An increasingly hard-to-follow duel.

The fighting pair had progressed to the second, Celestial trial. Slinking the playground map, they ducked behind swings and slides and exchanged flashing volleys of flesh-scorching spells. In an odd rhythm, they pendulumed from holding down obstacles to sprinting through the stretches of open ground while the tempo of their casting fell and rose in accordance. Blasting away, they hovered from each other within a thin, half-metre-thick band of optimal distance, wanting to stay near enough to hit their shots but far enough to dodge. So precisely did they stick to this band that it seemed at times they were attached by a rigid pole; each step back or forward by one synchronised with the reverse motion of the other.

Off stage, the tired-out spectators—their eyes swinging back and forth with the crisscrossing lights of this mirrored spell phase—were sinking into a mesmerised confusion.

Why—the roleplayers wondered dumbly—did The Tyrant, this remorseless bullier of their ilk, now play out a friendly match with one of their most far-gone representatives? Where was the humiliation he’d dealt to Suchi’s golden knight? Where was the hatred? The mockery?

And how—the veteran duellists meanwhile asked—was this soil-sodden lunatic keeping up so well with The Tyrant? From where had she acquired this ease with the strategic flow that they themselves were months away from unlocking? How could a mere hobo navigate this complex game of his? Would the rest of them need to learn mysticism for A Thousand Tools’ final step?

Alas, these poor souls, untutored in the annals of The Gates, members of the unenlightened Many, were doomed to an eternity of ignorance (at least until they reviewed the lore recaps).

But not all who gave witness had been doing so from the unknowing dark.

London Tremor—handed the secrets of the past from the bleeding fingers of a hunchback—had been narrating up a storm for his viewers and a small in-person crowd collecting around him. His audience listened with mystified ears as the intern assumed his own role in the endless succession of martyred evangels, as he, like the many souls sacrificed to the lore, drove himself to madness and Beyond in the recitation of the holy gospel of The Gates.

His first divine vision had been received the moment HF delivered his duelling conditions while speaking of ‘strategy’.

“Of course…” London had whispered, struck by a bolt of insight from above, his voice tinged by some of the night-touched insanity of that lore-addicted hunchback. “But OF COURSE, this daughter-in-lore—The Third Gate, Successor of The Second Gates and The First Second Gate’s 1vMany—would have picked up The Cripple’s former technique, that parent art to what we diligently learn today, A Thousand Tools before A Thousand Tools…The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo. BUT,” he interjected against himself, his lore-poisoned mind reeling through the branching web of history, “BUT, after the aeons of separation, would what she brings to us today be The Strategy…or something else?”

The intern nodded, struck again by a prophetic certainty of inexplicable locus, its roots buried in the previous story of The Gates. “Of course...after all, that martial progenitor had ultimately been a dead end, had it not? Many more years of research would be needed before its principles could be made practical in the form of A Thousand Tools, and anyone sticking to the original would’ve found themselves met with one frustrating defeat after another - unless they had Legendaries. Can defeat be tolerated by The Strategy? No. A total focus on victory, a ruthless instrumentalism, this is the heart of The Strategy, and it demands that even itself be discarded when it cannot fit the task. No, a duellist could not persist with The Strategy alone. This Third Gate, starting from its cerebralised foundation, MUST have diverged from it no less than she had from The Second Gate’s parodical teachings. Like her sermons, her martial art would also have incorporated elements of the alien and contradictory, rebuilding itself anew.

“’But how,’ asks Malice71, ‘how exactly might it have changed?’” said London, thinking he’d read this question in his stream chat although it might have been a hallucination.

The intern paused, lacking any knowledge about the particulars of The Strategy.

...

......

“Well...” he muttered to himself, “drawing from our insights into A Thousand Tools and the character of its creator…why, in the essential aspect of complexity, might not The Strategy’s complexity have felt erudite, rigid, instrumental, sociopathic, and avant-garde? Its complexity would be like a mecha suit designed by a librarian who steals half the library's funds to pay for side hobbies, a complexity that doesn’t quite fit the contours of the human flesh encased by the mecha suit but still propels one’s thrusts so fast as to crumple space-time and punch your enemy as a baby. On the other hand, the complexity exhibited by The Third Gate’s new martial art, from an Earthfriend Virtual-Roleplayer mystic, wouldn’t this evolve to become crazier and apocalyptic and organic yet paradoxically digital? Her complexity should be like a hologram of an old-growth forest whose layers have accumulated centuries of intertwined abundance, a complexity whose pixelated bushes hide furries cannibalising non-roleplaying heathens and arguing insanely that it’s not technically cannibalism because they’re real ani—” The intern stopped, having lost his own point in the analogy. “Friends, the main point is that what we’re about to witness is a duel between evolutions of The Strategy. We’ll get to observe how that ancestral art has mutated after passing through the one Gate to his protégé Gate. In the crafty, thousand-title hands of The Second Gate, that Strategy of the past has become what we know and despair to study, A Thousand Tools. In the VRist mystical hands of The Third Gate, it’s become a completely different beast...The Strategy of The Apocalyptic Not-Fake Hologram Forest!”

Nobody listening had understood more than 37% of this gibberish. Neither had London himself, his sleep-lacking brain ascending to a state of lore-duelling hybrid psychosis. Still, a few in his audience managed to identify the key teacher-student connection between The Third Gate and HF a.k.a. The Cripple a.k.a. The Second Gate. They’d thus taken to watching the subsequent fight through that perspective while the intern frothed and foamed through his increasingly muddled commentary.

The opening of the match, the arrow-dodging trial, had seemed to support his conjecture.

HF's switched tactics from their first skirmish instantly unlocked a latent skill in The Third Gate, who avoided getting shot much longer than most players ever could. Her style throughout also bore a vague resemblance to her opponent's. She hugged the mid-range of spellkiting instead of the melee skirmishing more conventional in duelling. Her distances were managed splendidly, and she moved between the map obstacles with deliberation and exactitude. Most players, when using defensive spells, utilised theirs instinctively, burning them as soon a threat was recognised. The Third Gate appeared to ration hers, prioritising amongst the multiple contingencies worked out in advance. The failed manoeuvre at the end likewise possessed some of his fundamental sneakiness.

The second trial, the Celestial kite-off, would demonstrate her hidden skills even better. The range and tempo of the exchange corresponded closer with The Strategy's poison-dart techniques. As the pair traded while sprinting and ducking between obstacles, she seemed at home, flowing with a nimble yet calculated grace from spot to spell. Her teacher, with his mutant accuracy, still trounced her. Nevertheless, she managed to exceed the trial condition of matching half his damage, and, in reward, she would no longer have to deal with his spell attacks in the final phase. From the camp of pro players by the arena side, an applause rang out for the student’s superb effort.

The next cat-and-mouse Fauna phase brought out some of that otherness guessed by the intern to have infiltrated her art. Her monster-form control was immaculate. She could shapeshift mid-stride without disrupting her speed or balance. As a Cheetah, she could have been confused for the genuine animal given the naturalness of her gait. HF, using the advantage of his superior map knowledge, caught her and tagged her twice, once from out of a Chameleon Monkey stealth, again by running her down with human legs. But his third tag, she narrowly escaped in what—to London’s judgement—appeared to be an offered freebie, HF allowing her to pass and removing his shapeshifting later.

The teacher caught up to her in the very first second of the fourth minute, the trial against his weapon juggling. As she tried to flick a fast-moving at him for the instant win, he smacked the tip of her finger with a rapier, re-directing the spell glittering into the sky. A blinding sequence of steel and magic followed. Her arms spasmed about in search of a shot. His sword knocked each off trajectory and disrupted the attempts to gather new Charges.

One trick from The Third Gate was to collect Elemental Charges for . This ability—a favourite of Earthfriend roleplayers for creating fun visual effects—could replicate almost any magic conceivable at the trade-off of lacking the real version’s potency. A tornado could be summoned, for example, but it would be a tiny tornado, incapable of tearing a sapling from the ground. In the unusual case of HF’s trial, however, The Third Gate didn’t need to care about the amount of damage, any hit being a pass. Thus, she started trying to blast him with instant arcs of lightning and wide nets of wind. HF responded to her cleverness by drawing a second rapier and smacking her around harder.

The fourth minute concluded with the roleplayer’s failure, his weapons remaining a part of her ultimate fate, along with the Flora healing of the first unpassed round.

From the little that London understood of The Strategy via A Thousand Tools, the pair must have been engaged in a higher-level game across these phases.

Throughout, they would be vying to create windows of ‘Tool Surplus’, i.e. temporary advantages in terms of resources and cooldowns, and, during those, they’d switch between attack and defence. Each was constantly testing and reading the other. Through preliminary moves, they probed for limits in reaction speed and accuracy, for habits that could be exploited. This information, they used in real-time to formulate attacks aimed at gaining further Tool Surpluses.

The ultimate goal, built out of the shifting accumulation of these Surpluses, was to commit to an all-in finisher when the sum of Tools was stacked most in one’s favour. Both HF and The Third Gate would have several ideal finishers in mind, based around an intricate assessment of the other's skills relative to their own. Towards these finishers, they would attempt to manipulate their opponent by misleading with false, distracting finishers, by pretending to fall for the other's finishers and transitioning them. Meanwhile, in the bewildering midst of these feints, they occasionally weaselled in real but less-committal finishers, just to screw with the other’s plotting or land a cheap victory during a lapse of judgement.

London Tremor, unfortunately, didn’t have the skills to read how this meta-contest unfolded during a live bout, and almost no one in the world could have besides the two scheming in the arena. Instead—as the duel entered its fifth and final minute, as HF weapon juggled while collecting a pure set of Flora Charges for his finisher—the intern gave up on such impossible analysis. He also gave up on play-by-play commentary, his mind too worn-out to track any more of the action.

Discarding both, London Tremor reverted to his original role in this saga as an agent of pure, clueless hype, as a minstrel who sings in a half-conscious trance that most ancient and beautiful melody of redemption.

He turned aside from the duel momentarily and, with a fanatical glint in his drooping eyes, he swept a glance around the stadium, at his brothers and sisters anointed by the arena's sand and gathered in its blood-soaked bosom.

These last days, London had witnessed spreading to the others here a defeatist gloom. It was similar to that which'd threatened once to destroy himself, a mere intern journalist, made into an international joke after not recognising HF's true identities despite receiving a ton of hints, including from the teen himself chatting directly with him.

The source of these other duellists' despair had been a similar cruelty. After HF's premature leak, the teen had opened up this venue to instruct them and instruct them he had. Somewhere, casually in the middle of his never-ending lessons, he'd beaten up all the pro players arriving for the tournament, teaching them of the futility of competing against him and ruining the whole event. The duellists of the whole world, watching these spoiler matches, had lost their fighting spirits. One by one, they'd laid their bodies on the dirt of his stadium, inert and pathetic as a corpse in a field of trash.

Looking now, you could see hundreds who'd succumbed. Both amateurs and professionals wept on their backs by the side of arenas, fell lifeless from the dizzy heights of map obstacles. This was the uniform image of their duelling scene: doom, misery, and exhaustion.

London, who'd once fought against this same melancholia, could not endure the sight. To any of these premature dead, if they would listen, then he would try to raise them back up alongside himself. If he could, he would revive in their hearts a portion of the intrigue lost from the saga of triple redemption they’d all lost when The Return of The Cripple and Fanny-Packs and An Intern had been spoiled by this less interesting and more tiring story.

In a pose of humble supplication, verging on passing out himself from sleep deprivation, the intern stood beneath the arena stage, the shaking speck of a man cast into the shadows of two wrestling titans. Before his tiny form, their figures towered, two giants remerging from the catacombs of the arena’s past, two gates suffused with the glowing promise of the arena’s future, their heads penetrating the cloudless blue heavens. As their weapons clashed, as their stratagems clashed, the blood that spilt washed over him and poured into his veins. The tremors of their distant steps rippled through his soul and body and commandeered the insignificant muscles of his vocal cords.

“Watch her!” he roared to all who slept, rising to his lowly position as a preacher for these Gates, a Gate to The Gates. “Watch her now, you, whose hearts have fallen out of faith! At this, the hour of the closing curtain, when hope has sunken into the black pits of despair, when that devil The Cripple hop-scotches through the final squares of yet another invincible saga, a challenger has emerged with a chance of salvation, a chance of HYPE!" He raised a shaking fist of resistance against HF and the confused questions from his stream chat unable to follow his train of thought or figure out why he'd taken to imitating the hunchback from earlier. "Watch her, my tired kin, this sister rising in our stead, a student like us who fights the teacher tool-to-tool, a child forgotten but not forgetting, a daughter-in-lore bitter at the inheritance of only half his immortal blood and seeking more, The Third Gate! The Third Gate!” He repeated and emphasised, as if the numerology was profoundly significant. “Watch this Third of The Gates, she who locks strategic horns with her father-in—” The intern stopped, the match having ended abruptly. “Holy shit.”