An excerpt from The Selected Writings of The Invincible One, concluding advice for eliminated duellists.
"...at last, brothers and sisters in The Invincible Way, we reach the end of your tournament and this One's guidance. Before you shut these pages, meditate upon the key lessons of His Sermon on The Many, summarised below.
The Seven Pillars of Invincibility:
I. To know the presence of the joy of victory in the anguish of defeat:
Defeat itself carries little genuine pain, your last defeat delivering you to Nothingness as it swiftly removes you from this tournament and the audience’s judgement, positive or negative. Most of the anguish of defeat properly ascertained is not defeat itself but a fear of the cessation of the victories before. You, who have adhered to The Invincible Way, have been lifted by each win to soar higher and higher through the heavens until the wax that glued your wings was melted by contact with the sun. As you suddenly descend, it is the joy of your flight that becomes your pain – this sinking feeling is the heart regretting that it cannot flap another victory Beyond. The higher you have climbed, the longer you must fall and the more devastating will be the crunch. Is this sad? Irrefutably. Is this painful? For a second. But, grasped in these terms, the greatness of your sadness and the greatness of your pain are also testaments to the greatness of your joy. Do not forget the joy in your defeat.
To know the presence of the joy of victory in the anguish of defeat, this is The Invincible One’s First Sacred Pillar.
II. To know the insignificance of defeat compared to victory:
Knowing the presence of victory in defeat, tasked with no more duels to scheme as you descend, you should utilise the break ahead to reflect upon each win that preceded your elimination and from whose joy its anguish emanates. Take in your run’s full series, and scale this one defeat against the larger pile of victories. 'A man’s last day is death', proclaims The Invincible One, 'but before that he lives for thirty thousand days'. Likewise, as a disciple on The Invincible Way, your last duel is defeat, but before that is thirty thousand victories. Reckoned thus, the ending is invisible - it is a statistical rounding error in the immortal evidence of victory.
To know the insignificance of defeat compared to victory, this is The Invincible One’s Second Sacred Pillar. (This Pillar provides no relief if you finished the tournament with a negative record, but such an inferior duellist deserves to feel bad and should analyse their lacklustre strategy.)
III. To know either the transcendence of the Nothingness of victory in defeat through an Immortal Victory or the equality of Nothingness in defeat: (The most esoteric and difficult of the Pillars to translate from The Invincible One’s jihad to his tournament.)
You have won thirty thousand duels, and they have become Nothing in defeat. You have lost a single duel, and this shall, also, become Nothing in defeat. Does this mean that all duelling is Nothingness? Some would say so. An adherent of The Invincible Way cuts these know-nothings down with his katana. You are either the immortal exception who wins forever or a loser like the Many, at which point all these minor fears dissolve. In defeat, any embarrassment at duelling with delusion will also become Nothing, just as the know-nothing's smugness of a technical correctness that invites misery and defeatism also becomes Nothing. Losing equalises everyone in Nothingness. What therefore is your only salvation? To win forever.
To know either the transcendence of the Nothingness of victory in defeat through an Immortal Victory or the equality of Nothingness in defeat, this is The Invincible One’s Third Sacred Pillar..."
A final duel.
They began in the usual fashion. Grandma Ru flung spells while backtracking. Vicente and his wolf sprinted after her.
How this stylistic pairing developed for most players, a melee-orientated Beast Tamer would try to capture kiters with their faster pets, sometimes adding arrows with slowing venoms if they’d brushed up on their archery, although Vicente hadn’t. This tactic for the mage had a straightforward counter: welcome the creature and slay it before its master caught up. More advanced Beast Tamers therefore preferred synchronised pincers that minimised any isolation by slowing the pet’s speed or sending it on more circuitous routes.
In the case of Ruru and Vicente, they were both proficient at their respective sides of this equation. The Venezuelan, by harnessing the wolf’s telepathy, could adjust its pace without warning and continue to control it as it flanked through areas not visible to either duellist. Grandma Ru’s obstacle parkour in turn could extend the chases while she whittled down the pet through spell harassment. Her killer cherry on the top was to bait a pincer but dislodge it very slightly before contact so that the beast arrived a couple seconds earlier. In the slim margin this created, she could eliminate it with her rudimentary spear or dagger skills, then recover to disengage from its master.
Between these strengths, the grandma and Venezuelan had iterated back and forth through previous duels. What emerged was the tactic used by Vicente in this decider round.
The Beast Tamer—leading the pursuit entirely alone, confident in catching the senior with his younger legs—had his Grey Wolf glue itself to his shadow. There, it stalked patiently, sheltering from the old woman’s murderous intentions behind the safety of its master’s shield and armour. It waited until after Vicente had engaged her, until after his sword’d entangled the spear that had so often slain the beast. At last, delivered a command, it slipped forth, sprinting out and around the coverage of a statue to hit the woman’s exposed rea—Grandma Ru, with a quick back dash, a turn, and a sword in hand where once there’d been a spear, slit the lunging wolf from sternum to groin.
The beast, yelping, thumped against the dirt, writhing and spasming with horror as the steamy pink spools of its intestines gushed from its eviscerated belly.
“Cunt!” yelled the Venezuelan.
His chances dying with his pet, Vicente conceded and re-directed a swordthrust intended for the grandma to put his companion out of its misery.
“Deceiving cunt,” he swore, absorbing its soul-motes. “When’d you learn swaps? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”
“GGs, LIL BITCH!” Grandma Ru slamdunked her blood-smeared weapon on the helmet of this babbling Venezuelan toddler. “Your tactics? Fuck your tactics. Your arena? Poppycock. You accidently stepped into grandma’s house. Next time, pick a different one. Oh wait, there is no next time - you’re eliminated. Farewell, young scrub!”
Waving a mock goodbye in a continuation of her gloating, she
Theirs being a decisive bout, a small crowd of their peers had gathered. A few laughed at her antics. More booed – despite the impression one might get watching The Tyrant, an anti-social individual, Roboboomers were much better sportsmen than Millennial gamers, and they considered it slightly excessive to taunt an opponent after murdering their prospects and animal friends.
But Grandma Ru didn’t hear their baby cries, her earholes clogged by the drowning roar of victory. The adrenaline circulating in her veins bubbled into the ecstasies of surviving to another, brighter tomorrow, of actually pulling off her intended play.
How The Beast Tamer got snuffed: He, aside from his psychological softness and chromosomal inferiority, had misread her capabilities, missing a minor gap that'd grown to separate the grandma of his prior knowledge from the grandma that he’d fought.
Ruru, reliant on her spells for damage, had invested minimal study in offensive weaponry. In their matches of previous days, she could not have executed that melee finisher - by the way, she'd desummoned the spear that’d been too lengthy for the wolf’s lunge range and quick-drawn a sword. Her tiny, arthritic, little old grandma fingers couldn’t fumble up the nimbleness required for such a move - that had been true.
However, this day did not resemble those previous days. In both the opening of the obstacleless squares outside and in the ending confined to the sandpit, she’d been forced to put aside her preferred style, to meet her adversaries where they stood, and to adapt against—and to learn—their cruder methods. As a consequence, there were some of these thug-basic melee tricks now rattling in the grandma's purse.
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Around that gap, she’d planned, she’d baited, and she’d executed. And thus her struggles against hostile circumstance had in the final turn transformed into the very method of her ascension.
As her thoughts accelerated past this one duel to the stage ahead its conquest had unlocked, her joy rose higher. Leaping from her cheetah form, she parkoured through the dawning thrill, sliding through the legs of statues, flipping off their heads, cartwheeling like a lunatic until she smacked against one with a thump.
The collision sobered her a little.
Remembering her age and manners, she jogged back to the Venezuelan to say GGs. She might console him with the sage advice acquired as his senior in gaming and defeat. Her helmet would have to stay on, however, to hide an irrepressible grin.
Unable to help it, she offered bows as she passed their meagre audience. Most were leaving, rushing off to catch other ongoing deciders. Some familiar faces climbed onto the arena to slap her back and join her in the post-scuffle pillow talk. Reminded by this reception of her family, she fired off a quick message. She didn’t expect replies since they’d logged off hours ago, but one came from Jorge, struggling to sleep after the festival’s exhausting opening half marched through their night into their afternoon. A much larger flood of congratulations poured in from other rookies, news of the grandma’s advancement spreading.
In the bosom of their gathering group, the Venezuelan grieved his elimination in the most eccentric of ways. Ignoring his friends, unbudging from the bloodstain of his wolf, he produced The Invincible One booklet. Seeking comfort in its mystic nonsense as he’d sought advice, he intoned its final chapter with the sombre lilt of a Tibetan monk reciting the bardo over the deceased to assist their soul’s transmigration. Gibberish about gates, heavens, and ‘The Invincible Way to The Beyond’ mingled with the silent grave figures of the map and the laughing group, chiding him with reminders of the book’s ultimate failure. Still, Vicente chanted on. He went so far as to perform the booklet’s accompanying pilates-style exercises for stimulating a duellist’s immortal chakras or something.
Grandma Ru, despite her trashtalk, didn’t join this jest. This not her first rodeo, she saw in the kid's brainless flailing a forecast of her own pathetic destiny whenever her head got the chop.
After the others wished her the best tomorrow and dispersed to seek out further matches, she lingered by the babbling Beast Tamer and summoned her copy of the booklet, forgotten shortly after entering the stadium. She skipped to the section’s explanatory notes. It consisted of excerpts, apparently, from a sermon in The Tyrant’s mystic phase delivered to a duelling cult on the eve of a global jihad – Ruru understood none of this background. The original theme had been about composing oneself nobly in the face of certain death. This had been translated by the booklet’s author into words of solace and departure for this tournament’s eliminated scrubs.
She was reminded while reading of The Tyrant’s speech at the opening ceremony praising the competitors about to be swept. Both had a bizarre blend of hope and pessimism. The mood resonated with her feelings as a fossilised gamer, vibrating the many strings knotted between her bygone successes, her idiotic entrance in this tournament to claim another, and even the family troubles.
The last few pages summarised the wisdom as 'Seven Pillars of Invincibility.' Most of these seemed sensible beneath the jargon. Don’t lose sight of your previous wins. Learn from your mistakes for the sake of future battles. Forget the loss; try again. The ultimate pillar ruined this reasonability by circling into an asinine tautology that true invincibility was never getting beaten.
“God, I’m old…” Grandma Ru, snapping the booklet shut and laughing. “These Roboboomer memes are incomprehensible…”
Well, it would be foolish to expect answers for such complex issues from a scam book, as much as it would be from a positive or negative outcome in a weekend gaming event.
Vicente beside her continued through the cringey exercises. Grandma Ru, with a shrug, joined in, flailing her tools, bowing to the soil, shrieking at the cloudless Heavens of The Beyond.
You never know. The secret could be somewhere in their bodies. With enough forced movement, it might be evicted from her rattling joints.
When the two were done, she asked the Beast Tamer if he felt his spirits lifting. He answered no. His grief had merely been augmented with embarrassment. In his tone and bearing, though, Grandma Ru noted suggestions to the contrary.
“Rematch?” she asked.
“Yeah…why not.”
After the revival of his pet, they switched to Hamlet where she tested her preferred strategy. The Venezuelan, released from former pressures, moved with more fluidity, and he managed to shieldbash her while the grandma balanced on a table. She tumbled, neck-first, into the wolf’s snatching bite.
Ruru praised the gods of RNG, opportunism, and arrogance.
Offline, the grandma duellist finished her day by returning to her hotel room booked for the weekend and unwinding with a quick on-site sauna. Accelerated by the time-dilation differential, news of the others who’d survived the winnowing had beeped in within a quarter of an hour.
Number one amongst them all, with a miraculously-clean 20-0, had been the local wrestler, SaNguiNe. This surprised some but not herself. The kid hadn’t exactly been low-key with his first-place zone ranking, which any unbiased analysis would show to be justified. From her perspective, he was a sweatlord, anti-Thousand-Tools meta-gamer like herself. She suspected his methods would get humbled in tomorrow’s best-of-threes by the veterans, just as hers had been by Whitefrog and The Third Gate. These monsters wouldn’t entertain your tricks for a full series; one duel, you might pinch, before they resorted to their unfathomably-deeper fundamentals.
Speaking of the pro, Whitefrog finished 19-1. His last 1v1 had flung him up against a former season winner of the Open Invitational, a fellow American from Appalachia who’d downgraded to the rookie category for inexplicable reasons. Adding to the mystery, when this guy reached the arena and saw the pro, he spat dismissively on the ground and logged out.
As for ‘The Invincible One’, he collected no further duelling Ls besides his forfeit. Across the fifteen tournaments, his only real defeats were three in the rookie 6v6, the deadweight of his Australian substitutes messing up his otherwise near-flawless juggle.
Finally, after everything had settled down, after all the fights had been played out, Vicente returned to the duelling chat group with excitement. The heavens had granted him a second life, reviving him from the grave of his six defeats to walk again on tomorrow’s stage. The regional math nerd gave a less mystic explanation. His advancement could probably be attributed to Grandma Ru's genuine bad luck. Beyond coinflips, she'd confronted many of the top brass, including Whitefrog, The Third Gate, Vicente himself, and even the local knight, who’d advanced at 17-3. After factoring these opponents, her statistical performance likely ranked her in the top half of the qualifiers, and therefore the Beast Tamer’s loss to her had inflicted a lower score penalty.
Ru received that as fantastic news and replied that she looked forward to eliminating him again if the chance arose. Then, signing off from her devices, she slumbered into sweet dreams of reaching just one duel further.
"...IV. To know the Lesser Defeat as a path to Higher Victory:
Your ability to read The Invincible One’s knowledge proves that you did not suffer the Highest Defeat, which concludes all in the equality of Nothingness. You have lost one duel, but there are more duels in the tournament ahead. You have lost one tournament, but there are more tournaments ahead. Instead of wallowing in this Lesser Defeat, learn from its follies, and then your present anguish will one day return to the joy of future, Higher Victories. As you must suffer until that comeback, take comfort in the knowledge that those who have not risked defeat can never obtain victory, and, despite their insistence, all non-competitors count as automatic forfeits. Every tournament begins with several billion losers whom you defeated by enlistment.
To know the Lesser Defeat as a path to Higher Victory, this is The Invincible One’s Fourth Sacred Pillar.
V. To know to duel in the Highest Defeat as in the Highest Victory:
At some point, you will suffer the Highest Defeat. Such is the fate of everyone except The Invincible One, of whom there can be only one and who, putting aside the recommended Delusion of Invincibility, isn’t you. The Invincible Way has given you the knowledge that this defeat is insignificant compared to victory on the whole. Nevertheless, The Invincible Way also admits that the Highest Defeat is more significant than the average victory, it being your last duel and the one by which Many will recall you. Accepting your Highest Defeat’s significance and inevitability, your choice becomes only how you will conduct yourself in the minutes of that duel. Will you embarrass yourself by fumbling through a half-baked strategy? Or will you scheme an everlasting scam into the memory of those who duel Beyond you, i.e. The Non-Alone Way of Invincibility? And how, seeing the wisdom of the second, will you achieve that superior ending? The answer to these questions, for those who follow The Way, is to duel in your Highest Defeat as you have always duelled. Duel every duel Invincibly. The Highest Defeat will clean up any contradictory evidence of your mortality.
To know to duel in the Highest Defeat as in the Highest Victory, this is The Invincible One’s Fifth Sacred Pillar.
VI. To know of only victory until defeat:
Knowing you should duel in the Highest Defeat as in the Highest Victory, the step Beyond is to discard all knowledge of defeat that does not lead to victory. Knowledge of defeat belongs to lesser Pillars and lesser paths. You, who abide The Invincible Way, must duel as an immortal ignoramus. You must be convinced of victory until the end. You must forget the Lesser Defeats behind that did not finish you. You must be oblivious of both the Lesser Defeats ahead that you’ll forget again and the Highest Defeat whose Nothingness will save you from the embarrassment of your immortal delusion.
To know of only victory until defeat, this is The Invincible One’s Sixth Sacred Pillar.
VII. To know of only victory:
And for One alone who has followed The Way, who has studied each of The Six Sacred Pillars—to know the presence of the joy of victory in the anguish of defeat, to know the insignificance of defeat compared to victory, to know either the transcendence of the Nothingness of victory in defeat through an Immortal Victory or the equality of Nothingness in defeat, to know the Lesser Defeat as a path to Higher Victory, to know to duel in the Highest Defeat as in the Highest Victory, to know of only victory until defeat—you will soar Beyond all knowledge of defeat by circling the victorious heavens without cessation. Thus, you will fly forever, Invincible Beneath The Sun.
To know of only victory, this is The Invincible One’s Seventh and Single Pillar."