The remainder of Ruru's gauntlet ramped up the challenge. Every duellist morphed into a freak with some unique mutation. The freebie rounds dried up from being underestimated for her senility. Her opponents, members of the tiny cast of Suchi’s elite reuniting at the summit after trudging up the corpseheap, responded with appropriate vigilance to her and her notebook bulging with their vulnerabilities.

Her next loss, in the 14th round, came courtesy of The Third Gate, the crazy mystic who’d plucked The Tyrant’s death virginity.

This duel stung Grandma Ru much deeper than the others, as many of the shelters for her ego to hide in were demolished. First, by the mirror matchup – this nutjob, an Earthfriend, too, had developed a hybrid spellkiting method from the exact same teacher. Second, by the fact of Ruru investing a ton of opposition research; to her, The Third Gate was the tournament’s darkhorse, and Grandma Ru had recalibrated her whole kiting routine after witnessing the mystic’s superior implementation.

Confronting this superiority, the grandma's cute counter-schemes were blown back on her like a breath into a tornado. The Third Gate, detecting her intentions twenty seconds into their first exchange, destroyed her plans with one jittery tempo shift. Then, the mystic, as amused and flattered by the imitation as The Tyrant had been of hers, proceeded to haze the grey-haired copycat by exhibiting the consummation of the path she’d hobbled down a measly week.

For five dizzying minutes, Grandma Ru was repeatedly bullied within inches of elimination. Several finishers appeared—gutted by a spear, whittled down by spells, ambushed out of a Chameleon-Monkey stealth—but before each death she was 'saved' by the donation of a heal or shield from The Third Gate mitigating her own damage. Through this flirtation back and forth, the mystic flexed a full mastery of not only the grandma’s main niches of obstacle utilisation and movement but a supremacy in aim, shapeshifting, knife-skills, craftiness – her supremacy in everything.

To sprinkle salt upon a senior's wounds, the mystic also improvised her NPC apocalypse dialogue throughout. In the duel’s closing play, The Third Gate dubbed her ‘The Manifest Decrepitude of Shattered Epochs’, snapped her arthritic spine across a gorilla knee, and cast her paralysed body in the direction of The Tyrant’s blacksite.

Ruru had no response but grief. Her skills had not even been enough to break character. Such was the looming gap between a rookie and the veterans enrolled for a laugh.

Round 15 offered her a pick me up, her bitterness unleashed upon a popular streamer in front of an online audience of fifty thousand and a small in-duel crowd booing deliciously by the sidelines.

In the intermission before the subsequent round, the randomest of apocalyptic battles broke out.

One of The Tyrant's opponents in the high-level 1v1, an anonymous Qi Master, became ‘Legendary’ - from what Grandma Ru could tell, this was the game’s version of turning Super Saiyan. A zone-wide quest notification summoned everyone to eliminate the target. A follow-up announcement, though, straight from the mouth of The Tyrant, warned them not to interfere, the issue handled. In refutation of his claim, a cyclone descended on the stadium, tore the tent off the teen's blacksite, and whisked his troops in every direction, some flying kilometres over the outer walls.

The Super Saiyan guy emerged from the chaos racing to escape. Bestowed elemental magic by his transformation, he spammed a flame teleport every few seconds to zig-zag through the soldier squads re-converging to trap him. The organising mass of troops were joined by thousands of rookies, who, ignoring the command to stay put, rushed in and contributed nothing but gore, the Super Saiyan incinerating them in their dozens with cones of fire and crushing them with rolling waves of water.

Grandma Ru, wary of accumulating extra deaths and needing to re-level, admired the unfolding conflict from an abandoned officiator tower. From this vantage point, she eventually spotted The Tyrant, riding with a team of mounted guards around the periphery of his troops' containment formation. Equipping a bow that appeared plain, but evidently wasn't, the kid sniped at his fleeing adversary from a couple hundred metres, far beyond Saana's max effective range and far—more importantly—beyond a normal human's accuracy range. He missed four shots while calibrating to the novel conditions of horse-riding, distance, and the irregular bow. A fifth arrow pierced the back of the Super Saiyan's thigh, causing him to freeze upon the application of some rare poison. Before this effect wore off, a squad of teleporting shock troops had caught him, and a seamless combo of chain-disables and dismemberments then fed him into a larger platoon, already in the process of erecting a tent.

As the bagged target vanished inside, The Tyrant strolled in behind and, with a sarcastic thank you to the dead and wounded trainees littering the stadium, relinquished them to their regularly-scheduled matches. A global notification soon declared the quest's anonymous completion.

Observing all of this, Grandma Ru contemplated her pounding by The Third Gate and the more monumental feats of this teenager who had, in reverse, toyed with the mystic until his slip-up. Once again, she grasped the absolute chasm between her and this generation, between her and the top.

Everything was shortly after back in order, the original blacksite repaired, the teen rushing his next few matches to correct for the disruption.

For Grandma Ru, however, the disaster only spread from there. As if the omens of doom had been real for her—as if she were being punished for requesting one brief weekend re-dangling from the ladder—her luck deteriorated into one runny streak of diarrhoea.

In rounds 16, 17, 18, and 19, she lost every coinflip over map selection. Her opponents—recognising her, as familiar with her strengths and weaknesses as she was theirs—neutralised her kiting with a uniform sentencing to Sandpit. This arena granted nothing for her to operate with except flat sand and the hacked-off limbs of other cornered mages.

Rolling through the grit and the blood, she dropped two matches, and the wins were so breath-holdingly close that she didn’t register her actions until the aftermath, all calculating thought receding into the automaticity of drilled reflexes. The first was a narrow out-of-bounds shove, the second an omoplata into a beheading.

At last arrived the 20th and final round.

By this stage, many of her peers had secured their advancement to tomorrow’s bracket. Ruru, imagining herself at the outset with the same luxury, had planned a highly-calculated move of skipping it and maybe the 19th to pack in extra sleep and thereby shunt herself ahead of the exhausted competition. Three players did exactly this, including The Third Gate, a similar breed of conniving witch beneath the RP persona.

With a tally of 14-5, this option didn't exist. If she won this round, she progressed. If she lost, they'd be shipping grandma back to the retirement home and onto the mausoleum.

She could’ve wallowed in her luck, but she chose to adopt the mindset of being already in the bracket stage, which would have none of these second chances. Tomorrow, someone would be RNGing the Super-Saiyan-slayer in round one. What if that were her? Instead of wasting energy complaining, she would have to accept the choice on offer: get good or die trash.

Her 20th rung was to be a Beast Tamer, Vicente, a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan with a Grey Wolf speciality.

He was also one of her regular sparring partners. They’d formed an acquittance over a shared unconventionality since both had eschewed the flashy weapon juggle. Vicente's style combined auxiliary monster-tricks from A Thousand Tools with the sword-and-shield components of a different art, which he’d learned prior to the workshop while prepping for the tourney in a foreign zone. His wolf wasn't the strongest pet, big cats being deadlier. Its one advantage was a species ability to receive directions through a kindred telepathy without vocal commands. Exploiting this trait, Vicente would micro-manage and synchronise his pet’s attacks with his in millisecond windows - entangling the foe himself, he might block their sword, they might block his, and his pet, operated like a third arm, would sneak up and nip them in the leg.

At their assigned arena, she found the Venezuelan a sweaty shake of nerves. In his trembling grip, he held the same scam booklet she’d been gifted, The Selected Writings of The Invincible One, and his lips were mumbling through a passage at a crazy speed, begging for a blessed entry to The Heavens Beyond The Gates of this tournament. This fanaticism stood in bleak contrast with the kid's usually hyper-logical, dweeby bearing. It suggested at a similarly-cursed ordeal faced in his own bloody slog through the gauntlet - like a scientist who converts to religion after a rationality-imploding disaster.

“Good luck in the stands, young man!” chirped Ruru, stepping into the ring, snapping shut her research notes.

The Beast Tamer lifted his gaze from the holy booklet to confirm the voice resounding in his ears.

“Oh…fucking Christ bleeding on the cross…” Vicente swore. “This arsehole-sucking bitch of a game!”

At once, he cast down the superstitious tome that’d betrayed him yet again. A string of blasphemies were hurled at the sky, at their officiator, at the whole two-faced edifice of duelling, promising glory, delivering misery. A wolf beside him confusedly switched growling at the vacillating targets of his ire.

Grandma Ru chuckled at the reaction.

Really, it should have been hers.

This Beast Tamer prior to migration had been his zone’s number one. Here, he ranked ten lofty spots above her, belonging even less on the edge of elimination. Their sparring record aligned with the skill differential - he’d dumpstered her in 83% of their encounters.

So, this match was horribly cursed.

Still, Grandma Ru’s maturity allowed her to tank these troubles on her wrinkled chin. As she had in the decisive rounds of bygone competitions, she chose to believe in her superiority, to focus on the paths that led to victory. While she had slipped to the bottom out of RNG, she reasoned, Vicente’s demotion might be entirely deserved, his juvenile morale crushed beneath the tourney’s pressures. What more proof of this was needed than this pathetic search for guidance from some scam book instead of his own smarter, stronger capabilities? (Nevermind she’d done the same before – her opponent didn’t know this.)

Refusing to display her nerves, she goaded the Venezuelan’s meltdown by warming up with exaggerated confidence. Had he also missed his map selection four times in a row? she inquired, aware he hadn’t. The resulting expletives nourished her.

Naturally, she got flipped off by this coinflip, too.

Vicente, blowing kisses to the officiator, abstained from the Sandpit counter - the Beast Tamer had observed the granny madly drilling in it through her previous rounds. Instead, he picked his own comfort choice, Graveyard of The Gods. This flat ground arena was sprinkled with life-sized statues, around the legs of which he’d trained his wolf to dip and dart for rapid flanking manoeuvres.

The map had hosted several dozen duels between the pair. Of these, the old woman had won a crisp and even zero, the Beast Tamer in his realm another of those absolute chasms.

But again, Grandma Ru didn’t forfeit. Three-quarters dead already, with one foot in the real-life grave, she wouldn’t be spooked by any virtual cemeteries.

She picked her side, she picked from the limited strategies available to her—she was going to disembowel this dog wrangler’s precious mutt—and she duelled.