The rest of the trios.

Advancing to the higher tournaments, The Tyrant showed a little more respect by decoupling from his orchestra.

In the standard format, he switched team composition to overcome the weakness of his Martial Body, never trained as part of his disguise and now for the extra challenge. His first teammate, compensating for a lack of damage, was a Qi Master with a flying weapon speciality. His second, a shield-based Miracleworker, compensated for his lack of defence. Between these two, The Tyrant wriggled into a novel role, a type of harmless melee disruptor-facilitator. Accompanying his Qi Master, he parried using inert swords and blocked with inert shields, he intercepted enemy heals, he tripped and grappled the enemy before exposing their vital points for a synchronised ally thrust, he obscured the flying weapon in a swarm of juggled dummies.

His technique was unbelievably complex in action. It made anything exhibited through duelling seem like child's play, the tripling of participants multiplying the speed and complication. Nobody—not the audience, not the enemies, not even his teammates following his orders blind—could comprehend the sequence of battle live. On top of this confusion, the way he orchestrated each elimination but dealt none of them with his own hand created an uncanny impression of them lacking any cause or agent. One moment, an opponent was swinging an axe. Another, they were kneeling in a pool of spilt bowels. Between these two events? A mystery. Destiny’s capricious scythe.

The finalists who met this scythe last were two-time return winners. Their tactics, based around a Beast Tamer’s charging pet rhinoceros had a theoretical advantage in disrupting his disruptions. Alas, The Tyrant and his weapons simply reformed around the bulky monster like piranhas feasting on a jaguar flailing in a river’s deadly froth. The concluding match saw the rhino’s integration into the swarm. As its master’s leg was hooked by a halberd, its hoof stomp squashed their tripping torso, their viscera extruding from their armour with the texture and lurid colour of mashed pulp from a rotten pumpkin.

The complexity of The Tyrant’s methods ramped up further in the Opens, a category with zero limits, dominated by The Company’s frontier raiders advantaged with rare artefacts and Classes.

With another stylistic shift, he debuted a magic-builder composition. This consisted of a time-manipulating Tempicanist and an Earth Shaman of the Dancing-Stone Architecture school. He himself blended Spelltome combos while supplementing his Shaman’s battle engineering with his own. Their skills combined into a basic tactical schematic of splitting enemies in maze-like boxes and then eliminating isolated members with nukes accelerated by the Tempicanist. As for the execution of this basic tactic—the way he adapted his constructions to various foes, advancing against those that camped, controlling those that rushed—few could decipher this within the obscure pandemonium of steel and timber.

Around the stadium, around the world, millions scratched their heads, watched slow-mo replays, and continued to scratch their heads.

But, amongst the baffled masses, the worm-eaten Kolonian, whose history had granted him a semblance of understanding, was absolutely blown away.

Live combat engineering...this was the actualisation of every sapper’s ultimate desire. In the quiet dark of the bunker, how often had he and his comrades designed silly prototypes with the mind of progressing their craft beyond the deadness of its static limits? An animated wall, one capable of response, of growth, of breathing, of achieving the multiple functions of protection and aggression - this was their trade’s long-sought salvation.

To think, that this dream had been made material as a mere side fascination of this teen, as the centrepiece of only one in fifteen categories…a man could weep.

And the Kolonian did weep in the semi-finals. There, this master of everything trapped the slithering particles of a Sablelist mage-assassin in a sealed box and oven-baked them with an instant infusion of flame.

In this one action, so many of the crusader’s memories were revived and muddled. He recalled his upbringing amongst the Sandfolk and their perpetual flight from The Cleansing’s blaze. He recalled his final engineer’s impractical designs for a similar contraption, and he recalled that poor fellow’s disintegration by one of these sandwarlocks. He recalled, in the indomitable figure of this teen inventor pumping in the heat, the arrogant sacrilege of youth that’d once coursed through all their muscles, too proud to bend before the false laws of life and pantheon. And, for a moment in which time collapsed, all of these memories—like the animated timber—were alive in him, alive again, alive and capable of redetermining these battles lost to the atrophy of mortal existence.

Forgetting his allegiances, forgetting his infirmity, he rose in tears and joined the Offworlder’s applause. Cheering for what? he couldn’t say, but there was something everlasting between them.

After the half-squads concluded in The Tyrant’s victory, the Kolonian didn’t get to watch the rest. His mistress, learning of the job, threatened that she’d leave him if he stayed. The extra pay, she swore, wouldn’t be worth a palmful of camel dung if he became a casualty in the games between these heavenly powers.

He thus exited in solitude. His passage out fought against the opposing reverse currents of the still-expanding crowd. Apprehensions by the organisers that The Tyrant’s spoiler effect would trigger a mass exodus had proven incorrect. Many, fascinated by the versatility of this generalissimo-turned-arena-star, competed for a chance to witness how he’d adapt A Thousand Tools to the next category. They hungered for the ingenuity with which he'd feed another set of hopefuls into his slushpile of blood, metal, and gold medals.

Back at the demolition site, he laboured while continuing to follow the duos on the stadium’s remote projectors.

In the rookie format, The Tyrant supported his Qi Master partner with a mix of heals and bowmanship, shooting arrows to distract and debilitate opponents before his teammate killed them. The standard was a bizarre monkey show; The Tyrant, alongside a Beast Tamer and their Clambering Chimpanzee, poisoned opponents and then grappled them into out-of-bounds victories. Finally, in the Open Gear, The Tyrant didn’t even appear. While he rested who knows where, a Necromancer partner—lent a triple set of artefacts—mass-spawned undead every round to swamp enemies, including a finalist duo who’d possessed a single, much weaker Legendary.

During a subsequent fit of public anger at his victory in absentia, something curious occurred. One of the duos, incensed by him pissing on their field, leaked footage of their preliminary match at The Tyrant’s blacksite. In this, the teenage emperor was revealed to have done the total opposite, 2v1ing their fight in his underwear while armed only with a knife. One of the half-squad teams then corroborated, a member claiming that he'd soloed their triplet, too. These rumours together suggested at him employing a categorically different style from that exhibited in the bracket stage. But why this subterfuge, none could give a solid explanation. Tiredness? Boredom? Innovations between the phases? A fakery of the preliminaries to prevent leaking his real methods for the finale? Or, maybe, the conspiratorial whispered, the reverse of that, these finales being the sham?

While these mysteries were still afloat, the Kolonian received another recycling job that he couldn’t pass on. Much more meaningful than stadium building, a charitable load was destined for experiments on a mobile hospital system. Designed by a coalition team of The Empire and tourist engineers, it would—if it worked—lurch in the migration’s bosom, collecting their wounded on the periphery. His mistress when informed protested yet again, repeating the threat to leave him. She was paranoid about the job’s remoteness from The Company’s headquarters, deep within the labyrinth of The Slums. This time, however, he ignored her - an Offworlder spectacle, he could sacrifice, but not this more personal crusade.

His travelling party numbered less than fifty. Few guards were available, and The Company determined that the risk of ambush was at a minimum with the high-noon sun beaming and everyone—criminals included—watching the tournament. Nevertheless, some precautions were taken. As they separated from the official highways, they equipped their armour and donned cloaks to minimise attention.

Mid-way through this trip, they heard the shrieks of a woman being assaulted in broad daylight.

The Kolonian drew his dagger and began to cast a stealth. The leader of the crew, however, interrupted him by yanking his cloak and clasping his gesturing fingers. A telepathic communication from the fellow rebuked him, warning him of falling for the set-up. This, he promised, couldn’t happen to their women since they never travelled alone. Their group needed to beat a quick escape before the ambushers switched to a more aggressive plan.

The rest of the crew showed the same intent to run. Although they’d drawn their weapons, none showed any sign of giving aid, all of them huddling behind their shieldmen and checking their surroundings nervously.

The Kolonian threw off the leader’s hand, throwing off also his disguise by reverting to The Slum’s vernacular. “Don’t stuff your ears, you scorpion! She’s calling for her neighbours.”

The crewleader had fibbed to convince him to give up. It could’ve been a home invasion. These were common in The Slums, where the buildings lacked both defences and privacy. A deviant merely had to monitor for the departure of any stronger guardians, and daylight was actually preferable for this, since most were absent labouring.

“At least wait while I scout,” he implored. “You’ll soon know whether it’s an ambush or not.”

The crewleader responded with several blinks of calculation, registering the engineer’s disguise and trying to factor it. Then—with an instantaneous resolve—he gave a formal bow while one foot slid backwards through the dirt.

“You know our ways, brother,” said the man. “Rest assured. If this is a scorpion tail, none of the venom in it will be ours.”

Continuing the sliding motion, he swivelled sharply and jogged down the street in the opposite direction to the shrieks. With him ran the others in a defensive arrangement, leaving the supplies in the middle of the road for later retrieval by called-in soldiers, along with the Kolonian, ejected from the group’s magical connection. The fleeing crew were trailed by the hummed notes of a slumditty about the tragic hero Zoldokol, who perished slowing down a meteor.

Slumdwellers mutually understood flight in this scenario to not be cowardice but intelligence. The necessity became self-evident when working through the game theory of interference, none of them familiar enough to guarantee the others weren’t participating in the set-up.

For the Kolonian, however, support or not, he could not run. Binding him were the waning traces of his race still flowing through his arteries. His people had integrated with The Slum only half a millennia ago, at the twilight of their empire, and this recency meant they’d yet to complete the full dehumanising metamorphosis. As poverty had stripped them of one belonging after another, they’d clung even tighter to their valour. This, they reckoned, was man’s last, inalienable possession before his devolution to a cockroach, fleeing every noise and shadow.

These days oddjobbing at the stadiums had doubled his racial obligations. No audience might be around to applaud his bravery. Nevertheless, he offered his demise to that which spectates man wherever he might flounder, to the watchers in the sky, to the watchers of his own heart.

Thinking this, he stripped the encumbrance of his cloak, revealing the final armour he’d achieved. Its metal formed a patchwork of discoloured blotches from repeated repairs. Its segments, loose upon his disease-withered frame, clattered as he snuck after the call for help.

His scythe came swift. A chest-height pit concealment down a detour path. A poisoned arrow as he fell. Three spear thrusts while disabled.

The Kolonian had meditated long upon what happens after life. His people’s myths of a heavenly crusade had been disputed by his own, by immersing in so many contradictory fanaticisms that none could be believed.

At least, in line with the behaviour observed in others’ soulmotes, his consciousness did not immediately dissolve. He continued to murkily perceive his surroundings. He saw the pit in which he’d died, the shacks of the alleyway, and the bandits panting. Any negative judgement of them was obscured by bliss – although that might’ve been mere alleviation of his former suffering. A prodding urge, strengthening by the second, called him towards a fixed point in the sky, to join—or rejoin—a flow of other transmigrating dead.

Resisting that a moment, he lingered above his murderers. They were joined by a woman, no longer shrieking for assistance.

Beside the pit, a pile of his valuables condensed, his Spatial-Bracelet arm extended when he took the plunge. The bandits, with atypical precaution, refrained from leaping straight upon it for the customary hyena tug-of-war, a distribution that would eventually circulate a few traceable pieces to the markets and corroborate his demise for The Company’s insurance agents.

The gang’s leader instead summoned a bucket and pointed at an initiate. This lad, a child of ten, had shown no distress at the killing, neither his first nor his last. At the command, however, his nerves flared. Breathing shallowly, as if it might help, he lugged around the bucket to the others as they bathed their gore-anointed weapons in a sloshing maroon disinfectant.

This procedure followed the instruction from the hit’s arranger, who’d warned them of the contamination that the dead man hadn’t cured. The jungles hid much worse than appetite-changing worms. Some afflictions were so consuming of the psyche that one would barely notice the taste of rancid meat.

The Kolonian wished with all his heart to stay and confirm the many questions outstanding. Would this gang complete the proper cleanup? Would his bequeathments be delivered to the pockets of the right inheritors? And would anything manifest of the stadium he’d done a tiny part to salvage?

Alas, the call from above had grown irresistible. Conceding, he allowed himself to float away, to go wherever they must go. Perhaps oblivion awaited him, or the next frontier of an endless crusade, or—as the Sandfolk put it—the desert in which the absorbed blood of the world's scum sleeps until another cycle.