The New Suchi Arena.

Kimura-san, the horse galloping him ever forward to his suspicious destiny, gazed on with rising horror.

Ahead, where the row of battlegrounds suggested a continuation, an abrupt break appeared. Multiple former sites had been dismantled and removed. In their stead now teemed a field of soldiers buzzing in formation. There were thousands of troops, dark skinned, dark uniformed, wasp-like in their density and menace and the sharpness of their pikes.

The queen defended in the centre of this hive was a giant tent of sinister black cloth. Based on location and dimension, it veiled one surviving battleground, which, like a monstrous salamander, had doubled its size by cannibalising its weaker nearby siblings. At a lightless entrance, queuing to fill the black beast's insatiable stomach, was its next meal, a mob of fifty pink-fleshed individuals undergoing the rough molestations of a strip search.

Strangely—most strangely—the group, eager for their digestion, were hyping themselves up by slapping each others' naked backs.

Kimura-san recalled the earlier passing group of horsemen, their number roughly equal to this clothesless mob. He then thought of himself, also mounted, also being hurried towards the same direction, towards—perhaps—the same sacrificial fate.

“Our destination," he said probingly, "it has bountiful security."

“That’s not your destination,” the escort answered. “Only those against the big boss get their cavities explored. Whatever teammate you've paired against will shuttle out. To these peripheral arenas.”

As they were about to collide with the field of soldiers, the escort suddenly veered hard-right and galloped them along the border of the surrounding battlegrounds. Kimura-san continued staring at the soldiers to their side. Dozens of eyes locked on him in return and followed.

“The big boss?” he asked.

Did they mean...The Tyrant? The guy he was supposed to steal this tournament from?

“The BIG boss," the escort confirmed. "Mr Tyrannical. Senior Shadow. He’s pitched a cave and retreated to his native nighttime for the day. Can’t be torturing the kids out in the sunlight, I suppose.”

Kimura-san gulped at the mention of torture. “So, I’m not against the…big boss.”

The escort laughed. “Not a chance, brother.”

Kimura-san took some relief in the assurance, both from his suspicions of arrest and the left-of-field possibility of duelling the teen right now. He had expected a confrontation at some point. Nevertheless, the timing during these preliminaries seemed premature, risking the exposure of The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent.

Their journey came to a transfer station by one battleground. There, other staff overtook the final leg of freighting the assembled competitors. The place had a musky odour from a warehouse-sized stable, hundreds of steeds being fed and watered by their diligent attendants.

As their horse trotted up to this juncture point, Kimura-san’s anxieties settled, the salaryman finally accepting he was not under arrest, and his attention drifted about with the purpose of duelling in mind.

By the nearest battleground was seated an official in a tennis umpire’s elevated chair. Beside them hung a flipboard with 9 names like ‘Dragon’s Skeleton’ and ‘Catacombs,’ and indicators of their use. A third of these were currently reserved, including one called ‘Sandpit’. When he glanced further along the battleground, he found the corresponding section, an arena of pure, flat sand in which two mages dodged burning streaks of violet.

“One sub-map at a time…” Kimura-san muttered his deduction.

He filed away this information, unsure whether or not it mattered for his ring's capabilities.

The escort dismounted and helped the salaryman down.

“Not a chance,” the escort repeated. “A perfect score would be needed just to qualify. You’re against one of the subs.”

The man gestured to another battleground bordering the same clearing. In a camp beside this one was a congregation of Australians wearing purple-gold bandanas. Compared to others in the stadiums, they displayed a distinctive lack of seriousness, chatting and lounging on sofas while waiters served them delicacies from a private cooking station. The atmosphere of leisure clashed heavily with the soldiers.

Kimura-san received an insistent peck against his earlobe, Kaito-chan scouting a banquet table of unguarded morsels.

"Manners," he whispered again.

Around the stables, staff were hustling to service the exhausted mounts. The one he’d ridden was taken by a Polynesian stablegirl with a rapier at her hip. As she grabbed their horse’s reins, she stopped in front of the salaryman and squinted suspiciously at him, her gaze foraging through his middle-aged Japanese wrinkles.

“Nope,” the stablegirl said to the escort, denying the overheard assertion. “Bird guy’s on a win streak.”

The escort frowned at the incongruity. “He claimed it was his second day playing.”

Kimura-san bowed humbly to them both. “My deeds are nothing. It is the heavens that bless me with their fortune.”

“Second day, my arse!” The stablegirl cackled. “This spy's not even trying to be subtle. Which one are you, mate? Which org?”

Kimura-san, taken aback by the accusation of industrial espionage, bowed again. “Sixteen loyal years at Furukawa Vacuum.”

Although he usually wouldn’t do so for a common manual labourer, he reached into his pocket and produced a business card - he’d ordered a wad from a stall and was eager to debut them. To his immense embarrassment, however, the stablegirl rolled her eyes, perhaps unimpressed by the paper quality. She then wandered off laughing.

Exacerbating his distress from the rejection, his escort then revised the previous claim of safety based on his win streak, Kimura-san now having a 1-in-2 chance of entering the interrogation tent, and wished the salaryman luck as he fetched a fresh horse for the next pick-up assignment.

Kimura-san was left to ponder the news alone.

"Hmm...1 in 2..." he mused. "Hmm...but...but I suppose it doesn't matter."

Come what may, did he not possess The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent?

With the careless confidence of one selected randomly for greatness, he climbed onto the battleground. Surveying the various sub-maps on foot, he strolled through an arrangement of spikepits onto a pool of acid crossed by wooden bridges and flanked by Aztec pyramids. Along the way, he conversed with Kaito-chan. The pair brainstormed her potential employments.

At a recreation of a medieval village, he ran into an eccentric Chinese-American grandma, shredded like a bodybuilder but with wrinkles that suggested she was older than himself. She’d been jogging on a tavern roof while scribbling in a notebook. The first thing from her mouth when noticing him was a request to spar. Kimura-san, again seeing no benefit to training, gave a bow of courteous refusal.

He finished by hiking up the battleground’s central map, up a grassy hill pockmarked with rabbit burrows. The crest opened up a view of the soldier-strewn field and the black tent in its centre. The Tyrant’s match against the mob who’d entered soon began, signalled by the clash of steel and chattering fire of spells. The noise of battle held an eerie quiet. The source, Kimura-san eventually identified, lay in a glaring lack of shouts or orders. In something only possible within a videogame, both teams were communicating through the outward silence of telepathy.

The tent’s black-cloth roof began to glitter, a procession of souls evaporating through the fabric.

“A difficulty,” he said to Kaito-chan of the roof, “we might have to revert your employment to the original kamikaze.”

His falcon replied with a screech of anguish.

In their initial matches, Kimura-san had simply launched the bird straight at his foe like a feathered fastball. By the third bout, this crude strategy had failed, the unstartled duellist simply blocking her with a shield and shanking her before Kimura-san could catch up. They’d since refined her job description to aerial kamikaze. The salaryman engaged first, alone, relying on the power of his ring. Kaito-chan meanwhile circled from the sky while hunting for an opening to ambush, a job to which the bird’s thieving skills transferred excellently.

If they were to duel inside a tent, however, this aerial innovation of the kamikaze would be rendered useless.

But, in deliberating thus, he may have been jumping too far ahead.

In terms of Bes’s scheme, it seemed illogical to fix a matchup at this early stage. A victory now would be inconsequential since The Tyrant losing one duel in the preliminaries would not eliminate him. If that were the primary aim, to steal this tournament, then Kimura-san should not have paired against him till tomorrow’s bracket, should not reveal his magic prop until the crucial moment.

Of course, there were a dizzying number of alternative options. They could’ve matched up by pure randomness or from the arrangements of agents other than the hobo trickster God. Or Kimura-san, feigning weakness, could be expected not to use the ring yet. Or there could be multiple infiltrators gifted with broken treasures, a prank collective facing The Tyrant in an orchestrated series and barring his advance together.

Or perhaps the set-up here was leading to the theft of something beyond a mere tournament…

The kamikaze, he thought, ruminating on the word's literal meaning. A divine gust of wind...yes, that could solve everything...

Unfortunately, Kimura-san had been offered no additional guidance by Bes. The God, like an absent father, had skulked off after spawning the scheme to sow his mischief elsewhere. For the salaryman, this level of autonomy was mortifying, and it pained him more than either the trickery or crime, his Japanese soul able to accept villainy but not villainy without regulation.

As the fates would have it, this was his time to duel The Tyrant.

His head echoed with the voice of the stablegirl who'd accused him of industrial espionage.

-Caramel_Sprinkles_Sunshine: Step on down, Mr 'Kimura'. The next attempt is yours.

By the side of the battleground, the speaker herself was waving to him, along with a guard retinue.

Kimura-san, after a sniff of hesitation, decided to go. What's more, he would go fully, ring and schemes of theft and all. An intuition told him that this, however strangely premature, would be his only chance.

Strolling down from the battleground to meet the stablegirl, he was jogged through the field of troops, through hundreds of suspicious stares.

At the entrance, he stripped down to his salaryman tighty-whities, and they groped both him and Kaito-chan. An inspector—with the bored, gum-chewing tone of constant repetition—warned that if he tried henceforth to summon anything without prompting he’d get executed quicker than the three-second materialisation window.

While a glowing stone was flashed down his throat, a chatty assembly of players exited. It mingled a minority set of Germans, the survivors of the naked mob witnessed entering, with The Tyrant’s teammates, dismissed until their next spin in his category carousel. The Germans despite their loss were in a faint but upbeat mood, like theme-park-goers stepping dizzy off a rollercoaster.

“Any other kid, I’d call that infiltration reckless,” the German captain was saying, “but with him…well. Proof is in the victory. GGs on the 50s, boys.”

“Impossible…” The co-captain was less talkative, their mouth twitching, their fingers squirming and knitting in a sort of replication of the sequences they couldn’t disentangle. “Impossible....”

A member of The Tyrant’s chosen sighed nostalgically. “That’s nothing. That’s six months rusty.”

Another ally with his eyes tightly shut grumbled with the satisfaction of a wine connoisseur examining the aftertaste of a fine vintage. “Or maybe…maybe six months matured? Extrapolate.” At this one-word imperative, he suddenly bobbed his head, his own extrapolations splashing the empty canvas of his eyelids with a maelstrom of colour. “Yes…we must take the alienated sightings of the playground and extrapolate them to their rightful home.”

For Kimura-san, their talk of large-scale combat bore little relevance. Hearing it, he imagined only how the public might soon be gossiping with similar awe about himself. He thought of the media frenzy in the wake of his grand heist, the experts searching to puzzle out a rational explanation for how The Tyrant, this conductor of impossibilities, had been swindled by an ordinary Japanese salaryman from Aomori.

Security inside the tent was suffocating, as if to deny all who entered the oxygen that might feed the brain such fantasies of grandeur.

He was guided through a staggered maze of timber fortifications, walls obstructing all direct view of the arena, random turns dropping into pits of spikes and nests of mute soldiers. It sprawled with a jungle-like verticality, the defences extending upwards through a latticework of scaffolds. Spotlights hanging from above spewed down a harsh, sterilising glow. Squinting back against their brightness, Kimura-san discerned teams of archers distributed about the ceiling. They were like prison guards in watchtowers. Their bows were trained on him, and, with a sinister coordination, they were alternating drawing shots and cancelling to rest. The sum of their revoked attacks allowed no gaps, thereby shaving the response time to any later order by a few fractions of a second.

Looking back up at the archers, he wondered if they might also get blown away.

As with previous duels, Kimura-san was forced to join a group interface governed by the match supervisor, who’d monitor their health and hijack POVs in cases of foul play. Additional measures to this seemed wildly excessive for a mere salaryman. To track his whereabouts, a shuffling queue of mages fixed spells to him that would highlight his silhouette through walls. While those were attached, an interviewer with an allergy to humour applied lie-detection magic and interrogated him about enemy affiliations.

“Karnon?” Kimura-san repeated a name with blissful ignorance. “No.”

The interviewer nodded routinely. “Ever visited Togavi?”

Kimura-san bowed in embarrassment. “My adventures have not yet travelled far beyond the limits of this city.”

He was also forced to register every item that he planned to use. A harsh warning accompanied. If he so much as summoned anything else during the fight, he’d be disqualified from the tournament, permanently blacklisted, and spawncamped for the next three years.

Kimura-san, unfamiliar with the full limits of his duelling ring, dumped out the entire contents of his inventory. The inspector rummaged through a mound of Kaito-chan’s tourist pickings, in which was buried swords, shields, bows, knives, blowpipes. Funnily, the harmless novelty trash was separated as contraband while the weapons got a swift approval. The variety of the latter roused no suspicion, most students of The Tyrant’s recent juggling art experimenting with mixed combos.

The inspector did pause at a set of black-dyed stealth equipment.

“Wrong class.” They rattled a pair of cloth boots, custom-stitched for silent treading.

“An error of humiliating proportions.” Kimura-san bowed towards the contraband off to the side. “I thought everything I owned must be presented...there was a...ninja cosplay event.”

“So…you don’t want to register these.”

“Hmm…” The salaryman hesitated, his cheeks blushing with the rose regret of fooling about the markets instead of testing the ring’s full gear preferences. “Perhaps…yes? Perhaps, no?”

“So, no?”

“Hmm…” He reached for the ninja gear and discreetly pushed it towards the pile of weapons.

The match scheduled before his own, a rookie-tier 3v3, concluded. With no casualties, five exiting contestants crossed his path at the inspection zone. There were three Chinese, the opposition, along with an Indian Qi Master and a 7-foot Crusader with the gold-purple bandana of The Tyrant’s substitutes glimpsed earlier. As with the previous group, both enemies and allies were departing in a jovial spirit. The two teammates even wished Kimura-san and Kaito-chan good luck.

Within all this, The Ring of Instant Duelling Talent also weaselled through the check. Kimura-san handed it over in a heap of gimmick jewellery - he’d had the foresight at the markets to 'obtain' other scam items promising success. The inspector did a thorough enough job investigating each, but they failed to spot the difference, the ring’s power concealed by a secret activation phrase.

Seeing his success, Kimura-san pushed his luck further by mentioning the guard-peppered ceiling. “Kaito-chan’s aerial techniques...these confines could be limiting...in the spirit of fair play, less than equitable…”

“No.”

Some mages were called back to fix extra monitoring magic to the bird, and then, at last, the salaryman and falcon were ushered through to test their strength and craft.

A short distance outside the tent.

While the suspicious 'salaryman' was entering his match, on the battleground he’d briefly left, Grandma Ru was prepping for her own.

Inside a beerhall on Hamlet, the village recreation map, she could be seen warming up with a spot of spellkiting parkour. Her millennial limbs were vaulting over stools, sliding under benches, tic-tacking off of corners and up onto tables. Between these acrobatics, she flicked and at an invisible pursuer, no doubt both frustrated and impressed by her geriatric speed.

Grandma Ru had heard the Japanese oddball being dragged off to the big tent.

If his opponent was the master, then hers—by elimination—was the student, Whitefrog. Against their teacher’s favourite pet, she, a few rows behind him in the class, would have to try RNG a win through frantic preparation, rushing out this homework started mere minutes before the deadline...