“Well, that was unceremonious.”

Nathan spoke the words into what he nearly perceived as nothingness, unfloating in an approximation of total sensory neutrality. He felt no pain and no comfort, saw neither light nor darkness; he existed only as a being of thought and consideration, a soul unmoored from physicality.

This was new to him, but also unchallenging—it is difficult to feel challenged, or for that matter to feel any emotion in particular, when one is an Earth baseline human devoid of a limbic system.

(It should come as no surprise that the words were also not precisely spoken, or in fact spoken at all. But permit the narrative contrivance: they were spoken, as it were, as dialogue on the page is spoken; they were spoken in the same manner in which a soliloquy is spoken.)

It could have gone better.

The thought drifted up into his consciousness, and he acknowledged it. No doubt it could have gone better. However, was he in possession of any concrete way of knowing what he should have done better? Had he been in possession of any such knowledge? After all, with how unceremoniously he was slain, it wasn’t as though he could have put up a meaningful fight. In order to survive the round, he would have…

He would have had to have figured out what was going on, and then gone from there to figuring out who had the power to set the brackets and tournament structure—and by extension, who could have changed those brackets. He would have had to do so in order to set himself against someone he could win against, rather than someone who would destroy him so casually.

Of course, this would have been against the tournament design. While there is a design of a tournament which matches the strong against the strong and the weak against the weak, with the intent of having as many close matches as possible, this is often not the design selected. The result, past the early stages, is that many rounds do have a moderate disparity; and in the early rounds, many of the strongest are eliminated early, having fought others of the strongest. It feels fairest to the weakest of teams, and it makes for an excitement in the first stages, but is that the most important of metrics? No!

Here is the core of the matter: the grand final of the tournament should be the greatest match of the tournament, fought between the two strongest contenders. The semi-finals should be the four strongest, and the quarter-finals the eight strongest! And for this purpose, there is only one design that suits: the most powerful shall crush the weakest, and the second-most-powerful the second weakest. And there will be a lower bracket, which will permit those whom an upset has been enacted upon to recover, and to shuffle the contenders so that a team which might beat all but one, and that one under-perform against all others, will not be eliminated so easily.

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Nathan was not the weakest of the contestants. Even before adjusting, as the organizers did, for the power and flexibility of his absurd piece of equipment and the rate at which he would improve from his anemic starting strength, Nathan was still not the weakest of the contestants. From this, you might correctly infer that the opponent who disposed of him so easily was far from the strongest of those competing, and even in the infinite multiverse there was never a continuity in which he triumphed.

He could, however, have made it… one more round, and this realization and understanding drifted gently into his mind. There was only a fuzzy sense of the steps he would have had to take to enact it—to train, to catch the eye of someone powerful, to feed his PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM so that it had more to work with, to find a new piece of equipment to replace the sword which he’d thrown to such dramatic effect, and with all of those in place to find himself matched against someone whose strength was possible for him to stand against. The odds might not have been with him, but they might have, in the end, had he played his time well enough.

“Well,” he did not mutter, because speech was not a literal act in the liminal realm where he was so briefly existing in a manner of existence that was likewise not literal, “that’s done and dusted. So, what now?”

Now, he came slowly to understand, it is time to name the PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM, and then to look at the skill grid and pick upgrades, and after—

“Like hell,” he interrupted himself and whatever mystical cosmic force was expressing itself through his subconscious. “I refuse to acknowledge the validity of litRPG jump-chain mechanics. Also, one thing at a time, I have ADHD and tend to get distracted if I don’t focus on the thing in front of me, then the next thing. Which, actually, is that really an ADHD thing? My niece does that, and maybe she only does it because she’s four, though admittedly both of her parents have ADHD and it’s pretty strongly inheritable. Still, I feel like all of the memes are just astrology. Probably everyone gets distracted when they’re trying to maintain a list of stuff they need to do in their heads.”

There was a long pause, a time of contemplation and bafflement in a place that did not have time. What name, the thought arrived in a slow bubbling haze of disbelief, should the PROTEAN PRIMORDIAL LIVING SOULBOUND GLORIOUS ETERNAL ULTIMATE GROWTH WEAPON, SHIELD, ARMOR, AND UTILITY CHEAT ITEM bear for the rest of your million lives, never to change?

“Saucer,” Nathan decreed immediately. “Not that it has to keep that name forever, what is wrong with you? Or me, if that’s actually my subconscious? Names change. That’s, like, inherent to names.”

There was an even longer moment of disbelief. This time, the emotions failed to cohere into words or coalesce into meaningful expressions, but Nathan understood them well enough.

“PPLS GEUGW SAUCI,” he said matter-of-factly. “Peoples go saucy. It turns people into sauce. And it drinks stuff, so that’s fine too, it’s drinking-adjacent.”

He felt Saucer’s vibrating, delighted acceptance of its name at the same that he felt the horrified recognition of that acceptance from the animating principle of wherever he’d come to, and despite the lack of a limbic system he felt true joy.

“Anyway,” he continued blandly, “that’s settled. Let’s talk about progression.”