***

White Mouse Stalking.

In Saana II, the White Mouse Stalkers had been a cabal of sewer-dwelling Earthfriend Orc assassins.

Within that timeline, this subterranean race had been aliens to the rest of their world. Although Orcs, they lived daily as mice in independent communities, and they only dropped their transformations when communicating with outsiders to organise hit contracts. This isolation seemed to have been ongoing for millennia, causing the White Mouse Stalkers to become unique in multiple respects, from their clothing customs to their unsettling, rat-like mannerisms.

Henry’s duelling interest in these mice-LARPers was two-fold.

Firstly, the cabal had perfected Earthfriend stealth methods. Its members abided by a strict code of 24/7 non-detection because kingdoms, for obvious reasons, tried to exterminate them. Rodents were enough of a pest as is, let alone assassin rodents.

Second was an opportunity to study through this single style one of the deepest, most elusive aspects of all styles, their 'martial grammar'.

Like languages or any complex human creation, every martial art had some underlying logic to it, a grammar. A cognitive sub-structure flowed between attacks, linking them in meaning and purpose and placement, governing what classes of manoeuvres popped into the practitioner's mind in various circumstances.

Consider the approaching knife thrust. When a duellist recognised the attack, a mental process below conscious thought and much faster than it assimilated this danger with a whole number of connected variables. The weapon’s velocity and accuracy, the vulnerability of its targeted spot, the location of one's own weapon for retaliation - all were registered in milliseconds. Then—just like when speaking casually we answer without strenuous deliberation, our intent semi-automatically parcelled from a lexical storehouse into a language-specific ruleset—so too did the duellist devise a rapid reply to the knife thrust. Either a side-step or a block might come to mind, both workable synonyms for the intent of defence. The chosen response would then be articulated through the limbs, firing off in a learned sequence, a type of syntax of the muscles.

Even the most proficient duellists tended to be oblivious to this fight grammar, and—if made aware—they could not coherently describe any part of it. Nevertheless, all were beholden to its subconscious laws. From out of their drills, their sparring, their nerves, there emerged in every person its network of nebulous order. It connected every element of the fight together and presided over their coordination. Certain features of this martial grammar were universal, arising in unrelated styles through a convergent evolutionary process due to bodies and minds conforming to the hard limits of combat. Others—and what interested Henry more—were arbitrary, quirks blindly inherited from teacher to student in lengths and rhythm of drilled combo sequences, in weapon preferences between weight and shape, etc.

For his investigations of this complex topic, White Mouse Stalking was his chosen art.

Due to the degree and length of its practitioners’ societal alienation, it'd evolved a combat language and accompanying grammar bearing little resemblance to any other Earthfriend tradition. The thousands of years crawling through the sewers had caused The Stalking to undergo intense martial mutation and divergence.

Henry, through a type of comparative analysis, used this subterranean art to unearth fighting’s tectonic structures. Contrasting White Mouse Stalking's similarities and dissimilarities with competing styles of its era, he tried to pinpoint what between them was constant and the range of possibilities for what wasn't.

He then strove further, cross-analysing the traditions he’d learned from Saana II with those from Saana III. These two periods and their styles were separated by events of cataclysmic discontinuity, like The Redeemer’s global genocide.

He then strove further still, into the actual alien arts he’d encountered while star-hopping through the cosmos.

This study period helped immensely with A Thousand Tools. Much of the art's finalisation required overhauling Saana’s combat down to its grammatical substratum.

For a bonus, Henry, his infinite-capacity cyborg brain crammed now with so many styles, sensed a horizon looming. One future day, he might acquire the mastery necessary to synthesise from his manifold techniques new deep structures and implement them in the middle of a fight. That ability, if ever obtained, could unlock some pretty nifty tricks. A White Mouse Stalker out on a hit might crawl into the buried sewers of their target's technique. Hiding within this hidden place, they could nibble out the perfect covert stab, a stab that seemed akin to every before it while being, at its core, indecipherably estranged. Likewise, for a duellist like himself, there too one could become unreadable. Radically and scarily so. One could speak through their body a phrase unheard of in the arena, a command above all anticipation and counter, without precedent or rival, neither beneath the heavens nor beyond.

***

Scorpion-Mounted Bow Duelling.

After some of his most exhausting studies yet, he closed his penultimate session on a silly duelling art, one light and conversational.

In the Enuchibe Desert far to Suchi’s north, the local clansmen had a custom of duelling on top of giant, semi-domesticated scorpions while shooting arrows back and forth. These ‘duels’ were pure farce. Rarely would either party die. While the participants flung missiles, they also flung insults, and these were the main attraction, spectators lining up along the sand dunes and laughing at the comedy.

This weird art, he picked for the reason of advancing the sub-genre of horseback duelling. The skills involved would be worthless in tournament duelling - mounts suffered permanent death, and Henry refused to condone (or legalise) such a flagrant waste of life, animal or otherwise. Where the techniques would benefit him, however, were with another sub-genre of adventure duelling. See, if you duelled expertly enough and earned too many haters, whenever you went into the open world, some two-inch pricks would make it their sole mission to kill your mount. If they succeeded, you'd then be stranded and forced to walk for days or weeks back to the nearest town. Henry was still salty about the times that’d happened to him. Thus, he set aside some years to countering these nuisance pests by figuring out how to duel them from the saddle.

That aspect of the research, he held in secret, refusing to expose any flaws in his defences.

As for his publicly-explained—and arguably much more important—reason for imitating these scorpion shooters, that was to perfect the sub-field of duelling trashtalk, to create an official A Thousand Tools methodology for hurling verbal shit. Such had also been a core feature of The Strategy. However, Henry’d since outgrown his over-ironic weeb parody aesthetic, and he wanted a more sincere, more mature form of communication, one that would better convey his heart’s disgust.

So, towards this goal of a more open speech, he laboured. He studied as he had so many other arts the nomads’ ritualistic disrespect, along with countless other genres of trashtalk, in-game and out, from gangster rap to medieval flyting. He put his microscope to the anatomy of funny insults and hurtful insults. He sat beneath waterfalls while meditating on competency-based insults, look-based insults, and smell-based insults. He even dredged the dusty archives for mother-based insults, which’d been retired by the civilised citizens of 2050 due to their rudeness.

One might dismiss this subject as a joke, however, Henry treated it with immense earnestness. After last session’s Silk-Pillow invention of the hot new field of duelling aesthetics, his appreciation had blossomed for the importance of the dialogue and other elements conventionally considered 'not part of the duel'.

Truly, on careful examination, how much of the appeal ever lay in a duel itself? An aesthete lounging on a couch could find little. One yawned observing for the billionth time that tired scene, the latest repetition of life’s first action when we coagulated from the primordial soup and murdered our neighbouring microbe. A duel, properly assessed, obtained its meaning only through the extra context beyond it. The very same muscular duelling action, one person shoving a dagger through another’s jaw, this could be interpreted according to thousands of significances petty and grand. That duel could be a forgettable tussle between two dirt-smeared hooligans. Or that duel could be a transcendent battle between gods merely wearing the clothing of men. Both were technically duels, but were they same? Hardly. The true and unique magnificence of each duel existed in the things outside the duel, in the subtle tweaks by the author at play, in the actors chosen to portray each part, in the tastefully-placed lighting fixtures, and in the opening insults delivered with style and exuberant gusto.

But, sarcasm aside, most of the martial arts Henry’d learned during this duelling research really did, when analysed objectively, reduce to the same vulgar purpose – kill before you get killed. Yet, these days, it pained him to think how much was missed by that restrictive focus. Each duel, each art for duelling, each contained for him so much more beyond the fight.

Gum-flapping scorpion-riders sounded dumb in brief. However, after jostling out the years in their saddles, he came to notice the rest of it. Their silly duelling method attested to a peaceful compact. Once, these desert clans had been mired in blood feuds breaking out over every perceived slight. Now, they resolved their disputes through comedic ritual, the murder of old replaced by the lesser violences of words and arrows.

There were always way more points of interest beyond the duel itself.

Henry’d already had a dawning sense of this from his first major art, from Heavy-Finger’s Twenty Tools. Compared with these scorpion dudes, the monk’s duel had touched upon things totally different. It'd had that fundamental yearning of even a man at miserable odds with his world to leave it some legacy, to birth his intellectual child. Your universe gives you nothing but a disorienting mess of blood and chaos. A person in this scenario could just accept their allotment, could lie down in the ruins and wait to be pulverised by the cosmic boot. Or they could choose the splendour of the mad struggle, of the synthesis, of seizing together the scraps at hand and assembling them into something new and complicated and, perhaps, lasting.

And in every art that’d followed, Henry glimpsed a bit more beyond the duel.

Adopting the ways of Floating Leaf scouts, those lonesome explorers of remote frontiers, he'd discovered their same joy in meditating through the urge to return home, in aligning and stretching your whole person through mind and action to your assigned purpose.

In the Death Training exercises, Kemenrang and the other War-Priests had searched for some semblance of reason after the extinction of their god. They'd fought to break through the brainwashing from a system of overwhelming cruelty and indifference. That they failed, that they all died, did not annul the nobility in the attempt.

The Starhunters, those hermits of the savannah – their art held both an unspoken grief at their abandonment to the colossus-haunted wilds and a solitary pride at surviving the stacked odds, at defying the stars and reversing the monstrous hunt.

Even in the mad cackles of The Laughing Sons. There’d been something vague in the art of those tricksters. A rebellious amusement maybe, a quiet delight in hiding within irony one’s disdain for a censorious parent.

There was always more outside the duel, beyond and above it. Every art attested to more than itself, to the specks of it surviving somehow in the most hostile circumstance of an active battle, like seeds beneath the ashes of an inferno-wasted forest.

Henry supposed A Thousand Tools, on the cusp of its final two decades, would soon be dissectible in this same manner of retrospect. In the future, a keen-eyed student might feel out the greater significances beyond a very fine technique for stabbing a person. He himself would not have the right to dictate what they’d find, joining as he would the wordless past alongside his art's completion. Still, he did hope that curious fellow would spot the little traces it’d contained.

And what had his own art contained beyond the duel? What more was there to himself, the one who'd made this syncretic abomination?

Henry liked to think the final answer to both these questions would be a bit of everything. During the selection process of A Thousand Tool's many constituent styles, his hand had been guided as much by practical considerations as by kindred resonances with his own adventures. What’s more, regardless of the starting point, during any sincere creative exertion, the labourer and their material always blended to some degree. A farmer who’d been at it long enough eventually resembled the fields he tilled, his skin tanned the rich brown of the soil, his eyes gleaming like the sun upon the corn. A writer, likewise, was destined to become half his fiction. And Henry, too, had assimilated into himself some portion of all his martial arts.

But that was enough musings on a distant youth.

This year in the Overdream, he’d celebrated his 231st birthday, and more than two centuries now separated him from the start of this longest of quests in duelling. It would be absurd to consider him the same person as the teen who'd embarked on this journey. To him, that fleshbag kid had become like an ancestor re-enacted in his by-gone mannerisms and foibles by a descendant depicting him in an autobiography, a half-forgotten Adam passing down the shape of his face and the sins of his blood. Nevertheless, some constants remained. Between them most of all persisted the mad yearning that carries one so far in these dumb climbs. What he’d never lost was his appreciation for that, for the immortal spirit of young men in whatever pursuit it manifested, whether in the invention of some time-flouting artefact or a crude word spat from the back of a scorpion.

Trivial or not, to win your duel if only by another word, that seemed to him, reflecting in his life's endless twilight, still better than nothing, still something infinitely and invaluably More.