The other semi-final.
While The Tyrant of Saana had been trading wounds with the veteran from America, the other semi-final to select his next opponent had been taking place concurrently. It'd been pushed forward in a minor effort to repair the tournament's disrupted schedule.
How was this other semi-final unfolding? What’d been its dramatic twists and turns? Which post-maximalist themes had been encoded in its allegorical layers? What, on far simpler grounds of pontification, was the score? And who, again, was competing?
Interrogating the members of the crowd as to these questions, it is likely that each and every one would answer with a confused shrug, if not a more hostile expression. Unfortunately, the stadium’s attention had been monopolised by The Tyrant’s tandem fight, and this other semi-final had devolved into one of those niche, insolvable mysteries beyond public concern, like the properties of dark matter. Had anyone been interested in this other, forsaken-runt-of-a series—although this is purely hypothetical, not one such maverick soul existing—they would’ve still struggled to give an answer, for the organisers had totally forgotten to broadcast it, all the cameramen watching The Tyrant’s duel, and no substitution stream had been provided by any of the thousands seated with a direct view, also watching The Tyrant’s duel.
Zero viewers, an ignorance spanning stadium and globe – it was a small shame, in a way. As had been suggested in the cryptic twinkling of the stars this evening, The Tyrant was decreed to lose, and this other fight, between the only candidates remaining, happened to be deciding the tournament’s improbable victor.
Suddenly, in the stands, where tens of thousands cheered and gawked, but not one for the destined winner, a voice of mysterious origin—booming down from the clouds, perhaps—interjected to correct the public’s misaimed focus.
“Welcome back, old friends and new friends! The saga at last resumes after many bizarre digressions and imposed gaps of silence.”
The crowd winced, the crowd raged, this voice clashing with the shoutcasting for the Tyrant’s ongoing match with The Machine.
“Who the heck's projecting?”
“Stop!”
“It’s another narrator. Quick, flush him out!”
The bulk of the audience simply muted the intrusive voice and continued to admire the exchange of high-level swordplay between The Tyrant and his opponent. A search mob, however, of less forgiving, somewhat bored folk was engaged. With knives in hand, with Gestapo-like squints, they roamed the stands, interrogating anyone suspicious.
The narrator hidden amongst them continued unperturbed. “Yes, friends, we have returned, and what—you inquire—has happened during our hiatus to the hero of our story, chosen by the heavens to win this so-called tournament and defeat The Cripple’s villainous designs?”
“Zip it, dude! The match is still on!”
“She—and The Chosen One is mostly certainly a she, as anyone examining the hinted silhouette inside the lore can tell—has been locked in her own desperate battle off to the side of The False Gate’s evil-hearted abuse of Elderly ‘Murican, a.k.a. Emerson Miller, a.k.a. The Second Oldest One. If we friends would kindly redirect our gazes two maps to north, there we’ll find her, our queen of many names and many claims - including the victorious claim of this 'tournament'.”
Nobody followed this guidance, the side series continuing to be an unreportable enigma.
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“I’m going to kill you…”
“Ain’t nobody cares about RP right now bro…”
In one of the rows, the search mob apprehended a man in a robot costume. The fellow, removing his steel head, claimed that it wasn’t him - he wasn’t even a roleplayer, the costume a pure coincidence, sometimes in this far future year of 2050 people just liked to dress up as robots. The man seemed sincere enough. However, just to be safe, he was decapitated, his human head rolling right off the neck from the stroke of a scimitar.
The narrator rolled on, too. “She—The Third Gate, a.k.a. The Final Gate, a.k.a. The Daughter of The Twin Snakes, a.k.a. The Chosen One—is risking her life yet again in this latest exciting episode. And her foe? Why, it’s none other than that young cad Justinian The Great, a.k.a. Justinian The Great Traitor, a.k.a. The Vowless Knight, a.k.a. The Soldier of The Faux Dawn.
"Last time, we learned how this scoundrel had defected to The False Gate’s inquistion. Now, he stands between our hero and her destined showdown with his new lord, employing his perverted knight powers to defend The Company’s oppressive campaign against all things kind.”
“I’ve found him! Over there!”
“It seems our heroine’s attempts to reason with the traitor have failed, yet whereas others might’ve resigned their compassion, might’ve declared that the brother eleven-times forgiven deserveth not the dozenth time, The Third Gate has persisted. Behold the charity of she, The Most Forgiving Gate, permitting The Knight of Fool’s Gold to live, retaliating to his callous stabs with softly words of amnesty.”
Still, nobody looked at the match to corroborate it with the narration.
“That’s him, in the dress!” One searcher jabbed a furious finger at a lady in an ill-fitting dress.
“That’s obviously a female, friends, an innocent. We, a male, as the depth of our voice suggests, are narrating from a realm far beyond the physical. This is actually God communicating to you right now. Yes, it is I—The One to Whom She Prays, El-Yahweh, The All-Loving and The All-Friending—and I have infiltrated this virtual universe just to reveal your hell-bound heresy of ignoring The Third Gate’s series!”
“With the big red hair-do! He flinched!”
“It’s not.”
“It’s definitely him! He's responding to me! Seize him!”
A section of the search mob split to converge on the accused lady with red hair. At first, she didn’t move, as if they’d been mistaken. When they neared, however, she picked herself up and began to trot away, apologising to those around, claiming—in a pitched-up baritone—of wanting to purchase a piña colada from one of the crowd’s roaming liquor-vendors. All her own cheering for The Cripple, that impressive and not villainous scallywag, had left an old fangirl’s throat parched - and hoarse.
The narrator, time running short, raced to finish the match’s introduction. “Will the once golden knight, unlike so many other blind fools this day, perceive his mortal misperception? Will he awaken to the false shine of The False Gate’s briberies and see the more authentic treasure of uniting with your friends in battle against evil?”
The lady side-stepped an arrow, which pierced a boy child in the side of the ear and exploded his cranium. A man in the row below was so concentrated on one of The Machine’s combos that he missed the death and bit into his sprinkled hotdog with disgust.
The red-haired lady, with the panic of a prison escapee spotted by tower lights, broke into a zig-zagging sprint, shoving spectators into the path of the pincering attackers. Other missiles flew. The air buzzed with initiating spell casts.
“Or will she, our hero, The Third Gate and The Final Gate be reduced to tears as yet another kindred soul expires, this time by—”
An axe-blow from a leaping player clanged against the fleeing lady’s temple. The force ripped off her red wig, exposing beneath it a helmet and the astonished face of a Somali gentleman with purple-painted lips - one of the Third Gate’s African compatriots, caught RP-handed.
The Somali man crumpled from the hit, his spindly man legs tipping up and out of his dress, his 2-metre arm-span knocking over others with him. The one fall propagated into an avalanche of bodies dribbling clumsily down the stands. The narrator surfing on this flow raised a desperate arm to those around them for assistance.
“Unite, friends! Unite behind The Third Gate’s struggle! Unite against this era’s callous inattentions! Only together, hand in hand, heart in heart, can we hope to swing apart this heaviest of gates between us and the heavens!”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
The crowd caught up in this tumbling fiasco drew their weapons, but not to help.
Down in the Sandpit arena, amidst a maze of monster carcasses, two unwatched duellists were tangled in a melee skirmish. One, a woman vaguely mystical, was rapidly shapeshifting, lashing out between gorilla and human form with the concentrated ferocity of a caged lioness. The other, a man of knightly build, sheltered from these blows behind his shield—an innovative new piece of equipment—while delivering the occasional retaliatory cut.
Out of the mess, one of the pair disengaged and darted into one of Karnon’s active healing zones. A knife clattered behind them, dropping from a mending throat gash.
FuzzyGirl35—only partially in character—squinted at the stands, just in time to spot a chunk of her narrator’s sliced liver being yanked out of his belly, the audience butchering him alive.
Another minor mishap to improvise her way out of, she thought, yet another one…
The roleplayer finger-painted some of the blood from her throat into a sigil on her forehead. She summoned her snakestaff prop, which she twirled above her head like the blades of a helicopter that might’ve lifted her out of her troubles.
Her eyes rolled back into a prophetic vision. “I see, too—in this horrific hour, when every sacred vow is over-turned,” she cartwheeled off the corpse of a demonic horse – Justinian was still chasing her this whole time, “when friend must slaughter friend—I see, too, the dismemberment of shadowy regimes, whose dying viscera is tossed to feed the salivating dogs of revolution!”
The roleplayer’s shrieking voice trembled with a genuine note of despair. This pain inside worsened when she scanned the crowd after her divine proclamation. There was not a single reaction, positive or hateful. Even the blood-smothered assailants of her narrator had immediately tuned back into streams of The Cripple’s duel.
How horrifying…her show was continuing to flop…
Time was needed to salvage this, but Justinian, in the manner of all inept stage partners, refused to give her any breathing room. These buffoons were always chasing, always slashing, never appreciating that a good fight should be 99.8% dialogue to a salty sprinkle of action.
In her next attempt to shake him off, she used a shoulder-height mound of dead scorpions to juke. She hit a triple feint around them as she signalled going one way then another then another before flinging a handful of the bugs at his face. The knight pausing to slap these bugs away allowed her to beat a fantastic getaway.
FuzzyGirl35 taunted back. “How tastes that crawling mouthful, you Paladin of Spineless Virtue? Accustom heart and tongue to the love that sour flavour, for it will be bugs at every meal when The Wilds reclaim your Master’s falling castles, when he and you are cast out to wander through The Desert Inhospitable!”
Not one laugh from the crowd responded to her escape, not one smirk, not one irritated sigh at the prolongation.
Well, she could admit this wasn’t her most creative or engaging performance. Still, nobody could blame her, not given the many absurdities of the current situation - even her own thoughts were elsewhere, caught up in a predicament far beyond this one duel and its half-arsed dialogue.
What was the roleplayer’s trouble? Well, this was a complicated story, one that would require going both back in time and back behind the scenes...
The most natural—and really most logical—way to explain everything, rather than focusing on the exterior events of the tournament that were already no doubt familiar to the audience, would be to examine the RP script she'd worked diligently on in the lead up to this Justinian duel. Her script had undergone continuous revisions in accordance with the day's ever-changing circumstances. (Like all top-grade roleplayers, FuzzyGirl35 was a devout Neo-Scripted-Improvist, practising a happy, adaptive medium between the two main schools of RP that’d survived the purges of 2043’s Reformation Two. An artiste should neither over-construct their bits to the point of suffocating all the joie de vivre, nor should they deceive themselves with the lazy hack’s cope that great art always manifests spontaneously.)
Her original script against the knight had been a tragedy of moral corruption and fraternal, roleplayer-on-roleplayer violence.
She’d scavenged material for this from an RP plot of earlier that week, her team pressed to take shortcuts wherever possible due to needing sketches for every one of the other 31 finalists. The Third Gate, to remind the casual viewers, had upon arriving in Suchi identified the hardcore knight roleplayer in her sermons as a prime candidate for her Chosen One apocalypse prophecy storyline. That is to say, he could’ve been The Key, They Who Unlock Rapture’s Gate, etc. Justinian’s candidacy had since been revoked and retired, its purpose served after she—the real Chosen One—killed The Cripple on a map the knight, a lesser duellist and lesser roleplayer, had been humiliated on. Towards this outcome, her sermons, superficially praising Justinian, had actually contained multiple cryptographic allusions, allusions she’d unfortunately been prevented from tying together for the public because The Cripple had rudely interrupted her celebratory villain monologue by executing her.
Between then and today, the knight, through several pre-filmed sketches with doppelgangers, would be framed as having undergone an existential crisis due to the heavens casting him aside. His jealousy had culminated in a renunciation of roleplay and a switch of loyalties to the evil Him that Justinian habitually slandered. In corroboration of this heel-turn, her team had fluffed up several fraudulent pieces of evidence – the knight’s partnership with The Cripple in earlier tournaments, and the circumvention of his vow of exclusive sword usage through a shameless loophole by which Justinian simply relabelled non-sword equipment, calling his daggers ‘Compact Swords’ and his shields ‘Swords of Expansive Parrying.’
After the pivot towards such villainy, the deserter knight would be made to attack her in this ‘tournament’ on the orders of his master, The Cripple, who continued to dodge her out of terror that she'd smoke him again and spoil the secret anti-RP-apocalypse scheme behind this 'tournament'. She would try, at first, to persuade Justinian of his error, appealing to his former RP sympathies. When this compassion of hers proved futile, their series would end with the knight, a dud Chosen One, being murdered by his prophetically-superior successor. This ending naturally foreshadowed, and duplicated, the fate of his diabolical master, destined likewise to lose to her.
To spice things up, the setting of this mini-drama would be a mock jousting tournament nested within the duelling tournament, hosted by a princely-attired Cripple doppelganger. A fun collab had been arranged here with a troupe of medieval RPers, providing scenery, livery, and horses. She herself would open this episode as a knight, conscripted from her mystical wanderings by The Cripple and forced to battle for his sadistic anti-roleplayer pleasure. In order to flex on Justinian and show the world the better RPer, she’d planned to act her knight character completely straight. She would also out-joust him with a replica of his replica sword, although—if her amateur knight skills proved too weak—she did have a lycanthrope-bite skit to re-unlock her shapeshifting and cure her, through the poison-immune blood of the lycanthrope, of The Cripple’s chemical brainwashing that’d convinced her she was a medieval knight and not everyfriend’s favourite vagrant mystic, The Third Gate. (In this adaptation would be a subtle RP meta-flex, demonstrating a much less character-breaking way of rolling with external tournament pressures than Justinian’s cheap sword re-labelling stunt. An S-tier performer, through resourcefulness and ingenuity, superseded all the supposed necessity for humiliating patchjobs - as Patisserie Peterson, the retired French genius of baked-goods-absurdist RP once mimed, ‘You can have your cake and be it, too’.)
As a random aside, her team, while investigating the knight’s impractical sword vow and his Him slander, had dredged up a fascinating piece of non-fraudulent lore. Between him and The Cripple existed an obscure connection based around mistaken identities, dumb wagers, and replica weaponry. This connection—most bizarrely—The Cripple had never himself appeared to recognise. After much deliberation, she’d chosen to nix any revelation of this on her end. Her skit was already over-spiced, and any new material would’ve merely detracted from her own divine prophecy narrative. What’s more, none of it would be of any consequence once she’d eliminated the knight – it was just one of those curious what-ifs, an amusing chin-scratcher.
Wait, one moment, please…
(In the background of this timely script review, the roleplayer—still kiting the knight throughout—spotted a decent finisher within a configuration of dead monsters, arranged by one of The Cripple’s slain opponents into a three-walled defensive triangle.
While vaulting over the stomach of a bull into this triangle, she did a quick turn, shapeshifted into a gorilla, and snatched up a mace deposited during a previous run-by. She swung the weapon hard.
Justinian, vaulting after her, received the blow with a fat clunk against his shield. The residual force propelled him back, slamming him into the bull.
FuzzyGirl35, ditching the mace, rushed in close before he could clip her with his two-hander. She tried to transition to the same shift-grappling methods used to beat the wrestler.
The knight, however, recovering from the maceblow far too fast, evaded all her grab attempts. With the daintiness of a ballerina, he back-stepped around the triangle’s limited space between her and the monsters, his shield continually manoeuvring so that her gorilla fingers attempting for its rim kept fumbling against the shield’s smoothened surface.
A surprise punch of hers, thrown within the feints of clutching, was nullified by a Crusader spellshield.
Justinian could’ve easily disengaged after wasting that ability. Instead, he lingered within reaching distance of her flailing limbs, calm and focused. His sword—held patiently at bay—flickered between different guards.
Then, when she tried for another lunge, the knight stepped forward in sync, and he stabbed into her open gorilla side.
This attack was blocked, abruptly, by a shield, one wielded by the mystic dropping back into human form. Simultaneously, she lunged under this surprise shield and made, with her own snuck-out sword, for a lethal thrust into the knight’s groin.
This counter-counter of hers had been perfectly timed. It would’ve been a finisher to anyone and everyone else, the one movement merging into the other with the calculative fluidity of her hybrid fusion of The Cripple’s strategy with Uncle PLH’s monster-shifting. It was a level of finisher nobody else besides The Cripple could execute at this point. Each of the preceding steps, from the blocked maceblow to the spell-shield-pop, had been plotted, arranged, and funnelled towards this one decisive finisher. It was a finisher totally unpredictable, and uncounterable, as it'd debuted a skill she’d kept securely secret, much of her training with the amateurs this week having been devoted to the mastery of non-Earthfriend weaponry.
Yet what was her reward for this marvel of a play?
A pitiful shriek of steel, her sword-thrust intercepted by the knight’s armoured shin as his leg—from nowhere—kicked up like a Muay Thai boxer’s.
“Devil...” FuzzyGirl35, shaken to her soul, rolled past a retaliatory strike.
Coming back up, she vaulted out of the carcass triangle, returning to back to her flight routine, back to a begging glance for the crowd.
Yet, once again, she found not one face of sympathy. All eyes were distracted by The Cripple’s duel. None but herself had stared into that heinous maelstrom, in which swirled the stupefied expressions of the others already drowned, in which swirled a picture of her own gasping phantom.)
…so where was a roleplayer about to win this tournament? Right…the script….