Suchi, a duel between The Tyrant and some mystic roleplayer.

“Nope.” Henry was not entertaining further RP hijinks. “Whatever this is, I am NOT interested. I’m assigning you one quick beating as punishment. Then you leave. Pick the map.”

The roleplayer, The Third Gate—Daughter of The Two Worlds Colliding, Harlot of The Holy Holocaust—ignored the warnings of the white-masked fiend. Fearless before all destruction, she continued preaching to her friends in the audience, waving her staff of entwined snakes and drawing a beautiful picture of the apocalypse approaching.

“...tremble not, my two-heart kindred," the mystic proclaimed, "for this marks the hour at which The Last Gate creaks open upon The Mending Decimation. These are the strange days of paradox foretelling our Joyous Union, when the sun shall reflect the moons’ brighter glow, when the rivers and the lakes shall swell with the ocean’s reversing currents.

“From this land, where no rose sprouts, where no violet sprouts, no daisy, no orchid, here have I heard The Violent Spring’s most verdant melody. Listen, ye of faith, and hear it, too. Hear the voice that shall raise the sleeping seeds and raze the restless gardeners.

“From this land bestrewn by blanket dark, here I have glimpsed the golden ray that lifts the smothering shade—”

A fist-sized stone cracked against the babbling hoboess’s skull.

Henry yawned, the tiredness of the day finally beginning to hit him. “From this stadium be-owned by me, you’re getting kicked if you don’t pick a map by the count of one-times three. One. Two—"

“Playground.” The Third Gate, flicked back at Him a rebellious smirk, then thrust her snake staff towards the map with the confidence of one imbued with destiny. “It is there that—”

Another stone struck her.

“Hurry up,” said Henry, jogging over.

In the crowd, amongst all the wailing freaks in costume, the sleep-deprived masses continued to be immensely confused.

A fifth of the non-roleplayers, seeing no sense in any of it, tossed their hands in the air and walked away to a different arena to resume practice. Another quarter meanwhile blinked one-by-one out of physical existence. Having assumed they were hallucinating, these players finally put their mental well-being over the torturous workshop and logged off to rest.

The few familiar with The Third Gate were surprised by her picking the least-roleplay-friendly arena, that toy-strewn cemetery where Justinian and several other characters had been broken and buried. Her selection of it, however, seemed to have been calculated around this specific weakness. As she followed after The Tyrant, the woman babbled a string of riddles, some alluding to the duel against Suchi’s resident Crusader. Every few steps, she spat on the ground and consecrated the map with a less anachronistic title. ‘The Soldier of Dawn’s Napping Grove'. ‘The Shadow Jester’s Wicked Abode’. Before anyone could mistake this for mere scripted RP, she hurled a glob of spit on a previous challenger’s severed arm and, exhibiting her improv skills, renamed the arena, ‘The Charnel House of Mocked Limbs’.

As for the roleplayers watching this impressive feat, they grew more intense in their warnings, screaming at her to pause this dangerous enthusiasm for their craft while in The Tyrant’s bigoted presence. To them, The Third Gate replied with a stern rebuke. She chastised their lack of faith in this, The Night of Isolation’s Dwindling Final Hour.

But the roleplayer at least possessed enough common sense to change gear, her technique not so constrained like some other hardcore RPers by any in-character combat demands. Crawling into a tube slide for privacy, The Third Gate emerged a moment later wearing a suit of standard-issue armour along with two medium-sized shields dangling from her wrists by rope. Double shields were used by some Fauna-specialised Earthfriends who hadn’t learned other weapons due to relying exclusively on attacks.

Her equipment did have a few RP-appropriate touches. It was caked in a rancid layer of dirt, blood, and organ fragments, having never been washed. None of the pieces matched her body proportions. Some sagged due to being too large, others stretched exposingly tight, all having been given to her by different fans. (This related to an essential virtue in her school of mysticism. One of its key points of departure from her teacher's school had been to renounce The Second Gate's detestable avarice for loot. The Third Gate, identifying this as another sin of The Many, had since converted to asceticism, refusing to own anything but what'd been gifted by others.)

Henry—paying attention to absolutely none of this—continued throwing rocks at the hobo and hurrying her through the usual procedure. They split map halves. They took up their respective positions.

This being an Earthfriend mirror match, each collected Charge combinations in accordance with their different opening strategies. Henry, intending to use his tool juggling, went for a Flora-heavy build, loading up on shields and heals, his weapons sufficient to deal damage. His opponent selected an opener that seemed to be intended for Celestial-based kiting.

This choice of hers, he found somewhat peculiar. Few challengers attempted to kite him due to mid-range combat being his speciality even before A Thousand Tools, from back in the Komodo, poison-dart-blowing days. But he wasted no time analysing this, attributing the decision to some or other roleplay madness.

The wisdom of his indifference was affirmed by her next action.

As the duel was finally beginning, the crazy hobo, with her helmet still in hand, stooped to the ground and scooped out a fistful of dirt. Taking a pinch of this, she smeared it into her teeth and gums.

“My friends, has this soil not our world’s humble taste?!” The Third Gate shrieked with her reddened mouth; then, escalating her insanity, she snorted a second pinch like a bump of cocaine. “Has this soil not our world’s fecund scent?!” A third pinch, she jammed into her left ear. “Has this soil not our world’s joyous echo?!” A fourth, she rubbed onto her right eyeball, directly onto the pupil and sclera. “Has this soil not our world’s exotic shades?!” A fifth and final pinch, she sprinkled on her head, adding it to the grime of her unwashed dreads, speckled with the dirt of the many lands she’d wandered through. “We are the soil blessed by the living breath with choice, but we are also the choice that breathes the blessing of life into the soil!" Blessed by the soil, ready for this fight against Him, she, The Third Gate and The Last, donned her helmet for war. "Choose well, my brethren. It approaches.”

“Roleplayers…” Henry groaned, using it as a swear word.

“…1! Fight!” the match officiator called.

To open, The Third Gate, Preacher of The Final Creaking, Mistress of The Marvellous Mayhem, stationed behind a playground bench and flung a salvo of , their vibrant blaze illuminating His dark person in wicked approach.

Henry—who, again, had no clue what was going on—jogged straight at the roleplayer with a casual stride. He held a rapier in one hand and a mid-length, Roman-style scutum in the other. The latter tool gyrated about with minimal effort to intercept her flashing spells. Her still phased through it, but—after a subsequent journey through his armour—their damage was made negligible.

It only took him four seconds to reach her.

The Third Gate, who’d stood before many larger beasts in her vagrant journeys, who’d heard Annihilation’s Anacrusis and smiled, held off on her retreat until the last moment. Then, turning she—she froze, gawking as The Tyrant launched his scutum straight at her legs.

Before she could register the purpose in that odd move, he dashed forward with a rapier thrust at her thigh, inciting her instinctively to crouch to catch the sword with one of her shields, and her left boot slipped on the scutum sliding beneath it.

“Shit!” The roleplayer swore, immediately breaking character.

The next instant, somehow, she was flipped and airborne, her vision filled with whirling blue. Too disoriented to track his location, she’d activated , the Earthfriend spellshield, in case a stab was coming. Simultaneously, out of an instinct to disrupt his plans, she into a gorilla. This caused her body’s flight to slow due to the momentum of his throw dissipating over her tripling mass.

Spotting him mid-spin as she landed on her feet, she swiped out with her lengthy ape arms to grapple him but missed him by a hair’s backstepping breadth. Trying to recover and flow on from his retreat, she dropped her form and turned, sprinting, to diseng—her abdomen rammed up against a spear he’d summoned behind her, wedged between her stomach and the soil of Suchi sullying her clothes.

Suddenly, as the roleplayer’s breakaway was hampered by this one weapon, she beheld the arriving multitude.

Her nervous gaze flickered between three additional tools - an extra spear and a pair of shields. Each dropped at different points around her person, eliminating escape routes she’d not conceived of but might have. And these four were but the vanguard leading the march. All around her, the air glittered with the condensing shapes of weapons, with their shimmering, multi-branched prophecies of her defeat.

In a flash, she saw the unstoppable advance of destiny. Raising her shields, she span back to face him, right in time to glimpse the edge of his approaching rapier and the other weapons surging over her like the rising ocean washing over a stranded crab.

From the sidelines, her supporters in their motley dress watched with despair as, caught, their queen became a blur within the weapons’ clattering chaos.

A defeated sigh rang amongst those who'd noticed her waste her . The Tyrant had yet to commit to an attack, and she'd fallen for some feint of his. Doom, they knew, awaited her at the moment of the spellshield's expiration.

Those roleplayers with the most tender hearts (portrayed or real) averted their weeping eyes. Her holy head split by a hatchet, her blessed body impaled through the groin by a spear – their prophetess in the struggle was about to be dismembered like a pig spread on the butcher’s block. They could not bear to watch The Tyrant’s hand conduct its gruesome craft, to watch his fingers smite another of their punished kind.

But, by some hard-to-catch miracle, their queen was saved!

At the fatal instant, in the blur of the juggle, the tip of a shortsword glowing and plunging for her armpit scattered into a harmless spritz of motes. A fist shoved her chest.

From out of the deadly swarm, the dirt-clothed hoboess stumbled backwards and landed butt-first on one of the playground map’s spinning wheel toys. The device catching her momentum, she went for a few comedic revolutions.

Her head reeled as dizzy as an infant ejected from a tumble dryer. If Saana had the bodily function, she would have vomited.

As one spin brought her back around to face her opponent, her turnings stopped, a spearpoint snagging her by the throat and pressing with warning into the cartilage.

“What the strategic turds?” Henry stopped, several uncontrolled weapons raining on the ground around him.

His fingers, holding the spear at length, wavered between amusement and a paranoid instinct to ram it hard into her brain.

This is weird, he thought, having caught something in the middle of that brief exchange.

This is very weird…