"FUCK OFF! DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!"

Ramiro—panicking as he sensed The Tyrant fighting to bind him in another inhuman rhythm, finding himself suddenly engaged in a tug-of-war with this monster of order attempting to box him in—pounced the teen amidst the forming weapons, his sword clawing with murderous liberty, raking to break the teen’s rule-bound stride.

Despite this savage tempest, this tantrum from his heart, his aim to kill was by the pesky tools denied. The weapons swapped through turns at HF’s side, and helped the teen his to cast, while maintaining the pace of his rule-bound stride.

Shing! Thump! Their thrashed anatomy cried, but the brute’s club could not their steel surpass, his maims and thrills by the tools denied.

This was the civil son’s reward for his jungle pride

Abandoned, the gain of—

Ramiro abruptly side-stepped, changing the trajectory of his sprinting from pursuing The Tyrant to ducking behind a bell-shaped statue about to pass them by. For two seconds, he stood warily in place, raising his shield, listening intently, as if he’d switched to defensive play to hug the statue’s cover for healing. Then, as abruptly as he’d stopped, he dashed forward again, swinging his sword at the empty air ahead of him.

Shing! With a familiar clash, his cleaving weapon was parried by the rapier held over his opponent’s front, the teen emerging from the statue’s front to maintain the harassment.

Their weapons clashing further, Ramiro pushed forward against the teen, his arm jackhammering with relentless stabs, the pair of them moving through the dissipating lights of tardy weapons rendered useless by Ramiro’s unpredictable attacks. Allowing his adversary no space, he struck out wildly with both his sword and shield, the shield, though not , doing its work walloping the teen’s side again and again and screwing up his attempts to recover the order necessary to use his weapons.

His beleaguered opponent was compelled to defend his attacks with a shield

Of his own, to regather his wits, recompos—

Ramiro, the 6-second cycle of his sword expiring, didn’t switch the ability onto his shield as The Tyrant had tried to bait him into doing by accepting the previous hits. Refusing to comply with this brat’s measured notion of him, he continued clawing with his feral sword.

But in the storm of blows,

By the king’s shield-side sprouted,

Like a calm lagoon

Of an island in the Pacific’s tempests,

A space for HF to—

Ramiro flung one of his legs out, kicking aside a summoned hand-axe at his waist about to be employed to trip him. His shield simultaneously punched down, smacking the teen lunging for the axe on the top of the crown of his helmet, and his sword sneaking under the shield’s approach stabbed through the meat of the teen’s shoulder.

The Tyrant, to avoid a more deadly blow, had leapt askew and flip-rolled back upright after the failed move.

The king fought on to stop the teen regaining the rhythm lost. His sword and shield assaulted his foe with rapid nicks and knocks.

The defending teen was forced to retreat, towards the temple’s edge. As he neared the precipice, archers and mages throughout the crowd below spied a brilliant chance to help their struggling king.

They drew their bows and prepped their spells, and waited for their king’s

Attack to make the backing target into their sightline move.

But the teen had more immediate concerns than the nearing crowd.

Entangled in the king’s untamed clawings, he almost lost

His head to the sword, if not for a lucky shield that blocked its edge.

To disengage, he kicked The Saviour’s chest, his boot knock—

Ramiro, with the faster speed of one unbound by rules, had used . His bodyweight tripled. His feet cemented to the arena stage. With him anchored so, the teen’s boot came to a dead stop against his chest, the kick able to knock him no further back than if it’d been dealt to a grizzly bear. With equal force to this mighty forest beast, Ramiro, having dropped his sword, snatched to grab the leg offered by mistake from his foe.

By arresting him so, the king could halt his evasions and land a hit to slay this foe. His fingers—seizing his enemy’s knee, hoping to force it to bend in a loss—crumbled against the boss of another nuisance shield summoned to aid his foe.

A centimetre-thick wall of steel - this tool the king’s bestial clutches constrained. Like an ox tamed to pull a plough, his subdued grab pushed the leg beneath down, disengaging his foe.

But not all the king’s hope for death were dashed. The leg dislodgement was strange, defective, awkward - he detected discomposure as the teen fell back into the floating weapons, which were disarrayed. His foe had been overwhelmed for a second between the king, the kick’s recovery, and the sudden awareness of the crowd behind, whose spells and unkind arrows were ready to join this fight against their Saviour’s foe.

Thus, for a fleeting moment, the teen had left his front wide open for attack.

Simultaneously, the king’s attack cooldown had reset. A perfect shot, if he chased his foe.

He slipped his dagger out of his sheathe…

And did nothing. Ramiro, alarmed by something insidious within The Tyrant’s bumbling, didn’t pursue. Cautiously squatting down to retrieve his dropped sword, he kept his shield raised while monitoring his stumbling enemy over the rim.

A moment later, The Tyrant, abruptly regaining his composure, ducked and hugged the temple’s low outer wall. In the next instant, over that same wall, a massive load of spells and arrows from the incensed crowd poured, hundreds of projectiles condensed in a thick, colourful torrent of death rushing like water escaping a broken dam. The low-flying shots blasted holes into the temple’s exterior, while the rest inundated the space where the teen had been pretending to bumble.

At the sight of The Tyrant calmly ducking this load, Ramiro comprehended the danger that his wild heart had grasped in an instant, as it’d detected the unnatural order in his foe’s fraudulent blunder.

His first thought had been to maintain the chaotic momentum, rushing forward into an opening with his dagger. The moment he’d advanced, however, The Tyrant would have made an abrupt switch from the evasive manoeuvring he’d been doing thus far to grappling. One lulled into his rhythms might’ve assumed that, due to the constant threat of instant-death, the teen had decided to avoid grappling out of caution. But this was an error. He’d only maintained what distance he had due to the hidden presence of , this Fighter’s weight-increasing skill, which made their bodies too cumbersome to manipulate. The instant Ramiro’s moved his feet now, this ability would be cancelled and put on cooldown. The instant he’d moved forward without its protection, The Tyrant, as confident using his limbs to grapple as he was with his weapons, would have wrestled Ramiro into the rain of projectiles. Thereby, in this deflated moment of observation and epiphany, The Saviour of The Slums should have been finished off by the attacks hurled from his own people – a poetic end.

This avoided demise is what Ramiro saw in the teen ducking under the spells and arrows flying overhead, harmless as fireworks wasted in the night sky, a convoluted strategy foiled by the quicker wits of savage instinct.

But Ramiro had no time to gloat. His instincts flared again, when he caught a sudden increase in the volume of light-motes pouring out of The Tyrant’s Spatial Bracelet.

A summoned load was pooling to their side,

A circle of sneaky items, crafty supplies.

HF flicked a spell to blind the king’s

gaze, while rolling—

Ramiro, picking his sword from the ground and using a Bullet-Time charge, dashed forward to fight The Tyrant away.

The two of them were soon battling in between the condensing lights of planks, ladders, and boxes, The Tyrant sneakily attempting to summon a replacement wood-swarm – the device light enough for carrying spares.

Ramiro, refusing to fight this horrid thing again, hammered with his sword and shield at the teen to bully him off the spot. His foe meanwhile, stopping spell-casting completely to prioritise reactivating the timber pieces, focused entirely on weapon-play while aiming to create a safe path to grapple, for either pinning or throwing the king. But Ramiro was insistent; he abandoned all the swordsman’s predictable caution and committed himself forward with his body’s full weight, ignoring the harmless attacks like a wolf invading the nest of a goose. The King, with hulking force, unyielding might, advanced and bashed at shields, axes, and swords.

The teen did try to hold the whirlwind’s site, but was quickly forced to cede his timber hoard. Ramiro shoved him off the finished swarm, before he could connect the magic link to animate them, to make them rise and soar.

His careful plan destroyed, he raced to think. The passing seconds grew the gap, as King Ramiro’s weapon beat him further off. His eyes surveyed for chances, wondering how to reclaim his wood and the rhythm lost.

As the blood diverted from his limbs to brain, he tripped.

The King lunged and stabbed.

In vain.

While his weapon dove for HF’s twisting back, the teen mid-fall had caught a spell. A door engulfed his toppling form, and the stab, instead of his liver, instead of fatal gore, pierced a pillar of bright-hot flame, which bathed the king in fire and singed his goatee bald as it passed through him and spat out the teen safe in place with the wooden troops awaiting his call.

HF crouched low, and pressed to his chest a hand, then pulled out motes, a string of glowing pearls, which he linked to the wood arranged in its circle plan by touching each in a practised, wake-up twirl.

So the pieces rose from their sleeping graves, like ghouls, rejoining their necromancer’s thousand tools.

Ramiro, twisting ‘round to see the swarm’s return, the completion of a dread design, received another jolt of boyhood trauma. At once, as though the weight of heaven’s skies had thunder-smacked his minute form,

the wretch

Perceived the laws inscribing his forecast defeat.

He felt the limit to which his arm could stretch,

The heights to which his weighted legs could leap,

The volume at which his voice could shout, his throat’s

Walls collapsing, his air-impoverished lungs.

His eyeballs bulged like a frightened son who’s choked.

But unlike those who’d fallen still, the young

Within his grip, he would fight his father’s rule

Until the end.

With his club, he sprint to face

The moralising teen and his ordered tools.

Ramiro plunged into their thick embrace,

Like a jaguar leaping into the jungle shade,

To the dark unknown, where ogre-fathers reign.

The teen, under attack, sustained his trance,

His order undisturbed. He fought with the calm of

A matador inviting a bull to dance,

To sweat and sway before its estocada.

HF—having baited ,

Whose extra weight had been forcing him to flee

The clinch—enticed his foe to nearer bounds.

Of the tools for tonight’s task, the last was he.

To the magic, steel, and wood, he gave his soul,

Their volleys, parries, and trips, by his flesh complete.

His palms, the king’s attacking sword-wrist, controlled.

His sweeping legs dislodged Ramiro’s feet.

With his arms, he placed Ramiro’s joints in locks

With his bowing waist, he raised the king for throws.

As a seasoned handler tames a writhing croc

With ease, he was not scared to hug him close

And feel the raging limb-heat, the grunted moans,

To be painted red by his rival’s sweat-mixed blood,

To blend the fumes of his date-worn cologne

With the dead girl scent on Ramiro’s tongue.

His magic chipped away with a sculptor’s peace,

Methodically around this hardened lug,

Here and there, removing shards, the King

Slowly reduced, revealed as a crownless thug.

But this evil portrait, Ramiro would not contest.

He’d yanked the father’s fingers from his throat

And filled the growing lungs of his savage breast.

He would be their ogre, their monstrous oaf.

Toss him in the graves of men with crimson fangs,

In whose guts the sweet laments of children sang.

In the crimson reverie, the king and HF brawled,

The unbound body versus the ordered brain;

The driftwood Slum, the city’s clay-built walls,

Freedom versus law, the bestial saint

In hostile feud with the civil-hearted boy.

The duellists danced the stage with rhythmed form.

In one phase, King Ramiro tried destroy

The wood again.

But HF, his muscles warmed,

Defended his troops himself. Since he’d trained to tank

With shield and sword, the king’s attack he could brunt.

Next, he was wrestling from Ramiro’s flank,

And fisting into his royal butt.

One minute, King Ramiro was sprinting after

The teen in Cheetah form.

Then, the cheating hound

Was back to box and chant as a hybrid caster.

The next, HF stole a heal from a Count

Intruding.

There, this friendly helper died,

Beheaded by his grace, the saintly brute.

Then HF mockingly aped the savage guy,

By returning to their primate roots.

He crafted bridges from his timber swarm,

Monkey leapt along the statue tops,

And up the temple’s terraced stories soared,

While hurling spells at the king like faeces hot.

At last, Ramiro’s whittled health approached

Its end, the brute subdued by the modern mind.

The king, refusing still his final reproach,

Like a boy who from a drunken father hides,

Delayed by hugging a statue’s shade, to buy

A chance to heal.

His fans implored the saint;

They howled for him to battle on.

But their cries

And yelps of shame to fight, their judging plaints

Didn’t stir his wounded soul. A beast that shivers,

Alone,

he only heard his drive to live.

While Ramiro held his ground, the teen had run,

Had sprinted to the stage’s centre point,

The summit with a sprawling view of The Slums

And crowd.

For them all, he cast the last exploit,

to rush a .

Fire spells, in Suchi, the Church and his guild alone

Could wield, for reasons one would now observe.

As the hiding king the teen a break bestowed,

As the crowd harassed the kid with shouts obscene,

He spewed a wall of flame that split and dashed

Across the temple top and caressed the Queen’s

Statues, each one carved from discount ashwood.

The Counts on stage, seeing the fire erupt,

Leapt to their feet with hopes to interrupt.

But HF, the arena’s layout scorched in his brain,

In a blink had finger-sketched his heated aims.

In seconds, the temple burned with a scorching flare,

Dispersed with such 3-D precision to wipe

Out every single statue, while the ground it spared.

The crowd, enduring the rising, flaming sight,

Were stung by bitter memories of the monthly purge,

When to ash their shacks were turned, to smoke their work.

Ramiro noticed only once the blaze

Was reaching him to burn his shelter last,

Once all the nooks in which a beast might evade

The Tyrant’s endless-stretching rule were arsoned.

The King, his jungle burned, attempted one last

Attack.

Racing into the open, he climbed

The temple’s platformed stage. He sprinted past

His goons scrambling to douse the spreading fires,

And he brought to HF shooting spells from high

The twilight jungle that in every man resides.

In flame and smoke, they shared the final kiss

Of gore. Like lustful youths, they mixed their fluids

And swords, descending down the blood abyss,

Recalled to the primal hell of flesh’s ruin,

To mankind’s gloomy dawn, where abstract minds

Still slept, the body’s savage, dreamless state,

The realm where logic only death would find,

Where the ego’s bounds dissolved in fists and hate.

Yet their combat ceased to leave a conscious rhyme,

Which fixed their bloodshed’s scope to ordered tim—

“DIE!”

The battle’s end abruptly came.

The king, with the speed of chaos unconstrained, from their blurring limbs, a chance had sharply gleaned—from the suspect mix of a brandnew spell, a beam misplaced, and a shield forming slightly slow—and he’d swung.

“NO!” a girl’s voice shrieked below.

In the crowd erupted the first delighted screams, their shouts exploding faster than the teen’s arm—the Saviour’s weapon, splitting a beam, beating a forming shield, and biting clean from HF’s shoulder to armpit—could strike the ground with a sickening thump.

His reaching limb, which’d been bound to the path of a waiting spell, was severed off.

It joined the rest bestrewing the temple, those lost from previous duels in which youths had blundered.

The temple shook, and the sky gave laughing thunder at this humbling lesson to countless geniuses told:

A fight was not a place for thinking bold, not a place for plans, not a place for complex tools. Wherever blood and chaos bloomed, the rules laid down by mankind’s ceaseless march through time, enabling minds the highest peaks to climb, the lofty dreams of boys who gaze at stars, expired as quick and pointless as swords through hearts.