An arena map, stinking of geezer sweat.

Preparing to defeat a pro player, Grandma Ru, a pro herself turned elderly parkour witch, jogged a circuit around her chosen map, out of a tavern, to a house, to a church, and back to the tavern.

Between the flips, rolls, and spells along the way, she paused frequently.

She'd been carrying a notebook with sketched diagrams of the map’s village layout, onto which she was pencilling an increasingly-crowded mess of icons. These followed a symbology used by A Thousand Tools' spellkiting specialists - marked were dead ends to avoid, sections for advantageous trades, loops that could be exploited once or repeated. Some of these notes were generic, representing her discoveries in previous duels against similar opponents. Others, those being added now, were specific to Whitefrog. Ruru’d highlighted random pockets that would restrict his weapon juggling – corners with room for swords but not for spears, rooves too precarious for the art’s demanding footwork.

In terms of higher strategies, a spiderweb of dashed lines stuttering between these pockets tried to connect them into multiple coherent paths to victory. However, at her novice level, most of her plays would be semi-improvisational. She had a rough sense of what techniques could be applied in various subdivisions, and she would do her best to maintain the duel in areas that favoured her. Only the master mutant she'd avoided could plot a whole match from start to end.

Compared to anyone but the master, though, her implementation of A Thousand Tools' spellkiting methods was fairly advanced.

For her, the techniques had been somewhat familiar, reminding her of an old-school arena shooter. In that ancient genre, dead even by her time, a 'microgame' of shooting and dodging had coupled with a cerebral 'macrogame' of tracking item spawn timers and map routes. Through intelligent play of the macrogame, it was possible for one quite weak at the microgame to achieve victory by entering each skirmish at a resource advantage. Grandma Ru conceptualised A Thousand Tools on those same terms, the microgame martial arts, the macrogame all the tricks with cooldown combos, weapon counters, and the obstacle exploits she'd specialised in. Thus, while in the flow of spellkiting, she pretended she was in a round of medieval Quake, bunnyhopping around the arena, evading skirmishes when her cooldowns were depleted, camping elevations, railing noobs with thunderbolts. So far, this seemed to have worked.

Now, whether she'd get to flex any of the above against Whitefrog, that was an as-of-yet unsettled matter. Due to time constraints, she'd limited her preparations to this one Hamlet sub-map, and her ability to fight on it would come down to a 50-50 coinflip. If the Qi Master won map selection, he, a melee specialist, would likely pick one of the simpler, anti-kiting arenas, and the unready grandma would definitely lose.

The grandma was monkey climbing up the façade of a chapel when Whitefrog turned up.

The Qi Master prodigy came around the arena’s side flanked by an entourage of guards, private coaches, analysts, and personal assistants, amongst whom could be spied the gaunt figure of Mrtyu. With his abundance of support, Whitefrog looked in a rested, pampered shape. There were no signs of wear from his own busy juggle of a triple tourney run. The Qi Master had enlisted in the 1v1, the 2v2 with The Tyrant, and—due to the last-minute team substitution—the 3v3 as well. But, for a pro, the pace of these rookie categories was relatively mellow, and it might be a holiday compared with the rest of Team Pravah battling through the higher-level 6v6 gauntlet.

Grandma Ru, sizing up the youngster from her perch, felt a surge of excitement, an impatience to unleash her opposition research.

From a strategic analysis, their matchup could be said to favour her. Her whole approach had been cultivating anti-melee counters to the juggling meta, and the Indian Qi Master epitomised that style at its purest. He’d trained singularly in the weapon swap. Because he aimed to hone skills for his pro career, he’d made zero adaptations for the sake of this tournament, his technique ripped straight out of the manual. This left him wide open to examination and exploitation by cheeselord metagamers like herself.

Of course, these advantageous considerations might be dwarfed against the larger base martial realities. She was an elderly woman with her toes dipped one-week-deep into the vast ocean of duelling. Her adversary was an active pro, a genetic freak in his physical prime, and a recipient of 1v1 coaching from their mutual style’s inventor. Nevertheless, they were variables for a grandma to try strategising with.

“Any chance you’ll go easy on an old lady?" Ruru asked, releasing her grip on a chapel brick and sliding down to the dirt. "My sciatica is flaring.”

Whitefrog shook his head. “Not me.” He thrust an open palm towards the opposite side of the arena, from which his group had circled around. “My opponent quit on sight. I’m just tagging along for practice after.”

"Oh?" said Grandma Ru.

Before she could inquire who then she was paired against instead, or how, another young man burst out from behind the entourage.

The replacement challenger, a Crusader, fixed her with a gaze of heroic intensity. His physically maxed out avatar towered seven muscled feet tall. A lion’s mane of hair shimmering with Suchi’s dazzling rays had been drawn back seriously for the tournament, the locks tamed by the bindings of a purple-gold bandana. His gauntleted fingers clutched a sacred weapon, a zweihander of mountain-halving length and dragon-slaying sharpness.

“Fair lady!” the Crusader cried, giving the air an introductory chop. “Tis not Sir Frog who jousts against you in this tourney fair’s next exciting tilt. The sword of—” the young man stopped, correcting himself. “The swords of righteousness that rejoice in crossing blades with yours belong to me, Justinian, squire of The Lord, knight errant of Byzantium, crusader of the light, and eternal champion of the goodfolk!”

With each self-bestowed epithet, the knight twirled passionately, his zweihander chopping down invisible enemies of God. Whitefrog's entourage, after previous incidents, had retreated as he’d come forth to give swinging space.

Grandma Ru replied with a blank stare, her lips pursing at the sight of this fairytale knight parody, at the unravelling of her opposition research.

“Can you give me a minute?” she asked.

“Do not cower to haste’s whipping lash, my lady!” Justinian swept his knight’s blade in a gesture of regal acquiescence. “Our brother crusader, He of The Good Shadow, has spared us one full notch of the sundial.”

Whitefrog translated. “He gave us an hour break, but don’t take that long.”

Grandma Ru, returning a wave of assurance and brief farewell, turned and stepped through the chapel’s front door, entering amongst a scene of pews like one of Jesus's lost lambs seeking guidance in their hour of bamboozlement.

“Hmm,” she said. “That’s weird…what's this weird character doing here?”

She vaguely recognised this knight roleplayer from his challenge against The Tyrant. Most of the specifics had been drowned in the lurid spectacle of hundreds of penises flopped out by the teen’s mute guards. If her memory served, The Tyrant had clobbered him without abilities, just wailing down dozens of non-lethal strikes with raw steel. Nothing in the beatdown suggested the Crusader would be a skilled duellist. What's more, based on the humiliation, his selection as one of the teen’s substitute teammates was also puzzling.

Ruru, knowing nothing and prepping nothing on this ‘Justinian’, asked around in Suchi’s duelling chat.

While most were equally clueless, a pre-migration local summed up his biography. The Crusader, an eccentric knight roleplayer from The Tyrant’s former slum village, had once been ranked in the top twenty after staying in Suchi for half a year and participating in the rookie tournament multiple times. He'd since dropped off the radar post-migration, unable to keep up with the innovations. His skill level more than qualified him for a 6-0 streak, a fact that would have been noticed had anyone recalled his presence amongst The Tyrant's substitutes, but it wasn’t enough to progress through to tomorrow, nor to trouble the grandma. Style-wise, he sucked. RPing in duels, he adhered to rigid codes of chivalry, forbidding any armaments except his knight’s sacred zweihander. That excluded spears, daggers, and shields. This last weakness would leave him trivial pickings for a spellkiter.

In other words, the gambling gods had snuck her a freebie round, Grandma Ru skirting both The Tyrant and Whitefrog for a dud.

She supposed she should be thankful. However, in her heart of duelling hearts, the anticlimax disappointed her.

When she reemerged frowning from the chapel, the pro player was mixing up a four-weapon juggle constellation while coach Mrtyu fought him with a slower, three-weapon pattern, spears and sabres clattering between the two with the joint fury of a skirmishing squad. In a less impressive corner, the knight kneeled in front of his zweihander in a combo of rest/roleplayed meditation.

“Can you spare a friendly afterwards?!” Grandma Ru shouted to the pro. “I did a bit of prep, and it seems wasteful!”

“Sure,” the Qi Master answered. “If you survive.”

The grandma pumped a fist. "Cool!"

More eager for that duel than her official match, she rushed the one against Justinian, treating it like a warmup.

The Crusader conceded the coinflip over map choice to her out of chivalrous obligation. Ruru didn't refuse.

As they set up on the current village arena, Justinian did some further RP weirdness.

Contrary to the previous information, he whipped out more than his trademark zweihander. This weapon, switched to a single-handed grip, now coupled with a roundshield – one of the mass-produced models on sale at the stadium’s smithy.

The knight, observing Grandma Ru's mild—and one had to emphasise mild—confusion, mistook her for a follower of his saga. In defence of the change, he flashed the shield’s front. On it had been painted a half-arsed picture of a knightly sword. Some bible-quote-strewn RP mumbo-jumbo followed justifying the acquisition of the shield, gifted to him and anointed by ‘the crusader of the shadow’.

From what Ruru deciphered, The Tyrant had gotten fed up with the Crusader's self-imposed shield ban. To circumvent it, he'd convinced the roleplayer to equip the item by drawing a sword on one and pretending to cast a prayer of transubstantiation, the shield becoming a sword as wine becomes the blood of Christ.

Despite the comic absurdity, Justinian's speech was delivered with grave sincerity, the knight alternating between sunken sighs and cloud-reaching grabs. It was as if, by picking up this basic piece of equipment, he’d surmounted a conundrum of dire personal, religious, and ethical significance.

The monologue left Grandma Ru infinitely more confused. She didn't understand the hangup over a standard adaptation to the meta-game. After all, she'd done the same turtling with a shield earlier.

One had to sympathise with The Tyrant. If the other substitutes were a quarter this bizarre, then carrying them through the rookie tournaments might be the weekend’s most astonishing feat.

For their duel, Grandma Ru cast aside all these peculiarities as irrelevant and fought a standard mage-v-melee game. Her preparations against Whitefrog were overkill for a random substitute. Moreover, the pro and his entourage, waiting for the duel against her, monitored the match from the side, and she didn't want to reveal any special techniques.

The Crusader throughout showed his total inexperience with shields. Instead of blocking her and healing the minimal damage with his Class's hybrid spells, he attempted to dodge every shot. In doing so, he exhibited the habits ingrained from months of sword-only combat.

As far as dodges went, though, they were pretty solid. He executed them successfully on the ground, around the furniture inside the buildings, and even on the sloped rooves once she took the fight up there to make him stumble.

In fact, the knight, spinning, ducking, and hopping like a frog, managed to dodge after closing within a few metres of her, at a proximity she’d thought impossible. It was a bit spooky.

“Justinian wins!” the officiator called.

“He won?” Grandma Ru baulked. “…when? We just started?”

Her questions were asked with a petulant, wounded sadness, like a child refusing to acknowledge the tragic news of a parent’s death. The source of the emotion, purely physical, was in her chest - or not in her chest. From the spot radiated an icy dread, a profound sense of error as she suddenly recognised the heartbeat that’d accompanied her quietly and underappreciated throughout life from before even her first breath had abandoned her, its cessation consigning her to a swift and solitary annihilation.

For the grandma, after countless duelling mishaps, this doomed feeling wasn't alien.

She'd suffered her first death of the tournament…her first loss.

Disbelieving, she desummoned a shield drawn in the frenzy of the final seconds, and she peered down. She was guided not by her eyes, which’d completely lost track, but by a sharp tug inside her stomach, by the blade unsheathing from her organs after a clean thrust from her groin and up into her sectioned heart.

Her gaze crossed with the roleplayer's staring back. He was crouched in a blindspot by her knee. Beneath him an expanding stream of red poured down the tiles of the roof on which she’d made her last stand.

Of the two, the knight, the victor, looked much more embarrassed.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” Justinian apologised. “The Lord provided no more savoury openings...”

“No, no, you did great.” Ruru, moved by the young man’s genuine contrition, assured him. “Just caught me off guard. Good—”

Before she could complete the phrase, she blacked out. Her body tumbled from the roof and shattered into lights as it crunched against the waiting soil.

In the aftermath of her defeat, Grandma Ru's soul made the slow flight of shame to the nearest spawn. During the retreat, she glimpsed Whitefrog—who’d never been monitoring her—leap back on stage and resume his practice with the Crusader, the young man treated not with her own dismissiveness but with the caution befitting of an equal and a rival.

A lesson, she thought. Her perspective may have been too concentrated on the small elite of Suchi’s rookie trainees. She would have to ruminate on this one unaccounted freak, on the others that might still be lurking yet to debut on the tiny field of her awareness.

A different breed of competitor might’ve looked upon this incident as a forecast of growing difficulties leading to her termination in the ranks of today’s mass culling. Ruru, however, was far too old for pessimism. In this one surprise setback, she saw only the heightening of the call to challenge and the heightening of herself should she overcome the growing trial.

Eagerly, she awaited her return and her next shot.