A Shakespearian tragedy before the third decider duel of a videogame tournament.

Third Gate (Shrieking): Not on my life! Not on my constant soul!

Is this the recompense of loyalty,

To topple from the vessel’s final league,

To drown without one glimpse or taste of heaven’s soil?

First Gate: Now abdicate your struggle, little one.

Your seeds already sleep beneath the dunes,

And soon this heathenous desert waste

Will bloom afresh with the flowers of annihilation!

Third Gate: But, teacher, death’s young sprouts are fragile still,

Yet destiny entrusts them to his care,

To the callous nurture of our enemy?

Our theology won’t balance on his

Unbelieving shoulders. On our faith,

That SaNguiNe scowls! He spits! He stomps! He pukes!

His cheek, you realise, his blushing cheek

Denied the womanhood of Artemis!

Her brief first birth as man, he sees,

But not the feminine eternity

Awaiting on the brighter side of ruin!

The cretin cannot be The Hidden Twelfth Imam!

First Gate: A worthy criticism, child of mine.

But The Beyond will not discriminate

In the injustice between skin and choice,

Nor casts it judgement for its instruments

On whether they seem true or infidel.

All serve The All-Mighty’s twice-blessed strategy,

And your service, Youngest Gate, is done.

Resist His Hands no more. The Chosen One must enter!

Second Gate: Squeak, squeak squeak squeak, squeak squeak squeaksqueaksqueak squeak!

Squeaksqueak squeaksqueaksqueak. Squeak squeak squeaksqueak

Squeak squeak squeak squeak, squeak squeaksqueaksqueak, squeak squeak squeaksqueaksqueak.

(Translation: Umm, actually, you five-IQ pleb, SaNguiNe is not a heathen! His faith is merely hidden from himself as well. Like myself being cringe in the current timeline, he will one day confess his suppressed desires, and he will strive into The Invincible Beyond of Cringe.)

Third Gate (descending to her knees in torment): O Fathers, why have you forsaken me?!

What sin have I committed ‘cept to covet

With all the fullness of two souls The Way…

The Third Gate was torturing the audience before the final duel with a stageplay. It was an afterlife setting, the mystic dressed in heavenly white robes, the dirt cleaned from her hobo skin after reviving from her duel-two disembowelment.

For scene partners, she had one and a half people.

The first was a male Earthfriend in a similar white gown. He appeared to levitate above her, standing as he did upon the exterior of the arena’s glass dome. Earlier, a beam of holy light had plopped the guy there after a dramatic entrance from the ceiling. He had the somewhat creepy but to those who knew him loveable face of a never-married uncle. A generation of youngsters would recognise him as Peaceloveharmony. This popular showhost, a sort of Roboboomer Mister Rogers, had turned his in-game adventures into a children’s web series about friendship and acceptance. He was also, within The Third Gate’s insane lore, ‘The First Gate’. In that mystical guise, he’d arrived today, time-travelling back from ‘The Beyond’ to communicate with his disciple.

The half-person crawled on PLH’s sandaled toes. This was a bipedal rat, sewn into its own cute afterlife garments. One of its raised paws wielded a miniature religious tome, the other a miniature blowgun. The rodent, its squeaks translated by the match commentator, had turned out scandalously to be The Cripple/The Second Gate. Aeons ago, or a few minutes for the audience, he'd perished of nine-heart cringe. After much meditation on his errors, he’d repaired his broken ego as all massive-brained rejects do by changing nothing about himself and instead inventing a new political ideology, ‘neo-post-cringe-hyper-maximalism’. This genius creed ‘resolved the historical contradictions’ in his cringe by ‘integrating it within a higher system of moral cringe’. Practically, this meant renouncing humankind and transforming into a garbage-eating vermin. (The logical connection between theory and praxis was dubious, a flaw even The Third Gate had the stability of mind to point out. A mid-scene debate with her mentor had culminated in a tear-jerking rat monologue, The Cripple confessing to tossing out word-salad in order to obfuscate a harder-to-admit wish to roleplay. As was often the case with the loudest critics of their craft, he'd been a closeted Virtual Realist all along, another adherent of The Way.)

But the stageplay had focused on a different scandalous reveal. The time-travelling Gates had come to her to spoil the future by announcing that the next fight would be won by SaNguiNe, as would be the entire tournament. Her second duel, in which she’d lost while mimicking The Tyrant, had been a coded prophecy. SaNguiNe would replicate this feat in the grand finale against the original Tyrant, crushing the juggle with his humble muscle. And, finally, through this victory, the wrestler would—somehow—initiate the cataclysmic merger of the virtual and real universes.

All of that was to say, in terms perhaps not simpler but different, SaNguiNe was The Chosen One, The Divine Scorn, The Multiverse Madhi, etcetera etcetera.

As for the mystic, a mere gate welcoming the wrestler, her function in the doomsday saga had concluded. Her elders commanded her to die a martyr for the sake of his ascension. In reward, they would escort her onwards to the roleplayer-governed paradise of the future. (For the few super-pedants bothering to track their lore, fears could be assuaged around the original messianic tragedy, which’d barred the three Gates' own access to heaven. The Second Gate had once again cheated the cosmos by using his new rat-mode powers to gnaw a loophole through the time-space-lore continuum. That was also how he could be here right now, as a rodent, while simultaneously frowning from the sidelines.)

The Third Gate had not received these spoilers gracefully. In the quiet crevices of her prophetic soul, she'd believed herself to be The Chosen One. News to the contrary had caused her to throw a fit, and, like a toddler permitted one scoop of icecream but denied a second, she'd spasmed through the traumatic phases of refusal, negotiation, and despair.

Third Gate (hammering fists against the sand): No warmth grants me this dawning revelation,

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Not I who’s slept too long beyond the hearth!

My hermit tour prepares me for the chill

Of cities’ dark in retributive midnight!

My pillow comforts not in dreams of bliss

But nightmares cosy-made by frost and flood and quake!

First Gate: And hail and locusts, too, shall rain in due,

But this forecasted weather’s not for thee.

A Gate you’ve been, and no more than a Gate.

Fulfil your duty, Gate! Permit The Chosen One!

Second Gate (distractedly gnawing a fan-tossed burger): …

(Translation: Trust SaNguiNe. He will halt the schemes lurking behind this so-called ‘tournament’, and will free the world, myself included, from my tyrannic reign of cringe. He will usher forth a new multi-globe tyranny of friendship a.k.a. the neo-post-cringe-hyper-maximalist heaven! There, everyone will roleplay free of judgement, even from their parents and co-workers, but more essentially from the judgement of themselves. So get on with it, you stalling bitch! Start the duel and lose immortally!)

Third Gate (grinning): But what, pray tell, if I refuse…

First Gate (gasping): Do not!

Second Gate (still gnawing the burger): … (Translation: Do not! Do not! Do not! Do not! Do not! Do not!)

Third Gate (grinning mutinously): If I refuse to split at Rapture’s Call,

If I reciprocate Eden’s betrayal

And block admission to its favoured Son,

Who dares to thieve my villainous inheritance…

SaNguiNe was out of sight and earshot of the stageplay, totally unaware of his selection as some schizophrenic chosen one.

He'd been keeping his muscles warm by jogging a two-map circuit that connected the village of their first duel with the neighbouring children’s playground. His opponent would likely pick one of these after her sketch, and he'd figured he would gain a minor readiness advantage. (This prediction underestimated her nuttiness and would prove incorrect.)

Outside, through the glass dome, he could see the rising wall of spectators, their heads fixated on the projectors, few following his preparations. Once again, as seemed to be the theme of his own drama of the past two weeks, he’d been subordinated to the role of side-character.

Their disregard continued to frustrate him; however, it did not at this moment hamper him.

Through his concentration on his single goal and through the sustained muscular activity of these warm-ups threading their interspersed skirmishing, he’d stoked himself to the problem-free peak of combat. His heart was like a furnace running at its highest temperature. Wet logs that might've stultified his flame in a cooler state were now consumed as tinder. A failed crush, a humiliating parody, a planet laughing – all of this burned inside his belly.

Into the same hot place, he’d already cast the other many disquieting aspects of the series. From her apparent throwing of their second duel for a skit too elaborate for improvisation, to the mysteries in her grappling that the throw had prevented him from probing, all was fuel. Confusion and embarrassment would convert to the raw energy of physical action. Everything flowed into his quadriceps, warming them an extra tenth of a degree. It flowed on from there into the milliseconds shaved from his level changes, into the centimetres added to his penetration lunges, and from there to victory.

The heated wrestler received a surprising message from the match official. His opponent had chosen a rematch on the sandpit.

Cued by the crowd’s excited response, he opened up the tourney stream and found a ridiculous scene. The Third Gate’s lackeys, after another costume swap, were wrestling in a pile luchador style, a blurring orgy of oiled muscles, tights, masks, and capes. At the centre of the chaotic tableau, his opponent tumbled around in a neon-pink getup. She stalked goon to goon, toppling them with comedic finishers: poking spines, karate-chopping throats, rubbing kneecaps roughly. A stripe-shirted ref trailed behind her slapping counts out on the sand. Throughout, ever the performer, she kept her face pointed at the camera, and her expression, conflicting with the surrounding jolliness, was of a sulky, melodramatic concentration, like a schoolshooter at a disco. SaNguiNe guessed the look satirised his own.

The Third Gate's stageplay had finished on a twist. If her time-travelling elders had anointed the wrestler The Chosen One, then she would simply use her forbidden humanshifting magic to steal his form and destiny. Diabolical!

SaNguiNe—shaking off a sense of vertigo—raced over via a shortcut through the catacombs at the arena’s centre. As he emerged from its dark passageways to the light outside, an assistant of hers in waiting threw confetti. The stadium band kicked up a corny intro song.

He passed HF, who’d been seated on the hillside with the other contestants while a medic tended to the regrowth of an amputated arm. No hot tips were offered by the teen this round. With eyes sealed shut, he was bobbing his head and shoulders to some faraway rhythm, one disconnected from the soundtrack playing for the wrestler, from any of the trivial occurrences here.

SaNguiNe, accepting that as fuel as well, jogged on to the sandpit.

The Third Gate approached him, her lackeys curled up around them groaning. A wooden microphone was handed to her by the tuxedo monkey from the earlier execution skit.

“False Gate!” she screamed, strolling straight past SaNguiNe and thrusting a finger at the teen meditating on the overlooking hill. “You claim to be The Man of A Thousand Finishers, but I counted, and you know about 60. I know a thousand and More, and I’m gonna show ‘em to you. Here I go. Roly Poly To Infinite!”

Lifting one of her stooges by the ankles, she tipped them forward. The stooge continued the motion themselves and rolled ten metres until they fell off the edge of the arena.

The roleplayer continued in this fashion, showcasing a reel of nonsense moves with absurd titles.

In the stands, a laughing crowd, mildly entertained, were struggling to find the reason for her antics. By most appearances, her reselection of the map on which she’d fumbled suggested throwing in the towel. Perhaps she’d deduced that her run was over, that her first win by stalling out the clock could not be repeated. She might in that case have been using her loss for a last fun spot of roleplay, the captive audience being the biggest she would ever have in life. Thematically, the defeat would at least be congruent with her martyr lore.

But one person wasn't yet counting the mystic out.

SaNguiNe had frozen up, and he stared at her buffoonery with a dizzy panic.

His mind reeled as a flood of disparate observances—her ineffective dagger technique, HF’s warnings, her slipping from his hold in cheetah form in their first match, his involuntary release of her that same match, and, before this series, her splattering HF as a gorilla, and, before that, his sparring matches against HF—consolidated around one burst of epiphany.

This crazy bitch was warming up to grapple, SaNguiNe realised. Her ‘nonsense’ finishers were genuine.

The missing piece was that her grappling repertoire didn’t correspond to any dagger-grappling tradition but to shapeshift-grappling.

Earthfriend transformations opened up to members of the Class several idiosyncratic grappling methods. These possibilities were limitless at higher levels, with insect and serpent forms. In the standardised rookie category, it tended to revolve around blends of the human and gorilla. The more agile first would be utilised to shoot for holds and secure them. The stronger second would then deliver the finisher – snapping a bone, ripping off a limb, and so on. On the whole, the lack of weapons granted this a strong resemblance to real-world freestyle wrestling, much more so than Saana’s prevailing dagger styles.

And with the addition of her unshown gorilla mode, the lethality of her current moves would be refactored. Lifting the legs? Hurling them out of the arena. Rubbing a kneecap roughly? Breaking the joint.

This also solved the enigma in their first duel of his instinctual release. Consciously, he’d been tracking her dagger, and its lack of access to his exposure points had qualified the position as safe. His body, however, had grasped the grimmer truth - she’d been a second away from tearing his head clean off his torso.

He should’ve recognised this right away. However, shapeshift-style grappling had vanished from the meta-game after every top rookie besides himself changed to the dagger wrestling taught in HF’s workshop. What’s more, The Third Gate, from her own dagger reliance throughout their fight, had been telegraphing herself as one of these converts.

But she wasn't.

SaNguiNe, the vertigo from earlier returning, watched her execute a ‘Self Heel-Kick’, bending a luchador’s leg to kick themselves in the face. The missing extra strength would've wrenched the leg from out of their hip socket.

But the more alarming fact was not shapeshifting-grappling itself, a tactic he’d faced and squashed in many fights before. His disturbance emanated from the unknown limits to which a freak duelling ‘strategist’ like her might’ve pushed it. He—perhaps alone—had been teased into the depths of the abyss. HF of all people had shown him it. Before the grudge, before the teen’s public exposure, SaNguiNe had sparred him regularly, and HF throughout those matches had experimented with indescribably-complex hybrid chains, seven or eight times in a few seconds, utilising unintuitive body weight and size alterations to nullify holds, cancel throws, and recalibrate lost positions into dominant ones. The teen had since abandoned that research to concentrate on his weapon juggle. However, his disciple might’ve gone further down a similar path. In fact, not might’ve – SaNguiNe was convinced she had. This hid as the central point in the weirdness of their skirmishes and her shapeshifting-themed skits, a mutant type of grapple as fluid and excessive as her wardrobe changes.

So, then, what would be his genius counter to all of this?

No clear answer appeared except to add it to the furnace, too.

Shaking the vertigo from out of his muscles again, SaNguiNe marched to the map’s centreline, minimising the starting distance, and he drilled in place.

Where others might’ve shut their eyes and muted the obnoxious noise, he kept his senses wide open. He took in the stadium’s glaring lights, the walls of laughter closing in around him, the mysteries of his enemy’s technique, and he stacked everything within himself to raise taller and taller his funeral pyre for this world of cunts.

A single minute, he thought, as the theatre flowed as one timeless block of motivation into their countdown. The future might belong to these mutants, but not this single burning minute.

"3...

2...

1...

Fight!"