Children must be divorced from negative parental influence and disciplined into the national mindset through compulsory education.

No society volunteered for this conditioning. They were either born into it or bestowed it by a tyrant's violent hand, and, if you think otherwise, Henry spat upon you.

"So, it is to create a better, more tolerant people, to prepare them for liberty, that our tyrants have marched their armies into neighbouring cities and hanged anyone who complained."

Henry spat upon this ludicrosity. These were his goals, in his hangings, the goals of a thoroughly modern subject conditioned to tolerate and love and spread the spit.

The historical tyrant spits on this sappy humanist ideology. To him, the pros of empire are but part of a half-conscious state religion aggrandising the greed of himself and his people, but the propaganda served to his conscripted peasants before marching them off. His own moves are guided by immediate, unstained positives. He thirsts for the prestige of war, he eyes his neighbour's juicy tax base or a mine for rare minerals, and the cost of these acquisitions in young men's bodies doesn't weigh his noble conscience.

No, to discover the goodness in those hangings, we have to flick through some intermediate chapters of the civilisational chronology. It’s merely incidental, after centuries or millennia of serfdom and ethnic cleansing, that anyone reaps his order’s reward.

But still, for we who've survived to enjoy the aftermath, that tyranny was an essential step in today’s peace and prosperity. Our liberty from the free-flying murder of the past required those mass murderers. Now, as we launch our spit upon their graves, we should not forget to add a flower of gratitude.

Thus, Henry, comprehending the unintended good in their violence, had chosen to be the good of their violence with intention. And, unlike them, he didn't even request the flower on his grave. Give him just the spit, if you wish.

"But, within this demonic garble, you've hidden away the countless alternatives to tyranny. Assuming we accept the premise of this modern civil order requiring creation, a contentious assertion in and of itself, there are many non-militant methods of propagation. Trade incentives. Technology sharing. Media. Even that education you've conflated with atrocity."

Upon this passivistic myopia, he also spat. To view these alone as sufficient is nothing but the final proof of tyranny's success, the ideology of its wind-down and transition.

The critic, having been generationally brainwashed, forgets the utility of violence and its vital presence in their own manufacture. They lose sight of the many globs of spit congealing on their jabbering cheeks. They can’t perceive that an earlier version of themselves could never have smiled while wearing these invisible humiliations. Everywhere this blind critic has gone, they've congregated only with the other spit-habituated freaks who’ve survived the culling, who've also been walled away from the brutality beyond and before.

If they ever question anything, it's only the wall. Some of these dolts, recognising a few skeletons mixed into the cement, protest with disgust, and they demand the wall be torn down, they object to its raising elsewhere. Into the well-meaning but stupid faces of both, the anarchists and the cowards, Henry spat.

Before peace comes war, before sacredness transgression, before freedom from tyranny tyranny.

In this world, in this cycle, he'd volunteered to be the evils that precede all good.

Thus was the general, laughably simplified logic in the founding of his empire, in speed-running the civilisation process, and in finally—after establishing enough systematic peace to make himself redundant—retiring.

And is that not the final proof? He, who once held all this power, has already returned it.

"But yours were not original arguments."

Henry spat upon the insinuation that reality demanded novelty. Tell this spit upon your face it's unoriginal, and let us see if that alleviates its slimy texture.

"That was not the critique. Last we heard them, this unoriginal argument, the necessity of brutality for a greater freedom, was in the mouth of those you've executed, the dictators about to commit genocide, the noble-hearted rebels about to destroy their nation."

Henry spat upon this, too, the false belief beneath that life's meaningful distinctions and justifications will be dredged up from pure rhetoric.

Upon all words, he spat. You have to look further than words, to the actions of consequence taken during the ambiguity of possibilities such discourse generates. Look at the number of people able to eat bread. Look at the number dead. Beyond these, there are no other clear lines of logic in the field of tyranny. Only you, upon whom the tyrant spits, are imprisoned by words. When one chooses this route, one transgresses all further argument, becomes beholden to no word of law, answerable to no word of expectation or word of promise.

And therein we cycle back to the very danger of tyranny. The absolute ruler, in transgressing all, exposes themselves to every good and every evil, inviting a thousand new and tempting ways to fail. In the hurricane of all allowed to me that follows, even those who assuredly began on a noble footing might've lost it. The tyrannical choice is, inherently, contradictory and precarious, one's growing comfort with its mass of transgressions steadily disintegrating whatever humanistic impulse might've first impelled. Hence, in the ever-circular logic, Henry detested tyranny and spat upon anyone who didn’t.

"Yet you are a tyrant."

He wouldn't deny it. He, with spit on his own face, had been a tyrant.

And for the most part—with himself as the sole judge—he’d stayed his course, had administered an amount of misery justifiable by what it’d purchased. If he were being frank, the only ambiguity to him had been where to conclude the march, where precisely to punctuate the transition between himself and what comes after. This, also, unfortunately, had had no clear lines.

"For only you can determine the line where it ends."

Indeed. After all, even this voice of petty criticism was only his own, a tyrant accountable to nobody but his insane conscience.

But such were problems in a videogame centuries ago. Spitting upon them now, he'd moved on to the infinitely-lower stakes enterprise of duelling in this videogame.

Although duelling itself wasn't particularly edgy or transgressive, his research had still circled this subject repeatedly.

Many of the arts so far had been derived from maniac NPCs who’d gone down their own transgressive avenues and been destroyed by their decisions. From one perspective, this was the great, big lesson in the story of The Laughing Sons Combat System and its most deranged trickster son. Some humour to alleviate the misery of killing? Fine. Maybe encouraged. But, by treating the matter too glibly, you might become a comically-reckless lunatic. Likewise, the Western Rangbitan studies were basically a catalogue of different violations of death - The War-Priests with their Death Training were an extremity of calculation, The Gladiator’s Duty of spectacle, The Iron Defence of suicidal disregard.

Research-wise, these sinister studies were valuable to Henry, who sought what martial knowledge had been found at every deranged height, when people sacrificed everything for their obsession. However, one could also take them as cartoonishly-exaggerated, videogame examples to himself of how absolutely not to live.

And this next style—the opener of A Thousand Tool’s final stages of synthesis—would be another extreme case of caution. This art, of The Left Hand Kings, was an art devoted to spitting upon everything sacred to himself, an art devoted to the perfection of his own greatest transgression, to the highest mastery of tyrannical mass murder.