A crowded stadium staring in shock.

After the first bold soldier removed his pants, he was joined by increasingly more, hundreds of pants flying off around the arena, hundreds of NPC penises flying in the breeze.

The audience blinked doubtfully, rubbing their eyes in wonder if The Tyrant of Saana had really just ordered what they were observing. Scattered voices burst out with laughter at the absurd act, igniting a wave confused amusement that followed.

Justinian (and Hadi) gasped at the horrific sight. “What...what is the meaning of this debased humiliation? What...what prove you but your wickedness? This is what you call respect, Sir Henry? This is the yoke crushing their lowered shoulders. This is the terror of another whip-blow.”

Henry, without any of the crowd’s amusement, pointed seriously at both Justinian’s roleplayed response and the genuine one. “There it is. That reaction is the ignorance that comes from projecting your cartoonish fantasy instead of gazing directly at the scene occurring before you.”

“Sir Henry, I see perfe—"

Henry held up a commanding palm of silence. “No, I, ‘The Tyrant’, am speaking now, and you can either listen and learn or fuck off. What you’re not seeing, Justinian, is the actual soldiers before you outside of the limited perspective of this knight’s grudge." He pointed at the strange scene around them, insisting that the roleplayer take a closer, more serious glance. "You’re not seeing that each of these men pulling their penises out isn’t displaying any sign of duress. You're not seeing that I only asked one of them and not the rest. You’re not seeing their beaming faces, their total immunity to the crowd’s laughter, their giddy exhilaration at the chance to flaunt their penises before me and you. You’re not seeing that the Lieutenant Colonel here wants to show his penis off in many contexts outside this one, that when offduty—despite it going against the code of military practise—he still on the sly walks around the barracks with it hanging out. You're not seeing that what motivates him and his comrades to expose themselves is not an obligation confined to this moment of our 1v1 but a pervasive, generalised pride in showing their penises. Because you're not seeing any of this, you will never truly ask yourself why they’re behaving in this baffling manner. What is the meaning not to your limited perspective but to them of showing one’s penis? What exactly in their circumstances, their personality, their culture might have produced such an alien regard for this gesture that, for you, could only be performed at the tip of a sword? Because you neither saw nor questioned what was actually before you, you will never learn that the Big Men who’d once ruled over the Chayokan tribes of these soldiers had a custom of turning male newborns into eunuchs, castrating them at birth and holding their severed penises hostage until adequate tribute had been paid through decades worth of dangerous mercenary work that could not be fulfilled by 96% of the boys, most of Chayoka’s sons dying neutered while its daughters got hoarded and used as breeding mares to produce the next eunuch generation, to propagate this vile method of domination for yet another millennium - thousands and thousands and thousands of years of little crying boys getting their dicks hacked off. Because you never inquired into this island’s demented history of sexual repression, you will never realise that the one who ended it and who returned their penises after 'murdering' all these wretched penis-thieves—in the same way that he 'murdered' your demon-coveting Swordmaster—that person was me, ‘The Tyrant’. It was Him, he who crusaded not in your guiltless light but in a thankless dark far, far beyond the borders of your infantile, bloodless awareness.

“And that’s why, Justinian, the Chayokans respect Me. They respect that I, who slaughtered my way to rank of 'The Biggest Man', who earned through the arduous trial of bloodshed the supposed right to own their manhood, made the unprecedented decision to relinquish it. Their stolen, mutilated penises, that’s what my men are showing you with the pride of one who has reclaimed what should always have belonged to him, with the relief of overcoming a level of oppression that you're totally oblivious to.

“And if you were to gaze accurately at the other places where my rule has spread—and this place," Henry made an emphatic gesture at the stadium of highly flammable wood around them, "this place is not one of them, as you would’ve deduced had you not been blind—the story’s very, very similar. Those who chose to stand in my path speak silence from their graves. Those who made the reluctant decision to move aside are bitching as they plot the return of themselves and their subjugation. And the rest, the majority, in tandem with their grief, are struggling to come to grips with the unbelievable fact that they might be free enough to celebrate some of what I did. Daily, in the quiet of their conflicted hearts, a part of them alongside the subservience and terror is thanking the cosmos. They're thankful that, of all the alien immortals invading their world who might’ve had the strength to seize the reins, it was me, who didn't execute them simply for the non-crime of calling a tyrant a tyrant, and not you, some out-of-touch roleplayer seeing them only to the caricaturised degree that their suffering comports with his self-heroising fantasy.

“But you can’t see any of that because you’re a roleplayer, a shit one who hasn’t even seen the history of the world you claim to originate from. Did you know the real Justinian The Great had eunuchs at court? This valiant defender of Christ was also a penis-thief. But you, you who sanctified his legacy by adopting his name, are not cognisant of that because such methods of oppression were normal for the sovereigns of his time, for “”your”” time, and he sure as fuck didn’t encourage his eunuchs to speak of their grievances, to preserve their woes within his golden libraries. So why, then, do you level upon me an expectation of untainted goodness that you hold for no one else, not even this cunt you've named yourself after? Who exactly here are you comparing me to, Justinian? Compared to Justinian The Great, I’m the fucking messiah. Anyone ‘teleported’ from the medieval period would have their minds blown simply by my abstention from enslaving my defeated enemies, which that cunt also did. The rest of what I've done beyond this would be inconceivable to them, my efforts to go beyond a slave's conception of good as merely refraining from abuse while thanking those who heap it upon you, my commitment to take the wealth I ‘stole’ from the cunts before me and return it to those they’d stolen it from through fair, robust systems of hospitals, transport, schools, land grants, all while restoring their right to call any cunt a cunt, including me. Show me, ‘Justinian’, which of your cunt monarchs contributed to their world what I have to this one. Let’s inspect whose eyes behold this universe and their own more clearly. Because, by the estimation of mine, a genuine medieval transplant would compare me to every one of their lords, to my player competitors, to the NPC rulers in this deranged exaggeration of reality, and what they would see is not just a tyrant but a horrifying blessing, a miraculous aberration never to be repeated. I was the fairy-tale knight that you wish you had the strength to be. I was the immortal synthesis of Life that strives between Birth and Death's most profound extremes. I was the sword that pacified peace. I was the nightmare that prolongs the fickle dream. I was Chaos taming the spree of Order. I was Dionysus sobering a mean-drunk Apollo. I was the Godless Will-to-Power spreading Christ’s Supreme Love. I was the climber that elevates this fucking mountain. But you, you who buffoonishly stub your golden toes again and again and again as you stumble half-blind through the shadows of a fiction, you will never see the totality of me, the full shades from terror to relief that I represented to the citizens of this world. You’re nothing but a shit-lazy roleplayer flailing at the juvenile picture of an enemy that your own squinting transforms me into. You've diminished me into a one-dimensional cartoon like you have the ‘Goodfolk’, many of whom are also very much cunts deserving the 'murders' I gave to others.

“And that’s why I’m conceding this match. It’s not because of my agreement or disagreement with your accusations but my much greater indignation at the thought of even fighting within the ridiculous paradigm from which they're made. So, you can have that free point. It doesn’t matter because the next and final one will be mine, as it has always been and always will be. No roleplayer can see me, let alone beat me - I, who've risen beyond you, require everything you have to reach, and More.” He snapped abruptly to the soldiers with their penises out. “Put them away already, you god-damned savages. This isn’t the village. I didn't ask for all of your dicks. Fucking hell.”

The former eunuchs gave a laughing salute. They then made an exaggerated show of machismo as they pulled back up their trousers, pretending to struggle with how difficult the task had become these days.

The crowd who, like Justinian, would never gaze directly at their surroundings, reacted to this tirade with baffled laughs and head scratching. Most were unable to take The Tyrant’s monologue seriously after the joke of a duel before it. But, even without the comedic context, it seemed unnecessary to waste so many words refuting an accusation about 'crimes' in a videogame. The Tyrant had killed some NPCs? So what? Who hadn't? The crowd would have to chalk the motive for his pointless rant up to a deeper, private dispute that must've arisen between him and The Golden Crusader during his week hiding out in Byzantium. Maybe they'd been having an ongoing argument about roleplay ethics?

A few geniuses, straining their noggins for a sensible explanation to the bewildering speech and even more bewildering scene, eventually found one. They soon recognised it from the flat, disimpassioned tone with which The Tyrant had delivered his speech, including the profanities, while surrounded by hundreds of exposed penises. This was none other than an ice-cold duelling tactic. The Tyrant, wanting to avoid the Sand map that limited his tools' capabilities perhaps, had simulated the psychosis of the medieval knight roleplayer in order to destroy his foe rhetorically. Through this oration, he'd concocted and administered—as he had his custom Komodo poisons against past rivals—the targeted pin-prick—or perhaps penis-pick—that would penetrate the chinks in the golden armour of Justinian's persona and debilitate him for the next round, a sort of partial victory within the loss achieved through parodical counter-roleplaying. Yes, flicking back through the pages of the strategy manual The Tyrant had written in his Cripple days, he'd hinted at this exact possibility once a Next Level duellist had passed through The Gates of Heaven. At the very highest echelons of the 1v1, you could end your opponent's career without lifting a weapon, crushing their heart with an elaborate string of trashtalk in The Technique of The Final Tool Beyond All Tools Of No Tools. A few words and a few eunuch penises, these, too, could become tools in a duel. The king of the ring had actually pulled it off as he'd pulled those pants down, the LARPer on his crusade for peace truly pacified by The Tyrant's sword(s). How ruthlessly avant-garde! How sa-dick-stically tyrannical!

The Crusader, ‘Justinian’, certainly appeared to have been slain, even harder than after the first humiliating fight.

His spirits levelled by the rebuke, he seemed to have shrunk a foot. The knightly pomp of his character had been disrobed. Exposed beneath was the Indonesian kid Hadi who’d played him, who stood awkwardly in his underwear on stage after being chastised in front of millions. The roleplayer’s mind raced with many memories from his struggles in Suchi, and he felt gripped by a flood of shame.

Henry, despite his demented heart taking a secret pleasure in observing the roleplayer's misery, knew better than to prolong it. In a paradox that few but themselves would understand or care about, this kid, who’d volunteered to rot in this hellhole for six months, was devastated precisely because he wasn't just roleplaying. No mere actor would be hurt by the rant, dismissing it as pedantic madness.

“You had three grudges,” Henry said with finality. “Which of my shadowy crimes will our last match dispute? Be specific. You haven't earned the right to an answer for everything.”

The roleplayer, Hadi, unable to resume character, grimaced. He shook his head, too embarrassed to deliver the main monologue he’d prepared about Worlddevourer and the confounding identity split of The Tyrant.

“Whatever the reason,” Henry continued, impatient to finish this up, only having a week to process his long queue of enemies, most of whom had much more ‘real’ grievances, “I pick this playground map again. For this round, we duel until one of us is dead – well, dead until we respawn, of course. COUNT US DOWN!”

Once the officiator had started the match, Henry and his swarming tools descended without the clownery on the Crusader, who put up a half-hearted defence, his sword slow, his dodging clumsy. The kid was hacked down within three seconds. A halberd split his skull and burst him into a cloud of soul-lights that Henry told to scram and not return unless out of character to accept his gracious offer about Saana League, ‘The Tyrant’ charitable enough not to revoke it despite loathing his guts.

While wishing the roleplayer farewell, he received a message from a watching Alex saying he'd finally remembered this 'Justinian'. Henry, having already spared more of his attention than this one clown deserved, didn't care.

Next up for the 1v1 challenges was a lady pissed she’d been rejected three times from Flaming Sun’s painting department when her talentless hack sister had been accepted in one round. Henry examined the painter’s portfolio and gave advice on areas of growth while beating her up.

After her, he beat up a Tyrant fan, then a disguised assassin, then a Tyrant fan, then a Tyrant fan, then a duelling trainee, then a Tyrant fan, then a Saana food-blog writer wanting to wager his cookie recipe...

Thus, The Tyrant of Saana, while juggling his duelling workshop and his multi-tournament training, dispatched another set of minor challengers, the first in the great flock migrating to compete for a piece of his time, for a piece of his invincible flesh.