The Stadium.

  The knight delivers his filler oration in the hybrid mannerisms of his roleplay. Prompted by the sell-out accusations of his previous opponent and by the presence of the two Hims, he talks about the error of misjudgment. He confesses, like many, to having once despised the duellist, whom a private acquaintanceship has since revealed to be a person of the highest, most noble character, driven by compassion, strength, resilience, and a multitude of other virtues that would humble any real knight.

  At no point does he mention the sword, which, in his mind, has already been relinquished, nor the mystic’s prophecies of his impending win, which he failed to decode.

  The crowd replies with boos, angered by the presumptuousness of the knight to hog the stage. To them, he is just the latest training dummy onto which the duellist can demonstrate his spectacular techniques. A dummy, as a dummy, should be silent.

  Just as the drinks and hotdogs are about to fly, the duellist interjects that he quite likes this speech in adulation of himself.

  The crowd is instantly won over. They laugh. They cheer for the knight to pour forth a thousand more sweet words of praise.

  Continuing, Justinian says that to receive teaching from this superior crusader has been a once-in-a-lifetime honour, a miracle, and a blessing. To share this finale stage with him has been a second. For both, the knight cannot overstate his gratitude.

  The destroyed market.

  “Wait, why are you good customers still here?” asks the butcher of the corpses. “The tale’s done. You should all be sprinting off to lay your bets!”

  The soldier's corpse replies harshly. “Only an imbecile would put money on your cock-and-bullshit tale. Some segments might be grounded in the truth—I won’t deny that—but others are clear farce. Between the King Arthur roleplay nonsense and the multiple layers of unreliable narration, from Justinian’s roleplay to yourself, a supposed meat-salesman, who’s to say that the final message being derived, all this fluff about ‘destiny’, isn’t also a fantastical concoction?” The soldier, flipped by remote puppeteering, turns to the corpse of the priest. “Back me up, as the only other adult here. This is a scam, isn’t it?”

  The priest lies about being neutral. “We’re not interested in your Offworlder affairs. Just keep them outside of the wall.”

  “Ah,” the butcher says, “I see you good customers aren’t buying it; your hard-earned dollars need more proof! Well, I can confirm some parts, at least in the second half. You are correct to question my vocation – I wasn’t always an unregulated butcher.”

  With dramatic flair, he tears off his outer garments. Wool robes, designed for a much colder climate, fly away to reveal a set of armour with a striking sky-blue shade. As he removes his giant hat, his harp clatters out, along with a pile of other miscellany: his glass scimitar, a medieval abacus, a bible, and a full-sized raft covered in barnacles after being dredged up from the ocean. His exposed hair is also blue, and from it sprouts a pair of inhuman antlers.

  “It’s me! The knight satyr, Sir Goat himself! I’ve returned from my mortal injuries to life, although not to my former job - knight errantry doesn’t pay the mortgage.”

  The corpses were unimpressed. The adults whisper snidely amongst themselves at having figured out the stranger’s identity ages ago, the original pretence of being a free-market butcher having long gone stale. The hooligans express anger at the earlier denials and gaslighting.

  The soldier's corpse can't hold his tongue, which is being torn out of his mouth by a rat. “Well, even if your part of the tale was confirmed, there are still multiple outstanding leaps of faith required. For one, let’s say the knight does somehow beat the duellist, why would Ousted Wong honour this half-forgotten wager? Nothing compels him.”

  The knight-turned-butcher smiles conspiratorially. “Nothing is compelling him, yes, but he does think he’s being compelled. Right now, convinced that all of this has been orchestrated by the duellist, he’s mind-gaming himself through a Russian-doll of counter-responses, picturing, for example, how the duellist might create an avant-garde presentation to shame him or might break his kneecaps like an unpaid loanshark. All of this leads to him forfeiting the sword - voluntarily. And, in that is the anarchic ethics of the scheme. Destiny has never once infringed the NAP, restraining from any obvious acts of intimidation or coercion. The various players are all guided by their own self-interest, misreadings, and paranoia.”

  “That still seems awfully precarious,” says the ash-pile of the hooligan leader, drawing from her experience as an agent of Ramiro's. “Paranoid thoughts are prone to flip-flopping, and there’s no way you can be certain that he’ll be thinking what you need him to be thinking at the right time.”

  “Idiot!” snaps the soldier. “There’s nothing precarious. Just as there is no ‘destiny’. Do you not recognise who it is you’re talking to? This ‘knight’ has mapped everything out, and he’s continuing—right now, as he teleports back and forth from this location—to manipulate everyone into their place. Isn’t that right, ‘Sir Goat’, or should I say—"

  This one ventriloquism is replaced by the same pedantic parody, just attacking different details. “Idiot! This psychologising of Washed-Up Wong is inconsequential. All of this relies on an assumption, first, that the knight can somehow win, that he can succeed against our dear leader where everyone else today has been trampled miserably. Even if we accept the knight has ‘fate’ betting in his corner, what does that matter? ‘Fate’, thus far, is also amongst the ranks of certified losers. In the series just before this one, it dumped a much larger contingent of enemies against him, all of whom are now dead, their own swords stripped from them. In the tale sung, likewise, fate, if we see its machinations behind this ‘Sir Goat’, attempted to manipulate the knight into slaying our dear leader, only for the plan to be derailed by an asinine debate about the ethics of murdering scribes for heresy. Tell us how exactly things have changed since then, buddy ‘satyr’, mister ‘goat’, or should I—stripping off ‘destiny’s’ lazily-applied mask—"

  The knight-turned-butcher quiets this nay-saying loser. “To you, incapable of comprehending fate, those may seem like losses, but I—as an impartial outsider—say otherwise. All of this might also be part of fate’s soul-expanding design. Plus, fate had many months to learn from past non-failures. On a less vague level, beyond these weaker factors of psychologising etc, you are prematurely counting out the knight’s ability to win without tricks. He’s no longer the same clown who tried to storm a fortress solo. After all the evolutions since, including much assistance by the duellist, he stands perfectly qualified to compete. In fact, there’s little luck if one can just discard the bias of the former pattern. Comparing him to any of the other finalists, I’d argue he equals if not exceeds them in every important strength while not being hampered by their deficits. The pro? The knight, without the overcomplexity and complacency of success, has also discipled himself to someone better, has received a mentorship in the trade’s most useful instruments as his sword has been expanded with a shield and knives. The wrestler? He is simply better in every metric. His speed is faster—a point noted by the duellist from the start—his physicality much tougher; as for his specialisation – while the wrestler devoted a few weeks to maximising this one format, the knight, thanks to a certain bet, has trained in it for half a year; this is home territory, in more sense than one. The soldier? He—as the tale itself illustrates—also has behind the silent veil of simplicity an impenetrably-deep history of conditioning and preparation, yet, while once having a grudge as well, the knight has moved on from his, is no longer made irrational by it. The mystic? Sister Gate? The knight—even more sincerely, discarding the performative mask once necessary to bring him to it—has also tapped into the religious heights, where one strives with faith past every doubt, where pain, difficulty, and struggle are embraced as destiny and transformed into increased motivations, where the limits that would halt others are transcended by a knowledge of a purpose larger than the self. Everything is there."

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “But Jo’s brain’s missing,” slips in one hooligan.

  The others laugh, but not the knight-turned-butcher, who sits amongst the amused corpses quietly, his expression having darkened.

  “So what?” he answers. “This, the simpler arena of history, isn’t calling for a genius. It just needs a sword. And our hero, in possession of these other merits, might just be about to receive his. Can none of you imagine this possibility? Is that how small your souls have become? Isn’t there some chance—when everything aligns, when we concentrate our entire being into the single moment when the enemy has relaxed their vigilance—that we might, however impossibly, engineer a miracle and defy the immortal law of tyranny? Fate has done this work, I say. After far, far too long, it has done its work. This duel is already won, and soon…soon we can all sit back and laugh.”

  His audience continue laughing for a while. But, far from satisfied, they eventually resume pestering him about the many other residual mysteries never addressed. Why, assuming everything to be true, should they be invested in this random knight bozo defeating the duellist to indirectly retrieve a sword? Why would they find this convoluted anti-climax a more satisfying, soul-expanding conclusion than the invincible sweep it threatens to disrupt? Why does he? What’s driven him—reading between the lines—to sink months into manipulating the knight into this one niche victory? For a silly prank? Why? And what about all the other swords, and the ‘bioweapon’ sowing chaos in the background? And how does any of this relate to the principles of anarchism, capitalism, or their enlightened union?

  The knight-turned-butcher, assaulted by such questions, gives a shrug of shared ignorance. “I’m not the one to ask. The rest, like everything, belongs to fate.”

  His audience is left unsatisfied, each speeding through the stages of decay. The third hooligan’s bloated stomach erupts, showering out a yellow-green froth of maggots. The stray mastiff from before trots over to the filth and begins to lap it up.

  The surrounding battle reaches its conclusion. The Company’s forces, having bled too many troops, disperse in multiple directions. The abomination slays the stragglers, then she turns her attention to the original combatants spectating. Their bodies quickly join the decomposing stack.

  Once the last is dead, she climbs a tower to inspect the topography of this new land, raising a pair of dropped binoculars to her camel eyes. Several other battles rage nearby. The soldiers fleeing this one are heading for a gathering of reinforcements, positioned between the abomination and the distant stadium. On the walls of the region’s blood-red city, an archer with binoculars flinches when their gazes cross; the human, unable to maintain the contact, lowers theirs nervously. The city’s guardian, a tiny woman, hovers in the sky directly above them, listening placidly, thinking, waiting.

  The abomination leaps down to the knight-turned-butcher in his circle of dead listeners. She doesn’t try attacking him. She recognises him. She also, having listened to the tale throughout, recognises the farcical knight, Betruger’s disciple, who’d visited her once upon a funny time, herself getting a small cameo in the forgotten recesses of this forgotten history.

  Despite these acquaintances, the abomination makes no mention of them, nor does she express her dissatisfaction at the oddities of her chimeric avatar. She senses that there is no time left for reminiscences or grumbling. She studies the glass scimitar lying on the ground, seemingly free for the taking.

  A strange voice chirps from her throat in the squawky intonation of a parrot. “What’s the catch, o brother of bedlam?”

  “The usual nuisance,” replies the knight-turned-butcher, casting a sensual gaze into her camel eyes, although he winces when his nostrils are molested by her deathly halitosis. “There are cops afoot, and they’re not too keen on anyone possessing such illicit contraband. Survival will be challenging, but I believe in you, and maybe so does fate.”

  The abomination cautiously approaches the weapon, stoops, and picks it up.

  She tests the strength by slashing through the decaying soldier. The corpse, armour and all, splits so invisibly thin that none of the putrescence bubbling inside spills out.

  “It’s blood brother’s over yonder.” The butcher gestures towards the stadium. “At the setting of the last duel, between none other than Him and your knight. If you race, you might just steal the weapon for yourself. That’s not the worst investment. Risk one sword to double your earnings.”

  The abomination ignores the market tip. She sucks in a massive inhalation, producing storm-force winds. The swarms of feasting flies about are vacuumed up in seconds. Their millions condense somehow inside her slim bulk, and her muscles harden and tauten. Urgently, she sprints off, not in the direction of the stadium but the nearest battle.

  The butcher has already disappeared.

  The stadium.

  The knight finishes with a last comment of thanks for the goodfolk, promising those watching in their difficult journey back into the plains that he won’t forget them. One day, however long it takes, he will return, stronger and equipped for justice.

  Few pay attention to this promise, except, oddly, the duellist, who pretends to miss it while he contemplates its futility.

  The competitors finally take their positions in the sand, one in his complex tornado of weapons, the other holding the much humbler armament of sword and shield.

  Alex Wong suddenly returns from his expedition into paranoia. Waving his gold sword threateningly, he rambles about the spirit of fair play and states that, as the new tyrant, his regime will not be so tolerant of cheaters or collaborators.

  The duellist raises two palms in confusion.

  Alex Wong, infuriated by the show of innocence, announces that he’s banning all gambling on this match, illegal or otherwise, that all subsequent wagers (including his own) are now cancelled, and that violators will be punished with blacklistings.

  The duellist, who’d been so distracted that he’d forgotten to place bets, admits this openly: “Oh…nah, mate. I totally forgot to bet. No scams this round.”

  Alex Wong, not fooled by the charade, escalates even further by declaring that he’s reversing the previous switch-around of prizepools, returning the top-prize once allocated to second-place to spite the duellist back to first place to spite the duellist again, denying him if he would choose to throw that little bit of extra cash.

  The knight interprets this as a petty insult from Him, just to deny him the second-place jackpot, which the knight now values after being enlightened by the duellist into the moral virtue of avarice. The duellist—noticing the knight’s annoyance, vaguely recalling the tension between them earlier, and figuring the issue must be personal, his friend beefing with too many souls—gives a shrug of indifference and assures the knight that he’ll still get what’s owed to him.

  By that, of course, the duellist simply means that he will gift his first-place winnings. The knight, interpreting it that way, returns a bow of gratitude.

  Alex Wong has a totally different interpretation. He’s mind-blown by his friend just openly declaring his intentions to throw the series and guarantee the sword that’s owed to the knight. Ranting crazily, he marches to the sidelines, his thoughts continuing to spiral.

  (Fate, curiously, plays no part in these close-calls, but it has kept a few corpseflies buzzing around them prepared to bite in case.)

  With the stage cleared, the officiator starts the countdown. Each number, drawing ever closer to the end, is echoed by the millions watching.

  The duel starts.

  Backed by the ecstatic chorus, the two advance. They begin a rapid exchange of feints, of shoves, of thrusts, of grunts.

  They wrestle. They stab each other.

  They separate, covered in each other's blood and glued-on sand.

  They wrestle again.

  There's nothing beautiful in the action worth singing at lengths about, no rhythm, no technique, no clever little tricks. Just blood. But this, the blood not the glory, is what they most love, what they have most conditioned their souls for.

  Their figures, sweating and panting and bleeding, blur within an increasingly-dense cloud of weaponry, which settles upon them like a high-altitude blizzard. Vision of the two is obscured as they leave their audience beneath them, as they clamber up and up and up against the resistance of each other's limbs, up and up beyond the enemy, up and up beyond the self, up and up and up and up until the inhuman peak.

  And who, when the winds of victory disperse the storm, will emerge still standing on their feet?

  We know the answer already. There are no further games, no further surprises. Fate has spoiled the outcome - has been doing so from the day each of us was born. This is the iron law of gravity and life: all that rises must descend, and at the bottom there is only blood - just blood and the joyless nothing.