A conference room, the crowd slightly confused after Mayonnaise’s anti-climactic announcement that he wouldn’t be attending The Winter Open Invitational tournament.

"You childish, irresponsible cocksucker..."

"Childish, irresponsible cocksucker."

"The Tyrant’s dead. Long live his successor, unchecked and all-powerful.” Alex, his head crowned, the forfeited reins of power seized, spurred The Company in the changed direction of his arrogant will. “For my first edict, since it would have been a disaster for The Tyrant’s heir to miss the inaugural event of his new reign, I’ll be working with the logistics team to make a fix." In dramatic fashion, he spread his arms imperiously wide, wide as his mighty empire, and pretended to sweep something up off the table in front of him. "We’re going to pick up the tournament, and we're going to ship it to a new location: a location between Abhaya and Heimland.”

If The Company were relocating the tournament for him to make the journey in time, the most logical place would be to their island kingdom, Chayoka, almost equidistant between the tournament's current location and Alex's.

Or the Starting Zone right across from the kingdom.

Alex gave a thumbs-up of kingly confirmation. “That’s right, everyone. We are going to Suchi!”

We - not merely himself and others of The Company but the horde of competitors and fans that attended the once-a-season affair. The entire international scene of arena enthusiasts would be going. There'd be tens of millions of them, an influx of multiple-times the number of locals dwelling in a place as small, poor, and irrelevant as Suchi.

Listening to the ridiculous 'edict', the journalists were gob-smacked. They couldn't comprehend the logistics involved in the abrupt move, the migration of so many support staff and spectators within a week. And why Suchi? Because The Tyrant was there? For a joke? This move made no sense.

Adding to their confusion was the response that followed from the other members of The Company’s inner circle.

The group of friends—aware of the stupid bet with Henry aiming for top ten in his own recruitment tournament, able to infer the drastic increase in noob competitors to fight him and the audience to spectate the embarrassment of The Cripple, a.k.a. The Tyrant of Saana himself, duelling total amateurs and maybe even losing because he couldn’t employ 91% of his skills at Tier-0—burst out laughing.

"Good one!" declared the head of The Company's justice department, leaping out of his chair to high-five the gloating beaver-head.

"You madman!" yelled the chief of naval operations, who'd been blindsided, too, and who'd be forced to remobilise their entire fleet for this endeavour. "You got him! My brother, did you plan this from the start? Nice."

Their PVE director placed down his tablet with awe. "Genius."

Like monkeys on amphetamines, the others slapped the table, howled and hollered, giggled as they rearranged their own wages on the outcome, spitting on their palms to reseal their deals.

Henry, observing their ludicrous celebration, sighed, his heart clenched by the despair and horror of entrusting the fate of a planet to these goons, by the guilt for the mental weakness that’d cracked his brain and forced him into retirement, for the invisible casualties.

“Irresponsible clowns...” he muttered.

Of course, this announcement shouldn’t have any impact on himself. He’d retired, discarding any further control or care for the guild. As for the recruitment tournament wager, with The Card returned, his further participation carried no consequence or incentive. Nothing could stop him simply dropping out anymore. He could declare that, just as Alex had altered the conditions on a whim, so too had he altered his choice to enter.

However, the beaver-head had conceded the symbolic card before this surprise blindside for a reason. He'd wanted to clear the air of one last deceptive mask.

Henry—a game addict or mass-murderer, depending on the perspective—had never genuinely been driven by the petty emotional blackmail of 'The Card', by any lingering attachment to a favour once offered to his dead mother, whose phantom now languished indistinguishably in a sea of millions of ghosts. This story had merely served as an excuse. A plausible-sounding motive for a teen his age, it'd helped him to rationalise and shroud his deeper, inhuman compulsions.

Now, with The Card off the table, with the lies unspoken, nothing remained to pressure him to accept this unfair deal. Nothing remained, that was, except that one and only pressure present at the very start of this weird week in Suchi, his total decline into a creature who hearkened nothing but the mountain’s thrilling call.

In the abrupt heightening of the tournament, Henry heard it once again, his heart lurching into life.

However, in the light of this week’s event, his first romance dead, his videogame persona invading and disrupting his reality, he heard also that other pressing need of his. He was compelled to purge his soul’s deranging attachments, to return to his self before this morbid fixation rotting inside of him.

There was all the Karnon crap, too.

Wedged between many conflicted states, Henry studied his celebrating guildmates. He examined their uncritical clowning, their appearances clean and pure, the features of their child-like faces—not weighed down by any misery greater than boredom—able to contort with lively emotion.

He looked at the reporters and staff who, although older in terms of their flesh, were coming to mirror the juvenile mood as the humour spread to their clueless expressions. The lot of them were realising that, if the inner circle were ecstatic, then at least something fun lay on the horizon. This secret conflict, hidden between Mayonnaise’s mockingly tyrannical declaration of a tournament move and the swearing Tyrant's first notable loss of composure during the conference, was about to yield a spectacle.

Henry supposed the same would apply to most watching, examining the minutia of his own flat features back through the cameras, a whole world of amused, careless children.

But, really, the flippancy of these people, these real people - wasn’t this the appropriate mindset to take with a videogame?

The immediate thoughts of a player their age should not be calculating the consequences downstream of every action: worrying about economic disruptions, about the dangers inherent to grand movements, about those invisible figures who get squashed by their whimsical frolicking like bugs and bacteria crushed by giggling children wrestling in a garden. A teenager should not carry so much macabre baggage. He, too, should frolic weightlessly within the domain of the immortal self, of fun and friendship, in the ignorant Eden of youth that preceded all awareness of our naked flesh rotting from our bones as death’s gnawing maggots converted us to shit and blowflies.

The only idiot child here was himself, demented by a game, hunched and broken absurdly beneath the weight of a completely fictional guilt.

Once again, he saw the extent of his madness in the laughter of the people around him. And, although he couldn't simply leap over to sanity's laughing side, he saw also a way within this fucked-up mess to make another few steps towards normality, another few steps down.

Henry, gesturing with anger at Alex to follow, stood up. Wordlessly, they walked to a backroom, kicking out a group of staff who’d been using the space.

They were gone for a few minutes. During their absence, the journalists theorised with their viewers about what might be going on between the two tyrants, and The Company members shared snickers, arranging to drop their characters on the first ships sailing to Suchi.

When the pair returned, the beaver-head wore a smirk that stretched from ear to smug ear.

Henry, not bothering to sit, stooped over his seat to lean into a microphone and gave the cameras his best glare of young, impetuous challenge. “Slight change of plans. With the winter tournament moving to Suchi, since that happens, by coincidence, to be my current location, I might as well just go ahead and take first place in every single event. 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 6v6, 50v50 – all of them. I will enter every category, and win – easily. First place in everything, or nothing.”

(Author’s note: No, I’m not as psychotic as Henry. I won't be writing five different tournament arcs. This is a story about videogame duelling, single combat.)

Henry, studying the baffled audience slowly registering his announcement, felt a compulsion to goad them further, to trashtalk as he’d once done as a duellist, to maybe ape a warrior-sage and compose a parodical poem of invitation.

The words of one were already crawling up from his throat.

’Bring, rubbish noobs, your worthless skills!’ cries He

With smiling lips. ‘Give me your tantrums, your hates,

Your toddler diapers soaked in blood-tinged pee,

The vacant vomit of your empty pates.

Send these, ye witless, ye barren-brained, to me,

Your arse-whipping waiting behind Heaven’s Gates!’

However, this type of dorky showmanship, the imitation of a childhood he’d abandoned years ago, struck him as yet another form of escape. Its ironic layers enabled him to hide in it his immense disgust and preserve the stubborn feeling that had to be purged. Even that verse, his brain had skipped to rip off The New Colossus, a poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty welcoming the poor and exiled to the new world, betraying the allegiances of his mad soul.

Thus, he discarded that false mask. He would come to them authentically, at the middle point he currently resided at, this awkward teenage flatness between the laughing hills of youth and adulthood.

“To clarify,” Henry continued flatly, not hiding the repressed contempt in his voice, “that’ll be first place in every category for every format: Standard, Gear Unrestricted, and even Tier-0 – I’ll be competing in them all with my nerfed character for extra challenge. 15 tournaments, plus maybe some minor ones, won at my discretion. During my multi-event run, if anyone has any unresolved grievances—about my reformations, about me crushing your guild, about me executing your criminal NPC buddies—this will be your opportunity to air your complaints straight to my face without getting blacklisted or stabbed by my guards. Anything else you might wish to say, no matter how nasty, I promise you can come and voice your opinion freely to me, mano a mano, and the only repercussion will be me beating you up senselessly.” He paused, attempting to also mentally construct how a normal person might view a videogame tournament. “Or, if you want a fun challenge, to try test your wits and fists against the big bad Tyrant before he bounces from this dogshit game, that’s fine, too. Bring your mates. All are welcome. All reasons, all levels, all arena specialities – I’m willing, graciously, to beat all of you.” He glanced at Alex, who’d also be competing for a beating. “And that’ll be it for me.”

The beaver-head held up his empty, Cardless palms. “It's entirely your decision, mate.”

"That'll be it." Henry gave a nod of finality and turned back to the journalists. “A grand tournament in which I effortlessly sweep every field - won’t that be a more fitting send-off for The Tyrant than this lame Q&A? I was born by blood; by blood, I make my exit. In a week. Best of luck to the competitors."

He waved a curt farewell, smacked Alex's stupid fake crown from his head, and marched off, pushing through the bewildered audience invited to test his fading might for the last time.