“Justinian eliminated! HF wins! -8, +13!”

So the first match ended with The Tyrant’s victory.

In the aftermath of the humiliating rodeo, Justinian, the knight naked and broken, was splayed out on a neon-painted roundabout, spinning as the life flew from his defeated body. His ears throbbed with the callous sound of the laughing audience. Tears, blood, and mucous streamed down his jaw from the axe-wound to his nose, and his dying gaze lifted to the cruel heavens where Betruger’s spirit howled unavenged.

😭

A medic arriving to treat him had their hand slapped away, the knight choosing death over submitting to help from His agents.

“Master...” Justinian choked out through the iron taste of his fast-approaching demise, “I have failed you again...your student...to beat...Him...I...I HAD NOT THE STRENGTH!”

His anguished death-cry stabbed the heavens.

A shadow passed over the Crusader’s mangled face, a head intruding into his sky-view and staring down at him in confusion.

“Are you roleplaying this cluelessness?” asked Henry. “You know that Swordmaster Betruger was an evil NPC, right? Not even ambiguously evil in the way I am. Just a 100%, wagyu-grade cunt.”

Henry’d not initially planned to bully Justinian quite that severely. However, when the kid tried to make their videogame duel about vengeance over an obvious bad guy, the hypocrisy had pissed him off a tiny bit.

“Lies!” Justinian replied. “Falsity! His...his only crime was not kowtowing...to Your tyrannical subjugation.”

Henry continued staring blankly, still unable to decide at what level this Crusader was a moron. “And the crime of attempting to summon a chaos demon.”

He held out a glowing hand. Footage played on his palm of an elderly Crusader hacking through a sea of troops, each sweep of his blade chopping several apart as they sacrificed themselves to dogpile him. The scene was set in front of an Interplanar portal, its opening swirling with a scorching flux of magic, its rim decorated with several hundred nailed-to-the-wood peasants, each with their feet hacked off and jammed through the shattered teeth of their moaning mouths.

Henry pointed at the configuration of the bodies. “That’s the summoning ritual for Katusi’us-ur-Deckt-ish-Zonare, The Acrid Breath of Bedlam.”

“Lies!” Justinian shouted, his voice quivering with doubt (Hadi channelling his anxieties about the Saana League offer into the gesture, the roleplayer himself obviously having been able to identify Betruger's villainy. Indeed, as The Tyrant had guessed correctly, the knight character was fanatically clueless. All great roleplayers gave their personas a flaw or two, the extra problems these caused being an opportunity to flex one's creativity and improv skills). “Slander. You...you...you charge him for a plot arranged by Yourself...You, Consorter of Hell’s Denizens...Betruger...my master...he perished trying to stop You...”

“But he didn’t stop me.” Henry, pointing out the obvious, sped up the footage to the end, where some of the troops managed to apprehend the limbs of the Swordmaster and, receiving the go-ahead from himself directing in the background, beheaded the guy. “That’s Betruger getting his neck sawn through. I won, so, logically, if I was trying to summon a demon, I could have resumed the ritual. As it happens, however, there’s no demon. Where is the demon I’ve apparently summoned, Justinian?”

“Hah...” the knight scoffed with dismissal and the biting hatred of witnessing his master’s cruel demise. “Your weakened troops...they could no longer complete the summoning. Betruger’s sacrifice...it was not in vain.” He smiled bitterly, his last words whispered with the last of his lungs’ air. “It was not in vain...”

Henry skipped to the end of this dialogue tree by simulating the brain damage of a hardcore roleplayer. “If I’m lying, then why did I win this duel? Why did your valiant knight’s sword not pierce my blackened heart while dozens of my strikes were aimed true? Is this not the light of God illuminating the path of righteousness, or something like that?"

Justinian’s face froze in shock, his eyes bulging, his mind searching for any flaw in this irrefutable logic.

That’s right...he thought. THAT’S RIGHT! Sir Henry had won this duel to divine a judgement on Betruger’s grudge...then...

The Crusader, dumbstruck, examined the evidence in his fate-ordained defeat, his shock and grief deepening at, finally, accepting his master to be a warlock.

Once again, as with King Ramiro, he'd stood naively on the side of malevolence...

As he registered this horrifying fact, the fight relaxed out of his limbs (Hadi relieved someone had freed his naive knight character from this impossible questline), and the medic was able to mend him.

Henry meanwhile stretched, expecting a character this stubborn to carry another imbecilic beef.

Indeed, once the knight had been fixed, he sprung to his feet and thrust his sword at Him, the malignant master of darkness.

“For this one mortal grudge,” Justinian continued to roleplay, “perhaps God has cast a pebble of exoneration, your name ordained to have one foul stain cleansed by my fate-selected loss. However, Sir Henry, many more skulls have been piled at the foot of Your dark throne, each of whose former possessors, for their murder, holds a likewise grudge. Would you also charge each of these massacred millions with consorting with hell’s fallen angels? Let us learn, through this next crossing of noble blades, whether your conscience for your whole craven career can balance so lightly on the edge of this sword.” His zweihander, regaining its knight's stability, hacked the wind, his point directed at the map chosen for the second clash with Him. “In the map of Sand, away from the devil’s obfuscations of this...” he paused a second, staring hard at their current arena, (Hadi yet to find an appropriate medieval synonym for this anachronistic playground setting), “....arena for children’s frolic, as two men naked beneath God’s judging gaze, that’s where we test Your sordid virtue.”

Henry—staring with boredom at the roleplayer, one eye glowing as he retested a 6v6 strategy in the adjacent arena by substituting a Fighter tank for a Crusader—replied with a resigned shrug. “No, all that stuff I won’t deny, nor will I bother fighting over it. I confess. You win, Sir Knight; the dark truth sought by your crusade has been revealed, the evil Tyrant exposed. Congratulations.” He signalled to the Officiator to mark it a loss, putting the series at a 1-1 tie. “Now, if you were wanting me to ‘die’ in repentance for my crimes, that I can't give you. This is a videogame. We’re immortal.” Catching a summoned dagger, without a change of his flat expression, he slit his own throat down to the cartilage, a necklace of blood spurting from the wound before it healed half a second later, leaving nothing - nothing at all. “What was your third grudge?”

He flat-out refused to fight another gag duel over his entire career.

There was a hard limit to how far he could push his insults. He didn’t mind mocking the ghost of Justinian’s teacher, but the vast majority of the NPCs killed in his campaigns had not been this laughably evil. You’d have to be a mental baby to imagine that the formation of any globe-spanning empire could have played out so cleanly. Most of his casualties had, obviously, been civilians. And, videogame or not, Henry could not and would never spit this liberally on these tinier graves, on the millions of literal toddlers—kids as small, precious, and innocent as his nieces and nephews, as Little Liu—that he’d poisoned, starved, incinerated, infected with plagues, beheaded. There was nothing funny about that shit. His job had been horrendous, and struggling too hard to obtain inner peace with a fundamentally unpeaceful subject was how you demented yourself into a Ramiro, chowing down on orphans in a back-alley as a psychotic proclamation of your freedom.

Justinian stumbled backwards, the weight of the admission and the horror of the straight-faced self-mutilation almost bowling him over. “Sir Henry...Sir Henry...you admit to the charges laid, to these innumerable misdeeds that befoul your nocturnal honour?”

Henry shrugged again, his naked shoulders rising to meet the burdens of his career. “Yep.”

Justinian’s eyes flared with disbelief. “Then, you confess, to plundering the land of its native wealth? To setting alight its cities, to spreading pestilence and famine? To scything God’s flock like Death in a murderous orgy? To raising the dead as armies of skeletons and demons?”

“Yes, although some of the demons are OK. You’re projecting a speciest morality from different fantasy universes."

Justinian, gasping, swung his sword towards the audience. “You’ve heard it here, jury of the world, spoken before us and The Most High by His own blood-wet lips! He, a vampire who's sucked the vitality from the Goodfolk of this realm, confesses to the blasphemous deeds inscribed by his death-dipped pen! A crime, a crime, a crime, a crime, a million crimes he shan’t refute!”

The knight expected the crowd to mirror his horror and fury at the shocking confession. Their actual response shocked him even more.