“Welcome to the garden! Yikes! Rares, put those tables back so I can welcome them to the garden. Is this what being a realtor feels like?” While Quircy Rau pondered that, the expedition's nine Rares returned the furniture of Freegate's cozy outdoors retreat to the state they remembered.

“I'm not the kind of buman who goes around pretending to be somebody I'm not, so I won't say I visit the garden very often,” Heartful Azalea said. “But did it really have tables and chairs stacked on top of one another to make an unsittable tower?”

“It's an efficient use of space, and besides, this way you really get the contrast between the artificial and natural decorations because the tower is straight while the trees bend and curve. Oh, oh! And the next time the collab tunnel opens, it'll be a bigger spectacle when the furniture falls over!”

“You convinced me.” Azalea shook Ipons Ulsrada's hand.

“Now hold on there just a minute, Azalie, hold on, and let's run our thinkers over what we just heard, real thorough-like, hear?”

“Huh. Hm. Eh? Oh.” Azalea scratched her head with her whisk. “Nope! Sorry Hank, but I don't get it.”

“You'd get it if you tried, girl, but I'll go ahead and say it so as not to keep everyone hanging, which as a ballooneer I just can't stand to see, though there's some as figured it out already. See, it was kinda our expectation that the tunnel would be open so our HLA guests could go through it.”

“Aha!” Azalea's delight did not resonate with the greater audience. It appreciated thrills and surprises, but not when they bore the implication that the earlier tussle in the tube had broken the collab system. Cries of anguish and denials of responsibility filled the garden, and many shared indignation that the people in charge thought they could away with using such shoddy materials to connect games as lively, boisterous, and downright rambunctious as Commandment of Hero and Holy Legend Army.

Once they had convinced one another and themselves of their innocence, an easier task than might have been predicted from the circumstances, the officers and crusaders could consider matters of a less moral and more practical nature. “First thing thing to do is we must have our trusted local reporter write up an exculpatory article,” Wruden Calx said, and for once Society Page Lasva acquiesced without insisting on the independence, no, supremacy of the press.

“Second! Mind if I take second?”

“Not at all, Mr. Eten.”

“About getting these crusaders home. Not a problem! We entertain our guests today. Tomorrow, sending them out through the login calendar will probably work. You have to admit it's likely their own options menu is on the other side of the tube. Jump on Back and that's it! Success!”

Asmodeus responded, perhaps because he and Eten matched each other as far as their impeccable muscularity. “I confess to some trepidation when 'probably' and 'likely' are strung together. How sure are you of your conclusion?”

“Fair. All right. If there's a 95% chance the calendar trick works for you, and an 80% you can find your options menu, and given that there's a 99% chance you have a back button . . . a 274% chance it will work. Skaya, check my math.”

“I'd better not, Master Eten!”

“Good call, Skaya,” Gaelvry Bride said. “I won't ignore your intentions. Let me say instead that Eten's plan should work, but we might not need it. Here's where I'm going. The passage opened for the first time when Cadmos came here. Can we get the HLA collaborators over here?”

Metatron said, “I observed the same, mutatis mutandis. I did not then appreciate the significance. Let us find Kullervo. He is assuredly leaning against a wall somewhere, brooding.”

The host split into detachments. Officers led crusaders around, the latter to point out Kullervo and the former to point out the tourist attractions. “Past this door is the Inferno gym. Guests here may use the facilities, but be warned. The Infernos will challenge you to a fight. I like the parallel bars,” Lua DeMereanch said.

“I begin to wonder if returning home is so urgent as I had earlier considered it to be,” Asmodeus said as he flexed his trunk-like purple arms. “Universal Temporary Asset Substitutes should not cease to function so quickly as that, cheap knockoffs though they are.”

“Yours as well? We shipped ours in from Convergence/Divergence.”

“As did we.”

Relaxing in the lounges or pacing over the main hall's thick carpet decorated with birds woven of gold were time-passing methods too mainstream for Kullervo, as the crusaders expected. They found him up the stairs, his back to the outer wall in order that his jaded eyes would not need to bear the sight of officers and monsters running back and forth over the horizon in a comical style to constitute the background for the Vigilant Patrol menu.

“Kullervo. An experiment. Come with us.”

“Hmph,” Kullervo told Metatron. That response left the officers in doubt as to whether he would help or have to be rolled up in a tapestry and carried to the garden, but the crusaders assured them he would accompany their group under his own power.

Back at the garden, the ground split open as hoped, and the tower of tables and chairs crashed with great noise and spectacle, also as hoped. “The experiment is conclusive,” Metatron declared. “Are more trials desired?” A vote by acclamation revealed they were. Kullervo backed up to close the tunnel, inched forward, stepped back, and was hurled over the wall as part of a more dramatic experiment. Rares piled up tables, chairs, UTASes, other Rares, fishbowls, and whatever else the imagination could devise.

“I've just gotta go against the grain! Can we do it the other way? Put stuff on it so it can't close?” Cloton Zvolo's suggestion impressed his fellows enough that even Gintus Pelluina and Santa C. Dorenz apologized for believing him to be, to put it courteously, stupid. “But I am stupid,” he told them. “Stupid for rock!”

Nothing could happen next but a concert, and Serdon Miloz, Cloton Zvolo, Wedding Singer Vritia, and Yutak Zvolo embraced the inevitable while the assembled officers and crusaders unloaded their vines and anchors to try tying down the doors to the collab.

First attempt! The vines snapped, the anchors flew. Second attempt! The anchors flew again and the tied-down Rares escaped before the entrance closed. Third attempt! The Rares, the other Rares, the Commons, and the Ultra Commons stayed put and were dumped down the stairs without even slowing the doors.

“Such failures as these might dishearten the hardiest heart, were it not for the blood-warming music,” said Fafnir, whom Holy Legend Army chose to depict as a Dwarf rather than a dragon. Dragon crusaders when, the players asked, and would continue to ask.

“Hrm, yes, but I give it about,” Orrevan C. Hinks checked one of his five watches, “eight minutes before Sir Cloton and Sir Serdon have more, well, creative differences, I think they call them.” The ailing reputation of Strategists recovered a bit after Miloz and Zvolo made a joint announcement of their intent to pursue solo projects for the time being and assured their fans that they wished each other well in their future endeavors.

“Too bad. I almost had a notion,” Surt said, and the crusaders assured their hosts that Surt notions always had something to them. “Vines. Anchors. Hmmmm. Ah! I have this rope.” He held up the aforementioned item, thicker than a thumb and longer than a stuman taking a nap. When the watchers neither praised nor criticized his idea, staying silent instead, he elaborated. “A magic rope.”

“Sure you do, and don't I feel richer for having it pointed out,” Hot Air Hank said. “Why, I bet a magical rope could reach through the very dimensions and pull a feller into the options.” Surt nodded. “So if we send you out riding that calendar, you and all the other gentlemen of similar constitution I see hauling them things around, and you leash us, we can pop in and out without worrying about this stubborn tunnel at all. You all got UTASes too, dontcha?”

Some of the crusaders liked the idea more before the UTASes came into it, since an idle Common was a wasted Common, but others as well as many officers, Infernos especially, had moved beyond that. “Though evidence will be had soon enough, suppose our options menu and Holy Legend Army's are on the, shall we say, same plane. Would not those of other games as well?” Hyune Giling pushed up his glasses. “If so, and supposing further this rope idea is feasible, could we not invade other games and plunder them?”

“My ears were not deceived! Slaughter and the song of swords call me!”

“I simply must pay a visit to Styleful Happy!! To the Live! To see the styles!”

“Aerywe might like something from another game. I'll write that down.”

“To learn the lore of other lands! A dream finer than waking.”

Risk-takers and peace-haters of the sort to treat collaboration events as excuses for a fight naturally fixed on that plan the moment they heard it. Already the prospect of a struggle between two games alone seemed a small and trivial thing, though they still wanted to do it.

So they did. A fighting tournament began, one with rules and Medics standing by out of fear that a dead crusader might respawn in Holy Legend Army and miss the rest of the fun. Even some of the officers who had opted not to participate in the invasion plan came out to watch or enter the lists. Right from the beginning the event revealed truths never suspected.

“My sword is now a sword of water,” Musashi said, which upon interrogation turned out to mean his element had changed from Land to Flood.

“What a scoop!” yelled Society Page Lasva, high society's latest Storm, as she slapped him around with elemental advantage and took the win.

“Verily, I am Inferno,” Surt declared.

“Not to be rude, but which one are you?” Luau Lua asked. “This isn't your fault, but all you giants look the same. Or Ogres, you're called? And you Angels. And Paladins. And so on.”

“I, Asmodeus, am purple. He, Beelzebub, is yellow. That one, Imp, is beneath consideration.”

“It's entirely my fault, but I don't think I'll be able to remember that. Where are your names displayed? Ah, below you. How novel.”

The 1v1 format enabled useful comparisons. A Holy Legend Army R Samurai, Yuusha for example, did damage equivalent to an officer with about 19k Attack, placing it below a Rare Reaper but above a Common.

“I see no Commons,” Metatron said.

“Your drop luck is that bad?” Inorrea Vacationer asked. Less flippant officers explained CoH Commons were fodder for XP and novelty videos, not genuine characters.

Crusader Cs, UCs, and Rs failed without exception to advance from pools. Local mathematicians figured their SR damage dealers to be coming in at around 23k Attack, better than Rare officers but no match for Super Rares, who met their match and often more in Holy Legend Army's SSRs. That game had something Commandment of Hero lacked, however, which was the Ascended SSR rarity that required duplicate SSRs and assorted other materials to unlock.

“None but a few crusaders have been so blessed, but those that have receive our full confidence,” Turpin explained.

“I can see that,” Zimley Boe said. “Ivar seems to be hitting about 30,800 Attack I'd say. UR level for sure.”

“May I ask, how many URs are there among you?”

“86. I'm wrong, it's 89 with the collab.”

“Saints preserve us!”

As the tournament advanced, the crusaders shifted from wondering how an open battle between the two games would go to what excuses they might offer to get out of one. Youl Sandshaker humiliated Belphoebe, who already had to live with being a green archer. Nonneros Under the Moonlight, despite not joining the expedition, made sure to teach Ragnar what they did with guys like him in his territory. Ascended SSR Dracula defeated True Beryllia to reclaim some dignity for his game, but it was the fight that knocked him out afterward which provided all the excuses and indignation Holy Legend Army wanted to feel better about itself.

“If ever I wished for anything, whether an event to occur or some portion of wealth to come my way, I regret its fulfillment should stingy Fortune decide for that reason to deny me what now I seek, which is for someone to explain this absolute nonsense that transpires before me even now,” Ruthven said.

“Allow this maid to clear things up,” Skaya said as she put on her glasses and looked up Hilliarde Feablas on a popular internet resource. “He just landed a hit, which adds a stack of Myrioi Expression, and he procced two of his debuffs for two stacks of Myrioi Realization, and one of the debuffs doubles the cooldown of the next skill the target uses, while the other applies a Mark of Myrioi which will detonate in nine seconds and damage everything in a small area, and once he reaches twelve Expression stacks he'll hit all enemies twice, each with a chance to inflict each of his debuffs, there are four of them, and then . . .”

The bout ended before her description. The outcome disappointed without surprising not only the crusaders but also most of the officers, whose hearts wanted Commandment of Hero to win when they dilated, but when they contracted hoped Hilliarde Feablas would lose. Babump went those hearts, and bump went his opponents as they hit the ground every time until the finals, when Nonneros healed his way through Hilliarde's ferocious assault and seized victory.

“Milder in ostentation yet sillier in substance is that werewolf,” Puck said, and a dozen tier lists agreed, though a dozen others insisted that while Nonneros Under the Moonlight might outperform Hilliarde Feablas in a one-on-one scenario, to ignore what Nochilliarde OPblas brought to a group betrayed a misunderstanding of gameplay fundamentals.