The Heroes and Villains tournament, a pregnant pause.

-Ramiro: We will be fighting. Our friend did promise me a prize if I win, but, to be frank, stabbing you in front of the people you stole from me is prize enough. The rest is a bonus.

Henry stood fixed in place. At the epiphany prompted by this reminder of his reincarnation Amulets, the world around him faded from his conscious and his mind flooded with the images, events, coincidences, and oddities of this previous week.

In their globe-trotting during the Earthfriend acquisition quest…in the people and places they’d visited…in the pranks they’d committed…in Karnon's delayed Ascension to the Cosmos…in the missing commonality between Karnon and the Maalundi-deity Bes…

In the gift of the Tier-8 Spelltomes through the cooking competition...in the necessity to sneak them under the nose of those monitoring them…

In the day on the plains at Lake Hotferver…in the ominous fourth hidden within the assumed trio…in Loki’s sham identity crisis…in the crass pun about a cockblocked king and a set of divine genitals…in the rearrangement of Henry's assassination plan within a prank…

In yesterday’s meeting at the execution grounds…in the chest of smuggled weapons…in the cruelly-murdered twins…in the story presented through the elemental golems…in the monologue about The Hero’s duty against The Enemy-Bear…in the mural of blood...

Even in this silly date with Geno’s sister…in their encounter with Loki…in the blunders they'd made...in the matches they’d observed…in their conversation…

Everywhere in this horrible city it abounded…in the oppressive caste system…in the cannibal cultists…in the religion and the history…in the blood-coloured clay and skin…

This whole time Henry’d been immersed in the answer. He'd been circling it, investigating it, training in it, being manipulated by it, enacting it, retaliating against it, but only after Karnon’s reminder of these Amulets through Ramiro, through the slotting in of this missing puzzle piece, did he complete the logical leap necessary to recognise what had been before him all along.

Jesus, Henry might’ve thought if he hadn’t already solved this mystery ages ago. To imagine that he, using a Tier-0 character, had actually plotted to assassinate the god-damn—

Henry was suddenly toppling forward, the ground rising up to catch him as he, unable to react quick enough, slammed face-first into it.

Rose grimaced.

A few in the crowd were also disgusted, but most laughed.

“NICE shot!”

“That’s what scaredy cats get! Flattened out, cunt!”

“Fight and die, you bitch!”

Henry, splayed out on his belly, lay still for a moment. The one confusion of his epiphany blended into another from a small weight pressing down on his back that reminded him of when he was reading on the couch and a niece or nephew clambered onto him to use him as a mattress. The corner of one eye caught a young arm draped over his shoulder, its slender wrist ending in a freshly-sawn stump of bone and meat, and the odour emanating from the wound soon filled his nostrils, while a wet sensation soaked through his top, the embalming fluid used to preserve her body infiltrating his clothes.

Ramiro had the girl’s corpse at him.

Henry supposed, rationally, he should respond to that instead of the epiphany.

With a twisting motion, he shrugged the dead body off of him, then rolled away from it. As he stood back up, he joined Rose in giving an appalled glance at the one who’d catapulted the corpse.

-Zhangmei33: Maybe he smokes something more potent before killing?

Ramiro, wondering whether that provocation had also been insufficient, hesitating a moment, shrugged and swung his arm, launching the girl’s head, too.

The second foul missile, unaided by any abilities, fell short, bouncing off one of the arena’s bell-shaped stupa statues before hitting the ground with a splat and crack.

Henry and Rose continued to stare back in astonishment.

Henry wondered whether Karnon had pulled a switch-a-roo to perform that bizarre stunt or if this dude was an actual crackpot.

-Henry Flower: …Ramiro?

-Ramiro: What answer have you for the dead girl lying at your feet? How many schools must you fund to compensate for the defilement of this little tailor's corpse? I killed her, Tyrant. I cut her into pieces. I ate some of her. The four other kids that preceded her this evening I managed to eat more of. And I will eat many more in the future. These polite, liberal solutions you offer will never rid this slum of us filth-eaters. I'm going to be lurking here, feeding myself and waiting for the lapse of your vigilance through which I will return. Fight me, you coward.

Henry, ignoring this deranged idiot and sighing at this wretched game, approached the girl’s head where it’d rolled profanely to a stop.

The crunch had been her nose breaking on impact. Her expression showed no horror, death relaxing the facial muscles into the saggy, undignified state of one drooling while sleeping. Nevertheless, for Henry, who’d last tortured a person to death only yesterday at his execution ground, the suffering in this girl’s final moments was readily apparent.

Picking up her head, he brought it back to her body. Part of his costume consisted of a knee-length robe made of silk. This garment, he removed and used to wrap up the girl’s pieces, binding the limbs tightly but gently as if he were swaddling an infant.

Destroying the corpse on the spot like he had those left by the cultists would have been preferable. But he figured, since this one had been displayed in front of tens of thousands of spectators, the news of its existence might transmit back to any family, if she’d had any. He would ask the vendors near her stall if they knew any relations who’d want the remains. Before handing her over, he might sew her head back onto her torso. They’d have to cope with the missing hands and foot.

Bundling up her body, Henry picked her up and continued on his way.

Ramiro, noticing his provocation's failure, switched tactics.

-Ramiro: Careful, Tyrant. I might have to inform our audience exactly who’s fleeing.

The teen might not value ‘symbolic fights’, but this he undeniably cared about.

For years, The Tyrant and his guild had engineered an elaborate charade to present Alex Wong, this playboy clown, to disguise the humourless individual at the core of The Company. The real Tyrant was a nocturnal creature like Ramiro. He needed the dark cover of anonymity for hunting his prey, for evading the guilt that pursued all true saints gobbling on the filth. Examining the kid now, one could see his pervasive bondage to his camouflage. It evinced itself in the way he communicated exclusively through these traceless messages while, outwardly, conversing in a foreign language to distract from the mere chance of recognition, in the way he, even while wearing a material mask, maintained a second layer of concealment beneath by attempting to soften his murderous gaze and directing it away from the target of his hatred. This kid was terrified of the public.

And Ramiro, who’d identified him, had the ability to unmask him on a whim. With a couple sentences, he could put this teenager’s private life on show, just as his own had been tonight. He'd refrained from doing so thus far only out of respect for a gentleman’s agreement, the expectation being that his dethronement would be celebrated with a spectacular bloodbath, a gorgeous battle owed to the mighty who ruled the weak. However, if The Tyrant were going to retreat from the arrangement, then Ramiro wouldn’t continue granting him this grace.

Henry, hearing the threat to expose him, snapped around and ripped off his mask himself. “TELL THEM, THEN! IT DOESN’T MATTER! I HAVE RETIRED! WHO I AM NO LONGER MATTERS, YOU SMALL-MINDED SWINE! FUCK YOU!"

His lungs lashed out with the frustration of having to deal daily with these blind, egoistic, murderous, roleplayer cunts incapable of peering beyond the meaningless drama of themselves and seeing and feeling the more monumental problems everywhere around them.

Henry may have gone to extravagant lengths to safeguard his anonymity, that was true, but there was a limit.

Once upon a time, he had indeed woven an intricate deception employing an enormous number of staff for the purpose of safeguarding his identity, thereby preserving his ability to disappear, to compartmentalise his life enough that he could hang out in a bookstore without any undue interest in his obscure scribblings. However, what’d justified this monumental exertion had not been his personal desire to avoid the limelight or to take the occasional mental health break from his public persona. Having others disguise him was not a benefit of being the all-powerful Tyrant, whose every wish should be gratified.

No, his anonymity had been important solely because, as ‘The Tyrant’, as a career general, the condition of his mind had determined his job performance and his job performance in turn had determined how many people got killed each day. Whenever a lack of sleep threw his calculations off by seconds or metres, hundreds more were sacrificed to the meat-grinder, incinerated in bunkers, hacked apart by enemy brutes in trenches, shanked through the eyeslits of their helmets. Each tiny mental fuck-up of his was amplified as they propagated and multiplied across the millions of bodies placed under his command. Far too many soldiers had been lost for no other reason than a rougher-than-usual night had impaired his judgement. It was only the mitigation of these consequences that’d conferred his privacy any importance. It was always with this life-and-death desperation that he’d ordered his behemoth to protect his avenues to sometimes withdraw from the horror, that he’d resorted to measures like blowing a fortune chasing down The Cap of A Thousand Dreams, just to be able to rest his eyes a little longer before returning to the fray.

But the wars were over, his conquests done, and his duties were finished. By retiring, he’d demoted both himself and his right to over-sensitive treatment. The privilege of being a nobody, the ability to be viewed as an individual and not a caricature, the chance at a teenage love, what mattered the loss of any of these compared to the infinitely greater loss of dying? Henry would not risk a single life to uphold the mere conveniences of his own.

In fact, even if there wasn’t the catastrophe of the Amulets at stake in duelling this freak, he would still have let his identity be leaked instead of ‘fighting’. He would have done so purely to avoid furthering this disgusting insult upon the girl in his arms - how abominable to play at egos and videogames within direct eyesight of a mutilated corpse.

This is what it meant to hold death in its full, ugly, pitiful weight. To be surrounded by death was to always be reminded of the unimportance and transience of your own existence, to know that all you loved would be stolen one day, and to be made comfortable with this fact. Death was the unavoidable and often abrupt erasure of everything in life that was sweet or vile. All the noble goals you aspired to, all the meticulous plans you’d made for their obtainment, all the struggles you bitched and moaned about, all the deep-seated fears you tip-toed around out of an aversion to their mere mention, all these individual quirks and experiences and connections with people that made life holy were liable to vanish in an instant when some unhinged lunatic plucked you from the street and stabbed you in the organs.

“BUT YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THAT!” Henry continued to rage. “YOU ARE STILL JUST ANOTHER FUCKING ROLEPLAYER, BOUND BY THESE FANTASIES OF POWER FROM REACHING BEYOND YOUR BRAIN TO MAKE GENUINE CONTACT WITH THE WORLD! FUCK YOU! YOU MAY LIVE SURROUNDED BY PEOPLE, BUT I PROMISE THAT YOU WILL DIE ALONE! FUCK YOU!" He calmed himself. "Tell them exactly who I am.”

Henry might have ranted more, but this profanity was distasteful when holding a corpse. He resumed his departure, Rose towing along behind in sombre contemplation of his outburst.

They were greeted by the audience, who’d minutes earlier been copying him in adoration, now groaning, swearing, shouting, and booing in revulsion, hundreds of voices venting their complaints.

“Oh, this guy,” moaned one spectator recognising him. “We were cheering for HF The ‘Oracle’. Ugh.”

“How many competitions will he steal? It’s not fair.”

“He’s insulting roleplayers again!”

“I bet he’s the reason Suhita withdrew from the ball!”

“Company dog!”

“Our poor Queen. Justice for Suhita!”

“Justice for Suhita!”

Scattered throughout the masked sea, dozens of sparkling lights began to shine. The bravest Villagers were bringing out their weapons.

Henry, not rejecting their hatred, understanding it and accepting it, strolled forth to meet them, summoning his chest-strapped Spelltomes and readying himself to part their dense mass like Moses crossing the Red s—

He lurched forward abruptly, tripping but prevented from rolling down the stairway by Rose grabbing the back of his shirt.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege, your foot…

A branch had sprouted from a plank in the imitation-stone step beneath him, and the mischievous appendage had wrapped around his ankle, impeding his departure.

Pranked!

‘Stop,’ Henry signed a plea to the mad deity. ‘I can’t do more…I've reached my limit...I’m tired…I'm tired...’

At his pathetic begging, as if accepting his refusal, the branch withered away. Its verdant strength faded into a dry husk that disintegrated into dust, releasing the captive—

Henry and Rose jumped back in retreat. The stairway in front of was showered by hundreds of arrows and spells fired from the incensed crowd. The path forward was blocked, clunking and sizzling with deadly missiles.

Pranked...again.

Henry, expressionless, chose a different route down, leaping off the side of the temple, and a mischievous gust of wind plucked him out of the air and deposited him back up on the stage, twirling him around to face an amused Ramiro - amused at the childish outburst, amused at The Tyrant being bested by one stronger than himself.

Pranked! Pranked! Pranked!

Henry could call in The Company for backup, but they would be cleaning the disasters at The Trading Posts right now. Besides, their arrival would likely be twisted into another comedic travesty.

No, he had no choice over whether or not to fight, only how to fight…

Whatever grief Henry might’ve felt at being trapped in such a tacky manner by this Trickster god soon evaporated. He had no right to whine. Routinely, he’d ordered his men to conduct manoeuvres that both he and they knew were not survivable; he’d still expected them to perform, and they had. In comparison, no great tragedy was being done to his immortal self. His only lament was for the horrifying fact that, once again, the fate of so many would fall upon someone like him, an exhausted teenager with one foot out of the door on this miserable universe.

But the time for these feelings was passing.

Henry scanned the raging crowd, absorbing the pleb's judgement, which, although negative, nevertheless acknowledged him as a human, a possessor of a heart that could be moved by their disdain. He wondered in passing if Silver might be out there watching - but, most likely, she was focused on the injured at the Trading Post.

Facing his losses, he asked his heart whether or not it did feel anything. It replied back coldly: quit stalling.

Expelling the remnants of his teenage years with a sigh, Henry laid the dead girl in his arms against a wall, positioning her in a spot out of the crowd's line-of-sight, a spot unlikely to be invaded by this duel.

-Zhangmei33: Cri—

Henry Flower: Monitor for any intruders and give me the space to concentrate. Notify me, but don’t stop them. I’ll accept anyone volunteering their bodies for a shield.

-Zhangmei33: Got it.

Although he gave this order, he didn’t anticipate any further external meddling - even, oddly, from Karnon. This should be a straightforward 1v1. And if it wasn't, then millions would die.

The sole anomalous variable was buffing up his freak opponent. Alone, two main methods were available to defeat this. One would be to counter power with more power, as he had so often in the past, the ol’ Cripple whipping out the stack of cheats, his Tier-8 Spelltomes, his Legendary Armament set. The other was to, while leaving the disadvantage intact, demolish his opponent honestly, through an extravagant outplay with the help of a martial art he’d recently developed.

Both options would ultimately expose Henry irrespective of whether or not Ramiro chose to, both being different ways of losing, giving up some of his secrets, preserving others.

Henry, his plans thrown into disarray by the previous shock revelation from the Amulet, considered flipping a coin for which tactic to pick. But, instead of hiding away in fate, it was his duty to use his knowledge to make what he assumed to be the best of the choices available and to then live with the consequences.

While sizing up Ramiro, he paused again for a few seconds. In this break, he pretended as if he were naively pondering the many factors, the costs and risks and gains, until the final plan formed for approaching the unavoidable defeat in style.

Use A Thousand Tools. Win.

It seemed that he would be debuting the supreme martial art right now.

Ramiro, staring back, had observed the first switch from flight to fight, the silent transition when the prey, recognising their inability to retreat, began to calculate which parts of your body could be maimed by their surprise rebellion. This pleased him. One should resist until the end. Man ascended to his greatest heights in these moments of resistance.

“I’m no roleplayer,” Ramiro refuted the earlier accusation out loud. “It might give you comfort to believe me one, but I’m not. Your sentimentality is not inevitable. Some of us just happen to not be teary-eyed faggots too weak to maintain our composure.”

Mirroring The Tyrant, he ripped off his ogre mask to reveal his visage beneath, grinning.

When The Saviour normally smiled, there’d always been a trace of irony, a humorous note sneaking in from a comical fact withheld from the unenlightened. Now, that secret that’d given him such private pleasure was brought to the forefront of his two lips, displayed by the framing of his goatee and jaw drenched in crimson.

He flashed this cannibal’s smile at a cameraman so that every one of his stolen followers watching could admire the filth in their saviour’s mouth, could witness the repulsive nature of those who dominated them.

Then, Ramiro was re-concealed by a suit of metal armour materialising and enclosing around him; except for a driftwood crown carved into the breastplate to distinguish its owner, the armour was of a humble design, sturdy and practical for the kind of close-quarters urban combat prevalent in Suchi. His weapons were similarly pragmatic - a spear, a shield, a shortsword, and a dagger.

A hush settled upon the spectators, who, although recognising the face, the voice, and the equipment of their leader, struggled to fit it into the context. Why would King Ramiro be here substituting in a match against The Oracle? Why did it seem like they’d been chatting via message? Why had he, the most gentle and modest of their royals, sworn so profanely? Why was such a selfless soul costumed as a ghoulish street murderer? Why was his kindly mouth stained with blood?

"Holy smokes," screeched the match announcer, "King Ramiro is about to personally beat the crap out of this Company brat! Finally, the people will have our righteous vengeance. Get hyped, comrades! Saviour! Saviour! Saviour! Saviour…”

“Saviour! Saviour! Saviour…”

“Saviour! Saviour! Saviour…”

“Saviour! Saviour! Saviour…”

“Saviour! Saviour! Saviour…”

Their confusion vanished in the wall of unconditional support. The arena stage was shaken by the one-word chant, thousands of voices punching forth their leader’s title again and again like a fist into the teenager’s smug mug. In their fanaticism, all that existed was the duel ahead, and the dead girl's corpse was forgotten.

“Please,” Henry replied tiredly to this scumbag’s insult, The ‘Saviour’ being far from the first blowhard to mistake the wounds of compassion for fragility. “Anyone can emulate a staunch posture when carrying absolutely nothing. This spine of mine may be bent and broken, but it still has some of the old strength left in it. Come. Let me show you a fraction of what it took to hold up the world for a while.”

The air around him glittered as he summoned his tools. Within seconds, the crowd had fallen quiet again.