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

"What the strategic turds?" Henry stood confused, holding his spear to this hobo roleplayer's throat. "Don't speak. Your lips or fingers move, I stab you."

He signalled to the officiator to put their duel on pause, and he told this very weird lady to rise to her mystic feet, while still holding her up at spearpoint.

Henry, during their short skirmish, had felt a vague ghost of familiarity. In the woman’s subtle muscle movements, in the precise timings of her shield blocks, in the calculations spoiled by his overwhelming speed – in all of it, her technique carried an ancient presence, an all but forgotten déjà vu.

Then, in the tussle, an instinct buried deep in his own muscles had revealed to him a finisher he rarely used but was certain, this time, would hit the mark. At once, in a violent burst of recognition, he knew the identity of the phantom hovering over their match. This weird stranger he was stabbing, this weird art he was stabbing, this was his own weird self.

This crazy bitch had been fighting him with The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo.

Or, at least, some mutated version of it. As Henry now reflected on the lingering impressions of the exchange, he caught traces of another familiar ghost – his retired Earthfriend bud, peaceloveharmony.

“What the hippy shit?”

He was stunned.

Dismissing his posture of wilfulness ignorance, he re-examined this roleplayer and the mysterious connection with themselves.

He dissected the beggarly articles of her costume, capturing in one sweep her dirt-stained dreads dangling from her helmet, her tattered rags beneath the soiled armour, her serpent-staff jabbed ring-side into the ground, her East African mug blinking through the aftereffects of his hypnotic tool juggle. With another sweep, he took in the cast of freaks shouting off-stage. Over them, in a semi-transparent display, he fast-forwarded through the previous speech of hers as it’d passed unnoticed in the background of his awareness. Her apocalyptic rhetoric hit him with another strong dose of déjà vu. His ear picked out, from the audience, a zombie roleplayer moaning a warning to stop bullying her, ‘The Third Gate’.

“The Third Gate…” He, The Second Gate, muttered in further amusement, the dots rapidly connecting, one eye closing to conjure up a profile on this mad wench in his Mental Library. “Is that what you call yourself? You can answer that.”

She—The Third Gate, Seer of The Agonising Genesis—regathered her bearings and cast a dramatic address to both Him and the crowd. “A whisper from the shadow asks, ‘Are we the shell that shields the feathered young before it breaks, or the meadow burned to ash before the harvest sprouts?’ Tell that little voice, my friends, you, whose chirps echo in His silence black, you, whose roots are crawling in His ashy dirt, tell Him what you are - exactly. Say, ‘we are The Angels of Catastrophe! In the Heaven Beyond The Flames, there alone will You know the deadly music once our two-fold wings are let—at last—to spread!”

“The shadow…” Henry smirked, discovering in her bio that she’d done an out-of-character interview with his challenge queue organisers to score a slot – in this, the roleplayer had given a rather dry explanation of The Second x Third Gate link. “Nah, mate, that’s not our connection. I—Mystic of The Means That Master Many, Hermit of The Humble Hundred, Sage of The Simple Surplus, Wayfarer of What-Are-In-Fact-Not-Cheats-But-Items-That-Are-Working-As-Intended-By-The-Game-Designers-And-Trivially-Acquirable-For-Anyone-Who-Is-Not-Genetically-Trash—I’m your crippled grandpa.” He laughed, reading a particularly stupid episode. “Dude, this is hilarious. Top-notch comedy.”

Where others might’ve stumbled through her lore, Henry grasped it effortlessly. He could track clearly the hybridisation and evolution from out of his parody 1vMany passivism, PLH’s hippy monster-love, the imposter dude’s Sufi mysticism, and a fourth influence from radical, Low-Justinian-tier roleplaying.

He grimaced at that last integration. “The Virtual Realist addition to the parody is abominable. Are you one of my anti-fans? If pissing me off were your motive, frankly, I’m impressed.”

That would make her smarter than himself.

Back during his Second Gate phase, he’d yet to develop his loathing for roleplayers and had no inkling he would. That period pre-dated his ‘serious’ metamorphosis. Henry’d only had a foretaste in the losses of his first NPC pals during his guild's steppe campaign, the deeper milestones of Heavy Fingers and his mother yet to occur. In retrospect, one might be able to infer his destiny from The Second Gate lore, since his mock passivist writings did contain hints of a nascent sincerity. However, extrapolating that trajectory without the major clue of The Cripple and The Tyrant being the same person would be an act of inhuman genius.

“Nope,” he mumbled, leaping several conclusions and correcting himself. “That’s not just a parody.” Nor, he held his tongue, was it a coincidence. “As your ancestor in this idiocy, switch to a different RP soon. You’re about to go bonkers - for real.”

Although not quite there yet, this chick teetered on the verge of his own madness, the joke in danger of forgetting its irony. In two or three years, she’d be trying to orchestrate a half-baked revolution. While she might not be aware of it herself, that might be her deepest motivation in confronting him, Saana’s prime target for any discontented rebels.

The Third Gate, listening to this last accusation, dismissed it, as she did the protests of the rest of The Many, who knew their sins but lacked the character of soul to rise beyond them. “What is this madness but the truth unmasked? Who is this whore that’s purged upon the flame but she who dared to not forget her lover’s name and measure? You, who’ve yet to leave the shade, preach not to me of sensibility, of ‘real’. The more the sun of life you glimpse, the more opaque will grow your vision. How can—"

Henry—opening his eye, having read enough—cut her speech short by thrusting his spear part-way into her throat - not killing her but making it impossible to continue talking.

“So what are you seeking from me - specifically?” he asked, withdrawing the point of his spear and hurrying her to the point of her challenge. “If you’re hunting for PLH, I—again—don’t know where he is, nor if he’ll return.”

According to Henry’s quick assessment, his Second Gate mystic episode may have heavily informed her persona design, but the roleplayer herself was an infinitely bigger fan of peaceloveharmony. He thus pre-empted a common question from the former tyke watchers of the guy’s webshow. Up until a few days ago, that’d been the most frequent comment left on Henry’s montage vids. ‘Where’s PLH?’ ‘When’s Uncle returning?’ ‘Takezo, my maaaaaan! Huge fan of the series. Still watching in 2050 – still loving it. Hey, have you spoken to Uncle PLH recently?’ Henry’d beaten up five kids so far this week who’d wasted challenge slots on this snivelling.

The Third Gate, her horror at being stabbed at once cured by the mention of that bygone saint, stepped away. Hand to heart, she delivered a dreamy gaze to her peers in the crowd, to any who might recall their lovely uncle.

“In the grace and virtue, friends," she began a speech of remembrance, her voice trembling, "in the patience that you’ve sustained through these years banished from The Two-Fold Eden, there has persisted that First of Friends, The All-Friend, he who saw the smile trapped in every snarl. As you bore your fangs through this scornful winter, your grinning warmth returned his gifted spring. By—"

“PLH isn’t dead,” Henry interjected. “Just retired - like me. He’s ventured off on his own nobler, fanny-pack-equivalent pursuit.”

I.e., growing organic beets in tropical Alaska.

“You may not be DEAD!” The Third Gate snapped around in fury, casting at this Monster of The Many the judgement of The Heavens he'd kept divided. “But NEITHER do You live! You, You Gateway-Blocking Cerberus, have breathed The First of Being’s breath, but not the fuller Second! Soon You, You Cynical Hydra, whose lungs cannot the air of two worlds store, soon will You perish, in the nearing day of Union! Then, You shall behold the death that was half inside already! Then, Your chest shall burst as the doubling oxygen exceeds its meagre, stingy volume!”

“March and June, ’49; October of this year.” Henry listed off some of her previous miscalls on the supposed RealityxSaana merger apocalypse. “That’s a rookie mistake. Prophecy 101 is to keep the timelines vague. Leave room to weasel out. Don’t talk specifics unless you’re stewing the sham yourself.” He smirked, remembering fondly some of the shams he’d stewed, the frauds he’d fried, then he followed with a shrug. “Well, whatever your reasons, I’m just here to duel. Do you still want to duel?”

To his question, the chick, refusing to break character, roleplayed some double-entendre gibberish about justice and Justinian—he hadn't the foggiest what that connection was—that he deciphered as a yes.

Henry was pleased enough.

He really wanted to test her true abilities out. Despite her trash aesthetic and the terrible start, she was likely a genius in the 1v1, if only due to her impeccable choice of inspiration.

The contribution of his humble self, The Invincible Cripple, shouldn’t need to be stated. But his buddy PLH had been a formidable duellist, too, despite not specialising in the craft.

The hippy had been an expert at Fauna/monster-based . Hanging out with his ‘Fuzzy Friends’ had granted him an encyclopaedic knowledge of monster abilities. More than knowledge, it’d blessed him with a natural grace and fluidity, the hippy adapting to their divergent physiques like a second skin. When fighting him, one would often feel the intimidating pressure of confronting an actual beast of the wilds, its presence larger, its senses sharper.

It would be hard to quantify his rank against dedicated duellists. However, Henry’s current sparring score against him stood in the negatives, PLH winning more than he’d lost – that was without Legendaries.

In certain respects, PLH’s method had just been a natural counter to Henry’s. The Strategy had aimed to transcend his slow body, to submerge his sluggish limbs in a dense array of weapons until they all but disappeared. Something More than human was his ideal, a future man whose thought bypassed his muscles to connect directly with his tools, a sort of homo technologicus. PLH, in contrast, a back-to-nature hippy, had fought using nothing but the primitive body. The dude's technique shunned not only that first tool of the rock but the hand that’d wielded it, his human appendages receding into a feral collage of claws and hooves and fins. For Henry, such beastliness had been hard to make conform to any calculated design.

With that said, all martial arts possessed a complexity that defied this reduction to single dichotomies. Plenty between their styles overlapped and even complimented. PLH’s method had been primal but it had not been simple. As another Project Aevitas member, he’d also been fairly smart. His genius had manifested in an ingenuity to his usage of the monster forms, in the exponential blend of the hundreds he’d studied to produce a near-infinite number of combinations.

So, the synthesis of their two techniques could have produced many, many interesting possibilities.

Henry'd come up with some of those himself. And as he'd read between the lines of this unwashed wench's profile, sifting through the esoteric tangle, it’d seemed to him that she’d found one workable hybridisation as well.

A clue to her abilities lurked camouflaged in her questing achievements, the random feats in the dark of her journeying from sermon to sermon, in the conflicts even a roleplayer can’t avoid in Saana’s wilderness. To the indiscriminating, her doings might appear unremarkable, dwarfed by the gargantuan deeds of players from orgs like his own. But, for Henry, who’d started off a solo adventurer, who could mentally subtract the bonus of having a multitude of staff at one’s disposal, the small movements of her saga were not so small.

She didn’t quite reach his or PLH’s level. She was, however, somewhere in their species of mutant, a dangerous freak.

This little mini-them, Henry would’ve loved to learn of whatever alien realms she’d taken their joint styles to.

Would’ve - alas, with her Tier-0 character, only a fraction would be visible. PLH’s shapeshifting combos relied on the variety of monster forms unlocked at higher levels; with the current tiny pool—the tank gorilla, the stealth chameleon monkey, and the mobile cheetah—it’d be akin to oil painting with kids’ crayons. Henry's Strategy likewise shared that limitation. Any bastard children between them would be the same.

How regretful, Henry thought, wishing she’d ridden the boat instead of respawning. This could’ve been one of the week’s few interesting duels.

Hoping to extract still some fun from this, he decided to throw this ugly half-kid of his a handful of bones.

“I won’t dictate how you play or roleplay around this,” he said, as, setting up for another duel, they reset their map positions, “but here’s my plan. I’ll be utilising four main tools available to me in standard Tier-0s: Flora healing, Celestial kiting, Fauna transforms, and, what I’m guessing you don’t have, the juggled weapons.” By his estimation, she’d substituted the Twenty Tools swap out of The Strategy for a variation of PLH’s complex shapeshifting. “For a fun twist, in the first four-fifths of the bout, I’ll be using them separately, one minute each. Each tool will be accompanied with a bonus trial condition. For those whose test you manage to pass, I’ll graciously drop the corresponding tool in the final minute, when whatever’s left will be combined to finish you off.

“Starting simple, for phase one, Flora, I’ll be hitting you with nothing but heals, shields, and this:” A bow materialised in his hand, the weapon largely worthless for their Class. “This trial, you lose if a single arrow draws blood.” He tossed the bow. “Minute two, Celestial, we’ll have a friendly kite off. You lose if you inflict less than half my damage. Three, Fauna, up-close-and-stinky with the beasts, I’ll chase, you run. You lose if you get caught three times. I’ll grant you 3.5 seconds to run after each tag. Four, the tools, the realm of man, the realm of Many, I’ll be smacking you with a rapier. You lose if you can’t land a single attack during that whole minute – physical or spell." The spell addition made this exponentially more difficult for him.

“For a fighting chance at the end, you’ll need to pass two at minimum. Three is preferable. Four, I’m not going to gift you. If you’ve put in any sneaky IFH* research—and I’ll be disappointed if you haven’t—this’ll be the order of my arts: Small Island Shooting, Starhunting, Monster-Self Veneration, The Iron Defence, and A Thousand Tools. Exploit them as you will.”

(*AN: ‘Inducible Fatal Habits’, one of the core concepts of both Twenty Tools and The Strategy. This is the practice of identifying key habits in an opponent's technique, invoking them with one false tool and simultaneously countering with a swapped tool. For further details, see Chapter 175, where it was most appropriately explained in the middle of his spectacularly successful IRL dating episode.)

“That’s my Strategy, out on in the open. Play around it. Or don’t. Fight normally, if you want. How rigidly I’ll stick to the plan, that’s for you to determine. I will confirm that any cheeky grapples during the ranged phases will earn a dagger thrust.”

In this way, Henry offered his deformed bastard a leg and a few more. Whatever scraps she’d inherited from The Strategy, that should be enough for her to exhibit them.

A fun, nostalgic 1v1 between himself and a child he'd had no awareness of, that’s what this match would hopefully be.

But he obviously had an ulterior, paranoid motive. This dumb duel could turn far more serious than anyone yawning in his audience was guessing yet. Any second now, his stadium might explode into the apocalypse this lady had been ranting about, into an abrupt storm of chaos and bloodshed. Although unlikely by his calculations due to the timing, this might even be the start of the very end.

Or he could be completely overthinking everything. Who knows?

Regardless, he wanted to collect more information, and this semi-structured duel would be his quickest and safest method of interrogation.

His mutant disciple, this 'Third Gate', replied to this most generous of proposals with a dismissal of mystic confidence. The Gates to The Beyond were destined to open without the help from His black fingers etcetera. Nevertheless, in action, she seemed to comply. He caught her eyes between her semi-scripted lines rescanning the battleground, formulating a rough plan for each stage…her own strategy.