Concurrent with a lengthy speech, at the official grounds of The Company's Monthly 1v1 Recruitment Tournament.

Several miles from the stadiums as the seagull flies, things were being readied for the amateur preliminaries.

The gauntlet’s starting battleground would be quite simple. Due to the logistical brain cancer of supplying enough arenas for the migrant hoard, the organisers had used sticks to draw 50-by-50 metre squares in the dirt. Tens of thousands of these crude sites had been marked out. Stations at each with sun umbrellas and flags hosted the officiators - randoms hired from the slums and monitored for bribery by a smaller full-time staff.

With ceremonies underway, most sites were unoccupied. Here and there, however, clouds of rising dust and the clattering of metal punctuated by pained grunts distinguished rookies hard at practice.

One notable dust cluster consisted of four hundred trainees exhibiting the impressive skills honed over the preceding month - flipping acrobatically, juggling swords, deflecting poisoned arrows with their pinkies.

These were duelling’s top-ranked fledglings. They represented the best of not only Suchi but of this entire month’s record-breaking influx of 48 million new players, the best of whom had transferred zones. In an odd physical manifestation of their exclusivity, a company of soldiers shooed off any lesser duellists trying to set up nearby. This guard duty had been assigned to protect certain VIPs amongst them.

Aside from the troops, the atmosphere was jovial, excited, optimistic, boastful, and a tad complacent.

Amongst their lot, they knew, would be the majority of this weekend’s rookie finalists, and their competition over second place had taken on a friendly air. On the one hand, the workshop’s hazing had induced a fraternal bond. On the other, theirs was a recruitment tournament, and as recruits most of them had already secured their admission to the top guilds watching, through their bloody climb up this region’s over-populated 1v1 ladder.

In that last regard, this weekend was truly only their adventure’s start. After its finale, they’d be shipping off to bootcamp as cadets. From there, they’d enter a pipeline accelerating them towards pro-careers and frontier expeditions. Knowledge of this destiny, guaranteed by merits served, enabled them to rest their blistered feet and participate at leisure in the passing joys of competition.

This sense of calm applied to most of them.

In one ring lurked the Miracleworker SaNguiNe, Suchi’s resident dagger-wrestling expert, its first-ranked rookie, and a prime candidate for one of this weekend’s silver medals. While others chilled, he'd been circling a cornered enemy, glaring at and through them with a penetrative, heaven-stabbing loathing.

“Which tool will save you now?” SaNguiNe asked, side-stepping his foe’s spearthrust.

His opponent—an elderly Earthfriend from America—had been trying to generate distance with her stabs while the wrestler strolled her perimeter like a big cat prowler, his posture long, lithe, unflinching.

SaNguiNe's current foe would not normally qualify for one of his sparring playmates. He'd picked the old woman out due to her being one of the fastest to adopt A Thousand Tools in its purest form. He was eager to test how the art conformed to the pressures of this opening stage, whose no-frills arenas limited the style’s preferred obstacle-reliant kiting. Of course, for himself, a wrestler, these setting changes mattered little - his arena was the body, his terrain the limbs, his obstacle the resilience of joints.

“Which tool will save you now?” SaNguiNe asked again, both of this cornered grandma and of her cornered style.

His foe did not return the satisfaction of answering his taunts. Like most apprenticed in A Thousand Tools, her eyes were perpetually flittering between him and multiple intense focuses. Her spearthrusts, defensive and non-committal, were of secondary aim. She was trying to use them to cover the replenishment of her Class’s spellcharges, their fight having depleted all but one healing-based Flora. Around her, undifferentiated motes of light continuously pulsed and dissipated, cancelled as the grandma determined the follow-up gesture to be too vulnerable.

“Which tool will save you now?” SaNguiNe repeated hatefully. “Should I lend you one of mine?”

In a pose of supreme arrogance, the wrestler stretched his arms in offer. Both hands were empty.

He’d been circling this pensioner without a shield or weapon, out-witting her sluggish spear technique through the raw, superior reflexes of his youth. Such was the gap between HF's disciples and himself.

The next feint aimed to pierce his waving forearm.

His opposing hand slapped it off trajectory.

A second stab—the tip aglow with actual damage—ventured for his inner thigh.

SaNguiNe snapped into immediate action. He'd trained like most grappling specialists in the rapid level shifts required for takedowns. In one burst, he crouched, causing the spearpoint to plink harmlessly against the lower section of a metal breastplate. This downward motion flowed into a penetration manoeuvre, as he shot forward three steps and swept the grandma’s legs effortlessly as a panther snatching up a sick, decrepit deer.

The old woman's fingers—reaching from her spear’s shaft for a spell—yanked back in failure.

“WHOOPS!” SaNguiNe shouted, as he brought her to the dirt of his domain. “Which tool will save you now?”

In his disdain, in the vigour with which he bent her, one sensed it wasn’t only this old nameless hag that he was toppling.

As the pair began to flail about, the wrestler’s Spatial Bracelet activated. Two dozen threads of item summoning lights poured out. These pooled around them, condensing into daggers of identical type arranged in a simple grid pattern.

This technique—allowing easy weapon access while freeing up both hands—had not been invented by SaNguiNe. It’d been copied from a manual - from the manual. However, his ‘methodology’ did not rely on lofty, pretentious notions of martial originality.

"Borrow my tool instead," he said, wrenching the grandma’s hand away from a belt-fixed knife and slapping zilch into her denied palm. “Take my speed.”

All the wrestler’s higher mental activity suddenly melted in a burst of muscular velocity. SaNguiNe became an animal of four raw limbs fondling through a tangled orgy of ground, joint, grunts, and hips, groping through the fluctuating presence of the daggers littering the mattress of their bestial romp. Pure instinct chained him through his sequence, a botched arm bar rolling into the rear control of a half nelson.

His foe sensed death in this manoeuvre. She fired off her spellshield, whose green glow covered her constricted neck and stalled her beheading for three precious seconds.

“STRATEGISE!” SaNguiNe grunted.

Inviting her to play her art’s best tricks, he raised his hips as if to hook her legs with his.

The grandma used the space to roll out. Then, in a splendidly aggressive turn, instead of breaking free, she scrambled for control. Twisting to invert her smaller frame, she wrapped her legs around his arm and attempted to bend him into a duel-winning omoplata.

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The omoplata: what a sumptuous choice of finisher!

The trauma to the shoulder used to force submissions in real-life grappling could be ignored by players, but it had another distinct advantage, in dagger wrestling, of trading your legs for the opponent’s arm. The victory afterwards sprang from basic limb mathematics: your two hands free to stab > their one remaining hand. The move’s only weakness was a window during its execution – while spinning around your foe’s trapped arm, you temporarily presented them with your undefended backside.

SaNguiNe, snatching up one of the laid-out daggers from its memorised location, stabbed the offered groin. He dove in hilt deep. 24 centimetres of sharpened steel plunged through the leather of his adversary’s pants, split her rectum, entered her intestines, and erupted from the soft belly beneath her chestplate like a caesarean scalpelled from inside.

He could’ve stayed in this spot, locking grip and continuing his operation through another attack cycle to the end. However, he was not content to obtain victory from this humiliating base position, staring at a mangled asshole.

Accelerating up the chain of triumph, he rolled out of his opponent’s pathetic omoplata. The meat of his wrist blocked a counterstab intending on his throat. Through greater might and agility, he shoved them down and to their back, he stole a low mount from above, and—when his attack cooldown refreshed—he knifed them for a second time. His weapon, fast and accurate, passed through their armpit into the unresisting slush of their torso’s organ-filled cavity.

Yes, like this, SaNguiNe nodded as the heart blood of victory spurted from his foe, whose identity had blurred with their teachers in the tangle of their bodies.

He would defeat that slow-moving braggart HF just like this. He would clamber from his ugly and forgettable position beneath. He would stand above, superior...and seen.

The wrestler’s fingers lapping up the sticky warmth, he closed his eyes. The music of a distant crowd was cheering from the stadium rafters, cheering for him.

“Shoot," said Grandma Ru beneath the wrestler. "GG.”

SaNguiNe was summoned back by the weak, elderly voice, back to the reality of this arena, at the mere beginnings of his run against the heavens, starting from the dirt while a distant crowd applauded his enemy.

He rose and scowled, refusing to reciprocate her call of good game.

Too weak, he thought, turning dismissively from this one poor clone of HF to the other weak-spined imitators fumbling around him.

The majority had ceased their practice. When they should be at their most focused, they’d given up to ogle streams of the stupid ceremonies.

A Shanghai Crusader, sheltered by the guards, had been glancing between the show and the wrestler’s duel. Noticing SaNguiNe’s gaze, this person flicked a thumbs up in approval of his growth. The gesture looked languid, slowed by the exhaustion of secretly attending last night’s parties.

SaNguiNe, nodding back, sighed in lamentation.

The tragic figure giving an energy-less thumbs up was ‘Picasso’.

Who was Picasso? This tag should’ve inspired reverence. Once the region’s first-ranked duellist and SaNguiNe’s former superior in The Silent Three, Picasso should’ve been a top contender. However, he’d fallen for an invitation to a certain conniving teen’s 6v6 squad. Accepting this had been his ruin. He’d since squandered every hour out of training hooking up with fangirls, who’d swarmed him like succubi trying to steal his new master’s vitality through second-hand seduction.

Picasso’s tale recounted that of man’s original descent, his downfall by womankind and venom-talking devils.

“All seduced…” SaNguiNe—who’d disavowed all virtual ‘females’ after being hoodwinked by a cross-dressing spy—mumbled. “All distracted…all undisciplined…all complacent…all already bowing…”

Beside him, Grandma Ru frowned. "What are you mumbling about, dude? Are you OK?"

SaNguiNe paid no attention to the grandma beside him, having already forgotten her and her weak, unsatisfying imitation of A Thousand Tools, unable—just like the technique of all these others—to test his full power.

The closure of this week had brought the wrestler to a lonely apex. Picasso and his friends, like mosquitoes poisoned by a toxic blast, had dropped off one by one until it was himself alone who truly hunted after more than silver. His first-place ranking had grown by a huge, huge margin. No one equal to his skill remained for him to spar against…no one except one, who’d been safeguarded by a wall of exclusivity and waitlists, by SaNguiNe’s own conviction not to cross knives again until their all-decisive duel.

But he would not weep for his lost friends. Did a bodybuilder cry when his equipment wasn’t stronger than himself? While these lazy bugs had slacked, he’d achieved the perfection of his muscles by straining extra repetitions and stacking up their worthless, lightweight parts. His condition was optimal. His limbs were strong, tight, and agile. Through his forearms flowed the tension of a bowstring micrometres from its snapping point, his shaking fibres yearning to release the force pent up by his training, to strike out at the target they’d been purposed to destroy.

No, he would not weep for those beneath him now. They were nothing but the molecules of air between him and his bullseye. Of them, he asked only that the winds of fate stirring through their invisible mass did not disturb the straightness of his path to gold.

SaNguiNe—the thought of straightness reminding him of how he'd lusted after a dude imitating a woman—doubled the fury of his scowl. "All seduced..."

"OK...cool." Grandma Ru backed away slowly. "Good luck, I guess. Duel you later, maybe."

A lull in the sparring matches followed. The opening ceremony in the distance finishing, the trainees paused to watch the burning of The Tyrant’s massive ‘funeral’ effigy.

The spectacle was hammed up by Alex Wong. In a dramatic introduction, an orchestra coordinated a requiem with a pyrotechnics show. Several mages had been dispersed in cavities around the statute’s towering bulk, wedged inside its fist, hidden in its dictator’s cap. At the climax, this team began to cast in military synchrony, caesuras in the music allowing their amplified spell-chants to sweep across the audience. Then, as one, multiple tendrils of flame emerged. They curled out across the statue’s limbs and connected up into a luminous arterial map whose blaze soon spread to devour the surrounding timber.

Throughout, at the statue’s burning feet, stood the dwarfed figures of The Company’s twin leaders. Despite the raging festival, despite the millions gathered by their antics, the pair’d assumed a bleak and private aspect. The noise of celebration failed to reach them. In silence, the two young men—who’d heard and witnessed much in their joint crusade—admired the transformation of their ludicrous construction into smoke and ash.

The younger of the duo, with a laugh unheard beneath the orchestra, slapped his comrade’s back. As if preparing for a stormy chill, he sheltered his relaxing shoulders in a magical cloak. He then turned translucent and retired in a gust of passing wind, leaving for the first scheduled battle of his last mass murder.

With that, the tournaments had started.

SaNguiNe, squatting in the dirt over a projection—shrank intentionally small, his palm hiding the glow—glanced in the direction of the concert. Far across the plains, the flaming colossus rose out of the silhouettes of the stadiums, fireworks rocketing out of its head. Between it and himself, he saw his peers, these rookies totally absorbed in the celebrations of this one kid’s triumph.

The sight of it all caused his own veins to pulse and burn with a jealousy to be venerated in this same monopolistic light.

Cutting the stream short, SaNguiNe resumed a solitary drill, working with a ferocity as if to stoke the heat inside his blood until his arms might catch aflame.

But the Miracleworker was not alone for long in his petty search for vengeance.

“Stop fucking around,” a female voice spat upon his training.

SaNguiNe, who’d been rolling in the dirt shadow wrestling, flipped onto his feet.

A blond-haired Cutthroat had separated from those captivated by the show and stepped into his ring, shield and spear in hand.

This duellist, Alpha, rank 11, was a latecomer to Suchi’s top cadets, a transfer from a foreign zone.

SaNguiNe had initially dismissed her, as he had most. Her avatar had been stolen from an in-game author - alpha wolf or something. His prior troubles being duped had left him prejudiced against this anatomical fraud. What’s more, he couldn’t imagine anything but mediocrity from a superfan, from one lacking the individuality to even create a unique appearance.

But his assessment had been proven wrong. This Cutthroat had skills. She could withstand the pressure of his fastest chain wrestling sequences, which caused the technique of most novices to collapse. Her dagger handling was especially superb - steady, untraceable.

Hers was a rare talent. A less experienced, less concentrated player might’ve been enamoured.

“Alpha.” SanNguiNe nodded, respecting her enough to don his own shield as he readied up opposite her corner.

“Alphamutt,” The Cutthroat replied angrily.

“Alphamutt,” SaNguiNe corrected himself - the girl—baffling himself and the other trainees—always insisted on her username’s ugly second part.

In this hour, though, her mad anger resonated with the fire spreading through his arteries. He felt as if the two were united by a common bond of spiteful insanity.

With thoughts of this, his gaze lingered on the female Cutthroat. Her shadow-steeped muscles radiated a ferocity that was to him both familiar and, embarrassingly, still attractive.

It seemed he’d not yet shaken off the queer, androgynous appeal of these goddesses of violence. Hopefully that wouldn’t pose an issue if he had to eliminate her later…

The Cutthroat grimaced, disgusted by his stare.

SaNguiNe grimaced back.

Focusing, he shook his head and beat his chest, sending his blood’s heat to purge these obstacles of mind and heart. Then, cleansed by rage, he approached this latest feminine distraction, his knife unwavering in its determination to pierce both her and the enemy behind her.