First Strike

AND SO IT BEGAN. The Alex Wong Gallery of International Art, a four-storey building of faux marble where tourney winners advertised their showpieces, suffered from a catastrophic earthquake. One moment it was housing snobs, the next it was gone, critics and creations compressed into a mash of organs, clay, and painted timber.

This choice for a first target was unusual. The motive may have been something like a spree killer starting with their loved ones: an act of renunciation and irreversible commitment.

A few minutes later a neighbouring district for haute cuisine crumbled, followed by an exotic zoo popular amongst tourist families, who were ravaged by the monsters escaping from exhibits. A scenic architectural garden where sweethearts took romantic strolls and where the perpetrator had intended his first date–a classmate to whom he’d blubbered would share his plans—was next up on the hitlist, the wild plants and the couples entangled in them shaken from their roots.

Beneath these disaster sites El-Masry was repurposing his artistic talents, using unlocked earth magic to excavate subterranean tunnels like a mole. Some victims who survived the fall into these were pulverised, the sculptor collapsing the tunnels to barricade pursuit. Perhaps more misfortunate were the stronger folk who didn’t instantly perish, entombed as they were under tons of clay that emergency crews could not legally touch with a spade. One trapped Minnesotan reported that the earth appeared to be digesting him, for periodically his skin would tingle and the surface layer would melt.

El-Masry fired up a public stream. As viewers hopped in he embarrassed himself with a virginal rant about his underappreciated art and his muse Dina—called out by name—being a common "bandwagon-riding, thug-dick-riding whore". Lee was administered a challenge. El-Masry threatened to cancel the whole festival if unstopped, as the power absorbed through the deaths of these preliminary massacres would snowball him towards ever-greater destruction. His targets were Lee’s flea markets, Lee’s stadiums, Lee’s military bases, and eventually Lee’s girl-stealing empire.

An angel meanwhile flew above the Suchi River, in whose trickle an eleven-thousand-soul caravan of Sandfolk were completing pre-migration rituals for blessings from their pantheon.

Wilson’s attack from the sky would parallel El-Masry’s from beneath the earth.

A holywoman received the first heavenly arrow through her sternum, having been selected for a two-fold betrayal against creed and gender. Wilson then hurried to pick off targets as the thousands scattered into the river and the sparse forest on its banks. Even if she loved each and every one of them, this eradication was necessary. All mothers carried the unenviable duty of rehabilitating their misguided children and aborting the defective. “I do hear your reluctance,” she lectured, “but you will leap with many lifetimes of appreciation once you reincarnate to the kinder Duties that this sorrowful labour births.”

From a toothy grin and supercilious pose, however, it seemed that Wilson was not simply driven by a divine obligation but her own all-too-human satisfaction. Adding to the contradiction, she soon veered from the dispassionate archery taught her by The Clique and instead, making it a sport, wasted time hunting missed targets and stragglers.

The success of Re-Live could not yet soothe past sins. Like that first yoga class, this whole continent had abandoned Her—their own Mother—and such a cruel dereliction of familial Duty deserved many millennia of punishment.

After shooting up the caravan, Wilson relocated to an in-game convention for the Rationalist International, who’d recently accused her of peddling pseudo-science. During this shootout, she noticed the ongoing earthquakes, and one of her adherents explained their origins from El-Masry.

As followers operating on the ground flushed out a building of atheists for her by setting it aflame, Wilson tuned into El-Masry’s stream. Upon then hearing him label all women “power-lusting, no-dedication-having, no-hobby-having prostitutes”, Wilson who’d worked for thousands of years to better society grew infuriated. She declared to her adherents that under no circumstances would they be outscored by this “misogynistic tunnel-dweller.”

She flew petulantly over to the earthquakes to snipe his targets and perhaps himself.

But the scene on Wilson's arrival dealt her a traumatic blow. From her view above the streets were clogged with thousands spasming on the ground and moaning as their bones shattered. From the dust-fuming rubble of devastated buildings, survivors clawed out shrieking the names of children and spouses and parents and friends, and the glittering souls of those being called failed to reach the bereaved and give them comfort due to the sky’s magnetic pull.

Surrounded by a thick cloud of departing lights, Wilson was pained by the realisation that her bow could not compete with this loser’s wide-area magic. She would nevertheless try.

Delay

THE GAUNTLET NEARED ITS CLIMAX, a slumbering Lee awakening for the final leg. Twelve golds were locked inside his trophy case and only three for his revived duelling fascination remained. However, it is the nature of a great summit to resist ascent, and he would upon the highest slopes of this one confront the bathetic winds of farce and chaos—and apocalypse.

News of the twin attackers reached him during the lottery selection of his first duel. Lee gave a frustrated but resigned chuckle, like a patient discovering their cancer had returned, then he announced a four-hour delay. No more; no less. The audience, crammed up and onto the ceiling, were given the option of either A) logging out or B) sitting patiently through a pre-arranged emergency performance that kicked off with a laugh-a-minute set from Pedro Hernandez. No further movement was permitted. While the Texan family comedian took the stage, the NPCs throughout the venue were given first priority of evacuation in a precaution against Ramiro.

Compared with the mind-hijacker lurking in the background, the sculptor and the yoga teacher did not by Lee’s estimation pose a significant menace, their apprehension not worth the endangerment of his Chayokan military. These troops, reluctantly following his orders, left the stadium obscured behind a wall of mobile fortifications while self-monitoring for rats. His private regiment marched to his West Bank estate. The remainder headed for the city’s docks, where they were inhaled by the warships of his armada.

Lee moved out in the opposite direction towards the chaos. From the festival’s background staff he mustered twenty-seven thousand guildmates and arranged them into a loose army corps. The assignment of command roles for the sub-divisions, covering eight brigades, stoked tears of resentment amongst his left-out generals, especially from Alex Wong who was granted only a regiment to babysit the stadium. The boys and girls of The Company were eager. They missed this scale of action like a lover’s hot caress.

A delegation from the church exited, too, skirted the destruction zones, and slipped back into their fortress city. The sky would monitor these troubles without one cloud of trepidation. Any Offworlder who so much as dared to spit upon their wall would be skewered by their guardian Nerin.

The opening of Hernandez’s comedy show was ignored by the in-seat audience, most watching with riotous anticipation as reporters outside livestreamed the first pirouettes of this rain dance bringing some much-needed moisture to a thirsting land.

In the streets the two parvenues of mass slaughter—and soon three—were being stalked by a force more veteran in the art, by a machine that’d ground to dust the tens of millions gathered in the Blood City several times over. Somewhere also, vanished in the bedlam, hunted this death machine’s shadow operator.

Churned and Steamrolled

IN THE MARKET DISTRICT traders mobilising to avoid the attack drew El-Masry to the surface. Piles of wares disintegrated around him. The mass exodus had caused a traffic jam of abandoned wagons, over which the shopkeepers scuttled like frightened rats. He pursued them with 3-metre waves of moving earth, and as the swarm and their possessions sank into the churning undertow, the sculptor savoured his new-found pleasure. This was not the old creative tedium with its patience, plasticity, and permanent blueballs but the instant and uncompromising gratification of annihilation.

A less generous observer might alternatively label it a toddler’s joy in scattering blocks.

From the wreckage of a food warehouse, a platoon of survivors returned fire. El-Masry liquified them with a quake, along with others hiding in the same building, including the last candymaker of an eight-hundred-year Sandfolk tradition. Three infants in a nearby showroom for arcane devices shook until their brain matter spilled from their nostrils. The acid of an exploding machine melted the face off a woman, an incident reminiscent of the 19th-through-21st-century vengeance custom of ‘vitriolage’.

Involuntary shrieks from the disfigured woman tugged El-Masry’s attention to the showroom, which he hit with a shockwave that finished all inside except a lone guard who would recount the scene. A mostly-intact jail next provoked his fury, and he deconstructed it along with a crew of teens, booked for petty shoplifting and forgotten during the evacuation. While the sculptor then undermined an admin’s office, a vanguard unit of Lee’s arrived on horseback several hundred metres away and dismounted for a stealth approach by leapfrogging through the cover of the surrounding ruins. El-Masry jolted when he sensed the opening tremors of his ending and retreated to his tunnels.

Over the sculptor’s dipping head whizzed a dart unnoticed.

The one who’d failed the shot did not appear or chase but slinked off for the next attempt with his usual unshakeability.

Nearby Wilson’s yoga cultists reached nirvana as they ambushed a section of El-Masry’s fleeing victims. One woman stabbing a boy of ten orgasmed. A future serial poisoner bragged on the forums, “the combined tyranny of all penis-kind can not restrain us! Their gore cakes so thick upon our sarongs that we look as if we’ve waded through a baptismal river of divine menstruation!”

The tyranny these girlbosses wished to dismantle, however, had more testosterone than a mob of panicked shoppers. Its arrival soon sedated them. The cult were steamrolled as five of Lee’s companies converged upon the massacre and identified each member—thanks to the matriarch’s rigid fashion choice—and flushed their lowbie characters like blood-smeared tampons. The serial poisoner, in a de Sade villain monologue, would live commentate the eroticism of getting decapitated without the game’s pain filter.

Wilson’s arrows tried throughout to snipe his troops but were foiled by spot callers and clever use of cover, such that a grand total of eight enemies fell before her cult had been extinguished. A follow-up plan for the ladies to “Cyclically Re-Live” as practised in their yoga was pre-ruined by Lee’s foresight to secure all of the city’s spawnpoints.

Despite the failure the empress retained her altitude. “I will not weep over my darlings butchered by your patriarchal brutes,” she said to Lee below,” just as I will not weep when they and your regime, which has controlled this world through the systematic fraudulence of masculine supremacy, are castrated. Much is destined for the chopping block this hour. All your flopping pieces shall be recombined into a stronger maternal empire within my everlasting uterus!”

This comical threat contained additional absurdities that flew too far over the head of most, including Wilson herself, but some were convulsing with laughter, others with rage.

The Other Devil

LEE PREDICTED THE WORST of the Blood City’s devils wouldn’t join this starting skirmish openly. He thus distributed the bulk of his army around the Chayokan evacuation, the festival, and the slums. They were configured into a network of small-scale patrols tasked with collapsing upon any budding mind-slave insurgencies from Ramiro and stomping them out before they spread like a bushfire. The slums were difficult to cover in ordinary circumstances, its labyrinth of densely-populated alleys offering an infinite banquet of pickings for a hog. The additional burden of El-Masry and Wilson would’ve seemed to bless Ramiro with the perfect opportunity to revive his empire. But both he and Lee inside his head thought otherwise.

In one of several concurrent baits, Lee redirected two companies from their original assignment, monitoring the campsite of a Sandfolk confederation hurrying to pack up for migration. This exposed the confederation to the quieter infiltrations accelerating in the background of the anarchy.

Ramiro would eventually bite.

Lee monitored through agents left behind.

Ramiro’s entrance to the camp went undetected. No other soul had invested so many hours into the exploitation of the slum’s obscuring chaos.

His own informants hiding in their shacks had notified him of the enemy’s departure. A puppet then drove his body in, Ramiro pretzeled inside the trunk of a covered wagon. Risks were minimal, the wagon being one of hundreds rushing over. He would also never have to physically leave his hiding spot, his magic letting him leap into the bodies of nearby agents—a lucky thirteen were pre-installed into this confederacy. He hopped around for a gulp of fresh air and a survey of his next feast.

Although he preferred the mouthfeel of fingers, he wouldn’t pass up on this smorgasbord of free brains.

Lee caught none of that. His attention was preoccupied with the elimination of the first of the attackers.

Alice Wilson would die first, he'd decided. Lee probably thought the Blood City couldn’t fit another monarch obsessed with immortal comebacks.

His army began assaulting the winged empress, dozens of towers suddenly being erected to reach her in the sky. Wilson, incensed by this “grotesque gangbang of phallic symbolism”, shot their shafts and made them shrivel. But the towers just kept coming and coming.

A confederation chief sprinted into the tent of his second-in-command who’d summoned him. One assailant behind the door stunned him. Another shoved a memory sphere in his eyeballs. It was projecting footage of his cousin—one of several recent missing cases—being sawed through the neck. Ramiro’s brainwashing worked best when a target’s heart was pounding. He may also have developed an exposure fetish after being outed. As the chief was forced to watch the first bite, Ramiro came forth in the second’s body to perform the conversion. The tent’s walls muffled the noise of moans and magic syllables. The gaze of the chief gradually stilled like his cousin’s, then softened. Disgust was repolarising to love.

Ramiro agonised a little. He could not shake the impersonality of this brainwashing. His thoughts continuously returned to the back-alley politicking of the slum’s unification. Back then, with no more magic than his tongue, he’d dared a mission not even Lee was up to of disentangling the history of bloodfeuds between the Sandfolk, whose subjugation had required months of diplomatic balancing between negotiation, empathy, reconciliation, acquiescence, and selective extermination. Yet now, even the most stubborn of them, like this chief, could be mesmerised with just a few finger gestures, could be convinced to hug his cousin-eating nemesis with a beatific smile. And it would only get easier from here, as any of the chief’s subjects in the vicinity would become vulnerable to an instant brainwashing with a toggle spell. The upgrade in efficiency disturbed Ramiro. He worried that by relying on these brute tactics to simply override the history and the wishes of his followers he might be overriding his own. All his kingly toil would be converted into this, a blank-eyed nothing devoid of what might be the most essential human trait: resistance.

The chief emerged from the tent after twenty seconds and shouted a brisk “Relax, we’ve got this!” as he sprinted off to help another follower.

Lee spotted it himself. He picked up some pattern error during a random sweep of his agents’ vision. If he wished, he could reconverge his troops, lock down the perimeter, kill everyone in the region and celebrate the premature aversion of all that would befall the Blood City. He could finish Ramiro in four minutes, shorter than the length of an official duel. He could do that.

Or he could—in the most intellectually patrician of sick moves—sit patient and feign ignorance and add the converts to a list, setting up his adversary in the future for a highly-aesthetic constellation assassination whereby the nodes of Ramiro’s puppet network would be severed when he tried to mindjump. Or he could head to the confederacy, alone, and pork the hog himself. Lee’s present movements on horseback were amusingly sluggish compared to a mobility combo still reserved in his toolkit.

There were many options for handling Ramiro.

What confounded Lee was the prioritisation of this one death in the wider scheme of deaths. Ramiro's mindslave army carried at its most pessimistic estimate a casualty rate in the tens of millions, but this theoretical number had to be weighed against a dizzying vortex of competing factors like the prolongation of the active massacres from El-Masry and Wilson, the latter 42.7 seconds from returning to The Cycle.

The calculus was hard. Still, it was in the dynamism of these multi-body predicaments that Lee most thrived. They returned him to the past era that his tourney juggling boredly simulated, his maximalist prime when each of his hydra heads had possessed a novelty to contemplate.

He ordered the arrest of the latest converts, just to cause a spook.

Ramiro reincarnated in the basement of a shack a kilometre away—he’d not been killed but fled the instant the agents unstealthed.

In a creative implementation of his new abilities, he’d sown a city-wide network of mindslave teams based around his ability to revive from a puppet whenever his original body perished. This enabled him with smart timing and assisted suicides to traverse significant distances unnoticed.

That panicked getaway had been its first live demonstration.

When the Argentine subsequently learned that no additional troops had been sent, that the escape had been pointless, he became red-faced, breathless, and hopelessly small. He, too, was returning to the past. Once again he was a child being suffocated by his war-drunk papá.