After that brief pow-wow with his school pals, Henry wasted the rest of his relaxing retiree evening at the stadium. There, he continued to practise, oversaw renovations of his arena redesign, beat up challengers, and used tests of mass-volunteers to iron out some kinks in A Thousand Tools.

He also prepared for tomorrow’s continuation of his avant-garde workshop with Mrtyu and several other decrepit, over-the-mountain rivals. A few more had impatiently deleted their characters and respawned to meet their old buddy The Cripple sooner. Henry wasn’t bothered by their turn out. Graciously, he gave them their requested beatings.

For the workshop, his teachings had been given a warmer welcome than his failures half a decade ago. The audience in attendance and abroad listened to every word and acted out every instruction with blind obedience. The change could be attributed partially to his refinements and simplifications; however, much of it stemmed from the sheer deference commanded by his proper gaming career, those grander deeds casting a complicated halo on his lesser actions. He tried to perceive the positive in both those aspects. The first marked the completion and continuation of his duelling legacy, and the second was the happy side-benefit of the work he’d invested elsewhere.

He'd received another accidental gain from the workshop. Thanks to all his competitors ignoring his advice to delay testing his hard-to-learn methods, the tournament(s) ahead would become less difficult as everyone tried to destroy him with his own technique and flopped disastrously. This benefit actually outweighed the loss from the lectures cutting into his practice hours.

Henry—honestly—had not planned for that. One might imagine it playing into some 10-dimensional giga-brain chess scheme, but no. Not to sound arrogant, but he'd put very little forethought into how he'd clean-sweep fifteen tournaments because everyone else on the planet happened to be a useless pleb whom he could body effortlessly at pretty much anything except table tennis. Fifteen categories had just been his estimation of what might pose an engaging, fun challenge for someone on his level. Consequently, due his workshop decreasing the difficulty, he might have to bump up the number of tournament entries to make it hard again – toss in a couple extra arts, crafts, and PVE events. It didn't really matter. He'd see how he was feeling once the weekend arrived.

Either way, closing out another slow day, he returned once again to his farmstead inside a time-defying dream. In the quiet solitude ahead, he continued his labours, sowing and reaping the grains from a wide range of fertile fields.

***

The Inner-Fire Spreader’s Duty.

The Inner-Fire Spreaders had been one of the Old Rangbitan castes. Bloodmancers, they'd been tasked with designing custom plagues and infecting enemy populations in a pseudo-magico-biological warfare. The Earthfriend Vampire Moth Transformation curse that Henry’d cured was one example of this, although it’d originated from a different culture and tradition of Bloodmancy.

Henry—ignoring the bulk of the style, his plague-spreading days done—borrowed their research as a platform for investigating the applications of debuffs in the arena. He concocted experimental weakening poisons. He mixed together hyper-elaborate impairment spell combos. Etc.

***

Broken Skull; Tranquil Mind.

He continued down the path of debilitation into yet another Rangbitan style, one of whose techniques Henry’d used to finish off Ramiro yesterday a few seconds quicker by sacrificing an arm. Broken Skull wasn’t a caste Duty, having been founded in the wake of The All-Mother’s demise. Nevertheless, it still shared the depravity of her arts, the flagrant disregard for bodily and psychic suffering in the crazed pursuit of a demented ideal.

For background, demonic cults had since become endemic to the region, and one of the strangest new groups were the worshippers of Grigh-Mornoth, an Infernal God of corporeal debilitation. His fanatics demonstrated their loyalty by maiming themselves through rituals of self-amputation, disembowelment, and worse. There was much worse. Saana's sky was the limit thanks to the game's convenient health system. As long you had a team of healers on stand-by and servants to feed you mineral-replenishing foods, you could lop off three hundred arms before lunch if you wanted. Grigh-Mornoth’s cultists, exploiting this to the extreme, could often be spotted (and smelled) limping around Nilke’s crowded streets in grotesque garments woven from their shed body parts.

Basically, they were Saana’s equivalent to 2050’s mallgoth revivalists, a gloomy, edgy menace to the public and its nostrils.

The Broken Skull; Tranquil Mind sect formed the cult’s martial wing. The zealotry for getting mauled proved useful for perfecting both the skills of dispensing and accepting injuries.

The cultists explored further extremities than simply staying calm with a broken skull. They would learn which specific segments of their skull and the brain beneath could tolerate breakage, how the rupturing of different inches of their cortices translated to temporary sense losses or muscle seizures. The entire body would be subjected to this demonically-thorough examination. A practitioner mutilated themselves until they knew the subtle changes in grip strength or hip mobility depending on which ligaments, tendons, muscle fibres, or bones were severed. It was no exaggeration to say that even the sect’s initiates possessed a functional knowledge of anatomy dwarfing that of any real-world surgeon prior to the innovations of VR training.

This practice made the Broken Skull cultists terrifying combatants. They fought with supernatural precision, and they were fearless when the struggle demanded that limb be traded for limb, life for life.

The style truly would have towered as a premiere, peak-among-peaks martial art if the cultists didn’t inevitably die young. Unfortunately, anyone unhinged enough to worship an injury demon made for an atrocious sparring partner. At some point, they would go too far and kill you, whether accidentally or intentionally - many of these cultists would, obviously, be murderers.

But Henry, a player in a videogame, wasn’t restricted by that teeny-weeny chokepoint. Thus, drawing upon this art—plus the previous butchering component of Starhunting and the risk-calculated trades of Burning River Bravery—he plunged his studious fingers deep into the guts of injured fighting, deep into the guts of himself. He went further than any human ever had (or probably ever should).

Unlike The Death Training experiments in extreme pain that'd finished in a dead end, his research with Broken Skull produced fantastic results. He acquired such a staggering knowledge of mutilation that he could reliably utilise the diffuse nervous-system paralysis of abrupt physical trauma. Through combinations of minor injuries, he could throw off an opponent’s rhythm or stun them in preparation for a proper, lethal blow.

But that minor reliability part was the most critical gain of all. As Henry absorbed these anatomical insights, a subtler randomness of his duels began to disappear.

Before Broken Skull, he’d already stabbed enough people to form a complete awareness of the possible outcomes. However, he’d always been plagued by a residual uncertainty, a mystery or magic of the individual. The same stab in the same spot that might cause one opponent to blackout in seconds could be ignored by another for minutes. This indeterminacy existed for a variety of reasons, from age, motivation, and preparedness, to adrenaline levels and the slight differences in how every duellist’s internal organs were sized and configured. This last variable was one the average person didn’t much ponder, the fact that the layers beneath our skin looked as unique and amorphous as our exterior, our heart and spleen having their own distinctive fingerprints; well, that one-of-a-kind interior changed how quickly we died when stabbed.

These individual unknowns presented an enormous hurdle in a duel, especially for A Thousand Tool's cerebral methods. The greater any attack’s complexity, the higher the likelihood of a sub-step randomly failing and ruining the whole sequence. Henry could only pull off his extended strategies because 1v1s were so cognitively simple to him that he had spare space to pack each play with redundancies, alternative routes, and opportunities to retreat and improvise - his final thrust was usually one branch of a probability tree with dozens of options.

But now, Henry, after breaking his and hundreds of thousands of others’ skulls while analysing the consequences in tranquillity, developed a frighteningly firm grasp of the causal relationship between a thrust and an individual’s anatomy. More and more, the once indeterminate branches were trimmed. More and more, the first end that he foresaw inside his enemy’s flesh solidified into the end that survived into actuality - or didn't survive. In fact, his predictive senses grew so keen that he could occasionally pull off the disturbing reverse: as his dagger sank into an unfamiliar opponent with varying degrees of success, his mind blossomed with a map of the naked interior hidden by their skin.

***

Loving Spearmen.

Switching to a lighter-hearted art, he picked a defunct school from Basindi. The Loving Spearmen had been hybrid soldier-priests used in small-unit skirmishes. They'd mixed their primary healing role with defensive spearwork in order to protect themselves when isolated from their squad. Unlike many misfortunate traditions, their demise had been fairly peaceful. The style had fallen out of fashion after The God-Emperor’s subjugation of the realm and the subsequent shifts in the martial culture from total war to ritualistic group battles.

In the arena, their isolation techniques happened to be quite useful for any solo healers. When Henry examined some of his Miracleworker and Shaman rivals, both from the past and in the present, their tactics had convergently evolved to approximate Loving Spear. They fought in an ultra-defensive manner, chipping the enemy while spamming heals. They sought victory in attrition, which substituted for the Loving Spearman’s win by receiving team support.

At Tier-0, this tactic was quite viable but it fell off at higher levels. Gradually, the heal specs lost the ability to deal lethal damage with melee attacks and, in turn, offensive-based Classes acquired disables that could lock up a solo healer long enough to kill them. To contend with the best duellists, a healer would have to give up their role entirely, switching to a hybrid spec like Caramel’s Fire Shaman.

Henry—borrowing from Loving Spear, previous caster-friendly arts like Blood-River Stalling Shield, the three Volefan Dragons, and more—worked to refine a viable duelling option for solo healers who didn’t want to hybridise. This research continued his earlier unsuccessful efforts with his first Miracleworker style, Sibylline Auguries.

From what he could tell, healers would always remain at a Class disadvantage. Nevertheless, month by month, year by year, as he had for the most genius of duellists, he reduced the hostility of the arena to its most loving. They, too—the squad’s supportive pillar, that tender soul hiding bravely behind the tanks, mending wounded hearts and wounded parts—could also have some occasional fun stabbing a man in the heart one-v-one.