The Overdream.

Sheathed Dagger.

Djengi—Maranya’s pygmy Zone Guardian—was a jovial God, a patron saint of chill vibes and reckless substance abuse.

Other deities busied themselves reclusively cultivating power. This half-pint drunk instead leisurely toured the jungles of Yamalai. Wherever he appeared, he gave the tribesmen a free grand-scale multi-day piss-up with fermented fruit wines and psychedelic herbs.

Unlike with another ‘comedy’ God, Djengi’s hijinks were simply practical. His socialising maintained political unity in a region otherwise prone to fragmentation. The usual brute force methods of control lost their effectiveness in untamed, roadless jungle. Thus, where others might have to stab their defiant subjects, Djengi kept his weapon sheathed and won the conflict before the conflict. (Of course, push come to shove, the God could still fight, Sheathed Dagger doubling as an Alchemical assassination technique - the dagger unnecessary with poison.)

For Henry, this ‘martial art’ gave him a flimsy excuse to get wasted on every drug under the sun, to eat weird fungi, to smoke musty flower leaves, to snort crushed seeds.

Why not? he thought. This videogame’d already let him try murder. After that, the rest of the universe’s vices were baby shit.

In the haze of these leisure years, he worked on what he took to calling the ‘social aspect’ of duelling. He created avant-garde finger foods for spectators, duel-conducive background music, arena lighting, etc.

His prize achievement was a multi-volume treatise addressing duelling’s unsolved ethical questions. What makes a duellist good or trash? What practical steps can one take to maintain a proper duel-life balance? Is it possible for humanity to reach that elusive goal of a cooperative, socially-conscious duel? What lies at the end of man’s quest for the existential meaning of duels?

But, seriously, this time off gave him a chance to reflect on his previous studies from many angles. Seriously - he used the substances in a programmatic regime to reanalyse his findings from altered mindsets, thereby enabling him to overcome some of the perspectival limitations intrinsic to solitary research.

***

Lightning Sword.

This one had been practised by the Goddess Amagwu, the ancient tribal matriarch of Henry’s tutorial trainer. The oldest-confirmed art he would learn from Saana III, it dated back at least seven millennia, to The Epoch of Heroes. Records of that era’s styles had been largely expunged by The Redeemer. However, Henry’d managed to recover fragments of a Lightning Sword manual while undertaking a Legendary quest.

In characterising the art, Amagwu and her sect predecessors would have emphasised its blitzing speed. The combatant strove to replicate the decimating force of Nature. One’s limbs should be held taut with the brooding might of the waiting thunder. One’s attack should arrive as random, abrupt, and violent as the striking lightning.

For Henry, however, who’d met hundreds of styles with such a generic ambition, what made Lightning Sword stand out for study was the unique Martial Class of its adherents. Called by the sect the ‘Blitzdemon’, it’d centred around in-and-out melee skirmishing. Its skills included shock-stuns, millisecond-long lightning shields, and nifty teleport skips with multiple charges.

The build was a little broken, but so had most been from the Epoch of Heroes. That age had been distinguished by its extreme Class heterogeneity and power. Today, options were limited to a dozen stock builds like his Earthfriend, plus specialisations. Back then, however, Class-types had numbered in their thousands. Every martial tradition had its own exclusive build, Lightning Sword included. In tandem with this anomaly, the planet’d been overrun by tens to hundreds of thousands of Gods, dwarfing the handful in Saana’s current age.

It’d been a peculiar era. Henry’d observed nothing of the sort despite travelling many planes and galaxies. His best guess as to the cause? Saanatek were teasing a new, super-secret game feature, one to be released not in Saana III but a future instalment - much like the cosmic battles he’d skipped to. One day, at the end of the power creep across expansions, every common idiot might be a God.

Wondering if he could cheat Hannes again, Henry examined Lightning Sword for potential exploits. Along with it, he revisited the previously-studied War-Witch’s Duty, whose secret Martial Class had also survived from that era.

This research failed.

***

Universal Big Man.

Universal Big Man was an umbrella term for the native martial arts of Henry’s island kingdom, Chayoka.

Technically, it encompassed several thousand styles. The island had been highly-fractured before The Company's conquest due to its mountainous jungle landscape. The largest polities had contained no more than 80,000 residents, and neighbouring villages often spoke mutually-unintelligible languages. Ethnically, too, the ‘Chayokans’ were hardly one people. The island had lanky giants and muscular pygmies, and the palette of skin tones ranged from the olive-brown of the Rongbitans, to the blood-red of Suchi, to the ghost white of the Neeshifites, to the ink-black of the Odayakans. This diversity extended to their martial arts.

The only real trait shared by the islanders had been an ant-colony-like civil structure, the one mentioned in Henry’s rant at the knight LARPer. Each village was controlled by an absolute ruler, The Big Man. This guy monopolised all resources, including women. The other males—typically, his sons—would be castrated and tasked with bringing The Big Man materials for his martial cultivation, by raiding enemies or completing mercenary jobs abroad. If these eunuchs gifted him enough tribute, he’d graciously re-attach their genitals and assign them a plot of land plus some sister-wives to start a new colony. (The mutant horrors one might expect from this arrangement were minimised through hyper-intensive violence. The vast majority of Big Men eventually died at the hands of a rival, who’d steal his sister-daughter-wife hoard and integrate their genetic variety. Additionally, tribes with obvious defects were preyed upon for their weakness. To avoid this last danger, Big Men customarily murdered any infants with visible deformities.)

Within this delightful culture, the notion of ‘The Universal Big Man’ towered as the highest ideal and aspiration. All Chayokans longed to become The Biggest Man conceivable. This was a man who could defeat any rival in the universe, who could tame the very heavens and lop off its cosmic member.

For Henry’s research, the main plunderings to be taken from the islanders were in the rather tangential topic of duelling flexibility.

To reach the top of the arena and stand there, you have to be open to constant, instantaneous change. This rule applied in the short term, one switching up methods in accordance with different categories of opponents, who came from across a thousand-shaded rainbow of Classes, weapon and armour types, styles, and talent. In the long term, too, the duelling meta-game underwent continual evolution, and a duellist must consequently never stop adjusting their grip to fit the latest broken tech.

Chayoka, as a direct consequence of its social dysfunction, had evolved to excel in this area.

On one level, the eunuch mercenaries—selling their skills to foreign kings and warlords—were experts at adjusting to the local conditions. Every assignment brought new change – to climate, battle sizes and types, opponent specialities, durations of service. For a mercenary, it was suicidal to bind yourself too much to anything. One had to look with perpetually fresh eyes, re-analysing the balance of combat, anticipating troubles and heading them off before their arrival. In a mirror of the duellist’s struggle, these eunuchs thus kept ready at any moment to swap a technique or a piece of armour, to discard a group tactic that’d worked in one frontier but not another.

At the same time, however, as mercenaries, they were soldiers. This vocation made them subject to the battlefield’s uncompromising demands on discipline and obedience. The person who discarded the wrong piece of their doctrine at the wrong time also got killed. In this second regard, the Chayokans, living like ants, were doubly adapted, conditioned to an absolute rule from their castrated births.

These resulted in a rare military ethic that maximised both discipline and freedom. In the Chayokan eunuch, these two contradictory forces bickered around the final arbitrator of base survival. Together, they built the optimal soldier, capable of moulding themselves to any frontier, to waging war on every blood-drenched corner of the globe.

At another level, at the pyramid’s top, The Big Men fought endlessly with each other. Their battles tended to be 1v1s - the eunuchs were excluded in a gentle-savage’s agreement due to their relative weakness and a reluctance to damage the property. When not locked in combat, a Big Man’s entire waking life revolved around preparing for the next decisive conflict. He trained his muscles and wits, he analysed the weaknesses of each neighbour, he schemed for the best chance to score a lucrative kill. This intense intra-Man competition—combined with the fractured landscape of Chayoka that crammed dozens of hostile Big Men within close proximity, combined with an entire polity’s resources being pooled into one dude, combined with the perpetual threat from underlings desperate to retrieve their stolen genitals—had made every Big Man a superbly-gifted solo fighter. His person swelled with the 1v1's vital traits. He was vigilant, cunning, individualistic, psychotic, and—most of all—flexible.

Pulling from this study period on duelling flexibility and the rest of his past, Henry finalised one of A Thousand Tool's mightiest devices of all: its core preparation regime. He crafted the precise method by which one examined the next opponent’s traits, selected the exact configuration of tools targeting their destruction, practised the planned plays, went for the battle, and won.

Now, technically speaking, this preparation regime revolved around a mental checklist, a tool not usually associated with flexibility. However, his was the perfect checklist, highly-flexible, adapted to every type of duel and foe. It covered duels against every Class match-up, every spec, every favoured weapon, every environment, every bodyshape, every Tier. Impromptu duels in an ambush scenario, and theoretical duels where you had days, months, years, decades, or centuries to plot, these it covered. It covered one-off duels, and it covered duel tournaments, where one had to prepare against the enemies in aggregate and ration tools across the extended span, utilising some tools while holding others in reserve.

In short, it covered everything. Just pick the enemy, and A Thousand Tool's Official Universal Pre-Duel Checklist would show you how to beat them.

A student of his studious school should rest assured. By diligently memorising his immaculate checklist, they would make themselves like the ever-flexible Chayokans, ready for any challenge anywhere against anyone - except maybe an invading general exploiting the underlying social problems with divide and conquer tactics. If one could truly master this checklist supreme, a duellist might even become impossible to defeat, might become as he himself had once been: invincible.