“That lens, how much of me will it preserve?

—What fraction of your drive commemorates

The passions of an Aussie? In my urn,

—I’ll sleep amongst your million clips unplayed;

Amongst the Aussie blokes your camera stores,

—Their southern souls reduced to bits and files;

In the reels of Aussies and how Aussies fall,

—Boys caught mid-nap, boys sobbing in boys piled.

If I, of poetry and flesh, rot next,

—You mummifying not a word, then tuck

——My vid beside the rest of Aussie's pieces.

My bits by theirs, in days our bits forget -

—These fragments of the boys will serve enough

——To decorate an Aussie’s mausoleum.”

-G. Walker

First series of the semi-finals, The Tyrant versus The Machine, duel one.

The stadium had swollen back to capacity. The crowd, after all the flopped fights and roleplay farces, were awake, alert, and starving for a decent duel. This time, their hunger would be satisfied. Oh yes, the heavens had been baking just the gut- and soul-ballooning banquet they desired, a full buffet of skewered meats and liquids amply poured.

The audience, costumed for this feast, had brought their brightest colours. Dominating the palette was the red, the white, and the blue of Emerson Miller’s countrymen. This mingled with a minor complement of Indian greens and oranges - many fans of Whitefrog, stumped still by the pro’s defeat, had yet to stow their banners. And a minority within that minority, despised as nerds and brown-nosers, waved The Company’s ash-greys for its retiring guildmaster.

Song further enhanced the gala atmosphere. The Americans, from the jostling stands to the field of millions arrayed in front of the arena, had taken up for Miller a patriotic chorus of The Star-Spangled Banner. The anthem's notes harmonised exquisitely with the cries of eagle pets circling the midnight sky.

There was much to be hyped over in this face-off between the older duellist and the teen. They might’ve been the best two players that Saana’s arena had churned out thus far. Emerson Miller was, until two weeks ago, the apex of the 1v1. He was a freak gifted with such impossible perfection of precision, speed, muscular thrust, and reflex that some thought him inhuman - a machine, The Machine. And The Tyrant was The Tyrant. Between them, to be settled by the blood, raged a host of conflicts, the past versus the future, the sword versus the strategy, the arena’s Less versus its More.

The only lamentable and detracting point was that, for some puzzling reason, they were meeting in the semi-finals of a rookie tournament. Both rightfully deserved a larger, more elaborate, higher-stakes arena to flex their skills - if only some outside party could swoop in and provide it.

Predictions-wise—not that these would soon matter—most rational folk were betting on The Tyrant. Any other gamble was preposterous considering the day’s monotonous pattern of him stomping every other ‘strong contender’. Really, all significant hopes of disruption to this trend had been buried, patted down, blubbered over, and forgotten tournaments ago. There were, nevertheless, a few stubborn souls clinging to the underdog. Some, a crazy lot, argued from Whitefrog’s elimination by an amateur knight roleplayer that any end this day was plausible, including the end of days - such had been The Third Gate’s position, preached from her gag through a stooge until an archer sniped him. Others, slightly more rational but still demented, perceived that the same weaknesses behind the pro’s defeat applied to his teacher of A Thousand Tools. This latter group were scrutinising the next fights with a microscope, if not for Miller’s victory then for their own opportunities in the duels of higher categories to follow.

Down in the arena, assisting with that scrutiny, the duellists glowed bright beneath the stage lighting. On view for the camera was every sweaty pore, every fleck of gore painting their armour, every flaw and opening.

The coinflip had been clinched already by Miller. Match one—and what would turn out to be the sole match of their series—would thus be hosted on his comfort map, The Graveyard of The Gods. One of them was to have their tournament run snuffed amidst the statues of by-gone heroes from by-gone empires repurposed as novelty duelling terrain. A fitting spot to end.

Suddenly, eagles galore were screeching. As The Star-Spangled Banner concluded, hundreds of thousands of voices crescendoed towards that resonant last lyric about home and bravery. Patriots across the globe, with hands on hearts, wept big fat tears of pride.

A brief skirmish over anthems followed. A feeble volley started in support of The Tyrant by citizens of The New Commonwealth. Alas, this group’s largest base, the Indians, had no zest after Whitefrog’s exit, and their voices soon fizzled out beneath the Americans restarting. The patriots, in turn, were silenced by the Europeans. Tired of these grandpa powers barking, they launched into a multi-million rendition of The Future Internationale, whose exhortations to break the chains of labour slavery drowned all others.

But the two duellists registered none of this outside noise. Their sole fealty in this hour was to the 1v1, their only territory that which they could hold through personal talent.

The Tyrant, since the lottery pairing, had been drilling continuously and with more strenuousness than for any of the weekend's preceding matches. He and his trail of flashing weapons bobbed amidst the statues in a preparation routine similar to Grandma Ru’s but more advanced. His research notes, of an unrevealed complexity, were accessed from his Mental Library with one closed eye. Instead of single clips of his opponent, he projected them in half-a-dozen batches, analysing not the one match but the pattern. Where the grandma had shadow-kited air, The Tyrant’s guards jumped in as practise dummies to be flung, shot, bent, blocked, dodged, parried, and stabbed. The most critical upgrade, exhibiting the teen’s increasing mastery of A Thousand Tools, was that all of this was done without apparent pause. The Tyrant juggled these preparations with his weapons, whose numbers merely decreased or increased as he split his mutant focuses. At the very highest level—as had been observed of him in the open-gear, no-rules versions of the group tournaments—he’d advanced beyond the whole discrete notion of a ‘preparation routine’, continuing to review and cogitate upon his notes while victims keeled around him.

Theoretically, the composition of his weapon juggle betrayed the strategy he was building against Miller. As it was, however, no one yet possessed the required expertise. Analysts in prior matches with the technique were limited to the vaguest of comments – more shields this round, more flips that round. This round, they were further stumped as his compositions shifted several times a minute with all the pickiness and indecision of a girl swapping outfits prior to a crucial date. What did that signify? No mortal could tell.

…Yet there was one monitoring who had grasped the significance.

The boy tyrant had been testing various martial complexes, some already activated by earlier matches in the tournament, others not yet active but which might be activated before the conclusion of the series. The problem he was discovering was that none of these were winners, nor were any of the untested complexes they connected with.

A gradual slow-down of the pace of the boy tyrant’s testing routine indicated he was beginning to weigh matters beyond the series. On the one hand, he might sacrifice one of the higher, syncretic martial complexes not yet divulged - Anti-Fighter-Deity Complex Variation 4, as a prime example, should win round one without confessing too much due to its misleading sword focus, as would Starhunter 7 augmented by selections from the Evasion Super-Complex. On the other hand, he might accept the one tournament as a loss, semi-covertly rig the matches for a profit, and covertly utilise this challenging opponent to exercise some of his dormant non-syncretic complexes. Amusement, barely disguised, suggested the latter decision, as did the better disguised sub-emotion.

Notably, the boy tyrant’s concentration on these options indicated that he and his security had missed the full extent of the anomalies surrounding his opponent, as they had with the tournament’s other plant. This naivety was double verified by the tested martial complexes - there'd been minimal increase in the Anti-Trickster Super-Complex, and most complexes—unwisely—branched from his Sword-Offensive Super-Complex, an energy-conserving measure that borrowed the activations of the previous duel with the assassin girl…

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Across the map, Emerson Miller, warming up himself, stared at The Tyrant like a guard dog grumbling for a gate to open.

This staring during the juggle had been cautioned against by most prior challengers. The technique was already visually cursed - the spinning weapons and flickering inventory motes had triggered many spectators into seizure. A greater disturbance yet was recalled by those who’d been the juggle’s direct recipients. They could recognise themselves, they’d sworn, the tools replicating them and murdering them with ghoulish repetition, its knives scraping their throat cartilage, its hatchets splitting their kneecaps, its spear-prods popping their eyeballs. This was not, as some conjectured, a hallucination but an indirect consequence of the technique’s origin with Twenty Tools and that art’s focus on habit exploitation. During his juggle, the teen was in a certain sense using his weapons to draw a martial caricature of the target, one they themselves had a vague, uncanny recognition of.

Miller ignored those warnings, which correct or not, had brought nobody to victory. Staring hard at the juggling teen, he awakened his muscles with the ancient methods of duels past. He stretched. He squatted. He swung the smaller yet nonetheless impressive set of melee weapons that he’d mastered.

In terms of fighting style, Miller was a generalist, at home with one-handed and two-handed spears, shields, halberds, maces, daggers, and swords of several lengths. With the last type, some fans had noticed a new rapier, this nimble addition substituting for a meatier longsword of old. Why this change? No one yet knew. Physically, he was compact of limb and starvation thin, abominating any excess burden of weight posed by fat, muscle, or skeleton. The build, favouring speed, had been outdated amongst melee players even in Saana’s pre-Tyrant duelling scene, which’d morphed them over the years into gorilla-shaped grapplers. Miller had overcome this disadvantage through raw skill, through movements purified by drills of wasted energy and a comfort that made his weapons seem extensions of his arms, the distinction vanishing between material and flesh.

In that regard, he, The Machine, shared a second trait with The Tyrant beyond their joyless expressions. Although cruder in comparison, Miller had achieved an impressive degree of integration with his gear. To coordinate his multi-weapon loadout, he’d practised a basic version of weapon swapping by alternating the side-arm on his hip throughout fights - as had been demonstrated when he’d maced the grandmother’s shield last duel. His gear-centredness extended outside of the arena, too, and—if he hadn’t been guarded—one would have spotted him between rounds compulsively inspecting, testing, and polishing his armament.

“Ready up, bot-lover,” said Miller, not quite raising the scorn in his voice to a shout.

The older duellist moseyed up to the starting line. He took partial cover behind a shield-maiden statue and rested a spear on his shoulder as he waited. Through a gap between the statute’s legs, he maintained eye contact with the teen. Miller's right hand that’d been holding the spear meanwhile fidgeted strangely. His fingers, clenching and unclenching, seemed to be weighing an unsummoned weapon, playing with its heft, shape, and consequence.

The Tyrant—in a rare occurrence that weekend, at least for himself—delayed. He utilised almost all of his available pre-match preparation time, and only as the final minute ticked down did his guards re-stealth and exit the stage. Afterwards, still with his weapons for a pulsing company, he glanced through them at his glaring opponent with a look of mild puzzlement and subtler hints of amusement.

If one could peer through that expression into The Tyrant’s calculating brain, they would discover something astonishing - an acknowledgement of destiny, a resignation to destiny. He, the teen was realising, had just lost this tournament.

('Author’s' Note:

Before resuming the narrative, I’m going to jump off of Henry’s puzzlement and interject with an extremely long ‘author’s’ note as I document my own puzzlement with the duel ahead and try my best to offer one solution.

The problem—as I examine all the pages of the struggle spread around the floor of an Airbnb, from the few paragraphs above onwards to the eventual loser’s death by sword—is one very curious omission. In contrast to the rest of the contestants, there is, at no point, an adequate explanation for Henry’s latest opponent, Emerson Miller. We are never, actually, informed why this previous season winner has demoted to a rookie tournament. We never learn why he despises Henry so much as to disregard the tourney format and, as we’ll later see, request a duel to the death. We’re never shown what must’ve been a challenging, twist-riddled quest to obtain the Legendary sword he summons in this duel to the death. More than this artefact, we never learn why Miller refuses—repeatedly—in the course of the duel to employ said weapon, which, within a few moments of the narrative’s resumption, we’ll see him toss to Henry—a person he openly hates—as an apparent freebie. The duel offers countless enigmas but no answers.

These gaps, although not the first in Henry’s saga, strike me as especially problematic with this duel, which, by its positioning in the tournament as the semi-final and by its length and by its post-maximal complexity and by its stakes, appears to be one of the story’s decisive fights. Beyond the wonky pacing these gaps generate—a lesser problem, which any mutants still reading must’ve resigned their spirit to—they pose a greater barrier to making any sense of the struggle, to following its increasingly-packed, royal-rumble-like sequence, and to slotting its outcome within the larger puzzle of the saga as a whole. Without Miller’s rationale, his stubborn objection to employing the sword strikes the reader as the height of contradiction and insanity. We likewise cannot connect to his and Henry’s actions the multiple intruders and intruding vignettes, like the poetry in the header, that intersperse the combatants’ blows. Ultimately, the resolution reached by the final swordthrust, assuming there is a resolution, is made utterly opaque. The duel ends as it begins, a mystery.

Why these gaps exist, I cannot say precisely, no more than I could for any of the saga’s previous omission-plagued episodes, which infiltrate my head in the fragmentary state presented. One intuition suggests that Miller did have a proper introduction, only it was lost at some point, maybe in the preceding series forfeited by the tea-enlightened grandmother. Another intuition suggests that this first intuition is misleading, that an emotionally-constipated tendency shared by Miller with this saga’s main hero censors his perspective and limits its ability to yield a proper picture of the past, at least not within the brevity of this single, albeit-quite-lengthy duel. A third intuition says both these intuitions are merely covers for some demonic post-maximalist game played by the saga's cruel sender/senders, the investigation of whose sinister motives would likely spiral us into further confusion and madness.

Regardless of the cause, this time, I’m not content to sit by and passively observe as another of this series’ centre-piece moments slumps so anti-climactically into the obscurity of incomprehension. Thus, I’m electing in this ‘author’s’ note to fill in the gaps.

('Author’s' note within an 'author’s' note: Not—of course—as the supposed ‘author’ of this saga, spoiling everything. I, obviously, despite frequent assertions in the chapter notes to the contrary, could never have been this story’s true composer, living as I do in the 20s and unable therefore to have witnessed any of the events directly. What help I offer stems from my limited capacity as the first recipient through whose brain and idiolect filter these far-flung visions of 2050. This privilege, and curse, although perhaps impressing the saga deeper upon my hijacked neurons, nevertheless leaves me in as much perplexity as the dear reader, if not more.)

In the following multi-chapter ‘author’-note essay interjection, I, Enchi, formerly of a longer name, will be constructing (or re-constructing) the missing explanation of Henry’s opponent based on the scraps of background material dispersed throughout earlier chapters. The reader will thus be equipped with a sketch of who this figure, Emerson ‘The Machine’ Miller, could be, of what peculiar circumstances and motives might’ve gravitated him towards this showdown with our mountain-obsessed hero. Then, with the potholes of this duel packed in, you should be able to guide yourselves without stumbling through the struggle and discover in its cracked mysteries—as I now have—the latest causes for entertainment and moral education.

For a warning, as we’ll enter the stomach and intestinal depths of my quest for explanation, I’ll have to introduce my own, personal reading of Henry’s saga. This does not, as convention dictates, interpret the person or the role of Miller through the ordinary literary framework – i.e., Miller as a character in a radical anti-videogame litrpg, one exemplifying the threat to human progress and self-actualisation of taking up dangerous hobbies. Diverging from this standard, although not completely shunning it, I judge Miller according to what I believe is this multi-layered saga’s higher, if not highest, mode of literary interpretation. That is to say, reconceiving the story as an ‘uberpatrician’ myth, of whose structure there are countless clues it abides, I read Miller as merely the latest incarnation of a repeating or ‘cyclical’ dream-myth archetype whose core tale is shared across multiple iterations throughout the saga, the past versions of which inform us about the puzzling present one. The logic, the veracity, and the utility of this theory, I hope to convince the reader of as we, together, illuminate the duellist’s otherwise shadow-scrubbed history. My interpretation, admittedly, may have its faults since I lack the genius of the parties involved, not to mention their technological support, sentenced as I am to research with a flawed human memory and the pre-super-A.I. methods of the backwards 20s. Nevertheless, I pray my opinion will be entertained with due regard before any summary rejection, if only out of respect for whatever authority ('author’s' note within an 'author’s' note: but, again, not authorship) might be granted by my honoured/cursed role as the transmitter of this slice of 2050. Those who endure will also be awarded with answers based off my research to several other of the story’s sub-mysteries, such as the propagandistic meaning behind its frequent castration scenes and the orphan-esque psychodrama behind Rose’s inexplicable theft of Silver Wolf’s appearance.

Finally, rather than delay my conclusion on our unexplained man as if it constitutes a grand reveal worth guarding, one impossible for the astute reader to determine on their own, I’ll summarise it upfront here for those who cannot endure the tedium of further exposition or for those who—comprehending another key moral injunction of this myth-tale—have learned to enjoy the fundamental indeterminacy of the future / this story as a parable for the future and want to plunge without a bungee cord into the next soul-expanding void of confusion. My take is evidently simple. The hidden conflict between Emerson ‘The Machine’ Miller and Henry ‘The Tyrant’ Lee—whom we know to be a secret machine, a duelling cyborg—is, in fact, a hyper-futuristic, post-human love triangle/square. The third corner of this ménage à three/four, although never identified in the narrative, is by my myth-reconstructed reasoning Miller’s ultra-intelligent duelling robot ex-girlfriend. This third party—responsible for the intrusion above and later intrusions describing Henry’s ‘martial complexes’—has, secreted within the saga’s murky underbelly, been tragically seduced away from Miller by Henry’s superior mastery of (and fusion with) the tool. It is for this reason Miller, the latest of the archetypical lovers spurned, rejects the employment of his Legendary sword, a symbol in steel of his disloyal robot girlfriend, and it is for this reason that he seeks his retribution in a more primaeval gambit of the flesh.

So, whenever I return, we start in the next section of this ‘author’s’ note essay with a review of the grounded, irrefutable facts.