Grandma Ru versus Emerson T. Miller, a fight series between ancients from the before times.
An intermission followed the previous duel as Septic Rose’s multi-sword dissection played unedited for home viewers. The time-dilated crowd in-game meanwhile were tortured with advertising.
The current sponsor: a camping gear manufacturer.
To hock their wares, bodydoubles of The Tyrant and Alex Wong were strolling the ring between the stands and the arena, testing lava-bomb-proof tents and insect-repellent footrests.
“99 gold!?” The ‘Tyrant’ shook, a plume of soup dribbling back into a self-warming bowl. “I’m sending in the secret police because that must be a scam!”
“We’ll need our best to investigate the set of six,” replied ‘Alex Wong’.
“A further discount? You’re pulling my leg!”
“Just 499 while supplies last!”
A chatting crowd ignored this atrocity.
During the lull, the most excitement stirred from those jockeying for the attention of roaming snack vendors. The majority of players had tuned into commentary streams attempting technical breakdowns of The Tyrant’s avant-garde swordsmanship. Others napped. A few logged out, although not as many as had throughout most of the day’s rookie tournaments.
It'd been the habit of the audience, when the main attraction wasn’t fighting, to cycle through phases of winter patchiness, the impatient desyncing their VR units to fast-forward through the filler. For this next series, however, these departures were minimal, the spectators less enthused but still eager for one of its surprise stars.
Down in the village recreation map, monkey-vaulting past the blood stains from the roleplayer and wrestler’s earlier duel, there stalked a grandmother of all strange things.
It was a decrepit, sagging creature. Rumour said it'd spawned not in this current millennium but the fabled 1000s, that darkest of ages preceding the advent of hyper-realistic VR, Super AI dictators, and delectable seaweed-based meat substitutes.
Examining this grotesque relic of the past, it appeared to be running through standard spellkiting movement drills. Intermittently, it would halt to watch clips of its opponent and leaf through the brainstormed counter-routes pencilled in its notebook. Some believed these alterations to be a modern invention, corresponding to a beginner’s preparation routine from A Thousand Tools whose practitioners soaked brain and muscle in the gameplan. Performed by the crone, though, the routine had an archaic aspect. The observer was reminded of a priest browsing scrolls in a cloister or a college kid walled in by a stack of library hardbacks when print media had still existed. Continuing that last by-gone metaphor, the deadline on this time-abomination's assignment seemed to be drawing near; the pages of its notebook, with the speed it flipped them, almost tore, and down the creature's wrinkled brow, glistening from the exercise, streamed an extra ounce of nervous sweat.
Perhaps most horrifically, in an ancient ritual whose purpose has now been lost in the indecipherable aeons, the thing sometimes madly talked when nobody else was around to hear.
"We can do this, Ru...it's just another duel!"
Yes, Grandma Ruru was not yet in the crypt of this tournament, no one more astonished than herself.
When Ruru'd logged on today, she’d assumed her run was caput.
The issue had been she'd slept worse than a hobo in the rain, tallying, maybe, three hours. That'd been scattered between what she would describe as ‘muscle nightmares’ – these were dreams devoid of visual or auditory content, dreams of failed blocks and heinous limb contortions.
As it would turn out, however, these bizarre nightmares would augur a mental powerup. In practice, she found herself executing significantly longer spell-kiting routines. Before, the sequences that ended as she had intended were always separated by gulfs of misprediction and blunder. Those once-scattered plans suddenly clicked together. Their faults shrank, and they combined into the eventual achievement of flawless duels, duels won without incurring any damage.
The neurology was magic to her, but she attributed these gains to yesterday’s forced melee training.
And with that much-needed powerup, she’d managed to hobble through this tournament until the quarters, rising upwards and upwards off the blubbering skulls of three youngsters...
A quick retrospective obituary for the triplets dumpstered:
Her first schooled kid had, by pure chance, been the last of yesterday, fate handing her a rematch with her revived Venezuelan friend Vicente. Both he and his pet wolf were put down with a clean 2-0. Her overnight growth had outstripped him, and his knowledge of this from their sparring, plus stagefright, caused a tragic underperformance. She felt a minor sorrow in the re-elimination, but this was eclipsed by a much larger pleasure at things falling into their correct order again. Trash, once placed in the trash, should remain in the trash.
Next up, in punishment for her hubris, had been a monumental ninja leap in difficulty.
Ruru’d battled a Norwegian Qi Master who’d hovered around the 5th spot of the zone-wide league. Of note, like herself, he’d used the lightest practical muscle build to boost his stamina and acrobatics. This, combined with weapon juggling, made him—basically—a ninja, a Norwegian ninja.
For a spellkiter, the Norwegian ninja created a janky, exhausting fight, one forcing her to flirt constantly with capture and death. By most accounts, he should have sliced her. Their sparring record during the morning prep had been no less in his favour today than before – a uniform streak of amputations.
That she would triumph over the Norwegian ninja when it most mattered was thanks to a sumptuous piece of opposition research, a cheese shaped and fermented through A Thousand Tool’s scammier inclinations.
Throughout their practice, she’d surreptitiously investigated the Norwegian ninja for habits to exploit. She'd managed to identify—and test—one of these without his awareness. His critical weakness was a finite set of trigger conditions that prompted him to activate his Class’s teleport spell, an ability he'd relied heavily on when catching her.
Grandma Ru, by hiding those triggers in the liner of her notebook, by then frauding them on the bigstage, managed to trick the Norwegian ninja into wasting the teleport repeatedly. She pulled this scam off twice before he noticed. After he noticed, she pulled it off twice more, Ruru betting, correctly, that the habit was too ingrained to alter mid-series.
And so the Norwegian Ninja flipped right into the trash.
Although small, as her first official targeted swindle, it’d been very satisfying. The trick had even earned her an applause from The Tyrant, to whom she’d afterwards proudly exhibited the sketches of her plot like a kid showing their parent an A+ test.
Her third series was at once easy and a highly-intellectual test of prophecy, of who could gaze further ahead and deconstruct the contours of their future battlefield.
The opponent had been a French Bowman with a paradoxical melee-only specialisation. This odd choice of Class reflected him being the top dog of a kindred but different lineage to herself of meta-gaming tryhards. Their breed of nerd had determined that, firstly, the core of A Thousand Tools resided not in the flashy weapon juggling but the trick swaps it enabled. Secondly, they'd realised the simplest method to execute these swaps at Tier-0 was using a Bowman class’s
What, however, this Frenchman had lacked the foresight—the perspicacity, the sharpness of wit, the in-born genius—to counter was the ultimate weapon counter: herself, who did not rely on weapons. As a mage, her avoidance of the melee nullified 97% of his martial repertoire.
Grandma Ru thus waltzed onto the arena already victorious, her enemy analysed, strategised, and trashed a week earlier by her superior intellect.
Some spectators, defending that trashed foetus, might point out that their second match in the sand arena had seen her eat a mortal spearthrust through the eyeball not half a minute in. Likewise, scuffle two against the Norwegian ninja in the same setting had concluded even faster with an ISIS-style beheading. One could reason from the context of these deaths that she’d only survived because coinflips had gifted her twice each series the single map she could reliably spellkite on and that she would've been boned anywhere else.
Ruru disagreed. Was how a player adapted to their destiny not a skill? Was destiny itself not also a skill? These kids could have prayed harder to the blessed coin.
The desperate present.
...off the blubbering skulls of three youngsters stomped through raw skill.
Her spellkiting performance throughout the brackets had earned her many an applauding fan. In addition to her fellow rookies and the random crusty grandpas waving banners with her old gaming tag, she’d received extra love from the higher-level mages of the world. Perfect spellkiting happened to be rare at every level, and her feat obtained a milestone value as the first concrete evidence of the path’s feasibility for plebs without The Tyrant’s mutancy.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Ruru had known none of that last fact, believing from watching mostly only his duels for end-game content that all non-trash could kite indefinitely. But, having been informed, she would accept the accolade as part of her legacy. It, and her survival, was yet another proof that this might still be the millennium of millennial gamers!
"Yeah, it's the millennium of millennial gamers!" she hyped herself. "You've got this!"
A nearby cameraman coughed.
The old woman had been chatting to herself while balancing along the spine of a building’s roof. When she paused to resummon her notes, her eyes scanning a diagram caught over the page’s edge the change in banners waved amongst the crowd. Those in support of Alpahmutt and The Tyrant were being replaced by a sea of patriotic red and white and blue.
Reading the banners would show the tide of uniform support behind the star of the hour.
‘Miller The Killer!’
‘ETM ❤ from Kuwait’
‘The Machine Marches On’
‘No Honour Without Skin, Black Fist, Black Fist, Hooah!’
‘The Tyrant Will Also Try’
‘Emerson: Skill is Never Out of Style’
‘The Machine Marches On’
‘Confederate Son!’
‘First Then - First Until The End’
‘The Machine Marches On’
‘The Machine Marches On’
‘The Machine Marches On’
‘The Machine Marches On’
The surprise star wasn’t her but her opponent, another freak enrolling in this rookie competition for some unfair reason.
Ruru’d had a wonderful run, and now her wonderful run was done. Those minor wins, things of the past, were already fading into the same, half-recalled obscurity of her pro-career as she progressed to an adversary nigh-on impossible to beat.
Emerson ‘The Machine’ Miller, a Gen-Zer from the south, was an accomplished veteran of Saana’s 1v1 scene.
Ruru, unlike her fellow rookie SaNguiNe—whose loss one might recollect her predicting yesterday—understood what a veteran duellist meant. A veteran was the unbridgeable gap between a child and an adult in combat. A veteran's fights were faster, more complex, more coordinated, more lethal. At the most basic level, and a critical divergence from non-VR games, a veteran with identical character stats inflicted more damage, each attack boosted by the greater precision of their vital-point targeting and the extra forces generated by their superior kinetic efficiency.
Her opponent—a former winner of the main 1v1 tournament and, until last week, a prime contender for Saana’s top duellist—reigned as a veteran amongst veterans. The consensus of amateurs and experts alike placed him third in the tournament. He lingered right behind Whitefrog, who had the double benefit of The Tyrant’s tutelage and Saana League’s greater competitiveness over the previous 1v1 scene - SL pros were more talented but less specialised. Grandma Ruru, though, reckoned third place a slight undervaluation. After researching Miller during her pre-bracket preparations, she ranked his prospects above the pro’s. The weakness of the younger duellist was his being in the early phase of a new art. He’d yet to iron out its complex kinks, yet to adapt his body to its alien demands. While his usage of A Thousand Tools would eventually surpass the veteran's outdated style, his current mastery of A Thousand Tools had not. The pro, she thus expected, would lose.
And Grandma’s spicy predictions didn’t stop there. Although less certain about this one, she believed all of the above applied to The Tyrant, too.
Given these prophecies, she, an elderly newbie, would logically not be winning.
She entered the series with zero advantages. There was no exception for her main speciality, the obstacle-based movement. She’d clocked the guy running her village routes an average of 21% faster on foot. Moreover, several of the map’s trickier shortcuts that she’d never executed—designed as they were with the complexity of bouldering puzzles—he could smash consistently. The comparisons only got worse from there in terms of weapon-handling, evasion, and, well, everything.
And the same forecast, really, would’ve applied had she matched with any of the veteran duellists, from The Tyrant to, apparently, Alphamutt. Grandma Ru’s only beatable pairings in the quarters had been Justinian or the now-eliminated wrestler. So, by not rolling either of those, she’d known her pacemaker had ticked out since the lottery.
If she hadn’t beepered the mortician on this tourney yet, this was because her opponent might still feasibly be removed from the competition by third-party divine intervention. This possibility could never, ever be ruled out in a fantasy game. At any time, he could get abducted by one of Saana’s evil deities or by a miraculous bout of real-life diarrhoea.
Such was the most rational explanation for her sticking around. The other, sillier, was that, despite all facts to the contrary, she retained a hope of winning.
Ruru, removing her gaze from the distracting stands, squinted at her sketched strategies.
She squinted harder.
She squinted harder than harder.
She crossed her squinting eyes.
"Shit! There's no way I can win! I'm cooked! Unless..."
The old woman, this duel requiring her to transcend logic, closed her notebook shut and clasped it to her chest with the reverence of a bible. She peered through the hole in the stadium ceiling, beseechingly up at the corner of a passing moon.
“Please,” Ruru prayed, “you who’ve controlled the blessed coin, who've chosen me to progress this far, please grant me yet another favour and curse my enemy with diarrhoea... ”
The diarrhoea request was not as crazy as it might sound. Several players throughout the day had succumbed to the surprise lavatory finisher. You see, a severe crap could cause hours to be lost due to the time-dilation, and not every competitor had her own sagacity and indomitable willpower to diaper up.
Astonishingly, the try-hard grandma's ludicrous prayers would be answered by one of Saana's higher powers.
“I’d save the curses and drill harder,” said a sagely voice. “Only noobs poop themselves - long-term duelling makes you too in sync with gastrointestinal rhythms.”
The response had come from the hillside of the adjacent map. There, the grandma’d had a special audience. Seated on a cushion, pouring tea out of one of the thermoses currently being advertised by his doppelganger, was The Tyrant himself.
He drank alone. Alphamutt had been dispatched, and Whitefrog and Justinian warmed up elsewhere for their fights next.
The teen, after sharing the advice, took a sip of his drink with a Buddha-like serenity. His face sparkled porcelain clean. On it, one would find no trace—physical or mental—of the gory sword extravaganza minutes earlier, nor of the eighty other matches of the day plus the mass-bodying of the triple threats preceding this final.
Grandma Ru, with the duelling god all too herself, imagined this might just be her prayed-for intervention.
She hopped down from her building and trotted up the slope in greeting.
“Doesn’t my guy want your head as well?” She referred to the fact guards had been assigned to both The Third Gate and her opponent. “Maybe you can share some of those pro tips you had for SaNguiNe. This humble student will obey every order without question. You tell me to jump; I'll say, 'With which tool?'”
The Tyrant shook his wanted head. “Emerson doesn’t worry me.”
“He should,” replied Grandma Ru, who’d foreseen this kid’s defeat.
The Tyrant paused for one second, deduced her entire perspective in another, and smiled. “Hah. However, there’s nothing in the ‘combat’ that bugs me, neither from him nor my accidental spawn. The concern is more in the external oddities. Call me paranoid, but I sometimes ask myself, 'What if this dirt-eating indigent is right about the apocalypse? Will my soul pass beyond The Gates? Will my retirement plans be spoiled by the real-world merging with this dogshit game and trapping me forever?' Terrifying stuff.”
While all of that was spoken to Grandma Ru outloud, a mind-blowing thing transpired. In front of her appeared one of his Cutthroat guards. They were semi-translucent, visible only to herself through their proximity. The figure, tapping their temple in a common gesture to open one’s DMs, indicated between herself and the teen. After complying, she received a text message from a random username.
-Higglebottom Rollerderby: Yo, grandma, here’s the killer tip: since you’re going to lose, why not lose lucratively? Pick one of the rarer ways of losing that you’re capable of orchestrating, and stake some cash on it. The gold equivalent to your quarter-final prize will be fronted for a 15% cut. Bookies are waiting. Just name the throw and you’ll be loaded. This is not a scam or test. We repeat, this is NOT a scam or test.
The kid, somehow, interwove that with his vocal reply, the two ending in perfect sync.
Grandma Ru, although impressed, was offended by his immorality and total disregard for her prospects.
"No, thank you." She raised a hand in firm rejection. “Back in my day, win or lose, we believed in the spirit of honest competition.”
The Tyrant responded with a masterful charade of gaslighting. He blinked, glancing askew for a few milliseconds. He then frowned with a confusion that looked very authentic, as if he were struggling to identify the root of a tangential comment from a dementia patient. Next, out of courtesy to the rambling old lady, he covered the first reaction. It vanished beneath a nod of enthusiasm whose mild exaggeration hid an intermediate reaction of humanistic sorrow.
“Yeah…me, too!” He nodded chipperly. “That’s another reason, so obvious as to not require statement, for not spilling tips – out of my love for equitable combat. But I can give you my encouragement. Go pawn that noob!”
-Higglebottom Rollerderby: Congratulations, you passed our test. Thank you for upholding the competitive integrity of this event brought to you by Flaming Sun Incorporated.
Grandma Ru, wanting to argue but cognisant of the stealthed security, turned around and stomped off.
She set a reminder for later. After her loss, she’d take out her frustrations reviewing previous matches for signs of fraud and snitching.
But then Ruru snapped back violently towards the kid, towards his teacup.
The fragrance hit her hard. Beneath a citrus cover-note simmered a sweetness so potent that it tickled her nose hairs from afar. Earlier, she’d had the privilege to sip one of his experimental brews, and it had—no exaggeration—been the most delicious liquid to touch her tongue in six decades of existence, like dewdrops dripping from a lily cultivated by a god. This new tea, although not so overtly delightful, carried a secret promise of much higher intoxications.
The scent continued its development into a bodily hallucination of floating. Grandma Ru was drifting up, up to some exalted altitude, to the heights of gathering thunderclouds. As if uniting with their charge, she felt a buzz like static electricity suffusing from her nostrils to her sinuses and her lungs and her blood.
This delirium of elevation caused her to forget the huge difference in stature between her and the teen.
“Share a cup or grandma snitches,” she threatened, attempting—with full sincerity—to blackmail him. "And I'll take the tips while you're at it."
“Not this one.” The Tyrant—unmoved—drained his cup, desummoning it along with the thermos. “It’d be poison with your Constitution.”
“What’s this constitution crap?” she fumed. “Because I’m about to lose? What, did you invent a fucking tea exclusive to semi-finalists and above? That’s—”
She stopped, her mind regaining clarity after the fragrance’s disappearance.
“Alchemical Constitution,” the teen explained with his grudgeless buddha calm. “Forget smelling it. If you drank it at your level, your character would die. So…poison.”
She received a longer synchronised message. In this, he offered to prepare a different brew for after her matches, a special reward for advertising A Thousand Tools to the hard-to-reach elderly female martial-artist gamer demographic. This other tea was a no-less experimental concoction, one that he’d been saving to unwind when his multi-tourney gauntlet ended. The catch was that its calibration procedure would require her to sit with him through the rest of her warmup. He promised, however, that doing so would not affect her odds of victory, and it may even lead to the obtainment of treasure of infinitely greater value than victory.
Ruru was not persuaded of this ‘greater treasure’ business. Nevertheless, she agreed on the slim chance she might yet squeeze out of him a series-saving tip. There was at least more hope in that than pep-talking herself or praying for a turd.
As she approached the teen, she almost died of a heart attack when eight guards unstealthed around her.
Within seconds, they’d pitched a tent occluding the outside world. One guard carried off a bucket from beside The Tyrant, its soapy contents pink with Alphamutt’s diluted gore. A seat for Grandma Ru was prepared by another with earth-shaping magic; the slope of the hill in front of the teen was raised into a level platform, onto which condensed a summoned coffee table and a cushion.
The group’s commander throughout didn’t budge. He gestured for the old woman to wait a moment as he dispensed orders unrelated to her.