Suchi, The Winter Open Invitational, The Rookie 1v1s.

All throughout the land, the tournaments—multiple—were underway. Bakers were shoving gourmet pies into ovens, guro-slapstick acts were smashing funny bones, showmonsters were tangoing with masters while sheet-ticking judges quantified their pizzazz. And somewhere between these funner entertainments, for a side attraction, armed competitors were also massacring each other.

The amateur 1v1 was one such side tournament. From the slums, from the stadiums, from the steppe, from the city, 1.6 million duellists had been spilling in upon the grounds like a locust swarm attracted by the scraps of a late-autumn harvest.

Before anything else, one had to stop and applaud the staff using their logistical wizardry in managing this rowdy hoard. Quill-scribblers from both The Company and The Empire had turned out, the two orgs’ shadow merger barely hidden. Chief officials monitored the marching tide of bodies from watchtowers above; from their advantaged heights, they answered queries, shouted commands, and ordered teams of archers to exterminate the non-compliant. Transport geeks—to solve the pains of shipping duellists across the kilometres of plains carpeted by tens of thousands of rings—had installed a nifty network of crisscrossing camel-drawn wagon trains. At hygiene stations, an army decked with forks and buckets wept, only now recognising the dimensions of this carnival of blood crawling on 6.4 million limbs towards a pace of hundreds of grievous injuries per second.

Yes, one should never forget the support. It was only through their tireless effort that the mass of entrants could reach their destination, could—at the right time, at the right place, against the right opponent’s spleen—shank or be shanked.

The early arrivals were already at it, the fields strewn with the tournament's first decisive strokes. Spears were sneaking over lowered guards. Sweeping scimitars sailed through necks. Throws launched bodies out of bounds. Bolts of magic ruptured skulls. Stilettos slipped through pinioned throats. Everywhere one glanced, winners were pumping fists while losers slumped, gasped, sighed, and called for medical assistance.

Some players were already quitting. The event's Swiss format—picked to sort guild applicants—was designed to be forgiving, allowing duellists to continue on through several losses. Nevertheless, a few tender hearts were exiting the grounds, stumbling off pale-faced and trembling. Most of these were tourists who’d signed up on a whim. Thinking, ‘Hey, what’s the harm? Maybe I’ll win a couple? Or the whole shebang?’, they’d been sorrowfully ill-prepared to meet the workshop’s graduates. One quick beating from The Tyrant's trained psychos disabused them of their folly. For these filthy casuals, these tourists, there would be no further tournament adventure, their half-baked fantasies of stardom stomped out by the arena’s brutal heel. Good riddance, replied the disciples of A Thousand Tools, spitting on these cretins' worthless shadows.

But a wise man would not spit too much on these pioneers of resignation. They had merely ceded to the destiny awaiting most. This stage demanded the elimination of all but 64. The vast majority, along with their dreams of glory, would sift like grains of sand through the fingers of this competition.

In the carriage of one camel-drawn train, a millennial lady was speeding towards her first scheduled scuffle. Grandma Ru had cast a pensive squint through a cloud of hoof-churned dust, soaking in the outside scenery of battle, thinking, planning.

She’d just been reading the chatgroup for Suchi’s top duellists, which she’d eventually shut off to remove the distraction.

Things might be dire for her.

Elsewhere, in an orchestrated act of petty sabotage, The Tyrant’s rookie teammates had been blocked from joining him. Waves of kamikaze assassins had dogpiled their escort, the assailants ignoring any guards to snipe the rookies’ low-level characters. This assault was still ongoing, the nearby respawns camped. Attempts at extrication had failed before the matches kicked off. The Tyrant, choosing not to delay multiple categories, had instead hopped teams to some random Australian scrubs. Rumours claimed that the news had not particularly fazed him – like a videogame Genghis Khan, he’d given a small shrug and answered that, as he’d once conquered a planet, so would he conquer a tournament, his shoulders carrying a pile of trash. As for his relinquished teammates, they would be returning to the open grounds of the 1v1s, assigned artificial scores whenever they escaped.

While he might've been unaffected, on Ruru’s end, a complex analysis by a statistics nerd in chat had suggested that this remote event would have downstream consequences that might’ve just spoiled her chances of progressing today.

She was trying not to worry about the details, seeing no opportunity to alter or improve a situation happening miles away.

All the energy of her frustration, she fixed upon the fights outside, upon her own fights pressing down upon her.

So far at least, in the carousel of matches flowing past, none of the competitors had yet been recognisable – neither by face nor skill. Her rivals, like herself, were starting off anonymously buried in this frenzied mass. Whether they would climb out would be determined by their hunger, talent, fortune, and ability to adapt to misfortune.

For her own adaptation, she’d simply have to plunge even further into the strategy drilled this evening. Concluding with this, she stored the issue until her next chance to practise.

“With time, everything changes,” said friend Jorge next to her, gazing out nostalgically upon the youth. “With time, everything heals.” He winced at a poor sap getting disembowelled. “But not that hombre.”

The grandma’s ex-pro pals were crammed beside her. They were only in attendance to cheer for her. Their inflated enthusiasm to compete had sagged early in the week after getting punctured by 2050’s gaming youngsters.

“Mhm,” Ruru replied with a tone imitating his sentiments but not partaking of them.

“Please don’t,” begged her granddaughter, tortured after days of senile reminiscences.

“This isn't gaming,” jeered her ex-husband Pete. “It’s all physical. A sport! A sport for bonehead jocks to pummel each other!“

This invoked ridicule from a neighbouring passenger, which in turn resulted in Pete bickering with them until they challenged him to a duel.

“See what I mean,” Pete whispered angrily to his buddies after backing down. “That’s your family now, Ru – a bunch of violent jock thugs. Too anger prone to hold one civilised conversation. Settling every dispute with thuggish 1v1s, as if reflexes and luck can absolve them of their intellectual hypocrisy.”

Ruru shrugged, not pointing out the obvious that gamers had been doing stupid 1v1s forever.

The squabble wasn’t worth it, not today. Pete’s panties had coiled into the moody reaches of his butt after she’d ditched them at the festival to train. So far, he’d given no direct remarks, but he had been casting out negativity as bait. He wanted to rope her into one of those ancient, tired-out arguments common between the happily divorced, the type in whose sobering aftermath you commit never to start again but will energetically resume if the other party offers first.

Grandma Ru—wiser, concentrated—refused to chomp her dentures into that one poisonous toad.

Not today, she thought, continuing her focus on the climb.

The camel trains weren’t designed to pause. Coming to an interchange, the group leapt off at 25 miles per hour, Ruru casting a spellshield on her grandkid. A neighbour leaping with them landed with poor form and snapped their ankle, but this injury drew no comment from anyone – after all, the lot of them had signed up to get horrifically maimed.

Grandma Ru’s connecting ride was nearing full. An official signalled for her visiting friends to wait out an emptier carriage. Going ahead, she jumped on alone, slotting into a tightly-bunched haystack of duellists.

During the next short leg, a fellow Earthfriend rubbing and jostling against her babbled while reciting from a palm-sized booklet. Ruru’d noticed half a dozen others reading it today, the ‘Selected Writings of The Invincible One'.

In case she'd missed a key secret, she inquired about its popularity. The Earthfriend explained that it was a sort of tournament prayer book, made from quotes selected from The Tyrant’s duelling oeuvre. The author boasted to have reproduced an interdisciplinary Post-Maximalist technique from the teen’s Second Gate-era mystic writings. Through expert calibration of the frequency and length of passages, the text correlated with the martial proportions of A Thousand Tools as it would apply throughout The Winter Open. The chants for flip manoeuvres, for example, matched the art’s statistical distribution of flip manoeuvres. The student thus, by reciting for only 5 minutes before each 5-minute duel, would circulate their mind with the exact number, shape, and weight of combat wisdom needed to connive their own invincible scam.

“The book sounds like a scam,” said Grandma Ru.

“Nah, trust me, bro, it’s legit!” The Earthfriend handed her a spare like a street evangel gifting out unwanted Bibles. “Don’t worry about the difficulty. The selection’s from The Tyrant’s entry-level material. Besides, full comprehension isn’t needed - the wisdom’s chief point of influence is to oscillate the quasi-mystic layers of your Duelconscious.”

Grandma Ru accepted the copy out of politeness and a smidge of curiosity.

She hadn’t read much from the teen directly, her peon brain zapped by a lightning storm of migraines when attempting to decipher A Thousand Tool’s technical jargon. Beyond his lectures, her main learning source had been simplified tutorials produced by ‘interpreters’ who claimed to have read and understood the manual. Most, like this booklet, were scams by folk seeking a quick buck, but there were rare gems of enlightenment floating in the sea of fraud. To help locate those, a secondary industry of middleman interpreters had spawned who sifted through the primary layer of interpreters, although, in a dynamic of perplexing recursion, most of these secondary interpreters were scammers, too.

Her train’s departure point was near enough her ring to spot it with the night’s dampened, two-moon luminosity. She saw the match official but not her competition. They could end up a no-show - many players were losing due to tardiness.

While walking over, Grandma Ru thumbed through the prayer book. She found a page of brief quotes tailored to these preliminaries.

One excerpt read: ‘6-A: When racing a mosquito, you do not need to flap your own wings.

The Invincible One warns against the newbie error of crafting specialised counters for every adversary. A human can defeat a mosquito using their legs. Likewise, your comfort methods should defeat the weaklings you encounter. See also: 15-C: The infidel dares not pass The Gates! Against The Many, brothers, abide The Strategy of No Strategy Beneath The Heavens.

Seven chants of 6-A. Finish with two declarations of 15-C, the second forceful.’

“The Strategy of No Strategy Beneath The Heavens,” said Grandma Ru. "Sage words..."

It was reasonable advice, although slightly miscalibrated to their present level. A mere week into their studies, even the most proficient hadn’t reached the mastery of A Thousand Tools to deploy foe-specific counter strats. Most would stick quite rigidly to the sub-set of techniques they’d drilled, their adjustments limited to the crudest factors like terrain and class matchup.

On her end, Ruru’d only planned out custom tricks against those provably stronger than herself. This was less in the delusion that she could sculpt perfect counters. Rather—having seen her usual methods fail consistently in practice—she hoped to introduce some unpredictability and gamble up a W where otherwise she’d lose. It’d be a sort of calculated chaos.

A ring down from hers, a halberd-wielding Crusader had been chopping air while waiting. After registering, she challenged him to spar.

For her own equipment, she lugged out a tall, oblong shield, one with Roman Legionnaire proportions. The other hand she left free for spellcasting. This pair would be her mainstay through the initial rounds - she’d chosen one of A Thousand Tool’s goofy hybrid turtle-magic strats, developed out of The Bloodriver Stalling Shield.

Shields, to be clear, were not her preferred style of casting, but she’d had to switch things up because these flat arenas prohibited her sub-speciality of spellkiting. Some younger mage types could work on open soil by taking rapid, fencer-like steps in and out of weapon ranges. Her grandma reflexes couldn’t cope with that madness. Instead, she fought a slower, more deliberative game using obstacles to block angles of attack. Ancient World of Warcraft degenerates used to call it ‘pillar humping’, a timeless art that’d kept its cheesy flavour through to the middle of the century.

With that caveat stated, although not her speciality, she had dumped a ton of drillwork into shields. This—along with defensive styles of dodging, spearwork, mobility, and grappling—she’d actually trained more hours overall than direct spellcasting. In a highly-calculated decision, she’d calibrated her exercise regime around predominately nullifying melee attacks, a mere fifteenth of her schedule devoted to magic proper. In part, hers was an anti-meta-game response. Most students of A Thousand Tools had all-inned on offensive weapon skills in a frantic, global race to replicate the kid’s multi-spear-axe-sabre juggle. Her approach summed up to a general advantage against this majority. Her experience negating their superior offence dwarfed theirs negating her inferior offence. In part, it was also a basic necessity, these foundational skills required before one could kite with any level of reliability.

A bonus of all that—combined with the experience of sparring agile freaks—meant her melee capabilities were better than most pure casters. If she encountered any in her run today, she’d likely spear or grapple them.

Ruru, after summoning her shield, swivelled it and inspected its cut-scored face. In the previous hours of training, she’d broken and repaired multiple, her inventory stacked with spares.

She addressed the shield as if it were a person, delivering it the evening's dire news. “Might just be you and the sisters today. Let’s see how far we go.”

She jumped into the ring with the Crusader. Her fat clunker of a shield ate a rain of blows and halberd thrusts while she calmly circled about and her spellhand sprinkled their anatomy with . Her shots, like most A Thousand Tools mages, traded speed for unpredictability, both in rhythm and in point of origin, her fingers peeking at one instant from above her shield’s rim, at another from its side.

The Crusader soon lost hope at slipping her defence. He switched to a bullrush, sprinting fast and lunging.

Grandma Ru, in turn, side-stepped at the last moment. Then, putting her shoulder behind it, shoved her shield into his side, sending his off-balanced bulk toppling and skidding through the dirt.

Several finishers appeared in his fall. Standing over him, she might've blasted a three-charge through the thinner leather backing of his tourney armour and into his heart. Alternatively, having measured his melee skills and found them inferior, she could've pinned him and slit his throat.

Ruru held back from both, not wanting to destroy her practice dummy. She gave him room to roll away and cast a heal.

The Crusader—failing to respond as her usual partners would—lay face-down like a corpse breathing dirt.

"Right..." said Grandma Ru, forgetting how quickly the younger ones conceded. "You’re doing brilliant!” she shouted with encouragement. “I’m rank 44. In the whole zone. You weren’t going to beat me.”

The last digit of her rank was emphasised with a drawn, pride-filled pleasure. Grandma’d climbed three rungs through her pre-event sparring!

“Oh!” The Crusader—resuscitated from the despair of being inexplicably demolished by a sixty-something—leapt to his feet.

Ruru was transformed instantly into a mentor. She advised him to try detain her shield with one hand while using his halberd’s tip as a pseudo-dagger. While he practised that, she practised various disengagements, from shoves, to leg sweeps, to A Thousand Tool's more complicated shield-juggling swaps, the captured shield desummoned precisely when a spare finished materialising from her inventory.

Her main goal would be to play it safe until she could escape these obstacle-less starter rings. Fingers crossed, she wouldn’t be stuck here for the entire preliminaries.

A promotion system existed thanks to The Tyrant’s tourney juggling. The teen couldn’t teleport between fifteen different match sites. Competitors who thus paired against either him or his teammates would be picked up by riders and escorted to his location, to his private stadium reserved for his exclusive use. Critically, to reduce the transit time of later pairings, duellists entering the stadium would remain, their subsequent opponents coming to them in a similar fashion. The sum effect of this would be a gradual, exponential convergence of the top brass.

It was in that promotion opportunity, by the way, that Ruru’s run might’ve been spoiled by the ambush in the distance.

Previously—according to the stats nerd—contestants shouldn’t have been surprised to enter by their 5th duel if they’d won all previous. That’d been a mathematical consequence of The Tyrant hoarding a sizeable chunk of the top rookie duellists for his 50v50 squad and the Swiss-format matching players each round with the same win-loss record.

His last-moment switch to inferior teammates had inverted the numbers. The nerd’s recalibrations concluded that now getting summoned to the stadium before the 8th round would be rare and, in fact, inauspicious.

Grandma Ru—distracted by the tangle of absurdities, by the statistics nerd being one of the ex-teammates giving this commentary mid-ambush—had missed the explanation for why early promotion would be a bad sign. For herself, it seemed the only possibility of survival. The simple arena grounds nerfed her skills far beneath her rank – she might’ve dropped, effectively, out of the top 500. Thus, lingering here for three or more extra rounds could be the ultimate determinant in her missing the cut-off.

She could only pray for a swift promotion.

Pray and train.

Against the Crusader, Grandma Ru manoeuvred her shield with hurried panic, like someone shaking a numb limb while fearing it might never wake from its deadened immobility.

This surrogate for her spellkiting, with all its awkward cumbersomeness, might be the sole companion of her tools to the very end. If that were so, then her memory of her speciality had to be erased. She had to open up a mental gap and fill it with more of the shield, incorporating the shield deeper into her technique, deeper than she had in previous training. The importance of the shield had to expand at once externally—its defence replacing the defences of ladders, climbing walls, and bunkers—and at once internally, as neurologically inseverable from her brain as her arm and the hand on the end of the arm that held the shield.

“Go, Ruru! Dumpster that trash kid!”

“To the dumpster? No, send that baby back to the cradle! Put him down to rest with a Twinkle Twinkle Little Star burning through the cortex!”

The old shieldmaiden received cheers from the sidelines, her friends running over as they mistook her warmup for a real bout. The pair waved a stall-purchased banner as if she were competing in a championship. Two arenas down the line, her granddaughter, who’d not joined the embarrassing grandpas, hovered while pretending to observe a different duel.

“Warming up!” Grandma Ru shouted back. “LUZ! You three!” She yanked her shield from the Crusader and shot him through the nose, his body stiffening as the scorched through the nostril cavity and up into his brain. “TOK! DIEN! VEP!” She blocked a recovery thrust. “In as well! Attack!”

Inviting them to join, she wanted more pressure and to also pre-empt shade from Pete - she imagined him whining that she’d somehow prophesied her opponent’s lateness and ran ahead of them for extra drills. (Yes, that'd been a consideration.)

The subsequent 4v1 became a marvellous booster to her confidence. Together, they still couldn’t penetrate her guard. Such was apparently the skill canyon now separating her from the workshop’s non-graduates.

Against her friends, Grandma Ru began to feel like Neo from The Matrix. Their attacks seemed to fly in slow motion after tuning her perception to the frog-tongue flicks of Suchi’s mutants. In a situation that might’ve once panicked her, she felt relaxed. She’d honed a concrete intuition for where substantial strikes could originate and—as importantly—could not originate, and the moments of vulnerability were interspersed by long stretches of safety, which she could extend by stepping out of attack opportunities before the others even registered them. Since their coordination was abysmal, she could easily manoeuvre to interpose one person between her and the rest, treating them like non-static arena obstacles. This interposition functionally eliminated those behind and reduced the assault to a shifting series of 1v1s.

Exploiting that last tactic, if she equipped a spear, it would’ve been quite trivial to prod them down one after another. She resisted this urge, though, neither wanting to demoralise them into quitting her warm up nor to sow a poor habit for against the tougher enemies she’d soon advance to meet.

Shield and spell, that’s all she’d use in this dump. No weapon-swap tricks, no ninja flips, no crazy moves that risked a loss against these low-tier scrubs. As that scam booklet had said, she should not flap her mosquito wings, she should employ The Strategy of No Strategy Beneath The Heavens.

Laughing, Grandma Ru continued flicking spells, blasting Jorge’s heart, melting her grandkid’s pretty left eyeball.