A dreamless place, tens of millions of bodies stacked in a pile, all of them in various states of dying.

The bottom layer was composed of gargantuan monsters with tentacles split, wings severed, fangs smashed, eyesockets emptied.

Above them lay the smaller monsters in no better state, whose crowded numbers had been expanded with the latest addition of hundreds of thousands of arrow-riddled wolves.

Then there was the layer of soldiers, the elves, the dwarves, and the humans in armour pierced and crushed.

Above them, there were the criminals with nooses around their necks, decapitated heads, and faces blue with poison.

And the topmost layer was the citizens, the men, the women, and the children, whose skin had been blackened by the flames of the castles in which they’d sheltered, turned green from the plagues that’d swept their lands.

None were fully-dead, though. Stuck for eternity in the last moments of their lives, the dying squirmed and shoved, wailed and howled to be freed from the crushing mass of each other.

On the face of this mountain of the near-dead, a solitary figure was climbing.

Using the bodies as hand- and foot-holds, he was forced to dig his fingers deep into their flesh to secure his grip. The closer he neared the summit, the steeper grew the mountain, the fiercer the gale winds that eternally threatened to knock him off.

He’d lost count of how many times he’d fallen and been forced to restart. This time, too, he would fall, he knew. Nevertheless, he could not stop the climb.

As he reached for the arm of a weapon's smuggler with liquid gold dribbling down their nose, he felt a hand clasp around his ankle.

“Help me, please!”

Staring down, he saw a malnourished boy of sixteen. Their upper half protruded from the mountain, the lower section being sandwiched inside. Their other hand was held on top of their head, as though trying to balance it. They stank of an expensive, spearminty, cola-ish perfume and the blood that streamed down their throat.

“Don’t you remember me?! The driver! You did this to me! With the axe!”

I remember, the solitary figure tried to reply, but his lips were sewn shut by barbed wire and the words were mangled into a grotesque mumble.

“Why?! Because of the Primordial Path?! I needed a way to feed my family! It wouldn’t have come to this if you’d fixed Suchi!”

Mumbling an apology, the solitary figure used his foot to stomp upon the boy’s fingers.

The boy grabbed him with his other hand, releasing his head. His neck, which'd been held intact only by the spine, pried apart like a mouth and revealed the pink interior of his windpipe.

The head, flapping in the gale winds, continued to scream. “Please! Stop! Szamar! What about Szamar, my donkey?! Has he not served you well? Repay me! Release me!”

It cannot be done. You are dead.

Landing two kicks on the boy’s wrist that dislodged the grip, he rushed to scramble out of their reach, climbing higher and higher up the mountain.

“Please! Don’t leave me here! It hurts! I cannot breathe! I cannot breathe! Please! I could have been something different! Come back! Please! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you...”

The New Suchi Arena.

Sword return misdirection. Wingless Dragon Takes Flight. Nine-Fists, Realignment. For Friends in The Branches. Brainspear. Steal – Helmet. Facestab.

Sword return misdirection

Henry, having improvised a combo from several of the martial arts he'd learned so far, initiated it by resummoning his sword, the lights of the weapon flooding out and condensing in the sheath in his belt.

Wingless Dragon Takes Flight

Releasing his grip, he crouched slightly and pressed both palms against the Arcanist’s torso in preparation for a shove that would put them back into Raging Husband range.

The Arcanist, noticing the sword and recognising Wingless Dragon Takes Flight, offered no resistance, since the extra distance would favour him.

Nine-Fists, Realignment

Henry, with the top of his helmet obstructing their view of his eyes, activated bullet-time.

When he began to move forward to put his weight into the shove, his foot rapidly darted behind the Arcanist’s. His arms, meanwhile, shifted position, one sneaking upwards, the other flattening its forearm against their torso.

Using a Nine Fists technique, Henry used his head, his hands and his elbows to manipulate their body into a more pliable position and raise them off their feet.

For Friends In The Branches

Next was a Jaguar Fang technique designed to toss an opponent to squadmates overhead. His arms shifting once more to grab the Arcanist by the crotch and torso, he exploded upwards, out of his crouched position, and threw the light-weight Arcanist above him.

Brainspear

Stepping to reposition under their falling body, he placed his spell-hand against the crown of their helmet and shot a into their brain, dropping them to within 2% of elimination.

Steal – Helmet

He slipped a dagger out of his belt that he’d stealthily summoned alongside his sword. With a technique from Nilkan Freerunning, which was as much about theft as escaping the authorities, he cut the straps of their helmet, while his hand attached to their crown dislodged the helmet, exposing their face for the finishing st—

His eyes flicked down, noticing their sword moving at a non-slow-mo pace, the Arcanist having used bullet-time, too.

The glowing point of their weapon was about to enter his thigh.

190 milliseconds later, Henry was covered by the shield of his .

But it was too slow.

“HF eliminated!” shouted the officiator. “The Indigo Guru wins. -5, +3.”

The delay caused the crowd to erupt with laughter.

Amongst the amused mass, a Bowman had a dark, puzzled expression under a mask he'd equipped to avoid being mobbed by his fans.

Why was The Tyrant here?

Why no disguise?

When did he learn to fight?

He felt a slap to his shoulder.

“Artemis, Is that you? Impressions on the—”

The Bowman, ignoring them, realised that they needed to inform their boss immediately.

Their character blinked out of existence as they disconnected from the game.

At Henry’s feet, The Arcanist landed with a soft thump in the sand, their sword, still lodged in his thigh, being extruded by his martial body’s healing effect.

His heart shrinking with a change in the poison, he clicked his tongue.

Well, those were the downsides of the hubris phase. He concocted stupid plans and forgot that he had the reaction speed of a turd sliding down a toilet bowl.

Into his peripheral vision, a shish kebab with chunks of Blue Manatee appeared. It was being offered by Rose, who’d been close-range stalking during the fight in her stealthed Chameleon form.

“You shouldn’t have," he replied, accepting the gift.

Bending over, he helped the Arcanist to their feet, then gave them the kebab in case Rose had laced it with something dodgy.

The Indigo Guru had a lost expression, his mind struggling to unpack the rapid events of that duel. “Was that a Wingless Dragon combo?”

Henry signalled for a Carcassworker to repair the Arcanist’s helmet strap, removed his own helmet, pulled out a bowling-ball-sized mandarin without skin, and bit into a slice.

-Henry Flower: Parts of it.

The Indigo Guru, seeing Henry moving on, began to eat to replenish his Stamina, too. The shish kebab tasted delicious, much better than the typical offerings in The Slums. By their side, a girl was staring daggers at him...weird.

Indigo prodded at a suspicion he’d been having since watching the Henry's duel against Destined To Rule, which had grown during that fight.

-The Indigo Guru: That variation of Endlessly Devours The Flesh seems challenging to execute with the addition of the stutter stepping...

-Henry Flower: Motor-wise, yes; mentally, it's simpler at this Tier with fewer spells to track.

-The Indigo Guru: Is that so?

-Henry Flower: I wouldn’t bother learning it, though. At this level, it’s only useful against Earthfriends in their clumsy Gorilla form; without stronger insta-cast spells to disable the enemy, the chain is easy to disrupt.

-The Indigo Guru: Ah.

-Henry Flower: If you were really interested, you could create a workable version for Raging Husband and Human ranges by stealing techniques from Nine Fists, Wankalgalese Shortsword, Hardman Handaxe, and any grappling martial art.

-The Indigo Guru: There are less than two weeks to the recruitment tournament.

-Henry Flower: True, I guess.

When their Stamina was replenished, they fought in Mesoamerican Ruins with Henry using Grass Dragon. The strongest of his three dragon arts for him, he expertly kited the Arcanist, constantly back and forth between his Cheetah and human forms while pelting him with . In the end, though, he still lost when the poison paralysed his leg.

After that match, The Indigo Guru, who’d almost torn his hair out trying to catch him, knew for sure.

“Your mental GQ is very high," said the Arcanist.

Henry raised his eyebrows in innocence. “Men-Tal...G...Que? Never heard of it.”

A chuckle came from above, Septic Rose having been stalking from on top of a pyramid.

Mental GQ, the converse of motor skill GQ, was a measure of one's brain functions – how quickly one could process information, determine distances, track cooldowns, formulate strategies, etc.

Henry, who was a freak in this domain, scored 197 on the metric, at least before The Overdream. He would never state that number out loud, though, as it was one of the highest of the game's 200 million players and would be a direct admission of his identity.

Not as The Cripple, but as The Tyrant.

His secret:

Although today they called him The Tyrant of Saana due to the perceived oppressiveness of his guild, the title predated both The Company and Saana III.

He'd first received it in Saana II, during the 4-month blitzkrieg campaign that followed Operation Phantom Limbs.

That’d been when he’d assumed the position he’d actually been recruited by Alex for, the one which would go on to truly define his gaming career. This wasn’t duelling, researching, espionage, strategising, or any other petty task. Instead, he stepped into Saana’s grandest, most prestigious domain, commanding troops on the fields of war.

In many ways, he’d been ill-suited for the job. He was young, inexperienced, indecisive, unassertive, risk-averse.

His worst flaw was that he’d been too soft. Most of the game’s best generals had had sociopathic tendencies that enabled them to thrive in the stress of battle and make the many snap decisions trading lives for more lives. Henry did share qualities with them, like being a Machiavellian, who had no moral issue with employing tools like poison or murder if the goals were justified. However, empathy-wise, he'd been on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, such that even the deaths of his NPC troops disturbed him. While they may have been 0s and 1s, the terrible game had made them feel too realitic for him.

But these weaknesses had been overshadowed by his one true strength: his ability to think quicker than ordinary people, i.e. his ‘mental GQ’.

While it didn’t have much impact in duelling, it was everything in commanding in Saana. Battles with their spells, their diverse troop types, their odd terrain were pure, informational chaos. The Commanders, who dared to try taming this beast, would link with their units via the Peopleworker class, rapidly directing them using skills like to indicate objectives and to flit through the POVs of scouts and read the flow of battle. In this role, the higher one’s ‘mental GQ’, the better they performed. It affected every aspect, from detecting enemy weak points to judging the crucial timings and distances that made up much of warfare.

Alex, when searching for talent, had predicted that Henry would be decent in this trait because Henry’s gamertag had risen to the top of the ladder for several real-time-strategy games - a brief obsession with mastering that genre. Because of that, Alex went to the elaborate length of tracking down his real-life identity, moving to his country, enrolling in his school, and scamming him into joining The Digital Justice Club.

Yep.

Once Henry’d been hooked on the game through his Cripple adventures, he did an apprenticeship in command under Septic Rose’s brother during their alliance’s unification of the nomadic steppe tribes. Her brother, who'd chosen the rather offensive username Genocidelol, was as brilliant as he was absolutely #&$*#& in the head. Henry learned a lot as Geno's protégé.

After Operation Phantom Limbs, after their alliance's base with its trans-continental canal had been secured, Henry finally stuck his own hand into the meatgrinder. His first assignment was in their alliance’s northern front, where the steppe met the snow. There, he was given sixty thousand mounted troops, mostly horse archers, and tasked with disrupting incursions from a confederation of 8 northern kingdoms, each of whom had larger but less mobile armies than himself.

Through a succession of lop-sided wins, he instead conquered those kingdoms.

During that string of victories, since he kept anonymous, the enemy commanders dubbed him The Northern Tyrant. In part, this stemmed from the fast-paced, elaborate style of command he employed with his freak mental GQ, a style that'd left them feeling oppressed and brutalised in their total inability to keep pace with him. In part, it contrasted him against The Eastern Tyrant, Geno, whose command style was brutal in a more literal manner.

After the defensive wars, Henry lead an invading force against their alliance’s biggest rival and Saana's dominant guild in that era. When his army, having trounced everyone, marched into their capital, his title was cemented in the public conscience, simply as ‘The Tyrant’, the game's newest rising star.

Then he quit to master something else.

In Saana III, he performed a similar miracle.

Initially, to pay back Alex for his mother’s hospital fees, he started an in-game trading company to accumulate goods to sell for real-life cash. But Alex, sensing an opportunity for a new ‘adventure’, spent weeks crying and begging until Henry was persuaded to expand The Company's operations. From there, they gathered up their inner circle, used his profits to hire mercenaries, and built their strength once more through war and other means.

He’d thought that the second climb would be easier, that the softness in his past had been a product of youth. In this prediction, though, he'd been dead wrong. Perhaps due to a part of his brain maturing, perhaps due to his mother's passing giving him a more tangible sense of death, he'd found that that pesky empathy for the NPCs had only blossomed over the years.

Not fully realising this until he was deep in the wars, he had to employ many techniques of suppression to continue to the end. He joked, acted, lied, sheltered in anonymity, distracted himself with hobbies, rationalised that it was just a game, reminded himself of the peace that bloodshed would buy, dreamed of how everything would be resolved if he could just obtain that stupid cap. But the reality always confronted him at night, when the psychological guards had to be relinquished to enter sleep.

Always that same bloody nightmare...

However, again, none of this had stopped him on the battlefield. In the real-life year he'd promised Alex, he swept aside his enemies and transformed The Company into a global military superpower without equal.

For this second round of success, a journalist obsessed with discovering his identity added the ‘of Saana’ part to his Tyrant title. This was a cheesy acknowledgement to him who’d firmly established himself as the greatest of the commanders. That journalist was actually in Suchi right now, Oliver Spears.

He could have quit again, ending the story of The Tyrant on that high note, but the growing softness prevented him from leaving it at that.

In Saana II, following his quitting, their empire had soon fractured. The world, with all the power vacuums they'd created, descended into its bloodiest state yet and millions died. All due to their naivety, their incompetence.

In the present version, refusing to repeat that element of his history, he continued to ‘play’ for a while longer in an 'administrative role'. He set upon taking all he'd snatched through war and reshaping Saana into something less brutal.

To achieve this, he assembled hundreds of experts—historians, game designers, philosophers, psychologists, politicians, economists, and more—and together, along with some but not all of his inner circle, they conspired once again.

Through Alex and Flaming Sun, they lightened up the atmosphere. They popularised the Civilian and PVE roles in place of PVP. They shifted the focus of PVP away from the chaotic battlefield to the controlled arena. They made Saana more attractive to casuals, including roleplayers.

Through himself and The Company, they spread law and order. They expanded international trade to build an interconnectedness that dissuaded war. They threatened guilds and kingdoms to resolve their disputes through diplomacy. In their territories, they forced players to stop being spastic murderers. They smoked out problematic leaders, assassinated them, fired them, replaced them with puppets such as Archdeacon Mohon.

For the most part, they achieved their goals, with the exception of a few stubborn &%*#holes like Suchi, which had much bigger problems than tadpoles like Ramiro.

And for the uncompromising brutality with which Henry’d enforced his vision, he came to be considered a despotic, authoritarian ruler - a tyrant.

Thus, in these many ways, he had been The Tyrant of Saana.

Listening to the crazy chuckle of Geno’s little sister, recalling those youthful adventures four decades now in his mental past, Henry gave his own complicated laugh.

He'd experienced a great deal of conflict as to whether the tail-end of his career had been the correct choice. For many players, Saana was at its most thrilling in the chaos of war, himself included. But, in his softness, he couldn't forget the NPCs being decimated while they had their fun. Peaceloveharmony’s hippy assessment had been right in a different domain; he was indeed ‘crippled by love’.

It was when Rose’s brother learned of his peaceful ambitions that they’d defected. Disgusted, they accused him of cowardice, went to their enemy’s side, and waged war to stop him. Henry, having long surpassed the mentor, smashed them as he had the rest.

"Sea Dragon?" asked The Indigo Guru, confused by the laughter.

Henry nodded. "Let's go."

For the third and final match, he got steamrolled because they randomed the Sand map again, which provided no cover for Sea Dragon's long-range techniques.

After that, he sent the young man away for practice in one of the arena slots with a list of flaws to brush up on. Then, he continued to accept challenges.

The Arcanist was the first to defeat him but not the last. In the course of the long afternoon at The New Suchi Arena, with Henry training, Rose stalking, Abigail craving, he went on to lose to many others. Some were also prodigies on their own blissful climbs; others simply lucked upon a misfortunate sequence of poison debilitations.

When the next in-stadium tournament started, he signed up to participate. He made it to the quarterfinals, where he was eliminated by a rank 77th, spear-wielding Accompanist.

None of these losses irritated him. They were to be expected before he finished synthesising the supreme martial art, which would employ a variety of styles to amplify the complexity of the boringly-simple 1v1 format. Through this, hopefully, he would be able to make duelling more hospitable to himself, and people like him, whose strengths lay elsewhere than their muscles.

In the past, when he'd managed a similar feat as The Cripple, except with Legendaries in place of styles, the analysis of duels hadn't reached the sophistication to view 1v1s beyond brute motor skills. Thus, both his haters and fans, assuming he was merely cheating, had missed that the strengths of ‘The Cripple’ and ‘The Tyrant’ were one and the same, that they were one and the same. (Also, it didn’t help that he had straight-up cheated against certain opponents. The best of the best possessed freak mental and motor skills.)

But the world of Saana today was more developed, a small part in thanks to himself. Now, even in this trashest of zones, one could stumble upon bright sparks like the Arcanist who knew to view solo combat through the dual lens of mind and body.

Henry supposed, therefore, that The Return of The Cripple would culminate in a second synthesis. By the end of this climb, both those roles he’d once played would be fused in the public eye, merging into a whole that was just little old him.

He felt ready for it now.

End of Volume 2 – Mischievous Friends of The Earth

Next up: Volume 3 – The Return of The Cripple