The Sand arena for their second match offered a sparse zilch for a player to strategise or dramatise with. Lesser RP-duellists might’ve chalked the bout a blooper and skipped onto their choice of scene for the dramatic finale. However, The Third Gate was not a Lesser RP-duellist. She hailed from The Cripple’s post-maximalist school of More - More RP. A disciple of this creed would impose—if through nothing but invincible will and genius—the miracle of RP on every stage…

The plot for this duel: a mysterious tale of three Tyrants...

At the chosen arena, a first Tyrant spectated curiously from the side, two swords in hand, feet balancing on top of the wall of the adjacent labyrinth map. A second Tyrant—with an identical teenage appearance, from face to bone structure to Tier-0 armour—marched with an imperious swagger to the centre of the sandpit. The second was accompanied by a retinue of soldier henchmen and five chain-bound prisoners, forced to kneel at spearpoint in the sand. As for the third Tyrant, they would enter the scene later.

Of the second Tyrant’s captives, four were human roleplayers, whose costumes had been ruined by rough handling. One, a vampire, blubbered over the dental agony of a snapped fang veneer. Another, a furry defrocked of their vulpine mask, shied away from the cameramen projecting their humiliated mug to millions. The fifth prisoner was a monkey roleplayer, an actual monkey, wearing a tattered tuxedo - virtual Realists were an inclusive breed, the magic of pretend available to any friend.

In addition to his soldiers, this second Tyrant’s entourage contained a figure dressed in an executioner’s black suit, who lugged over his shoulder a halberd splattered with dried blood and gore-glued strands of hair.

“With this tool!” declared the second Tyrant to the crowd, gesturing at the headman’s axe, “this minion under the command of Me—The Tyrant of Saana, The Hydra, The False Gate, etcetera—will soon administer My justice to these inmates for their illegal crimes. What be their felony, you ask?” He paced behind the prisoners, grimacing as if he’d smelt a line of five fresh-dropped turds. “Rooooleplay…for this highest of highest violations, I sentence them to death and—beyond death—hell. Would any here refute My immortal decree?” He looked at the first Tyrant spying from the maze and mirrored the teen’s flat stare. “How about you, imposter? Would you contradict The Tyrant?”

“No, by all means.” The first Tyrant presented a sword broadside, like a flat palm of permissiveness. “Grant no mercy to these roleplaying scum.”

“Hah!” The second sneered. “As if I—The Emperor of The Universe, The Shadow of The Sun, The Erstwhile Invincible One, etcetera—needed your fraudulent permission. These criminals will perish, but they will perish on My authentic command.”

Outside the arena’s glass protection, many in a laughing crowd for whom The Third Gate’s surrealist comedy had clicked were having a blast pretending to be mystified.

“Oh my god…he’s multiplying…what is this dire magic…”

“Flippin great. Now we have to deal with two of them?”

“Tyrant, murder that imitator! He’s also roleplaying! Murder him for roleplaying!”

Obviously, no genuine mystery existed.

Before the freak show attracted him, the first Tyrant had been practising his swordsmanship for the duel against Septic Rose in the adjacent arena, from which he now observed. As for the second, his marching group had awkwardly sprinted over to relocate the execution scene from a different spike pit map. There, The Third Gate had initially directed her theatre comrades in a failed meta-RP mindgame to ‘prophesy’ her opponent’s selection. For another giveaway, the second Tyrant’s armour was a shoddy counterfeit, the mythological carvings of the genuine set too ornate for any budget smith to replicate.

A third tell, most glaring and immersion-ruining, was the doppelganger’s user ID. The words ‘Aden Yusuf Waberi’—presumably the actor’s earth-name, although perhaps another ironic layer of the performance—blazed above his head. Glowing crimson, the ID couldn’t be toggled off, a punishment for in-game lawbreaking.

When the second Tyrant saw the real one examining this username, he raked a hand through its glowing letters.

“A spoofed ID,” he said. “I adopted it while transgressing this realm’s false doctrines. It can be erased, along with any evidence of My shadowy crusade, through a casual flick of this humble tool.”

The raking hand wore a rusty iron ring, a replication of the ID-swapping Legendary that’d preserved the Tyrant’s anonymity.

“Better flick it quick,” replied the first Tyrant. “Isn’t that a liability with all the other tools on you?”

The intensity of the ID’s redness, obtained from stacking crimes, indicated that he would drop his whole inventory if killed.

The fake Tyrant—unable to switch IDs—began a parody monologue explaining that he could switch IDs only he’d chosen not to. Firstly, he was invincible, a trait that rendered these fears unnecessary. Secondly, he'd not yet finished with this evening’s malevolence, after which he would switch IDs, as he did have the Legendary capability to. Midway through this monologue, to prove his authenticity, he commanded his executioner to apprehend the ‘fake’ tyrant for the double infractions of “lese-majeste via imitation and unregulated roleplay.” The executioner, five steps into a charge, split into three sections - one stealthed guard of the first Tyrant slashed a sabre through his chest, another through his abdomen. This setback prompted the second Tyrant to segue into a second sub-monologue embedded within the first monologue. In this, he detailed how his minion’s sacrifice had been intentional, intellects of ultrapatrician stature or above recognising it as step #478 in a thousand-step scheme. His impersonator could anticipate a future exploding into a billion meaty fragments.

It was during this absurd monologue within a monologue that the contestants arrived.

SaNguiNe entered at a jog, frowned, and took a corner of the map opposite the stage play. While rolling drills, he ignored threats and warnings from the fake Tyrant to stop scattering the “strategically-planted sand grains”, and he ignored spoiler advice from the non-fake Tyrant on how to recover the series.

The Third Gate acted astonished (despite plotting this dumb sketch).

“Too long, my friends,” she cried, “have we roamed the desert separating us from Eden, and too long has our thirst for the succour of its merging rivers gone unquenched. Who are these abominable twins that twinkle in our dehydrated vision? What devil’s trick proliferates our banishment to stumble and to stumble through illusion? The first mirage, that of our doubled yearning sun, has a cast a second and a third mirage, a couplet of fallacious shadows…”

The cure for her affliction was to ground her senses in reality, which she did by chewing a palmful of sand. The fake Tyrant broke from his monologues to accuse her of the double crimes of misleading the youth with illegal roleplay and first-degree grand larceny – he’d paid top platinum for those swallowed grains. His soldiers apprehended her, slapped out a couple of her sand-stealing teeth, and added her to the group of chained prisoners.

As they prepped her for interrogation, they conveniently angled her and the second Tyrant towards the first.

Alas, the teen had already departed in boredom. Over in the next-door labyrinth, he was sparring 1v10 against the spare cameramen unneeded for the simpler arena. The filming crew—stealthed in the background of the matches—happened to be a team of Company assassins, employed in the simultaneous role of security.

Attentions in the stands swivelled to watch the massacre of these elites. Official stream viewers would sadly miss out.

The Third Gate quietly fumed. Nevertheless, she delivered her best performance to her reduced audience as she and the fake Tyrant debated the apocalypse.

She plead in riddle-curses for him to return to the wisdom of his Second Gate mysticism. He declared (in a retort oozing irony because she’d composed this dialogue) that she’d never comprehended his wisdom. Her doctrine was a heretical misreading. His central cryptographic theme about the immortalising joys of martyrdom in the pursuit of revolutionary jihad had been distorted by her into a schizophrenic Day of Judgement prophecy for cringey roleplayers. She’d missed the nuance and dimension, especially the background layer of his sermons being embedded in an actualised world conquest plot and not some navel-gazing vengeance fantasy. Ultimately, his teachings had been a summons to action: mass violent action. The true ‘False Gate’ was thus her, insisted the fake Tyrant. He went on to denounce his original doctrine as well. Religious insurrection had been a fun meme when young. However, nearing retirement, he had to fuss over the higher mysticisms of savings accounts and investment portfolios, and revolutions generated economic instability.

Stolen novel; please report.

This conversation was punctuated with comic executions. With his headman sliced to pieces, the second Tyrant had to invent increasingly kookier alternatives to dispatch the prisoners. (The complexities of these demanded preparation, the dead minion part of the act.) The vampire roleplayer had his wrists slit. The furry was ravaged by a pack of foxes. A female Blurm-fan had a vial of poison labelled ‘Formula Euthablurmasia’ injected into her purple shoulder. A tall-guy roleplayer, charged for wearing shoe inserts to exceed Saana’s height limit, was bludgeoned by a gang of visibly pregnant women that he’d swindled. The sentence of the tuxedo monkey was benevolently commuted, but not before the fake Tyrant had humiliated the beast by wafting a bowl of bananas in front of it and cackling as its simian willpower succumbed.

“Behold, my daughter of The Gates!” He pointed at the munching monkey. “Behold the so-called nobility of your comrades! It is this that waits beyond your false portal, a face smeared with banana and disgrace! AHAHAHAHA!”

The dirt-caked hoboess, the last survivor, was dragged to a bath of boiling water. But then, the fake Tyrant (issued more screentime by Alex Wong in the backrooms loving this mockery) changed his mind and decided upon a re-match duel to avenge himself for her killing him twice.

A mock duel followed that would be roughly twenty-one times the duration of the actual duel it was delaying. The second Tyrant pulsed weapons from his inventory in a cosmetic imitation of the juggle, while The Third Gate pretended to struggle. Frequent pauses broke for anime-style dialogue. The crowd—those watching this instead of the bloodbath next door—were repeatedly called on by cue-card-flapping assistants in the stands to give her their energy through prayers and friendship. At one point, she stabbed him through the chest. Instead of dying, he stripped shirtless to expose a torso onto which had been sutured eight human (dog) hearts. These were a countermeasure to her previous cannibal hijinks, he explained, and the barbarity of their collection process had inflicted his crimson user ID penalty. Despite the demonic advantage this augmentation conferred, The Third Gate managed to defeat him, only for one of his guards to shoot her with a paralytic blowdart.

The fake Tyrant hovered over her tranquilised form, raising the snake-staff-spear torn from her grip.

“Backup help…” The Third Gate whispered up inertly, tears in eyes. “You…you’ve violated The Way of Solitude…this was not a duel…but a team fight.”

From both the duelling and the sage-mystic perspective, team combat was not halal.

The second Tyrant shared her weeping, shedding bitter droplets of self-betrayal. “The hermit path…you who’ve trod it understand its difficulties…the isolation…the lack of GF…that’s why…that’s why I’ve defected to The Many…”

“No!” The Third Gate shrieked. “You can NOT join The Many!”

“Forgive me, my child!”

But on the cusp of death, she would be saved by the miraculous salvation being prayed for by a few weirdos in the audience.

In unison, the stadium projectors were hijacked by a vision from a distant land…

The cabin of a rocking boat.

A teenage couple held each other in a tight embrace, one a blonde-haired beauty, the other a strapping highschool heartthrob. They’d paused on the verge of a steamy kiss. (The two, the narrator described, were the author Silver Wolf and the explorer extraordinaire Indy Johnson.)

“But first,” said the explorer, pressing a finger to the girl’s approaching lips. “Tell me why you've picked my lips over His.”

“Let’s not rehash the history,” replied the author. “It’s cringe.”

(Although her avatar matched, the voice clearly belonged to The Third Gate, doing an impression for this pre-filmed cutscene. The ‘Indy’ character appeared to be the actor currently spoofing The Tyrant.)

“I need to know,” insisted the explorer. “Is it because you discovered his cringe samurai persona?”

The author partially agreed. “The Cripple episode was very cringe, but that’s not quite the cringe that killed my interest.”

“Then…then...then was it his devolution to this more recent cringe? His decline into the hyper-cringe persona of a possession-hoarding dictator?”

The author, again, partially agreed. “The ‘Tyrant’ arc has been lamentably cringe, but that wasn’t the terminal dose of cringe.”

“Then what? Please, my love. Please! I can’t continue with this steamy kiss until it’s sweetened with the lore of his rejection.”

“Because, my love, he committed the ultimate sin of cringe…” ‘Silver Wolf’ turned aside from him in a full-body tremor at the embarrassing memory, and her twisting motion revealed to the camera a hidden half of her face, which she’d decorated with dirt. “Because he abandoned The Way…”

“God in our divided heavens…” The explorer shook his head in horror, revealing his own half-painted features. “That is apocalyptically cringe…”

The scene closed with the converts sucking tongue.

Back to an epic duel.

The Tyrant—cuckolded by his own cringe—reeled with anguish. Stepping off The Third Gate in a daze, he keeled over as if punched in the belly, (yanked a sewing thread contraption), and screamed as the eight hearts sutured to his chest split apart and gushed out a goopy red torrent.

“A surprise death by multiple heartbreaks!” narrated the commentator. “So it would be not the toxic noose of hatred but the redemptive magic of love that slew this second Tyrant and saved the universe from his mission to delay its righteous demolition..."

The fake Tyrant disintegrated into lights. The criminal penalty signalled by the glowing user-ID dumped out his full load of equipment. Over the resulting pile, The Third Gate squatted, her fingers plunging through a treasure trove of weapons.

Her face, drying of the crocodile tears, contorted with a smile of treachery.

“And we, too,” she whispered, “have abandoned The Way of Solitude. Come, Lonely Shadow. Join The Many as we go Beyond The Gates.”

Consecutive puffs of smoke shrouded her as the dead Tyrant’s retinue ambushed her.

(In the smoke, the assistants playing the doppelganger’s guards helped her rush another drastic makeover. One of them stealthed out and over to the arena’s side, where they tried to hide an excess of items from the roleplayer beneath a ground-coloured sheet. Their sneaking was captured by a cameraman, as were The Third Gate’s costumes and props for parodying the other contestants. Spread amongst wigs, snake-staff variations, and jars of multi-racial dirt lay wooden ninja stars, hillbilly overalls, a set of gold-painted knight’s platemail, cheerleader pop-poms in the official colours of Team Pravah, and neon-pink pro-wrestling tights. There was also one dead beaver preserved in oil.)

When the mysterious smoke had cleared, The Third Gate stood alone in a circle of blood. (The rest of her crew, after pouring out the blood from buckets, had stealthed away.) Only she was—yet again—no longer The Third Gate…

An exquisite (cheap counterfeit) suit of custom armour encased her body, the breastplate engraved with a hydra using its tangled heads to suffocate a conquered planet. Around her, in a nightmarish six-piece constellation, pulsed and ebbed a militant array of steel. Here condensed two swords, as sharp and pointed as the 1st and 2nd armies who’d severed the arteries of The Blood River; there, a shield, stalwart as the 5th who’d repelled the three-alliance Siege of Inguerrale. And, then, as quick as each instrument had appeared, it was gone, replaced by others flowing on and on through life’s immortal cycle of death and more death.

“Another miracle!” said the commentator. “That prelude battle would help greatly against The Villain of Vertigo on the stage chosen to neutralise her spells. No longer would our heroine be dependent on the roaming magic of the wilds. She had ascended into an ultimate form, a form both human AND monster. She, formerly The Third Gate, had become The Third Tyrant, equipped with his manifold tools and the thousand-style technique that combines them…”

She, The Third Tyrant, amidst the flashing mementoes of carnage, carried herself with a contradictory teenage modesty. Her shoulders imitated a bookworm’s docile slouch. Eyelids drooping boredly veiled a gaze perpetually hostile and dissecting.

She flicked a chummy wave to SaNguiNe rolling in the corner. “Careful, dude! Again, she’s better in the melee than she lets on. I’m serious, dude. Forget about the map after. You need to concentrate on this one. You’re not guaranteed to win.”

These lines, in praise of herself, were copied word-for-word from earlier advice by The Tyrant.

The stadium shook with massive applause.

But very little of this clapping was directed at the transforming mystic. In the neighbouring arena, an assassin trio had sacrificed themselves to perma-amputate one of The Tyrant’s limbs through the shoulder. The teenager had responded to the loss by impaling the last assassin who'd tried to concede and shouting, "Nah, cunts, we're not playing with the training wheels. You're not done until I fucking tell you you're done. Climb on, you fucking piss-weak dogs! CLIMB!" Seeming to give this order as much to them as to his struggling body, he'd cauterised the wound with a fire spell and persisted in the hunt one-armed. He'd managed to eliminate two more. However, clever evasive manoeuvring from the rest had stalled long enough for him to eventually faint from bloodloss.

Overshadowed by that spectacle, the duel between the mystic and the wrestler would be similarly anti-climactic.

The Third Gate, wasting most of her week delivering sermons, had not grasped the basics of A Thousand Tools, let alone its ultimate technique. This latest segment of theatre had also put her in a state of distraction. SaNguiNe, flowing right on from his drills, opened the match by summoning two shields and chucking one straight at her weapons like a boulder into a tower built of glass. Her six-piece juggle—following a single rigid sequence learned for cosmetic RP—instantly disintegrated, the uncontrolled gear landing with a soft plop in the sand. As these ‘tools’ descended, as she attempted a transition to proper knifework, she was caught and made to bend.

A few blending, groping breaths later, the wrestler had administered two cuts between her mistimed spellshields. The first cut, from a loosely-held side control, carved along the inseam of her upper thigh down to her knee, dividing the golden leg fat and the area’s thick bands of muscle tissue beneath. The second cut snuck in during a transition to a firmer hold. He slipped his dagger under the belly of her ill-fitting costume armour, and he sawed, and into her roleplaying crotch her eviscerated intestines spilled out in a hot sticky meat-blossom of death.