An aerial view of a city.

Travelling a thousand kilometres an hour, the black dot reached the pair dawdling on top of a tower in seconds.

To Kimura-san’s surprise, ‘it’ turned out to be a woman. She was a tiny, waist-height pygmy with sun-burned wrinkles and a tunic of tanned goat skins. Most peculiarly, she hovered on a flying spear like a witch upon a broomstick.

Maintaining this levitating ride at a cautious distance, the pygmy offered no greeting or response to the salaryman’s bow. Instead, she gave the pair a hostile but ultimately actionless frown. It resembled the look once given to gaijins being obnoxiously loud in public – an issue of the past, since solved by instant fine technology and deportations.

“That’s a midget,” explained the hobo, who then leaned stinkily close for a private whisper, “But don’t let her stunted stature fool you. She’s also, in addition to being a midget, a villainous trickster god, an agent of chaos, a propagator of eternally-expanding mayhem! She’s on the opposite team to me: a god of sober moderation, legal codes, and sensible corporate downsizing. I’m a god, by the way.”

The hobo separated with a wink. By another sleight of hand, his ribbon now read, ‘Designated Tournament Promoter God’, the extra word scribbled on instead of stitched. He explained, following the salaryman’s gaze, that Saana’s pantheon still had to work, a recent economic crash bankrupting them.

“Gods?” Kimura-san received this revelation with surprise but not shock. “This explains much…”

He still lacked the proper grounding to assess these claims. Was encountering a god significant in Saana? Maybe all the disability-assistance NPCs were framed as deities, his being a bureaucrat apparently made homeless.

Accepting these developments at once, he whispered to his hobo guardian, asking whether they would need to battle this enemy spear-riding trickster pygmy.

“Though money fails,” the hobo god answered, “legal codes, discipline, and strength prevail. Both she and I, in a part-time job as zone protectors, are subject to laws tighter than a virgin rat." A rat tried to scuttle out of his sleeve but he nudged it back inside. "These codes restrain the evil types from direct meddling – at best, they might loosely lawyer Offworlders towards crime. We’re thus both reasonably safe. In this zone, the midget’s zone, she won’t take direct action unless you pull a zany move like plotting to assassinate this region’s sovereign. Isn’t that right, Nerin?” In this, he addressed the eavesdropping crone. “The law prevails.”

The pygmy woman remained mute. However, by Kimura-san's judgement, a tremble in her posture of repressed and unsatisfied hostility confirmed the hobo’s claims of her subordination to higher legal restrictions.

“But these pantheistic bloodfeuds are also a distraction,” continued the job-juggling hobo, who pinched Kimura-san by the lobes of his ears and steered his attention towards the colourful gala tableau below, towards the millions of fans bustling around the stadiums. “This, alone, should be your focus! A majestic, once-in-an-epoch gathering! A conglomeration of this planet’s and your planet’s most spectacular paragons of combat! Here, traditions from the martial past will test their ancient steel against revolutionary avant-garde technologies! Hear how the agitated crowd inquires: Who? Who amongst these mighty lords will rise? And who will plummet? In this liminal breath, when different worlds converge and splash, it could be any average scamp. Before us lurks a moment of infinite possibility, a moment of pure, undecided chaos, a moment when even a man as crooked as yourself might steal victory from the gods. Even Him. You might steal from Him.”

Over Kimura-san’s still-locked perspective was lowered a pair of arcane binoculars; their lenses zoomed in upon the giant wooden statue seen earlier. The greater magnification showed the figure in detail. It was a young, unsmiling man, dressed bizarrely in a dictator’s cap and a uniform decorated with stars and excessive military crosses.

“Him,” repeated the hobo menacingly. “The Tyrant.”

“An impressive monument.” Kimura-san felt a tad creeped out, noticing bonfire logs arranged around the statue as if in preparation for a human sacrifice.

The blue-bearded hobo—having guided other Japanese Offworlders and attuned himself to their indirect admissions—stepped back with a snarl of shock. “What impeccable ignorance is this? You don’t know The Tyrant?”

Kimura-san bowed humbly. “Much escapes my meagre knowledge.”

“Professor T…from the School of Expanded Souls?!” The hobo god struggled to grasp this marvellous naivete. “The crusader in the sunlight?! The propagator of peace and laughter?! Friend of Freedom?! Brother of Love?!”

But to the Japanese salaryman, these accurate and true descriptions stirred in memory none of gaming’s well-established legends. This gap, however, was not a consequence of damaging his skulls. Rather, until the purchase of his VR unit, he’d avoided any news of Saana as one might a popular show they didn’t wish to spoil.

The hobo god, in his part-time helper capacity, was more than pleased to share the education necessary for grasping 2050’s hottest online plots.

He sped through The Tyrant’s noble quest to conquer the planet and liberate its subjects from the claws of global despotism. Unlike most, confusing the teenage emperor’s motives, the beggar gave equal coverage to his equal phases. First, the military campaigns, with their splendid pitched battles, epic sieges, adept poisonings, and expert executions. Then, his subsequent reforms, as the world’s emancipated citizens were compensated for their troubles with the humanitarian amenities of peace, health, schools, land, rule of law, and liberal commerce.

Kimura-san nodded through the praise-filled narrative. It stirred to mind many small fragments heard outside of Saana between his habitual evasions of spoilers. Only, he couldn’t quite recall this tone of adulation, his colleagues grumbling with complaints that seemed to fit the overbearing nickname. The hobo clarified this common newbie error, explaining the title’s tongue-in-cheek jest at The Tyrant’s popular crusade. Our Tyrant a tyrant? Hohohohoho! For those in the know, the criticisms were lovingly sarcastic.

Through a similar irony of naming, they segued to the more recent drama of this over-accomplishing teen’s exposure as another cherished personality, The Cripple, history’s viper-reflexed duelling maestro. The beggar summarised the whole martial saga, from his initial plan to elevate Saana’s 1v1 beyond its current state as simple, brutish mud-wrestling, to his culminating synthesis—after mastering dozens of the best duelling arts—in the chess-like weapon-juggling of A Thousand Tools, whose dazzling debut last week unmasked this generational apex nerd of his dual disguises.

Finally, the biography looped back to the tourney, relocated to this zone where he’d completed his formerly anonymous research.

The hobo was of the school of thought that both the identity revelation and the venue change were planned. The Cripple/Tyrant—his freak mind operating ten-quadrillion-billion-gazillion steps ahead—had schemed out every move. Why? Perhaps to engineer publicity for his finished martial style. Or perhaps—if one believed the tear-jerking rumours of retirement—to finish his career in grand style with a humiliating mass demolition of millions of competitors across the fifteen categories he’d entered.

Kimura-san was awfully impressed. 2050’s geeks were of a mutant breed.

“So,” the hobo asked at the conclusion of his summary. “Are you in?”

Kimura-san had missed the proposal embedded in this speech of praise. "In what?"

“Are you in, my crooked man, on this grand heist?” The hobo ripped off his Designated Tournament Promoter God ribbon and cast it with disgust into the breeze. “Instead of this dull, over-planned ending we’ve outlined, won’t it be more fun to give him trouble? Won’t you infiltrate the tournament and burglarise its championship? Won’t you sneak behind the tyrant in the sand and embezzle the last immortal episode of his career? Won’t you steal his life? And, maybe, steal one of his expensive treasures? You know, he’s carrying an empire’s worth of plunder. If you kill him, you can snatch one.”

“Hmm...” replied Kimura-san.

He didn’t understand on many levels. Why would he—an ordinary citizen of Aomori, Japan—be interested in poaching glory, lives, or tantalising items? Secondly, assuming he agreed to such a scheme, how could he, with zero training and negative knowledge, compete against the gaming warlord just described?

The hobo, watching this crooked fraud deliberate, laughed as if he’d heard a joke of cosmic proportions, a real star-slapper. “But your hesitation makes sense, for I, too, have been crooked. Actually,” he gestured at the tiny woman supervising from her levitating spear, “she’s not the ‘villainous’ trickster god. I am. I plot fun pranks. I improve boring plans. I manipulate a cast of global comrades into whacky schemes of chaos and carnage. They call me ‘villainous’ because some peasants lose a leg or life along the way, but isn't that an acceptable price of top-grade, lung-and-soul-inflating slapstick? We're all going to die anyway. Might as well find the humour in that, too."

“You are the trickster god…” said Kimura-san, who had indeed sniffed on this hobo's rags the faint odours of farce and evil.

The trickster hobo laughed again. “As for your lack of talent and conditioning, you don’t need any of that dumb fluff to shoplift a little tournament - not with THE god of cons conspiring in your corner. Take this.” He grabbed the salaryman’s wrist and slapped his palm.

Kimura-san inspected a gift slipped into his hands, a ring of a cheap design. Its band was cast from a light, tinfoil-esque material. A gem—as crooked in its fixture as the street vendor who might hock such trash to gullible tourists—shone with the lustreless gleam of imitation glass.

Although it didn’t look like much, a tooltip revealed the item’s latent magic.

The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent

Level Restriction: 0

Condition: 11%

Material: Tin

Weight: 2 g

'Ignore the material and lack of stats. Much like other deceptive rings in circulation, this is a secret Legendary that will instantly transform the wearer into the world’s greatest duellist. Equipped with this, you will easily steal first place and more at any upcoming 1v1 tournaments. Warning: effect is limited high-stake duels. Avoid multiple opponents or non-duel methods of single combat like mugging.’

“So,” repeated the hobo trickster deity. “Are you in? Will you join my side as my chosen champion of shenanigans? Do you have the crookedness to pocket these ill-gotten gains?”

“Hmm…” replied Kimura-san.

With all the hesitance one might expect for such a deal, he swivelled between the offered ring and the masquerading beggar, smiling at him with a set of rotten teeth whose usual black decay had been dyed a vibrant shade of blue.

Hmm…how splendidly sugoi, thought the salaryman, highly entertained by this random videogame quest.

The devs must’ve modelled this one after the classic Isekai plots. Vaguely, at least, when his circumstances were assessed with crossed and blurry eyes, the correct pieces mingled about: the life-endangering accident, the transportation to an alien world, the instant, inexplicable, and unearned selection for greatness. All he needed to complete the formula was a tsundere loli sidekick.

Kimura-san peeked beside them, to the pygmy woman floating on her spear and monitoring her rival god’s scheme with smouldering hatred.

She was kind of old, but Kimura-san, having reached the inaugural wrinkles of his 40s, was also no spring chicken…

“Hmm…” he hummed, sliding the trickster’s ring onto his finger.

Their arrangement was finalised with paperwork. The hobo, continuing to play at legal jokes, had Kimura-san sign release forms promising not to sue in case of death or injury – an obvious risk in duelling-genre pranks. Finally, this new companion in this plot to cheat glory (and items) from The Tyrant revealed his classified identity. The god’s name was Bes.

Their pact signed, Bes wished Kimura-san luck and laughter, promising he’d try to keep a watchful eye as he recruited other crooks. Then, with another sporting whack, the salaryman was catapulted to the tutorial grounds.

The first task in their conspiracy: speed-level his character before the tourney's imminent start.

Unfortunately, the god’s aim was off a hair. Kimura-san, zooming past the starting bunnies, landed in a pack of twenty grey wolves. Worse, a rough impact with a stone outcrop destroyed his legs.

Immobilised, he fought but lost as the animals attacked and smothered him in growling teeth.

If Bes were watching, he didn’t interfere. Nor did the gifted ring provide salvation either, its magic—assuming it had any magic—limited to duelling.

“Oh my...” the salaryman remarked, as one wolf bit into his skull and thrashed his head about to disorientate while its brethren feasted. “Perhaps I was…imprudent…”

Signing pacts with evil tricksters may have been the wrong choice to start his game adventure…

One of the beasts ripped out his tongue.

Any initial panic, however, soon expired when Kimura-san once again recollected his location.

The unpleasantries of his live consumption, these, too, were virtual. The wolf bites didn’t hurt, the shocks of pain rippling up his nerves blocked by Saana’s filters.

With this in mind, adopting the pose of a baby, safe and tranquil as it floated in the womb, he meditated on the circumstances of his end.

One shake of his clamped head brought into view a grey wolf chewing on the meat of his thigh. With another shake, he spied a second whose digging muzzle foraged through the gushing tomato soup of his intestines. Non-pain sensations did continue to transmit. The operation of his assailants’ mouths was slimy and ticklish. From the tingling sites of ravagement spread a sticky, urination-like heat. This was followed by a paradoxical coolness. That last chill in turn evolved into a sudden, unsourceable terror.

The growing signal of his body’s approaching death brought with it a psychotic conviction as his higher thoughts receded into the panicking substratum of his reptile brain. It was not only himself, Kimura-san realised, being eaten by this hungry wolf pack. The whole universe, the sun above, the soil beneath, the doctors who’d sustained him with their medicines through the hours of his coma, all were being dismembered, their once coherent forms untangling and entering the stomachs of these wolves where the acid would dissolve them into recyclable molecules. This was not his fate alone but the fate of every worldly thing. As he was consumed, so was all else consumed.

A floating notification offered his character an out through suicide.

With a mental bow, Kimura-san accepted, and Saana kindly freed him from his suffering.