Justinian, with the weather on his mind, watched at a curious distance as Sir Henry hopped off the operating table and slid directly back into his chair from earlier. A flask condensed in his hand. From this, he poured himself a heavenly-scented cup of tea.

  He raised the cup in a quick salute to those around. “Well, boyos and boyettas, that’s me for this trashshow. What a monstrous waste of energy – GG.” He saluted Justinian. “GG. Grats, champ.”

  With no further ado, he brought the cup to his lips like an executionee imbibing poison.

  But intervention came from the female surgeon he’d attempted to eye-gouge earlier, who slapped this cup from out his hand and started cursing him.

  “You shitty hypocrite!” the girl yelled. “We didn’t put all this sweat into fixing you up just for you to throw in the towel. Nah, bro. That’s not our way. Your duty, even if you’re fucking done, is to go out there and bleed.”

  The other staff, slowly registering the surrender in his actions, piled in on the harassment. Soon, the whole tent was a storm of insults, amongst which Sir Henry sat with the tired quietude of a captain on his vessel being sunk by wave after miserable wave.

  Justinian, especially, could not believe this. “You’re done? Already? After one fight?”

  “After one fight,” Sir Henry aped ridiculously, this having been the first match of this series but not by any means his day. “The rest doesn’t need to be dragged out – it’s too obvious.”

  Too tired for verbal explanations, he transmitted a schematic of the series into their heads, which he’d drafted in a bewilderingly-complex 3-D constellation map. Dozens of branches had been shaded to indicate their impossibility after the first duel’s outcome. A neon glow highlighted the path most likely, which he further emphasised by magnifying the nodes for each remaining duel in a sort of slideshow presentation.

  In match two, Justinian was apparently to be kited in the hamlet arena for five minutes, achieving contact on Sir Henry’s dictate for between three and six skirmishes that amounted to nothing, Justinian eventually losing by time.

  In match three, due to a devastated mindset from the previous one, he would return them without hope to the sandpit, where—to his astonishment, but not to Sir Henry’s—he would win even faster than match one.

  Match four had three contingent options, depending on Sir Henry’s assessment of the earlier rounds. The two in reserve were either another kiting stomp or a stealth duel in Catacombs, most of which he intended to spend resting between ambushes, unbeknownst to a paranoia-high Justinian. The preferred option over these was a lightning round in Graveyard. This would consist of between thirty and forty micro-skirmishes, every single one of which would be pulled short of a fatality for Justinian.

  Finally, in match five, with Justinian in the pits of hopelessness, they’d head back to the sandpit and Sir Henry would just lose, having failed in the implementation of an avant-garde rest protocol used throughout the series, starting seconds into match one when he’d foreseen all challenges ahead. No matter how hard he tried, either with this protocol or inferior ones discarded, he could not reverse his current phase of decline, which had, really, begun well before their series.

  He illustrated the last point by zooming out from the schematic, which shrank into one starry node of the whole rookie tournament. A thin black line in the middle of the semifinals marked where he’d censored the interrupting battle; blocks above and below the tournament schematic, blocks much larger than it, were likewise hidden. Chains at the edges hinted at a larger yet continuity with the tournaments before and after, everything weaving into one unfathomably-strenuous marathon.

  “All summed and simpler put,” said Sir Henry, disconnecting his audience, “it’s 2:3 to you. GG. So now, as I leave you friends to grieve and celebrate, I’d like to skip Beyond this to a higher, even more avant-garde rest protocol of napping through a grandfinale.”

  Several guards nursed headaches.

  Justinian, rather than celebrate, was taken by overwhelming frustration.

  To his opponent, these ends might have been obvious, but not to him. He didn’t have the same imaginative capacity to feel a duel out in advance. His muscles needed—and longed for—a confirmation in the actions they’d been prepped for, and these actions, whether they amounted to victory or not, were in a way more important than the victory itself.

  What’s more, he refused to accept that all of this—reading between the lines—had come down in the end to map selection, to a coinflip. The most critical determinants of a fight should never be in the terrain or in luck, nor in the assistance of earlier opponents. Victory had to spring from themselves and themselves alone, from their skill, their spirit, their heroism, their swords. That was the defining essence of the duel, one man versus another.

  And behind these complaints there was a deeper belief—nay, a conviction—that this story as so neatly laid out was not completely true. This was not his opponent’s limit. Justinian was being denied the greater effort and desperation that’d gone into the fights before, which would never have been forfeited.

  Justinian, with a nod of resolution, punched a fist into his palm. “The fix is simple. I just won’t—"

  Sir Henry cut him off before the charity. “If you have the gentlemanly space to manipulate the conditions and create a balanced, more thrilling challenge, that’s no longer a real fight. In a real fight, where the stakes are too high to lose, you have to take every advantage, you have to fuck the enemy before they even arrive." He paused for half a second, his thoughts leaping somewhere before returning. "This is just a game. I have no further interest in games.”

  Adding disgust to the emphasis of the last word, he poured himself out another cup, saluted, and had his drink slapped away again.

  The new offender, Alex Wong, growled at him imperiously, expressing Justinian’s own thoughts. “Nobody’s falling for your scam, mate. Not after everything else. You need to end this malingering sick-man routine and go out there and knuckle this punk kid. You’ve got the energy left for that.”

  Sir Henry raved scornfully. “’It’s right in sight, brother! Just another hundred steps! You’ve already conquered so much harder!’” He squinted as if Alex Wong were a tiny speck in the distance. “How despicably easy it is to cheerlead from down there. Time dwelling in the plains made you too forgetful of the larger struggle. These last steps, which your own endurance never would have reached, are only an illusion. Theirs is a siren song inviting a haggard fool to offer up that most precious last reserve needed for descent. Not for this mountain, I say. Not for this small bitch of a game that has done nothing to deserve my corpse. I’m turning back.”

  Shoving Alex Wong away, he swigged straight from the flask and reclined for the ride down. At once, his whole body wilted like a dying flower, the day’s repressed fatigue catching up with him and sapping his muscles of their striving tone.

  Despite the physical slackening, Sir Henry continued to mete out orders through a drowsy-voiced telepathy. The stadium was informed about his forfeit, given a simplified account that the last shot had struck out his seventh, eighth, and ninth winds. The crowd rebelled unhappily at first. However, with the admiration earned thus far, he won them quickly back. In a silly routine, he retconned his defeat as being 100% caused by random roleplayers in the stands, whose outfits had supposedly distracted him in the middle of various blundered finishers. His fans were then incited to cathartically beat these falsely-accused targets to death.

  Justinian understood the routine’s purpose to displace their anger from himself. Nevertheless, he felt no gratitude, emerging from the tent a winner but without any of a winner’s satisfaction.

  The closing ceremony was similarly anti-climactic. The staff had forgotten to repair the podium demolished in the earlier battle, and he was directed to stand on the highest point of its rubble. The bronze medals were awarded in absentia, neither Emerson Miller nor FuzzyGirl35 bothering to turn up. Second-place might as well have been a no-show. A freshly-bathed Sir Henry was plunked down in his chair carried out by the guards. He wore an eyemask—at no point in the ceremony removed—and stayed snuggly cocooned in a magically-cooled hoodie while masseuses patted him down and fed him smoothies through a straw. The goofiness of the silver medal being draped over his inert neck reminded Justinian of a tribal custom in his country of exhuming the dead to clean them and spritz up their clothing.

  He remained throughout in a dissociative fugue, the events flowing by observed but unregistered. He tried his best to immerse in the celebration, to at least adopt a knightly pose that might inspire some other poor kid watching. But the sense of unreality continued to blossom like a cancer. It swept slowly back from this disappointing series into the past, eroding the significances of the other struggles through this tournament, the earlier victories led by Sir Henry, the miraculous circumstances of their reunion, and the communicating lights from God that’d first ushered him in a moment of moral crisis to seek redemption in this stadium.

  What had been the purpose of all that? Was this role—this role of nothing, a spoiler for someone else’s glory—the divine mission that God had elected him for? What the hell was wrong with God?

  Justinian’s fugue worsened when Alex Wong—the censorship of the old grudge no longer meaningful either—followed up the awarding of the golden medal by slapping another golden object in his palms.

  It was a sword. Its blade, sleek but hefty, reflected the stage lights in its polished surface. Runes carved into the weapon’s cross-guard blazed crimson as it examined its new owner. Gradually forming an acquaintance, the former one forgotten with the destruction of his old body, it sent a second pulse into the veins of his arms, suffusing to his heart and then outwards. By the time it’d infiltrated the veins of the toes and his ears, the pulse had fully synchronised with his own.

  It was the sword - the sword he’d lost, Worlddrinker.

  “What are you boys scheming?” Sir Henry’s telepathy inquired.

  “Right, the bet…” Justinian answered.

  Right - this win had happened to fulfil the last conditions of that old wager, bringing to a close his sentence in the slums and the preceding grudges with the demonic sword master.

  “What bet?”

  “THE bet!” Alex Wong answered with cheer, swinging dramatically from the knight and his coleader to address the confused stands. “Yes, the bet! In this one upset has been another much more devious, one long, long, long, long, long, long in the making. There has been a bet of chivalry and high-stakes justice! Play the reel, Tim!”

  At his cue, the official broadcast switched to a compilation edited hastily from his own recordings. It showed Justinian’s demands for revenge for his dead master, his battle with the sword, his ultimate concussion (skipping the false challenge to single combat), and some sections of Alex Wong’s drunken speech professing innocence, moralising about the virtue of friendship over solitary pursuits, and establishing the conditions of the wager to win both a 6v6 and 1v1 tournament.

  “And on this blessed day,” concluded the present Alex Wong, removing the crown of his costume and tipping it while bowing, “both terms of our wager have been fulfilled. Both tournaments, after months of perseverance, have been miraculously overcome by this knight, not just in the ignominious conditions of a slum as initially required but against the toughest foes our planet has to offer - the very toughest!” He became philosophical. “But more than these victories, perhaps enabling these victories, this young man has overcome that deeper challenge at the heart of his chivalric quest. It is the same challenge that I see being overcome by many of you watching, a challenge of spiritual maturation, a challenge to recognise the supposed foes of childhood for who they really are: your most earnest, your most well-wishing, your most trustworthy, your most humanitarian friends. In their new alliance that fulfilled half the wager, as Team Friendship Forever, their motto was,” he paused to read from a note,“‘To cultivate the miracle of friendship through fun and more fun!’ How correct they are. Friendship is a miracle. Through the right friendships, any of you watching might one day repeat this young man’s grand example, succeeding from out of nothing not through the weak motivations of resentment but through the highest magic of loyalty and love. Through the right friendships, you, too, might prevail where tens of millions of others got crushed brutally. Through the right friendships, you, too might triumph over one tyrant in the ring and another so-called tyrant in a wager! Through the right friendships, you, too, might collude your way to a champion’s sword!" He placed a bitter, triple emphasis on collude. "Now, please, my friends, without further soreness or complaint, let us together join our hands in unified applause for this latest covert to our team. Welcome, Justinian! Welcome to the real side of Justice!”

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

  Inspired by his own speech, Alex Wong retrieved the sword for a moment, had Justinian kneel, and used the weapon to dub him the first official knight of The Order of The Flaming Sun. He then, reluctantly, returned the sword a second time.

  The audience, except for a couple weirdos clapping, began to prickle with boos. Rather than this corny lesson on friendship, most began to interpret this whole debacle as having been some kind of orchestrated joke or publicity stunt for the purposes of recruitment. Technically, this had been a recruitment tournament from its conception. Justinian’s previous opponent, for those recalling her, had also laid down a vague narrative about loyalty and miracles that would seem to find a story-book ending in the knight’s achieving victory through conversion, if not through outright collusion with the ‘opponent’ who’d carried him through other events. It was also clear of this ‘opponent’—based on the earlier bets and him now napping through this farce—that he had no respect for competitive integrity.

  Justinian couldn’t help himself but wonder if that might’ve been the case. This all did feel like orchestrated theatre, especially after watching the footage of his dorkish roleplay.

  Sir Henry telepathically maintained ignorance. “No. Your drunken bets are not sufficient reason to donate our weapons.”

  “There’s no need to play the foil, my friend!” replied Alex Wong. “I’ve handed back the sword, as you wanted, and that’s the last of it and the first of it. This is how the new era of The New Tyrant will be. My citizens around the globe will feel safe to trust their leader, as a friend, upholding his every sacred vow! Yes, I, too, have been inspired into something of a knight. Haha! A chivalrous knight!”

  The volume of the booing intensified. The audience, feeling scammed, began to pelt the stage with rubbish, thickshakes, kebabs, and one dead seagull splattering against the glass dome. Shouts rang out demanding the return of their ruined tournament, for The Tyrant to give this paid actor his paid-for beating.

  Justinian had a strong urge join them in revolt.

  His quest was done, the sword was his, but he could still derive no more happiness from these than from his empty ‘victory’. In this moment, he would’ve traded all of this for one more of those fights. Just one more. Not even the series - just one more honest duel, both re-exerting themselves to that most holy of places, which was—despite Sir Henry’s assertion—infinitely more than a mere game.

  The realisation that his priorities had changed this drastically was astonishing to him, who’d sacrificed so many months while questing to reclaim this sword. On self-examination, his indifference didn’t just stem from the frustration of the denied duel. The sword had already become a relic of a past that he’d prefer to forget, a childhood folly on the level of his roleplay. At some point, the struggles to re-obtain the sword had supplanted it in value, his prior ‘deeds’ with it of far less significance than helping folk repair their shacks or wrangling chickens on the loose. These smaller acts, if not so memorable, contained more genuine heroism.

  And, really, his quest, from the beginning, had been juvenile. How entitled he’d been to imagine the sword somehow ‘belonged’ to him, who’d deserved to lose it for the indifference to his swordmaster’s wickedness and the hubris of trying to destroy an empire solo.

  So why, then, was the sword given back to him? What, again, was God’s divine intent?

  Alex Wong mistook his fugue for disbelief. “Stick your teeth into it, my boy. That's real steel right there! The sword is yours – and it’s always been yours. Forgive me for borrowing it, but wasn't the time away necessary for you to mature out of your follies? Only now, as a friend, are you ready to swing it for a true and noble cause!”

  “My God…” said Justinian amazed.

  The remark had ignited a sudden, ecstatic flood of comprehension. God’s highest purpose was unveiling itself, offering an explanation for everything, for his past with his sword, for this empty feeling, for the sword’s return, and even for Sir Henry’s renunciation of this ‘game’.

  It was true as Alex Wong had said that he’d not been ready to possess the sword in the past, although the issues disqualifying him had been more severe than a lack of friendship. His priorities back then, the roleplayed quests and grudges, had been totally devoid of substance, and the weapon, aimed only at imagined enemies, had been squandered in his possession. The loss of it, as so wisely decreed by God, had been necessary to discover that misusage. Every second of his suffering had been essential to destroy Justinian’s faulty moral character and to allow him to reconstruct from out of the old pieces a more righteous self, a self that would not waste this blessing of a sword on fantasies and games but that would direct it to a crusade truly true and noble.

  Sir Henry’s dismissiveness had been correct. This had never been their mountain.

  As for the next phase of the crusade, God had already revealed that when first shining the light of guidance on the stadium. At the time, his plans might have seemed another knightly fantasy, a repetition of his past castle-storming ‘heroics’. However, the sword, as the equation’s missing piece, made everything quite practical. If Justinian gained a couple levels, recruited—through that other lesson of friendship—some sympathisers in the pro-leagues, and maybe found another Legendary class, then it might only be a few months before he could return and—

  But neither that crusade nor the sword belonged to him. Right as Justinian had fixed his vision on his highest goal, the ground began to speed towards him, his legs forfeiting their balance.

  He fell hard, his teeth smacking against the debris of the smashed podium. As his body continued to slowly ragdoll down its layers, he was struck by a lurching sense of déjà vu pulsing from a pain in the back of his skull. On landing, he still could not move. He watched helplessly as the guard who’d knocked him out bent over him and wrenched the sword from his fingers.

  Ah, Justinian realised, as time sadistically repeated itself. So herein lay the catch. That honourless bastard Alex Wong may have promised to return the sword, but nothing had been mentioned of what would happen after. Once again, as in their first confrontation, he’d committed the sin of naivety, putting too much faith in the letter of a thief’s worthless vows.

  Justinian glanced up bitterly, but he found the one accused frowning in as much confusion as himself.

  Alex had, truth be told, been plotting to retrieve the weapon. However, his ambush would not have been quite this soon, not on the big stage with a billion people watching. He was not this shameless.

  The weapon, confiscated from the knight, was carried past this innocent figure and taken to another, lounging in a chair while his goons did all the work. This other He, his eye-mask still in place, a single hand poking from his cooling robes, received the weapon thanklessly. A username, ‘myswordnowlol’, flashed orange over his head as he incurred a minor thief’s penalty.

  “Sir Henry…” Justinian mumbled through his paralysed teeth. “You…you…where is your sense of honour?”

  “Same place as your sense of reality…” the thief mumbled back drowsily. “Neither of you morons can be trusted with this…” His username vanished, the soul and the guilt of the spoofed ID erased, and then he stowed the weapon in his inventory. “Mine now…”

  Mine now – with this single, piliferous phrase, he overrode all further negotiation and begging. This sword, like all the other swords, now belonged to him, and there was no higher authority that the knight or his co-leader might petition to dispute this fact of facts. The police? He was the police. The law? He was the law, and the judge, and the noose. The heavens? He would love to see them try.

  Alex Wong—outraced in his audacity—responded with a gregarious laugh, finding something healthy and worthy of celebration in his friend’s revived avarice.

  Justinian, returning to his fugue, was escorted off the stage. As he shuffled past the crowd, who’d joined Alex Wong in laughing, and he disappeared into the stadium’s dark interior, he was left to brood on history’s cruel rhyme.

  Yet again, his crusade had fallen short just at the end. The real fight—which that was not—had been denied to him, and his sword had been stolen through an inglorious beating by some henchmen.

  How tragic...

  And so The Tyrant of Saana added yet another weapon to his prize collection. The acquisition of this one was the easiest thus far, requiring nothing but the loss of an otherwise meaningless amateur tournament and the betrayal of some roleplayer scum.

  With his 15-0 goal tarnished, he gave up on the day’s original conditions and proceeded to ruin any hype around the final two events. Before the standard-format duels, he re-wrote the rules himself to permit under-levelled players to use stat-boosting items; then, equalising himself to his opponents with his Legendaries, he stomped everyone without challenge. The Open Brackets, which’d never had any restrictions or hope, were an even faster blowout, and the only surprise was that Alex Wong, after being stripped of too many items, was eliminated well before the grandfinale by a stealth grappler.

  But the tourney’s tail-end wasn’t without entertainment. The official matches had become mere intermissions between much more sensational fights, his training sessions continuing to escalate in complexity as, hour by hour, he merged his ever-expanding armament with A Thousand Tools. During tournament fourteen, a battle raged outside between a chaos demoness and his troops, controlled by him remotely. Reporters found a vague connection between this demon and the knight of tournament thirteen, whose swordmaster had perished trying to summon it. If that connection had been meaningful, it ceased to matter when the demon was slain, and yet another sword, a cleaver, was couriered over for The Tyrant’s hoard.

  This latest sword, like all the others, was rapidly assimilated into the technological metamorphosis that by the final match had raised him almost to the stature of a god, no entities on the planet capable of rivalling him except for Saana’s zone guardians. His advancement was so impressive that it passively earned him new territory, several NPC factions that’d once held out against his armies offering surrender. Most significant of these was the western trading empire of Nikrugbeet. That gave him 150 million new subjects and secured his monopoly of Saana’s intercontinental shipping. The other western empires were predicted soon to follow, thereby achieving what he’d failed during the wars of The Schism, both halves of the planet submitting to his sovereignty.

  On that triumphant note, it seemed the eternal climber’s adventures in the game had come to a satisfying conclusion, and he was free to retire in splendid fashion to his next, even harder mountain of haute couture fannypacks.

  The closing celebration.

  The victor separated from practice with his guards to rejoin the podium after the last tournament. This time, as the 14th gold medal was draped around his neck, he wore the others, plus the one silver, their mass weighing burdensomely on his teenage neck.

  His closing address riffed on the same tragicomical theme of the speech that’d opened the event, about the many ways of coping with defeat like finding solace in camaraderie and religion. He was now able to speak not theoretically but from personal experience, having himself lost one of the tournaments. As his example invincibly testified, it was quite possible to survive such tragedies, to even return from them a better, stronger, more equipped person. He was himself quite grateful for the experience. The period of grief and self-reflection on his inadequacies had deepened his humanitarian sympathies and given him a valuable moral lesson for after his retirement. In the difficult hours ahead, he could always remind himself that he’d never been alone, that he, too, was a member of their universal fraternity of losers.

  The audience applauded this profound drivel for some reason. A rocket fizzled upwards into the night sky, setting off the first rainbow explosion of the closing fireworks. The band had been retired, but many still heard music in their hearts, which would carry them softly onwards through the days of afterparties and the voyages back home and the warmth of their beds...

  The music was interrupted by a zone-wide message, blasting in everyone’s head with the molestive shrillness of a fire alarm.

  “Big cheers for the winners,” announced the region’s Pope. “Big thanks to you all for bringing these fine entertainments to our shore.” After these minor pleasantries, he switched into a gangster-like oafishness familiar to locals but not the visitors. “But what I ain’t thankful for is the big pile of shit you also brought. All this trash, all these decaying fucking bodies...it’s gonna take us days to scrap this shit. We’re moving the clean-up job ahead of schedule. If you don’t wanna join the smoke, you roaches got until sunrise to vacate. That means all you roaches. All of you. Get to fucking scuttling.”

  Surprise and confusion spread throughout the region, to the spectators, to the markets, to the trading posts, to the dockyards. The weekend, although it’d reached its peak, was far from over, countless tinier events remaining. The time given was also not sufficient for the clean-up needed by the hosts. All of the venues, including this stadium, would go up in flames once the infernos of The Cleansing settled.

  Down in the ring, The Company elite began to throw a fit. Many took it as a provocation. They turned to their leaders and demanded to know if the slight would be permitted. They called for war, their ships just waiting in the bay.

  Amongst the bedlam, though, one figure stood without surprise. He wore a knowing smile that would’ve paired well with a hum, as if the night’s silent melody was not for him halted but beginning.

  A glance was thrown to him by his co-leader and co-conspirator.

  --Mayonnaise: What a cunt. You ready?

  The figure didn’t respond, pretending as he had throughout his sojourn in this land not to register the happenings most closely touching his ambitions. But he confessed his answer, in a way, in the absence of the expected sigh, in the beam of that symphonic smile splintering through the mask of lethargy.

  But he was ready, thought Henry. The hibernation through this babyshit of a prelude had prepared him well for his last duel.

  It’d been an age, a long, exhausting, flattened age, but fate does reward the persevering. At last, he was returning to that pinnacle of arts. Himself and these new swords would finally be put to their native work of humbling any cunt who thought themselves too lofty and too immortal to get murdered.

  His fifteen medals—unshod from his neck like a slave’s liberated yoke, tossed aside—landed somewhere in the dirt, their meagre weight forgotten along with all the other trivialities of this event. He gave a two-finger salute of farewell to his companions and nothing to his audience. His form disintegrated into a breeze, swifting him away from this playground and off into the plains outside where the real battle that'd been brewing for weeks and centuries was starting.

  End of Volume 4, Part II – Invincible Beneath The Sun.

  Next up: Volume 4, Part III – The Death of The Immortal Ones.