A replica of a desert, the land buried deep in the heaped-up sands of the past.

Henry and Saana's lead developer swivelled around, the pair taking in this desert view from the game's previous instalment.

On a present-day map of Saana, this arid region was located on the western continent, on the opposite side of the mountain range abutting Bes and Nilke. Today, a magical maelstrom covering the northern half of that continent made the place inaccessible.

Where Henry stood now, that range, called the Celaris back then, was visible to the south. Twice as tall as the Himalayas, its mountains with their razor-sharp peaks resembled teeth biting into the heavens. Their towering height created the rain shadow that left this desert so parched.

If one ventured north, the sand gradually gave way to a rugged steppeland inhabited by bickering clans of nomadic horsemen. Around the time he'd selected for this scenery, his guild had been finishing up a campaign of conquering and uniting those clans. For himself, it'd been a period of quiet, an interlude between his two main careers in Saana. Having risen to the top of the duelling scene, he'd been doing an apprenticeship in a new, more challenging domain.

(AN: Here's a rough world map from that time period for anyone struggling to visualise this: https://imgur.com/irmt0jl. The neon yellow area with the red star is his guild's. Other colours are other player-controlled regions.)

Not long after his apprenticeship, he'd be handed full control of their guild by Alex along with a request to conquer the rest of the world.

The request had been preposterous.

Their guild lacked numbers, resources, equipment, and decent territory. Although the steppes covered more area than some empires, they’d been left untouched because they lacked both economic and strategic value.

Despite the seeming impossibility of the task, though, he accepted it. Or it might be more accurate to say he accepted it because of its impossibility. At that point, he was as bewitched as anyone else with the game. The political plots brewing for months, the large-scale, colourful, ever-shifting battles where sword clashed with magic, the titanic quantities of manpower moving in accordance with your vision and will – in these, there was a level of mental stimulation hard matched by any other activity. It was addictive.

This spot in this inhospitable desert would be the chosen launching point for their new campaign, Operation Phantom Limbs.

Here, Alex delivered an epic speech to the troops of their guild and the others who'd joined their alliance. Here, in this desert, they were going to build their capital city. They would become the Las Vegas of Saana, a mecca of liberty amongst the sand, attracting gamblers and risk-seekers from all across the globe. From that day forward, in commemoration of the greatest task ahead of them, their alliance would be known as Flattening Mountains! Thrusting his finger powerfully to the Celaris range, Alex had announced that they would be knocking them down and creating a transcontinental highway so that the tourists could reach them.

Hannes paused his briefing. “Listening to him that day, my stomach hurt with laughter.”

Henry cracked a little smile. “You and the rest of the world.”

Even the most generous analyses had them struggling to avoid bankruptcy. The stupid endeavour turned them into an international laughing stock, a synonym for any expensive, pointless undertaking.

Henry updated The Overdream scenery to a later date, a gratuitously extravagant complex of buildings rising from the sand with all the facilities one might expect for party-goers - casinos, luxury in-game hotels, pompous statues of Alex. A line of floating sacks stretched from the gates across the dunes, the camels hauling them invisible. In the distant south, the first of the mountain peaks had lost their tops.

But becoming a joke had been the critical first step. Their opponents needed to be disarmed of the suspicions that'd arisen during the unification of the steppe clans. The guild too fragile to yet withstand a serious attack, they needed to return to the obscuring shadow of irrelevance.

A downside of this tactic was that the sentiment of the project's pointlessness also gradually spread through the ranks of their alliance. One by one, Flattening Mountains' leaders began to defect, the alliance's limbs were severed.

The first to leave was their most skilled commander and a teacher of Henry's in the preceding period. A stubborn, war-obsessed fellow, he accused the rest of them of cowardice and marched his guild southwards. Passing over the Celaris range, his faction began a new conquest of the tribes in the dense, untamed jungles on the other side. By most estimations, they did not have the forces to accomplish this task, but their commander, a lunatic who loved the challenge more than anything else, was not deterred.

Next to go was a crew of newcomer Bloodmancers, who'd Alex discovered and who'd hogged much of the limelight during the steppe unification campaign, becoming infamous for their skill and coordination. This crew, fracturing, were strewn across the globe, as its members were poached by guilds offering stacks of cash to steal their methods.

Another defecting commander said he was sick of these barren landscapes, took his forces to the northern tundras, chopped down a bunch of forests, and built a fleet. Fashioning himself an admiral, he went around trying to conquer the seas. His incompetence meant he failed to capture all but the most insignificant islands.

The last to ditch stole the nomadic clans and started waging war on the few stubborn Flattening Mountain idiots who’d remained to build their desert capital.

Henry, whose involvement with the alliance was unknown to most, turned up on a random island near present-day Togavi. Revealing himself to be The Cripple, his duelling nickname, he claimed to have found god, to have renounced his days of fighting. His fans were invited to come to his new commune, where they would receive religious tutelage in the path of pacifism. This was an inside joke based on a widespread rumour that the cause of his slow reaction speed was his heart being averse to violence - incorrect, he sucked even at rhythm games. In truth, his 'commune' was a training camp for anyone wanting to learn his unique duelling methods. Although, as his new disciples would spread out around the world to challenge others, he made sure they espoused his pacifist teachings - ironically, of course, just for a laugh.

But the world's laughter came to an end one Christmas day when the conspiracy bore its fruit, when the alliance's severed limbs were revealed to be still very much attached.

The desert scenery around Henry and Hannes shifted once again.

The original luxury complex of tourist buildings had been fortified with the excuse that the builders needed protection from the nomadic clans.

Alongside this castle, now, snaking through the dunes, was a river as wide and full as the Danube. It flowed all the way to the Celaris mountain range, which had a gaping hole through it.

Any student of medieval geopolitics would tell you that while highways were great, waterways were much better.

This river had been created by a combination of several Legendary items from nearby dungeons that generated lakes. By spreading these artificial lakes about, they'd made a series of rivers that connected right from the north of the continent to the Celari range.

On the range's southern side, there was already a sizeable river that had not previously been navigable due to it having a waterfall at each bend. These waterfalls had secretly been blown up by troops of the commander sent to conquer the jungle tribes.

Both of those acts, the waterfall destruction and the placement of the Legendary lakes, had been carried out on a Christmas day, when most guilds weren't paying much attention to them.

Through these two coordinated manoeuvres, their alliance had instantly created a canal-system passing through the entire continent.

The value of this was evident if one studied a map of Saana. Ships wishing to circumnavigate the planet had to pass through a narrow sea corridor between the Western continent and the smaller continent south of it. Although there was an ocean south of that smaller continent, this was littered with icebergs, making it unnavigable. As a result, the player empire controlling that sea corridor had amassed a fortune through customs fees.

With Flattening Mountain's new canal, they could steal part of this lucrative trade, turning their previously worthless desert capital into one of the game's most valuable spots.

However, if creating a canal was all they'd done, their land would soon have been seized by the stronger guilds nearby.

The beginning of the campaign's pre-emptive strike came from the poached Bloodmancers. Spread around the planet, having learned the vulnerabilities of the guilds who'd hired them, they coordinated a mass summoning of demons in Saana’s major ports and destroyed the fleets that'd docked for an in-game Christmas event.

With that single move, the world's dominant navy became the one belonging to Flattening Mountain's wannabe admiral on his insignificant islands. However, with the geographical and political changes, those islands' former insignificance had also changed. When the other player empires rushed to rebuild their ships, their efforts were thwarted by pirate raids from the admiral's scattered forces.

On top of harassment by sea, the shipbuilders also had to deal with constant assaults from highly-trained duellists, who didn't seem to care that they were outnumbered. Their oddball leader, The Cripple, proclaimed to his disciples that they would experience their most lopsided, challenging duels yet by fighting those desperate to save their lands - that, beyond the one versus one lay an even greater challenge, the one versus everyone. Basically, Henry'd turned his duelling fans into terrorist suicide bombers.

Now, Flattening Mountains had a temporary monopoly on all international naval movement, giving them the funds and breathing room to solidify their position.

The whole globe, pissed off at them, tried sponsoring the guilds on the Western continent to march across land and invade their capital in the desert. But those forces to the west, east, and north were having enough difficulty with the highly-mobile hordes of nomadic horsemen now razing their granaries. As for the enemies who tried the new southern route through the Celaris, they were slaughtered in the jungles by a unified confederation of jungle tribes.

A few enemy guilds were powerful enough that they might've pushed through regardless. These ones were suddenly hamstrung by their kingdoms splintering apart due to the betrayal of several rising commanders in their ranks - moles, planted by Alex before the alliance's formation.

Meanwhile, as all the enemy empires were focused on stopping the alliance, NPC populations around the globe were starting to feel the repercussions of the disrupted trade networks. As the famines set in, as the hunger in the population's stomachs grew, the NPC citizens heard ever more truth in a new passivist religion denouncing the Offworlders ruling them as despots who cared for nothing except battle. Soon, the lands were aflame with the blazing spirit of rebellion.

And that'd been Operation Phantom Limbs, their alliance's falsely fractured members coordinating a global catastrophe to cement their position.

Once they'd secured their canal, rather than stopping there, they jumped right into a blitzkrieg campaign, Henry making his debut as The Tyrant. Four months later, a Flattening Mountains army entered the last capital refusing to swear allegiance and painted the alliance's name across the castle gates.

(AN: map illustrating their directly controlled territories after the campaign: https://imgur.com/E4a7mNA)

Flattening Mountains wouldn't have the strength to maintain their hold indefinitely, but, for a while, they'd conquered the world.