The New Tyrant Arena.

The rookie 1v1s had progressed to the quarter-finals. As the event sped towards its bloody climax, a heavy fragrance of decline was settling on the stadium.

Moonlight poured in through the ceiling, where a gaping hole caused by the earlier attacks had been left unpatched. The spectators displaced by the incident had been demoted to the sea of millions watching from the savannah. This area in front of the arena had become doubly packed with tourists who should’ve been attending the festival’s less-popular attractions. Several of these outside, including the markets, had fallen into ruin after the infrastructural damage and the sudden flight of the NPC staff.

The disorientation spreading throughout the zone took on a unique aspect at the stadium, where the runtime of The Tyrant’s consecutive finales had surpassed 40 time-dilated hours. The crowd at the tail of this schedule had slipped into the spent delirium of an orgy lasting till the crack of dawn. Their desires had been thinned by many cycles of exhaustion, renewal, and re-exhaustion. Some lay in comatosed piles, their drool thickened by beer and the mushed crumbs of fried snacks. Others, sobering up, grimaced at the sweaty musk of bodies compressing them, at a glimpse of some poor sod in the ring getting disembowelled, at the foul dripping on their foreheads. The wise had rationed their attention by using the preceding attacks and this rookie category to log off for a recuperating nap. As these discriminating folk returned, they initiated waves of jeers at the organisers and The Tyrant to hurry up with the trashing of these amateurs. Everyone demanded the higher-level, higher-octane trashings that would conclude this festival he’d trashed.

The mood was much less deranged and pessimistic down in the arena, where the rookie duellists awaited the quarter-final’s lottery.

Most were positively vibrant, inflated on the heights of competition and existence. In this state, all chaos, all doubts, and all of the herd’s impatient shouts converted only into fuel for rising further.

Eight of them remained. They’d scattered around the ring and a row of benches at its foot, ample space provided by the vacancies outnumbering them. This emptiness—along with the repairs to gear and scars of half-healed injuries—formed a potent reminder of the friends and rivals they’d themselves eliminated. Beyond those lost today, already forgotten, hundreds of thousands of culled competitors also lay strewn behind the back of each duellist as they, alone, marched on through the last steps of the ascent.

At this lonely altitude, with no companions left to contradict, the brain a little starved of oxygen, anything felt obtainable. Even the summit might be obtainable.

A few in the audience shared this rookie fervour. For that, for their continued faith in the young and the eternally hopeful, they would be duly rewarded when The Tyrant, although still amongst the contestants, was defeated.

This tournament, alone, he’d not be winning. One of the other eight would be taking him out. (AN: wtf, distant future bros, spoilers??)

Alex Wong didn't bother with this round's lottery due to his backroom training for his own upcoming 1v1s. A doppelganger in his place rode out on a white stallion, hobbling onto the stage dressed like Napolean Bonaparte with a red cloak and bicorn headpiece. After a speech thanking an advertiser who’d hosted an intermission show, the stooge doffed his hat and began to pluck from it crumpled squares of paper naming the candidates to slay Saana's invincible shade.

First up would be the Earthfriend ‘Fuzzygirl35’, better known as ‘The Third Gate’.

Attentions around the stadium turned to the Somali mystic roleplayer in her seat. She was wedged between two guards tasked with keeping her behaved. Like a child who’d been playing in the mud, her armour had accumulated a mixed crust of her usual self-applied soil and the unwashed spillages of dead players, which attracted a cloud of flies. Her hands were rope-tied in her lap. The additional restraint of a mouth gag bottled in her ravings.

The mystic had been having a blast today. She'd not taken any of the event seriously since she'd already achieved her primary goal in Suchi of piercing The Tyrant’s death hymen. During her matches, while bullying the amateurs with her stylistic fusion of The Strategy and PLH’s monster-shifting tactics, she’d prolonged each fight to entertain the crowd with theatrical sermons forecasting the apocalypse.

The end of the old world, the merger of reality and virtual reality into one shiny roleplayer-ruled nirvana, was coming soon. It would be initiated by The Tyrant-Cripple’s second death and martyrdom.

The Third Gate had been predicting this from the very start of the tournament, announcing from the stands before every opponent facing the teen that they were the chosen one. She’d done this with every opponent. That meant from the 3v3s, to—of course—the interlude against The Slum’s attackers, and, now, to this rookie tournament starring herself. Every champion she'd identified had inevitably lost. That, however, posed no trouble to the roleplayer, who simply retconned her prophecies with elaborate excuses about misaligned oracle bones etc. The shtick seemed to be a fun support for The Tyrant's monotonous gauntlet and a weird satirisation of historical doomsday cults revising their predictions when the world awkwardly failed to implode. It was very much in the vein of the anti-comedy she'd inherited from The Cripple, from the over-commitment to a bit no one else found funny to the sociopathic immunity to shame.

Most curiously, The Third Gate prophesied her own explosive demise whenever they met. Her sole function, as ‘The Gate’, was not to kill him but to welcome the real prophet who would. This riffed off of the probable outcome due to him taking extra precautions. It also nodded esoterically to the Babi religion that’d spawned the Gate lineage, its prophet styling himself as a messenger anticipating god’s chosen messenger—like a divine hypeman—and then, later, revealing his true identity as god’s chosen messenger all along. A murky parallel may have existed between this bizarre lore and her duelling ambitions.

Between matches, she'd been gagged because the over-layered rambling on this stuff gave everyone a headache and terrified the children viewers.

But the roleplayer was not to be totally silenced.

Upon her latest selection to go first, she convulsed and rolled her eyes back into her skull at the onset of a trance.

In the stands, a young man in ordinary tourist garb rose to his feet. As a conduit for her divine message—sent to him via DM—he began a divine recitation about whether this next foe would be “her tragic passage through The Gate of Gates.” He resumed his seat after with a blush.

The man, who’d communicated multiple second-hand prophecies, bore a strong familial resemblance to the mystic. He seemed to be her cousin, perhaps attending as a normal spectator before being roped into her humiliating roleplay in exchange for a share of the prize winnings. But this may have been yet another absurd layer to the anti-humour, the 'cousin' perhaps a hired actor.

Alex Wong’s doppelganger, moving on from that oddness, drew for the hopeful slayer of this mad woman a Miracleworker from Central City, SaNguiNe.

This dagger wrestler—and a real-life wrestler on South Korea’s Olympic squad—was reclining in the arena on a building’s roof, lying against its tiles in a pose of conscious calm. His shirt removed, sweat dribbled down his rippled arms and abs as they cooled off from a warm-up. His panther-black eyes glared arrogantly at the stars above, like one tracking a wasp they were about to swat.

After his first-place finisher yesterday, SanGuiNe had continued his momentous roll through the finale. The many disciples of The Tyrant, competing in their race towards A Thousand Tools on the horizon, had been yanked back and grounded in the dirt by his muscular obstinacy. He didn’t possess their talent, nor their future. But, in this fleeting hour, he eclipsed them in his drive, focus, and the duellist’s love of opportunity and timing.

This performance had almost caused the public to forget the origin story behind his vendetta, his embarrassing crush on a gender-bending spy. Almost. Unfortunately, the commentators kept reminding the crowd of it during his duels.

SaNguiNe glanced down from the roof to the mystic at the arena’s base. He saw in her the theft of his enemy’s first sweet death and, simultaneously, a clone of this enemy, mimicking his grandiose flippancy. The wrestler, fostering an inner flame of anger, stoked it to rise and rise, to blossom through the friction of his limbs into an inferno that would engulf her and the mentor waiting on the other side of her ashes.

He shrugged. “She’ll do for the next warm-up.”

The Third Gate convulsed her reply. Her cousin chanted that, “He Who Spreads Cutlery,” a reference to SaNguiNe’s multi-dagger ground setup, “is once again misled by passion. Once again, he sees the soft skin of a woman but not The Harder Serpent Slithering in The Soil and The Rigid Demon of Denial, who bars his passageway to Vengeance and The Heaven Beyond All-Vengeance.”

SaNguiNe reddened and fumed.

Third to the ring would be the tourney-addict supreme.

The Tyrant had been sitting amongst the rookies in a pretence of equality. Despite his action-stuffed weekend, he was fresher than many thanks to the precise moderation of effort and liberal use of rest. The day's filthy residue had not clung to his gear, cleaned off between rounds. His mind, too, was pristine as a jewel. He had an aggravatingly-chipper demeanour, similar to a seasoned traveller killing time at an airport until their connecting flight. On the one hand, he was mentally alert, his thoughts turned towards whatever adventure waited at the unknown destination. On the other, subject to a delay beyond his powers, he roamed the facilities and sampled its offerings without an aim. Here, he grabbed a coffee; there, he practised an acrobatic drill; here, he inspected duty-free wallets; there, he swiped another tournament gold medal.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

When The Tyrant heard his name, he glanced at a cameraman and feigned shock as if his trajectory had been altered by the assignment.

A second later, he’d returned to chatting with a contestant. They were discussing a book he’d been flipping idly through, the ‘Selected Writings of The Invincible One’, a.k.a himself.

“Are the ‘martial correlations’ real?” the other asked.

“In my religious-phase revision of Strategy, yes,” he answered. “In this fanfic, sort of. The author’s just winged the proportions. But that’s to be expected. It’d take much longer than a week to grasp the new art to this depth, especially while compiling a book.”

“So you’re not the author?”

He smirked. “Yes and no; never and forever. At the highest level of The Way, aren’t we all but mouthpieces for the one divine toolbox, blessed be its All-Versatile jangling?.”

Next came the Qi Master Whitefrog, the Indian pro from Saana League and The Tyrant’s disciple.

The tourney’s second favourite was in one of the arenas with his coach team, sparring out the kinks in a three-weapon routine.

Like The Tyrant, the pro had borne an air of detachment from the tourney, its crowd and winnings unable to dislodge him from the larger objective in the distance. Whitefrog's goal, however, was less mysterious. In the months and years ahead, he would be chasing the mastery of the juggle and, through the juggle, the mastery of all combat. These rookie duels at the start of this pursuit were nothing but a minor amusement. The pro hopped arenas when summoned, dispatched a noob, and then resumed his drills.

He’d stated in prior interviews that his sole reason for participation had been a few extra hours with his mentor before the retirement. Reporters had nevertheless hounded him for his prospects in their fight. Whitefrog—more familiar with the teen’s new capabilities than anyone else—likened the task to extinguishing the sun with a pinkie. It could be done, in a sense, but only by holding the finger so close to yourself that you lost sight of your defeat. However, this deferential answer was belied by a contradictory note, a trace of youth’s undaunted zeal, which interpreted all impossibility as challenge. Even if the pro might not confess it, he’d glimpsed his eventual progression in the juggle beyond the mentor on account of his superior physical gifts. Part of him no doubt toyed with fantasies of expediting this transcendence to today.

Whitefrog’s draw didn’t cause a single falter in his juggle. Thanks to his huge fanbase from India and Saana League, he’d been awarded the people’s democratic exemption from an early Tyrant knock-out.

Gods of Comedy and Scandal seemed to orchestrate the re-selection. The replacement opponent was to be a Cutthroat, 'Alphamutt', or—as the sleuths had since identified to her and The Tyrant's embarrassment—the assassin Septic Rose in the most demented of disguises.

Oohs and laughter and applause and ecstatic shouts of “YES!” bounced around the stadium, as the drama-sows were roused from their sleep by the scent of this delicious pairing.

After The Tyrant’s forfeit yesterday to her, analysts had concluded her imitation of Silver Wolf was a twisted form of revenge. To offend and disturb her crush, she would force him to mutilate the girl he’d chosen over herself, ramming a spear into his love’s twinkling blue irises, planting against the cute birthmark on her neck not the kiss of his desire but the edge of a sawing knife. Avoidance of these unpleasantries had caused his previous concession and threat to ban any follow-up imitators.

But now, in these finales, he didn’t have the luxury to skip. So, it seemed the public would be witnessing the efficacy of the ploy in action. How would the teen surmount this barrier? Had he devised in the interval between a solution, to fight—perhaps—blindfolded or hopped-up on vision-altering drugs? Or would he choose to forfeit again, accepting this squished pimple of a tourney beneath the one foot of his colossal stomp? (He wouldn't.) Or would he, abusing his position, eject Septic Rose on legalistic grounds?

This all, of course, assumed the disguise presented a barrier. Many dismissed the theory wholesale. Saana’s ruling psycho would not wince at the trivialities of love, gore, and their unsettling union.

Septic Rose, adding to the weirdness, had appeared throughout the day aloof of this perverse romantic scandal. Her stolen face was dazed and vacant. Between whacking rookies absent-mindedly, between repeated ignored attempts to get The Tyrant to communicate with her, she’d returned to her seat in solitude. Occasionally, she'd laughed with no apparent connection to anything.

The Tyrant now laughed at the pairing.

The assassin, at a tug from a guard informing her, blinked in gradual registration, like one waking from a dream and struggling to untwine its fictions from reality. She whispered back to the guard for them to get him to at least unblock her during their match. There was news he’d want to hear, she said.

“Or…maybe not?” the girl second-guessed, bogged down in uncertainty.

Fifth to take the stage after the non-lover's quarrel would be a random 60-something millennial lady and ex-pro-gamer.

This notebook-wielding Earthfriend, Grandma Ruru, was a model student of A Thousand Tools, having customised the art for herself after an impartial assessment of her strengths and weaknesses and the tournament’s conditions. Senescence barred her from the weapon juggle. Where the youngsters tried it anyway, this older woman ditched the technique from the outset to focus on the less popular sub-speciality of map-based spellkiting. In a further—and wiser—distinction from more idealistic mages, now eliminated, she’d not clung too rigidly to this choice either, improving the speciality’s low feasibility at their level through the paradoxical supplementation of melee drills.

All that would still not have been sufficient to get her to the quarter-finals, but she’d had a key breakthrough on this path that’d enabled her survival. Today, at the peak of her conditioning, bolstered by the adrenaline of the audience, she’d become the first of The Tyrant’s mage disciples to achieve kiting’s highest ideal. Some crudely called this, ‘The Blueballs Rodeo’. It was a flawless, interminable duel, in which the opponent died without a single instance of physical engagement. The grandma had been able to execute this frustrating dance with frustrating consistency – at least in the matches on her favoured map.

Overspecialisation in the one arena had been her main flaw beside the age. In every other map, she’d gotten her grandmotherly guts pushed in, even dying twice, and thus the second key to her survival had been lady luck smiling over her coinflips. Whenever this fortune expired, so would her hour hanging with the grandkids.

At present, Grandma Ru had been chatting with The Tyrant about the book of quotes from him she’d been reading for encouragement. She had no real knowledge of his identity beyond the workshop for A Thousand Tools. Thus, she’d been treating him like an educator, bantering in the breaks and requesting pointers on technique. He, in turn, had been quite happy to offer advice to her and any other diligent contestants, his traveller-esque ramblings sometimes whisking him onto an unused ring for a mid-tourney demo.

The grandma waved to acknowledge a tiny base of fans amongst the crowd. Dotted around the stands and the fields were a couple hundred banners sporting her ancient gaming tag. Most of these fluttered in the withered claws of other millennials, who'd had the dust and cobwebs blown off their memories by her unexpected reappearance.

The hat, scheduling a hoedown at the retirement home, nominated for her opponent a fellow American and the second oldest finalist, Emerson T. Miller.

This Fighter, a gen-Z-er in his 40s, was also flanked by guards after earlier threats directed at The Tyrant. In some respects, he looked beyond this age, his hair grizzled grey and white from a period of sustained stress. At the same time, he carried his muscles with the sprightly vitality of a man habituated to physical labour. Like The Tyrant, whom he stared at with uncomfortable frequency, his expression had a grave-like haggardness; the look differed in one respect, the rage—less pronounced in the teen—having completed its journey to this older man’s eyes.

Miller had been a veteran duellist in both senses of the term. A discrete tattoo of a gorilla fist on his neck recalled his participation in the revolution’s American front. Decades later, in the game’s 1v1 scene, he’d scored several top-four finishes in major tourneys, including a first in this year's Spring Invitational. Many ranked him, prior to recent events, the best duellist in the world on a pure skills basis, his defeats a consequence of gear disadvantages. Due to a reclusive aversion to interviews, he’d not explained why he’d downgraded to the rookie category this season, but based on his animosities to The Tyrant, it was likely a calculated move. Miller may have recognised his greater odds for a successful win in this lowbie format, where the old art of the body still reigned over the new art of the weapon. As for the animosity, this was similarly unexplained but much less puzzling. A Thousand Tools disrupting the previous equilibrium in which Miller had found prominence, The Tyrant’s aggravating monologues - there were myriad justifiable reasons to want to choke the kid out.

As a veteran, Miller's fights against the rookies had been brutally one-sided. Less than duels, they’d more resembled a knife-only boar hunt, the guy running his prey down before the dry delivery of a stab to the vitals.

Learning of his pairing with the grandma, he steered a silent glance from this senile countrywoman, who’d summoned a notebook to research him like he was a school assignment, to the teen she’d been consorting with. A glob of hatred surged towards his throat. He hunched over and ejected the feeling upon one of his guards' boots, thick and slimy. They slapped his cheek. He turned the other towards them with a smile.

With six assigned, that left Whitefrog against the last contestant, the roleplayer Justinian The Great.

A teammate of the pro under The Tyrant in the day’s already-claimed 3v3s, this nitwit Crusader had stumbled through a series of close matches, alternating between impressive feats of swordsmanship and beginner blunders with the shield adopted only yesterday. Despite the awkwardness, he’d become a favourite amongst the locals, who’d rallied behind him as a champion of The Slums. Rumours had it that the knight had been recruited by an Indonesian professional org, although this had not received much attention due to the overshadowing of his teammates. Many attributed his advancement thus far to The Tyrant’s supreme virtuosity, two days of guidance capable of elevating anyone to greatness.

Throughout the lottery, the knight had been kneeling and praying for Jesus's favour. When the grandma option opened up, his exhortations had reached their maximum, but now—against the pro, who’d destroyed him in their training—he slipped into a despairing mumble.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Justinian self-soothed, “I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil…”

The locals gave a chorus of sighs and conciliatory cheers. Although his crusade may have terminated here, the knight's progression to these rookie quarter-finals had been worthy of praise, offering a spark of hope and pride in a territory that produced neither.

The sounds of any lament were drowned beneath the louder noise of laughter.

The first pair had been summoned to the stage. The mystic, her guards untying her hands and ungagging her mouth, leapt up grinning and beginning her next round of apocalyptic preaching. The wrestler, doing his best to tune her out as he slid down from the roof, clothed his shirtless muscles in armour and patted the placement of his daggers.