A fight already lost.
Grandma Ru, despite her refusal, would continue to meditate upon the conversation as she entered her doomed series. History’s top spoiler had confirmed it: she would lose. So, then, resigning herself to fate, how was she to extract the most from it?
She decided to return to the whimsy with which she’d first begun this tournament. Abandoning the try-hard delusion that'd formed of winning, she set upon the smaller task of discovering how far a week’s magical parkour and six-decades of no-life gaming before could take her against a reigning champ.
As a token gesture towards her humbled goal, she chose in advance to forfeit any matches outside of her preferred arena, where those skills could not be flexed. That wasn’t to say this decision had zero strategic value. Realistically, the off-map fights would not even grant a chance to learn. The sole gains would be to her opponent, who’d not put in a thousandth of the research into her than she'd in him.
Her resolve would soon be tested. Miller won the coinflip and selected his comfort map, The Graveyard of The Gods, against the statues of which he loved to pin his victims as he gutted them. Grandma Ru, combating a resurgence of her irrational convictions, reminded herself that this no more altered or sealed her defeat than before. With a wince, with a sigh, she messaged the officiator her decision.
The stands receiving the announcement murmured with wonder whether it was part of a calculated strategy fed to her during the chat.
She could hear on stage the commentators hypothesising. One guessed that she intended to stomp the veteran off-the-bat. From there, she might transition his bafflement into a series steal.
"I wish that was the plan," Ruru said to herself, filtering out the commentators, forgetting the audience.
She summoned to mind The Tyrant’s list of loss conditions and sent a simultaneous message to her ex-pro friends and the local duelling clique. Grandma claimed to have time-travelled not from the past but from the future. Her match would end at 70% of her opponent’s health with her miraculous defeat.
The duellists pinged back their encouragement, some bantering she’d be lucky to achieve that outcome.
Their banter had its truth. In the end, she could not aspire to anything more substantial, this being her maximum within the loss, to chip a shard off of her indisputable superior.
However, meditating on the third Invincible Pillar, she would take solace in knowing The Tyrant would be blindsided by the same guy. Herself and the braggart teen would before this tourney finished be equalised in their defeats.
Her daughter Cassie messaged a complaint. Ruru replied, as another token gesture of compromise, that she would concede before the mutilation.
Spite and self-respect prevented her from forwarding the tip to the teen.
Emerson ‘The Machine’ Miller trudged over after switching routes from the graveyard. A country-boy Gen-Zer, who’d not kept up with the fashions of his own generation, he looked as misfitting to the setting as herself. They made for an odd contrast with the crowd of multi-coloured mullets and Virtual Realists in costumes. As they faced off in the arena, they could’ve been characters in a dystopic sci-fi movie, a pair abducted with a time-machine for bloodsports.
The veteran arrived in a state of visible agitation, disdaining her for the association with The Tyrant and misreading her forfeit as tactical.
“Ma’am,” he greeted in a thick, barnyard drawl.
He tipped his head with superficial politeness, although his gaze lacked any welcome.
"Mr Machine," Ruru replied with a gulp, peering back from out of a building window.
Perhaps due to a similarity in age, she was reminded of her grandchild’s biological father, of how he’d glared across the courtroom after Cassie’s hospitalisation. Where there should’ve been remorse was only rage. It'd been a strange rage, one smouldering with an inexplicable indignancy, as if she’d been the one doing the battering.
The resemblance with this zoomer duellist freaked Ruru out less than it might’ve. Such memories, to be open in this confessional moment of defeat, had come and gone throughout her duels, but the duelling itself had helped in a way to process them.
That, she thought, if nothing else, might be one positive to carry on from this silly episode.
Grandma Ru, her concession granting her a sense of lightness, had fun reorganising her gameplan around the novel problem of losing maximally. She re-rationed resources. She identified several locations for a final skirmish.
As she toured the map before the countdown, it occurred to her that this might be her last scramble on it. The realisation carried its own grief. Infused with the memories of her training, its obstacles had taken on a sort of personality. Moved by this, she gave a farewell pat to one cute table that she’d loved to camp, and to a house whose internal circuit she had never quite mastered, she jogged past it with a nod of forgiveness.
The duel itself would be—and could be—nothing special. Grandma Ru had never reached the protracted epics of The Third Gate or The Tyrant. Outskilled now on every front, she wasn't even capable of delivering her own much shorter song.
Her pre-fight analysis could not prepare her for the veteran’s freakish talent. True to his nickname, ‘The Machine', he advanced into her projectiles with the unstoppability of a nightmare cyborg. His legs glided smoothly over the segments that she fumbled through in desperation. His body alternated gears without a pause from dodging spells at distance to negating them up close with the triple-layered interception of his sword, his shield, and his armour. She would’ve forgotten she was up against a human if he didn’t laugh with scorn after recognising her arthritic aim.
In the duel’s second minute, after constant hesitation, she stopped her opening flight routine and all-inned inside the map’s most cluttered tavern section. Weaving around its tables, she tried to sustain a volley with no breaks for him to heal.
The veteran persisting on her tail throughout reproduced each of her moves always slightly faster. Consequently, her capture could only be delayed by using evasive cooldowns. She did this in a messy, half-planned spam. Ruru improvised steps, botched them, aborted them, revised them, repeated them. The whole ordeal was as messy as trying to math out, on a paper, a twelve-stage calculus problem in the middle of a bullfight.
During this spasm of technique, her cooldowns rapidly depleted in the race against his healthpool.
To whittle just the first tenth, Ruru landing one solid
The second tenth, stacked from half-blocked torso shots, depleted three-fifths of her stamina and a third bullettime.
Finally, after exhausting all that remained, plus two spellshields—the first cancelling a spearpoint through her visor, the second wasted on a feint—the negligible tick damage of a
And that would be the best her meagre skills could offer, an awkward, ugly thing devoid of highlights, phases, interplay, or genuine progress.
Thus ended the grandmother's saga...
Yet no sooner than Ruru hit her target, she forgot it and the promise with her daughter to concede.
A voice of dissatisfaction whispered in her muscles that she wasn’t yet defeated. No resources, it assured her, was no problem. In fact, it would be the perfect lure. She could bait him into an over-aggressive manoeuvre, setting up a reverse knife finisher if she could—somehow—delay twenty seconds for her stamina’s replenishment.
And beyond that reversal, might a grandma not flow on against the odds? On into the next duel? On into the next competitor? On into the next career?
While Grandma Ru succumbed to these silly thoughts, her shield was snagged by a
As her shoulders slammed against a wall, as her helmet clanged against the ceiling and her neck compressed forward in a bow, she still did not release, the desperation growing as she pictured how her useless body ricocheting like her kids might suddenly transcend its limitations and reanimate in one gasp to redeem a spoiled youth.
With the last ounce of control over her reeling senses, the old woman gave a painful grunt.
“I give up...”
“Emerson Miller wins!” declared the match officiator a split-second later.
Afterwards, the veteran folded her and still attempted an evisceration. This late attack, however, was cancelled by a spellshield triggered by the monitoring official. After a subsequent warning, and only after, he released the grandma, discarding her like a rodent swatted off of clothing. Despite this rude treatment, she said GGs while drying her cheek of a random teardrop. The gesture wasn’t reciprocated by Miller. He stood glaring at her, red-faced.
“Why are you mad?” Ruru asked. “Bro, you won.”
The grey-haired zoomer continued glaring, the sword clenched in his hand beginning to tremble.
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“Ok…well…good luck.” She slowly backed away and exited the building backward through a window.
If she were confused by that anger, then the audience’s startled her. Outside, she was compressed between four walls of boos. Tens of thousands hurled their curses, shook their fists, jabbed their fingers as if at a criminal.
Amidst the raging throng, she spotted a lone banner that’d waved with her old username being scrunched up in betrayal, the one fan fusing with the mass's temper.
Grandma Ru—deeply confused, wondering if she’d missed an event while concentrating—swivelled around to check.
There were no monsters, no costume performers.
When she locked eyes with an officiator in a highchair, they pointed at her.
“Me?” she pointed at herself. “But I haven’t done anything…”
The officiator, wincing and shrugging, gestured the difficulty of explanation.
Grandam Ru was baffled. The spectators were furious, looking like a horde of apes about to storm the ring and tear the meat from her withered grandma limbs.
She really didn’t understand. Were they pissed off at her wasting time? But the harshness of their response exceeded even that for The Third Gate’s dragged-out sermon-duels, while her defeat had taken less than three minutes. In fact, after skipping the first match, her series was one of the tourney's shortest.
Adding to her confusion, she then heard clattering in the tavern behind her as The Machine began to throw furniture.
“Me…” Ruru suddenly squinted, her pointing finger prodding her heart re-racing in her chest, a sparkle of hope gleaming in her elderly eye. “Me…did I win?”
Maybe she’d misheard the call…there could’ve been a sick instinctual trick she’d pulled in the chaos of the melee…one that’d escaped her notice...it could happen…she was old, entering the decades of confusion…
Or a missed technicality after that fact…punishment for the late release, perhaps…not the most glorious win, but she could accept it…hmm…yes, why not...all’s fair in love and duels…
Then…how to win the third match…
“No, you demented bat!” The Tyrant laughed as he slipped in by her side. “There’s no rational explanation for ‘The Machine’, but the crowd’s annoyed that you blueballed their pay-off. Your priorities on ‘honest competition’, whatever internal conflict and resolution brought you to the bizarre choice of forfeiting – these mean nothing to these mongrels. All they want from us is death and viscera, and those who cannot deal it better damn well have the humility to receive it. Your end, after all the kiting foreplay, they’ve been eagerly awaiting.”
Fixated on her rookie struggles, the grandma had missed that her sole function on this day had been to get mauled by someone better.
If duelling were an art, one might say that she wasn’t qualified to be a painter but she could’ve been a respect-worthy canvas. Her comeback from those e-sports past, her struggles to surmount her age, her pioneering of the kiting arts – these, as with the tourney’s other throw-away personas who’d preceded her, would make for novel textures on which the arena’s real geniuses could paint their graphic skills. By thus not revealing to the spectators what it looks like when a grandmother and her high-flying delusions of being a parkour talent get disembowelled by a champion, she had undermined her purpose. This denial was hubris, self-indulgence, narcissism.
Worse than her betrayal of the audience—as comprehended by the true connoisseurs of duelling—she had betrayed the other trash before her. Their ends had been steadily accumulating in her run, as all vanquished losers are by their successors, and these losers should’ve had their ultimate incorporation alongside her into Miller’s larger run by spilling down his sabre.
“Oh...” Grandma Ru returned to her deflation, not caring about any of that but once again sad that she had lost.
“Here. This will accelerate the descent.”
She was handed a small espresso cup of tea, the teen explaining that a full one would’ve killed her.
“I’ll drink the whole pot,” said Ruru, too depressed to stop and appreciate the scent. “AGH! WHAT THE FUAG—"
Discarding the cup, she fell to the ground as her legs buckled under a sensation of plunging down a ten-thousand-foot rollercoaster.
The g-forces increased into infinity. Pressed against the earth, she felt each rib and limb weighed down by a car, a mammoth, a skyscraper, a mountain, the planet, the sun.
And as the universe weighed down, her other senses imploded.
She witnessed a symphony…
She heard rainbows…
She believed in the awakened truth of honey…
She tasted the Buddha Dharma and the Eight-Fold Noble Path…
Outwardly, the millennial grandma was spasming through a seizure. Her features purpled from hypoxia, and a tea-tinged froth spilled down her wrinkled chin.
A hundred thousand cheers hurled down upon the flailing woman from the crowd.
"Nice!"
"Get that, you old bitch!"
"Arigato, Tyrant!"
"Kick her in the stomach!"
They'd assumed that the teen had delivered her a proper send-off with his poisons. Alas, they were to be let down again.
Grandma Ru, a few life-long seconds in, experienced a lurching stop, the hallucinations clearing as her body landed gentle as a feather. The teen, his sluggish reflexes unable to prevent her fall, apologised for the miscalibration as he helped her to her feet.
When Ruru stood back up, she had a slower-paced, harder-to-define reverse sensation of elevation.
Or contraction – it was as if a mass inside her skull, the throbbing source of her failure, was shrinking.
Or expansion - while the mass remained, her brain grew, assuming such a magnitude that the mass dwindled in comparison to one measly cell of insignificance.
Regardless, the distortions brought with them a warm flood of contentment and an open yearning for the new. She wished to roam, to hear, to touch, to dream, to sample that next colour in the universal palette that she'd glimpsed.
“Yo, how long before this fades?” she mumbled from her beatific haze.
“A few hours. Maybe a lifetime if you play it well.”
“I’ll take the lifetime!”
What a marvellous feeling. The only thing she might compare it to was the ecstasy of finalising a divorce. It was like a thousand golden, heaven-generating divorces!
In this expanded state, Grandma Ru gazed with a fresh vision upon the spectators returning to their jeers, so diverse in their expressions of contempt, so colourful, so radiant with hateful energy. She gazed also upon her opponent, Miller, who passed them outside the tavern accompanied by a handsomely-built guard, who spat so thickly and enthusiastically at their feet, who swore with such compassion that he’d cut The Tyrant’s ‘bot-loving’ tongue out before he could pull a similar number, who enunciated ‘bot’ with all the mystery and breath-taking splendour of a redneck dropping the n-word.
Ruru, at once fascinated by these people and embarrassed, forgot her shame and her sadness, those petty feelings shrinking before a joyful, universal wonderment.
Even her choice to concede was recoloured in an optimistic bent, the awkward bathos evolving into hilarity and wisdom.
Ah, she realised, so this explained The Tyrant’s own tendency to frolic in the anti-climax, as he had in his comedic duels and the spoiling of her preparations with a lengthy monologue circling to a stupid offer. Why, this conscientious denial of the climax carried a quiet superiority, a solitary knowledge of control at abstaining from what these chimpanzees enslaved to their whims could never. Through the orchestrated flop, one mastered both victory and loss. These outcomes, and every shade between, were thus subordinated to the higher purposes of selfhood. It was, one then at last recognised, the self, the self, and the self alone that’d bestowed the arena its significance, a self capable of replicating this identical passion across an infinity of domains—from the flirtations of a young romance, to the blossoming of family; from the hoarding of career accolades, to the pursuit of dead-end hobbies; from the advancement of science and humanity, to the conjuring of all-adoring gods—and all of these, mere creations of the self, only mattered in so far as they served to elevate the self, to make the self through each fleeting encounter with these climbs capable of dreaming up and loving more and more and more and more and more!
“Crap…” she swore, the shrivelling delusion of the arena showing her another wise gem of orchestrated flopping shimmering beside it all along. “I should have accepted the bet…”
The offer had not been stupid whatsoever. If she hadn’t been so stubborn, she could’ve been engulfed in gold, and more than gold, in the real-world cash she could’ve pawned it for.
A refurbished kitchen…a playground for her dog…a top-of-the-line health insurance package…
“…Bet?” inquired the teen. “It’s good you didn’t if someone offered. Gambling on your own matches would’ve earned you a disqualification and More. Please forward me that contact so I can have them arrested.”
But Grandma Ru’s regrets about that, too, soon passed. She grew beyond the diminishing concept of a dollar and the mere material it bought, on towards higher spiritual states of eternity, intrigue, and bliss.
As The Tyrant walked the tripping grandma out, she inquired via private message if he’d used his next-level genius to wager on that outcome. He said he had guessed the health and minute but the pool had been refunded by her concession – another lack of pay-off to spike anger. He wasn’t bothered since all of this was pocket change compared to the grand heist he anticipated soon. He couldn’t share the details on that, but he’d front her prizewinnings if she wanted in. Ruru, blasted on the tea, signed up without hesitation. Was this kid, she reasoned, not ultimately always 110,000% correct? Was she herself not destined for abundance and More?
He sent her off into boos at the exit of the arena’s glass dome. There, before a last farewell, she admired the teacup he’d returned to sipping. In its citrus scent, she smelled a quality opposed to what she’d drunk yet no less appetising.
“So what does that drug do?” she asked.
“This one’s just tea,” he answered. “It’s called ‘A Monument To Nothing’. The background was a directive to my herb guys to breed an in-game cultivar that replicates a solid Earl Grey. That ridiculous venture would expand far beyond any of our expectations and cost me an embarrassing amount of manpower and budget. Was it worth the struggle? Not at all. And that’s why I drink it, to reminisce over the waste.”
Grandma Ru somehow understood exactly what he meant. He wasn't being negative. There was a monument in it, a monument to their immortal selves, who could take anything, from duelling to tea to nothing, and breathe into it an entire life.
Despite the teen's assertion, as he gave her a gloved hand and shook goodbye, she would swear that she detected yet a higher truth. Dampened through the leather buzzed a resurgence of the electric pressure, the one he'd pretended belonged to his calibration ritual.
Guards escorted her through a hail of missiles, Ruru admiring the fiesta of the assailants in the stands being sniped in droves. At a private box hired by Channel 5, she showered in congratulations from the other rookies on almost scoring a third of the dude’s health. During an exit interview, she shrugged off the attempts to extract secrets on the tea and other things. After that, they roped her into shoutcasting the final series of the quarters between Whitefrog and Justinian.
In a bit of an upset, the knight roleplayer beat the Saana League pro 2-0.
Scrambling followed after to determine how that’d happened, hundreds of millions in-game and out scratching noggins as they combed through replays.
Grandma Ru, higher than this hubbub, couldn’t summon the enthusiasm to join in. Her reaction mirrored that of the teen watching the matches on stage, a smirk of mild amusement.
A few minutes later, the semi-finalists were drawn. The Tyrant would be up against her opponent, Mr Machine. The latter happened to lose the exemption vote once held by Whitefrog to The Third Gate rallying her expanding apocalyptic fanbase. That in turn paired the mystic against the knight in history’s densest roleplay square-off.
At some point, Grandma Ru received an anonymous message to check her left pants pocket. In this, she found a scrunched note. It had coordinates, a time after the finale, and instructions to “bring a snorkel”.
How had that snuck in there?
Grandma Ru, with a shrug that embraced all beautiful possibilities, slipped away from the debating duellists.
A passageway winding through the stadium’s interior connected to another private box. She reunited there with her ex-gamer buddies and her family. They immediately dumped negativity on her, her ex-husband Pete complaining of her delay to shoutcast with babies, their daughter complaining that she should have forfeited the whole series if she’d known she’d lose.
Ruru interrupted with a joyous smile. “My friends, isn’t it about time we let the small things go? Pete, you’re a has-been who has fallen from my level of skill and wealth, and hair. Politely kill yourself. Cassie, I’m no longer going to be held hostage by your grievances. You could have moved on from them years ago. If you don’t, it’s because they’re a convenient excuse for being a domineering bitch just like your father.”
As dad and daughter gasped, as Jorge and her grandkid laughed, as her son-in-law cringed, the old woman continued to smile down upon them from the security of her unobtainable height.