Chaotic Fortunes

THE FESTIVAL BROUGHT FORTUNE TO The Blood City. On the periphery of Henry Lee’s extravagant performance, Suchi was raking in amounts of platinum that would have dazzled even a Rangbitan principality. This prosperity went to everyone, not just The Empire whose finances had amalgamated with the host’s. A Skyfolk preacher noted the economic boom with panic as she’d toured the markets. ”Too ample coin flows through the sand, as if there is a conspiracy afoot to foment anarchy,” she sermonised. “Only the blind can look upon this luxury without a premonition of evil. After sampling the shadow’s largesse, will these idlers and these thieves not yearn in his absence for more of his ‘More’?”

The festival had invited some misfortune, too. The delightful clinking of overflowing purses interpolated with the first pained moans of destruction. Guerillas loyal to Ramiro gathered from the steppes in the northern foothills. Next a mutant Goblybeast invaded a neighbouring region. In The Bay of Kanaru, two vessels of The Company’s armada sank while harpooning a leviathan. Tipped off about Ramiro’s re-activation, Central City’s authorities barricaded the gates and imposed a strict curfew on movement. The church’s blue-robed clergy reassured alarmed parishioners: “All restrictions, long or short, are temporary. We have outlasted behind these walls millennia of threats. Land upon our shore, they might, but never will they enter.” This prophecy was incorrect.

Out in The Slum two pestilences emerged in the same hour in the same Sandfolk quarters, the Murdonian district. An amoeba that caused haemorrhaging of the mucosal membranes spread through a party for a silver jubilee. Patient zero of the other disease was stabbed to death trying to stop a fraudulent rape. Shortly after his ambush, the assailant gang regathered in an underground chamber, where they conducted a suicide pact via narcotic overdose. Most later quarantines for this communicable blood cancer would choose likewise. “Inferno…inferno…inferno,” was the description of the symptomology by one semi-conscious patient, who did refuse euthanasia. Later, they would be force-administered it by researchers as an emergency precaution against the twin plagues uniting into one super plague.

A day ahead of schedule, Sandfolk caravans were loading wagons for an early departure despite the leftover business. A bard who’d get axed through his sternum sang, “Why must we march, you ask?/ This foreign jewellery glitters bright/but flounders to enchant/on souls migrating to the sky.” One educator of Volefan stock, who would be incinerated with six of her schoolchildren, expressed another common fear about The Company’s exit plans in her morning class: that after the migration, “our greedy moguls will return to buy up nothing but ash and muggings.”

The festival was chaos, fortune and misfortune converging into one apocalyptic forecast of anything happening to anyone, anywhere.

El-Masry

MUSTAFA EL-MASRY WAS CONVINCED his competition statue would seduce his class’s belle. In the throes of artistic and romantic passion, he began to veer from his design to elaborate her stallion’s fur with a floral arabesque. As the clock ticked towards the finalising hardening, he carved onto her spellbook’s open pages an amatory poem by Mido Hassan, of the Perennialist Sufi Underground. El-Masry defiled the rhyme scheme by substituting out the name of the original poet’s lover with his crush’s, then he scribbled a dedication on the statue’s pedestal.

“Inspired by a real beauty,” he wrote. “If this meagre imitation will be granted victory by the all-bountiful, I will handle the remainder.”

Bodies in The Wind

THE PLATOON TOURNAMENT DESCENDED LIKE a skydiving corpse. The multiplication of pawns to 50 offered up a freebie slaughter for Lee’s ground-warfare savantism, allowed here to manifest despite the scale difference. Yesterday had teased a minor upset with the rookie substitution, but a flawless record since had strangled that. By today a mood of fatalistic humour predominated. “We’re playing Tetris,” joked one entrant. “The winner is whoever solves the most lines before colliding with the wall.”

But many were allured by this call to splatter. The stadium bulged beyond capacity. El-Masry’s classmates, his muse Dina included, crammed and strapped themselves into the vertiginous delights of the venue’s ceiling seating. Spectators frustrated by the crowding created space through violent means and in turn became space courtesy the snipers. Fifteen children on their parents’ shoulders perished. Half the planet’s star commanders were attending, some in the backroom arenas where they continued to refine counters to the shadow blotting their careers. A highlight reel with their losses in the greater battleground warmed up the audience. Veterans of that era recalled its beauty fondly. “This half-decade will always reside in me as the core and mantle of my constitution,” Lee wrote from the stands in his therapeutic diary. The ‘climb’ of war never ceased to beckon. “This act and every act afterwards will just be the crust, floating on the mountain’s restless currents.” In a bar on the eighteenth storey of a Beijing hotel, Simon 'Genocidelol' Xiao also caught the highlight reel and laughed at the comedy of the tourney’s comparative insignificance. Lee’s sister-molesting teacher then launched himself off a balcony.

As the rookie commanders entered the arena and stepped up to their own balcony, prayers were cast from the crowd to bestow at least one of them a parachute. Millions booed Lee’s return to the stage after napping through his necromancer’s duos stomp. He ignored them while distributing frowns and hangover medicines to a blush-cheeked platoon of Byzantines. These drunken louts continued to inspire hope for some. In them the anti-fans, duo-connoisseurs, competitors, and gamblers saw a possibility: might their useless weight not anchor Lee and cause his miraculous downfall?

More buoyant wishes went to a second team of veterans. Through the rookies would bluster the elite stormtroopers of Anatoly ‘Fire Water Fire Fire’ Friendlich, major general of The Company’s 8th Infantry, the pan-Russo-Germanic ‘Sturm Und Drang’. Friendlich had respawned to challenge Lee after calculating a vulnerability in his rustiness and split attention. Rookies fed to Friendlich’s troops were overwhelmed by a strategic philosophy that abandoned caution for a high-tempo chaos fruitful for improvisation. He described his method as “Contra-Gestalt Expressionism”. The audience cheered as this band of prodigy combatants steered by a prodigy commander tore the rookies into minced offal, and as their swift and colourful advance—“an unstoppable hurricane of blood!", a commentator boasted—made landfall in the finale against Lee’s cobbled-together Australasian riff-raff.

But these hopes would be crushed from above. Sturm Und Drang’s first match opened faster than any round preceding. Lee directed a force segmented into 16 units for a multi-approach rush opener. Friendlich’s scouts solo engaged the vanguard units on contact and annihilated them with their elite talents. A light flashed from a burrow hole. In the next blink a thunderstruck Friendlich amidst his guards disintegrated in a charred mist. The pace of the match instantly reversed. Byzantine forces transitioned the false rush into camping several hard-to-access spots. While Sturm Und Drang without its brain hunted for this scattered opposition, Lee slinked about alone sniping leadership and butchering isolated squads. His storm winds blew a little faster.

The same base tactic was repeated, the Russian Major General unaccustomed to the personal risks of close-quarters command. Round two he occupied a building with a quarter of his force, while the remainder fought outside in one cohesive block. Lee in a bold manoeuvre infiltrated past the latter group with his stealth units. His Cutthroats then kamikazed Friendlich with smokebombs. During the confusion two nukes from a snuck-in spellbattery were shielded. A delayed thunderbolt from Lee smote the target. Sturm Und Drang in their elimination match sent a third of their force for high-loss disruption duty on the vanguard. Their bulk roamed behind in loose double squads that flushed out scattered enemies. When Lee was pincering a vanguard squad, he distracted Friendlich across the map with a 2-troop sacrificial ambush. A knight roleplayer in this duo impaled the Russki.

The crowd groaned; the crowd applauded.

Blue Ribbon

THE SCULPTORS STEPPED BACK FROM their stations, and soon a team of five examiners were patrolling the row and eyeing cracks with magnifying glasses and jotting scores. Most spectators had already exited to the merge with Lee’s bipolar horde, and the barrenness deprived this lesser grand finale of prestige. A solitary gull watched on and only because a bored child had pinned its departure with an arrow.

El-Masry should’ve had good reason to celebrate and kiss the heavens. The tribute to his sweetheart received with unanimous vote the tourney’s coveted blue ribbon.

On her scorecard, one judge wrote high praise for the sculpture moulded with affection.

“Detail, love of form and love of material have elevated this to the easiest of grandprize nominees. I’d bet my two thumbs the artist is the young Mustafa; only he could pacify the local clay this speedily. His craft is soaring to new countries, on the wings of Florence and Andalusia. If any despise him, it is because he makes true art. Munich says we can dismiss the Egyptian up-and-comer, his classic tendencies belonging in a sarcophagus. I wholeheartedly agree. Bury me beside this masterpiece.”

“Great,” wrote another judge between snatched viewings of a 50v50 stream. “Hits the theme, and the hair is well textured.”

None of the notes would document the winner’s mood, which was a slowboil of despair as El-Masry searched the competition’s empty stands. Dina hadn’t shown her pretty chin yet. Once she arrived, his sculpture should’ve caressed her soul, sensing the devotion massaged in its curves, and she without a word should have nodded yes to the silent confession of love.

But his belle had flaked. Her agreement to his invite had been forgotten in the enchantments of Lee’s dominance and Lee himself. Dina was by no means alone in the infatuation. A Standford paper on female psychology undergrads that spring concluded, “Public discourse attributes ‘Tyrant Fever’ to resource access and social prestige, but our research suggests the primary response of younger women is to a profile of extreme aggression.” Battle was stimulating, much more so than watching wet dirt harden.

The sculptor stirred up enough courage to message her about the unkept promise. His crush—without remorse—answered as if he were deranged for wishing her to miss the blowout by history’s greatest general. She even inquired why he wasn’t there as his own finale was shunted from all memory. “Upgrade it to a birdfeeder,” El-Masry instructed an official on his statue’s disposal before he stomped out of the venue. In his classmate’s chatgroup, Dina continued to listen with fascination to a rundown on a historic gripe between Lee and his next commander victim.

El-Masry reached the stadium’s three-mile queue. Inside his crush was being introduced to unknown pleasures, and his blue ribbon would not even grant him entrance. When his eyes over-concentrated on his niche took in the massive audience of this larger art, his soul shrivelled to a speck of dust.

"Mustafa!" cried a female voice. From behind the judge who'd fawned over his statue appeared after an extended chase through the festival's crowded alleys. She asked with panting breath if he was busy and if he might work on a personal commission. A nude commission. Her features weren't remarkable—besides a shock of azure hair, bluer than his ribbon—but the look of appreciation warmed an artist's lonesome heart.

Apprentices

VIEWERSHIP AROUND THE GLOBE ESCALATED as the perplexed tuned in to the mystery mesmerising family and colleagues. The finale of the standard duos was watched live by 706 million. Three hours later the 50s had surpassed the billion mark. A fifth of these were official CCTV viewers, the half-Chinese Lee granted state approval as a long-lost son turned to anti-liberalism by The New Commonwealth’s decline. Although he may have planned the tourney as the closing curtain on his gaming act, the number drawn was projecting his reclusive face to an international celebrity far beyond Saana.

The other finalist sharing this attention was Piaoyang ‘Passive’ Fan. He was then a 19-year-old prodigy from Nantong, Jiangsu and the rising star of The Company’s several-times annihilated foe Heavenly Mountain, the guild granted amnesty to participate in Lee’s retirement by Alex Wong. Fan juggled the opposing titles of ‘Serene Fan’ and ‘The Third Tyrant’; the latter referenced a hand-selected tutelage by the original tyrant, Xiao, whose suicide had yet to penetrate world news. Despite the apprenticeship, Fan’s command style bore more familial resemblance to the second of his namesakes, as did most generals spawning in Lee’s shadow. He’d boasted at the time of refining Lee’s method from a frenetic, multi-headed mess to a “battlefield calligraphy” that streaked troops from point to point with crisp deliberation. A series of tough losses in later wars would trigger Fan’s regression to the hydra model. But long before this metamorphosis, he was to lead a small platoon to this tourney’s summit and score a rematch of a preliminary defeat. That sour mark he ascribed to a one-off trick that could not be repeated. The 19-year-old took to the stage of the finale and proclaimed to the billion, “This victory goes to the next, last, and only tyrant, ascending on the shoulders of those forgotten for their mental enfeeblement.” Expertise granted him a special insight into Lee’s psychological turbulence.

Part of the hostility also stemmed from Lee’s disrespect. Lee, with the excuse of his colleagues out-levelling the standard format, had enlisted random guild recruits part-way through bootcamp. These nobodies were then arranged in a carbon-copy composition of last season’s 50s champion, eliminated by Fan in the quarters. The tactics of this outdated champ were also stolen and employed without augmentation. With this lazy plagiarism Lee had smothered all dreams of fellow commanders of witnessing a “Post-Maximal” platoon—his sole advancement being the speed with which he executed his borrowings.

Speed, however, when it came to Saana’s premiere commander, was a stratospheric difference, a mutant factor not to be dismissed. Fan got stomped three-nil and managed to eliminate across the series only eight opponents total, none of which included Lee who sat through every round unbudging on the soil. Twenty seconds of Lee's point of view released to counter foulplay accusations would cause dozens of hospitalisations for seizures.

In the morgue of a Beijing hospital, the broken cadaver of their mutual teacher lay on a table for autopsy. First whispers of Simon Xiao’s demise had been suppressed, political strings plucked by his family’s patriarch. His death would be announced weeks after the tourney’s publicity had passed. With a doctored timeline and motive, the suicide transformed into a drunken slip.

Xiao’s clueless students exchanged handshakes on the podium, where the two put aside the enmities of style and allegiance. Lee continued to look dreadfully bored, dreadfully distracted.

In a private message, he apologised to the silver medallist for the lack of real action caused by his reformations.

Lee was perfectly sincere. “You’ll have to rest your talents for a couple years until the cycling of instalments erases my material legacy,” he said. He added a recommendation doomed to fail but which he’d be remiss to omit for one tracing out his morbid footsteps. “Just quit now. You will quit eventually, so why not quit before the ruin? Rediscover the bliss before the mountain. Nothing’s at the summit, I promise. All you’ll find up here is a desire to leap off and restart the hellish climb. That’s why Geno chronically defects, and will until he’s dead. This fake world has stripped him of all sense for everything beyond.”

An hour later at an afterparty Fan would handwave both Lee’s advice and Lee’s retirement. “Look at this false gamble!” he pointed out a play to his colleague. “This anticipation, this bold plunge, this commitment without stutter is the naked confession of a mind still concentrated on an active field.” He assured them, “The months of playground wrestling are ending,”—a reference to Lee’s sanctioned inter-guild battles—“and we shall soon march with proper stakes when the war for which The Hydra prepares starts, when his third black crusade engulfs this napping universe.” Fan had been demolished but announced, “Every square centimetre of his campaign will be contested by the mountain,”—his guild Heavenly Mountain—“and the mountain by the end will stand alone while these liberal pussies kneel in supplication…”