Bow-shooting.

This geniusly-titled art belonged to Bow-man, the progenitor God of the Bowman archer Class. Henry’d met the dude in Saana II while chilling in the Cosmic Plane.

Even amongst the game’s quirky pantheon, Bow-man was a bit of a weird character. Apparently, he’d concentrated so hard on the singular task of directing his arrows through space that he’d inadvertently mastered the time aspect attached to space, becoming a time-travelling immortal. This magic might’ve made him a terrifying, unstoppable menace. A deity unbeholden to time would be of the most broken in the cosmos, capable of venturing back into the past to prevent his enemies from being born. However, luckily for everyone, the God seemed to have marked no one out for a target – or, if he had, they’d blinked out of existence without a trace. Instead, all Bow-man's animosity continued to be directed solely against the blockades to refining the aim of his bow; to this very day, the God's untallied epochs of existence had never ceased their devotion to achieving whatever shot lay beyond perfection.

Henry, back in his Cripple escapades, had searched the universe for the dude in the hopes of stealing his time-travelling magic. He’d found the archer God on a planetary gas giant, where he was shooting arrows amidst the winds of an anticyclonic superstorm. Bow-man didn’t bother talking to him or acknowledging his presence. Their conversation already complete in an alternate timeline, the instructions Henry’d sought fluttered into his hand, the God condensing the entire wisdom of his art onto a single palm-sized note.

It’d sagely read, “Shoot arrow good. Do NOT shoot arrow not good.”

Now, for the next 2.7 years of duelling schooling, Henry offered his bow-arm and bow-soul to this simple mantra.

Did he unlock the forbidden mysteries of reversing time’s flow? No.

Did his shoot of arrow become less not good? Surprisingly, also no. Turns out that his aim, like his physical GQ, had already neared his neurological max.

In Saana, some of the miracles were just magic technology bullcrap. Oh well.

***

The Shadow Silhouette.

This was the art of Vaif Ogen, The Borrower, a Saana II warlock spy God that Henry’d solo-killed.

Vaif had been an Illusionist, the same preferred Arcanist spec as Loki, which focused on mirage spells for deception, misdirection, and confusion. The God’s speciality within this speciality had been in mimicry. He’d used not just his magic to replicate a target’s appearance but he'd also emulated their behaviour so well as to fool a parent or a spouse. In combat, too, he’d had a freakish ability to adopt techniques in the middle of a battle, toying with his prey before choking them with their own twisted hand. This mirroring tactic hadn’t worked against The Cripple and his one-of-a-kind tools.

For A Thousand Tools, several components of The Shadow Silhouette were worth stealing. Deception helped with strategic out-plays, Vaif's observational methods taught how to assess a foe on the fly, and the mimicry provided rare insights into imitative learning.

If Henry’d studied the style earlier, it would have been quite demanding. However, he had much assistance from the trickster gags of The Laughing Son’s Combat System to the silent imitation-learning of Monster-Self veneration. Most of what he gained from Vaif’s art were marginal improvements to his human-mimicry and magic-based misleads, Henry mastering illusion spells.

For a nice non-combat bonus, The Shadow Silhouette greatly grew his espionage skills. In the future, when screwing around in Saana post-tournament, he would have no further troubles with spies, neither in detecting them nor evading them. The sole game entities able to see through his disguises would be the Gods, and even many of them would fail if he wanted to trick them for some reason.

***

Desert Pose-Dancing/The Postures of Minute Grace.

For a fun study break, Henry bust his smoothest move on the dance floor.

Desert Pose-Dancing - this was a folk Performer art practised by the women of Suchi's Slums. It involved shifting through a set of elaborate poses at a snail-like pace, and it looked like a fusion of the robot, ballet, and taichi. The Sandpeople claimed the style’s inspiration from the dunes of their desert homeland, from the gentle reshaping of their curves over the centuries of changing winds.

That backstory was pure historical revisionism. The dance, originally called The Postures of Minute Grace, had been invented by the No’Are of Sokygemant, who’d once controlled Suchi before their replacement by its current red-skinned rulers. The Postures seemed to relate to their greater cultural tradition of clay sculpture, which'd produced Central City’s towering, impenetrable walls.

One comical No'Are tale attributed the style's origins to a period of demographic danger. The young men around then had become so obsessed with refining their clay craft as to neglect romantic relationships. To the pestering of their worried parents, the sculptors would shrug and ask why they should go through the effort of courting a real woman when they could always shape a shapelier beauty from the moist flesh of the earth. "Your daughter-in-law is in the workshop, dad," a son of Sokgyemant might rebut. “I already have a whole harem of flawless 10-out-of-10 clay-fus." Thus, with no one dating, birth rates had declined to dangerous levels, and the No’Are nose-dived towards self-extinction. The young ladies of society meanwhile were indifferent, no one at any point having cared to give them a logical reason to favour the prison of wifehood over the prison of daughterhood. However, at the begging and bribery of their elders—mostly the bribery—the women reluctantly created a seduction routine to lure back the distracted sculptors. And so was born The Postures, an imitation of the beloved statues in which the dancer moved with the slender sensuosity of soft clay conceding to an artist’s fingers. The strategy worked, and the No'Are were saved for a while.

Was this origin story the truth? Maybe. Henry'd observed stranger events in this videogame and outside of it.

Regardless, for A Thousand Tools, he trained in Pose-Dancing in order to explore the limits of micromuscular control. The dance’s languid movements built a hyper-intense awareness of one’s positioning, of tension, of the angles and distances that one’s limbs occupied within the 3-dimensional tableaux. Some proper martial arts did share this focus, but they were constrained by practical limitations - you could only move so slowly within a fight to the death.

Henry complemented this research with shorter forays into other avant-garde dancing styles. He focused especially on the incorporation of experimental asynchronous polyrhythms into combat flow, a topic he’d given a preliminary study of via Nerin’s two-pointed-spear art, The Herdswoman’s Spear.

To that style and all his previous martial arts, Pose-Dancing yielded a subtle improvement. Henry's brain for the minutiae of minute muscle movements growing, he was able to find and refine their minor faults. Slowly, very slowly, he chipped away at the tiniest blemishes of their martial forms like the desert wind lapping against the cliffs of a sandstone valley, like a NEET sculptor kneading the contours of a clay figurine.

In turn, in the all-conjoining spirit of synthesis, Henry reshaped the dance with his many martial arts. Borrowing from the hyper-conscious Stretching of Floating Leaf, for one example, he pushed the Pose-Dances to the most hurtling heights of human slowness. He crafted a routine so strenuously, so tortuously gentle that the dancer would need to be fed water between poses or they’d expire from dehydration.

Finally, all this Pose-Dancing gave him a fantastic core balance exercise due to the constant battle with gravity during the painfully-long transitions between poses. After years of sluggish shuffling, Henry managed to sweat out a meaty 0.14 physical GQ points. That may not sound like much. However, when the gains were added to his frozen total of 137.39, it looked in the rounded figures as though he’d leapt an entire point, pole-vault-waltzing right across the chasm from 137 to 138. That was it, another milestone—nay, a mile-boulder—reached and whacked into the stratosphere! With gains this sexy, one could see why a man might abandon the lesser fulfilments of love.

***

The Torpid Mysteries.

From the nation of Bes in the Western continent, The Torpid Mysteries had been a cryptic Alchemical practise, one involving dark and dangerous drugs, superhuman cognition, and bodily forfeiture.

Historically, after the citizens of the region had been cut off from their Maalundi brethren by the Maelstrom, they’d resorted to many desperate measures to avoid total annihilation by The All-Mother and her Rangbitan horde. The Torpid Ones had been some of their many sacrifices.

A group of young generals, they were chosen from amongst the academy’s most promising up-and-comers. To compete with the invading legions, they would be administered a regime of experimental drugs that rewired their brains and transformed them into military savants, capable of delivering orders at a lighting speed that matched the enemy Gods. In exchange for this gift, The Torpid Ones lost all bodily control. They entered an irreversible vegetative state, from which their commands had to be delivered psychically while guards shipped their immobile bodies between battlefronts. The loss of movement was merely the first cost. Whatever action the drugs had taken to restructure their neurons never stopped. Rapidly, the general’s brain continued to change, to corrode, until after a few weeks they seemed to go insane, meting out nonsensical and suicidal commands. At this point, they would vanish from the public eye, perhaps stored somewhere to live out the rest of their existence in madness or granted a soothing mercy. Either way, another comatose volunteer would soon arrive to replace them.

Henry used his study of these sinister methods of cognitive enhancement to ponder and play with duelling’s deeper neurology. He wanted to test the upper mental limits of his tool-based approach and learn whether, with Alchemical help, he might be able to recreate his own freakish talents for others, if not permanently then for temporary boosts.

The original Torpid Mysteries practise had been a tightly-guarded secret, invented by the Maalundi before the Maelstrom and held in reserve for such an emergency. After The All-Mother got pranked into an early grave, the Besalaadans decommissioned the program and nothing had since been released on the subject. But Henry—who’d been dabbling in Alchemy throughout his career, all the way from his crippled Komodo hijinks to his post-Cap Poison of Mercurial Debilitation used to make duelling noobs a challenge—had already cracked The Mystery.

The secret? It hadn’t been drugs. The volunteers’ minds were sacrificed for demonic possession, their bodies turned into hosts for genius generals from the wars that tore apart The Infernal Plane.

He wasn’t particularly surprised, nor let down – again, some things in this videogame were just nonsense.

Continuing in the spirit of The Mysteries, Henry did his own Alchemical attempt to boost the mind. He soaked his skull and those of his Overdream replicas in an arcane mix of tonics, balms, gases, pills, and powders.

By the conclusion of these trippy years, he hadn’t formulated any miracle potion that could elevate an idiot to an Einstein. However, he had invented thousands of creative poisons that could do the opposite - breaking a brain was much easier than fixing one. This wasn’t the worst consolation prize. In a 1v1, enhancing yourself or crippling your enemy were roughly equal.

Naturally, he also tried to make a potion that would counteract being a cripple by granting him superhuman physical abilities, cat-like reflexes and monkey balance. That flopped.

Amidst all these failures, while it wasn't precisely what Henry'd been aiming for, he did manage to mix this neuroalchemocological research with his previous studies to brew one new tool. Synthesising The Torpid Mysteries with his knowledge of cosmic time-travel, of Saana's cyclical World-Substance, of The Cap of A Thousand Dreams and similar artefacts, of The Redeemer's Yin-Yang Monkey morphology, of his supreme debilitation poison, and of the hyper-speed Elementosaurs and the Nature-Energy-Gathering Grass, he concocted a Legendary Tier-7 time-slowing potion. (Henry may or may not have spammed Alchemy Miracles last Overdream session to boost his levels and catch up with his inflated Scholar Class.)

The Soma of Brief Transcendence (Legendary)

Quality: 100%

Quantity Remaining: 100%

Restriction: Alchemist 7-4

Effect: The player momentarily acquires Godspeed.

‘gg; ez lol’

This cute little tonic tapped into the regular secret game mechanics of Saana's native Bullet-Time function via . However, being Legendary, the effect was much more potent and not simply limited to time-perception, the body also losing its speed restrictions. For eighteen seconds after drinking it, he could roughly rival the pace of the game's higher deities. Henry, like a character in a low-budget Dragon Ball scene, could blink around the battlefield almost too quick to see. A hundred punches a second, he could spam in a blur while slipping in dozens of kicks and sick spinning backflips.

Alas, this fun item was absolutely worthless in his duelling tournament. Since it happened to correspond with another Project Aevitas quest, an astonished digital clone of Hannes turned up at Henry's Overdream lab, forced him to sign more legal waivers and NDAs, and forbade him from drinking it in public.

Overall, these days, it seemed to be just one sad failure after another...