“Let the duel commence!”

The announcer’s final syllable echoed across the vast crowd, quieting the din of song and conversation as every eye found the two competitors on the arena sands below.

The first, a hulking half-orc armored in golden plate, raised his greatsword and bellowed a war cry, which emerged as an unholy chorus of three deep, simultaneously shouting voices. The sand before him fanned outward as though disturbed by a powerful wind and swept across the dueling ground. As it passed the second competitor, an elven woman in dark leathers and hooded cloak, the invisible force knocked her backward as though she had been kicked by a horse.

She tumbled half a dozen times and came to a stop in a three-point stance, the move smooth and graceful despite the obvious shakiness of her limbs. With great effort she rose, fell back to a knee and rose again. From somewhere beneath her cloak she produced a pair of long, curving daggers, which she held weakly at the ready as her legs threatened to collapse beneath her.

The cheers and boos of the crowd warred for dominance as the half-orc lumbered across the sand, greatsword resting against his shoulder like a lumberjack between trees, and began to laugh. It was a haughty, cruel sound. His overlapping plates clanked with each slow, heavy step like the ticks of a malevolent clock, counting down the final seconds of the elf woman’s life. As he neared her crouched form, which appeared to use all its strength to simply stand upright, he raised the sword again and gestured incitingly to the crowd.

They roared, though not all of them with approval.

Apparently satisfied, he made a show of twirling his sword, casually like a child might twirl a stick. On its final rotation, the blade’s length glowed briefly golden and grew to twice its previous size, and with a great shout the warrior cleaved downward with his enlarged weapon to split the elf in two.

A collective gasp rose from the crowd.

It happened so quickly few could follow it all. A mere moment before the blade could gore her the elf blurred into moving shadow and flowed behind the half-orc, her daggers slashing into metal with rapid, sparking scrapes. She then fell back with a single flipping leap that carried her across the sands a full fifty meters back from her opponent.

Dislodging his absurdly large sword from the crater it had blasted into the sand, the half-orc twisted comically in an attempt to see where he had been struck on the back. Among the area he could not see, on the upper portion between his shoulder blades, a rune resembling the fanged head of a serpent glowed on the armor in bright, sinister red.

The elf woman merely waited, idly flipping a dagger and catching it, while the warrior sorted himself out. Laughter broke out when, her opponent now stalking towards her again, the elf woman pretended to collapse shakily to a knee, then rose easily and gave an exaggerated shrug.

The taunt having apparently done its job, the warrior raised his gauntleted fists into the air and drove them downwards towards his hips with another furious shout. Wind blasted out from him in a sphere - though when it reached the elf it only ruffled her cloak - and the warrior’s eyes began to shine bright gold. His next step catapulted him forward at greatly enhanced speed.

Now wary of the elf’s agility, he opted to begin his attack long before reaching her. His sword, still twice its original size, took on the golden glow as he drew it back near his shoulder in preparation for some kind of strike. The sands about his striding feet began to swirl chaotically with its gathering power.

The crowd drew silent, seeming to collectively hold its breath. The elf awaited her opponent in stillness, having assumed an elaborate martial arts stance with one foot forward and daggers parallel to the ground. Within the next five of the half-orc’s strides they would collide, and with this much power on display, that moment would likely decide the fight.

Metal crashed at the edge of the arena floor.

The half-orc drew up short, his charge momentarily forgotten, as he and his opponent both looked over in surprise to one of the massive gates leading onto the arena floor. Before it stood a dark-haired, bearded human in flamboyant blue robes. Clouds of sand settled back to the ground where the gate had been forced open and allowed to fall violently behind him. Despite the attention of everyone in the arena, including the active duelists, the man dug obliviously through the leather satchel at his side, occasionally poking at the empty air as though operating some kind of invisible device.

“What the bloody-”

A bit faster to adjust than her opponent, the elf woman blurred behind the half-orc and lept vertically. As she came even with his throat, she reached a dagger around him and a translucent reaper in ragged robes appeared behind her, its scythe blade and the blade of her dagger becoming one. She sliced at the mail covering the half-orc’s throat, silencing his proclamation of surprise, then bounded backward as the crimson spray of his blood erupted over the sand.

Bringing her daggers together into an x, she chanted hypnotically, the rune on the half-orc’s back growing intensely brighter with each word until a sizable portion of her opponent’s torso exploded outward in a burst of gore.

Before the corpse of the half-orc, which now had a hole in its chest large enough for a dog to jump through, had even finished its topple forward onto the sand, the man in blue robes began walking to where it fountained blood at the center of the arena floor.

A titanic hologram of a blonde human male in an orange and yellow toga filled the space of the coliseum, and when it spoke, its smooth, modulated voice washed over the crowd.

“The winner is Astria the Shadow Viper!”

The elf drew back her hood to reveal a lean, deeply tanned face and voluminous dusky hair highlighted with green. Her beaming smile fully at odds with her sinister moniker and attire, Astria the Shadow Viper spun about in a circle to take in the full crowd as she waved enthusiastically and blew kisses. When the man in blue robes drew near, recognition dawned on her face, and she opened her mouth to speak.

Absently, not even looking up from the bag through which he was still rifling, he waved her away.

Without a word, the elf’s face went neutral and she strode hurriedly from the arena.

“Our next duel promises to be one for the ages!” the hologram said as servants scurried from the bowels of the coliseum to remove the butchered corpse. “Two of the strongest competitors to ever grace these sands will face off in deadly combat, and only one will be named champion!”

The announcer, who stood on a prominent balcony amidst a more luxurious section of the coliseum’s seating, gestured to his side. Glowing crystals surrounded him, each projecting a cone of light to capture an angle of his body. Above the sand his massive hologram mimicked his movement, its large, translucent hand indicating an archway leading onto the arena floor. Its gate began to clank upward.

“Our first competitor is an oddity in this land. He hails from the distant, unclaimed territory of Arlex, where even now, at this very moment, his savage kinsmen resist the benevolent embrace of Her Imperial Majesty’s conquering forces. Before his capture at the great Battle of Many Ashes, he stood above his kind as warlord and chief. Though he has been humbled by the might of the Empire, do not underestimate his brutality, good people. He remains undefeated in over five hundred bouts of individual combat, and none - not one - has yet faced him and lived. On behalf of Her Imperial Majesty Vittoriana of the Sunrise Throne, I present to you - Gorlorn the Incinerator!”

A giant no less than nine meters tall emerged from the darkness of a tunnel onto the sand. Humanoid in shape, his flesh was black and hard like obsidian, cut through with chaotic trails of orange-red lava. Smoke rose from him in twisting tendrils, and the space around his body shimmered like the air above a scorched desert. Without clothing or weapon, he seemed a portion of active volcano that had risen from its main body of rock and decided to walk.

Boos rained down from the crowd as the giant surveyed them with molten eyes, stone fingers flexing at his sides.

“Our next competitor has garnered quite a reputation for himself here in Valheim. Many of you know him as “The Starborn” - the prophesied hero from beyond the stars - and the list of his deeds is long and illustrious. After rising to the head of Valheim’s Mages Guild by discovering the Eighth Arcane Secret, the Starborn faced off against the Mighty Black Dragon horde…”

Throughout the announcer’s dramatization of the fight to come, the man in blue robes, whose true name was Polaris, had searched intently through the items of his satchel, seemingly unaware of the tens of thousands of spectators watching him. Twice he had pulled an amulet from his bag, and twice he had shook his head and returned it. The first had been a glittering sapphire set in platinum. The second had been an emerald in gold. As the announcer had begun describing “The Starborn,” which drew an exuberant cheer from the crowd, Polaris had glanced up with irritation.

With a backward wave Polaris’ hand, like he was shooing a fly, the announcer halted mid-sentence and his face reset to neutral. His smile then returned, and he flourished as though releasing a butterfly into the air.

“Let the duel commence!”

The giant arched backward to release an apocalyptic roar, then charged. Each footfall was a crack of thunder as he crashed across the sands with shocking speed, smoke trailing behind him like the tail of an ash dragon.

An uproar of distress arose from the crowd.

It was plain to all what would happen when the hurtling behemoth reached the relatively tiny human, who seemed to not even realize the duel had begun. He would be crushed. To their collective horror, however, the giant opted to finish it well before that. Still distant from his opponent, Gorlorn opened the black-spiked oven of his maw and released a torrent of flame. The conflagration surged across the sand like a damn-broken river and swallowed Polaris in roiling fire.

Cries of consternation gave way to gasps as the flames dissipated, revealing a miraculously unharmed Polaris. A translucent sphere of blue energy slowly faded from existence as he reached up to casually pinch out a smoking singe in his beard. From his satchel he pulled a third amulet, this one a ruby set into gleaming silver, and upon seeing it, a goofy grin spread over his face. Muttering what appeared to be a triumphant phrase of profanity to himself, he looped it contentedly over his head, nodding to himself in obvious satisfaction.

As Gorlorn neared, the sand beneath Polaris shook like an earthquake. He staggered as he awkwardly tried to maintain his balance, though his eyes remained fixed on the amulet around his neck, its gem cradled in his palm and held up before his face. A foot the size of a wagon crashed down in front of him.

Gorlorn the Incinerator raised a fist, smoke pouring from it as it burst into flame.

Polaris glanced up from the ruby, his eyebrows climbing languidly as though an unexpected guest had shown up on his doorstep for tea. He reached forward with a lazy point of his index finger.

“Good game, chief,” he said.

Ice erupted from the sand. It impaled the giant through the midsection and rocketed him towards the sky, his roar of fury drained by the Doppler effect as his flailing form rose higher and higher into the air. With the fury of a landslide the entire coliseum rumbled and shook, sending spectators careening into one another like sailors in a storm.

Boredom stealing over his features amidst the chaos, Polaris looked down from the shrinking form of his foe and began to poke at nothing, again seeming to manipulate an object none but him could see. The base of his creation expanded ever wider, and he was forced to take several hasty steps backward to avoid the wall of sand being pushed outward along its circumference in a wave.

When the spell was finally complete, an incredulous silence descended upon the coliseum. None could readily believe what had transpired before their eyes. In the center of the arena floor, like some strange, arctic tower, a tilting spike of ice fifty stories high rose up from the sand. At its needle-sharp tip, smoking like a hunk of burning coal, hung the seemingly tiny form they had previously known as Gorlorn the Incinerator.

Without so much as a second glance at the arcane miracle he had just produced, or the tens of thousands watching him, Polaris turned and walked away.

The crowd erupted. As their roar rose to deafening heights, they unified into a writhing, undulating thing, the exultant gesticulations of seventy thousand blending into a massive, ring-shaped organism with twice that number of crazed flagella.

When the hologram of the announcer reappeared, its lower half was obscured by the ice-spike now puncturing through it.

“The winner is the Starborn!” he proclaimed, gesturing down to the victor. “Glory to the Empire, and long live Her Imperial Majesty!

When Polaris reached the gate, he flung it upward with a casual hand and stepped into the tunnel beyond, allowing the steel bars to crash thunderously down behind him. The din of the crowd, which had begun to chant Star-born, Star-born, promptly dulled to a moderate hum.

That was… something. Polaris hadn’t expected it to be much of a fight, but he also hadn’t expected the cakiest cakewalk to ever be walked. No one ever talked about how boring virtual godhood could be.

He removed the ruby amulet from his neck and frowned at it.

“Plus eighty percent fire resistance, and I didn’t even need you. What a waste of time.”

He tossed it aside, leaving behind an enchanted object that could probably purchase a third of the city. He could make more. The moment he had passed far enough into the dark of the tunnel, he heard servants brawling for it like dogs after a fresh bone.

As he emerged from the coliseum into the Valheim Territory’s capital city of Vilkfast, the chant of his heroic alias still echoing in the sky, Polaris snapped his fingers and a white, winged stallion appeared. Ignoring the stirrups, he lept several meters into the air and fell gracefully into the saddle. With a whooshing flap his mount rose from the ground, and Polaris the Winter Storm, popularly known as “The Starborn,” flew off in search of something that had eluded him for two, long years.

What he sought, of course, was an actual challenge.

John let the controller slide from his sweaty fingers into his lap.

He reached up with both arms until his spine gave a nice, satisfying pop, then hurried to pull down his t-shirt, which had predictably ridden up. That brief exposure of his big, shiny, embarrassing globe of a stomach was never a welcome sight. As he corrected the situation, a horde of twenty-something women appeared throughout his studio apartment, every one of them pointing and laughing at the slovenly fatass on the couch.

Heat rose into his cheeks.

When it came to spicing up the action of his favorite RPG video game, Nordic Runes, John’s vivid imagination could be pretty entertaining. When it came to his real life? Not so much.

His Nordic Runes character, Polaris, now flying above the streets of Vilkfast towards his estate north of the city, John did what he always did in the lulls between gaming action. He reached for a joint. It was three-quarters burned and loose at the mouth end from John’s half-assed roll, waiting for him above a dusting of ash at the edge of his garbage-covered coffee table. He groped for it, sending Taco Bell wrappers and various cans tumbling to the carpet. A Monster energy drink rolled to a stop near his foot, rapidly glubbing its cocaine juice into the fibers in successively smaller amounts.

Curious, it struck John, how similarly that process mirrored his life accomplishments. Early promise in the elementary school gifted program, dwindling to Bs in middle school, Cs in High School, a clinging-on-for-dear-life Freshman year at state spiraling into an embarrassing withdrawal from school and a retreat back to this tiny apartment on his parents’ property - and now, two years later…

“John Robbie,” he muttered, frowning at the joint pinched in his fingers. “You are one, worthless, fuck.”