Central City, a Trading Post in the wake of an elemental golem attack, a store.

Silver Wolf was seated at a table with a cup of untouched coffee and a book. Through a window shattered by an earth missile, melodic syllables poured in of mortuary prayers being delivered by priests outside in front of the complex's main office building.

Despite her washing up, the mess from inside clung to her skin.

She’d continued searching for survivors until the complex had been cleared. The tail end of the effort had been pointless, one disappointing room after another, but, still, she'd checked until the end.

Silver didn’t have much love for The Company or this city’s elitist inhabitants, but she still wouldn’t have wished this horror upon them...

In one room, she’d found two injured men, one patting the other lying unconscious in a pool of blood, and the conscious man had told her that he’d suffered a minor leg break and to carry out the knocked-out companion first, but when she returned minutes later, a Spatial Bracelet was lying in the blood-pool, which’d doubled in width, and—

“Silver, I love you!”

Receiving a random confession, she looked out the shattered window. In a group of uniformed players passing by, a fan had stopped to gesture a cute heart with their arms. Next to them, the priests had paused their chanting in disbelief.

The fan produced a copy of her newest book, waving it fanatically. “Autograph?”

They didn’t approach. A dozen troops were stationed in and around the store with Silver, the guards assigned to her after she’d forgotten caution inside and leaked her identity.

Silver shot the waving fan with an icy glare. “No."

The fan blanched with the shocked, crestfallen frown of one meeting a hero who didn’t live up to their image. Muttering something, they marched on with their group in embarrassment.

Silver watched them leave without regret. She understood, but, still, the flippancy of these Company goons frustrated her.

It wasn't the time for that.

After the disaster here, she was hardly in the mood to even talk with Henry. She’d asked to reschedule for tomorrow, for him to wait until she’d processed everything. However, he’d been dramatically insistent, saying he either talked to her now or never.

She already knew what he wanted, Henry having unloaded his insecurities about confessing on her yesterday while mistaking her for a stranger. He also hadn’t been particularly subtle. Informing her of his intentions to take his ‘stalker’ on a date in exchange for Silver’s safe passage back, he’d assured her that he’d only noticed the girl’s crush yesterday and, while he would try to be sincere, the odds of anything significant happening were quite low.

What a moron.

She'd already decided her answer to his confession.

Obviously, she should reject it. Him having a son with an ex who’d overdosed was way too much baggage to be loaded with at seventeen. Beyond the direct problems these posed, they were a huge red flag, suggesting a seedy, reckless background, Henry apparently smoking drugs and knocking chicks up. These facts corroborated the craziness she’d suffered from his insane attempts to seduce her yesterday.

When she analysed the situation, it was hard to fault him for giving up and putting distance between them. She might have done the same. As he’d said himself, there were plenty of fish in the sea and, at seventeen, with life ahead of her, she had no reason to linger on this one rotten mackerel.

That’d been her resolution after their conversation last night.

Then, however, while she’d continued hanging around and he'd tried to cheer her up by teaching her to cook ancient date-cakes, she’d gotten to thinking. He may have had a wild streak in his younger years, but he seemed to have sorted himself out, relatively, at least enough to manage the in-game publishing business. Despite the moral failing of bribing his son to stay silent and pretend to be unrelated, that he’d achieved this level of closeness to scheme with a kid so young was a bit endearing and oddly impressive. In his relentless, shameless pursuit of her, she started to see a moronic expression of the underlying passion, dedication, ‘post-maximalist’ extravagance that’d gone into his duelling adventures and the writing circle, and that wasn't entirely bad. Would it really be the worst thing in the world to be liked by someone that fiercely?

The other side of Silver being young and having her whole life ahead of her was that she had room for a mistake or two. If a kid turned out too much for her to deal with, so be it, she could end things and walk away. There’d be no permanent harm - so long as she didn’t make that mistake.

Tonight, she’d planned to lay out her own embarrassing secret about catfishing him with a false avatar. If he could accept that flaw, which she was certain he would based on last night’s intensity, then she would accept his.

Travelling back along the plains, she’d been racked with nerves and doubts. But, now, as she sat here in the aftermath of a disaster, the decision didn’t seem so huge. These issues were relatively tiny.

The only remaining problem with Henry was him continuing to mess around with this duelling stuff while a maniac god ran rampant. She’d have to talk to him again about his carelessness sometime…

-Henry Flower: Yo, Silver, hear the big news?

-Silver Wolf: Don’t care. Gloat to your date about your martial art…

-Henry Flower: Yo, Silver, can you do me a favour? Disable sound and ignore all incoming messages until I get there. I’m close.

She rolled her eyes. Another socially-stunted trick...

-Silver Wolf: Explain.

-Henry Flower: When I arrive.

Moments earlier, elsewhere in the pristine streets of Central City.

Passing through the checkpoint, Henry’d swapped his costume for The Company uniform. Inside, he was swarmed by journalists who’d been staking out the entrance. His guard retinue fended them off, and, when they refused an order to desist, an officer—with much higher achievements in Nerin’s Trials—hacked them down without any of the city guards interfering, no freedom of the press existing here.

His cavalcade sped through the morning streets. Central’s buildings loomed around, the Ibangua residing in mid-rise complexes, five or six storeys tall, with the ground floors dedicated to commerce. The city’s infrastructure stood out as nicer than The Slums’ in many obvious ways, but the keen-eyed could also pick out the subtler luxuries, the horses hitched unattended, the open windows, the trees. Traffic was light, the locals bunkering down after Karnon’s attacks against the Trading Posts. A tiny dot zipped around the orange-red dawn sky above, Nerin patrolling for the menace. Players spotting Henry in the cavalcade gawked and pointed him out to their friends.

As his journey through the city drew him closer to Silver, a rising anxiety was warning him to retreat, to withdraw like he had in the past when he’d ghosted her.

This urge to flee had been confusing to Henry. As one might have ascertained yesterday, he wasn’t afflicted with any social anxiety that would impede him from hitting on a girl. While the presence of others did unsettle him, that was due to the constant assassination attempts and large gatherings reminding him of the writhing masses of bodies getting obliterated on the battlefield. Searching his confused interior for the cause of his romantic apprehensions then, it might be reasoned that the confidence built up by his expertise in other domains didn’t cross over to this new one. Or, perhaps, due to his prediction of doom, he was avoiding the assured heartbreak and sparing himself a comfort in the possibility of what might’ve been. But to Henry, who’d confronted countless trials more difficult and bleak than love, none of this sounded correct.

If he dug deep inside himself, his greatest worry with romance might never have been failure. Rather, it might have been the other possibility that terrified him.

In the mythos of the Māori, the indigenous people of his homeland, the main hero had been the pan-Polynesian trickster demi-god Maui, who’d accomplished such feats as slowing the passage of the sun through the sky to enable farming and fishing up New Zealand from the pacific. The Māori tradition had assigned to this hero one of the most curious deaths in world mythology. For his final act, Maui attempted to obtain immortality for humanity by cutting out and stealing the heart of a giant goddess of the night and death. To reach her heart, he transformed into a worm and, while she was sleeping, snuck into her crotch, which, for some reason, was lined with razor-sharp obsidian teeth. Unfortunately for Maui, a spectating bird found the sight of him crawling in hilarious. Its laughter awoke the goddess up, who clamped her legs. Thus, the hero died.

A bizarre tale, but Henry did wonder if the Polynesians, a race who’d exercised a monumental feat of will and courage by voyaging across the pacific on stone-age canoes, hadn’t expressed through it a fundamental truth. When a man obtained love, in many respects his life expanded, and any children that love's nocturnal aspect might produce were a type of immortality. At the same time, however, because of the family for which he became responsible, because of the enlarged personal stakes, the most daring and valiant part of man—the idealistic boy who climbed with a singular focus towards a goal against the dangers of defeat and self-annihilation—this part often perished. In love’s too warm embrace, the hero died.

The inner warning to avoid Silver may have been something akin to that, the heroism in Henry, the mountain, rebelling against another perceived threat to itself. The greater catastrophe might be if he did find love, if he became soft and weak, if he lost the callousness that enabled him to tolerate the lonely heights.

“Wait…you're The Tyrant?”

Henry twisted around in his saddle, crossing gazes with a Company Cutthroat riding in his cavalcade.

A glowing beam was being cast from a hand fallen by the young woman's side; the projection, shining partially onto the belly of an adjacent horse and the street, was too distorted for him to make out. Henry, Boost-amplifying his hearing, caught the familiar British lilt of Oliver Spears, the reporter banished to Suchi for outing 'him' in a live broadcast.

Henry tuned in to Channel 5.

Spears was re-examining Operation Phantom Limbs. Using maps from the previous instalment, he illustrated that an island where Henry’d set up a passivist duelling bootcamp under the guise of The Cripple had been at a key location between the scattered fronts of their alliance’s multi-continent campaign, enabling him to zip from battle to battle.

Henry, rewinding the broadcast, skipped back through to glean a summary of what’d transpired.

The intern Beast Tamer following him this week had been showcasing A Thousand Tool’s constituent martial arts while other miscellaneous revelations about his identity were drip-fed in - no doubt by the more veteran journalist in the background building hype. At one point, a prominent analyst from Saana League was pulled in for an interview and asked to estimate the Mental GQ minimum for Twenty Tool’s weapon juggling technique through a comparison with other complex arts, like Nine Fists. Confusion followed for both the analyst and the broadcasters, the arrived-at figure seeming inhumanly high.

Then, Spears smugly stepped in, giving them a correction that there was one monster who fit this profile: The Tyrant of Saana.

From there, the veteran journalist hijacked the intern’s presentation, switching it from an analysis of avant-garde duelling to an exposé of Saana’s preeminent general. Viewer numbers were skyrocketing, all who’d lived under The Tyrant’s thumb drawn in to watch a gloating Spears undressing his long-time nemesis with a voyeuristic pleasure, the journalist betraying no trace of shame from having previously smeared the wrong person. A sneak preview of a timeline mapped the course of The Tyrant’s exhibition, Spears showcasing the anatomy of his career from Saana II to the present. One segment, ‘The Tyrant, The Person’ suggested that the obsessive journalist had even doxxed him.

In the end, the spear with which Henry’d tried to impale Ramiro had been redirected by Karnon back against himself.

Henry shut the stream off, not needing to watch a recap of his own past.

A glimpse of his escorting guards gave him a preview of his new future.

As he failed to deny the accusation, they realised the identity of the person with whom they were riding, and a chasm stretched out between them. The Cutthroat, shoring up the slacker’s casualness she’d retained around The Cripple, shut off her broadcast and apologised. The others, after staring transfixed at him as if he were a caged animal, recognised their rudeness and, over-correcting, jerked their heads away.

At once, the stranger who’d irritatingly tasked them with returning an NPC’s corpse, the teenager dealing with a private romance, even the genius duellist from yesteryear making his revolutionary comeback, all of these aspects of himself vanished as they, like every other component of Henry, were subsumed by the single and only important fact about him.

He was The Tyrant.

Henry, witnessing himself being consumed by an idea, spared his usual sigh of resignation.

With the tyrannical cat out of the bag, he considered logging off, but then spared some thought for Silver waiting for him.

Not giving up quite yet, he messaged her.

-Henry Flower: Yo, Silver, hear the big news?

While he waited for her response, he wondered whether Karnon, in his many acts of perverse mischief, had stripped him of this last minuscule aspect of control, the chance to make his admission face to face.

-Silver Wolf: Don’t care. Gloat to your date about your martial art…

Henry, taking extra caution, convinced her to block everything out.

He galloped through Central City, the ignored messages flooding in, including some from cousins who’d never followed Saana. The Tyrant revelation, a bit more significant than his duelling hijinks, was international news outside of the game.

Nearing the Trading Post, he dismissed his retinue, having them ride on to another to mislead the in-game paparazzi.

The state of the complex inside was better off than others in the zone, the golems inflicting minimal structural damage and leaving some survivors. Without the game’s visual halo-indicator, one could spot the difference between the NPCs and the players, the former wandering in a daze, worried about another attack, the latter pumped up and gossiping about The Tyrant revelation.

Priests in their sky-blue robes were scattered around the damaged sites performing mortuary rites. A contingent was always sent to investigate after excessive Ibangua casualties. Without the proper bloodrites, like those Henry’d administered to the Senior Director, control of a property would be automatically revoked by The Church - mostly a formality, the priests reinstating titles after a purification ritual.

In front of the main office building, a group of the clergy were chanting over a row of several dozen clay jars, each about six litres in volume.

Henry passed them by and entered an adjacent store.

Inside, Silver was seated reading his love story. The girl’s skin was white and clean from a vigorous bath that’d scrubbed off the natural oils, and her eyes, carrying a fraction of the tiredness in his own, were not registering the paragraphs they floated over. Dotted around the store were a few squads of troops, nervously tending their weapons in case the golems returned.

Saluting the soldiers, Henry approached Silver and waved his hand in her vision. After a brief delay, she craned her face upwards and gave him a weary smile, relieved to see him.

Silver noticed a patch of blood around his stomach. “A fight?”

Henry fingered the hole in his shirt, through which he’d let the tailor’s grandfather vent some of his misery stabbing him. As with Ramiro, the risk had been calculated. A later scheduled art, Broken Skull; Tranquil Mind, revolved around receiving attacks while minimising the damage to vital organs.

He shook his head. “I gave someone a jab out of pity.”

“Drat,” Silver attempted to lighten the morose mood. “No second date, then?”

Henry shrugged. “Probably not.”

Silver turned to the issue that’d occupied her mind while waiting for him in silence. “Henry, you need to deal with this madman. Look around you. This is…it’s…” The immensity was beyond her ability to describe. “You have to fix this. You’ve handled Gods before. Do it again. Find a zany combination of ‘tools’ and…take him out.”

The listening soldiers perked up at the mention of god-slaying.

“Do you think I’ve not considered that?” Henry replied. “Every second in Karnon’s presence, I am seeking an opportunity. But there won’t be one. This maniac is stronger than me; he’s craftier, he’s quicker, he predicts my actions and twists them for his own purposes. I don’t have a cheat that beats him. And even if I did, nothing would be solved. You saw it in my stories. The conclusion of me dumping my character in a black hole wasn’t a preachy, anti-climactic statement about videogames being a waste of time. It’s because it’d finally occurred to me that every enemy I had to slay was a consequence of those I’d slain before them. The Cycle is eternal.”

“Still,” Silver couldn’t accept this answer, “you can’t do nothing. Henry, it’s frankly insulting that you’re here goofing off beating up new players.”

“Insulting to who?”

“I don’t know!” She snapped in frustration. “Everyone. Me. The universe. Henry, a person has an obligation to give more effort than this.”

“A duty?”

“Yes! You have a duty, Henry! You have to try!”

Henry nodded, having no further rebuttal, his heart oddly comforted by the recrimination.

He walked over to the store’s broken window and stared out at the priests chanting over the rows of jars collected from some of those annihilated tonight because of his hubris. Knowing The Church’s archaic tongue, he could decipher the priests’ mutterings. Passing from vessel to vessel to another, they were reciting the genealogies of the ancestors who’d shared the deceased’s bloodname.

She was right. He did have a duty. Alas, that didn’t mean she would agree with the way he’d gone about enacting it.

He tapped a shard of glass protruding from the window frame, the sturdy material taking the impact without dislodging. “That’s why I’ve done all that I’ve done. To defeat not the handful of villains before me but the very conditions that manu—” He stopped himself, finding it distasteful to justify his actions for the sake of something as trivial as love. “Look, Silver, my ‘duty’ is my reason for wanting to speak to you. The news has already leaked it, but—not that it’s of any consequence—I did intend to inform you first.”

“That’s not important right now!” Silver misinterpreted him, assuming a reporter’d outed his irrelevant family background. “Focus on fixing this. Start hopping Planes until you find a twenty-billion-year-old anti-prank spoon. Time travel to his childhood and teach him basic man—"

“I’m The Tyrant,” Henry interrupted her, coming right out with it. “It’s not Alex Wong. He’s just my stooge. The Company, this trashed outpost, these armed troops, this uniform…” He gave his collar a detesting tug. “…it’s all me, The Tyrant.”

Henry—having himself failed tonight to overcome this romantic hurdle, but hoping that, with Silver not sharing all his beliefs, a chance may have slipped through one of the gaps in his flawed assessment—glanced at her to receive his final sentence.

But Silver, although she’d quickly processed and accepted many of his bold qualities, found the magnitude of this one too large. She blinked at him in expectation, waiting for the punchline to his latest socially-inept joke.

The soldiers were also doubtful, detecting in his teenage form none of the proper gravitas of their supreme commander.

“I’m not joking.” Henry slipped a glove from his hand to reveal a rusty iron ring on one finger.

He gave The Ring of A Thousand Souls a quarter turn, and, an instant later, the other username he’d used these years lit up over his head, a bright, tacky neon sign advertising the unsavoury contents of his life.

“Hail to The Tyrant!” A soldier threw themselves on the ground in prostration.

“Hail to The Tyrant!”

“Hail to The Tyrant!”

“Hail to The Tyrant!”

“Hail to The Tyrant!”

“Hail to The Tyrant!”

In dramatic fashion, the rest of the troops followed suit, filling the quiet room with their shouts of undying loyalty.

Henry, suppressing his disgust at their grovelling, growled at them to stop creating a scene while scanning each for signs of hostility.

Meanwhile, Silver's gaze was falling down from his floating username to meet his eyes, the descent slow and unsteady.

In her head, many of the mysteries about Henry began to interconnect, his regular absences, the location of their bookstore, his morose and shifty demeanour, the character in the story he’d sent her, his ‘duty’, Karnon's harassment, the little aberrancies in their conversation yesterday. Even the pitiful tone leaked into the reply that’d compelled her to traverse the sea to find out the cause of his misery – guilt, that’d been the sound of crushing guilt.

The person she’d hung out with in those late-night hours at their bookstore…he was The Tyrant.

Henry was The Tyrant.