A city’s slums, where the dreams of children choke, where a teen and king collide in fire and smoke.

“NO!”

“YES!”

“THAT’S IT!”

“NICE!”

“IN YOUR FUCKING FACE!”

The blood-mad crowd around the temple’s base erupted loud with cheerful glee, when the teen who’d dared to test their noble liege, who’d toyed and mocked at sword and hearts, received his rightful justice with his cocky arm.

The teen on stage, with slow reflexes, was late to feel his sword-cleaved shoulder separate.

Every duellist filtered the pain from harm inflicted to their wounded avatars, but the best retained a part to flag them quick when in fights too fast to think they took a nick. When the pained sensation reached the teen, he felt—as the nerves that’d run his arm’s full length belted a synchronised lament, their signal sung—as if his amputated limb had plunged into a tub of liquid scalding hot.

For those not used to such strange pain, the shock possessed a mystic trait that cleared the head. In a flash, the troubling thoughts, the constant dread, the frets and doubts by which the brain was clogged would empty out for a mind-consuming throb, reminding us that what we were, before all else, were fragile sacks of blood that tore, avoiding dismal deaths by sharp-fanged beasts.

Such was the shock for children raised on peace.

But this teen, though young, was not unschooled in pain; his face was weathered flat from crimson rains. His previous years had been one hard, prolonged tuition in painful loss, in staying strong. In the duties locked inside his soul unspoke, rarely slipping through his lips stitched closed, were the losses suffered through his daily plight, the severed limbs he climbed in sleepless nights.

To not by the flood of wounds be caught and drowned, a vital skill he’d taught himself was how to soldier through the sting, to hold the reins when bathed neck-deep in hell’s consuming blaze, to guide his armies’ titan anatomy and raise its intact limbs from the bloody sea, to right himself when keeled by mortal blows and fix his grip on the mountain’s endless slope.

In contrast with the Everest of limbs he’d shed already, one more was not too grim. It would not disrupt his stride, the ceaseless order. In fact, as also often occurred in warfare’s demented math of mutilated boys, one might choose to lose a limb in the general ploy.

Before he’d tried to grab a spell, the teen—

Before the sword had cleaved his shoulder clean—

Had swept The Saviour’s leg to break its grip

On solid ground and tripped the final quip.

It was in this ploy Ramiro’d spied his shot.

The teen, ignoring instinct’s call to dodge

The strike, continued through the weapon’s arc,

Assisting the blade to hit and split its mark

Of meat, as he reached his target’s open side.

With his remaining limb, he hooked a royal prize -

Ramiro’s sword-arm.

And—like a matador

Who strokes the passing bull and feels the scored,

Exhausted hide with muscles blood-moist and large,

And guides it through its valiant ending charge—

He steered the king towards the estocada.

And, sometimes, in war, the limbs you risked? Nada.

As he seized control of the king mid-lunge,

A half a second after his arm had stung,

From the shoulder stump that gushed its red cascade,

Slick and naked like a newborn babe

Emerging from its mother’s anguished groans,

Erupted the fist and wrist of

an arm

regrown.

The teen, who’d whipped with ease this cannibal sinner,

Had health to spare a measly limb for dinner.

Without a wince or cry at the harmless scratch,

He stretched his reborn fingers out to snatch

The spell his previous arm had tried too boldly.

“ÉAG!”

His hand ablaze with fiery gold,

HF raised The Saviour’s arm he’d hooked

And gently spanked the armpit of the crook.

Precise, the hit was aimed between a pair

Of kingly ribs. Between these bones, a flare

Slipped through to carve a scorching path; it flayed

Muscle, skin, and fat, invading its way,

Into the scoundrel’s chest, the inner chamber

That housed the lungs and heart corrupt with hatred,

Whose blackened surface the holy spellflame drunk.

The damage spread throughout Ramiro’s trunk.

Amongst the organs burnt to ash in the heat

Was the king’s aorta, the crucial artery

Through which his oxygenated blood was fed

To fuel his bestial form and savage head.

And that—the labour done to whittle down

The inflated health and pride of this savage clown—

Was the fatal stroke. Unlike his opponent’s hacked

Arm, Ramiro’s heart would not be back.

No pulse, he went to death’s climactic night.

Although his heart had stopped, the fight didn’t quite end there.

The king continued to swing and claw his weapon wildly in the seconds left before his oxygen-deprived brain shutdown.

His flailing lucked a stab in HF’s guts.

That would have been a mortal wound so fast after the armloss, if not for HF’s Class, if not for the Flora Charges he'd kept to spend on a . His health had been replenished.

A quirk of this wonky magebuild, soft as eggshell, of neglecting vital stats to pump his spells was that he could restore his puny pool of health, with any minor heal, to full - so long as he dodged the wounds that insta-snuffed. In a funny play, had this match been close, old tough Ramiro would’ve found the fatal strike he’d chased was somewhat false. The teen, through heals well-placed, could also shrug a thousand wounds, the floor repainted red with his severed limbs and gore. But the king was too inept to face this party trick until the end, when HF, his victory fixed, dispensed an arm just to end this duel a second faster.

The teen shoved the fool’s stabbing arm away, dislodging the saber, and returned a to the neck of The Saviour. The spellblast fried the brachial plexus nerves controlling King Ramiro’s arm, and the perv’s fingers, seizing, went limp. His weapon fell.

Safe, the teen approached up close his quelled opponent and gave a tight-gripped hug of love - like a grey-haired father might his wayward son, the childish sins of rebel youth erased.

HF’s weak spells could not perforate his skull for the instant death, nor saw his neck.

As such, embracing Ramiro’s half-dead wreck, he lugged it waltzing around a scene of lights, while catching an and to ignite The Saviour’s gaping armpit hole, to tear and mangle his inner organs beyond repair.

Against this end, The Saviour squirmed and clawed like the kids he’d killed for reasons sad and poor. He tried his best but failed to break the grip. He scratched and flailed and screamed at the hugging kid to die, to die, to die, to die, to die, to die…to die…to die……to die……to die………

As the hand of death his curtains closed, his last reserves of violent struggle slowed, and his raging cries declined to a whispered halt.

In Ramiro’s last pathetic squirms of revolt, the teen who hugged his body felt his own ejecting the desperate urge to smash his bones, his hate replaced by blank remorse, by grief – not for this brute, this rotten bag of meat, but for all the boys consigned by his calculus to have their hearts receive this sword-stilled bliss, to have their muscles quake and shudder so as their lofty, star-bound dreams expired in woe.

Henry, the match finished, as if gradually awakening from a trance, regained his sense of himself and the world around him considered in respects other than its fight-value.

Ramiro’s body hung limply in his arms, the man’s head cradled on the bare skin of the previously severed shoulder. The still weight of the dying body was like the heaviest of winter blankets. As Henry glimpsed from under the weight up at the night sky emptied of the lightning from the trickster god who could have screwed that fight up at any point but hadn't, he had a passing sense of the innumerable cosy evenings he’d slept beneath the open sky.

It was warm.

His nostrils filled with the scent of blood and ash, and the footsteps of Counts and Dukes drummed around him as they chased the fires he’d lit to distract them from disrupting the coup de grace. The buzz of the crowd was shifting, the premature cries of victory transitioning into the howls and boos of those registering the king’s defeat. Clunking and clattering, the weapons he’d been cycling from his inventory hit the ground, the ghosts possessing their metal bodies gone. Their dead thuds had a hollowness that resonated with his own.

His neck, groped by a slimy sensation, began to sting.

The semi-conscious Ramiro, having desummoned his helmet, fighting on to the very, very end, was attempting to chew through Henry’s throat. The cannibal’s teeth, glowing with -bolstered , sliced without resistance through the teenage flesh, but the jaw muscles tasked with moving these teeth lacked the energy to dig them to any significant depth.

Henry could at least respect the tenacity…

Disgusted, he shoved the child-eater off him.

The two of them had been fighting on the edge of this terraced temple’s highest platform. Ramiro’s tossed body fell to the next, a thunk and clatter resounding from the landing of his platemail-encased meat.

A moment later, The Saviour of The Slums gave up. His body evaporated into little fairy lights that flew shamefully away into the dark land of driftwood shacks.

A camerawoman beside Henry was glancing back and forth between him and the spot where Ramiro’d vanished.

Henry, removing his helmet, gave her and the audience who’d been watching his duel through her a whimsical smile. “Wow! Everyone, please, a round of applause for my dance partner – King ‘The Saviour’ Ramiro!” He began a goofy clap. “So generous with his hours! All the tiring rehearsals we had to do for this show match – would the leaders in any other zone be this generous with their time? Would their pride have allowed them to play the losing part? This is a guy who cares about The People. How…gra…cious…”

He trailed off mid-sentence, his expression returning to its usual blank habit as he reconciled with the fact that he would not be covering up his tracks tonight. The imbeciles booing in the crowd might be willing to dismiss him as a fraud, but too many others had watched this time.

He probably had less than fifteen minutes before the news channels were announcing The Cripple’s odd return.

And, after that, well…

Sighing, Henry reabsorbed his scattered weapons. He used the nifty wood-swarm device to build steps down the temple’s platforms, and, while he climbed down, he wondered what he would have to do now to escape from the crowd working itself up into a murderous rage - scattered calls were ringing out to avenge the closet cannibal.

Rose sprinted over in a jubilant mood, looking at him as if he’d returned from some heroic, decade-long odyssey instead of a fight that'd taken less than ten minutes.

-Zhangmei33: Cripple-gege! Cripple-gege! This disloyal rodent almost thought Cripple-gege’d lost but, of course, after conquering the realm of the fist, even grievous injuries can become a calculated tool for The Invincible...

Henry, his mind and heart in a completely different place from hers, couldn’t bring himself to share in the fangirl enthusiasm. He gave Rose a cool nod and put her on mute.

Continuing on, he walked down in the midst of the Counts and Dukes extinguishing the burning statues, giving him looks between curiosity and hate.

To the most aggressive, he grumbled a stern warning. “Don’t forget.”

Flashing his guild-tag, he passed them by and approached the sad bundle he’d set aside at the duel’s outset. He picked it up. The dead girl weighed so little that a second of her could easily have been carried under one arm.

Cautiously, with this load in hand, he approached the temple edge, peering over a wall and surveying the crowd.

The roped-off area at the stage’s base for match competitors was friendly; as the converts glimpsed his peeking head, their cheers of ‘good game’ and what not grew more fanatical.

The bulk of the thousands stretched behind them were less convinced. A lot of noise was being made about killing him who was stranded in the middle of them, a couple of eager, bloodthirsty fellows trying to work their friends up enough to storm the stage.

Henry, sighing, dipped back away from a torrent of projectiles. He opened up his Mental Library to brainstorm escape routes.

But, a short while later, he was saved from a tiresome follow-up battle by the blaring of a trumpet and a projected voice echoing in his ears and those of the crowd.

“Clear the way, kids! Clear the way! You’ve got company!”

At the edge of the mass of spectators, a platoon of fifty horsemen had arrived wearing the ash-grey uniform of Henry’s guild.

Despite massively outnumbering the riders, the crowd let them through, sobering up and regaining their sense of Henry’s privileged status from the official reminder. Also, due to their low levels and rubbish equipment, they would have lost this fight. In Saana, a handful of well-trained troops could slaughter thousands without one casualty; Henry’d orchestrated such massacres too many times to count.

Watching the platoon wading through the splitting sea, he guessed that the envoy had been sent to evacuate him not by Alex but his guild’s more cautious spy-master. The beaver-head would’ve been thrilled to watch him try to solo a couple thousand morons.

Happy to see some washed, civilised faces for once in this lawless slum, he stowed away his woodswarm and quickly descended the temple steps. This time, no asinine pranks interfered to fling him back to the top. Karnon and his mischief had left for now.

The platoon welcomed Henry at the temple’s base with extreme respect, dismounting to shower him with praise and firm slaps on the back. Although they hadn’t recognised him, they’d been able to understand his technical feats while watching the duel during the ride over, every one of them having been admitted into his guild through their excellence in previous recruitment tournaments. Several were unable to help themselves from plying him with questions, which he ignored. Henry resisted his own first impulse to inquire about the state of the Trading Post they’d come from – such things would only be the concern for someone who hadn’t retired.

In silence, he jumped on a spare horse, Rose sneaking on behind him.

They rode out in the centre of a protective formation, the perimeter guards catching stray projectiles and spearing a few brave-hearted dimwits.

Through the occasional gaps in the defensive wall around him, Henry continued to scan the spectators for threats. Amidst the angry mass, there were some exceptions - converts staring in awe, spies gawking at him like a rare animal in a zoo.

He crossed glances with one of the local Ibanmothe NPCs, who was looking upon him in distress and horror. For a moment, he wondered if their reaction was aimed at the dead girl’s pieces jostling in the bundle under his arm - a relation, maybe. Then, however, he recalled that these Slumdwellers had other valid reasons to be terrified of himself, his armour tattered and soaked in their Saviour’s blood, his gaze perhaps containing a trace of the final sentence of death.