That evening, Byzantium Village, its members gathering for their regular meet-up beneath the in-game sun descending into a warm horizon.

Wow. What a wild difference one short day can make. This humble group of a hundred-odd oddballs—playing less than a month, collected by circumstance and a shared peculiarity in this bizarre, Byzantine-style bastion within a slum—found themselves now at the centre of an international scandal.

One of their members, if you could believe it, had been The Tyrant of Saana. Yes, the shadow in which that titan of gaming had lurked had been their clueless own.

Their feelings on the reveal? Awesome!

Tonight, the Byzantines had logged on hours earlier, gathering like hyenas to a carcass and gossiping about the hot topic hidden in their midst.

They compared notes on what clues they’d missed. Some boasted they’d already figured everything out from his flawless orders during team practice, only they’d refrained from divulging their discovery—they wanted this officially documented—due to respecting his privacy.

“Pft,” a Byzantine arena player scoffed. “Dude, if you thought the flippin' Tyrant was ordering you about, you wouldn’t have argued and complained.”

The boaster shook his head in condescension, as if the answer should be apparent to anyone with more than twenty-seven IQ points. “Like The Tyrant, I also wore the deceptive mask of false incompetence. By simulating dissent, by imitating the laziness of an amateur, I helped to keep his identity secret. Otherwise, you jokers would have been like, ‘why’s Larry agreeing to this incomprehensible strategy? That’s out of character. There must be some deeper sensibility that Larry has cottoned on to. What’s going on here? Oh snap! It was The Tyrant all along!’ You see, through my pretending not to understand, I showed, more than anyone else, that I did understand. Multi-layered level schemes, these come naturally at our level - the next level.”

This boaster had been watching the workshop all day, copying everything, including The Tyrant's speech patterns, although he missed both the irony and the second layer of irony mocking the first irony.

Together, the Byzantines shared how many family and friends had chewed their ears for details, and they whispered the dollar figures offered to them by news orgs. Each had a piece of valuable property on hand, with the footage of their quirky adventures with The Tyrant. Unknowingly, they’d gotten drunk with The Tyrant, been bossed around in the arena by The Tyrant, mud-wrestled alongside The Tyrant, judged arts and crafts with The Tyrant, volunteered in The Slums with The Tyrant, ran a marathon under the sun with The Tyrant.

When The Tyrant’s schoolfriends appeared, the group were swarmed, asked exactly how long they’d known The Tyrant, whether they’d known he was The Tyrant. Would The Tyrant be participating in the Village activities this evening again? What time precisely could they expect to meet The Tyrant? How much of The Tyrant’s martial art would he be sharing during their training session, and might he be able to simplify the terminology a little? Could a nice word be slipped in on their behalf for potentially joining The Tyrant’s t—joining Team Friendship Forever, whose spandex uniforms had a snazzy, appealing quality?

In the unnoticed background of this hysteria, a gold-clad Crusader moped about, roleplaying his grief at failing to defeat Him, and the other Village leaders struggled to explain The Empire's new directives from management after Ramiro’s abrupt removal.

Henry’s friends, at the centre of this scandal’s centre, drowning in questions whose answers they lacked, looked exhausted.

On their end, the hours since his exposure had been an endless string of phonecalls and unannounced house visits from gamer cousins. Surprisingly, their parents had inquired for business reasons, Flaming Sun featuring prominently in the local economy. In-game, meanwhile, they kept getting attacked by gangs of strangers.

The friends had hoped the Byzantines they’d been hanging out with might be compassionate and give them a break. Alas, no. The extent of their quiet friend’s fame as an emperor or something in this game was beyond their conception, dwarfing everything else.

Through this harassment, they understood his secrecy and paranoia a bit more. Even Cathy and Abigail, who’d figured out his gaming persona earlier, gained a greater appreciation for the value of shiftiness; in such circumstances, one should indeed hide from the world, doubting and lying to everybody. Still, this newfound sympathy failed to negate their annoyance at him for not providing a warning.

The Byzantine’s interrogation driving them haggard, the friends made an excuse to separate. They assured those trying to follow that the accompaniment was unnecessary. Sighing, they speed-walked through the Village’s residential quarters of faux-Byzantine houses with court gardens. Scrutinising the group were the NPC guards, whose numbers had been quadrupled due to threats of arson.

Meanwhile, inside Team Friendship Forever’s bungalow, The Tyrant himself had been chilling.

Lounging on a sofa, Henry relaxed his muscles. Exhausted from a carefree day of duelling, of schooling the youth through one educative beating after another, he reclined into the sofa’s soft, welcoming folds. Eating a bowl of stew, he’d been fast-forwarding through footage of a couple 50v50 matches from last Autumn’s Open Invitational, chuckling between sips at the tactical plebdom of his competitors.

“lmao,” he said humorously, his laughing lips spilling a spoonful of stew onto his shirt. “What trash.”

For the 50v50 format, he, ‘The Tyrant’, had no plans of practising. Any unit sizes at the platoon level or larger tipped close enough to his former occupation that there was no challenge whatsoever. Due to the format’s sheer easiness, he’d almost considered skipping it. However, if he could squeeze some free tournaments in, why shouldn’t he? ‘Even more was even more’, as the Post-Maximalist credo went. More tournaments = more opportunities to beat noobs = more mental health relief.

The logic of his tournament and everything was hidden somewhere in that above equation. Henry’s social IQ was too low to figure out the deeper psychological algebra in Alex’s recommendation for solving his mood problems via a duelling tournament. Nevertheless, it was only one more week, so if his efforts flopped, whatever, bro. He'd happily wasted more time on other pointless endeavours in the past. Like this videogame.

His schoolfriends creaked open the door, entering with the tiredness of ghouls roused rudely from the grave.

“Looking fresh as never, Team Friendship Forever!” Henry pointed at a pot on the kitchen stovetop. “Others would pay top dollar for a spoonful of that masterpiece. You lucky lot can have a whole bowl of my stew for free. It’s tyrannically tasty.”

The group’s exasperation prevented their laughter. What’s more, the sight of him lounging about pissed them off immensely. The way he was relaxing on the couch, eating his stew...casually...smugly – he didn’t appear to have been affected in the slightest, their socially-crippled friend perhaps failing to register the gravity of the disaster he'd caused.

Abigail was so frustrated she dropped the suave Cutthroat demeanour she'd been maintaining since starting Saana, and, stomping her foot with petulance, she shrieked. “Henry! I’ve been jumped four times already! They had split squads camping the respawn points! Fix this! Give me a battalion! Give me scouts! Give me assassins! Give!” she brattily pounded her fist to her palm, “Me!” pound, “Everything!” pound!

Henry shrugged. “Yeah, that happens to The Tyrant’s amigos. I’ll consider allocating you guards if you quit your guild.”

He could no longer pretend to care about this snotty bitch. A member of Rose’s Garden of The Grotesque, Abigail regularly ‘harassed’ people with the same tactics. He saw no tragedy in this twist of karmic justice. They could both leap of a cliff, he thought.

“Either way,” Henry continued, trying to be fair, to step into the world of objectivity, “you can have half a bowl of stew.”

“No! I'm NOT eating your stew! I bet you've spiked it with more magical bullshit.”

“I did.” Henry nodded, taking another delicious sip. “Spiked it with the magic of my culinary climb.”

Also, he’d spiked it with literal magic - a milder, non-addictive dose of the cosy spell from his Legendary mind-enslaving cookie. Henry was high as shit on an airplane. Forgive him for such vices; it’d been an exhausting life.

During his bantering with Abigail, Cathy had approached him, looming over him splayed on the sofa with an expectant look.

A few wordless seconds passed.

Henry, confused, glanced for clues from the others, Anderson closing the door, a glum-looking Dan hovering in the background - nothing. “Yeah, Cathy, I’m too socially retarded to figure out the meaning of this posture.”

Cathy ignored the rudeness with a Christian smile. “Just stand up.”

Henry, not trusting the smile, didn’t budge. “If you’re plotting to slap me, I will retaliate. I’m not afraid to hit a woman in a videogame – in fact, I beat up dozens of them today.” He slapped his knee like he’d slapped those noobs silly. “lol.”

That crass reply successfully wiped the affection from Cathy’s face. Nevertheless, she got him to stand up, then, pushing aside the stew bowl held as a shield, wrapped him in a maternal hug.

“Henry,” she said, patting his bum and slipping some pills into a back pocket, “Our Henry, we're proud of you for quitting. No matter what any of the mean comments say, we're proud of you. You made the right decision. This evil empire business isn’t healthy for the soul.”

Cathy couldn't understand exactly what was going on, but it'd been clear to her since the group had reconnected with their youngest member last week that it couldn't be good.

Although others might miss it, in the two years since their split, Henry'd undergone a seismic personality shift. The friend they'd known in high school had always been a secretive, pretentious, selfish individual, but alongside his antisocial traits had been a balancing optimism, a sense of eternal playfulness from the hobbies he tinkered with in the quiet. That positivity of old had disappeared. Replacing it was an unfamiliar bleakness. Even his little jokes were kind of depressing, contaminated as they were by an underlying falsity, a desperation to reclaim something lost.

What'd caused this change, Cathy could only guess. Perhaps, as Alex Wong had explained when contacting her to organise their reunion, their friend was depressed over the conclusion of his gaming career. However, the time with Henry since had made her realise that the problem had to be deeper than that. He might never have resolved the passing of his mother.

Henry, feeling uncomfortable in the hug, laughed flatly. “Oh, they’re not all singing my praise? I hadn’t checked.”

That wasn’t a lie – he still hadn’t investigated the public response, nor would he. Some plebs loathed his guts? Ay, fuck ‘em.

“Good,” said Cathy, “those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity; those who guard their ears attend his guiding voice.” Pulling away but not releasing her troubled friend, she brushed his scraggly hair from his brow. “At least you’ve kept your appetite. Did you get any sleep?”

“As much as always,” Henry joked. “Really, this is nothing. Just videogame nonsense.”

It truly was nothing to him. He’d played at being a teenager fretting about the consequences of his identity leaking, but, once events had come to pass, his heart remained indifferent.

For him, this had been one of the most minor affairs in years. The inability to roam anonymously in public anymore, the romantic rejection, the new risk of crazy players stabbing him IRL, the open dissection of his private life – these combined didn’t match up to a tenth of a single one of the tens of millions of tribulations he’d faced. He’d suffered more grief within that short moment wrapping up the mutilated girl last night.

That, he supposed—if he were trying to turn a positive leaf—was one of the bright silver linings in regular encounters with this type of stuff. The significance of losses that might trouble a normal kid his age vanished when you held the pieces of a former person and observed in their stillness how you and all these tiny concerns will one day also be reduced to a sack of putrefying meat. The extra perspective chilled you out. Judging each event according to a larger tragedy, you began to experience an eternal calm regardless of whatever turmoil the universe heaped on you.

And beyond that resigned calm, if you plunged far enough into this search for scraps of hope amidst the ruins, you could even create a quiet pleasure from these losses. An amor fati is what the invalid philosopher Nietzsche had called it while praising his own bodily sickness, a love of one’s miserable fate. ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’. By embracing suffering and death, each tragic episode could become a reification of life’s significance through the spiritual leap required to overcome it.

Loki and the other Viking LARPers in Asatru—students of the Italian thinker Julius Evola, who’d developed Nietzsche’s ideas in a mystical anti-democratic direction—were deeper into this mindset than anyone else Henry'd seen. They viewed a lack of war and death as the prime flaw of technological advancement. The absence of mortal danger it'd created had transformed everyone into pussies with infantile priorities and no will power to struggle through the difficulties demanded by monumental feats. Theirs was a feminised generation, soft women and equally soft men, all of them guzzling from Mother Society's digitised teat and crying like babies at any minor disruption to her generous flow. For Asatru, Saana represented a chance to use technology against itself, its hyper-realistic wars substituting for the glorious violence necessary to awaken one's noble, slumbering manhood. Each divine victory, each divine loss, either nourished you and unlocked your inner god. Hence, alongside the guild’s animosity for Henry who’d sought to stop them, existed a paradoxical veneration for him, the adversary who'd bled them most, ‘The Hydra’. For the thrilling battles he'd given them, they loved him as much as they hated him.

And that, this psychotic fusion of one's love and hatred, the amor fati, was perhaps the inevitable outcome for anyone who fought a monster too long. Ramiro cannibalising a tailor girl, Geno gouging out Tael’s eyes with a dagger, Geno’s sister stalking someone sharing the brother's demented psychology, Oliver doggedly pursuing The Tyrant, Karnon using spectacles of massacres to expand souls, and Henry himself - all these were maybe expressions of the same fundamental derangement. They stood the madmen into whose eyes the abyss had finally gazed lovingly back, in a videogame.

Henry obviously saw the doom in going too far, the need for restraint and balance even in one's quest to retrieve happiness. However, the fact remained that, once you'd reached this point, stuff as meaningless as the gossip and the rest that Cathy was hugging him over only bored you. Like Loki, you could become a hardcore misogynist who dressed up as a woman and fucked dudes without any sense of self-contradiction or embarrassment. The mission was higher than such trivialities. Focused on the goal alone, you acquired an immunity to the dull, pitiful opinions of those who’d never climbed an Olympus, who’d never given the totality of their soul in order to steal the gods’ immortal ambrosia and sip of its honey sweetness, each mouthful almost as divine as Henry’s fantastic stew.

He laughed. "lmao 😂🍲."

“That’s right, that’s right,” Cathy agreed, using a thumb to catch a tear about to reach his cheek. “It's nothing you shouldn't laugh at. Just videogame nonsense.”

Henry frowned, not realising he’d started to cry.

By the time he'd recognised this, however, the flow had already seemed to stop, no further tears falling. Whatever source had stirred the surprise emotion had long since passed.

Cathy, alarmed at the speed of his recovery, hugged him again, repeating another string of assurances for a concern he couldn’t relate to. The rest of the group missed it, the moment brief and gone.

Henry, moving on, sat down his school chums to catch up over a quick meal accompanying the stew.

Team Friendship Forever had much to review. In the busy day since they’d split at the masked festival, one of their members had been exposed as an infamous duellist, then a more infamous general, had relocated the Winter Open tournament to this remote hovel, had started an avant-garde duelling workshop, and, somewhere in the mix forgotten by most, had given an announcement of his retirement.