A jungle, where water-plump trees were washed in tropical sunlight.

Henry and the donkey were spat out of a portal. They'd been transported to a proper jungle, the air humid, the foliage verdant green, ropes of vine dangling in the branches around them. Their ears rang with the squawking of birds and the hissing and clicking of insects. Nearby, a stream trickled along a bed of moss-covered rocks.

Henry spotted a monkey standing knee-deep in the stream, its back stooped from old age.

Unlike the Psychic Shadow Monkeys, the boss was covered in fluffy black hair, including a pair of long eyebrows. It also wore a few pieces of jewellery; its wrist was adorned by a Spatial Bracelet, its neck by a broken amulet of silver, and its head by a crown delicately woven from flowers plucked fresh from an adjacent shrub.

The old monkey made no remark on their arrival, fixated as it were on a school of fish swimming around its toes.

"You’re a Yin-Yang Monkey," Henry said in surprise.

He had not seen one of these since the game’s second instalment, when he'd first began playing. Previously, they were the final monsters in the tutorial. Their toolkit was similar to the male Psychic Shadow Monkeys, with them also having two phases. In the 'Yang-phase', when their hair turned white, they would attack at hyper-speed; in the 'Yin-phase', where their hair turned black, they attacked in slow motion. The main differences were a lack of claws, limiting their range, an extra leap ability, and the fact that their hyper speed attacks were much faster. To beat them, the basic strategy was to fight during the Yin-phase and sprint away during the Yang-phase; although their attack speed increased, their running speed did not.

"And you’re a human," the monkey replied, without looking his way.

Henry, since the boss didn’t seem about to attack yet, inspected it and this jungle environment that might soon serve as their battleground.

The Yin-Yang Monkeys happened to have a particular significance for him.

Doing the tutorial back then, he'd gotten his arse handed to him by the monsters. Their phases didn’t have set durations. Instead, to signal that one should flee, there would be a 200-millisecond transitional window between each where the monster’s hair changed colour and it would remain motionless. Unlike the other club members, Henry couldn’t disengage fast enough within this window, causing him to take a beating.

While replenishing his health with food, his childish heart a little wounded at his failure, he’d studied the others to identify what he lacked. The missing piece would not make itself apparent to him on that day - his physical reaction time was slower by about 60 milliseconds, a flaw he would never overcome and which would cause him to be given The Cripple nickname. What he did notice, however, was an oddity with the way the monkeys blinked. Their eyes would occasionally remain closed for a fraction of a moment longer. As he observed further, it soon dawned on him that this lengthier blink was a telegraphing effect, occurring precisely 10 seconds before the monsters transitioned between phases.

Armed with this insight, he tried, against the next monkeys, counting as soon as that blink appeared so that he could run in time. Since he was a total noob, this plan had backfired, the extra cognitive burden of counting making him lose his focus and receive more punches to the face.

Nevertheless, that epiphany had marked a critical change. It spurred him both to seek alternative methods—cheats—and to approach fighting with a more long-term, planned out style, to eventually discover aspects of Saana that others had neglected.

He wouldn't say that was his starting point, a human life far too complex to reduce to single moments, but it'd been a starting point.

The old monkey, lost in its own nostalgia, suddenly made an expression of profound admiration, followed by another rambly click. "My grandfather once watched a human sharpen a stick and use it to spear fish out of a river. By blindly copying that technique, grandfather was able to fill every stomach of the troop, and so we prospered. I remember then, although my thoughts were not so complex, feeling envy for this thing that man had that we did not, for the flexibility of their minds that allowed them to reshape the world to suit their needs. In a word, creativity."

Henry, not understanding the point behind the monster’s anecdote, turned to considering its relation to the Psychic Shadow Monkeys. Based on his being summoned here by a foetus, the two species might have been one and the same, with the Psychic Shadow Monkeys perhaps reflecting a form of corruption that developed close to birth. They might be a chimaeric crossbreed of the Yin-Yang Monkey and whatever an Imbahalaala was.

Leading from that possibility, this quest could have an alternative, peaceful ending, where the two monsters, The Great Black One and this fellow, requested he solve their issue. That might be his dumb path to victory. A preachy ending about rising beyond the false dichotomy of kill or be killed, about searching for the humanity that exists even in literal monsters, this would be the exact type of annoying, anti-climactic conclusion this awfully-designed videogame might favour.

New quest available - Origins of the Psychic Shadow Monkeys (Legendary)

Henry skimmed the entry in his quest log, but it was simply a summarization of his theory.

"Is this thing your descendant?" he asked, gesturing towards a pregnant Psychic Shadow Monkey standing off to the side, doing nothing.

"It is me, and it is not me," the old monkey answered cryptically.

"How about The Great Black One?"

"That name is familiar. A moment."

The old monkey remained silent for a quarter of an hour, Henry continuing to survey the land while he waited.

"Sorry," it apologised after a while. "At my age, one’s memories become like clouds. One cannot order them to come or go, nor can they dictate how long they stay. All one can do is admire them when they choose to fly by." The monkey clapped its hands. "Oh, yes I remember it now! It spoke lines of verse that went...pardon me again."

Four minutes passed, the monkey had yet to recall.

"So is it related to you?" Henry asked.

"Who?"

"The Great Black One."

"It is me, and it is not me."

Henry tried a different angle. "Then, for a sense of relativity, assuming I am more you than those fish, while less you than another Yin-Yang Monkey, where on the scale does The Great Black One fall? Is it or he or she more you than I am?"

The old monkey scrunched its nose as if it’d caught a revolting stench. "To sate my envy of the humans, I disguised myself as one and wandered their world to learn their gift. A man that reeked of brimstone showed me a piece of glass that could bring into view the smallest parts of a thing, invisible to the naked eye. The man said, fantastically, that all that breathes is built of the same tiny spherical creatures and that, as a result, we are all one and the same. I asked him to compare our flesh with his glass, and his words seemed to be the truth."

The boss had once wandered disguised in the human world.

At this factoid, Henry discarded his previous inquiry and inspected the monster more closely. Not wanting to signal his intent, he closed his eyes as if to ruminate on its rambly message, while bringing up his character's footage the last time he'd looked directly at the old monkey.

His focus was drawn to its silver amulet, which had a hole where a gemstone might've once slotted. The shape, although the points were dulled and most had been broken, could have once formed a 15-pointed star.

Oh, no, there would be no peaceful ending here. Henry definitely needed to kill this genocidal maniac.

Despite the epiphany and his change in resolution, he gave no outward sign of hostility that might've warned his opponent.

Luckily, the same abnormality that made Henry's reaction speed so slow in duels meant he didn't have to worry about behavioural tells. Whenever he was facing a challenge, his thinking speed would increase, while his body's automatic reactions would disappear, as if blood was diverted between the two brain regions responsible for each. Heading off his body with his faster thoughts, he cut off the speeding up of his heart, kept his face calm and ripple-less as a lake. Just to be extra sure, he also stored aside any further thoughts for now, although the old monkey didn't seem to possess psychic abilities.

Henry opened his eyes, giving up after being unable to decipher yet another of the senile monkey's anecdotes. "This jungle of yours is a great place for a holiday." He waved at the lovely foliage. "Do you have any problems with me exploring, maybe growing a few crops?"

He asked this specific question because the Imbahalaala-like monsters would attack anyone who tried to modify the local environment. As a by-product of their telepathic connection with the world, ‘hurting’ the terrain would hurt them, too. The original Yin-Yang Monkeys had lacked this trait, but perhaps the species had changed in the time that'd passed.

The old monkey adopted the sagacity of a lecturer teaching his students. "I once envied human creativity. My envy pushed me to travel the world in hopes of learning this trait and bringing it back to my kind. However, the millennia have since revealed to me the dark side of this ‘gift’. At some point, eventually, things become complete, requiring no further change. But does the human’s need to tinker end there? No, they grow restless. They hallucinate flaws where there are none. Ultimately, even when presented with perfection, they are driven to dismantle it and try anew."

Henry nodded, understanding this point well enough.

Many of his friends' antics stemmed from them being bored after reaching the top and having no more real challenges. At some level, this was part of why he and Alex were having a stupid wager over a recruitment tournament. Too much success too early wasn't always good for the soul; it could make the rest of life afterwards feel flat in comparison.

"It is a bit unfortunate," he replied sympathetically. "So is that a yes or a no?"

"What was the question?"

Henry repeated his previous statement verbatim.

"It is a yes, and it is a no," the old monkey answered.

"Cool." Henry, choosing the Yes, rode off into the jungle on his shabby donkey.

As he was departing, the old monkey lifted its gaze from the fishes nibbling its toes and stared at him or, rather, stared at the rusty ring on his finger.

The old monkey wished it could find the cloud about that one...