The next day, in-game, The Slums.

Down by the coast, the seaside festival partied on, it like every Community Event stretching through multiple time zones.

Back on the dry, sun-scorched land of shacks, life continued, too. The streets teemed with Villagers and tournament migrants travelling to and from the beaches, taking breaks and returning to hobby projects. Amongst them, the locals also busied themselves. In addition to the usual black market commerce, small teams of labourers were zipping about, tidying up the area under the orders (and funding) of The Empire’s upgraded management.

A portion of these workmen were handling minor home repairs. Without announcement, they stopped in at ugliest eyesores, patched holes in tent ceilings, replaced the planks of broken doors, and left. The speed and ferocity with which they arrived and departed resembled a school of piranhas eating a herd of drowned sheep, moving one by one through each poor, bleating victim.

Outside an ongoing work site, an overseer was standing guard beside a supply wagon when a childhood chum approached, one of the neighbourhood slimeballs.

“Osinaj, you son of a snake!” yelled the friend, sidling up and slapping the overseer’s shiny armour. “What glossy new scales you’ve grown! What shimmering fangs!”

The overseer growled. “No. Get the fuck out of here.”

The friend laughed and patted a cloth bulge covering the supply wagon as one might the hump of a cherished camel. “You’ve piled up a whole dune, brother. Let a few grains blow from the crest. No one will miss them.”

“But I’ll miss my neck. Sarga, you need to rest your scams.” The Overseer switched to a whisper. “You think this is charity? You think we’re just fixing houses? No, my friend, this is surveillance. We’re making our presence felt within the home. We’re showing them the cracks in the boards through which they’re being watched. And,” his whisper sank deeper and quieter, “they’re watching us. Others have already disappeared. Sarga, this is not a joke. Take a break for a week.”

The friend followed the periphery of the overseer’s eyes. They'd been fixed on a masked figure across the crowded street, ogling the worksite. If they were a spy, they weren’t particularly subtle. Like many Offworlders, they’d used magic to make their body impossibly muscular and handsome.

“Who him?” said the friend, before turning and yelling across the road. “You, there, with the mask and the muscles, are you one of The Tyrant’s agents? Are you monitoring for corruption?”

The muscular fellow, blinking at them for a moment of meatbrained confusion, shook his head in an oddly childish way, as if he were a kid possessing an adult’s body.

The overseer—giving his reckless friend a paranoid look, wondering if the two of them might be coordinating to test him—sneered unpersuaded. “Sarga, my brother through The Cycles, the answer from me is no. But do feel safe to pester someone else. When you vanish, I promise to take care of your wife if he doesn’t execute her, too.”

The friend swore. “A snake of the skin and a snake of the heart, that’s what you’ve become! Fine then.”

Throwing up his hands in defeat, the slimeball marched off.

Across from the chatting pair, Handsome Dan had been watching the shack repairs.

His attractive mug was hidden behind a mask, shielding him from would-be assassins. The disguise had been recommended to him by Sister Cathy. He’d met with her and the others yesterday for arena practice. Although he hadn’t planned to go—unready as he felt to meet again with Big Bro—Big Sis had messaged him that Big Bro had quit Team Friendship Forever to start another team with better players.

Since dinner the other night, Dan’d continued to ponder the news of Big Bro being an evil emperor. However, against this complicated and troubling issue, he’d not scored any significant goals, still down a Billion-to-Zero.

Whenever Dan pressed his thoughts for answers, his mind kept returning to his last image of Big Bro. He saw again and again how he’d stood glaring at him, ready—and eager—to enter a stabbing match, to sink a knife into his own bro. That reaction, like many things in these days of strangeness, didn’t make a lick of sensible sense to Dan. Such hostility between bros was inexplicable, nasty, frightening, and sad. Something about it was real sad.

Unable to reach a resolution, today Dan had set off on a hikoi through The Slums, on a contemplative stroll.

Coach Brown, whenever him and the boys fumbled a critical play, would tell them, ‘I’m astonished you jokers can even run when you’re that dumb. You must be a pack of squids. Got separate brains in your legs doing all the work while your heads sleep.’ Dan had recently discovered wisdom in that. While wandering Suchi in his quest for independence, his feet had brought him into many novel intellectual perspectives and surprise epiphanies. If there were brains in the legs, then squeezing some extra blood into them through exercise did seem to help them operate smarter.

So, who knows? With enough time to march about, you might be able to sort through any puzzle in the world, even this big puzzle about Big Bro.

The shack across the street was patched up; the labourers shuffled on.

Dan then allowed his mobile ruminations to swift him elsewhere, exploring more of The Slums and the changes taking place before the weekend tournament.

His meanderings soon carried him to the temporary northern quarters built by Big Bro’s guild. Compared with The Empire’s district, the place stretched clean and spacious, and the air didn’t reek of the same stink smells. Still, Dan preferred The Slums proper. The people and the architecture there exuded more charm. He was always running into strange new happenings at the ends of its alleys, unique projects and Villages themed around unknown TV shows. In Big Bro’s part, everything felt uniform and touristy. It was kind of lame.

Dan also stopped by The New Suchi Arena. Next to it spanned a massive, massive, massive, massive, massive, massive crowd of duellists mid-practice. There were heaps of them. One lady he asked estimated that their numbers had risen over half a million, more than the capacity of NZ’s biggest stadium and way more than the population of Dan’s home town. Crazy!

Most of the buzz amongst this lot centred on Big Bro’s workshop and the arrival of some high-level today duellist who’d be challenging him or something when he logged on. Dan, truth be told, hadn’t been following this 1v1 business. For one, he enjoyed the 6s format much more. Duelling just made him feel bored and lonely in comparison - try as he might to gain independence, he’d always be at heart and habit a team player. But, more than that, he reckoned Big Bro’s ‘Cripple’ stuff to pale in comparison with Big Bro being an evil emperor. The two seemed to Dan in whole different leagues of significance. If fighting a planetary war equated to international rugby, then duelling was on the level of provincial rugby – maybe even less than that. Why anyone would care more about the second was yet another source of confusion for Dan.

At a crowded street on the edge of the training grounds, he found a ragged preacher rambling from on top of a crate. To the passing foot traffic, the dude was madly shouting warnings about The Tyrant's connivances to conquer their zone and chastising the locals for the Villagers for their abandonment of The Slum’s ‘falsely-accused’ Saviour.

The speech sounded loony to Dan. It contradicted most of the facts he’d collected in his wanderings, and it reminded him of a teammate’s dad who’d gotten divorced after diving deep into conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, Dan kept his ears and mind open, open to that unique wisdom possessed by the insane. As his grandpa had once told him, ‘Danny boy, there’s a truth in everything that stirs the impassioned hearts of men. These people we call crazy, often their real affliction is a higher sensitivity to the truths of the age, only what they lack is the mental organisation to isolate and identify those truths. They’re pointing in the incorrect direction. But they are correct to be pointing.’

Dan, while searching for the direction the madman should be pointing, spotted another masked fella listening behind them.

This guy had been glaring at the preacher with disgust and animosity. He seemed to have taken great offence at the spirited defence of King Ramiro.

This reaction—along with a certain dark, lonesome air—made Dan mistake him for Big Bro in disguise. But he soon realised that the eyes simmering in the mask were too expressive. Big Bro’s always looked flat and exhausted, the evil emperor business presumably making it hard to get decent shut-eye.

Dan, sensing another informative perspective, walked over to the disgruntled listener. The guy, in turn, detecting this intention almost immediately, aimed a wary stare at him, which a friendly wave didn’t disarm one bit.

As Dan approached, he made out a few more of the stranger’s features. The late youth of his skin outside the mask put him in his mid-30s or so. His muscles, he carried well and confidently, like some top rugby players. Aside from the facial disguise, he wore the standard issue Tier-0 duelling gear, and it was smeared with a few fresh red strains from rolling in the dirt – he must’ve been resting up after training nearby.

Dan, leaving some friendly distance as he slid beside the fella, nodded towards the shouting preacher and whispered. “You don’t see much sense in it either, do you?”

The stranger relaxed his hostile expression, surprised at a Roboboomer sharing his displeasure.

“No…” the man replied in a drawl rough and interior as the Appalachians. “No…I do not.”

Dan, seeking any source of enlightenment, asked the fellow to elaborate. The stranger refused, however, claiming that such matters were best not spoken out loud.

“Not here,” the man warned. “Not anywhere – but especially not here.”

But Dan himself had no particular apprehensions in talking about this subject despite his naivety. “Here’s my take, Mask Bro. As Big—as another Bro once remarked on the topic of the pervasive criminality of the locals, ‘You can’t expect a people to instantly drop behaviours they’ve acquired for survival the moment they've run their course. Moreover, sometimes, what you’re missing is that those behaviours are still serving them, that they’re continuing to make what is to themselves a completely rational choice between two abysmal options, between indecency and extinction.’ Mask Bro, I won’t claim for myself any special expertise on these Slums dealings - I’ve only been walking about this place a week. But, according to most of my gathered evidence, that Ramiro guy was a violent, oppressive menace. Anyone who criticised him - they got the pig chopper." Dan mimed a psychopathic cut. "A real bad guy. He ate kids! So, it follows on from the conditions established under the domineering control of such evil, that the fanaticism of this Preacher Bro might be an adaptive reaction to the eternal presence of this threat. Him lashing out in denial in this embarrassing manner—like when your favourite club’s losing but you want to pretend they’re not losing—is a lingering product of the adopted survival strategy. What do you reckon about that assessment, Mask Bro? Is that silly?”

Dan really had no clue. This political stuff wasn't his forte.

The stranger returned a long stare, his eyes creasing with renewed disgust for this filthy, bot-loving traitor. “Yes, sir. That’s kindly silly.”

Speaking no more, the stranger turned and walked off, abandoning Dan to scratch his handsome noggin.

A farm in rural NZ, the flowers on the hills spreading their petals to greet the ever-refreshing dawn.

The land already bore the first sutures of its looming make-over. In a field some distance from the farmhouse, a campsite of caravans had been hauled in overnight. In the coming days, these facilities would be hosting a horde of consultants invited for the week’s rushed pony project. Most of them members of The Company, they needed nothing to be happy except a stable internet connection. However, some lawyers were also scheduled to stop by, along with local farmers and council workers.

But these visitors had yet to arrive, the farm for now having just two occupants, plus the ponies.

Down by a creek that snaked through a forested gulley, a teen was bathing, cleansing himself in the coolness of the night that still clung to the water. Between dives and laps, he jotted designs on his e-assistant.

Meanwhile, on a pebble-lined bank, a figure joining him sat in a fold-out chair. A man somewhere in his 60s, he had a short, stout build like a tortoise. His face, focused in thought, conveyed a trained softness that it wouldn’t have by nature possessed had he chosen any other profession to follow his first. Between the occasional question to the teen, he’d been skimming a bizarre, exhaustively long and in-depth duelling-log/therapy-journal. The hand flicking through this monstrosity’s hundreds of pages shone a metallic silver, a cybernetic prosthetic having replaced the original blown off by an IED.

The therapist, trying not to get lost in the sheer quantity of information, remarked on the most salient point. “If I’m reading these tables accurately, the frequency, it’s—" He corrected himself, having been pushing the client to speak less cryptically and wanting to model more open communication. “Henry, the frequency of your hallucina—"

"Flashbacks. I do acknowledge that they're not real, but they're also events that I've actually observed. You have to meet me half way or you're going to continue missing everything."

"Yes, your flashbacks. But that's not the main point. The frequency of these is horrific. You're putting yourself into active psychosis by participating in these sparring matches. How are you even tolerating this state? Are you not, at least, distracted?”

Henry, floating on his back and studying the clouds, shed an inaudible sigh.

It struck him not for the first time during their sessions that if this geezer, paid to listen and simulate concern, was only half registering what he’d openly stated, then no one would ever truly sympathise with him. How horribly lonesome...

“Your baseline is off,” he replied. “The rate drops during the fight. The fight is the distraction.”

The therapist nodded at a recollection. “You did mention that, didn’t you? Worse when idle...”

“Mhm.”

“I apologise. Believe me, I am trying.”

“It’s fine,” said Henry fatalistically. “The pace of technological change has become hard even for us youngbloods to comprehend.”

How pointless, he thought. This energy he’d poured into keeping these aspects of his life private…in the end, his secrecy had been utterly pointless. He could declare the nature of himself outright: he’d murdered tens of millions in the exact same way that he would kill tens of millions of real people if duty demanded it. Yet this would disturb nobody. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to care. None alive anymore could fathom what any of this meant beyond the hollow hypothetical, could palpate the immense feeling and non-feeling that lurks in such calculations. To his confession, how might they reply? ‘That must be tough. Can you sign my boobs?’ What a horrifying clown universe. Geno was right. Humanity was as dead as God, and the next major collapse would be returning them all to the bloody bottom of the endless cycle.

A moment of relative silence passed. The therapist tapped away at his tablet. Henry scaled a small clay cliff and leapt into the deepest part of the creek. There, under the water, he stayed for a few minutes before his head popped out sporting a look of unfelt disappointment.

“Missed an eel,” he explained.

“Even now?” asked the therapist.

Henry laughed. “Especially now.”

The therapist dipped into another quiet spell while mentally reviewing their previous conversations and finding no visible trace of it anywhere. The teen, flipping again onto his back, splashed lazily through some thoughts of his own, through the clouds ambling above and the memories that glistened upon their fluffy white canvases.

After a while, Henry answered the dude’s confusion. “For some insane reason, you want to practice keeping a straight head and face while this stuff is playing in your vision. What's the best job for that?”

“Ah.”

They talked further about this and other things.

After the shrink left for the day, Henry met up with the first visitors about the pony farm, made some deals, discussed designs, signed some contracts and autographs for their kids.

Then he jumped back online for the next quick and quirky duelling session.