***

Insights of The Third Eye.

When Henry'd started his martial art climb, the primary candidate Class for A Thousand Tool had been the Forsaken Master, a rare Qi Master specialisation.

The spec was distinguished by a unique Basic Attack, . This ability, similar to the Earthfriend Silverback form's , was a sub-type of 'Body-Stored' Basic Attacks. Ordinary Basic Attacks were 'Weapon-Stored', meaning that their destructive energy was concentrated at the weapon's point of impact – or fist's, for someone unarmed. In comparison, Body-Stored Basic Attacks placed the destructive energy in the user's body, expending it whenever one exerted their muscles.

This distinction made Body-Stored attacks much more flexible. Rather than being stuck with the single effective strike of ordinary Weapon-Stored attacks, a fighter could distribute the destructive energy across multiple blows, some light, some forceful. Unlike the Weapon-Stored , which shared this splitting feature, there was no need to calculate every step in advance, divide the destructive force into pulses, and time their distribution; to adjust the expenditure of Body-Stored energy, one simply attempted to hit harder or softer.

These qualities of summed up to a looser, more naturalistic fighting style that better approximated real-life combat.

In exchange, Forsaken Masters gave up their Class's signature flying weapon. This trade-off couldn't be justified on paper. Flying weapons were a considerable part of a Qi Master's arsenal, granting flanking tactics 1v1 and having a separate attack cooldown for double-hits. In order to justify the sacrifice, a player had to have a peak martial proficiency, be capable of utilising the maximum effect of by weaving together multiple high-accuracy combos. For the unskilled, the spec was trash. As a consequence, Forsaken Master players always fell into two categories of either geniuses or wannabe idiots.

What'd made the spec the primary candidate Class for A Thousand Tools was it fulfilling the same role for Twenty Tools. The predecessor style relied on Body-Storage aspect for the advanced weapon-swapping manoeuvres. The version of Twinkling Annihilation, where one juggled weapons out of a Spatial Bracelet, was a hell of a lot easier than the adaptation Henry'd used to butcher those cannibal cultists with his swarm of - each weapon had had a separate cooldown he'd fired off in sequence while accounting for the activation delay. But the original was still astoundingly difficult.

Twenty Tool's incorporation of the naturalistic had been a major factor in the young Henry choosing the style those aeons ago. At the time, he'd figured that if he were going to waste time learning a videogame martial art, it should be one whose skills transferred out to real-life. A ridiculous idea, but, well, he'd only been thirteen, so...

Now, a tad older and wiser, in researching the candidacy of Forsaken Master spec, he decided against using Twenty Tools for a stylistic foundation. Ultimately, the foul-mouthed monk Heavy-Fingers who'd created it had been a low-level figure. The man's talents had never matched his lofty ambitions, and Twenty Tools, a far from finished art, was riddled with holes in need of plugging.

Instead, Henry studied the techniques of The Third Eye Clan, a sect of Basindi Forsaken Masters. These martial fanatics were the direct disciples of their region's Zone Guardian, Saana's number one living fighter, Three-Eyed Than, a.k.a. The God-Emperor.

***

Concurrent with the previous events between Karnon and the other deities in the Central Continent, the Western Continent had been absorbed in a conflict between The All-Mother and a fragment of The Maalundi Empire to her north, on the outskirts of the Maelstrom's annihilating veil.

The Maalundi remnants had been fortunate that much of their empire's army had been stationed along the border between their territories. After being cut off from their homeland and Glorious Seekubaa's protection, though, they faced an immediate crisis. They had no means to contend with The All-Mother's aerial assault. To solve this problem, the army's leadership gathered and, making a tough but pragmatic decision, they nominated a handful of their most apt members to be promoted to Tier-11 by killing the rest for a sacrificial power boost. This act, along with a shift to the underground guerilla warfare Henry'd learned in Tunnelling Cowmole Claw, enabled them to retain a small domain, today known as Bes.

The All-Mother, while clashing with these remnants, also looked eastwards, where the Central Continent was open for the taking. Normal military occupation was impossible due to the oceans separating the continents being too dangerous for consistent, large-scale navigation. So, she sent a handful of missionary deities to begin converting the population to her worship. By 1864 BP—before even the invasion of Togavi—Suchi and the surrounding regions of Kanaru had adopted her beliefs. Yamalai followed a couple centuries after. This takeover, once it had settled, saw the local introduction of The Death Training program, which would consume tens of millions of lives.

These two regions, combined with her majority control of the world's western half, totalled to 904 million worshippers, all bolstering her by feeding her their God Energy. Given that the next strongest deity, Basindi's God-Emperor, had only 102 million worshippers, her conquest of the globe should have been an inevitability.

In the year 1108, though, Karnon, who'd been farting around on the other side of the planet, popped by for a quick visit.

Descriptions of the incident varied across sources. Early Rangbitans portrayed it as a wicked, underhanded ambush by every other deity in the world, who'd been brought together by the azure menace. Later ones, doubling down on the theological notion of The All-Mother having surpassed The Cycle, retconned that their Goddess had been so distressed by her children's unkind repayment of her maternal love that she'd shed a river of tears and abandoned them by Ascending to the Cosmos. Neeshifites changed the encounter to a prolonged, desperate battle, with their own Goddess Mindobelli—whose flower panties Henry'd pinched during the Earthfriend initiation—administering the decisive coup de grace.

None of those were true. The real act, which the participating Gods had talked about openly, had been much more straightforward. Karnon abducted five deities for a classic group prank outing, gifted Legendary gag-props to each, and then teleported them into the bed chambers of that night's mystery guest: The All-Mother. The stunned Gods, transported into the heart of the enemy base with no option of retreat, had to choose between killing or dying. With Karnon coordinating them and their use of the 'gag-props', they dispatched the Goddess in half a minute. Then, before any reinforcements could arrive, the group bounced, Karnon dropping each terrified participant back home until the next outing.

Thus, on that anti-climactic note, concluded The All-Mother's reign, in less time than a responsible person takes to brush their teeth.

Deeper digging revealed that the set-up for this snappy punchline had been a bit lengthier.

The Legendary gag-props had been pilfered over a perpetual campaign of harassment against The God-Emperor, the azure menace snatching every magical artefact the poor Basindi God tried to collect for his power cultivation.

As for The All-Mother, Karnon had been gradually weakening her for centuries by plaguing her empire with 'catastrophe-genre pranks'. The writings on these disasters were fascinating, her worshippers struggling to reconcile their image of her as a supreme deity pre-destined to control the universe and her failures to stop one lone God. The pre-death theological consensus settled on him being an agent of hers, meting out punishment on her behalf. In reality, The All-Mother had just been vulnerable to his scattered assaults. She'd hoarded most of her domain's resources for herself through her monotheism, and this selfishness made her unbeatable directly but left any area where she was physically absent exposed. This hoarding hadn't previously been fatal to her strategy because The Rangbit Empire's western territories had a large but densely-packed population, akin to India, and there was nowhere within its borders she couldn't reach in a few hours by flight. Against the teleporting Trickster God, though, this speed was insufficient. To counter him, The All-Mother had been forced to distribute more of her might across her subordinates. In turn, this sharing diminished her power enough for her to be slain.

(To be more precise, this distribution shouldn't have hurt her to the point of losing a 6-on-1. Henry devoted a two-month-long effort analysing notes from a Rangbitan investigation into the incident, which mapped the palace layout, damage marks, and blood-splatters, combined with his own research on the Gods and Legendaries involved. He eventually reconstructed a rough scheme of how the attack had unfolded. It seemed that in her final breaths, the Goddess—like her forebearers in underestimating the azure menace, The Laughing Man, The Turtle King, and The Eighth Prince—had simply been outplayed.)

And as The All-Mother was returned to The Cycle she'd claimed to have overcome, her domain fractured and decayed. Going the way of their Maalundi rivals, The Rangbit Empire transitioned into The Old Rangbit Empire, a story set in the hazy, uncared-for past.

Afterwards, Karnon, who'd felled the mightiest oak of his age, Karnon, who might in an alternate universe have seized the throne of global dominion, resumed his degenerate prankster gallivanting.

And that was The Trickster God's chronicle.

The subsequent period of pointless pranks carried on right up until the current day, when he'd teleported to Suchi to interfere in Henry's affairs.

***

Cursed Ex-Slave Tactics.

During the period of chaos in Old Rangbit that followed The All-Mother's death, a defecting army of orc and dwarf slaves commandeered part of the Rangbitan Armada. With the stolen ships, they sailed away to escape east.

Of the 30,000 that started the journey, 2,200 survived the dangerous ocean crossing to the Central Continent. There, these survivors continued to be beset with challenges. Pursued by local Rangbitan loyalists, they fled into the remote interior of the Parani barrens, hiding in the desolate expanse of grass and beasts. This already hostile environment was made all the more harder by a blood curse. In the modern region of Nilke, there was (and is) a mysterious tower connected to the orc and dwarf races that crippled them when they roamed beyond its range, an affliction transmitted on to any offspring of the escapees.

Over time, through the will to live and brutal, militant collectivism, the ex-slaves managed to eke out a decent existence. For a while. Up until half a millennium ago, their descendants could be found in small settlements all throughout the barrens, toiling to extract the minor riches from areas no one else was desperate enough to care for. Following a global plague and a two-century dark age, though, most had been wiped out. The remnants were now concentrated in a single mountain town community, who, still cursed, crafted arms for nomadic Druk tribes in exchange for protection.

Henry stole the military tactics of these cursed ex-slaves during their apex, using them as a centrepiece for a general study of how to fight when much weaker, physically, than the enemy.

Although the ex-slaves had been the masters of it, all of Saana's martial arts had to account for this eventuality to some degree. The game universe was moulded to the norms of RPGs, and one of the sinister implications of this, for the average soldier, was regularly having to face enemies much stronger than themselves.

Severely lopsided situations could be quite horrifying. The trusty, life-saving armour, the skeleton beneath, might be split in two with a casual flick of a sword. Shield-spells became flimsier than rice-paper, thunderbolts fizzled out like harmless sparks off a flint. Disciplined groups in the shadow of one of the battlefield's giant replied with coordinated attacks, sacrifices to stall, traps, and containment. Undisciplined groups broke. Solitary soldiers of either type knew to run away.

But, for duellists, fleeing forever wasn't an option. Eventually, one has to stand their ground, even when outgunned.

Henry'd first scheduled these niche David-vs-Goliath tactics later due to their irrelevance to his recruitment tournament and him usually being the guy with the overwhelming gear advantage. With Karnon's meddling, though, they could be needed sometime soon.

***

After over a decade of archive-diving, cross-referencing, reading, and reading, Henry'd established a comprehensive account of The Trickster God's twenty-three-century lifespan along with 341,640 pranks spread across it.

To this great stockpile of information, he performed the scholar's chief labours of analysis and synthesis. In search of the truths that could be extracted from the past and projected into the relevance of the current moment, he drew from the equivalents of drills to bore for deeper meanings and distillers to separate inscrutable complexities into simpler, understandable constituents. Maybe some bright fact would elucidate and ease the tensions of what was happening in Suchi.

The two big questions were: 1) What type of person did The Trickster God favour for victims of his 'pranks' - clarifying who would be the likely target amongst Pope Berbahaya, Ramiro The Saviour, and Henry himself, The Tyrant. 2) What determined the severity of these pranks, which ranged from innocent animal puns to empire-terminating assassinations - clarifying the specific ruin to be given to the chosen victim (or victims).

To sieve for answers from the entire, massive body of Karnon's chronology, Henry's widest-reaching tool was the method of Deitological Thematic Induction Modelling, or DTIM. This was a type of quasi-quantitative comparative analysis for testing the veracity of inferred motives from patterns across a large dataset of behaviours. Models would be built in which the subject of investigation was assigned various 'explanatory themes' - hypothesised determinants of behaviour such as goals, habits, beliefs, or external incentives. In an iterative process with this first part, the subject's observed actions would then be used as dependent variables for statistically testing the accuracy of these themes. In much simpler terms, you guessed the reasons (the themes) behind a person doing something, then checked whether those reasons were true by looking for traces of them in the other things the person did. It was a formalisation of the ordinary questioning procedure.

As 'Deitological' Thematic Induction Modelling implied, the specific method was designed for Saana's Gods, whose extended lifespans yielded a fertile bounty of analysable actions - for purely mathematical reasons, the models tended to fail on real-people, who didn't present enough data points.

Despite that last fact, the basic logic of DTIM could be illustrated with an example from an analysis of another trickster figure, Loki, whose scheme, unbeknownst to the spy, was about to be steamrolled by Suchi's more pressing politics.

So Loki, or Ex-Spy-Bro, had planned on garnering sympathy after his ejection from Asatru with Henry through the shared narrative of both being mask-wearers struggling to construct an authentic self from a fragmented interior. In Ex-Spy-Bro's self-search, he would call upon the material of his many female personas used for past assignments. From their frequency and from the passion of their delivery, he would conclude that his attraction to portraying these falsely gendered identities betrayed an inner secret: Ex-Spy-Bro was Ex-Spy-Sis. Scandalous.

In a DTIM analysis, this hidden personality trait, powerful enough to shape Loki's actions without even his/her conscious awareness, would constitute one theme. We could label it 'Unrecognised Transgender Inclinations'.

Now, the core of DTIM was testing competing themes to find that which most accurately harmonised with the patterns of the past. In the case of Loki, there was an alternative, wildly-different explanation behind him portraying so many female personas.

Firstly, for context, the spy's guild, Asatru, were—no hyperbole—radical traditionalist white supremacists. Their veneration of the ancient warrior lifestyle was conservativism cranked up to the point of absurdity, with them wishing society would reverse social progress so much as to go back to the era before nation-states. Their worship of the Germanic pantheon, Odin and Thor etc., was paired with a hatred of the Judeochristian god that'd supplanted Northern Europe's autochthonous deities, and their obsession with this mystical conflict functioned as a symbolic vehicle for the expression of a less palatable deeper hatred, the rejection of an alien religion being a signifier for a rejection of alien people - they hated foreigners. None of this part was conjecture. 'Asatru' had been a real-life historical religious movement with such associations, and the guild, not coincidentally, consisted of 100% ethnic Europeans.

Pre-Overdream, Henry had been fairly clueless about the Asatru's background aside from a vague notion of them as racist viking LARPers. In the past, he hadn't had the time to care about their or any other of his enemies' lore - not in a game where people pretending to be from the Warhammer 40k or Harry Potter universes were a common sight. His only demand had been that everyone, when in The Company's territory or using their services, stopped behaving like murderous animals. Asatru, for their reasons, had despised his reformations and they'd taken up arms against him. Therefore, he'd seized their land and banished them into hiding. Other guilds—made up of Technocommunists, Theocratic Buddhists, Democratists, Anarchists, Virtual Realists, Globalists, hippies—had opposed him, for their own reasons, and their fate was the same.

But The Cap had given him spare hours to investigate Asatru in depth.

For DTIM analysis then, amongst the constellation of the guild's ideological beliefs was a veneration of traditional western gender norms and an antagonism to any deviations from these. One of the guild's main targets of ridicule were modern women, whom they viewed as having betrayed the honourable viking ideal by refusing to date them. This female-directed antagonism, after filtering through a layer of postmodern irony, became our alternative theme for Loki's behaviour: 'Ironic Misogynistic Parody'. Just as Henry'd found joy in using The Cripple's trash trash-talk to mockingly parody his duellist enemies, Loki might be doing the same thing with his female personas to mock the ladies.

As it would happen, this second theme explained aspects of Loki's past that the first theme of Unrecognised Transgender Inclinations failed to.

His—and Loki was unambiguously a guy—female personas always had an extra dimension of derogatory caricature. Artemis was a violent, infantile, impulsive woman who got away with being insufferable due to being hot. From their duel, SophieRTR, the upbeat Water Tiger girl, had been a moron so dumb she couldn't access negative emotions. The autistic savant, unable to control her romantic impulses, had destroyed an Irish PVE guild by e-dating both its main tank and raid-leader. And so on. Every one of his personas contained an incrimination against womankind.

Loki's actions external to these personas didn't evince any trace of hidden femininity either. For example, between mission assignments, the spy was active on Saana's forums. According to a content analysis of Loki's posts, 76% of his negatively-valenced comments were towards female posters, and 39% of his arguments occurred in game-unrelated topics about interpersonal player drama, where he sided against female parties in 100% of cases.

Finally, there was the glaring counterfactual that Asatru, in addition to hating women, also independently hated transpeople, who deviated from traditional western gender norms, too.

So, if all of Loki's behaviours were input into Deitological Thematic Induction Models, the first explanatory theme of Unrecognised Transgender Inclinations might be congruent with 11% of the spy's actions, clash with 7%, and neutral with the rest, while the new theme, 'Ironic Misogynistic Parody', matched perhaps 22% and clashed with 0%. Therefore, the first had to be rejected. Loki was lying. From the perspective of most ideological frameworks, he was simply a dude. (Most. Virtual Realism, the insane roleplayer ideology, continued to affirm his womanhood, one's online presentation being the sole dimension of importance).

After adding some other themes to pad out the gaps—e.g., Loki's extreme dedication to maintaining character, to the extent of hooking up with dudes in-game, originating from a 'Psychopathic Perfectionism'—the misty picture of the actual spy behind the many masks began to solidify. Being kicked from Asatru, the persona conflict of Ex-Spy-Bro/Sis, these were fabrications. All were but tools of a spy's manipulations, sources of psychodramatic tension that generated opportunities for forming sympathetic connections with the observing target - Henry, in whose presence the spy would have moped. And from the emotion of sympathy can be stolen moments of exploitable trust, mistakes, doubts, vulnerabilities. If this failed, the fact of Henry merely taking too long in his confusion to rid himself of the spy was an opening, the delay creating time for the up-close perusal of his many flaws. But an outcome of failure was not seriously predicted by the real Loki, who still had his theme of 'Arrogance'.

The spy could have picked a different focal point for his identity-reconstruction scheme aside from transgenderism, like feigning a connection with Henry's war PTSD or the post-climb existential vacuum when one is past their peak. These, however, would have been less effective given Henry's greater familiarity with the topics. More critically, Loki couldn't resist the sexy allures of yet another woman-bashing imitative jest, this time with the extra garnish of see-through, trans-ridiculing lingerie - such was the pervasiveness of his Ironic Misogynistic Parody drive.

As for what the spy ultimately stood to gain from this convoluted scheme on the whole, the theme at the root of it all was not so complex. 'Enemy'. They were enemies in the past, and they were enemies today. Theft, sabotage, assassination, just any opportunity to remind Henry that his enemies were defeated but never deceased - these were all counted as victories by Loki and the other spies that followed him everywhere.

He would have killed the donkey.

So there was the first trickster figure laid out, cold and dead on the dissection table of DTIM. The real Loki, after the layers of false skin were peeled back, was the very first person one encountered: a conniving, arrogant spy willing to go to extraordinary lengths for the task, an enemy til the end, someone whom it would have been a mistake to consider being anything else.

The question now was whether a similar conclusion would apply to the second, much more important trickster figure.