Suppression
IF THE ROOKIE SQUADS were a gag, the standard was a strangulation. The front half-kilometre stretch of audience outside the stadium produced the most claustrophobic example ever documented of crowd crush physics when hundreds of thousands with the same genius idea to camp spots earlier logged back on top of their current occupants. In less uncomfortable quarters, the TV audience also swelled by 352 million to become the festival’s most spectated event.
Lee’s grand juggle was part of the attraction, but what drew additional viewers were pre-existing fan loyalties to the professional squads from Saana League who’d gathered to contest him. The attendant crowd, including those queued outside the gates, elbowed each other to display their favourites’ banners. National anthems—these barbaric grunts still in vogue and continuing to feed disunity—rose up wherever fans formed clusters and clashed with other anthems in counterpoint to create a discordance that drowned out commentary. Over this sea of human noise and colour, inflated effigies of star players floated and then burst from the missiles of anti-fans.
For many newbie devotees of Saana League, The Winter Invitational would be their introduction to the game’s background emperor. Jean-Paul ‘Cascade’ Beaufort, the future général suprême of Saana VI to VIII, spectated in the stands as a four-year old. “As the light of my hero was blown out, the dark eclipsing him began to twinkle with the shine of a thousand others,” he recalled in his memoirs. “It was an awakening for one who’d known nothing but combat’s minimalist mode. Beyond this candle held to the sky was drifting a galaxy of stars!”
His babysitting cousin, Beaufort’s first instructor in the art, told him she’d been defeated by Lee herself in a western theatre.
“You were a pro, too?” he asked.
Between Lee’s newness to the squads and Saana League’s high-investment professionalism, many had forecast his embarrassment, reasoning that a field so deep could not be mastered in a fortnight. These predictions had since been quashed in the preliminaries, by his capture of first place with whatever innovation had been censored by the curtain of his blacksite, by the pessimistic shrugs of the pros to questions on their prospects.
A dependency on Lee’s financial patronage and a bruised-eyed embarrassment served to unify the competitors around his gag order—which Zack Atete of Nigeria’s Kano United described in a pre-interview as “a mere cosmetic muzzle, one strapped across a corpse’s lips to give the false impression of it breathing”. The muteness of the pros prolonged the Blood City’s passivity for a few more hours. “I promise that not one of us,” Atete said, “has any further pulse to be this autocrat’s rival.”
Lee’s bracket debut didn’t initially live up to these claims. His first two series were so close that analysts became mystified as to how the better teams had struggled or why their captains were dejected. His compositions were conventional, the Saana League meta-game altered slightly to accommodate his Scholar build. He almost dropped his first match out of the gate due to a misplay from his tank. Match two of series two actually resulted in his loss.
The answer to this incongruity was first teased in the quarter finals against a Brazilian squad, Fluminense Fênix, who pushed Lee to the edge of defeat after a convincing match-two stomp. He in response converted to a weapon-juggling-based disruption role, while substituting out his teammates for two healers, one tank, a hybrid tank healer, and a Conjurist controlling a levitating gladius. He started off this unusual no-damage comp assisting the main tank on the frontline to grapple enemies into out-of-bound eliminations. This duo was supported by the rest operating as one backline unit. However, his companion’s death soon forced yet another strategic switch-up. The solitary Lee, seemingly isolated, seemingly dead, seemingly eliminated from this tournament, absorbed the Conjurist’s floating gladius into his juggle. This weapon could with enough foresight compensate for his character’s low level if he manually told his mage when to activate it. Doing exactly that, he proceeded to zig-zag through a section of the enemy squad as their attacks were blocked by a chain of shielding spells from his healers, also manually directed. The Brazilians forfeited 13.9 seconds later. By that point their tank had been decapitated, their captain in the distance had been disintegrated by a friendly-fired thunderbolt, and the mage who’d zapped the captain had been disembowelled.
This gruesome turn-around raised many suspicions.
To dispatch the team so fast, Lee had resorted to what appeared to be the same 1-v-multitude method leaked in the 2s and 3s footage from his blacksite matches and shown in traces of his 50s Legendary heist when slaying each wielder personally. These together suggested that he’d synthesised his recent studies of these various team categories with his duelling from A Thousand Tools into one stronger anti-group art. But inexplicably he’d refrained from debuting this higher technique, such that it would only ever be witnessed by the gagged competitors of the preliminaries against whom he’d refined it. These battles on the main stage warranted only inferior compositions, perhaps invented on the spot, as if the real art were still being held in reserve until the hour of a subsequent and more monumental grand finale beyond these smaller grand finales.
The sheer absurdity of this, of not prioritising gaming’s largest tournament ever, caused many of Lee’s critics to revive old rumours. His announcement of retiring after this weekend must have been a load of crock. The conspiracy theories were true of him harbouring alternative ambitions, such as the activation of a Legendary Class, supported by his revival necklaces, for the expansion of his global holdings, or his ascension to the Cosmos for the by-gone Saana II thrill of duelling hyper-gods.
To the most observant, Lee’s mere attempt at suppression had already admitted his intentions in full, but the charade continued to serve a secondary function of restricting opposition research. These fragmentary glimpses could not be assembled into a counter.
Lee’s semi-finals leaked some more. He tried in the first round to mask the previous bout’s containment of his main technique by swapping to an aggressive 4-mage composition. When this flopped against the Saana League elites, he was forced to revert through the remainder of the series to butchering them in his weapon-juggling solitude.
All these slipups on his part might have triply been intentional. In a post-mortem of the Blood City affair, a Bavarian reporter called the leaks, “a last olive branch of honesty, like the countershading of a honey badger that signals its genetic eagerness to scrap.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Alice Wilson
AT THE HEALTH & WELLNESS EXPO, the tourney escapades of Lee were mere side gossip. Here Saana’s womenfolk, especially the crystal mommies, were going bonkers over yet another hidden monarch’s avant-garde creation: the Re-Live Yoga sessions, re-invention of one Virtual Age spiritualist, Alice Wilson, latest convert to the true faith and—secretly—the next fleshly avatar of its Cycle-transcending empress.
Her recruitment scheme was going marvellously.
Re-Live had tapped into the public’s heart chakra, many charmed by the quality that one leading women’s guru described as “aesthetically outlandish, horrifically traumatic and wonderfully healing.” Wilson had arrived three days earlier by ship from Nikrugbeet, been allocated at first a modest site in the expo’s back alleys for the weirder exhibits, and since upgraded to the main complex where tutors now ran additional classes. Saana’s self-care-nuts saw the near-death and beyond-death components of her yoga as a subversive addition to the growing methods of spiritual exploration opened up by VR technology. Feminists hoped the psychological challenge would prove to the world, or at least the gaming world, that ladykind could be just as fearless as the manchildren running around swinging sticks for their knight fantasies. The only sizeable community pushback emanated from crusty naturalists, whose snivels warned of the reprehensible fact that Re-Live’s most advanced programs involved chemical intoxicants.
Between the classes that she led herself, each one packed with thousands, Wilson toured the exposition in a royal sarong, accompanied by a female coterie and sometimes the blue-haired agentess assigned her by The Clique. The Canadian delighted in her blossoming stardom. “Nothing could be more empowering,” she was heard confessing to the agent, “than to stroll among the thankless caste of womankind and see them grin from ear to ear after just a single session of rebirth, beaming at me, at this timeless queen who will liberate them from the cycle of masculine oppression.”
From Lombardy with Love
THE OTHER GRANDFINALISTS of the 6v6 were fresh off winning Saana League, the Italo-Spanish team Bellatores, captained by one Gianfranco “Acolyte” Sozzani. If this genius from Lombardy had not been channelled into the arena, his talents would have likely destined him for a significant command in either the ranks of The Company or their fiercest European adversaries. Sozzani blended a savant’s speed with a contradictory interpersonal patience, and, bestowing these twin graces on his comrades, he’d shaped them into what was judged the single most coordinated combat unit in the game ever.
Since their preliminary defeat Bellatores had been hard in preparation against Lee’s solo massacres, which Sozzani had deduced from Lee’s squad-pool would be his only viable strategy. The Lombardian, further pinpointing the method’s syncretic foundations in an ancient NPC art for roaming battlefield elites jacked-up on power, had fashioned several in-depth counters based around severing Lee from the bolstering of his support unit.
All of those failed.
In an exit interview, after several revivals, Sozzani strongly denied that Lee’s tactics were the squads’ “Next Level”, and he asserted that Bellatores would not be duplicating them. “The sovereign is the exception,” he paraphrased the political theorist Carl Schmitt. “This single man parading over the laws of the arena does not grant the rest of us that privilege or ability. And honestly I’m not convinced any of these ‘duelling’ techniques have a sustainable future for anyone, including their inventor. I think I’d also quit this game if forced to wallow in the nightmare of such misanthropic solitude.” Sozzani believed that Lee had never sincerely bothered to learn the 6v6, which left the captain with a complicated bitterness. “I find his apathy to our rich craft disrespectful,” the Lombardian said, “but at the same time fully justified, so much so that it would be the height of ingratitude to grumble. Who is it that defecates today over our field but the very shit-stirrer who’s made it feasible? Many here forget our origins. There is much praise owing to him yet for the labour of the past two years—which has conjured up from a senseless, hopeless turbulence the inspiriting vision of these stadiums—but I doubt, however, that the man himself would appreciate our meagre pandering. This profession that means everything to us must from his perspective be quite trivial. For so long he’s fought and struggled on a global stage, and in comparison these minor tussles must seem small and claustrophobic. Fundamentally bloodless. But I speak too much, I think. All of this belongs to the victor alone and his past era. I wish him peace beyond the crusade.”
The newbie viewers attracted by Saana League tuned out when Lee no-showed as he’d promised to the Opens. Households from Alaska to Antarctica buzzed with agreement that the tournament—though not yet over—had been far more exciting, comedic, and soul-inflating than last season’s. Britt Ekberg, the socialite supreme of the 50s, who’d made her first character that morning to watch from a front-row seat, took to her account gushing. “Amazing!” she said. “The food! The fashion! The shows! The crowd! The fights! And, of course, the invincible star! This has been the psycho-est day ever!” Executive boardrooms of advertising firms resounded with the same arguments, CEOs demanding meetings with this 17-year-old sensation and younger staff struggling to explain his inaccessibility and possible retirement. In cafes, delis, bars, and gyms, super normies who’d been sucked in at the peak expansion of the viewership blackhole began to contemplate their own arena future. VR units were discounted now, and the purchase of one for the home was starting to look more and more attractive. Even necessary.
If only the kid had stayed online to entertain them through the next stomp. The tournaments were running out!
The Return
AFTER ALICE WILSON REACHED her follower goal—at a time when El-Masry and Ramiro were already honing the skills of their Legendary classes—she was transported by her agent from The Clique to an underground preparation site where she “reincarnated Herself in Her second aspect, as the holy archangel”.
The Goddess soon remerged down an alleyway with a silver bow and two shiny pairs of feathered wings. A young street urchin, of the penis caste, found her wings dazzlingly beautiful and asked if he could stroke them.
Wilson shot him through the nasal bridge.
Under the cover of night, she flew out of the Blood City and travelled north beyond its urban decay to the target range of the savannah. The water holes were long exhausted by this phase of the month, their bottoms caked with dust and bones, and the monsters of the plains were desperate for any drop of moisture. Wilson’s preparation shooting spree thus caused a frenzy. For each beast she lamed, guilty and sentenced for its lack of devotion, a dozen others pounced upon its bleeding hide to quench their ceaseless thirst. The shots were also ceaseless, her bow casting down one beam after another of a pretty lavender hue. The weapon had, of course, been stolen from one of Lee’s caches.
A few hours later—as the looted party himself was returning from his nap to start his final run of duels—Wilson reappeared on ground level at the festival. Few players would have recognised her. After a round of transmogrification to better slip into the role, she’d increased her height, bulked her musculature, dyed her skin a shade of blood, and threaded flowers through her hairdo.
She looked just like Herself.
Sandfolk stared in alarm. If they’d attempted this stunt, the imitation would’ve been a capital offence. Poor taste costumes were an occasional occurrence amongst the Offworlders, who in the slums especially had no respect for either history or the prohibitions of the church aloof behind their guarded walls. This woman’s choice seemed bolder than most, however, and her behaviour was disturbing. Some of the shopkeepers contacted the authorities, though not fast enough.