"...Will Heaven's Gates swing open for her after she becomes a nakama-less Legalist who argues victory through lame-o technicalities? Nay. The sole price of admittance to the apocalypse was this heathen's blood...”

The Third Gate's location was revealed by the stadium projectors switching to another cutscene.

While SaNguiNe outside had stared in confusion at a dying shark, the mystic had returned to the church, where she kneeled before the altar and a black-and-white portrait of her dearly-departed mentor. The cameraman approaching her from behind picked up the rustling pages of a book in hand.

The scripted narration continued to explain how their heroine had failed to defeat the wrestler with the Goddess form of Artemis. The traumatic memories she thought could be exploited must have been conquered by him, perhaps by listening to her sermons and obtaining the enlightenment that fancying the Goddess would be completely heterosexual once the world-merging apocalypse transmuted Loki into a chick for real. Although the spreading popularity of The Way pleased her, The Third Gate was disheartened by her inadequacy in battle. Thankfully, she and their two divided planets could rest at ease because she’d eaten an extra heart, one invincible to loss and shame, and this cannibalism had unlocked—as had been pre-teased by The Tyrant a.k.a. The False Gate a.k.a. The Lernaean Spoiler—the power of Many humanshifting shapes.

Her next, more powerful form was truly ancient, hailing from an antiquity even older than the Greek Goddess.

The cameraman swooped around the kneeling mystic, bringing into angle the front view of her metamorphosis.

The seaweed curls of Artemis had been replaced with a white mop of elderly locks (from the head of a cleaning mop), and her skin had been smeared with yellow dirt for a racial shift towards the Orient. In one hand, she clasped a notebook scribbled with extensive notes detailing kiting routes around the current map, the pages speckled with crumbs from the bread she was wolfing to restore her Stamina.

On the hillside, the knight, pro-gamer, and geriatric observed.

Grandma Ru frowned. “She actually copied my notes…”

She, The Grandma Gate, rose from her knees, supporting herself with a snakestaff cane and groaning at her creaking joints.

“The youngster crapped her diapers,” she said of the Artemis form, then raised her fist in a peppy imitation of the challenge-loving millennial. “Guess it falls on Ru to carry these shit-soaked toddlers to the W.”

Her vocal mimicry continued to be lacklustre.

Her imitation of the elderly parkour was better. Tossing the cane and the notebook, she wedged herself horizontally between a wall and a pillar, and she shimmied up to an upper-storey window, through which she slipped out to spank the kiddo.

As they reunited in their game of zap and chase, the grandma parody bestowed a doubly stupid power boost. First, the spell parkour approximated her own kiting style, allowing her to shed the entirely-self-imposed debilitations of Artemis’s spear and bow. Secondly, she’d lifted from the old crone's notes a circuit custom-prepped to counter SaNguiNe. With cougar-like dexterity, she pranced along the rooftops of the village buildings, avoiding their interiors, while the annoyance of its vertical segments forced the wrestler clambering after to discard his shield and gargle magic.

For a special highlight, the loop was knitted by an inhuman trickjump. This spanned 13 metres between two buildings, and it required a Cheetah sprint leadup followed by a last-instant de-shapeshift to handclutch the lip of the target building’s roof. Others would’ve needed to practise this, but not The Third Gate, a monster-RP extraordinaire. She sent that badboy on the first attempt - EZ.

“Smash a Redbull, bro!” she shouted back “You’ll need the wings!”

(The energy drink company had not survived the A.I. revolution, but one of her assistants was ancient enough to feed the Somali girl references from the before times.)

A few millennials in the crowd chuckled and applauded nostalgically. Younger folk applauded, too, but for the much less impressive reason of grasping the jump’s difficulty.

SaNguiNe, ditched on the initial building’s roof, cursed his first comment of the entire duel. “Aish…sshi-bal!” (Translator's Note: Korean for 'Nice job!')

As a whizzed overhead, he descended and slipped inside a doorway to take refuge while he healed.

The Granny Gate, denying him this break, reappeared by a window. Like a busy-body village elder on a stroll, she pretended to walk past, peeped into the building with a sideglance, and only waved a cordial good evening when the young man inside caught her snooping.

The fingers of her greeting hand crackled with a charging .

SaNguiNe might’ve fled. Instead, he sprinted at her to outrace the spell.

The grandma, feigning senile alarm, raised a shield concealed beneath the window sill, obstructing his approach.

SaNguiNe, undismayed, leapt slightly askew. His right foot clipped the corner of a bed. From this boost, he leapt again and sailed through the closing slit above the shield’s rim.

And as the brave lad soared to wrangle out a miracle, The Third Gate, staring upwards at his head, his neck, his chest, his armpit, smirked strategically.

In a dramatic turn, her grandma face—shown throughout this latest act in profile—twisted up to him to reveal the hidden half, moistened by dangling strands of seaweed, re-plastered with the olive-coloured dirt of his Grecian crush.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Her spellhand no longer clasped a spark of lighting but Artemis’s man-piercing, match-winning spear.

It was—the roleplayer savoured her own creative genius—an immaculate climax to this first duel, uniting in one dense scheme the various narrative motifs of her humanshifting, Artemis, Grandma Ru, and, of course, her initial threat to break this loser’s heart, exposed to her through the armpit hovering above.

“DIE FOR ME!” The Goddess shrieked.

And it would’ve been an immaculate climax, if not for one of those pesky minor variables that jostle in the random anarchy of combat. Unbeknownst to the roleplayer, the granny being mocked had practised for hours with the wrestler yesterday, and the old bat—her wings too feeble to flap beyond his clutches—had eventually resorted to this exact type of stylistic bait-and-switch.

SaNguiNe, this experience primed by the cosplay, tucked his arm in unconsciously and blocked the thrust with an elbow.

As he landed right on top of her, the pair contorted outside the building, falling like lovers after a period of tense separation into a soft bed of grass and daggers.

SaNguiNe, avoiding a previous mistake of hastiness that’d led to her release, exercised more caution as he manipulated her into a rear mount, his legs wrapped around her waist, his arms snugly threading around one armpit and her neck. From this secure position, he craned back her chin and dealt his first throat slash, which she burned a spellshield to nullify.

During the cooldown for his next attack, much shorter than her shield’s, she tried to break away, to scramble while his dagger arm was drawing. This failed. The wrestler, his weapon desummoned instantly, re-secured his hold. He then tipped her with his bulkier weight to one side, where his fingers swept up a replacement dagger from the summoned circle.

SaNguiNe, as he waited the last seconds, listened to the pulsing crescendo of the crowd counting down towards his triumph. He absorbed their tumult with a potent sense of joy, just as he absorbed the hot squirming of this grime-smeared clown suppressed beneath his muscles.

If there were any prophecies or miracles this day, it was only this one, imposed upon her through brute persistence, the shared destiny he’d created for her and the greater comedian who’d spawned her. After all the laughter, after all the humiliating tricks, the sun would rise for him alone, purified of the mockery and the filth by strength and unrejectable victory.

The officiator called the match. “Time! FuzzyGirl35 wins, 4-1.”

SaNguiNe’s dagger glowed against her throat but did not draw. The wrestler stared with a vacant incomprehension upon…upon his loss?

The crowd, who'd been counting down the duel's dwindling seconds, went wild like a pack of animals loosened from the zoo. Elephant roleplayers trumpeted. Dog roleplayers howled. Robot roleplayers beep-beeped. Mime roleplayers gesticulated trophies. The continent of Africa clapped hesitantly, unsure about the desirability of these associations.

The Third Gate may have been outwrestled in space. However, she’d won through that subtler dimension, time. Over the duel’s five minute-long phases, her kiting had inflicted more damage in four of them.

The mystic twisted in the wrestler's loosening arms, flashing him with the grandma half of her features. “Seems the clock’s ticking for both of us, young son.”

One of her disciples/performance-crew ran onto the stage and tossed a smokebomb onto the pair.

The Third Gate emerged from the cloud without the wigs, her face re-painted in regular dirt, and her eyes tearing sorrowfully.

A sermon followed for the crowd lamenting how these mysterious higher powers had intervened before their battle could conclude, this first round ending in a draw against He Who Falls Over Constantly Due to Debilitating Vertigo. (Her RP storyline could not acknowledge the point win, nor the more general presupposition of her battles being part of a ‘rookie recruitment tournament’. The contestants, by her account, had been teleported to this ring and pitted against each other by The False Gate in a dastardly scheme to thwart the apocalypse.)

But beneath her sadness sang a note of smug jubilation. (You see, from a technical standpoint, time-victories were an order of magnitude harder to pull off, especially when one allowed multiple entanglements for greater RP tension. Now, from that RP perspective, the flubbed spear-switch finisher would’ve been preferable. But, from a meta hyper-ironic RP of the Crippleverse, of which she was maybe a character, this fuckup into a time-victory was superior, representing a loose implementation of ‘The Method of The Komodo Who Played Dead Regurgitating from The Stomach of The Dying Komodo', whereby the true finisher is debuted and discarded earlier in the duel—as she had, loosely, through her RP allusions to not going for a time-victory by hiding—before ultimately returning imbedded within another botched finisher. (Had she planned that fuckup? Not at all, but, by monitoring the minutes and her defensive cooldowns, she had accounted for the fuckup. Her finisher could thus also be judged a minor example of the Xanatos Gambit, in which every path chosen by the enemy led to their defeat. Within The Cripple’s finisher ranking system, this was known as 'The Invincible Way', and it marked one of the highest obtainments in strategic duelling…))

While the mystic hogged the stage and wept (and gloried in) her 'draw', her opponent recovered in the background.

SaNguiNe, the whole universe tuned out, was squatting over footage of their grappling encounters from his POV and that of the official stream.

The grapple was the sole point of consequence, he determined, the clock rendered irrelevant if he’d not failed his earlier shots.

The roll where he’d voluntarily released her especially perplexed him. He’d been prompted by a jolt of danger, like someone holding onto a struggling wild cat and realising it was seconds from mauling them. The cause of this had not been apparent in the moment. On present review, though, he saw that she’d become disturbingly relaxed, one of her hands loitering softly on his shoulder as she pondered whether or not to execute a sequence.

To his alarm, he could not, even after slowing down the footage, determine what that sequence might’ve been. She could've been pulling a well-acted bluff. Or, as HF had warned him, her groundwork might’ve been more proficient than she betrayed. The latter would explain her last play. It would be the stupidest of risks when she could’ve simply waited him out after he’d lost track of the clock - unless, by her calculation, it wasn’t a risk. Which would mean...

On the verge of psyching himself out, he dismissed the clips. He jumped upright, and he hopped around, and he shook out from his limbs any lingering residue of defeat.

In any combat sport, he reminded himself, you also just lost sometimes. If there was anything more than that, nothing could be gained in this immediate moment by brooding further on it. He was a grappler, not one of these avant-garde freaks reinventing techniques on the fly. He would have to trust in the sturdiness of the foundation laid down in the prior weeks, in the deeper martial millennia of the Boulderfoot tradition; this base was set, and now was merely the hour to discover how tall he could erect his monument upon it before it collapsed.

Defeat did humble SaNguiNe enough to ponder his map choice for their second duel instead of conceding it, as he had against previous opponents in a gesture of arrogance. His best was the spike pits, whose titular obstacles made for easy wrestling eliminations. Another instinct guided him away from this, over to the barebones sand arena. This had fewer opportunities for trickery, and the slower pace of its grappling would let him better feel out this girl’s oddities. That knowledge, he sensed, would be essential if he were to not repeat his embarrassment in the third duel of the series, a probable rematch on this village.

His choice made, the two relocated. The mystic continued to preach. The wrestler jogged to stay warm and limber.

Awaiting at the sandpit would be the next bizarre act on The Third Gate’s program.

They and the crowd were greeted by two Tyrants. There was one flat-faced, globe-conquering, tournament-ruining teenager and a second flat-faced, globe-conquering, tournament-ruining teenager. These twins stared at each other with a mirrored boredom.