“My renewed vows aren’t to a tournament,” Justinian corrected the mystic. “That’s the distorted, least charitable framing of the Lady Sorceress’s own sword, no longer willing to accept that there might sometimes be more virtue in victory than defeat. Your speeches, by my interpretation, emphasise a dual importance of both universes, of reality and this virtual reality. From each of those sides, there are victories galore to appreciate in the events of today beyond a vacuous quest for standings."

  His eyes searched the audience, picking out a couple watching faces. “Throughout the crowd, however few, countrymen from both our corners of the world have been cheering for us despite the absurdity of our characters, and they’ve staked in our improbable struggle against these behemoths the fragile hope of a people not accustomed to hoping. Millions more are watching on from home, likewise hoping, likewise praying. In the fulfilment of these hopes and these prayers, I recognise more knightly virtue than the sword. Within this universe, although they’re not so visible, driven as they are now to repeat the endless trial of the plains, the Goodfolk have imbued into my gauntlet a similar prayer of the despondent. In honouring them, in forfeiting my pathetic failures of them, who’ve shared with me the meagre bread of this second home, I recognise more knightly virtue than the sword. Between these universes, our brothers and sisters of the stage, the many-skinned folk whom the Lady Sorceress asserts to champion, have likewise placed on us this duty of representation.

  “In any single one of these, I recognise more virtue than all my achievements with the sword. And together? How weigh these hopes in their combined consequence against that of a roleplayed chivalry? The difference would be mortifying if not for the awareness that, again, without my floundering, I would not be planted here in this exact moment, ready to receive such a miraculous coincidence of blessings.

  “Better yet, what greater victories, what greater blessings, are dawning after exiting the purgatory of the sword. Ahead are opportunities for virtue that exceed the mere token act of representation, vainglorious in its own way. Thanks to the ‘crusade of coin’, thanks to the second-place prize, this marks the last day that my parents ever have to work – no more stress about the future, no more calculation and self-denial of the basics. Such a filial blessing could’ve gone to someone struggling in your sphere, yet the Lady Sorceress has forfeited it, and on behalf of what exactly? For roleplay? Because it’s too difficult to minimise the theatrics for a single series? This is the vanity of your own sword. Your bondage to this role, to this loser game of asserting and defending its ideals in every unnecessary situation, has separated the Lady Sorceress from what’s genuinely meaningful and made you as mad as your character.

  “Leaving that madness, I perceive more distant victories and blessings in store, but if this alone was my reward, everything so far has justified the price. That includes the price both my former vow to the sword and its ‘betrayal’, for the push to which I will always be indebted to Sir Henry.”

  He glanced across the arena, in the direction—somewhere beyond the debris of battle—of the tourney’s other grand finalist. His look, one of admiration, had a minor note of complication. In an earlier headspace, this might’ve been a sourness from the story incomplete, something like a resignation but a happy resignation. As it was, by now, the sword and its residue had been better processed, such that this resignation had transformed into a much purer expression of gratitude.

  A subtler expression joined these, one of mystery.

  “I’ve asked God many times as to his purpose in delivering me here,” he continued, seeming to speak of God in non-RP terms, through the faith of one beholden to a personal miracle. “Whatever higher virtue in the renunciation of the sword, it all still seems too self-benefiting to merit a divine intervention. These are duties that—with any worldly clarity—a knight should have been pursuing from the start. God’s purpose, in the conclusion, must’ve been subsidiary, to have me sacrifice the one role of a crusader to better fill a minor yet far more significant role in another’s larger mission. Maybe, as my subservience to God’s Will suffuses every second of this day with the character of destiny, my purpose may have been this fight. Maybe I was sent here merely to obstruct the Lady Sorceress from her closing show, to prevent the mockery of a heroism that you misunderstand and misconstrue. If so, then I recognise in this purpose, alone, more virtue than the sword, and, that purpose served, I let the sword go without regret. The higher crusader, the real crusader, has prevailed.”

  “Justinian wins match two by points,” announced the officiator, their review finished. “Series victory.”

  There was a tiny, scattered applause amongst the crowd. It came only from the corner of stands with a direct view of the duellists, the official broadcast switching straight from The Cripple’s match to commercials. The number clapping was so low as to be countable - two Indonesian kids and three Village players familiar with the knight from his questing in the Slums.

  To each of these, Justinian turned and gave a bow. The action, by habit, had a chivalric magnanimity, like one bowing before an emperor.

  The Third Gate, kneeling in her loss, could see that The Cripple had out-plotted her. He'd planted much deeper into the brain of this toady that’d blocked her the insidious mindworms of betrayal.

  The thought was saddening - and lonesome.

  When she’d first arrived in this zone, Justinian had been selected for her prophecies out of some appreciation for his work. The character of the hopeless knight, persisting half-a-year against failure and local ridicule, had seemed a marvellous freak of roleplay, as intricate and devoted as herself wandering the planet eating dirt.

  But how wrong her estimation had been, how devastatingly wrong. That supposedly unbreakable crusader had been dismantled after a mere two weeks of The Cripple whispering in his ear like some anti-friend Shaitan. Justinian’s vows, when one peeled away their layers of superficial spiritualty, had only been to his sword in its most material regard, as an item of high market value, and his renunciation was simply a matter of dangling before him a more profitable calculation.

  Of the true devotees to roleplay in its purest sense, to roleplay for roleplay’s sake, there was left herself alone, a vagrant dressed in beggar’s rags yet enriched with the treasures of a soul unyielding.

  In the extremity of this devotion, she spoke nothing of her grief, this stage no longer hers. Instead, with mystical jubilation, she bowed again and kissed once more the sacred soil of Saana.

  “All glory of this day to You,” she sang her praise, “O Transmuter of Revilements, O Angel Sinning into Heaven! By passing through your passing heart, O Champion of Friends, The False Gate’s tin has transformed to gold, rubies, and diamonds of insight, with which abundance you have purchased me from my enslavement to a Lesser Way. By passing through your passing heart, O Champion of The End, His poison has distilled into this two-fold wine, which on my addict’s tongue does sober me of false intoxicants yet makes me drunk on Causes higher! This Lady Witch, awakening from her heresy, now comprehends the origins and justice of her incandidacy to Enter. I, who have proclaimed to love both our worlds, have loved in action only one. I have gouged the eye and torn the tongue of the first half of my birth, and I have thereby rendered myself a Loser and a Cripple, too, too lame to see or taste the higher delights of the singularity Beyond. For this sin of halves—of which I confess not the strength to re-unite, my nature pre-destined as A Thing Divided—for my being in this world but not of both, it has been my righteous punishment to stand Behind you and Beneath you, O Chosen One, as all other Losers and Cripples must. We, O Champion of Friends, O Champion of The End, must witness the glow of Heaven’s golden heights only in the dim trail of your shadow passing through Us.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Rising to her feet, she faked a sudden seizure of mystical possession, biting off her tongue, the bloody remnants of which she spat out, and using one of her hidden knives to scoop out her right eyeball.

  A private message during this to the knight told him to kneel for a Christian ritual of baptism. Since he was going to lose, she argued, he might as well have fun and let her play into her routine of failed predictions against The Cripple. She and the RP community were owed at least this favour. Justinian reluctantly caved.

  With her remaining eye rolled back, she used her wooden parody sword to knight him and painted a cross on his forehead of the other eye’s blood mixed with the arena sand. As she drew, she repeated the names of the defeated competitors spelling out her trashtalk prophecy. Her theatrics managed to draw a couple extra dozen in the crowd from the competing attractions of the pre-final commercials, the bikini-clad cheerleaders now bathing in a new beer product being distributed for free sampling throughout the stands.

  “But, O Son of Night,” she rounded off her chant in a haunted voice, “O Knight Before The Sun, our Mission for The End is not here done. This future glimpsed in the winking of the blood foretells of you—who leapt into the abyss of treachery and falseness, who landed on the heights of a more authentic honour—the resolution in your gentle fist of further contradictions. By kneeling to this dark master, you, Disciple of Shadow and Shadow’s Discipline, will rise above Him in the light. By your disclaiming of the sword avowed, you, O Possessor and Disposer, have the sword avowed reclaimed." She added in that another cryptic Easter egg - assuming He upheld the deal. "And, by the staying of your passive hand, you, O Key Unlocking, O Key Blocking, have The Gates surpassed.”

  As she finished this declaration, the audience, in a miraculous turnaround, broke into a million-strong chorus of cheering and masculine hooting.

  The Third Gate, at first smiling tentatively bright, then smiling confidently brighter when she noticed them cheering in her direction, received a sharp kidney jab of disappointment when she spotted the real target. A cheerleader nearby on the other side of the arena's transparent dome had lost her bikini top. With a roleplayer’s eye for performance, she immediately detected the fraudulence of an orchestrated stunt, following in the wardrobe malfunction lineage of 2004’s Nipplegate.

  Cursing this whore, cursing the lechers of this heathen age, she took refuge in the comforting irony of knowing that The Cripple, by so thoroughly brainwashing this kid to win previous money-grubbing tournaments, had accidentally coordinated the circumstances of his own righteous punishment.

  Using that as inspiration to grow her mistaken smile into one of mystical beatitude, she raised her prop sword to the night sky. She then inverted the weapon, and, doing a quick callback to the snake apocalypse subplot of The Cripple’s death-orgy, swallowed its blade whole like a python (actually desummoning it), fell on the ground, and slithered away from this godless world of smut to one of the tunnel holes left by the battle.

  Her departure left a creepy, mysterious snailtrail of blood (from popping bloodpacks).

  Once beneath and off the stage, FuzzyGirl35 flicked a message of thanks and farewell to her troupe then blocked them, her collaborative arc complete.

  She skipped the walk of shame by discretely hitting the suicide option. As a cloud of motes, she flew back out, savouring the puzzlements of the knight, soon returning to a drill, and the select few in the crowd. Her rising vantage point revealed The Cripple, napping sweetly amidst the debris of battle, napping amidst the portents of sweeter things.

  Higher yet, fusing with the sky, she took in the millions crowded in front of the stadium, as dense, numerous, and fanatically devoted as Hajj pilgrims, worshipping their new god of entertainment. Around them—in a gorgeous conflict, perhaps another omen—fanned a scene of apocalypse, the markets and the festival grounds annihilated by the attacks of earlier, broken like the false idols of this emerging cult. Fleeing this ruin, circumnavigating the crimson city and its equal sin, stretched for tens of kilometres across the grassy plains an ant trail of migrants. Wheeling and marching as they did for the in-land horizon, they seemed to be returning to that truth beyond the arrogant view of man, that truth conserved eternally in the dark bosom of the wilds.

  As she meditated on this wider picture, an odd idea came to mind, an answer.

  It emerged from several disparate happenings, from The Cripple’s exhortations to her against roleplaying, from the image of him exhausted amongst her slaughtered monster friends, from the bizarre extravagance of this tournament, from the knight’s lectures on a sword, from the historical transformation logic between The Cripple’s 1v1 and the 1vMany, and from, of all odd things, one of the minor subplots she’d been denied the chance to ever properly portray.

  Within her sketches charging Justinian of betrayal had been an earlier fact and accusation of betrayal against The Cripple, a.k.a. The False Gate, formerly The Second Gate.

  Once upon a time, he—as the numbering of her own descendent Third Gate character suggested—had been a roleplayer if not officially then in soul, had known the splendours of the performer, the duellist, and the mystic, which together formed a hybrid outsider role, a ‘Way of Solitude’, one so engrossing as to allow the practitioner to be called a cripple or a lunatic hobo and to laugh it off as the empty prattle of the uninitiated.

  Yet, as one could see of him today, he’d deformed into a gloomy spoilsport, a sellout, a ‘Tyrant’, someone so hostile to fun as to strip it from those around him. At some point, The Cripple had abandoned The Way. The question for her, who knew its attractions better than anyone else, was why? This enigma had been one of her main reasons for adventuring to this place – perhaps, as she soul-searched in defeat, the main reason. It’d underlaid her absurd sketches about a universal anti-RP campaign, which’d sought, in the extravagance, to fill in the chasm of inexplicability behind his transformation, from the most ascetic and joyful of beings to a fragile bozo obsessing over cash and wallowing after a rejection from some low-IQ author. What had happened to The Invincible Cripple? Why was he such a lame bitch now?

  As she surveyed the stadium and the many surrounding signs of apocalypse, a possible answer manifested. Maybe, just like the crusader and his sword, there was no act of betrayal from The Cripple’s view, the old vows of the mystic continuing in some obscure, elevated fashion through this epilogue of by-gone virtuosity.

  When she recalled the sermons of the 1v1’s evolution into the 1vMany, the new role of a tyrant did preserve the concept in a distorted regard, a single individual imposing his will against the despised masses. This tournament likewise did so in a comedic parody as he monopolised the competition. In the side-battles, too, which’d obliterated the arena and the region around the stadium, the heart of the same thing endured, drumming its repetitive, changeless, solitary, misanthropic rhythm.

  FuzzyGirl35 pondered these parallels. She weighed and measured them with her experience decoding the lore. She poured through their layers in search of the cryptic unity at their nexus. And then—with the embarrassed laugh of a defeated soul—she dismissed them.

  Nope – all this was just another multi-layered deception by The False Gate, an onion of rotten nothing.

  But, she thought—descending from the sky at a respawn point on the slum's interior edge and merging with the evacuating horde, amongst whom the spreading news of the knight's victory was adding a light note to the paranoid whispers of catastrophe and death gods—one could at least take comfort in the knowledge that a minor justice would be dealt quite soon. Of the many destined to plummet from the sky on this immortal day, this traitor of The Way was not exempted.