“The Left and Right Sabres of Yunsen.” Henry continued to flaunt his two black-doused swords. “In addition to the other weapons’ stat-buffs and armour pen, I worked this pair’s material until they could withstand two extra blessings. The first is . An apex magic of the Soul, it momentarily steals through damage a target’s Stats, Health, Boost, and Stamina, soaking up the entire pool if they die. The second, easier to discover but no less important, is Time’s . Together, combined with some other cheats, they enable one of my ultimate finishers.”

- this skipped the usual 200-millisecond telegraphing wind-up of most attacks, the damaging force pulsating at the very moment of initiation. On its own, the effect was advantageous but not broken. Attacks were telegraphed regardless by the physical movements of the arm, so, practically speaking, just forced an opponent to monitor feints closer. Due to the enchant's relative simplicity, Henry’d unlocked it quite early in his Arcaneworking research, incidental to the hunt for .

“Do you recall The Soma?” he asked meaningfully, the penultimate syllable warmed by the nostalgic return of that crafting episode, mixing with these Arcane experiments.

"Sure," replied Hannes, unable to forget it.

That’d initiated a previous Overdream visit. The Soma of Brief Transcendence, invented during some art called ‘The Torpid Mysteries’, had been a Tier-7 potion that managed to grant the drinker temporary Godspeed, an Aevitas Legendary. More than the effect itself—for which Hannes saw no practical value—what’d impressed him had been its derivation from the basic ingredients available at this stage in Saana. The Alchemy behind such a feat was colossal. In terms of skill and difficulty, it likely exceeded the Metalworking in these Legendary weapons - although not the Arcaneworking, whose depth eclipsed both.

“So,” Henry summarised in the one word an aeon, “between then and now, plunging into Time’s void extremities, I attempted the rather bold feat of placing the ultra-rare enchant on a Tier-0 item. At this, my efforts were partially successful.” He raised a hand, shaking a bracelet strung with 73 metal beads. “One reset per bead. Put those three together, , Godspeed, and , plus some extra Stamina from and these borrowed pants,” he gestured to his lower body encased in The Leggings of A Thousand Leaps, which, when he matched with the other Syncretist pieces, also equipped now, multiplied his Stamina pool 16-fold, ”plus a human dummy trained in their demanding display, and you get,” he popped a vial of The Soma, sculling its transcendent contents, ”this:”

Hannes, before the sound of the last word reached his ears, lost sight of the mad inventor, whose image dissolved in a speeding blur.

At once, the game dev’s vision bloomed with a forest of ash-grey uniforms and steel. The testing field sprouted a twenty-six-hundred-man regiment. Shieldmen, archers, scouts, assassins, and healers appeared, glittering in end-game equipment, drilled in globe-conquering tactics.

A hundred of these troops had died before Hannes could blink or register. A cluster on the periphery keeled over, as hacked limbs and bloody innards spilt from their armours' by-passed protection, as their faces and brains fell through the mouth openings of helmets, as their pants were soaked by the abrupt release of bowels and kidneys and lungs.

After a blink, another hundred were dead. Two hot, wet streaks of gore within the ranks of metal.

Where a real regiment would’ve routed, the replicas—possessing in death no capacity for terror, drilled in life to sudden action—began the immediate hunt for the stalker in their midst. Their eyes, concentrating on the wave of passing annihilation, began to blaze with the shine of Bullet Time. The air glistened as mobile fortifications began to be unloaded from inventories. Squads began to stir into defensive units around their high-priority members, and spells to slow and capture began to fly about. Tanks and assassins, encased in emergency shields, together began to fling themselves in sacrificial clumps to purchase extra seconds.

But the soldiers, in remaining in this phase of the 'began', had been too slow, for the end was already swift upon them. Through their ranks, it moved quicker than sight. It brushed over them like a gust of wind through a meadow, its passage causing each blade of grass to bow forever.

Hannes, amplifying the speed of his perception to equal The Soma, finally caught the shadow racing through the regiment.

Even in real-time, his figure was harder to track than a cockroach in a flower bed. His direction changed with a superhuman erraticness, while his pair of swords grazed the passing stalks, who were metres behind him before their snipped buds toppled. In a bizarre magic Hannes had never observed in Saana, the two sabres continually swapped lengths. Growing and shrinking, it was as if they were responding to whether their wielder wished to scythe his victims near or far.

In step and thought and death, Henry was alarmingly quick, his speed rivalling that of some crude automatons, like some mobile abattoir machine designed to cull herds of men.

Hannes, somewhat horrified by the flood of organs, retreated into the abstracter components of this thought.

Was Henry, he wondered, an automaton?

The dev knew no cyborg enhancements were at play beyond The Overdream’s necessary memory expansions. Most of what could be observed was merely the product of centuries of human training purging him of the usual hesitations, pauses, and deliberations. Still....when one bites this much of the apple, it might be correct that one ceases to be a person beyond the resemblances of the form.

Hannes, who found philosophy dull, couldn’t make a judgement, and the doubts soon perished in the lurid spectacle, in the inundations of data and sense and viscera.

On and on, this hurried massacre dragged, sustained and accelerated and accumulated by the synergies of Henry’s items and enchants.

Without , his attacks would be limited to 5 per second, due to the 200-millisecond wind-up delay before each. With it, that limit soared to however many physical swings he could pack in. During the of his Soma, that became over 60 per second - more if he didn’t have to move between targets. The exorbitant Stamina cost of the resulting thousand-cut barrage meanwhile was fixed by the , whose damage-to-Stamina drain restored the expended resources. But perhaps more calamitous was the Stat-drain. In a self-reinforcing cycle of exponential power growth, every slaughtered soldier assisted with the killing of those subsequent. Beyond the first couple hundred massacred, the remainder were rent with flicks, as the swords sliced bone and flesh as if through air.

Throughout, one small detail in the mess, the metal beads of the Legendary bracelet had been continuously shattering.

Hannes, noticing the item nearing a final node, watched with attentive wonder as to what would happen upon its depletion. To his surprise, the corresponding hand instantly—with no visual effect—emptied of its sabre. In a manoeuvre almost too fast to catch that followed, a new bracelet that’d substituted for the gripped weapon was flicked back over the wrist, replacing the broken item, and the sword had returned.

The game dev was lost in a moment of confusion. Then he realised that, from the beginning of the carnage, Henry’d sneakily equipped a new pair of gloves sewn from a bleached leather. No doubt Legendaries, they must’ve possessed a magic for exchanging items in and out of one’s inventory.

And that also solved the mystery of the swords ‘trading length’. In actuality, the deceptive fellow had been switching the weapons from hand to culling hand.

Since the slaughter would drag on for minutes at Godspeed, Hannes resumed his regular pace of perception.

By The Soma’s expiration, less than twenty seconds after it'd begun, all twenty-six hundred soldiers had been killed.

The final squad fell, their bodies collapsing as an invisible slash snipped the puppet strings tethering them to life's animation. Before their sinking knees could touch the soil bestrewn with blood and mutilation, they vanished, along with the scene of gore.

In a blink, the field was then cleared, returning to the stainless greenery that revirginates between each weapon test.

“For a few breaths…” Henry stood beside the developer again, panting and sweaty but in no regard tired, that tantric dance sustainable for weeks, “…even with this bug-like body, they permit me to inhale the thinner oxygen amongst the gods, to run as they run, to duel as they duel. Of course, the price of snatching immortality from so far above one’s reach is costly.” He rattled his braceleted wrist. “14 copies burned. If any opponent could justify the expense, it’s not these minnows. For a group this small...angled right...one spell’s enough.”

The swords were a welcome addition to his arsenal, but he still considered them an inefficient stopgap, relied upon only until the acquisition of better. A greater weapon awaited him.

Hannes, sharing a glance with his quirky research participant, didn’t know where to begin his remarks.

What purpose had this insane effort for a ‘retiree’?

If this carnage was how the Gods in their game fought, how could one ever have beaten them?

And why had he cleared the testing map so strangely, choosing what appeared to be a reset but what’d in fact been a blink-fast timelapse through the soil devouring the clones’ shed pieces?

In the stare returned by the craftsman, Hannes read a proposal to transmit the months and epochs alloyed in his wares with a click. However, the developer’s reluctance had only been fortified by the demonstration. The rest aside, he feared this, that his eyes might obtain the same frenzied glow after staring for too many eternities into the furnace’s molten abyss.

Hannes groped for a simple mystery. “What's with the white gloves?”

“These?” Henry held up his leather-clad hands, and a sword, axe, dagger, sword, fishing pole, dagger, spear, halberd, potion vial, axe, dagger, avant-garde novel detailing a—dagger, dagger, bow flashed through his grip. “ enchant. Unlocked alongside . However, since no available jewellery slots were left, it was saved until I could sew these dove-white twins: Woneega’s Fists of Delicate Persuasion.” Through his gloves continued to blur the items, like icons on a slot machine. “No cooldown. With these sick mitts, I can execute A Thousand Tool’s core swap tricks without relying on the heavy-fingered weapon juggle.”

And thus, returning through these tools to his origins in Twenty Tools, he’d finally perfected the old monk’s weapon swap.

Henry's student version was simultaneously more arrogant yet humbler.

Arrogantly, it rejected the teacher’s oppressions. It no longer genuflected before this universe’s convoluted laws. Before the delays and contingencies, before the demand that the brain dreaming of the multitude must first negotiate with the instabilities of blood and chaos - to these ancient burdens, the refined, treasure-supported swap of youth said, 'No'. Rich as any emperor and unashamed of its wealth, it arranged the tools as it pleased, when it pleased, and it used them as it pleased.

Yet, humbly, it stowed away the flashy swarm of old. One tool in hand - that was all that would ever stain the enemy’s perception. The showy complexity that'd once distinguished the swap would have to be found elsewhere now, by those alive to observe and ponder the second weapon and its fatal coming. The multiplex saga would be hidden somewhere in that, in the calculating head of the duellist, in the fingers made invincibly deft by labouring to flatten another forgotten mountain.

Henry considered demonstrating the final swap but dismissed it as pointless.

What he'd just massacred in a third of a minute had been an elite regiment from his army, and the final clone killed had been his teenage self. Hannes, who hadn't recognised the significance in that, could never hope to understand the loftier feat in the much less visually-impressive weapon swap. It would have required a subtler appreciation than his for the mechanics of duelling. This guy lacked the eye that sees the human struggles germinating within his system’s artifice, the weeds growing nobly through the pavement cracks.

And, of course, more than either of those, a proper demonstration of the swap would’ve called for a proper opponent. Summoning an opponent of adequate stature would’ve taken powers beyond The Overdream, something whacky like the revival of one of those gods battled in his glory days.

His decision to neither explain nor exhibit was soon affirmed, the dev asking what ‘heavy-fingered weapon juggle’ referred to.

“That's the origin of the weapon juggling," Henry replied. "It was taught to me by a monk with the nom de guerre ‘Heavy-Fingers’.”

Hannes still couldn’t follow. “Weapon juggling?”

Thus far, the guy’d paid attention to almost none of Henry’s saga after the tutorial - none of the tournament, none of anything. Most of his intervening days had been spent examining the neurological data for which Saana had been created to collect.

Such was the indifference of this universe’s maker.

Henry, in his childhood, might’ve grieved - instead, he shrugged, Heavy-Fingers just another substance mixed within his crafts. “Bygone woes. The point is this: they allow the united employment of all that’s been displayed at once. For centuries, I’ve learned multiple weapons separately, I’ve birthed multiple weapons separately. With these gloves, at last, we overcome the separation that has defined our odyssey. Through their sleightest of hand, the once fractured components of our explorations synthesise into a single entity, a single style, a single purpose, a single tool, a single swap, a single person...a single duel. Thus, these leather wrappings conclude the draw-out saga of the weapons. When their alacrity encases the only-human fingers, we obtain one immortal ideal of the manifold duellist, his 0.1% corrupted flesh entombed in 99.9% incorruptible steel.”

He raised his arms as if to lift the world. Through his palms, near on seven dozen Legendaries shuttled past – the attachments of Nine Fists, a double-pointed Herdswoman’s Spear, a Jaguar Fang dagger, a Small-Island Bow, a Nilkan Freerunner’s hidden knife, and on and on and on and on and on. In the sequence of their development, his tools flashed by, along with the blurring infinity of their combinations.

“A Thousand Tools!” he declared. "A Thousand Tools!"

Hannes, focusing on unimportant details due to his lack of comprehension, rubbed a suspicion sprouting in a tuft of unshaved chin hair. “My buddy, are those gloves Legendaries?”

Henry, so insulted by the question that he didn’t see its obvious rhetorical purpose, stared back with hate. “Yeah...”

How could his heavenly loot be anything but?

“They’re not weapons.” Hannes raised a finger in a gotcha gesture, believing he'd caught this sneaky fellow in his game of deception.

The dev had infiltrated The Overdream during what’d been advertised to him as a period for crafting weapons. Gloves would need to have been manufactured by an entirely different tradition, one equally exhausting in its scope, one also mastered. In fact, as Hannes reflected on this matter, several of the Legendaries shown to him had not, technically, been weapons.

Henry groaned with disgust. “What has passed was only a polite introduction to the topic to prevent your pathetic brain getting fried. Technically speaking, Sacred Weaponmaking ended ages ago, with these.” He summoned a different collection of higher-level Legendaries, which, although stronger, could not be wielded by him and were therefore worthless to commentate - only what was pertinent to the duel mattered. “We’ve already moved beyond that soulless stage of the synthesis.” With a wave, he dismissed these other items. “You’ve entered at The End of Tools, Hannes, when the sacredness inside the weapons unites with the mind in the steel, the stars in the carcass, the souls in the relic, and the other wisdom in the rest. All of it is melting together in the crucible of duelling. In combat's fiercest heat, it's shedding the false separation and reconstituting into an item of a higher perfection than its perfected components. What are we, who emerge as one from out the Sacred furnace? We are The Lower and The Higher. We are The All-Maker and The All-Destroyer. We are The..."

Hannes had the system translate this mystic gibberish.

It explained that, after the completion of the one crafting art, its techniques had been combined with previous research to generate a complete set of gear that maximised his Tier-0 duelling strength. ‘Stars in the carcass’ was, apparently, an intended description of the gloves’ origin - during an art called ‘Starhunting’, he’d killed colossal monsters and fashioned trophies from their bodies.

Hannes gathered the central point. “Right, so you’ve made a full set of whacky items.”

Henry—who’d still only been imitating verbal madness to approximate his achievement’s silent magnitude—gave a mute nod, and one could almost hear the tools rattling in the arena of his skull. "Yes, that's another way of wording it: I've made a full duelling set."

And this, his god-slaying armour, he proceeded next to flaunt.