The New Suchi Arena.

The entire stadium had come to a standstill. All other duels had been paused. All other weapons were stowed away. All conversation had stopped beyond clipped remarks of surprise. Every eye in the venue concentrated on that one arena in the corner, on his arena, the site now lit up with a confusing firework display of spells flashing in the gleam of swords switched to axes hacking feinted puffs of smoke hiding tripping limbs struck…or not struck?

All watching were captivated by an incomprehensible glimpse of the beyond. Before them played the latest exhibition of the future of duelling, of their inheritance to be passed down by this mutant hermit emerging from the shadows of his terrifyingly-avant-garde research.

None yet could fully fathom A Thousand Tools, what little they’d learned of it through the workshop having failed to prepare them. However, the spectators were beginning to feel something within the tangled confusion. Their reconditioning nerves were electrified by a dawning cognisance to the inner workings of the multi-weaponed symphony.

How, the audience wondered with awe, how could a duel contain this much?

The weapons, the flesh…

The spells, the dodging…

The tit-for-tat all-in clashing, the opening stretches of restful silence after separation…

The dancing, the stopping…

The play, the drama…

The laughter, the angst…

The hard-drilled wisdom steeped in the greater martial history, the youthful spontaneity that discarded it all for on-the-spot invention…

The violence, the beauty…

And the beautiful violence...

It felt at moments as if the entire depth and multiplicity of human life were being demonstrated in this fight. Each tussle flamed with the generative heat of two lovers whose merger creates something more than their isolated halves. Each spark that flew from their weapons glittered with a different fragment of man’s incomprehensibly-layered essence.

With each second longer that those watching held their gaze, more and increasingly more unfolded. Their hearts and stomachs and souls began to fall towards a dense sense of destiny, of finality. A gravity captured them like someone staring with horror as they descended into a black hole and their eyeballs were stretched from their stretching skull into the endlessly stretching infinity. This match, through its ever-expanding duration, quickly engulfed even this duellist's larger persona outside the ring. Every incident before this, all of the wars, all the labours collecting tools, all had culminated in nothing but this one divine act. Their purpose had been to transform a man into something like a god, to enable one human to manifest through his solitary body the titanic genius, the magnitude, and the ascendant striving for that highest goal of More that’d once animated the millions of limbs of his nation-spanning empire. A whole planet's weight condensed within the skin of one person...within one duel...

There was so much in this…too much…how could a mere duel contain this much?

Backing up a bit, earlier this morning, a major wave of ships travelling from abroad had entered the harbour. These boats had deposited the first high-level tournament entrants, decked out in end-game gear and armed with powerful abilities and complicated Class specialisations.

These arrivees included a sample of the current top duellists in the world, every star scheduled to attend at some point. The 1v1 scene had yet no official league. Thus, the Company’s seasonal events marked the main competitions in the duelling calendar. At these quarterly rallies, these creatures of solitude left their caves to settle scores and create new ones, to establish who amongst them should hold next that fleeting but eternal title of number one.

Naturally, the first of these big shots to step on Suchi’s shores had rushed over to the stadium. They’d joined the workshop as everyone else had. Most of them also cherished hopes of challenging the one hosting it. They wished to dispute through their youth and modernity this crippled ancestor who boasted about bringing back their future.

The Tyrant—wanting to meet these youngsters, too—had invited the best of them to skip to the head of his challenger queue, to taste the upper limits of his technique.

His present opponent, a Russian Cutthroat somewhere invisible within the spectacle, had been amongst the chosen.

Unlike those who’d fought The Tyrant in the preceding days, this one wasn’t a washed-up rival nor an impatient pro respawning over with a hamstrung character. The man was in his prime in every regard. His name until not a week ago in any discussion of history’s greatest Cutthroats would’ve been spoken on the lips of a thousand times more than the all-but-forgotten Cripple. For their Class, he ranked—right now—within the top five globally. This apex position, he’d claimed not in the past’s tiny amateur scene but in the present when one’s worth was tested by tens of millions. To stand so far above so many, you needed the rare union between freak talent and a freak drive to hone one’s born gifts further over endless years of repeated hardship. Both of these, this Cutthroat possessed.

He was a genuine contender for the pinnacle of the duelling mountain. In the months before The Winter Open, he’d devoted every waking hour to preparing for this next ascent. In secret, he’d drilled in the most up-to-date techniques. He'd conditioned himself with teams of coaches hired by sponsors. He'd fixed his weaknesses and invented moves targeting his opponents’ weaknesses. All of this, he'd done in the desperate hope that in the upcoming challenge he might somehow fling himself over the few bodies that intervened between him and the immortal summit.

And this genius of the modern era, a young savant exulting in his prime, like the rest of the challengers preceding him today—all of them meeting a has-been whose image they’d dwarfed—was getting absolutely shitstomped.

This poor Russian guy getting hard fucked by The Tyrant - that’s what the crowd were glimpsing somewhere within their bewilderment.

They were staring at this sad sap getting smacked around the ring like a diaper-strapped baby in a stampede of bison, a thousand blows caving in his soft, underdeveloped skull and turning his psychology into mush. His brain, his body, his very soul – the whole constituency of this dude was getting remorselessly annihilated. He was getting railed, steam-rolled, and steam-railed through one lop-sided match after another, none of them close. In fact, he was getting so catastrophically dumpstered that the fights circled around from embarrassing to impressive again. It was like watching a drunk gopnik lurching back to his feet to continue boxing a bear. In such an unbalanced match-up, all an observer could feel for the losing party was the deepest of human respect. Bravo, you red-faced Slav! Bravo! His end might’ve been settled, yes, but that didn’t mean his journey before then lost its intrigue and captivation.

The end had been settled for all of them – this final fact, everyone monitoring today’s challenges had soon realised, witnessing in each genius’s graphic doom their own.

There could be no further doubts about the outcome ahead. The Tyrant—or as he called himself half-jokingly, seeming to have the skill to back up the bold claim, The Invincible Cripple—would be clean-sweeping the tournament. None of them had any chance. He was easily trampling this sampling of the scene’s best, and this was before resorting to his ‘tools’ of old, his stockpile of broken Legendaries which he’d once carried and—probably—still carried in portion. Nobody arriving later would be contesting this gap. Not whatever forgotten duellist had won last season, not some secret up-and-comer, none of them - no names were worth even whispering alongside The Cripple and whatever monstrous hell he was unleashing upon them.

There it was for all to witness: the end of this saga, settled.

For the rest of them, mere mortals, the only competition remained over the silver medal. Who amongst them would get to the privilege of standing below The Invincible Cripple on the podium after he broke their bones and spirit in the finale? That was the only question left. Maybe entrants in the other categories would have a sporting chance. However, nobody cared about those anymore. Their collective time had become of this and this alone, of the 1v1 and A Thousand Tools, and inaugurating their new era was its inventor, who—after closing out one age with his world-enveloping fist—would usher in the next through a series of indescribably complex curbstomps.

Just brutal…just horrifyingly brutal…they were all going to get smashed, and no one would be able to pick out their mangled pieces from the slop.

The end was settled. Today’s challenging duellists—like this one famous Cutthroat from Russia getting his legacy erased—had seen this inevitability clearest. As they marched now onto the stage, they did so with missions made humble. No longer were they aimed at victory. They came simply to learn what could be learned in defeat and to receive the honour of some part of history being written in their offered blood.

All other duels had been paused in the stadium, all except one.

In one of the arenas off to the side, SaNguiNe—the local Miracleworker specialised in dagger wrestling, once ranked third place in the zone, and scorned by Artemis/Loki—was ignoring that other duel while sparring.

With a shield and sword in hand, the muscular fellow was circling a Crusader adversary, blocking spear thrusts while waiting. Their fight traversed between other trainees sharing the map, all of them frozen in the reverie of spectation. SaNguiNe paid these statues no heed beyond their utility as obstacles. His every bone and nerve were focused on high alert, searching within the distracting flurry of prods for that one instant, that one all-determining gap through which to leap explosively and seize victory's exposed throat.

His sparring partner flicked their head.

SaNguiNe pounced. He pushed past their spear. He dropped both shield and sword to bind them. He pretzeled their limbs, and he sank a dagger through their armpit and ribcage and into their heart.

A moment later, he disengaged, the duel won.

Despite winning, the young wrestler sighed as if he’d been demolished - again.

His partner stood up without glancing at him, their gaze tugged elsewhere. The official monitoring their match—distracted, too—gave no call to its conclusion. Both had joined the masses mesmerised by the stadium’s other and, now, sole ongoing duel.

“Useless sheep…” SaNguiNe, muttering after losing this partner as well, risked a peek at the spectacle.

In the distance, HF was acrobatically using his timber swarm to build a box around his Cutthroat foe. Hopping up along the device’s outer surface, he kited them vertically while spamming spells and blocking their escape. Within this structure, the trapped opponent twisted and squirmed like a caged tiger being speared in all directions by a dozen captors taunting safely from behind the bars.

The pace of the box’s construction was especially mesmerising. It had a dizzying rapidity, a disturbing mechanisticality. As the pieces slotted together, they gave one an uncanny sense of the invisible hand at play. Its presence could be detected like the fingers of a speed-solver flicking through a Rubix cube’s algorithmic pattern.

This exchange lasted a few breaths, and then the shrieking, Cutthroat was flying from off the top of the box following a failed attempt to teleport out. As they were about to eat dirt, HF slipped from a flaming door beneath them and flowed into a seamless five-second joint manipulation sequence while switching out his Spelltome configuration.

SaNguiNe bore a reluctant and complicated witness to all of this.

The wrestler did have as strong an urge to study these duels as most. Nevertheless, he’d been restraining himself. Over these past few days, he’d ignored not only these exhibition matches but the bulk of the lessons.

HF himself had warned at the outset of this workshop that the transition to adopt his system would take too long for any tournament entrants. SaNguiNe, like the rest, had initially dismissed this advice. Unable to resist the new method’s allures, he’d been one of the forerunners in practising the weapon-juggling, even before any official release. However, the harsh truth in HF’s counsel had hit SaNguiNe after acquiring a copy of A Thousand Tool’s training manual. The art was alien. So incompatible were its foundations to any previous techniques he’d picked up that the two couldn’t be reconciled. He would have to start from scratch, ruining almost a month of conditioning in Suchi’s Boulderfoot Wrestling.

SaNguiNe, prioritising The Winter Open, had thus chosen to ignore the workshop consuming the planet’s attention. He would switch eventually. But not now. For now, he’d stake everything on his arm and his dagger, on the simple but effective brutality that’d preceded these cerebralised advancements.

The wisdom of his decision could be seen already in the results. Previously ranked third in Suchi’s rating system, he’d climbed to the first spot, over both HF and the thousands of other savants flocking over and being led astray.

A very logical, effective choice. It was only surprising that others were not doing the same, that no one else seemed to possess a duellist's conviction to ignore the wayward multitude and strive down triumph's lonesome path.

SaNguiNe’s sparring partners, if asked, would have disputed that pragmatic description of his motivations. The doubters included even his compatriots from The Silent Three. Although they wouldn’t speak it out loud, they chalked his refusal up to a comedic embarrassment, a bitter resentment. They judged him unwilling to take direct instruction from HF after the ‘theft’ of Artemis, who’d turned out to be a male spy flirting with him for no other reason than to add to the cover story of infiltrating the teen’s guild, SaNguiNe simply another piece of the disguise discarded once the sham was blown.

Did these accusations hold any truth? Maybe, but SaNguiNe didn’t think the answer to that particularly mattered. Anyone who poured their heart deep enough into duelling would realise that origin stories were pure fluff. The intention with which one set out was only ever a tiny step in an extended sequence whose every moment had to be contested anew. The fight itself spared no respect for either motives or history. You could stake your claim on nothing more than that which you had the strength to defend in this instant. The rest were just tissues to soak your tears with after defeat.

Whatever humiliation and resentment might swim through his veins, SaNguiNe was quickly losing it through the purifying blood-lettings of the arena.

He watched on as HF finished this latest foe in spectacular fashion.

While the Russian Cutthroat, on the verge of losing, attempted to quaff a Health Pot, the teen cheekily into their embrace and stole the spilling liquid with his own thieving lips. His palm meanwhile shoved their face away and slapped a between their denied teeth and into the roof of their open mouth. The Cutthroat’s head then went pop. It detonated like a frozen watermelon whacked with a sledgehammer – a burst of slurried brain shards and white bone fragments mixed within the scattering pink.

This whole sequence had been performed mid-air, the Cutthroat having tried to sneak his drink with his back turned while leaping off a rooftop. In a shower of their descending skull-gore, HF landed gentle and light, solitary but not alone, his floating weapons surrounding him like the extra arms of Shiva The Destroyer stepping from a cloud of blood drops.

His touchdown stirred after a second delay a massive round of applause. Tens of thousands of hands throughout the stadium joined together. Clap by clap, they enunciated the sharp and monotonous rhythm of his invincible victory.

SaNguiNe found himself swamped by this music, this song of failure and glory. Its noise travelled in over the stadium’s walls from the greater audience arranged in the fields outside, from those celebrating around the globe beyond wheresoever they watched and admired.

As this symphony of grandeur shook the wrestler's soul once more, he felt the noise of his petty worries sinking and drowning beneath the rising volume. The concerns of the past were cleansed from his flesh like dust brushed off by a storm. Their particles of nothing were stripped from him to reveal the primal state beneath, the muscles born and sculpted and resolved upon one purpose: to force this choir, in the most decisive instant, to chant this song in honour of himself.

HF, The Tyrant, The Cripple, whatever else one might call this target at the top, SaNguiNe was going to beat him.

He meant that with only a bit of the duellist's arrogance and delusion. He—who could admit that he'd never been the best and never would be—still planned to climb to the summit and wrestle man-to-man with this figure looking down so imperiously upon them all. To slay him was far beyond his strength – certainly. But such was not SaNguiNe’s aspiration. Accepting his mortal insignificance, he would be satisfied if he could steal one single move, one single moment. To catch a god off-guard, to twist him in an unexpected direction, to stand for half a second over his slack body before it repaired, to make him stride forever afterwards with a memory of a limp from that one day when that one plot did not go so smoothly to plan because some forgotten third-place ant snapped his spine in two – this was enough, and this is what SaNguiNe would do.

This tournament ahead, its end had not been settled yet. There was at least one category this kid wouldn't be winning.

Putting aside these distractions, the wrestler returned to his silent preparations, giving up on his lost sparring partner and shouting down a replacement.