“Justinian wins!”

  There was a long delay before the crowd could register the call. As it drifted through the noisy stands, it had to fight against the day’s amassed inertia, against the invincible pattern established by a hundred more exciting fights. That this, a tiny scuffle in the epilogue of challenge, would be where his myth fell short and stumbled seemed in defiance of some greater law, a law beyond propriety and justice and karma and rational cause-and-effect.

  Their faithful eyeballs found even less confirmation than their ears, the first confused inspections of the action concluding that the call had been in error. As the swarm of weapons cleared, their champion emerged in a position of total dominance. The roleplayer had been forced down to his knees, his shield disarmed and lying in the sand beside them, his hands flailing in panic at his neck as a short-sword chewed through the meat towards the spine.

  On a close scan, the champion seemed unhurt: the head was healthy, the neck was healthy, the chest was healthy, the arms vigorously holding the roleplaying and sawing were impeccably healthy, but, ah, there was a little something off about his waist.

  Around the belly, slipping out from the bottom of the breastplate, there dangled a sword’s lower half. The upper sections of steel could not be seen, having found a cosy lodging place deep inside his torso.

  With an amused laugh, he released his sawing blade. “Don’t remove yours yet…”

  A hatchet landed softly in the sand nearby. A shield clunked down a quarter-second later, and this was followed by a second shield, another sword, and a dagger, each dropping from the halted juggle like flies struck dead on the wing by poisonous gas.

  To Justinian, the victor, recognition was also far from instantaneous. The call had gone unheard, his hearing saturated with the more urgent noises of grunts and pants and scraping. As the vice-grip on his helmet and the burning of his throat suddenly relented, he continued to lurch back in panic, putting distance between himself and the opponent, his hands still slapping at the self-mending neckwound.

  It was only as he struggled to decode a collage of odd observances that followed this—the lack of pursuit, Sir Henry’s strange posture of immobility, the hand raised skywards to catch a condensing potion, and the sword protruding from his waist—that he reconstructed what’d happened.

  He’d been spared thanks to his faster strike, which’d brought their duel to an end before the beheading.

  That was to say, he’d won.

  He’d actually won – it hadn’t been a trap.

  A second epiphany chased this one as he registered Sir Henry’s posture, which seemed impossibly tall and sturdy.

  “But you’re dead,” he said in disbelief.

  This was not a question but a fact. Justinian recalled it in the sensations that had preceded and been stamped out by the panic of the neck. His final thrust had passed through with perfect smoothness, encountering significant resistance only at the very, very end, which was even more perfect, the tougher tissues of the heart pierced after the softer organs of lungs and intestines. That strike had been mortal.

  “These weak cunts wish…” Sir Henry answered. “I’m not gifting them…a single…free…life....”

  His words, despite their staunch assertion, trailed off feebly, like someone whispering while descending from the relinquished edge of a cliff. All his concentration was directed at the vial raised above his mouth, at an attempt to will the fingers clasping it to pop its cap. A tiny action of the thumb, a rotation of a few centimetres – but the fingers protested: it could not be done, not after the blood had drained from them, not after the nervous signals of control had arrested. His heart had indeed been pierced.

  The arm fell limp, as did the rest of his body, which sank unconsciously back into a summoned chair.

  Beside the collapsed figure, as another random addition, stood a table of scalpels, needles, saws, and other medical supplies. Mid-combat repairs had been one of the more manly feats observed by Justinian during their private training, Sir Henry slinking off with mortal injuries only to resume the battle seconds later, the wounds stitched or cauterised. Self-administered heart surgery, however, seemed too lofty an ambition even for the immortal one.

  The two combatants disappeared from public sight, swallowed suddenly by bodies and movement as Sir Henry’s guards rushed to his aid.

  A tent popped up around them, snuffing out the first murmurs of confusion from the audience. The table of medical supplies was replaced with more elaborate gizmos. The dead Sir Henry was laid out on an operating table. A team of surgeons, jabbing tubes into his veins and setting magic stones at vital points, then began a highly-coordinated routine to save him and uphold his stubborn promise against forfeiting even one insignificant demise.

  Justinian, made to wait before the sword’s removal, got a traumatising view. They carved open his chest, used their hands to crack and pry away the ribs, siphoned out the blood filling the cavity, and revealed the blade’s path of inner destruction. The heart had been skewered nicely, its anterior surface split by one edge of the erupting sword, its aorta partially severed.

  On a surgeon's command, Justinian desummoned the sword. Too grossed out, he immediately relocated to a quiet corner, dodging and trying not to look at several magnified projections thrown up for the operation.

  It was disgusting but impressive. The team's professionalism made for a stark contrast with his usual experience in the slums, where surgeons were in short supply and any injury more severe than a broken arm was ‘treated’ with a trip back to the spawning point. These higher-tier orgs adhered to much stricter protocols of preservation. Deaths could not be so liberally donated when gear was harder to replace and hundreds of kilometres might separate a field of operation from the territories where they could grind back levels. The Company had, he'd heard from other trainees, pushed this to an extreme. One of the most coveted badges amongst their members was a serpent scale symbolising the god Aion, awarded when a person had been recycled from injury so many times to the frontline of one battle that Saana forcibly ejected them from their VR-unit to preserve their brain. An even greater prize, Aion’s Wheel, signified the twelfth occurrence.

  In less than half a minute, Sir Henry's heart was beating, and circulation had been restored enough for him to regain consciousness. This seemed fast to Justinian, but apparently it wasn’t, the patient cussing out his team for being drunkards and arguing with one snorting surgeon wrist-deep in the mangled pandemonium of his intestines.

  The farce escalated when their other leader, He, stormed into the tent, throwing out accusations of collusion and fraud. His eyes perused the patient’s organs with the suspicion of someone inspecting the engine of a dodgy second-hand car. He wasn’t buying any of this.

  But, with everyone ignoring Him, the energy in the room soon relaxed as the crisis passed and the team switched to less vital repairs. Sir Henry lay back and switched to—or continued with—telepathic communication, Justinian receiving a message of approval that seemed by its terseness to be fired off between a dozen other conversations.

  A projection was turned on of the official broadcast, where Justinian got to see a slow-mo of his finisher.

  It showed himself shoving and battering with his shield, his swings alternating between Sir Henry and the condensing weapons knocked aside. Then, abruptly, he ditched the shield, dropped to a crouch, and thrust for home with the full strength of two arms.

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  The broadcast’s analysts connected these into two phases of a finisher, his intention being to draw a high defence before sneaking in the low shot.

  From his own perspective, there’d been no such strategy. His ‘game plan’ against the jugglers was to just swing at stuff randomly until he found a vague point of give. The opening this time had felt like nothing. He’d only capitalised on it because his arms were maybe six strikes from effective fatigue and, based on previous duels with Sir Henry—who tried to finish before Justinian resorted to last-ditch hijinks—that meant he was about three strikes from losing if not already in the middle of losing. A moronic instinct had thus directed him to all-in even earlier, to behave with desperation well ahead of the apparent need.

  Another point of disagreement was with an assessment by the analysts that Sir Henry’s ultimate error had been a rare miscalculation of speed, his finisher delivered just a fraction of a second later.

  Justinian felt otherwise. In the moment recollected, there’d been no sensation of victory, only panic, Sir Henry gripping him on through and past his own attack without hesitation. There’d also been a strange confidence in the laughter afterwards, which'd confessed amusement but not defeat or embarrassment. The real error he deduced might have been one of misprioritisation. Justinian had won according to the official rules, his opponent’s health points hitting zero first. However, if—hypothetically—the conditions of victory were slightly redefined, if the duel had not been interceded by official monitoring, then he would have lost his head while Sir Henry would be here relaxing through a surgery. In that regard, the end may have been a calculation, Justinian’s spontaneous pre-finisher anticipated, accepted, and traded with another intended to be more lethal yet.

  That, at least, did seem to give a better explanation for the discord in his heart.

  He wanted to probe Sir Henry on the matter, but the relaxed posture of the surgery had whisked the patient off into the land of nod. He was apparently a sleep-talker. In a janky rhythm, bordering on poetry, he was conversing with some woman, explaining first how he’d killed a Russian guy with an icepick and then his first love with a kitchen knife. These confessions of murder flowed, oddly, into a Mandarin lullaby about mothers, which he sang with infantile tenderness.

  The whole tent laughed, except for Him, continuing to mumble about charades.

  The mood snapped into something very different when the sleep-talker lurched awake and seized one of the surgeons. In seconds, the operating table had been flipped and several staff had lost their footing. Amidst the rushed unsheathing of weapons, sight of him was regained in the confusion by layers of spellshields activated in emergency, many assuming another enemy surprise attack. But the sole assailant this time was the patient himself, glowing and huddling in a corner of the tent.

  He was holding down the surgeon, a girl, and trying to vigorously gouge out her eyeballs with a scalpel. These attacks harmlessly scratched her cornea due to him being underlevelled, but her distress was acute.

  It reminded Justinian of his own panic earlier and a couple of alley rapes he’d intervened. Sir Henry’s eyes were identical, the pupils massive and nocturnal, taking in the by-standers but too committed to stop. The sight was made further disturbing by his organs oozing from his torso and sticking wetly to the back of the shrieking surgeon.

  This nightmarish episode soon passed.

  Returning to his flat expression, the assailant released the girl with an apology, picked up the table, hopped back on, and signalled for his surgeons to resume. His captive initially made to leave to calm her nerves, but he called her back to work.

  “At this level,” he said, “you need to be able to perform straight after the real thing, let alone a neutered simulation.”

  There was no boast or humour in this, and the girl, once reminded, did indeed pick right back up with her interrupted section of lung.

  The only other explicit comments on the incident came from Alex Wong, who vacillated between praising his friend’s impeccable acting and calling him a psycho who would die alone as a deserved punishment for the rat schemes weighing on his conscience. Sir Henry accepted these charges with a shrug. Simultaneously, to possibly prevent drifting back to sleep, he conversed outloud with multiple people at once, talking to one about a demon let loose outside the stadium, to another about an earthquake overseas.

  Justinian was the sole witness it seemed who could not move on so easily, yet he was lost as how to process any of it, the scene congealing nauseously inside his stomach.

  The best solution, he decided, was to sweat it out with drills, preparing soul and body for the next round. Mostly the soul - he expected nothing but blowouts from now. That first miracle of a win would most likely be his only of the series, any sense of possibility forgotten in the skull-bashings of the rest. On the bright side, the brain-damage might also purge his memory of these cursed observances.

  On his way to exiting the tent, though, he was tugged back by an overheard snippet.

  All of Suchi’s Oracles, explained one of the assistants chatting with Sir Henry, had gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

  This was somewhat catastrophic. The Oracle magic was needed to progress beyond the starting-tier cap, and, without it, the millions of under-levelled players participating in the tournament would have to travel thousands of kilometres to other zones or—much more likely to happen—permakill and respawn their characters.

  Justinian was one victim of this. So would be Sir Henry, who—based on the hesitancy of the assistant to share this bad news and a response that followed—had apparently been seeking out an Oracle to power-level before the next, non-rookie tournament.

  That last fact was interesting in its own way. In doing so, he would be abandoning an earlier boast of sweeping all the higher categories with his handicap.

  A guard whispered to Justinian that the order to retrieve an Oracle had been given to them in the middle of the earlier battle. That slog-fest had cured their leader of any further interest in maintaining these low levels. Once their category ended, he’d intended to advance, to unlock new skills and stronger gear, and, consequently, the day’s last two tournaments would have been downgraded to a leisurely stomp. Alas, by vanishing the Oracles, the fates were dead-set that an arrogant youth fulfil the challenge as originally stipulated.

  This news seemed to be received by Sir Henry with an unusual spike of emotion. Although the muscles of his face never dropped their stoic mask, his eyes watered with a couple tears of frustration. These passed quickly, blending with his sweat and going unnoticed except by Justinian glancing back, whose perception had been fine-tuned by the hour to read levels of exertion. Even Sir Henry, it seemed, had his moments of doubt and vulnerability. The fights beyond this one must’ve become difficult in a way that none of them could yet conceive.

  Justinian tried to offer consolation. “That’s tough luck. But you’ll be closing this one out a true man of Suchi. Under-levelled and ill-equipped – that’s been our path from the beginning, the path of stubbornness.”

  Sir Henry, nodding, gave a sigh of resignation.

  The same guard asked what Justinian meant by that. He explained quickly how it was, in a way, the zone’s oldest tradition, its residents a horde of undesirables contesting higher powers armed with nothing. Himself, wasting six months volunteering at the bottom, was more characteristic than exceptional. Day zero of Suchi had started with the proto-gangs slaughtering all the region’s trainers, and that spirit of ‘stubbornness’—truly a spirit of self-handicapping—had continued to the present with the constant infighting and the crabs-in-a-bucket hatred of anyone who dared to leave the place.

  After this explanation, a voice echoed in his head.

  --Henry Flower: Mate, you can’t still be falling for that crock of shit, right?

  A second glance back by Justinian was not returned by Sir Henry, who’d never paused the juggle of conversations with his guards.

  “Nah, don’t bother,” he was saying outloud, turning down a suggestion that they might borrow an Oracle from Central City.

  “Why not?”

  “They’ll just transform into naked clowns or some other soul-expanding crockery.”

  The lack of visible acknowledgement made the words appear misdirected or hallucinated.

  --Henry Flower: No, I am talking to you, you tin-headed idiot. Are you also still imagining a demon caused the drought?

  “The ‘heavens’ have made their intent clear on this one. It’s pranks until the end.”

  Again, there was no outward sign, which now seemed quite intentional, as if the speaker wished to preserve under later interrogation the ability to claim innocence while denouncing Justinian for lunacy.

  But the drought demon – that was also central to the foundation myth. Farg of The Drought Curse, a titanic monster in the highlands to the north, had been slain by the collective armed only with their baby lion fangs. With its death had come the first rains after a four-month drought that’d halved the population of the slum. With its death had been born Suchi’s stubborn spirit. Justinian, although not here at the time—his journey starting elsewhere—had heard countless recitations of the tale from The Slum’s veterans.

  --Justinian: That demon was no fiction.

  He’d seen the footage of them swarming on its bulk – everyone had.

  The next reply was mocking.

  --Henry Flower: Sure, there was a demon, and that demon is dead. But where, exactly, is the rain it was withholding? How many natural days of it have you counted since arriving, brother?

  Zero was the answer. In half a year, he’d yet to see or feel or sniff or taste a single drop. The region continued to rely on magical production.

  --Justinian: Then what was behind the drought?

  --Henry Flower: Not what. Who. Same question as to who assassinated all the trainers back then, and who just assassinated all my fucking Oracles to keep me down as well?

  Justinian, at once, grasped everything, his vision clarifying as to the demented picture of holocaust behind this land of sand and blood.

  --Justinian: Jesus….

  As Justinian mulled over the horror, Sir Henry seemed to conclude his own deliberations, factoring this latest setback into his calculus and resolving from it his next logical course of action.