"...And so, I, whose grip was stronger, followed my path. I walked over the frozen dead, and I climbed the cliff, and I felled the forest, and I built the bridge.

As I then crossed the ravine at the head of our people, taken under my command, I looked down upon my friends whose bodies lay stiff and smashed at the depths below, and I spat upon them my thanks for showing me their folly.

And so would continue the rest of my struggle upon the mountain. My weak-souled brothers, I led, and I, who feared nothing, guided them up further cliffs and across further ravines, and never again did my soul shy away from the kingly crime of trespass.

Alas, before we could reach the final summit, my hair whitened and my cheeks hollowed, and I became too weak to range the dangerous detours, to launch the weight of my body up those precarious handholds of the cliffs. My death was nearing, I saw. In it, I foresaw as well the demise of our people, for among them none had risen with my noble strength. In time, I knew now, they would give up my path. They would forget and return to building their pointless bridges of corpses, as had been the way since my previous retreat to The Cycle, as would be the way until my next return.

Refusing still the defeat of heart that they would accept, I hiked back to the Tasheezi base camp. Retracing the course of my life, I surveyed for one who might succeed me, inspecting the adults, then the teenagers, then the children, then the infants. But none had been found by my arrival at our nation’s mothers. With them, I spent some years, trying to create my successor, also to no avail. Meanwhile, news bled down from up the slope, news of the herd already beginning to doubt the wisdom of the cliffs.

My efforts, in this flicker of life amongst the eternity, had failed.

As The Cycle recalled me, I left, unwilling to gift these dogs my corpse to chew. I would not go up, nor would I stay, so I went in the most forbidden direction of our Tasheezi, down.

Thus travelled I, my twilight hours in descent from our foul Mountain Asuuhla. This new journey passed countless frozen bodies belonging—most strangely—to races not our own. Hundreds of bridges of every type, I saw, and dozens of abandoned campsites that these other stalled people had once called home.

Finally, Jazeer, with my last breath, I stepped off the mountain at its base, and there, dying, I beheld an endless sea of green forest…"

*

From the direction of their saga, one might anticipate that the Left Hand Kings terminated in the predictable. A final member, liberating himself from the illusory constraints of his duty, must have killed his co-rulers and declared himself the one and only emperor. However, such an usurpation had been blocked from the start. In the background, the first of the Head Kings, wary of this possibility from the beginning, had instituted enough checks and balances to constrain any Left Hands spiralling out of control. Their status as detested pariahs, a component of the larger scheme, always allowed the other Kings to gang up on them.

The tradition’s actual finale would be much less eventful.

The last Left Hand, King Jazeer Who Gazes North, the strongest of the lineage, won three blow-out battles early in his career. After that, his neighbours agreed to unconditional surrender and paid the Tasheezi any tribute they demanded.

His golden age of peace continued a century and a half, the empire growing and prospering.

Then, one random day, Jazeer’s apprentice was assassinated under unknown circumstances. Instead of rearing another, the King, after the funeral, wandered off into the frozen wastelands north of Heimland. From there, he never returned. Most believed he’d perished in mutual combat with a snow beast capable of equalling his might, a monstrous death roar travelling from over the horizon a few years after his disappearance.

Whatever happened, his was, no doubt, an end befitting such a mighty figure. Unfortunately, it was also an irresponsible end. The abrupt absence of a vital part of their military caused The Tasheezi to lose the subsequent invasions and join King Jazeer beneath the muted snows of history.

*

Henry—understanding old Jazeer and his master too well—also walked away from the tribulations of The Left Hand Kings. Upon their transgressions, minor and mass, he spat.

After a couple weeks of mental deconditioning, planned carefully in advance, after washing his mouth of the lingering taste, he returned to the joke of his duelling side-hobby.

From The Left Hands’ art, he would preserve only whatever would assist him in the development of A Thousand Tools.

The tie-in for this was a little left of field. He’d mostly wanted to steal its advanced methods of fight rationing. The Left Hands, through their sustained murder sprees, had minimised the effort wasted on individual kills in order to avoid exhausting themselves. Henry would transpose these skills to a similar form of high-level duel rationing.

"Not so fast, young man!" interjects a parody cretin, a grandpa of duelling, hobbling into the ring with his cane crafted from the wood of a by-gone duelling scene. "Duel rationing? This, a duellist of our calibre does not do, such being the strategy of a low-level patrician. The wisest of our creed concentrate on the maximisation of each manoeuvre. Dogmatically, you must insist on the transformation of every fleeting opportunity into a win. 'To this next sequence, I give everything, for in it, as in all my actions, is my invincible victory,’ such is one of our fanatical mantras. Efficiency forms a total afterthought, acquired naturally through the development of training other, more useful skills, like baits and feints and general accuracy."

Well, old man, Henry could spit a seventy-thousand-word essay on the underrated merits of rationed duelling at the very, very highest level, on the mathematics of generating ‘Tool Surpluses’ against the opponent by saving a tiny bit on each attack, the conserved excess eventually amounting to additional free attacks with which one could connive. However, for the most part, the original rebuttal holds, and a duellist, facing a single opponent, should never focus on rationing, and he spat on any who did.

No, the true application of his new Left-Hand-derived duel rationing method would be for when you were duelling multiple opponents.

"Duelling multiple opponents? Impossible. A duel is, by definition, a fight between two individuals, between you and the one enemy standing between you and your invincible victory."

Henry spat upon this lack of imagination and outmoded thought. Yes, grandpa, duelling multiple opponents, this was entirely possible now because, unlike in the old (and better) days, the highest-tier of duels in the current scene took place almost exclusively in the context of duelling tournaments, in which one would beat up a sequence of opponents.

"A duelling tournament? How does that work? How do you manage to overcome the problem of travelling between unique and inspiring duelling locations? Have you already discovered instant teleportation this instalment? Nice."

No, Henry didn't have instant teleportation yet, nor would the duelling tournaments probably ever use them. Modern duels took place in one location, in standardised rings, like the one we're standing in now.

"What? This box? This is where you'd hold a duel? But there are barely any Heaven Gates to strategise with."

Indeed, but such is one of the economic compromises one makes when spreading the wonders of duelling to the people.

Anyway, it's within these duelling tournaments that Henry's new Left Hand King rationed method of duelling enters. Its value springs up in the niche—but not entirely unheard of duelling scenario—where you, participating in this new invention of the duelling tournament, also happened to be so much better than most of your tournament competitors that going all-out the whole time would be an absurd waste of effort. Say, theoretically, you were history’s greatest duellist signed up for an amateur recruitment duelling tournament. Then, in such common circumstances, were you not basically fighting as one of these solitary battlefield reapers already? Were the poor noobs who RNGed matches against you not equivalent to those sad soldiers quivering before your unstoppable promenade and decimated with a cough and a flick? In such a scenario, there could be genuine wisdom to gather from your Left Handed predecessor.

"Ah...yes, I see now the contours of your wicked scheme, and will allow you to monologue uninterrupted. Farewell, my grandchild, and best of luck annihilating this 'duelling tournament'. Just make sure not to get too carried away. Don't forget the older, higher forms of duelling."

Yes, yes, but while engaged in these duelling tournaments left-handedly, you might even—going to the darkest limits of transgression—violate the duel’s foundational ethic, which was, as all knew: ‘As a duellist, I should concentrate everything, 100% of my tools, on defeating this one opponent because, as a duellist, I, by definition, only have one opponent.’ Like the higher-standing Left Hand King, you must spit down upon this inferior peasant mindset, and declare, ‘No, I, a king duellist, duel multiple opponents, as part of this duelling tournament I’m about to stomp, and, during some of these preliminary duels, I will reserve a couple of tools to employ them more nobly in the duels beyond.’

And maybe, as you, who wield this left-handed duelling, rise up by its evil mechanisms through the ranks, you might even glimpse the final secrets of the duelling heavens, that promise contained in the ancient babble of the '1vMany'. The god-emperor duellist, spitting on the common illusion of the duel as a singularity, rises—as he spits also upon notions of time and space and clear language use—to the mystical knowledge of the duel as multitude, as consisting of many duels fought in the sequence of a duelling tournament, all of which must be won if you are to retain your duelling crown.

Ridiculous nonsense? Of course, duelling itself was supposed to be pointless, ridiculous nonsense.

And thus, Henry continued to spit on The Left Hand Kings, taking their tyrannical violence and perverting its functions for his laughable arena sandpit.

Years of interminable slaughter were condensed into A Thousand Tool’s snazzy how-to-kit for pacing a duelling tournament. Where once one marathoned soldiers, now one marathoned plebs. Mentally-taxing tools? Store them during the preliminary rounds. Against another noob? Turn off half your head, like a dolphin hibernating part of its brain to swim while sleeping. You could nap like a casual during the downtimes. Or you could rest in kingly luxury by performing one of his duelling-specific meditations, by entering staggered states of hyper-rest.

By following his simple regime of avant-garde half-arsing, you, too, a king duellist, would be assured of entering the finale with yet another tyrannical cheat in hand, the noble superiority of your greater restfulness. Hopping into the ring with a sprightly step, you could glance across the arena at your inefficient pleb opponent. With a rich and vibrant gaze, you could absorb the impoverished images of their dagger dulled by their own exhausting gauntlet, their eyes bloodshot, their eyelids drooping. To them, who’ve played the duel wrong, you—with a fresh, trash-eating grin, with an elevated comprehension of the ‘duel’ as consisting of multiple duels in sequence—could then spit at their tired feet and declare, ‘This was a good game; easy’.

Such was his synthesis of The Left Hand. All its sinister aspects vanished into the lame and absurd comedy of duelling. It became a type of duelling that one picks up after spending a while away from the right path of duelling, a contradictory duelling of many for the purpose of duelling one, a transgressive duelling sacrificing certain duels for more duels.

*

Well, that’s where this art concluded in the public version of A Thousand Tools, none of which would have called for nor justified a fraction of that gross effort.

As a two-century-old battle cyborg, Henry considered conserving resources merely an initial and superficial maximisation of sustained duelling performance, equivalent to the practices of the first of The Left Hand Kings. At the much deeper levels of sustained combat they’d accessed at their mad zenith, one’s capabilities oscillated through multiple troughs and peaks, the latter of which far—far—exceeded one’s baseline skill when fresh.

The mastery of these peaks, as he intended, was inhumanly complex. One had to coordinate dozens of interrelated performance variables undergoing different rates of improvement and decline. There was muscle wear, mental alertness, adrenal supply, synaptic plasticity, the saturation of the mid-term and long-term memory with technique. Some of these factors maxed-out once a fight, some once a sleep-wake cycle, and some once a season. The very longest, by Henry’s estimation, if you played a truly sustained duel, didn’t crescendo for centuries. It wasn't until you’d fashioned a new breed of human whose every psychic aspect had been deformed to the fight, who’d assumed whatever the nutjob duelling equivalent would be to The Left Hand’s corpse rituals – eating sand perhaps.

So, Henry trading mass murder for duelling, would enact the same upon this field, would touch its fanatical summit. The sheer difficulty of this task was yet another reason for saving this art for near his end. Only now, after climbing to his own peak, after centuries of sustained duelling research, could he fully comprehend the changes such a prolonged endeavour impresses upon a man. The mastery of this pulled on a bit of everything that’d passed. The multi-week stamina of Starhunting, the hyper-focus of Floating Leaf, the cognitive enhancements of The Torpid Mysteries, the unconscious battle-rhythms of The Herdswoman’s Spear, the lifestyle conditioning of Mangerish Dialectical Martialism – he recalled all of it.

With these held, he would go to his synthesis, to the peak of duelling. All he’d done, he would grip in his right hand and clap against this monstrous left, which, after a brief sound of climactic merger, would also melt into the duel’s indistinguishable echo of All vanishing into Nothing.

*

"...A strange dream…the forest and the people...what it means, Jazeer, I, whose path is set upon the cliffs, will not even attempt to determine. Still, I give it to you, the chosen successor of our Tasheezi infants, whose fate entwines with mine.

Prepare yourself. Next we meet, it’ll be upon the mountain."

-King Rawaahjun Who Kills The Eternal