Tyrant-san's arena.

Emerging from the maze of fortifications, Kimura-san got his first view of the actual battleground. It was a replica of those outside, a perfect replica. As if offended by any variation from its platonic ideal, a crew were frantically poring over the site to erase all trace of previous matches. Kimura-san was struck by a multiplicity of tradesmen hammering broken sections, stamping divots back in place, pitchforking severed limbs, and mopping pink intestinal spills. A smattering of gore had been left by the previous 50v50.

Before he could absorb it all, the guards led him on, to the centre of the map, up the hill with rabbit burrows, where Tyrant-san waited.

Kimura-san—based on the rigorous security and the statue at the concert in military grab—had expected someone grave and menacing. What he got was a literal child.

A teenager, cherub-faced and nude, was soaking in a bubble bath. While an attendant massaged his soapy hair, he leaned against one side of a portable tub. A set of scrawny arms dangled out and made the bored, zombie-like swipes of a toddler parented by a tablet. Flashing before him were two dozen simultaneous recordings, projections from a matching number of palm-sized pearls resting on the ground.

Kimura-san, drawing close enough to make out the details, raised his brows in astonishment. The scenes featured none other than himself, a humble Japanese salaryman. From various distant angles, they’d captured a humble Japanese salaryman dying throughout the tutorial, a humble Japanese salaryman duelling, and a humble Japanese salaryman committing petty larceny with a falcon.

It seemed the cops had been following him ever since his meeting with the trickster god, Bes...

“Oh dear, Kaito-chan,” he mumbled. “The gestapo suspicions were correct, and now I'm stuck upon the fascist spider's web.” He peered at the ceiling and the archers. “My yakuza friend, your escape would also be…difficult.”

The bird—still under the order of manners—replied with an ordinary, non-suspicious chirp.

Tyrant-san, hearing their approach, snapped towards Kimura-san. In an unsettling contrast, a deadpan stare clashed against his blazing irises, his eyeballs glowing with the magic of external observation. His mouth creased into the faintest smirk of recognition.

“You’ve got my buddies stumped,” the teen greeted, tapping his temple and popping a blood-pink bubble sparkling on the spot. “They’re still combing for unaccounted raptor specialists. It hasn’t occurred to them that this meta-worthless falcon is of secondary importance, that you—actually—didn’t teach it, and that whoever did was a decoy replicating your instructions while you prepped with another falcon in a different region off the grid, following the principle that only small-scale bandits meet the target prior to the scam. No, the bird’s main function is only to fly off with the prize after I drop it.” He twirled a finger upwards, pretending to dart through the soldiers stationed in the roof above them and into the sky beyond. “That’s the essential clue, the after. You have the confidence to kill me, at least enough to burn a week hatching up this kooky getaway, and that confidence shrinks our list of candidates. Do you want the honours of the rest of the reveal? Or shall I continue blathering?”

Kimura-san—skewered by these random accusations—struggled for a sensible retort.

The teen’s schizo narrative defied all rationality. Before addressing the nuanced gaps of motive and vocation, none of these insinuations befitting of the conduct of a salaryman, how could he, Kimura-san, have found the time for this clandestine switcheroo training in a foreign zone? He’d spent the past fortnight unconscious in a hospital, recovering from a nearly-fatal stairwell tumble.

Bes had mentioned that this tournament celebrated the teen’s retirement. Now, Kimura-san understood the truth, how someone not of legal age could qualify for ‘retirement’. Retirement? A lie. This young man must’ve been fired. Paranoid outpourings like this had no doubt spoiled his suitability for employment and embarrassed the company. Such tragic forced ‘retirements’ had been frequent amongst Kimura-san’s older colleagues at Furukawa Vacuum when senility rendered them unfit.

But, thought the salaryman, the teen's distraction by this fiction might be fortuitous. Focused on that, he might neglect The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent, could allow it and its awesome skills to slip on through….

Kimura-san, doing his best to generate a smirk in line with the roguish allegations, bowed permissively. “Tyrant-san would do me a greater honour by educating me on the errors of my ways…”

The young kid used the authorisation to triple down on the crazy nonsense.

First, he accused Kimura-san of faking being a Japanese salaryman. To hide suspicions of his out-of-zone preparations, in a whacky scheme of identity fraud, his user ID and middle-aged appearance had been stolen from a local player. There was a ‘real’ Takahito Kimura, one whom the teen had himself met briefly during his first day in Suchi. That real one must’ve posted about the encounter online but would’ve since deleted any traces after the ID had been purchased by a scam artist with a sense of humour.

If it weren’t enough to charge Kimura-san with impersonating himself, the teen further denied his noble Japanese heritage. He claimed that—as all of them could hear—his accent prior to automated translation belonged not to a native speaker but a foreign language learner, stumbling through the basics of the grammar.

The teen then used these language errors (in fact, a by-product of the brain damage from falling) to derive Kimura-san’s ‘real’ identity. In the past, the teen himself as ‘The Cripple’ had spoken and written in Japanese, the whole shtick being a parody of a weeb parodying Miyamoto Musashi, grandfather of the 1v1. In this backstory was the supposed origin of both Kimura-san’s confidence at duelling and his knowledge of Japanese. Kimura-san—not Japanese, not a salaryman—was actually one of The Cripple’s former students, and in a mirror of his own wasted hyper-genius, he must’ve studied the language to decipher the finer cryptographic points of the manuals that couldn’t be translated. Corroborating this student theory was the general aesthetic goofiness of this identity fraud scheme, of him faking a brain injury and pretending his skills belonged to a scam vendor item. Was this hammed-up charade not distinctly Cripple-esque?

All this false conjecture was reeled off in a rapid monotone. The teen simultaneously finished his bath, towelled off, and selected a fresh change of clothing from a personal tailor.

Throughout, Kimura-san received the allegations like censure from a manager. Contradicting nothing, he bowed apologetically, and he accepted all responsibility for his superior’s mistakes. Thus, the duplicity of his ring, the sole and not fake source of his abilities, slipped by unconfiscated.

“Hmm…” the salaryman bowed, “It’s hard to reconcile such ‘Cripple-esque’ shenanigans with Tyrant-san. However, whatever similarities are beyond our meagre notice must be obvious to one with your penetrating vision…”

“As for which student,” the teen concluded, squeaky clean and ready for the next leg of his grimy marathon, “that’s easy to derive from the constellation of remaining clues.” He swept his hand over the activated orbs, over the subtler patterns lurking in their footage. “Class: not a Beast Tamer, but a Cutthroat. Role within this Class: not an assassin, not a duellist, but—as the kleptomaniac training of the bird suggests—a thief. Who is this Cutthroat thief?” He mimed reaching towards the salaryman and pulling off his scooby doo villain mask. “You are my delinquent offspring Z, last spotted plundering a Humakungan villa and now here to try lootjack one of Tovariš Cripple's priceless Legendaries.” (AN: Chapter 210)

“A thief named Z?” Kimura-san repeated the dazzling one-letter name. “I’ve never heard of him. But, to be acquainted with you, Tyrant-san, he must be a figure of prodigious mis-achievement. Perhaps the root of the confusion of this ‘Z’ with me, a law-abiding salaryman, might be clarified by recounting some of his distinctive qualities or by a choice selection of his top three or four international finesses. Who, pray tell, is Z?”

The salaryman, clueless, punctuated his request with his deepest, most humble, most authentically Japanese bow yet.

The tale of Z, Saana’s Lovable Technocommunist Robinhood.

Who was Z? the salaryman asked and answered with a wicked grin.

Some had branded him a veteran rogue, a master burglar with a subtle touch of stealth and a sparkle of audacious greed. But those who voiced such lies would be best to clamp their mouths shut, their breath reeking with the dusty odours of vanquished ideologies. Comrade Z, a thief? Not quite. He was a counter thief, a paradoxical hero of sorts.

As a born citizen of Europe, he'd delved into the material truth of history and seen that the greater and first theft had been that of the people's stolen land and robots. Outside this game, not one free soul continued to defend the propaganda once used by the capitalist worms to justify their parasitic sucking of the techno-material commons – their so-called intellectual ‘property’, their self-serving myths of individual ‘invention’ and human ‘labour’. Z, a member of the party, voluntarily enlisted, had merely taken it upon himself to carry the eternal revolution into Saana by reclaiming our confiscated digital possessions. Reflect for a moment, what element of this virtual world had not been generated by supercomputing? By the people’s supercomputing, run by none and owned by all? From every molecule of air to every article of dungeon loot, there—

“A common thief; a commie dork.” Tyrant-san made a lazy flicking gesture, dismissing the past and any tedious revisals. “Let’s not drag out the reunion, Z.”

“Hmm…” Kimura-san grumbled, perturbed at the rude skipping of an introduction of appropriate length for this magnificent Slovenian rogue that he was being falsely accused of being.

“I do apologise for the lack of hospitability,” said the teen, “but the years apart have widened the disparities between us. For you, this might be the grand culmination of a week of scheming and half a decade nursing a spanked bottom. For me, this is just another odd duel in a week packed with odd duels. You’re not even the first disguised Cutthroat of the hour.”

Kimura-san swivelled around when Tyrant-san pointed at a spot of grass behind him. Indicated was one of the many burrow holes skirted by while walking up the hill. Around its rim fanned a bloody splotch sprinkled with a pink-white mess. These, on closer look, were revealed to be a couple fragmented teeth and braindrippings smashed out of someone’s face as they must’ve popped their head out like a gopher. The gore belonged, the teen explained, to an assassin called ‘Vitharr’, a mutual enemy from the guild Asatru who’d infiltrated with the German 50v50.

The salaryman, spotting a dislodged eyeball, produced a handkerchief and picked it up. In colour, in size, in fascist glint, the grotesque charm recalled none of the memories that the teen had claimed. When he showed it to Kaito-chan, she didn’t recognise it either, squawking cluelessly.

“Bi-zaa-ru?” Kimura-san, struggling to pronounce the Nordic tonguetwister, turned the eyeball upon Tyrant-san. “Who’s Bizaaru-kun?”

“We’ll skip that memory trip, too,” replied the teen, “along with answering the obvious questions that now arise. ‘Did Z arrange a meeting with Karnon before deleting his character or did he get caught snooping?’ ‘Does Z’s tacky ring have any genuine secrets or is it just a goofy improv cover for his cat-burglar talents?’ ‘Did Z want to meet this early, in a setting where his pet’s wings were clipped?’ ‘Does Z’s pet have any hidden traits to counter these restrictions?’ ‘Given Z’s a criminal surrounded by uncertainty, why entertain this silly bout when I can have him ejected from my tournament and shot?’ None of that is my concern. In retirement, I’ve outsourced both the calculation and responsibility of risk.” The glow in the teen’s irises—representing the borrowed vision of a network of agents deliberating throughout their conversation—extinguished. “They’ve voted 31 to 2. No vetoes. So, we duel.”

As he announced the decision, a suit of armour materialised upon his body, along with a shield and sword.

Kimura-san—not whoever that smart and most likely well-endowed Z guy was—inspected the gear and nodded with respectful awe. It fit much slimmer than the salaryman’s purchased at a random stall. The chestpiece, granted hours of love by a team of smiths exhibiting their talents on this prize model, had been engraved with a finely-chiselled hydra whose snaking heads engulfed a globe that he assumed depicted Saana. Similar mythico-fascist symbology decorated Tyrant-san's boots, his gloves, his helmet, and his weapons. The salaryman counted three knives, strapped in unconventional locations.

Kimura-san’s attire looked dreadful in comparison, but that didn’t matter, because everyone had forgotten about his unbeatable charm, The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent!

Off to the arena’s side, the official flipped a coin and assigned the choice of map to his opponent.

“That might’ve settled it,” said the teen, stomping his foot upon the hill. “This one. Let’s see how your bird chirps underground.”

“Hmm…I believe it is my choice of mapsplit.” Kimura-san, spinning slowly through a circle, scanned the burrow-speckled hill. “Doesn’t seem to be any differences...”

He drew a random line from one corner to another.

The teen, jogging to his side, tsked his tongue at the dragging pretence. “Z, you’re going to lose if you continue wasting brain power. Focus. The gods are fickle. All—"

He paused as the setting suddenly darkened. The Lightstones installed to illuminate the tent's interior began to malfunction. Three-quarters of them failed completely, and the rest dimmed. Soldiers rushed to unload spares from their inventory but found them broken, too. Several jumped down from the ceiling around Tyrant-san, whose body lit up in the increasing shade with the radioactive glow of accumulating protective magics, dozens of spell projectiles zapping in from around them.

Kimura-san found himself breathing dirt. A stealthed assassin, apparently hovering behind him during their conversation, kicked his legs from under him, pressed him to the ground, and put a knife to his throat in anticipation of the order.

But, after only seven seconds, the bedlam ended. The salaryman was picked up and righted to his feet. The landing troops immediately scattered, sprinting off to clear the field.

At the centre of this rapid start and stop, Tyrant-san abolished his protections. His glowing figure receded as a silhouette into the dimmed environment, which his calculating mind had observed, assessed, and dismissed as nothing of consequence.

"The gods are fickle," the teen repeated. "All we can rely on is our own determination. Ave Imperātor.”

With a traditional duelling salute, he jumped into one of the burrows, disappearing into the hill’s shadowy intestines.

Kimura-san, confused by the faulty lighting and the vanishing trick, sought answers from his ring. Looking around surreptitiously, he raised his gloved hands, bringing one to his mouth while shielding it with the other from the archers staring down upon him.

“Razuru dazuru, sukiburi duu,” he whispered Bes’s secret words of activation. “This magic ring will make the world’s greatest duellist out of you…instantly!”

Nothing happened.

Nothing seemed to happen.

Kimura-san's mouth widened with a rascal grin, his mind blossoming with undefeatable duelling knowledge. At once, he understood where the teen had gone, this ‘hill’ being, in fact, the mound of a multi-level subterranean catacomb. The treasure injected him with the full underground architecture. He saw the dark twists and exploitable turns, made darker by the supplemental shadows of this malfunction. He saw himself with Kaito-chan stealing victory and, perhaps, more expensive things.

As the officiator counted down their match, the salaryman’s equipment disintegrated, replaced by a set of black-dyed cloth, and he leapt into one of the burrows. Out of the hole soon reverberated a gentle, musical whistling and the flapping of wings.