***

Five Stars Sovereignty.

The Five Star Sovereign had been a half-dragon, half-human Goddess that Henry’d fought in Saana II at the tail end of his inter-Planar Cripple adventures.

A tough opponent, the Goddess had hoarded the resources of five solar systems for herself. She’d been the queen of an intergalactic matriarchy that determined its succession through highly-ritualised space duels. Notably, these matriarchs weren’t Cosmic Gods, having chosen to remain at Tier-11 and abstain from Ascension.

Henry’s interest in their style arose, specifically, from their ingenious usage of the abundant God Energy they collected. As one might’ve glimpsed in the fight between Karnon and Nerin, this resource broke the limits of Saana’s conventional spell system by increasing potency, enlargening scale, resetting cooldowns, fusing spells. Generally speaking, it made battle looser, more chaotic, more destructive. The Five Stars Sovereigns had mastered the resource’s possibilities beneath the Cosmic realm.

Although few players would ever reach this level, Henry, for the sake of futureproofing and completionism, did his best to formulate a version of A Thousand Tools augmented by God Energy, methods for fighting with it and against it.

Since he didn't possess these powers himself, this research period was dominated by theory, the years split between experiments with the Overdream’s creative mode and diagrams and graphs. Crossing the Bamboo Jungle in the middle of this made for a much-needed break from the stacks of paper.

***

Dialectical Martialism.

This was another soldier style - kind of. Dialectical Martialism had been created by Vollus, Zone Guardian of Manger and Karnon’s former brother-in-law, the twin of his first non-animal ex-wife, Donnera. Vollus, unremarkable in individual combat, had grown an awe-inspiring military, with which he and his sister had conquered their territory.

The Mangerish troops were notorious for their impeccable discipline, their morale, their skill, the unshatterable tightness of their formations. But, even more than the soldiers, the rest of their army structure shone above their peers. Surveying their commanders, their scouts, their field engineers, their supply planners, their castle builders – one glimpsed in every member a psychological fitness for war, that martial health that pervades a Spartan body born to hold a spear, to smile in battle, to die on a shield.

They’d once been even stronger. This fitness of today merely hinted at a former, totalitarian lifestyle, devoted to one mission. War, its purpose, had once suffused every aspect of the Mangerish existence: their education, their housing, their fashion, their myths, their art and music, their virtues, the topics of their dinner debates, their choice of sports, their fairy tales told to children, their whole daily routine from wake to drills to work to evening drills to rest to pre-sleep drills to sleep. Every object the individual encountered, every waking moment, had served to shape, compress, and grow them into a thing that volunteered soul and limb to the kingdom’s cause. Although this martial tradition had been obscured by the changes of the passing centuries, by the softening deformations of peace and prosperity, traces of the hard shape that’d once been remained palpable.

What was most unusual about this fading martial aspect was that it’d been built from scratch by Vollus. The Mangerish were, originally, several Inuit-like tribes from the frozen waste north of Heimland, scattered herders of reindeer, drinkers of fermented seal-blubber and bear-blood. Unlike Saana’s other military cultures, they weren’t forced by the scalpel of generations of warfare, chipping away for thousands of years, to either reshape their national soul to the violent mission or perish. In real-world history, most great conquerors were the culmination point of a longer development in their civilisation, having clear antecedents to which their success could be traced, like Alexander the Great inheriting King Philip’s army, or Genghis Khan uniting the war-ready but fractured tribes of the Eurasian steppe. This had not been true for Vollus. He’d created the Mangerish in one generation. After studying the Maalundi colonial expansion, he’d adapted and applied it to his own people; he’d brought them together, armed them, taught them, invaded, conquered, and—the greatest testament of all—remained.

To orchestrate such an operation was difficult beyond reckoning. One did not simply gather a number of key personalities with power and deliver a sensible plan of action that persuaded them through its robust, irrefutable argumentation outlining the certified gains for all who participate. The pillars of a society that, for such a violent undertaking, must be upheaved, remodelled, shattered, replaced, these were not all up for open discussion, were not accessible in its field of common discourse. Discourse itself was one of the societal pillars, which coordinated with the others, which reinforced and defended them through discursive tactics like enshrinement, politeness, obfuscation, and silence. To enact drastic change, one had to fundamentally re-gut the language of a society, creating a new conversation between Man, World, and Cycle, between Cycle, Word, and Man, setting into motion a dialectic of mutual reinforcement aimed towards the intended goal of total war.

Henry’d never fully understood Vollus. He himself had merely been a commander who'd directed troops quicker than his enemies. Nevertheless, in his campaign with The Company, he’d borrowed from the God’s military and civil planning in order to avoid a repetition of the disastrous global collapse after his Saana II conquest. The final six months of his Tyrant career especially, after the wars, had been dedicated to stabilising their domains according to a hybrid of Vollus's methodology that'd been carefully researched with thousands of hired real-world experts in everything from anthropology to game design. The result of that had been the mix of Alex's promotions with Flaming Sun and Henry's own background work using The Company for infrastructure development, trade, political assassinations, diplomacy, soft power, and other such tactics of nation-building.

But anyway, now, a mere duellist, revisiting Dialectical Martialism in his retirement, Henry attempted to transfer this framework to A Thousand Tools. His purpose would be to facilitate the art’s spread and integration into the existing duelling scene. He wanted to avoid the failure to take root of his first attempt, the sad fate of The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo withering like a seed in arid soil. Henry'd learned in retrospect that simply pointing in the direction of the future had been insufficient. Many practical barriers had prevented others from following in his footsteps: the art’s complexity, its inherent alienness to the mindless arena, the years of training that needed to be invested before any tangible pay-offs, the lack of fun.

In a certain sense, this had formed the greatest obstacle, more than the completion of the art itself. The inheritors of his art, the putty he had to reshape, they weren’t soldiers, nor were they reindeer-herders willing to risk life and soul to migrate from a frozen shithole. In the arena, his people were wageworkers, housewives, school kids – a mass of casual gamers with a minority of degenerate nerds - plebs and, relative to him, still plebs. He couldn’t rely on the drive of his own psychotic climb-lust that made him willing to pursue a goal for sleepless centuries. Like his schoolfriends, his people played Saana for fun. Whatever wasn’t fun, they wouldn’t do. And the grind required for his art had not been fun.

Thus, Henry, perverting Vollus’s technique for seeding rapid militarisation, perverted A Thousand Tools by repackaging it into the more dialectically-efficacious mode of fun.

He put the missing fun into everything.

Having studied styles across the entire spectrum of complexity, from superhuman to neanderthal, he divided his art’s lessons into a relaxed, forgiving, and fun difficulty progression. Much like his ultimate pleb-bait story, noobs were eased through their ascension to patriciandom, tasting a bit of fun at whatever stage they reached, teased by hints of more fun to try for higher types of unknown fun.

Most gamers didn’t have the attention span to read his in-depth explanations. Therefore, he adapted The Death Training to teach A Thousand Tools without words by producing a fun sequence of interactive monster-training exercises.

From his Gladiator’s Duty research, he restructured the current duelling scene to be more fun. He designed funner maps, funner conditions of victory and failure, funner rewards, funner supporting institutions.

Since few players had the time-availability or endurance to complete his full course, he modularised A Thousand Tools. Now, noobs could pick and choose whatever set of weapons they found most fun, attacking A Thousand Tools from a thousand fun angles. If they thought shields were lame or incongruent with their roleplay persona, fine, they could learn complexer techniques while having fun swinging their impractically-long sword. If they were too much of a baby to tolerate getting stabbed repeatedly, fine, they could learn instead from afar with fun arrows or fun magic. If they were too much of a baby for any fighting—some moronic parents letting their wee-ones play—fine, those literal babies could learn A Thousand Tools while building Dancing-Stone-like forts of fun in their sandpit.

Although the youths of 2050 had done nothing to earn his charity, Henry piled up the fun for them, higher and higher. Defiling his creation for the sake of these plebs, he hid the sour morsels of A Thousand Tools inside the fun like green vegetables grated into a chili for ungrateful children.

***

Invincible Steel of The Excavated Mind.

Switching things up for this Overdream session’s final art, Henry studied armour smithing. He attacked this field through the Invincible Steel tradition belonging to some Saana II dwarves. For the most part, it’d been a regular smithing craft – no avant-garde techniques, just a fine eye for design and function, and a calloused hand from swinging a hammer.

One might think an amateur putting only a few years into smithing couldn’t hope to improve upon the work of the field’s existing masters. Armour-making, after all, was as deep and multi-faceted as his martial arts explorations. However, there was plenty of room for easy gains, conventional smithing stuck in the tradition of group combat, which had different threats from the 1v1. For a basic example, a duellist didn’t have any allies to free them when grappled; thus, spots like armpits and the groin couldn't necessarily be left unprotected, spots which were impractical to aim at in a proper battle. Conversely, since a duellist only had to worry about one archer or mage, a much smaller shield was needed for blocking projectiles. Overall, the range of armour designs for single combat were much larger, being flexible depending on weaknesses and preferences.

Henry thus optimised armour using his expertise in the 1v1. In addition to Invincible Steel, he supplemented his research with briefer investigations for leather and fabric armours, giving himself a practical grasp of all protective materials to make composite sets.

By the end of his smithing studies, he’d forged an official Thousand Tools armour system, with adaptative customisation depending on the strategy used to dismantle an opponent.

The dwarves had had one avant-garde quirk. The ‘Excavated Mind’ part of Invincible Steel of The Excavated Mind referred to a practice of consecrating armour by infusing their metals with the preserved brains of enemies. They'd believed this method granted the metal intelligence with which it could block autonomously. Henry—testing whether brain matter enhanced the metallurgy, checking out demonic soul-infusion magic—eventually dropped the ritual, dismissing it as nothing but the dwarves' insanity, the act of plunging too deep into anything driving some mad.