Half a minute earlier, a duel beneath the always spying sky.

To the crowd's sleepy delight, the match, its four preliminary phases passing, climbed to its climactic crescendo.

The Tyrant—having allowed his discipline to skirt through his trials—closed upon her with his weapons drawn. It’d seemed the full force of his hand had been withheld, like a teacher sparring with a student and hoping not to crush their confidence. Now, for the last exchange, he removed that charity, reminding her that a few more years remained between them.

The Third Gate, prepared for such, had kept a bit of her own energy in reserve, her own tools. As he raised his tempo, so did she. In sync with him, she reached inside herself for that highest of states, that energy that lasts but a few breaths before collapsing into self-ruin.

Within four seconds of the minute’s opening, a javelined spear of The Tyrant’s pierced her cheetah leg and pinned it to the ground. Leaping over a bench, he landed on her. His weapons clattered against her blocking double shields, thrusted back against the multitude by her arms lengthening out of the cancelled . One of her shields smacked away a condensing dagger, sending it and its ending flying. Her spare, she tossed at him, and, as he ducked its desummoning lights, she slid beneath the tube of a playground slide to break free, to a cheetah and sprinting for the shelter of another map obstacle.

The Tyrant, all sight of him lost to her in her rushing flight, ran perpendicular to The Third Gate’s path. He aimed straight for the obstacle after that obstacle, to meet her again within a few seconds.

In the breath before they next clashed, each was deep in their own heads, in the contemplations of the strategy they’d used throughout and that would take them to their chosen ending...

Henry, having been using these trials to probe this unusual opponent, didn’t feel satisfied with what he’d uncovered.

Had this Third Gate stranger, after studying those ancient duelling writings, become a hardcore fan of his, The Arena-Revolutionising Cripple? Had she, after studying those ancient passivist writings, grown to despise him, The War-Mongering Tyrant? What did she want in challenging him? Who was this person, really? What was she hiding?

He could answer none of this.

If sizing her up had been his sole concern, he might’ve finished already. However, he’d been simultaneously contending with the second, infinitely-more significant puzzle in the background of this silly duel, clearly visible if one stepped a few inches back from it.

Look at the odd ‘coincidences’ between him and his mutant spawn. Both were ‘Gates’. Both were Togavian Earthfriends. Both practised versions of the same over-complicated, underhanded technique. Both had origins buried deep in the mists of the game’s forgotten past. Both were touched in the head by madness and apocalypse…

Wasn’t it obvious? This stupid match had been arranged, a malevolent God orchestrating this meeting between himself and an estranged student.

Karnon’s awareness of a link that Henry himself didn't know was alarming but not too surprising.

Based on the locations he'd been abducted to during the Earthfriend tutorial, he’d already suspected the trickster of figuring out his deeper past, his actions from the previous game instalment that included this Gate garbage. While the time skip in the reset had erased most traces, there were still some left. During the Plains Day, when they’d run a marathon out in the savannah, Henry’d recognised in the landforms many eroded, dust-buried scars of his first global conquest. This region had been one of the main theatres of his campaign. Other remnants were scattered around the planet. If any NPC could connect those clues, it would be a character with a global teleport. Moreover, the whirlwind marriage episode had indicated that the God could cross into other Planes, where Henry’s cosmic escapades would likewise be preserved.

Their encounters since had confirmed this suspicion, the God whipping out one of his old Legendaries during the first Trading Post attack.

But why the God would arrange this meeting with this disciple, Henry couldn’t say, nor what tricks might be in store. Was his stadium about to shatter in an earthquake? Was this mad roleplayer, in fact, the trickster himself in disguise, portraying an elaborate gender-swapped parody of his parody? Did the end begin now? Was this the defining moment of blood?

The number of possibilities were too many for Henry to sort.

As for what steps he should take in response to these unknowns, he was equally clueless.

Once again, he contended with the same problem he'd faced repeatedly since arriving in this degenerate slum. A few things in this universe were of a complexity beyond the comprehension of any one man, including himself. All he could do was prepare his best while palpating with blind fingers through the immediate sensations of the chaos, feeling his way fatalistically through one instinct to run and a much stronger instinct to shank this girl in her highly-suspicious guts.

However, wasting time on doubts was itself another step. In this moment, Henry didn’t see any more of it helping. He'd analysed enough of this stranger. He'd made his preparations. The remainder, he left to the heavens.

Finishing his contemplations thus, embracing the simple, worry-free path of duelling, he closed in and committed to his ending in silence.

During those ruminations, The Third Gate—or, really, the roleplayer generally known as The Third Gate but currently on holiday—had been focused on her own.

Everything in this match seemed to be going according to her plans. Maybe better.

Entering this duel, the suspicions she’d read from The Cripple against her had been 100% warranted. She wasn’t an assassin, as she’d subtly teased in the occasional acted animosity to throw him off. However, she was a student of his own mad, assassin-like craft, one of the solitary nutjobs who’d learned the joy of taking long shots at far-off targets, who’d acquired the patience to sit through lengthy examinations, dissecting the techniques of an opponent, their tools, their habits, and their knowledge for any minor gaps through which to cheat them out of victory.

Here was the gap she exploited today: her opponent, Many Be His Sacred Names, had made a critical error at the very start in his judgement of her.

He’d assumed she’d arrived here recently, sometime after his public unmasking. This was a fair assumption. It could be applied with 99.99999% accuracy to any of the millions of fresh faces transferring for his tournament, giddy at any chance to fight 1-on-1 with Him, The Hydra of Darkness, The Night-Cloaked Commander, The Tyrant of Saana.

But for her, The Third Gate, this inference was off. She’d respawned in Suchi several days earlier, having swapped over to duel him, of the lesser titles, The Cripple/The Second Gate.

How she’d discovered her half-mentor pottering about these slums earlier had been a combination of luck, lore expertise, and—one might say—genius.

Last week, a minor rumour of The Cripple’s presence in Suchi had been circulating amongst fans of uncle peaceloveharmony. A local Earthfriend, Quinoaking38, claimed in a deleted forum post to have spotted the Cutthroat in the area hanging out with Fuzzy Friends. This rumour, The Third Gate—like most PLH viewers—had dismissed at first. Everyone knew that The Cripple was too much of an anti-social loser to maintain human friendships, let alone animal ones. (She, who’d studied his obnoxious mystical and duelling writings, understood this fact better than anyone else. The guy cared so little about others that he'd put a cryptographic interest over explaining his martial art in simpler terms. What most people wouldn't realise was that The Strategy flopping out of history had been mainly a product of its manuals being intentionally incomprehensible. The Cripple's goal seemed to have been to let the art fail. If it weren't, then it'd been a miscalculation as to the difficulty of their decipherment that he'd been too indifferent to correct afterwards, the guy shrugging his shoulders at the death of his art. The Third Gate leaned towards the latter rationale.)

But, concurrent with that tiny and ignored affair, amongst the international Earthfriend community had been a larger quest to identify Karnon’s new protégé. Due to the God’s global wanderings, the candidate list numbered in the hundreds, an overwhelming amount to sift through. And, in fact, one of the main suspects had been The Third Gate herself, who was from Togavi and whose crazy speeches the speculators reasoned might've appealed to the trickster.

Of course, she knew that she wasn’t the protégé – nor would she ever volunteer to be, finding her Zone’s ‘Guardian’ obnoxious in a hard-to-articulate way. As she’d skimmed the candidates, her attention—already drawn to Suchi by that little rumour—had focused on a Company Scholar Earthfriend, ‘HF’. This odd fellow had been spotted practising multiple martial arts while pretending to have invented them from scratch.

The Third Gate hunted down a clip of him taken at the stadium. Although the Class no longer fit, nor the speech style, nor the age, nor the mood, she recognised instantly the turtle-crap reaction speed and the pointlessly-complex anti-humour. Additionally, she’d studied The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo during her mystic roleplay, its manuals being part of The Second Gate’s religious 1vMany canon. The purpose was thus obvious to her behind ‘HF’s’ mock research. His various arts patched up The Strategy’s deficiencies and made the style less impractical for non-hyper-geniuses.

The rest of the picture was easy for one of her intellect to fill out. The Invincible Cripple, after a half-decade hiatus, was plotting his grand comeback, his art complete.

Naturally, she, a student of his—having inherited not only his style but other certain quirks—immediately began her own elaborate counter-plot to 'improve' his.

Taking a holiday from RP, deleting her character, The Third Gate had at first respawned in Suchi with a different, throwaway username. Using this, she’d entered this stadium while keeping a covert, low-ranked profile. Over the following days, she’d trained to condition herself to the simpler tempo of Tier-0 duelling while also monitoring ‘HF’ for any exploitable flaws.

Her plan had been to continue in this quiet way until she could blindside him at the weekend recruitment tournament.

She’d, correctly, guessed that he’d intended to debut his finished art then. Unveiling the finale to years of impossibly-difficult research at a noob event in the game’s worst zone instead of the international event occurring simultaneously – this was an obvious choice for an anti-social type like The Cripple.

So, what—she, one of his few successors, thought—would have made that silly debut even funnier? Him losing.

Imagine that ending. Old Sage Slow-Mo—after labouring to prove his dismissed theories correct, after devising a revolutionary martial art that would change Saana’s duelling forever—still gets eliminated. At the cusp of his victory, some random Tier-0 super scrub (secretly herself) slaps him back into the irrelevant past.

Wouldn’t that have been hilarious? The Third Gate would never even have revealed it was her. Ruin the teacher’s big day, delete her character, and return to her preaching with a silent snicker. (A simpleton might look at this as pointless or at her spoiling her part-mentor’s big plans as rude and ungrateful. However, The Cripple would have found this hilarious. It was a very high, thousand-IQ type of puerility.)

Alas, it’d turned out her sage sensei wasn’t just The Cripple. He was The Tyrant!

How obvious in retrospect...she felt silly for never making the connection.

But this whole Tyrant leak botched his dumb plot, along with her dumb counter-plot. She now had to compete against millions to meet him at the tournament. What’s more, he’d be on perpetual guard, monitoring for disguised spies, enemies, and calculating lurkers like herself.

With her hopes sinking like the universe into the flames of the gorgeous apocalypse, she, The Gate Numbering of The Three, had almost called it quits and returned to her main RP hobby.

But then, for some reason, The Cripple opened up duelling challenges, inviting fans and foes alike to 1v1 him.

Thinking fast, she’d switched to her real username and rushed to join the queue. After an interview with a manager, she was assigned a priority slot for the triple criteria of a past connection, a unique technique, and obnoxious roleplaying.

Beyond acquiring that queue prioritisation, she’d made the swap after determining it could give her several competitive duelling advantages that offset the costs of spoiling her prior knowledge of The Strategy.

Firstly, due to her being a pseudo-disciple, he would likely assign her more matches and go easier on her out of a desire to inspect her mutation of his technique, synthesised with Uncle PLH's. This move succeeded wonderfully - as evidenced from the trial-structure of their duel.

Secondly, his struggling to figure out her purpose from their complex history would doubly distract him. If one examined her riddles, she'd been prophesying her IRL-Saana apocalypse merger was imminent, beginning here in Suchi. The Gate lore—all three of The Gates' lore—centred around the arrival of a mightier prophet than themselves, the real messiah for whom they were only the prelude, 'The Gate'. For her own apocalypse-initiating hero, she'd just singled out the Crusader with whom The Cripple had been beefing, Justinian The Great. Reading the guy's profile, she'd learned he was more hardcore than herself, making him a reasonable candidate for a VRist-champion successor. A pretence of joining the knight's crusade against Him became her in-character reason for today's challenge - hence, her picking this playground map where Justinian got humiliated. She'd hoped, overall, that The Cripple's deciphering of this plot would have consumed a portion of his brainpower. This move seemed to have failed, the rude guy ignoring her speeches.

Thirdly, and more critical than those, her giving him her identity would, paradoxically, provide a martial cover. The Cripple—making the reasonable assumption she’d transferred alongside everyone else—would miss the prep she’d invested before his outing and therefore underestimate her slightly. She herself had reinforced this misconception. She'd kept her arena rating artificially low since the username reversion. In their current duel, she’d been downplaying her familiarity with Tier-0 duelling – e.g. the moronic that’d lost her phase 1 had been intentional. Her identity likewise gave a plausible explanation to the noticeable awkwardness of her movements caused by her downplaying, a degree of disfluency intrinsic to both her character acting and the innately-shifty martial art that she’d copied from him. The Cripple would know that she was withholding something, but not what.

So, circling back to their current duel, that last move would be the source of the exploited gap. So long as he underestimated her, he, who'd played always at the edge of his opponent's skill, would risk—and had already risked—several moves that he should not have dared otherwise. It was this misjudgement that had formed the centrepiece of her plan, her Strategy.

Throughout the match since, she’d had to fiercely defend this gap. Her extra training had been in constant danger of exposure, as he’d been scrutinising her from the very start. Many of their silly exchanges had been tests designed to reveal whatever she might’ve concealed. At some point soon, he would figure her out. However—due to her talent from years of roleplaying, due to her luck in catching him after the exhaustion of hosting two workshop sessions in a row, and due to her bulging brain—he didn’t seem to be quite there yet.

And that tardiness on his part—in this most sacred of domains of duelling, where millisecond delays determined all—would be more than enough. This senile old Cripple—his wits, like his reaction speed, a smidge too slow when it mattered—had lost.

Yes, today—as they were about to reunite—she was certain she'd won. To defeat such a monolithic figure, it'd taken her over a week of work, but she'd done it. She'd came, she'd strategised, she'd conquered.

Not only that, for a bonus far beyond her initial goal—The Third Gate smirked in her conniving heart as it raced into the highest beats of her Strategy made manifest—she’d just spoiled his invincibility streak. First To Murk This Tool-Wielding Tool, that glorious title would now be Hers forever, added to her list of epithets, along with his smashed body.

As The Cripple himself might gloat at such a funny moment, ‘Bad game; painfully EZ’.

...and the ending was to be hers.

The Third Gate allowed herself to be caught by The Cripple and his swarm while juking around the climbing wall from earlier.

Unable to flee, she pulled out two shields in a defensive technique copied from a lesser-known Togavian Earthfriend art, Wide-Fisted Grizzly. While pretending to panic block and get distracted searching for escapes, she ‘accidentally’ fell into one of the style’s common defensive patterns.

Her opponent, reading that, ‘manipulated’ her into one of the shield-art's Inducible Fatal Habits. She lifted a shield against an axeblow to the head. He crouched abruptly and tried to drive his rapier thrust up from beneath both her guards and into her groin and into the bowels – a finisher.

His sword instead pierced her intercepting knee, raised with the jerky speed that comes after targeted and very intentional practice.

In sync with his thrust, The Third Gate had desummoned one of her shields. The palm of the free hand, unveiled by the shield’s scattering motes, was curled as if holding a dart-blower – The Strategy’s main weapon and a poetic touch for the ending.

She'd kept one Elemental Charge from the previous spell-v-rapier phase, 'failing' to replace it before his chase began. This, she into a magically-propelled breath. From the tube of her hand, out blasted a pinch of dust she’d picked up at the beginning. A powdery missile flew straight into his slow-reacting eyes, yet to even register the failure of his thrust.

Momentarily blinding him, The Third Gate slipped through his weapons falling to the ground in disorder, grabbed him, and into a Gorilla. Due to him not bringing his own Fauna Charges after she’d passed that trial, he couldn’t match the extra bulk of the monster form. This advantage, combined with her no longer hiding her grappling practice, enabled her to easily out-wrestle him. She waited, pinning him through an attempt to delay with a spellshield. Finally, her old teacher in this craft—The Second Gate, History’s Greatest Duellist, The Invincible Cripple—she picked up by the legs and hurled him headfirst into the climbing wall beside them, his whole body folding and crushing into itself like mouldy, old trash into a trash compactor.

There was no trick from him after this.

That's how He went out, Blessed Be His No-Longer-Immortal Names, slammed against a wall, disintegrating into a blood-spritzed explosion of easily-dumpstered lights.

The end.