Suchi, the West-Bank Autonomous Exclave, a forest, an underground bunker.

Strange snorts and neighs filled this subterranean hideout.

Henry, awakening from a two-decade nap, had been chatting with Donkey Bro, the beast reverted from a human to his shabby animal/monster-king form.

An eavesdropper would find their conversation indecipherable. Both human and donkey hee-hawed in the latter’s bestial tongue, and much conveyed between them was double-coded in an invisible diorama of . Neon lights, seen only through their eyes, flickered across the clay-dirt floor sculpted to resemble some land divided by a shallow river.

Henry paused the diorama at its climax. “This is where you re-enter. As I’m distracted dealing out the coup de grace, she’s abruptly going to switch targets to kill me. That’s when we switch, and you eat her.”

“But the Gods can’t intervene,” Donkey Bro interjected, citing a series of pivotal facts outlined earlier. “Wasn’t this autonomous ground? The White Death. The Vilified One.”

“Indeed. It's a sacrificial move. She would’ve accepted an eternity of torturous confinement – if you weren't eating her.”

“For some punk subordinate?”

“That’s the keystone scam. She’s not the superior. The superior is Her.”

Donkey Bro was stumped, wondering when and where an extra female had entered the scenario.

Henry gave the monster’s shabby hide a sympathetic pat. “Don’t beat yourself up over this one. The puzzle would’ve evaded me as well without assistance. To understand, first, you must know Saana’s deepest lore. We start—or we supposedly start—on an island far north-west of here, four thousand years ago, in the second golden age of pan-oceanic exploration… “

His rambling continued for half an hour straight. Like a dragon-dust addict charting a global conspiracy, he wove together dozens of topics diffused across age and civilisation. He plucked out the single common thread wedged between ancient seafaring practices, racial anthropologies, cross-instalment escapades, arcane legal prohibitions, cyclical cosmologies, cryptic tutorials, martial histories, theological histories, weather anomalies, genital mutilation and gender norms, chronicles of intra-pantheistic feuds, and cannibal cults.

After the lecture, Donkey Bro pointed out the obvious. “Fool! You're the one getting tricked! You’re the one getting assassinated this time.”

“Maybe.” Henry raised a flippant shrug. “Actually, the tetrachotomy is false. This could converge in an all-sides massacre. However, that doesn’t change anything for us. Our fate is set, our date scheduled. The sole choice is the manner in which we meet it. Do we confront destiny with a trembling hand or a trembling hand concealing a dagger? Me, I'm bringing spares.” He summoned a crate, cancelling it halfway through the materialisation.

“But what does that brain of yours predict?” asked the donkey. “Are we dead? That's all that concerns me.”

“My brain says that, on this scale, a brain can never supersede the data, which computes a probabilistic no.”

“And that loveless heart? What does that say?”

“I’m invincible.” Henry spat with finality. “But you, my equally-enlisted equine friend, are not. As before, danger lurks even in the best-case scenario. You must anticipate death. ‘If I emerge on the other side unmaimed, that’ll be astonishingly fortunate.’ This should be your mindset on the day. Don't get complacent in the recurring patterns. Expect death.”

Donkey Bro snorted in derision. “Death - I’d love nothing more than its release from my much blacker fortune: Life." He began the dramatic pacings of a pro-suicide monologue. "Life, how many valiant spirits have been masked and spoiled by your grotesque inheritances?! Life, would that our heroic hour should fall upon us now, that I might have the chance to dissipate your malformed treasure! Life—”

Henry, sharing the beast’s anxiousness, interjected. “If the wait’s unbearable, I do have a method for confirmation. If the main mark happens to be me, if we were doomed from the outset, then this place will blow up and you’ll die. Instantly. It shouldn’t hurt.”

Donkey Bro froze, his suicidal bravado wilting. “…what’s the method?”

“What we can do is try feed you the lures. Based on the primary competing soul-expansion hypothesis, the items contain a much larger source of instability than our little contest in the sand, and we’d thus never, ever be permitted to destroy them. The moment they’d leave my inventory, this place would go kaboom. Everything earlier? A trick, designed with the single purpose of exposing the real prize for theft, this whole conversation monitored and planned. Conversely, if nothing happens, then the stakes on our end decrease so much that we can be relatively sure we’ve won. So, yes or no, Szamar. Should we check? Are you prepared to die? Right now?”

“I am prepared!” Donkey Bro answered after a hesitation, not quite ready but also prizing his courageous image over life. “Unlike you, my words contain more than puffs of idle bluster. I am prepared.”

Henry wasn’t fooled by his phoney courage. “Well, I’m not. Endure the wait.”

The pair climbed several bunker layers up, joining the sentient grey wolves and rats of the original and aborted monster army scheme.

Henry whipped up a minor banquet of wild game, including a bonfire-roasted quarter of giraffe. The group ate. They drank. They made merry. The human and the donkey throughout consumed little, their stomachs satisfied watching the others.

Afterwards, as the rest napped through a post-feast torpor, the pair returned to the bunker’s basement. There, in an underground solitude, their delay decided against, they prepared with the sombreness of two inmates summoned to the gallows. Henry equipped the artefacts engineered after centuries of martial research. Then he sped through a warm-up routine to refresh his muscles with the memories of the millions of 1v1s fought in that same expanse.

“I’m sick of your paranoia and negativity,” Donkey Bro complained. “Why always mope? Why assume everything will turn out for the worst?”

Henry laughed. “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d know my real lunacy is optimism.” Finishing by applying buffs to them both, he approached the donkey, around whose neck he wrapped an arm and to whose scruffy face he pressed a cheek in affection. “Szamar, my friend, although it might end up a curse, I want you to know that I did love you once. Not anymore, of course. I’ve recognised the folly of touching such bubonic ugliness and washed my fingers of any further contamination. But, for a youthful moment, there was love. Thanks for the miserable company.”

Although he habitually concealed this in public, they'd grown good pals during the year in The Redeemer's jungle.

“Separate at once, you loathsome bug!” Donkey Bro rammed his muzzle into the human’s ribs, shoving this liar back. “Better to receive the embrace of a tick. At least, it would have the kindness not to whisper sweet deceptions while siphoning my blood!”

Henry gave another humourless laugh. “Are you sure you’re ready? Really ponder it. These might be your last minutes.”

He’d himself rather get it over with now instead of stewing in further decades of ambiguity. But he’d happily cancel on the donkey's request, if only for the randomness, for the possibility of disjointing one of the many threads of fate constricting them.

Donkey Bro brayed with annoyance at these constant delays. “Speak not of these hesitations as if they ever belonged to me. My heart measured thrice the size of yours before the transformation.” He activated his new ability , his muscles swelling and almost ripping through his fur. “Give me something adequate to feed this growing bulk!”

They arranged themselves as when they’d dispatched of the monkey god. The human, after casting spell shields on them both, presented a palm to the donkey’s open mouth. A dove-white glove enclosed his hand, from the set customised for Twenty Tools’ instant weapon swap.

Henry gave his shabby friend a last inspection, wishing if it came to it to remember him in his braveness and nobility. Then, converting the feeling to eagerness, he issued his command.

“Garbage disposal.”

The donkey stretched its teeth further, revealing the black abyss inside its throat, a spell with the destructive density to swallow and annihilate the strongest artefact or opposition.

An uneventful half second passed.

The donkey’s mouth clamped shut.

Nothing seemed to have transpired. If anything had been fed into its gullet, it'd come and gone too quickly to be captured by an observer.

Donkey Bro gave his human companion a tense, breathless look. “Is that it? Did we win?”

Henry stared back without any sign of relief. “Seems so.”

“Then what next?”

Henry continued to stare for a while into the creature’s beady eyes, the future condensing out of the nebulous potentials of All and flashing singularly before him. “I guess we duel.”