The Winter Open’s market grounds.
The stadiums were connected by one sprawling blob of stalls, of over two hundred thousand player-managed shops. During the preliminaries, this market bulged and gurgled like an over-fed stomach. Locals, tourists, and slacking competitors crammed the streets, none wishing to miss the consumerist orgy maestroed by The Company and their international trading fleet. From imported Chayokan arcane gadgets to tailored Rangbitan tunics of the softest Cowmole skin, from deeds to private-island farms to bags of soap—soap!—Saana’s global wares had infiltrated this once coinless, soap-less land, and all of it was offered at the fairest semi-monopoly prices.
Hail to The Tyrant, those emptying their pockets wept, hail to this god of discount commerce!
On a highway cutting through this Eden of the deal, a horseman was speeding, his mount weaving through a steady traffic of donkey carts. Some drivers raised their fists in anger but stopped when they recognised his ash-grey uniform and guild tag flashing like police lights.
“Between the horde invasions and the giant ice behemoths,” the horseman was chatting with a passenger clinging from behind, the topic having veered to his deployment with The Company to the frozen wastes of Northern Heimland, “the regularity of action’s nothing to complain about. It’s just desolate in terms of the sensation – the polar whiteness, the cold.”
“Aomori sees its share of snowfall.”
“That’s an understatement. Thickest in the world, right? One of our scouts is a climber from Hachi-something. The mad monkey actually enjoys the north, thrives in it. Not me, brother. I can feel my brain shrivelling in the emptiness - along with other things. They whine about this shithole but at least it has grass for vegetation.”
His passenger, a Japanese salaryman, was wrapped in many layers of suspicion, with a suspicious backstory of memory loss and a suspiciously-cheap ring hiding on his gloved finger. Suspicious, too, was the way he fumbled as he tried to eat one-handed from a jostling bowl of baboon jerky. As the shreds of meat were geysered out by the horse’s bobbing, their descent towards the dusty road went uncompleted. Each was intercepted by the swooping dive of a random falcon that’d taken to perching suspiciously upon his shoulder.
Kimura-san, watching the wasted jerky spill, perhaps allowing it to spill, contained his feelings beneath the stoic mask worn by all his nation’s timid salarymen.
These were suspicious circumstances, he’d found himself in, riding with this ‘escort’ dressed in a cop-like uniform.
“Three seasons of snow,” Kimura-san remarked upon the escort’s tale, “like the steppe, this also has a certain barren romance.”
The rider howled with laughter. “Oh, romance there IS, brother. ‘When you can’t light a flame outside, you’ve got to light it elsewhere.’ That’s the unofficial motto of The 19th. That’s how we answered the suits trying to crack down on the drama – the brothers getting caught cheating by their offline birds, yours truly amongst the guilty. We said, hey, since we’ve already got the isolation of a penal colony, let’s just go full moral excommunication. Every legion spawns a couple sluts and sleazebags that get the rinse for double-timing in the ranks. Instead of squandering their talents, why not banish them up north? Let them tussle with us in the snow.”
Kimura-san—wondering if this were a gestapo tactic of sharing fake criminal escapades to lure him into a confession—gave a neutral laugh, neither approving nor disapproving.
“That’s no joke, brother.” The escort sped up, blasting through a shrinking gap between two wagons. “You never snagged the news?”
“This is my first…my second day of playing.”
“Oh? A wonderful welcome to Saana! Well, yeah, that’s what us 19th scum are known for. We passed a controversial referendum by internal supermajority. Our legion was set to become a polyamorous free-for-all. On the quiet. ‘Do cheat, don’t tell,’ we called the policy. It passed the wider Company vote, everyone tickled by our audacity – that included Big-Wang Wong, Mr Ex-Tyrannical, who championed our cause against the PR suits and the HR suits. But, of course, the real Tyrant had neither the same humour nor respect for democratic processes. Sacked our ring leaders without warning, he did. Sent us a team backed by shrinks to install greenhouses and paint the barracks titillating col—wait, wait, wait…wait a happy minute. If Mr No Touch is retiring, then…”
The escort, muttering to himself, fell to silence as his conversation shifted conspiratorially to others via private message.
Kimura-san, while the rider was preoccupied, dispensed with the now empty bowl of baboon jerky, tossing it beneath the carriage of a passing vehicle with a covert flick vaguely similar to an arrested addict trying to dump a baggie. From his Spatial Bracelet, the salaryman next summoned five skewers of marinated oysters. One of these, he held up for the falcon perching on his shoulder. The other four, slipping from the bottom of his grasp, disappeared the same way of the bowl, into the streets and disconnected from his guiltless person.
To explain the salaryman's suspicious behaviour and his suspicious new bird friend, some events needed to be reviewed...
Since his live consumption by the pack of wolves, this first day returning from his coma had been plugged with fun, mystery, and a foray into petty crime.
After respawning, his first move had been to test whether he’d been swindled by the trickster god Bes and the promises to steal the tournament. Kimura-san, equipping The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent, had given a challenge to the first player he met. The trinket, although ineffective against monsters, turned out to work as advertised. Once their fight began, it was as if he were possessed by a ninja. Shedding his salaryman’s pudgy slowness, he’d deflected his opponent’s swordblade with his bare hands, gouged their eyes, disarmed them, flipped them, and assassinated them, this whole sequence blending in one incomprehensible blink of speed. At the tutorial grounds, he’d experimented further with the various weapons offered by the NPC trainers. The phantom duelling skills ranged far beyond barehand fighting. Kimura-san, for the duration of a match, gained familiarity with the mechanics of every piece of gear, from swords to buckler shields to blowpipes.
Thus, his and Bes's plot to steal the tournament (and maybe other things), despite its awkward opening, still marched forward in devious cahoots.
For his class, he’d picked a Beast Tamer. This was a hybrid that split its skills between archery and coordinated animal companions. This decision—to be frank—had been made with no mind for his ring’s compatibilities, whose ninja talents seemed desirous of a melee, stealth build. Rather, the Beast Tamer paired with Kimura-san’s longer-term adventures - he’d envisioned himself wandering the steppes while subjugating a menagerie of lions, ostriches, elephants, and stranger safari creatures. Thereby, he would unite his adult love of all things African and his childhood dreams, shared with many Japanese and non-Japanese Zoomers alike, of becoming a pokémaster. These future plans would not be jeopardised for the sake of some tournament he’d learned of mere hours ago. If Bes’s ring could not defeat that Tyrant fellow under these circumstances, then that would be the fault and embarrassment of the silly god, unable to outwit a child.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Higher fates approved this choice, continuing to reward him as if in karmic compensation for his traumatic head injury. His tutorial had concluded with the lucky find of the rare falcon roosting on his shoulder. She’d been abandoned in a cage beneath a random tree outside a levelling dungeon. A note from her previous owner had explained they’d switched pets to a rock eagle because of a duelling ‘meta-game’ (whatever that was) plus a mild penchant of the bird to swipe valuables from passers-by. The cage had also held a cute little seagull outfit of mysterious function. With no name given, Kimura-San had dubbed her Kaito-chan.
Her former trainer’d taught her well, Kaito-chan possessing expert aeronautic skills that let her dodge projectiles and snipe seagulls on the wing with admirable accuracy. Her only problem was the warned of thieving habit, which’d been ‘mild’ in the sense that one might describe a mild tsunami or a mild bout of stage 4 cancer. Her flight abilities, once put to this illicit purpose, had become a source of regular embarrassment to the salaryman. He’d spent much of the day apologising to and compensating one enraged victim after another as his bird soared away, their stolen goods clutched in her talons, Kaito-chan screeching maniacally.
After all that, armed with Bes’s gifted ring, his new Beast Tamer Class, and this sketchy raptor friend, Kimura-San had then attended this duelling tournament as contractually obliged.
So far, he’d clocked in six easy matches. The rookies had stood no chance against the world’s top duellist hidden in his ring, and he’d finished every round in less than twenty seconds, turning up, winning, then leaving.
The sole difficulty and point of interest had been a sidequest to employ Kaito-chan within these carefree duels.
Kimura-san, in this regard, had been operating both in the capacity of his new Beast Tamer Class and a deeper Japanese sympathy for the bird’s abandonment due to the failures by her prior master in this realm. Even if the ring were doing practically all the work, he’d wanted to instil the falcon with a sense of contribution. Without purpose, a salaryman or salarybird risked spiralling into despair and becoming a hikikomori or, like Kaito-chan, a yakuza. Countless Japanese studies post-AI-Revolution were in agreement. Whether or not it had about as much economic utility as categorising grains of beachsand by taste, the social good demanded that every citizen put in their daily 14 hours, and this maxim might also be reasoned to apply to wayward birds of prey.
Kaito-chan’s job search within the arena had thus far proven troublesome. Her duelling resume was lacklustre, for—as the note had warned—she truly didn’t fit the ‘meta-game’. The Rock Eagles that Kimura-san’d observed being used by other duellists had an armour-penetrating screech and a hardening ability to tank blows. Without these, raptors struggled to inflict damage against duellists while, in reverse, they died in a single hit due to the fragility of their lightweight bodies. Kaito-chan’s species had neither. Her sole attack was
Since the falcon had not yet comprehended the nobility of gainful sacrifice, Kimura-san had to soothe her after each revival. For that reason, along with a compassionate understanding that all significant life change was gradual, he’d allowed her between rounds to revert to her old habits, dressing her up in her seagull costume and granting her a moratorium on pestering the tourists. To this end, they’d had plenty of spare time for exploring the festival since his own duelling ‘talent’ came from a magic ring and saved him the need of other competitors to practise.
...and that, the salaryman's first flirtation with theft, was how they’d reached the suspicious present, galloping suspiciously through a fleamarket.
It’d been after one such moratorium while returning from a circus to his next duel, his seventh, that the salaryman had been intercepted by this mounted ‘escort’. The rider, messaging him, seeking him out, and whisking him from his feet, had informed him of the urgency to speed him to an upgraded duelling venue for his next tournament round.
Was that explanation honest? Kimura-san harboured doubts. Given the uniform and the wide-berth taken by everyone around them, his escort appeared to be some type of in-game gestapo. This might be an arrest, he and Kaito-chan fed a fake excuse to minimise resistance before their admission to jail, sentencing, and execution.
For now, with the bird's crimes neither stated nor proven, the salaryman would keep silent. If interrogated later, he would do his best to vouch for Kaito-chan’s moral character, and he would outline his gradual program to reform the criminal bird into an employed, contributing member of avian society. And if that failed, he would—with sadness and remorse—turn snitch, offering the yakuza falcon to the law's tight noose.
"Hello?" Kimura-san whispered.
The distracted escort didn't hear or answer.
The salaryman, raising a fist discreetly to his mouth, coughed and palmful of miscellaneous event tickets shot out the bottom to flutter in the wind behind.
Their trip eventually did reach a stadium. The structure loomed out of the distance, a massive eyesore whose kilometres of troop-patrolled walls delimited the market’s edge.
Near its entrance, a raving mob were cheering at a street performance. The entertainer seemed to be an African witchdoctor, a black lady sporting dirt-smeared skin and dreadlocks and waving a staff of entwined snakes. Kimura-san, who’d chosen Suchi for its Tanzania-esque exoticness, was INSTANTLY intrigued by the swarthy witch. Her act had a crazy, spooky sensuosity, and it reminded him of 2041’s cinematic masterpiece, Heart of Darkness 2: Repaving The Congo.
“Amazing…” he said, astounded by the organisers of the festival, who'd catered to every niche interest and fetish. “With such enthusiasm for her craft, would it not be a greater crime to race by this ebony beauty?”
With this declaration, he raised a pointing finger and a sparkling object dropped from his sleeve to vanish into the trail of dust behind them.
“Sorry, brother,” the escort denied him. “No delays. The rules are the rules…for the present.”
“Unfortunate...” Kimura-san replied.
Within the greater relief of getting rid of that hot item, his heart sank with a genuine flop of disappointment. However, in a very cool display of interactive improv, the witchdoctor shrieked over the crowd to curse him. 'A Buccaneer of Nearing Dissolution,' she labelled him and squawked at Kaito-Chan as if she were a pirate’s pet macaw. The salaryman clapped and promised to return if he managed to escape incarceration.
They skipped a lengthy queue outside the venue.
The interior was enormous, and it seemed—corroborating the gestapo escort’s tale—to be designed for duelling. The entranceway was lined with gear-repair workshops, infirmaries, and bakers mass-producing the official healing bread. Past these, they rode through battlegrounds of diverse terrain, dozens or hundreds of them extending to the stadium’s opposing edge two or three kilometres away. Once a few blurred by, Kimura-san recognised a replicating pattern, each one copy-pasted from a standard blueprint. Compared to the festival and tourney grounds, the place looked deserted, as each map housed only a couple pairs of duellists.
On his shoulder, the pet falcon swivelled about, casing out the joint for marks. Frustrated by the sparsity of pickings, she gave her master’s neck a nibble.
“Not now, Kaito-chan,” he whispered back, still conscious of his ‘escort’. “This is a space of…manners.”
At the last word, the falcon abruptly straightened out. As if attending court, she put on her best behaviour, she ceased her sketchy movements, and she began to preen the flecks of dirt and baboon jerky littering her feathers.
The bird’s suspicious shift went unnoticed by Kimura-San, his attention absorbed by a flashing stream of anomalous observances.
First, a pair of fencers, seeing him gallop past, stopped their duel, removed their helmets, and saluted sombrely as one might for a funeral procession. Next, a team of five teenagers accompanied by guards trudged by on foot, the group pale and quivering, one sobbing. Then, heading in the same direction as this dejected lot—opposite to himself, back towards the stadium’s entrance—several dozen horsemen cloaked like riders of the apocalypse zoomed by ominously.
Between these sightings was an obscure mood or idea that linked somehow with Kimura-san, continuing to raise his doubts of being transported to a mere duel. Seated on this horse, he felt as if he were an insect resting on a string and watching the world bob up and down. Soon but not yet, he would recognise how the string connected to the other strings of the spider’s web, how his feet were glued.
His suspicions really spiked when he glimpsed a field of troops ahead, thousands of them, surrounding what appeared to be a black-tent interrogation site.