Only, she was no longer The Third Gate…

She, like others on this strange weekend, had been reborn...a god…

…a familiar god.

The roleplayer walked out of the church as Artemis, her opponent's former crush once played by a dude spy. She wielded a slender Mithrilwood bow, replicating an original custom-made by a fan, and the deadlier weapon of Artemis's man-loathing glare.

The rest of the cosplay was a little half-arsed. (Her off-screen assistants, sneaking from the church, had been working on a tight budget and needed to complete the makeover in seconds.) The Greek Goddess’s olive skin tone had been emulated with a rushed re-smearing of a lighter-coloured dirt. Her flowing Mediterranean curls appeared to be a clump of wet seaweed fished up from the local shoreline. Visually, she continued to look like a Somalian hobo, one who'd maybe just been sleeping on a beach.

The roleplayer, however, did mimic Artemis’s gestures uncannily well.

She—The Goddess Gate—bounded forth with lengthy, arrogant strides, her huntress gaze sweeping across the crowd before locking on her latest sport.

“Oh,” she scoffed hatefully, “it’s one of the lover boys…back to have his heart re-shattered.”

The match commentator continued to narrate for the audience from the script the roleplayer had messaged him.

As long-time viewers recalled, their universe-uniting heroine had first mastered shapeshifting during her ‘Alliance with The Wilds’ arc, when she’d befriended their planet’s fuzzy monster buddies. These powers, which had carried her through so many wonderful adventures, had taken in this, her final saga, a turn towards the dark. Devouring the invincible heart of her teacher Gate had unlocked an ultimate, forbidden technique: humanshifting.

Yes…humanshifting. For years, the prophet had denounced the heathenous Many, ignorant as they were of The Day of Judgement a.k.a. The Day Uncostumed a.k.a. The Day Beyond Reality. But now, to defeat SaNguiNe a.k.a. The Sex-Duped Wrestler and save humanity and non-humanity from the possibility of avoiding calamity, she, Herald of The End, would have to become The Many. Thus she had become the weakpoint of SaNguiNe The Tuck-Fooled, had become his gender-bending love…

The crowd was applauding and cackling throughout, the dumb cosplay recruiting the roleplayer yet more fans.

Some were finally recognising the fun of RP. Lesser intellects were simply participating in a rookie duelling tournament wedged between the real tournaments. This crazy witch, toking up on the lore, had elevated herself to the mainstage of a realm of dark magic and intertwining vengeance plots.

There was also, behind the first layer of the story as presented, a lovely ironic background shade, this parody of Artemis against the wrestler mocking the mysterious choice of Septic Rose to infiltrate the tournament disguised as Silver Wolf.

Some fans, on yet another level of the layers, pondered the timelines and wondered if The Third Gate might actually be the spy, Loki, who’d played Artemis. This figure was infamous for impersonations, a skill he’d flexed during his last duel against The Tyrant at the monster event, when he’d rapidly alternated the masks of his career. Maybe, after vanishing, the spy had returned as the mystic. This would make the show an ego-blending monstrosity...an impersonation of an impersonator impersonating an impersonator’s impersonation...

A spoiler sounded from the hillside overlooking the stage.

“She’s unrelated to Loki,” shouted The Tyrant to SaNguiNe, deducing half the story from the narration and trying to help the wrestler stay composed. “This is an improv of convenience pulled from researching my matches with him for technical weaknesses. Any overlaps in mimicry skills are coincidental, his originating from espionage, hers from roleplaying. You’ll notice she’s terrible at voices. Her speciality’s animal imitation - 100% body language.”

Giving further spoilers, he warned the other gathered duellists that her inventory swap would’ve collected goofy costumes satirising all of them. That’s what the ‘becoming The Many’ nonsense alluded to. She’d prepared a whole cast of inflammatory parody RPs.

FuzzyGirl35, within earshot, broke from the layers of characters and raised her hands at him in a ‘what the fuck bro’ gesture, appalled by this disrespect for the craft.

She then glared Artemis-ly. “Retard-reflexed bug…I’ll squash you next.”

Her vocal mimicry was, truly, mediocre. RP-connoisseurs around the globe tsked and scathed.

SaNguiNe watched on with a stony expression.

He felt himself at once the target of this humiliation and not its target. This roleplayer, like everyone else, had kept their sights trained exclusively on HF. SaNguiNe—despite staying above the insufferable teen in the rankings and this tournament at every point—was dismissed as a mere side-piece, someone to toy with while catching HF's attention.

But he wouldn’t be tricked by this weirdo's shoddy act, not after weeks of sparring with the original Artemis, nor would it distract him from his concentration on the gold medal. He would crush this funny woman, as he'd crushed all before her and would crush all after.

In fact, in his current state of focus, Artemis her—himself could have shown up here, and SaNguiNe would have demolished that guy, that guy, that guy, that GUY without one slip-up.

In a fluster, he shouted at the dawdling match officiator. “Count us down!”

So began the epic showdown between the (real) goddess and the embarrassed grappler.

The duel’s start instantly blew away the smoke from The Third Gate’s metamorphosis. After all that ceremony, she merely pretended to shoot her bow. The weapon dangled unused from her wrist while she fired Earthfriend for ‘arrows’ and performed her ordinary spellkiting routine to avoid the chasing wrestler.

What was novel—and perhaps the true ‘power’ unlocked by the upgrade sequence—was her boosted ability to trashtalk. Against previous competitors, she’d had to imbed her insults in mystical riddles - a challenging task while simultaneously fighting and roleplaying. This phantom character shapeshifted over her own allowed her to maintain the integrity of her RP while freely spamming slur after slur like any other online teen from 2050s Africa.

“Pathetic maggot…”

"Chinese dog..." (SaNguiNe was Korean.)

“Call that a lunge? I’ve seen better from kids in wheelchairs!”

(After laser-sighting a groinshot.) “Ouch. That confirms at least one of us ain’t packing…”

Despite its silliness, the change bestowed a quantum power leap. Experts watching live estimated that the reduced acting demands had amplified her combat prowess by as much as 40%. Such was the forbidden magic of slurs.

These provocations, and the subtler skill jump, had no impact on SaNguiNe. Relentless training had brought him to the highest, zen levels of fight concentration, when past and personality vanished in a total absorption with the muscular present. He hunted down the girl as calmly and steadily as he did every generic mage. He never rushed - a consistency with beating opponents in a single engagement gave him the luxury to pass on several sub-optimal openings, to pause and heal whenever his health dipped low.

The mystic—from a pure combat analysis—fought leisurely for dumber reasons, wanting to drag out the show before the guards re-gagged her.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Their pace accelerated in the second minute, when the kiting circuit pivoted into a tavern with dense furnishings. The mystic’s banter faded. It gave way to the raspy music of exerting lungs as the two frog-jumped chairs and glided under tables.

After one phase of chipping his HP, The Goddess Gate dared her first finisher to cure the mortal of his pathetic existence.

Abruptly she switched to take the offensive by trading her bow for a spear summoned stealthily behind a bench. (This was a corny RP replication of , from Artemis’s Bowman Class, although the speed of fighting didn't let act to accentuate the point.) She instead just thrust the point.

SaNguiNe ducked.

A steel tip about to pierce his eyeball clinked off of his helmet’s crown.

He leapt at her. She leapt in sync, backwards, retreating through an open tavern window.

The wrestler’s arm extended after her to its very limit, stretching for the triumph wriggling at her ankle, and he seized it.

The pair landed rolling in the dirt outside. Knives entwined, spellshields glowed, spellshields popped.

All around the wider venue, millions of eyes at once flashed bright yellow, the audience activating bullet-time to try to separate the coiling dyad and decipher which was bleeding more profusely.

The small group of contestants spectating from the hillside had done the same, except for a flat-faced teen, whose eyelids declined with disappointment at the recognition of not only this duel’s ending but that of the abysmal series.

Saana’s Tyrant sighed at the state of his students. “All I leave behind me is absurdity…”

Looking on to his own match, inspired by the tussle, he turned to Septic Rose.

“I'll admit," he addressed her for the first time that day, "I was toying with humiliating you through my own post-maximal circus, but seeing it from the outside just makes me embarrassed. It seems you’ve hit a similar sobriety after that insane episode.” He waved a hand at her creepy skinchanging. “I won’t ask. I'll be travelling soon, and that baggage is far too heavy for the flight. Let's pack light and simple. Single-duel series. To the death. Knives only. For stakes, if you lose, you quit this game forever and hire a new shrink. If you win—not that you will—I’ll make my first stopover Vancouver and, personally, slap your brother and your parents.”

Septic Rose, after a startled blink, after another stranger pause, held up two fingers to signal a desired second-bout rematch, then mimed unsheathing a pair of swords from cross-scabbards.

The Tyrant groaned. “The past…the past…the past…well, I’m not doing the samurai accent…”

The two splintered from the group to warm up. Septic Rose jumped through a hole into the hill-map’s dark interior. The Tyrant retired for another arena.

Somewhere in the eight-limbed confusion, the wrestler took a nasty gash that split a calf from knee to ankle, and the left side of the mystic's throat was sawed through to her gurgling windpipe. Both injuries self-mended without triggering an elimination.

SaNguiNe was dominating, the duo tumbling amongst a circle of his summoned daggers - a speciality technique. Within the zone delimited by these weapons, within his zone, he alternated snatching them, his fingers guided by pure memory, and discarding them for two-hand grappling. The finer control this variation granted allowed him to continuously outmanoeuvre his opponent, compressing her tantrumming limbs, squashing her scenery-chewing, scenery-climbing theatrics within his tighter theatre of sinew.

Applause erupted when—by some divine miracle—The Goddess Gate escaped.

In the slickest of exits, the mystic had right when the wrestler had tried to grab a leg, whose shrivelling proportions slipped out of his hold and let her bolt away in Cheetah form.

To reward her clapping congregation in the crowd, The Goddess didn’t recommence her kiting strat. For variety, she switched to imitating Artemis’s spear technique, turning back upon the astounded wrestler while whirling the weapon and flicking its tip unpredictably.

SaNguiNe, without missing a beat, caught a shield and blocked.

The pair skidded back and forth around the lawn that snaked between the village buildings.

The Goddess Gate loosened the divine fury of the huntress, her feet churning the earth as she constantly side-stepped and plunged her Olympian thrusts beyond the challenger's defences.

SaNguiNe stayed comparatively motionless. He kept a minimal profile behind his shield, which he re-angled to block instead of dodging, and he waited as she exhausted herself through the exaggerated assault. Occasionally, he snapped forward, hoping to catch her if she overcommitted.

Within their exchange, many subtle details arose for the enthusiast of roleplay to savour and critique. For one highlight, the sharp-eyed would notice that the mystic’s spear was a modified replica of the snakestaff twirled while preaching, the sceptre slimmed, lightened, and fixed with a metallic point. Like the previous staff containing the dagger to un-heart her mentor, this unnecessary yet exquisite touch attested to the virtuessa’s brilliance, her continual pushing of the boundaries of their art. For a lowlight, her already disappointing line delivery worsened in this phase. The higher tempo of spear skirmishing made improv impossible, and she had to fall back on reciting from a pool of rote-memorised Artemis insults. (The roleplayer’s failure on this front, and her humiliation, caused the audience to miss out on a cancelled routine. This would have blended the spearwork with her ‘arrows’ in parody of Artemesis’s full hybrid Bowman style. Alas...)

The skirmish finished with SaNguiNe nearly losing.

While casting to refresh a spellshield, his exposed arm was skewered through the bicep. This minor wound opened up a lengthy sequence. The Goddess Gate shoved the limb pierced on her spear skywards to unbalance him, released her weapon, and feinted a shoulder-charge against his shield, which the wrestler desummoned to hug her, only to then take a kick to the abdomen, causing him to reel backwards as a spam of magic followed to push his damaged health beneath the threshold of elimination, a zapping through his helmet’s earhole and tickling his cerebrum.

Lesser duellists would've been done, but SaNguiNe’s groundwork knowledge allowed a quick recovery. In seconds, he was bolt upright, dodging, and outhealing her volleys.

Momentum from there immediately swung his way.

Her attempt had drained most of her Stamina resource. No longer could she empower her random melee stabs, and the absence of their threat granted SaNguiNe the freedom to crank up the aggression of his chase. His pursuit became so intense that she soon had to halt her spellcasting, which in turn pushed him to increase the pacing even further.

To generate breathing room, she tried to lose him in a circuit through the map’s obstacle-littered buildings. Her choice would be a blunder.

SaNguiNe, compared with most grapplers, had a unique comfort amongst clutter. His martial art, Boulderfoot Wrestling, happened to be a form of urban grappling, designed by the local Clayflok for defending their fort-city. Practitioners of this style thus didn’t train just conventional groundwork but an expanded surface repertoire of wallwork, stairwork, and crowdwork.

This trait would have been identified in her research, the roleplayer warning herself to minimise their hovering in these spaces. However—as was often the case with the subtler strategic details—the live pressure of the duel had caused her to forget it, and she’d lapsed into a habitual zoning preference built up while sparring against other grapplers. The self-distraction from roleplaying hadn't helped.

In a kitchen, when The Goddess Gate thought she had obtained immortality behind the 'bulwark' of a table, the wrestler caught her with a smooth penetration step, lunging and sliding around the table’s edge.

The roleplayer, apprehended, seizured through an extended disorientation routine. SaNguiNe shook her like a toddler in a pitbull’s locked jaw, shaking out the rest of the schemes hidden in her pockets and her bones, her body slammed thrice against a wall, her helmet bonging off a cast-iron cauldron. More force than necessary may have been thrown in by the frustrated wrestler.

The rattling sequence settled in the kitchen’s centre, where he pinned her in his circle of condensing daggers.

The Goddess's destiny appeared secure, the universe saved—for this round at least (it was a best of three series)—from apocalypse as its obnoxious gates would be clamped tight and locked shut by the turning of a knife in her right eyesocket.

But then, for reasons enigmatic to everyone but the grappler, he released her.

Spectators and analysts scratched their noggins. They wondered if he’d been bribed, or if the Artemis charade had fooled him. Maybe his dagger had been restrained against the coup de grace from a psychological inability to mutilate his crush?

The Goddess Gate skipped merrily out a doorway. Shapeshifting, she burned all her recuperated Stamina to sprint off in Cheetah form before casting a Chameleon-Monkey invisibility.

The stealth managed to shake the wrestler from her tail. It also, crucially, prompted the camera crew to kill the feeds tracking her until her opponent found her. With much higher levels than the rookies, the team could’ve followed her through the magic, but the ADHD crowd always spoiled a duellist’s whereabouts because stealth tactics slowed the action.

SaNguiNe had emerged from the aborted tussle with a stern expression, with a conviction to not be distracted by it until after. He jogged a circuit covering the map’s main hiding spots. Noise eventually drew him to its southern edge, an uproar sounding from the audience on that side, whom he interpreted as spotting her and helping him.

That, however, was a divine ruse.

He didn't find the roleplayer but the crowd standing and pointing and laughing.

Outside the arena's glass dome, a shark—or a guy in a very convincing shark costume—was flopping and thrashing in the dirt while it/he was pecked to death by a guard eagle. In the suffering sharkman’s teeth fluttered a banner. Painted letters on the banner requested supporters of their Virtual Realist queen to cheer and aid her victory.

“Even the friends of the ocean,” the match commentator piped up to close the weird episode, “were rallying behind our heroine! Her converts were legion, and through their sacrifice, she could continue this evasion of Kimchi Suplex until the first segment of their battle timed out in her win by points. But is that The Way she'll choose? Will she, plunging further into evil, obliterate more pals for this anti-climactic ending? Will Heaven's Gates swing open for her after she becomes a nakama-less Legalist who argues victory through lame-o technicalities?"