The New Suchi Arena.

Henry was sprinting across the Pitfall map with a Small-Island Shooting shortbow in hand. Reaching a pit, he leapt over it, twisted around mid-air and fired a quick shot behind him.

A Cutthroat chasing him, about to jump, took the arrow through their eyeball, then their unconscious body tipped into the pit, impaling them on a bed of spikes.

“SwordgodXYYYX eliminated!” announced the officiator. “HF wins! -1, + 1.”

The amount of 1v1 rating Henry was awarded for each duel was slowing down, as his score soared above that of these noobs.

Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!

“Victory again! Yay, Senior, you’re the best!”

By the side of the arena, Septic Rose was jumping up and down, acting as a one-woman cheerleading squad.

Henry’d told her she could use an arena slot herself for practice, but she’d claimed that due to her inexperience she would benefit more from observing him - stalking.

Although he could have pointed out the flaws in this excuse, he’d refrained from doing so in accordance with a soft-handed strategy he was using to rid himself of her. The theory was as follows: if her warped mind interpreted being killed as positive, then the reverse might hold true and she would be repulsed by kindness.

It wasn't a great tactic, but Henry hadn't conquered psychology yet.

“Thank you, Zhangmei!” he shouted affectionately. “Your delightful cheers keep my battery topped up!”

Septic Rose blanked out momentarily, before turning aside and cupping her face. “Oh, Senior, please, I’m not worthy of this compliment.”

“Don’t undersell yourself!”

The Cutthroat that Henry’d beaten heaved themselves out of the spike pit, the leather segments of their armour tattered and blood-stained.

“A tough fight, that was, partner. Ya mind skipping the last round and givin’ me pointers on that dagger-grapplin from before?”

Hearing this request, Henry closed his eyes as though his eardrums were being caressed by a sweet sonata.

This is why he’d purchased this stadium.

Here, he could find kids with their heads on straight. No drunken disorder, no mental illnesses, less Village politics, no pointless fun - just the pure pursuit of self-betterment, just the climb.

“Of course, young man!”

Taking the Cutthroat aside, he began to pretzel-fold them while imparting his many insights from Jaguar Fang.

The Cutthroat’s most glaring issue was over-relying on dodging attacks instead of allowing their armour to take the brunt of the damage, a common mistake for newbies.

Metal armour of a typical thickness had enough endurance to negate a full-stab before being compromised at the point of impact. Thus, incoming attacks should be viewed as posing a danger not to the whole body but merely to one's unarmoured parts. Although conceptually simple, this mindset-shift drastically changed combat.

For grappling, the most impactful manifestation was in the takedown, the attempt to bring the opponent to the ground so they could be manipulated. Against a skilled opponent, someone without armour, or not utilising their armour, might have to dance around for minutes before finding an opening to close in without being hit. Conversely, someone in full-plate gear could confidently charge the instant they entered melee range. Between these two extremes was a spectrum of difficulty depending on the extent of one’s armour coverage.

More complex armour effects existed in altering which grappling positions were effective and, in group combat, how safely one could shift between positions.

Henry laid the Cutthroat out on their back and sat on their stomach. “This is a dominant grappling position in general, but for your class, it means an assured victory. The opponent’s attacks will bounce harmlessly off your chest plate, while yours...” He slipped out his dagger and pretended to carve up the metal of the Cutthroat’s stomach “.... Focus your training on arriving in this position and you'll gain an easy 50 to 60 rating.”

Simultaneously, he fielded questions from Septic Rose pretending to be a noob rather than the second strongest player in this zone.

-Zhangmei33: Senior, why does your armour have dark patches?

-Henry Flower: A very perceptive observation! Those are sections that have been thickened as a defence against magical attacks, which ignore 50% of one's armour. When a spell I can't dodge fully is about to hit, the damage can be minimised by shifting to redirect it to one of these reinforced patches.

-Zhangmei33: Boy, that sounds tiring. Can’t you make it thicker everywhere?

-Henry Flower: Fantastic follow-up question! Since the total weight of armour we can equip is limited by our Strength stat, this technique allows for more coverage of the rest of the body. Efficiency!

-Zhangmei33: Senior, my armour’s different. Should I change it?

-Henry Flower: No, no, no. Since you're a novice, it’s best to ignore these subtler details for now and focus on improving areas with more impact.

-Zhangmei33: OK!

Cheetah Henry, sprinting across a children’s playground, pounced out of the way of an arrow, then dove behind a slide for a cover. Cancelling his form, he pulled out a standard-issue Duelling Bread Loaf and began wolfing it down to replenish his Stamina.

Behind him, a Bowman on top of a two-story tall geodesic dome, armed with his own bread loaf, frowned. They’d have to give up their defensive position or lose the match on points.

In the event that neither party eliminated the other within 5 minutes, the winner would be decided through a point system. For each minute of the match, 1 point was awarded to whoever dealt the most damage, the numbers being tracked by the officiators. If no damage had been inflicted, then the point would go to whoever had played the least defensively, thereby disincentivising turtling tactics.

By Henry's side, Septic Rose was playing on a swing set, swinging in an exaggerated, youthful pendulum.

“Zhangmei became an Earthfriend because she wants to make friends with everyone. But, Senior, it doesn’t seem to suit someone as domineering as yourself. Wouldn’t a Cutthroat or a Qi Master be better than this disgusting, hippy roleplayer class?”

Henry, cheeks bulging with bread, rolled his eyes.

-Henry Flower: Hmm...Is that so? To tell you a secret, I used to be a Cutthroat, quite a famous one at that.

Her mouth popped open in shock.

-Henry Flower: A world-famous duellist. However, I had one flaw: my unspectacular reaction speed.

“Really?!”

“I concede!” yelled the Bowman to their rear.

“Cupid of Slaughter eliminated! HF wins! -5, +5.”

Henry replaced the bread loaf with a lamington made from higher level ingredients, which would restore his Stamina faster.

-Henry Flower: my mediocre reaction speed, my critical flaw. At the time, I had an Earthfriend companion who claimed that the delay was caused by my violent actions running in conflict with my peaceful inner nature. ‘By acting like a Scorpio when you’re a Pisces,’ he would say, ‘you have disturbed the flow of your chakras’.

Septic Rose squinted in irritation at the thought of that hippy Earthfriend peaceloveharmony. Whenever she’d been stalking Cripple-gege in the presence of that guy, he would always try to lecture her into becoming a passivist. What a braindead stance to have in a video game.

“Gross. Why didn’t you kill him?”

-Henry Flower: Why didn’t I? Hmm...perhaps because he wasn’t wrong. I’d always dismissed his advice as the illogical, incoherent ramblings of a hippy, but, now that I’m an Earthfriend, I do feel as though a previously unnoticed tension has been shed. Passivism, astrology, veganism, perhaps these are my Path. That must be the reason I gave my character the last name Flower; inside of me, the delicate inner Senior had been yearning for release.’

Rose’s expressionless face made for a comic juxtaposition with her swinging.

In a stone maze, a ‘female’ Beast Tamer charged around a corner and received a through her chest.

“Amelia Beastheart eliminated! HF wins! -10, +10.”

“Oi!” shouted the Beast Tamer in a deep baritone. “That was unfair, you sneaky bugger. Give me a real match.”

“You’ve already lost three rounds,” replied Henry. “Vamoose.”

“Mate, do you know what village I represent?” The Beast Tamer tugged at a turquoise armband with a picture of an onion.

Henry, sensing that there was no civil discussion to be had, went to a corner of the maze where two walls met and, using a Nilkan Freerunning technique, wedged one foot against each wall and began to climb.

The Beast Tamer was silenced by the rapid ascent, before remembering his mission. “OI, GET BACK DOWN HERE, YOU LITTLE WEASEL!”

At the top, Henry summoned the officiator's attention by tapping his identification-emblem, then gestured for them to deal with the Beast Tamer.

“Senior, how did you learn all these martial arts?”

Rose had already been on top of the wall, her legs dangling over the edge, while her hands scribbled on a notepad using a quill with a fluffy pink feather.

Henry, catching a Vegienut Smoothie flying from the catering area, squatted beside her.

Her notes were written in a cutified hanzi.

“YOU IGNORE ME AGAIN AND I’M GONNA CALL UP THE LADS!”

Henry winced at the smoothie’s blandness.

-Henry Flower: I've learned them simply by observing the universe. For example, yesterday at the markets, a thief snatched my ethical coffee beans. While pursuing her, I gained dozens of epiphanies into the art of street movement.

“YOU CALLED THE GUARDS? ARE YOU HAVING A LAUGH, MATE?”

Septic Rose wrote down ‘observe the universe’ and circled the phrase for emphasis. “What about Sea Dragon?”

-Henry Flower: Sea Dragon? Never heard of it. If you’re talking about the long-range nuking style with which I defeated the Beast Tamer, I invented that while on a moonlit stroll down by the Suchi harbour. In the waves, amongst the reflection of the stars, I noticed a crab on a piece of driftwood fending off a seagull by throwing stones. Aha, I thought, so combat can also be conducted in this manner.

“Wow, Senior, you’re so smart!”

“OI! TELL THEM TO GET THEIR GRUBBY MITS OFF ME!”

On the edge of the Hamlet arena, Abigail was waiting for Henry to finish up his duel.

The shock of her friend drugging her guild leader had faded as it became increasingly evident from watching the two that their relationship was, indeed, ‘unique’.

Him being in a position to be stalked by someone so prominent was fairly astonishing. However, Abigail had become surprise-fatigued from witnessing too many abnormalities too quickly.

On the whole, this was a typical experience with her friend, who’d been weird for as long as she'd known him.

For one, he'd been in her school year despite being two years younger, and, even for a grade-skipper, he'd received an unusual amount of favouritism from the teachers, some of whom seemed to look at him like the second coming of Jesus.

Outside of school, when the gang had once been shopping, he’d ditched them with the excuse of being needed back home, only for Abigail to catch him later jamming on the keyboards for a moosestep-jazz fusion street act.

Then, there was that one time he read her 1800-volume manga collection in less than a month.

There was plenty more, but her friend seemed to go out of his way to mask whatever area he was obsessively trying to master at any given time.

From what she had witnessed, though, nothing he could do in this game could truly, truly blow her mind, not even if he were revealed to be The Tyrant himself.

Abigail snapped her fingers.

“Ohhh. My god.”

Henry actually was The Tyrant.

“Hahahaha!”

She burst into laughter, just as she had during their dinner when the suspicion had first crossed her mind and she’d pictured this sinister figure being scammed into hanging out with her noobs friends.

How scandalous...

“In The Light of Kasey eliminated! HF wins. -0, +0.”

Abigail wiped away a tear as Henry stepped out of a replica church alongside a shell-shocked Miracleworker. When the pair exchanged firm handshakes, a Chameleon unstealthed behind them.

Good for him, thought Abigail, but she had a more pressing matter.

“Henry!” she called out.

When he spotted her, he summoned a cookie in reward for her latest quest, defeating a Beast Tamer using only a bow.

Abigail raised her eyebrows imperiously, then messaged him in a haughty tone. ‘Only one? You’re going to have to grease me up better than this now if you want me to keep your dark secret.”

He’d thought himself so clever getting her hooked on these cookies, whose recipe he'd definitely invented himself, and ‘incentivising’ her into enduring his hellish training regime. Guess again, punk.

Seeing him scratch his helmet in confusion (Which secret?), she crossed her arms bossily. ‘Cathy might react poorly to news of someone being the leader of a certain guild.'

-Henry Flower: Oh, me being The Tyrant? Cathy already knows. That's why she's been babying me so excessively.

Abigail frowned.

How could Cathy have figured it before her? She was such a turbonoob that, whenever an opponent charged her, she abandoned her healing duties to flee as if she were in mortal danger.

Also, why would Cathy react to that by babying him? He was The Tyrant!

-Henry Flower: Yeah...Alex must have ratted me out while scheming to bring me here. The youth these days have no respect for privacy.

‘Youth?’

-Henry Flower: It's ironic smack talk, Abigail, Chinese-style, pretending you’re someone’s elder when you're blatantly not. This is how you roll when you're The Tyrant. Three more Beast Tamers with the bow. Tattletales get none of grandpa’s home baking.

A lone cookie levitated across the battlefield to her. Its flight was watched by an envious Chameleon Rose, who had to resist stealing it with a .

Abigail, catching the treat, stared down at it, tiny in her palms, her stomach groaning with despair, her mouth salivating.

Henry was patrolling his research area, perusing the martial arts manuals while Rose snuck peeks over his shoulder.

“Senior, you claimed to learn by observing the universe.”

“Are books not a part of the universe?”

Spotting an error in a user-made manual on shield use, he frowned, then he commanded a levitating quill to correct it.

While the quill was scribbling away, Rose bent over the page and marvelled at the ink flowing out.

“Senior, why study so many different martial arts?”

“None of them alone suit me,” he answered bluntly, distracted by the atrocity of this manual. “I need a piece of everything.”

Septic Rose, who had eventually identified that foreboding, tyrannical aspect of his playstyle after her countless deaths, understood immediately.

"I believe in you, Senior!"

"Shh."

Cheers rang from the grandstand on the opposite end of the stadium, where the tournament had reached the climactic last battle between an Arcanist and a Bowman.

With everyone including Abigail having left to watch the finale, Henry and Rose remained alone in his practice arena. He’d decided to use this opportunity to ramp his positivity-revulsion tactic to the extreme with a special, hyper-positive, hyper-praise-filled 1-on-1 training session.

“Senior, I don’t understand why I need to reserve two Fauna charges while playing Celestial.”

“That was a REMARKABLE question, student Zhangmei. While there are some exceptions, the flexibility provided by the two Fauna Charges isn’t normally worth the trade-off. If someone is closing in you, you can Cheetah into to extend the gap, Silverback into to stall for ally help or into for a surprise retaliation, Chameleon into for an alternative escape method. Are you jotting all this down?”

“I am, Senior!”

As she wrote, her head grooved along with a song. From her throat came the hum of a guitar riff. “Da-na-na-na-na-na-nugh-nugh-naaaa, da-na-na-na-na-na-nugh-nugh...”

Henry stopped.

Wait a minute.

It was Rose, not the fake persona, who was enjoying this charade.

Where had he botched his assessment of her stalking behaviour?

After getting to know Rose’s older sibling, Henry’d had an epiphany that her developing an attachment to him from being killed repeatedly was an adverse by-product of her being tortured by her brother as a kid. From this, she seemed to have developed a coping mechanism that warped negative experiences into positive ones. As an aside, this realisation had added an extra sinister angle to her stalking, which actually made Henry far more uncomfortable than the stalking itself.

It was for this reason that Henry’d hypothesised that her warped perspective might cause kindness to be interpreted negatively. At least, her brother operated with this mindset, viewing charity as an intolerable insult. Alas, this prediction seemed to be incorrect.

In fact, now that Henry reflected on matters further, it’d been many years since he’d last killed her, yet the stalking behaviour hadn't gone extinct as one might expect if dying was the sole reinforcement.

So what kept her around, then? Was the bond of death permanent once formed? Had the initial motivator been replaced by a new one? Maybe stalking was intrinsically fulfilling?

The spectators at the opposite end of the stadium erupted in applause when the Bowman shoved a spear through the Arcanist’s thigh.

“The Indigo Guru eliminated, Artemis8492 wins!”

That’s right, thought Henry, he didn’t have time to be distracted by this stalker issue.

Well, technically, he did, with The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, but it was the principle.

He discarded the ill-fitting mask of friendliness.

“Senior?”

“Acting without an external incentive is roleplaying – no more. The jig is up, Rose. Mask off, too.”

She blanked momentarily, the foreign exchange student program freezing.

A breath later, it rebooted in the form of a confused smile. “Senior, who’s Rose? I’m Zhangmei.”

The word 'Senior' made him shiver in disgust.

“BAGH!”

He threw his arms in the air, then began to pace in a circle, his hands frantically shifting back and forth between poses like an angry Italian on fast-forward, clutching his head, pleading to the sky, bunching into fists, holding a plate of spaghetti.

This crazy stalker bitch. Why did she have to be a world-class assassin instead of a tank or another role easier to evade? What the hell was he supposed to do? Murder? She’s into that! Blackmail? That’s never worked either. Poisons? Drugging her repeatedly would result in him getting banned, even though this inconsistently-moderated game extended none of the same courtesy to victims of stalking.

He froze, one hand gavel-hammering against the palm of the other.

Yes, that could work.

He would exploit the thing she cherished most: himself.

Turning back to her, he gave her a hard stare. “Rose, I’m going to speak straight. This exchange student act is creeping me out and distracting me from my plans. I can tolerate you hanging around, but, assuming you're my fan, you need to drop the act lest my mission be compromised.”

All the perkiness and optimism draining from her features, she replied in a monotone. “Sorry.”

“Great,” he nodded with relief, before immediately resuming his hard stare. “Rose, I’m going to speak even straighter. Having a stalker is also creeping me out and distracting me from my plans. Assuming you're my fan, you’ve got to put a stop to this behaviour lest my mission be compromised.”

Her eyes darted away.

But Henry had expected this.

“Too big of a request? Then meet me mid-way - and here I’m speaking not simply as a stalkee but also as a person who has known you for half a decade and who is so wracked with concern for your mental health that it is impeding his performance. Rose, visit a god-damn shrink. Stalking is not normal behaviour. In fact, it’s quite strange. Now, if you can’t build up the courage to book an appointment yourself, I will personally make the arrangements. I’ll hire you an expert team of braindocs that’ll get your head so straight you’ll make The Buddha himself look like a crack addict wearing a sweater made of a flea-infested hair. Can you do it? If not for you, then for me.”

Septic Rose, her jaw clenching slightly, struggled out a small nod of compliance, before spinning 180 degrees on her heels in what Henry assumed was embarrassment.

He patted himself on the shoulder.

Good game. Easy.

However, with her back to him, Septic Rose’s blank features scrunched up with the grin she'd been suppressing in order to avoid blowing her true cover.

Her secret: she’d been in therapy for ages now and could stop stalking any time she wanted.

While the crazy-perhaps-not-crazy-but-still-probably-crazy Septic Rose was trying to re-equip her cold-blooded disguise, Henry cast his gaze beyond her, to a commotion in the distance.

“A decent challenger is finally arriving," he said. "Excellent.”

Heading towards them was a short, wiry Arcanist with a basket-hilted broadsword on his hip. This figure was flanked on all sides by a rowdy mob patting him in congratulations and jokingly requesting that he share the farm given to him for placing second.

“Seems tough," stated Rose. "Can you beat him?”

“Today?” Henry chomped into a poisoned cookie. “Maybe one match.”

Since this Indian practitioner of Wingless Dragon was rank 32 in Suchi, Henry’s chance of victory should be around 15% under the current poison dosage, the exact figure varying depending on the martial art he used and the map.

The Arcanist, paying no heed to his followers, came to the base of Henry’s arena and stopped at the rope cordon. Feeling the sting of defeat, he sought one of the exclusive spots, with which he could excise his weaknesses.

“Since you seem unengaged," said The Indigo Guru, "I was hoping you’d allow me to skip ahead in the queue.”

The mob made a racket goading Henry to accept, but he’d already mentally filtered them out.

“Map-, split-, side-choice, pick ‘em.”

Recognising the unsatisfied gaze of a fellow climber, he would not deny them.

The Arcanist paused a moment before answering. “Instead of those, could I be more presumptuous and select the style? Rarely does one get to duel a Triple Dragon Master."

“That I can't do," Henry replied with a small laugh. "We don't want to skip too far ahead in the saga. You can experience them separately if you want, though. First?"

“How about a mirror match?”

Henry, equipping his own broadsword, signalled to an officiator to randomise the map and choices, as was done in the official tournament.

“Sand. Split-choice to HF.”

Henry clicked his tongue. Sand was his worst map - just plain, flat, featureless sand, with nothing to exploit except himself and the opponent.

“East-West,” he called.

The Indigo Guru ducked under the rope cordon. “North.”