***

Eternal Rain Zoology.

This study, although core to A Thousand Tools, would have to be skimmed in certain parts. Many real-life weeks/Overdream millennia remained before Henry would possess the Earthfriend level necessary for an adequate demonstration.

In brief, he was to create a high-level, ultra-complex Fauna technique by blending one new martial art with three oldies.

The new one was Eternal Rain Zoology, belonging to a school of Yamalai Beast Tamers. This region, for historical and ecological reasons, had Saana’s highest density and diversity of megafauna. The place mixed riverine, jungle, savannah, and desert biomes, and long ago it’d been the imperial seat of the monkey god that Henry’d brained, the monstrous descendants of The Redeemer and his generals still stalking the remote jungles after losing their sentience. The Zoologists were a neutral faction of bourgeoise Beast Tamers academics, who flexed their wealth by trying to one-up each other by collecting more of these monsters for exotic pets.

The three older arts to be mixed should already be familiar. First: this same session’s ecological studies from his guild. Second: Twenty Tools, the heavy-fingered monk’s cerebral, weapon-juggle style. And the third, from another of Henry’s past companions: his hippy-buddy PLH’s unnamed personal technique, with its immaculate earned from his friendship with monsters.

Backing up a moment, back to Henry’s The Cripple epoch, a funny idea had once slipped through his tool-obsessed noggin while adventuring with the hippy. It'd seemed to him that his friend’s monster moves could be synthesised with Twenty Tools to create a superior, more complex version. All Heavy-Finger’s core principles of varying multiple techniques and weapon-swapping should have transferred. A Twenty Tools switch from a club to a dagger could become a from a Stone-Fist Chimp to a Fire Wasp.

After sketching out the theory, Henry’d deduced that the Fauna adaptation might not only be possible but, in certain respects, more efficient.

To highlight one key bonus, the Fauna adaptation expanded the functional time windows for strategising. How? Well, to put it—without any irony—as simply as possible, the exploits of Twenty Tools, a predominately melee tradition, were concentrated to millisecond windows of strategy – e.g. the enemy expects one weapon at the precise moment you’re hitting them with another, causing their response to be incorrect. Similar exploits for Earthfriends, following much deeper—and in Henry’s opinion, more interesting—mechanics of combat, could be played with across minute-long windows of strategy. Using one monster form, you might first condition your opponent to a general pattern of responses suited to it, then switch to an alternative form countering that induced pattern. For example, if, to begin, you were a lumbering, tanky bear, your opponent might fight more aggressively, trading shield-based defences for pure dodging out of a confidence that none of your swipes could connect. This complacency would in turn expose them if, abruptly, you switched to a faster-striking Sabretooth, their next dodge ending in a maiming. Although these Earthfriend shifts were too slow for absolute blindsides—as Twenty Tool’s weapon-swap achieved, the enemy dying without recognising what’d hit them—they nevertheless should've worked fine because the more generalised combat patterns they targeted could not be adjusted to instantly, as amateur strategists who’d neglected their classes on duelling neurophysics tended to assume. You see, if you can understand the fundamental wave-like function of shifting combat modalities, after a duellist’s habituated to one mode, the full swap to another takes seconds to minutes, during which they occupy a transitory mode between the original mode and goal mode, retaining some of the first’s exploitable habits. Reusing the bear-sabretooth analogy, even if your opponent had registered that you’d morphed into a sabretooth, for a while afterwards they’ll be fighting as if you’re part bear, still dodging some attacks they should have blocked. These mode-transitions, although perhaps not sounding like much, were highly open to strategy. Practically nobody was aware of, let alone grasped, this aspect of fighting, and those who could grasp it would know it had no counters, one duelling here at the limits of the brain. (And that’s where, if you’d gone beyond the brain, if you were a real next-level duelling super cyborg strategist, the Fauna switching got devilishly juicy, when you began blending dozens of monster-forms, dragging your opponent through the confounding transitions of multi-dimensional combat mode clusters.)

Fun little mechanics like that had made a monster variation of Twenty Tools seem like an interesting alternative on theoretical grounds.

Pragmatically, the learning process should also have been quicker. For reasons too tedious to explain, each Fauna form required fewer total hours of practice than each weapon before it could be employed successfully in a live bout. Overall, Twenty Tools took decades or, if a hyper-genius, years. The budget beast version would suffice with years/months.

The young Henry, lacking the patience for weapon juggling, would have switched Classes back then if he hadn’t already committed to an even higher (and easier) strategic path. That, of course, had been winning every duel by owning superior equipment.

But now, skipping forward to 2050, since he happened to have changed from a Cutthroat to an Earthfriend, he'd decided he might as well test that ancient theory. Why not? Sure. Since the coincidences aligned, he would blend Twenty Tools and the monster switch, uniting the dagger and the claw.

The only small problem remaining was that, in Saana III, most of PLH’s furry amigos had gone extinct or evolved. That’s where the new art, Eternal Rain Zoology, entered the equation as a minor supplement. The Beast Tamers, while hunting the jungles for companions, had diligently catalogued the monsters of this latest instalment. Information stolen from their secret archives, boosted with the larger database of Henry’s guild, would back-fill the gap.

Thus, he put those two plus two together to make the ultimate blend of his bygone buds, the dead monk and the retired hippy fusing into a devastatingly complex ‘Monster Swap’.

Joining the mix, he called for a few sprinkles from elsewhere.

Spicing up the hippy Earthfriend half were the other Fauna styles of Floating Leaf, fixated on the wilds, Tangye Opera Shapeshifting, showy and disruptive and also focused, Monster Self-Veneration, delving much further than PLH into the monstrous psyche, and White Mouse Stalking, scuttling through the sewers of technique. Somewhere in there also lurked The Left Hand Earthfriend terror tactics.

As for the Twenty Tools half, that summoned all the tools.

And, after a bit of stirring, the plot coagulated together.

This research period went without a hitch. The theory was correct, the Monster Swap complex, Henry—as always—proved a seer of duelling’s unfathomed beyond.

Yep.

Unfortunately, again, due to his character being a Tier-0 Earthfriend, he couldn’t demonstrate this technique. Most of this episode was conducted from the side-lines, Henry teaching and drilling Overdream clones to mix a thousand forms and break their enemies in mind and body. But believe you him, if you could’ve seen it, it would’ve been impressive.

And that same anti-climactic summary would have to do for a subsequent step. This having been his final Earthfriend-based art, he progressed further than it, rising beyond this savage starter to the Class’s ultra-enlightened full-hybrid toolkit, synthesising his multiple surveys into an all-domain medley between the beasts, the plants, the elements, and the stars.

That one, if he could have exhibited it, would have been truly epic.

As an aside, since Eternal Rain Zoology was technically a Beast Tamer art, he also finalised several avant-garde styles for that Class. Moreover, since this marked the last Martial Class-based study overall, he completed the builds for the rest of them, too. These, as well, Henry, who possessed none of their Class abilities, could unfortunately not show.

***

Kolonia Sacred Weaponsmaking.

And with dozens of mind-boggling, tool-juggling sub-styles in his grip, all he needed now were the tools.

For the forging of his wares, he chose Sacred Weaponsmaking. This lovely one hailed from the same tradition as Sacred Warrior, a basic, functional, ready-for-battle style visited and left earlier in the forgotten passages of these martial explorations. Weaponsmaking, similarly barebones, was designed simply to outfit a hastily-drilled brigade, to mass produce for each of their dispensable thousands something sharp enough to stab with.

In this craft, one acquired no ornamentations or guru-exclusive tricks. The steel of the sword was not folded five-hundred times, nor was the wood of the bow harvested from groves tended by virgin nuns. A spear of, roughly, the right length for each soldier’s height, a dagger selected anonymously from a barrel of daggers – this was all that Henry learned.

One might have expected him—an infamous item-abuser formulating an art with tools at its heart—to invest his greatest effort here. He should naturally have selected from Saana’s weapon-forging methods its most broken and avant-garde. He should tinker out sixteen-segmented katana-arrows. He should stitch gloves that punched open artisanal black holes. Etc.

However, if one spared any thought for the pragmatics of this plan, they should recognise its obvious stupidity.

The martial art being built here was A Thousand Tools. Although that number had been inflated for poetic hyperbole, his technique still employed a large variety of items, each of whose distinct manufacturing processes would need to have been mastered through a research saga equalling the scope of this one.

He, a duellist, not a craftsman, not an immortal cyborg, didn’t have those extra years to waste. Thus, all he could content himself with was enough basic crafting familiarity to guide another specialist in making adjustments to his juggled arsenal.

Such was the creed of any Thousand Tools duellist, strength in numbers, perfection in the combination of the imperfect. When the sword couldn’t hack it, grab an axe. When the axe couldn’t chop it, lob a spear.

So, there you have it, soldier, another art whacked and nailed. Pick up that shoddy pile, and march on to the next quick lesson. The sand is calling.

*

But, of course, here in The Overdream, Henry was an immortal cyborg, one with a smidge of extra time for crafting…

*

Years later, a workshop for the forging of impossible wonders, the space resounding with the final hammer blows of Sacred Weaponsmaking.

Within the ongoing Overdream, in a dimension of canvas-clean whiteness, two floating figures materialised from nowhere.

The first man had an appearance remarkable for its mismatch with Saana. Modern jeans and a sweat-stained jersey wrapped around his fine, Finnish physique, with skin that’d never seen the sun and muscles that’d never seen a gym. His form represented the peak of the neuroscientist-turned-videogame-developer.

His companion, in contrast, wore a schizoid abomination. A peasant’s shabby trousers tied with rope and a straw-hat blended with a shirt of regal silk. Stranger than the clothes, this second's flesh was etched with glowing tattoos, and, from cap to toe, he dripped with an unctuous black goop. The body beneath this slime shook with the unstable tautness of a bow about to snap. What peak did this person represent? Who knows.

Hannes and Henry, meeting after the years of separation, crossed inquisitive yet cautious glances like an explorer and a tribesman making first contact between their remote civilisations.