The Overdream.

Thanks to the gods who seemed at slumber, the second-to-last day of Henry’s workshop came and went without drama.

In the most exhaustive teaching session yet, he’d crammed in three massive topics. In the morning, he’d drilled his students in mastering time and space through advanced movement tricks. Around lunch, he’d showed them the full utilisation of all the in-game magical resources like spells, HP, gear, consumables, and Boost. Finally, he’d closed out with a crash course on the entire Class system as it pertained to duelling, showing the major matchups and the optimal tactics between them. Somewhere within all of that, he’d debuted a new 1v1 arena map, which he’d built himself to create the most balanced yet dynamic fights possible. This impressive piece of architecture wouldn’t be implemented until after the tournament, much to everyone else’s relief, the design being a little avant-garde. He’d also beat up some high-level noobs.

After the workshop, he’d then logged offline briefly for a final meeting he’d promised Cathy and the gang before next week’s start to his global travels. They went to an indoor ski-slope he’d booked out after closing. Henry, maximising his limited time, had wanted to use the venue to test run some snow equipment purchased for his first international stop at Peaceloveharmony’s arctic beet farm. He hadn’t skied much IRL. Nevertheless, he didn’t suck too bad, having zipped down treacherous slopes and cliffs in-game during his winter adventures. This surprise skill amused his schoolmates.

Brian—who, although probably not obvious based off their minimal interactions this week, was Henry’s closest friend in the group by a long shot—volunteered as they were separating to tag along to Alaska. Henry told him not to worry. A later leg of the journey, perhaps. But he desperately needed a break to wander without company. Despite the apparent solitude, he’d spent the past two years drowning up to his eyeballs in people.

Then, with that last glimpse of humanity, he withdrew to his farm hideout, then to a hideout in Saana where he picked up a chest of crafting materials, and then to his Overdream hideout.

***

The Lame Crone’s Vision.

The Lame Crone had been a Nikrugbeetan warrior-princess who’d turned into a mystic sage after a duel in her youth dealt her a horrific injury that left her legs unusable.

Following her defeat, the disabled princess, like many tormented by an ailing body, withdrew into the less blemished fortress of her mind. She became a creature of chronic introspection. Her thoughts were consumed with reflecting on her loss, on the minutes of the conflict and the hours and weeks before, on all the tiny bygone details expanded and perused for any loose threads of fate whose plucking might’ve averted her disaster.

To feed this passion, she had her servants cart her about to spectate fights, frequenting gladiatorial bouts and duels of honour. Each match, she watched with rapture, scrutinising the contestants before they met and trying to envision which of them would meet her same doom.

Eventually, the mad lass garnered fame for her eerie predictions, for her ability to glance at two souls and see at once whose spilling veins would stain the ground. Flocks of gamblers paid her fortunes for a whisper in the ear. Hopeful students kneeled outside the gates of her compound, refusing to move until she taught them the methods of her scrying. Whenever a combatant absconded from a scheduled match, rumours abounded of some after-dark visit to The Crone and the ominous warning that must’ve spurred their flight as they abandoned their dignity but kept their head.

Henry, frankly, put no stock in this prophecy nonsense. Despite how novices viewed him, despite himself feeding the false image with jokes about his oracular powers, he didn't have any special powers here, nor did he think anyone else did. To him, it was pure fantasy hogwash, these old stories of strange far-seers, of white-bearded kung-fu masters meeting and picturing every action about to play out before them. A real fight protested against all attempts at augury. Any calculated lines were buried in the noise, were broken by continual change, by response. A human brain could simply not compute all the data with the right combination of speed, totality, and accuracy - and that was before its soft pink mush got rattled about the walls of the skull.

For him, the future, whether in a duel or outside of it, possessed a fundamental indeterminacy. People were limited to nothing beyond a pinhole view of how the scene might unfold.

For anyone seeking certainty, rather than waste time reading runes or astrological charts, it was more productive to focus on manufacturing your destiny. You should try direct the course of events in advance. You should hedge your bets for multiple possibilities. You should prepare defences against undesired outcomes. The ideal fortune-teller resembled a boulder, a person who’d grown so strong and sturdy that whichever way the wind blew ceased to matter, their fate reduced to a question of whether the left or right cheek would be tickled.

Of course, in practice, life dealt you the same hand as your opponent or worse. Thus, more than anything before, the very greatest act of divination lay in the greatest activity going forward. In your endless tit-for-tat with chance, you had to continuously grapple to minimise the mishaps and pull the fleeting advantages in your favour. That’d been the mechanism of Henry’s ‘prophecy’ – not some far-flung vision of the future but a demented determination to battle in the here and the now, to never concede one millimetre of ground for one millisecond.

In The Lame Crone’s Vision, he’d discovered nothing to undermine this principle. His analysis of her predictions scored them a mere 2.8% more accurate than her peers.

Still, when one was habituated to contesting every speck of dirt, 2.8% could not be disregarded. So, for this moment, Henry studied as another cripple had before him, watching duels from afar and pushing his mind’s eye to see them from a little bit further.

These side-line observations paired well with several previous studies. They were grounded by The Death Training’s more experiment-heavy prediction methods, and Floating Leaf’s hyper-focused Stretching technique helped to concentrate every shred of brainpower.

***

Turquoise Sea Scoundrelry.

And now he learned how to be a pirate, a scurvied, no-good rat of the waves!

Aquatic combat in Saana, although not quite as complex as the land battles he’d specialised in, could be surprisingly dynamic for a medieval setting. Galleys, propelled by magic-assisted winds, zipped speedily about. Waterworkers coordinated spells to summon swells that sped up ally and tilted enemy vessels. Crews of casters on opposing boats showered each other in cannon-like volleys, their hellfire clearing decks and blasting holes in hulls. Meanwhile, the melee troops wrestled on plank bridges forming and crumbling between ships. Everywhere, the defeated plunged into the surf, where their splashing bodies were devoured by sharks and much fouler beasts attracted by the sweet-scented chum of war.

The main failure in the area was its balancing around massive engagements. Naval battles were reserved for the late-game, for fights between national armadas and ocean-barricading leviathans. At the game’s low levels, the Waterworking spells to manipulate the waves required hundreds of troops coordinating, and, as the scope of the conflict reduced, the magic became increasingly weaker. For a duellist, alone, one could command little more than a splash. Taking a dip mid-match thus merely made yourself a target for arrows, as easy to shoot as a child drowning in a barrel.

For small-scale sea tussles, the least awful technique Henry’d witnessed had been from The Turquoise Sea Scoundrels. A gang of freebooting buccaneers, they’d haunted the highly-trafficked waters between Saana’s north and central continents. In disorganised but efficient bands of a dozen or so pirates, they’d harassed merchant boats and pillaged coastal villages. Their raids had been a common feature in the region, their members always evading capture. That'd been until, one day, when they sank a ship from an expanding trading company, whose leader, holding none of the modern romanticism for piracy, mapped the location of their hidden bases through a combination of spy-work and attack pattern analysis, rounded them up, and gave their necks to the gallows.

Henry himself had executed several of the pirates. Nevertheless, he had no qualms about looting the ghosts of his adversaries. Without any shame, he shrank The Scoundrels’ former tactics further and tried to use them to bail out another of duelling’s floundering parts. Methods once employed to sack his ships became cute solo water-spout shoves and pseudo-jet-ski tricks on portable rafts.

During this period, he squeezed in a splash of sailing. Using The Overdream’s creative function, he steered through impossibly-treacherous labyrinths of coral reefs and whirlpools and tidal waves and seabeasts. This part was boatloads of fun.

***

The Iron Defence.

The Iron Defence were a Nikrubeetan army division of kamikaze Cutthroats. They performed the vital but dangerous role of battlefield assassination. The poor shmucks allotted this job would stealth to infiltrate the enemy lines and try to whack isolated officers and commanders. Successful or not, the assassin would usually die, being swarmed and torn apart by their target’s infuriated guard retinue.

For reasons of honour, members of The Iron Defence refused to bring shields or any protective equipment on these jobs. After sniping a target, they would attempt to escape. However, they’d restricted themselves to parrying their way out using only a rapier, even if these thin things provided scant protection.

Behind this practice lurked the usual Western Continent, Old Rangbitan craziness. The division had originated from a dissolved caste, The Iron Offering’s Duty. This group of ancestral battlefield assassins gave up on flight completely. After sniping their target, they’d supplicate to The All-Mother, they’d praise her for blessing them with success in their latest Cyclic Assignation, and they’d wait till they were killed, their souls floating off in jubilation towards their next cosmic Duty.

To achieve this state of fanatical obedience, the caste were trained and brainwashed from infancy. As part of their conditioning, they received a lifetime religious prohibition against touching shields. Defensive equipment violated their singular purpose to act once then perish, like mayflies cleft from the air on the very day of their birth.

The Iron Defence had arisen from them after the old society’s collapse. They'd since lost their obligation to suicide but not the accompanying shield taboos. Thus, they fought to escape, but inefficiently, still retaining their ancestor’s insistence of honour above safety.

Henry shared none of that suicidal idolisation, nor was he interested in acquiring it. He understood, but, believing in nothing beyond life, he considered guarding it until the end one of the highest duties. With his bones shattered, with his back to the soil and his vision dimming, a man should still will his lungs to suck in the next hard breath, if only for the possibility of one last sweet chance to confront the universe again and spit in its hateful eyeballs. Also, by surviving, you could go and assassinate more enemies, saving others the job. This culture was a horrific waste of manpower...

No, for him, these Cutthroats’ fanaticism amounted to nothing more than Saana’s most effort-invested repertoire of parries!

Practising The Iron ‘Defence’ now, he tossed himself right into the middle of whole armies with nothing but a thin-bladed rapier.

This type of exercise was entertaining. The role shared vague similarities with the previous Hardman Handaxe study. The techniques were slipperier, more calculated, more athletic, and less group-orientated.

After that, striving beyond the kamikazes, Henry—not so loyal to the sword—perfected shield-less defences for every weapon, inventing parries with axeheads, blocks with spearshafts, trips with bow-strings, deflections with daggers.

Plundering other arts, he then added non-weapon non-shield defences. He wove spell combo defences from the many magical styles, pure movement-based stalling defences from Jingzi Doubling, wrestling defences from Mutambi Death Grappling.

From his Civilian class studies, he formulated poison defences and engineered architectural defences.

At some point, he even dared to innovate—although it’d make those Iron Defenders grimace with sacrosanct disdain—shield defences.

Finally, having over the centuries learned to defend himself with every weapon and non-weapon conceivable, he synthesised A Thousand Tool’s supreme defensive method. Whatever a duellist had on hand, or didn’t, there might be some tool to cheat death with, at least until the next hit.

***

Water Tiger.

This style was just a kung-fu rip-off.