Suchi, The Soiree in The Slums, the crowded nocturnal streets astir with some exciting drama.

“Justinian, be a good boy and substitute your young ears for mine. What are the children shouting about?”

“The cause of their delirium, I cannot scry, Lady Rancok…”

“’The Saviour’, is it? Is our gentle king under attack?”

A familiar gold-plated figure was conversing with an elderly Ibanmothe woman.

While others were out tonight on fun dates, Justinian The Great had, yet again, been trapped by the knight’s hopeless code of chivalry. This time, he’d been roped into guarding an old crone pretending to be on an important delivery mission while she actually meandered around the festival sampling the delicacies given to the Crusader free-of-charge as thanks for earlier deeds of petty heroism.

Their wandering had been disrupted a moment earlier by the crack of thunder in the sky – an ominous event in Suchi, where there were no clouds. Now, seeming to follow that mysterious omen, the festivalgoers around them were shouting while they crammed themselves into venues with projectors or shone footage directly on the dirt of the road.

“Justinian, spare me your young eyes.” The old woman, not sight-impaired but unable to see the Offworlder magic, asked him to narrate events for her.

“My holy eyes gaze past the devil’s trickery, too, my lady.” The Crusader feigned obliviousness to the anachronistic non-medieval devices.

The crone gave the boy a hopeless sigh and ducked into a sports bar with a screen.

Justinian lingered in place, roleplaying his mystification at the mass hysteria until he’d eavesdropped enough from those around him to piece together that King Ramiro was in a duel with none other than Sir Henry.

Unwilling to miss out on the match, the Crusader grabbed his brow as if afflicted by a cosmic migraine. “So it was the lord all along! He tested this servant’s faith before granting him the Goodfolk's collective vision!”

Having fixed his roleplaying-induced problem with roleplay, he squeezed into a circle of players huddling around a projection on the ground.

The group were tossing a string of blasphemies at Sir Henry for foul-play involving a weird device of spinning construction materials.

Justinian, his knight vision sharp and true, could read the obvious control of the woodswarm, along with its many gaps that the king’s slow, amateur swordwork missed. At once, he surmised the reality of this battle, that the combatant mounting the heroic defence against impossible circumstances was not their leader floundering away but Sir Henry. Sir Henry, facing his adversary shining with , was like a knight tasked with using a wooden spoon to slay an adamant-scaled wyvern. This would be difficult even for Justinian.

The Crusader's heart sank with disappointment at King Ramiro’s reliance on this unjust enhancement. The goodfolk could only rise to the level of chivalry exemplified by the nobility. Even against a follower of Him, a righteous king should have either dispelled the Blessing or conceded, defeat preferable to an unmerited victory. These tactics were more befitting of an immoral villain - like Him.

On the other side, The Crusader's chest inflated with a little pride at Sir Henry for finally absorbing his teachings and minimising his cowardly kiting tactics - a proper knight fought their adversary man to man, not always with his back turned. The weapon-juggling that followed the whirlwind was also impressive. The options created by the additional weapons shored up the usual openings generated by Sir Henry’s abysmal reflexes. Justinian’s sole criticism of the technique was its hints of promiscuity. A true knight, a paragon of chaste loyalty, should devote his pure soul to a single holy weapon, preferably a sword - and preferably a two-handed sword, shields exhibiting a lack of faith in God’s divine protection. The Crusader would need to have a stern word with Sir Henry about his moral errors during their next training session.

When Sir Henry’s arm got chopped off, when the streets around Justinian broke into celebration, the Crusader gave a slight nod of knowing, as if this'd been the inevitable end.

Indeed, failure and worse awaited all who forsook the Lord’s light to follow in the shadowed path.

Nearby, a jazz concert in an intimate shack venue, attended by a couple dozen enthusiasts lounging at tables and on couches.

In a scene mirroring the other performances around The Slums, the band had laid aside their instruments mid-show and joined the audience in cheering and swearing at a live projection from the duel between their valiant king and the impudent, cheating dog from The Company.

In the rowdy audience sat a spy, one who'd been addressed by many names - Loki, Artemis, Hugo Nilsson. He’d been watching the show reclined on a sofa, a drunken girl nuzzling against him with indifference to the duel or the politics. The girl was a different face from the one he’d been hooking up with during the coincidental run-in with The Tyrant earlier, the previous one ditched after he fucked her in a back-alley.

In the various personas Hugo'd adopted during his missions, he'd slept with dozens of other players—with men and women, and as men and women—and he’d gotten decent enough at simulating the proper physical reactions. At no point, however, had he spared much thought about how he felt about the matter. While fucking the previous girl unmasked, he’d discovered no pleasure in the act, her body about as sensuous to him as a steak wrapped in wet cellophane. He couldn’t be sure, however, whether his indifference was due to being unattracted to that girl specifically—who’d been a bit ugly, Hugo picking her out to save the effort—or due to being unattracted to girls in general. Thus, he’d switched his pincers to a hotter body, in whose flesh his fingers had been numbly searching for himself during this concert.

That was where the spy had been with Hugo’s identity crisis charade. Now, he’d discarded that last mask.

Observing this unexpected duel, the spy had instantly apprehended the collapse of his schemes in Suchi.

With Karnon forcing the premature revelation of The Tyrant’s martial art, this backwater zone, and the teen hiding pseudo-anonymously within it, were about to be inundated with international attention. In the noise to come, no quiet would be left for the spy to complete the subtle charade of sympathy and confusion through his multi-layered identity crisis. The Company’s spy-master would stick the Jakartan boys on The Tyrant, blocking any assassinations, any attempts at stealing the Legendary Class ritual he’d been preparing - that was assuming the kid stuck around.

There'd be a few hours before the major counter-operations began, but the spy couldn't think of any worthwhile targets to eliminate in that time. The morose NPC teenager, the 'Donkey Bro' who'd stayed briefly in Byzantium, had been hidden by the paranoid Tyrant after the latter suspected he'd betrayed their friendship the other day - which he had. Unlucky.

Therefore, the spy’s job was finished here, he having no further need to juggle this one mission's disguises.

He wouldn’t be wallowing in his failure. He’d understood from the outset the inherent fragility of plots this convoluted, the extreme risk adding to the challenge and thrill. The few weeks he’d lost were nothing either; the lessons from this defeat would only serve to help him refine his methodology.

He supposed that trait, more than any laughable doubts about who they might be ‘under the mask’, was what he and The Tyrant truly shared in common. Really, they had no doubts or any other negative feelings to muddle them up. The Tyrant, whenever you killed the NPCs he’d befriended, demonstrated the superficial signs of grief and guilt, but the depth of those emotions was always exposed by his immediate resumption of his mission to perfect war or—these days, after beating everyone—this cute martial art side-show. In the exact same fashion, the spy also single-mindedly dedicated himself to his own missions, refining his own idealised visions of subterfuge and assassination. And, deep down, that’s all the two of them were, things that chase difficult goals, monsters at the demonic limits of the will. The idea of them having ever been anything but this, that was the mask. The false appearance of humanity floated over the surface of themselves, but it never made direct contact, never—fundamentally—risked the mission. Even the self-doubts were just another part of the disguise, part of the complex of mimed insecurities adopted to hide unbothered while one chased amongst humanity, who reacted like they’d spotted an insect that must be stamped to death at any glimpse of the true face that was incapable of articulating an expression as dull-witted as doubt. The Tyrant, still a teenager, still relying on the childhood charades that’d once served him, had simply yet to pause, revaluate, and realise that he had outgrown their pragmatic necessity.

Before the spy moved on, he stayed to observe the remainder of the duel, studying The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo’s finalised, functional form. His eyes, usually carrying a faint trace of self-control, poured over the duelling teen with open greed, shining with a rare glimmer of genuine interest. He, whose cognitive abilities weren’t lacking, picked out the potential value in stealing parts of this cerebralised system for himself, and a fantastic imagery carouselled through his mind of the past assassinations that might not have failed and the future ones he’d erroneously dismissed as impossible.

When the audience cheered at The Tyrant losing his arm, the spy joined their revelry, laughing with the full force of his unrestrained lungs, his volume amplifying again at the duel’s fatal conclusion a few moments later.

"Bravo!" the spy roared and clapped. "Hail to The Tyrant!"

Then, as he’d appeared in Suchi from nowhere, so he vanished, deleting this persona to start the next in his interminable pursuit.

His honest laughter had possessed such an unsettling quality that his date, abandoned without a word, was left with a greater sense of relief than confusion. Sobering up a little, she got to her feet before he might return and staggered back off into the strange night, hoping to relocate her friends in the dark, winding streets.

The New Suchi Arena.

A fire-fighting team, stationed in the stadium 24/7 in case of arson attacks, were isolating and extinguishing a chunk of the venue’s massive perimeter that’d ignited after being zapped by Karnon’s mischievous lightning.

But this burning commotion had captured none of the arena’s trainees.

In the armouries, in the stands, in the tunnels and mock hamlets where they’d been bloodying themselves, and wherever else one might glance, they were all huddled, transfixed in the same reverent trance. The wrestler with his misdirected love, the Arcanist swordsman who’d been one of the first to notice, and the thousands of other youths lured into this bastion of duelling - all stared like hypnotised chickens at projections of the match between The Slum’s leader and the mysterious teen, whose mysteries were melting away before the trainees’ astounded eyes. Here, their lips muttered only the occasional exclamation of astonishment. From this lot, no insults would be wasted against HF, no accusations of cheating or hacking. Their loyalties to The Slums, The City, or The Company had long been purged, all of them thoroughly converted to the church of the 1v1.

As converts, what they beheld, the completion of this creation they’d glimpsed in vague fragments over the past week...how could one translate the beauty of such a thing to words?

The tallest mountain ranges form a rain shadow, blocking the passage of wind-carried moisture to their leeward side, which turns into desert. The duellists were like climbers transported to the peak of such a range. Through HF’s demonstration of the heights, they gazed in awe at the terrain stretching on both sides. Behind them was the aridity of the land in whose dunes they’d been unwittingly trudging. Ahead was a stormy torrent, the future green with the overflowing rivers of extravagant possibility.

Or perhaps they were more akin to musicians, and the multi-weaponed art he used to tame this tirading beast was like an orchestra with a thousand strings and horns in perfect rhapsodic unity. A musician, when catching the voice of their instrument singing in a symphony, hears something more than the layperson, hears—with the played notes contrasted against the body of notes accumulated in themselves from their own music-making—the finer masteries of timbre and timing and melodic expression and the slotting within the symphonic whole. Likewise, every duellist formed a richer relationship with their weapons, their own recollected notes being the impacts of axes shattering bones and arrows piercing eyeballs. As the weapons flowed through HF’s hands, as their weapons were each borrowed for a phrase to shape out the extended design, the duellists found themselves swept along in the movements of the deadly symphony, their muscles and guts evoking the carnal remembrances, the exhilarating music of harmonious bloodshed.

When HF’s arm came off, the duellists winced, remembering that sensation, too.

Central City, a Company Trading Post.

The city at the heart of Suchi was designed to be a fortress, its towering clay perimeter suffused with hardening magic to prevent the inner peace from being breached by the mayhem and filth outside. Within the fortress city, The Company’s Trading Post stood as an even more robust fortress, its labyrinth of walls made doubly sturdy to appease The Tyrant’s stricter sense of who was filth.

Tonight, these impenetrable walls had trapped The Trading Post’s occupants when a small army of elemental golems invaded. Those stuck inside, if they could not fight, had taken to hiding, while the monsters roamed the complex hunting them down. Every now and then, screams echoed in the passageways of a poor soul being discovered.

The Company responded fast. Every branch had been repeating catastrophe drills since yesterday’s attack by Karnon. Here, after recuperating from the initial shock, the players had organised into teams that swept through the fortress, clearing the golems out one section at a time. The buildings’ narrow, chokepoint-laden layout meant the teams had to attack the monsters in waves, the frontmost members continuously getting obliterated. But the players being churned up had no qualms, the suicidal action a fun change of pace from the usual boredom of The City.

Following close in the rear of the combat players was a train of support units, including medics to treat the wounded NPCs picked up along the journey. Injuries sustained after the HP pool’s total depletion didn’t self-heal by restoring the lost health; as such, they needed to be fixed via more laborious procedures.

One of the medics and her assistant were healing a merchant who’d been impaled in the chest by an ice stalactite.

Magic from an Arcaneworker-made operating table enabled her to visualise a detailed map of the internal damage through the patient’s skin. This guided her in efficiently directing mending spells to reconnect the severed tissues. Due to the ice stalactite completely shattering some of the organs, they had to be regrown from scratch with Alchemical materials attuned with the patient’s physical constitution. In emergencies, a rough, universal concoction was employed with side-effects that could be addressed later once they’d been stabilised.

Her spellcasting came to an abrupt stop when her patient disintegrated into lights.

“Fudge!” the medic swore. “Should have spent a Miracle…”

Her NPC assistant muttered an Ibangua prayer. “Spill nought for our brother passing between forms. He does not ride North, and he walks above the clay.”

The medic marked the fatality in a group interface and signalled to the medics handling triage further ahead that she was ready for another. The operating table was cleaned by her assistant, who, even in this emergency scenario, took special care to collect the left-over blood for The Church’s mortuary rituals – they went so far as to store the medic’s surgery garments, which had to be replaced with each patient.

While she waited for the next, she noticed a colleague behaving oddly in an adjacent worksite. In the middle of rebuilding an NPC’s shattered bowels, they were mumbling and grunting at a projection with the fervour of a football fan.

Curious, the medic joined them.

What they were watching turned out to be a duel, a teen using a dizzying array of techniques to wail on Ramiro with surgical precision. The Slum’s thug of a leader was amassing shots to vital points that should have severely debilitated him but weren’t, a fact that confused the medic until she recognised the urine-gold glow on his skin of .

“Wow.” She remarked in surprise, having never witnessed a fight remotely similar to this.

“Kid’s one of ours,” explained her colleague. “Stubborn as a Company dog. He’s been styling on The Saviour for several minu—"

“FOCUS ON YOUR FUCKING WORK! THEY’RE DYING!”

The pair jumped, startled by the yell of a young woman rushing past transporting a person who’d been burned to the point that their sex couldn’t be identified. The young woman, herself a sorry sight after swimming through the messy passageways up ahead, glared hatefully at them as she lay the wounded NPC at another station, before sprinting back into the fray.

The medic, unable to pick out a rank from the yeller’s bespattered uniform, returned to her empty operating table just in case.

Her next patient was an old geezer who’d been struck by an Earth Golem’s boulder. While repairing his exploded lungs, she gave a sudden glance at her colleague, who’d stealthily returned to spectating the match.

“Hey,” she called out in epiphany, "wasn’t that Silver Wolf?”

“Who was?”

“The hysterical girl.”

“Crap!” The colleague swore as the duelling teen blundered and lost his arm.