An arena with the lights dimmed.

There was not much to observe in the dark above the grassy hill, but, as the duel progressed, the ears of the stationed troops picked up a repeated refrain of twangs, spellchants, grunts, metal clangs, and musical whistling. In a shaky correlation with the last noise, the silhouette of the falcon occasionally re-emerged, darting out from various burrow holes and diving back into the catacombs beneath through others.

Around the four-minute mark, there was a final whistle, a twang of a bowstring, a screech of avian anguish.

With a flicker, the faulty Lightstones lit back up, the anomaly passing.

In the returning brightness, a thief popped out from a burrow hole, his stealth attire torn and soaked with blood.

Z’s mouth hastily chewed a loaf of duelling bread to replenish his critically-low healthpool. His eyes peered around, their expression as cloudy and lost as when he’d pretended to be a salaryman suffering from a head injury.

Somewhere in the shadow-stained passageways beneath, the yellowface persona of ‘Kimura-san’ had been snuffed out, along with the thief’s arrogance, along with Kaito-chan. His birdy friend was gone...that devil The Cripple'd nailed her seconds earlier with his bow.

Z glanced up, through the painful glare, at the archers in the ceiling threatening him with the same send-off.

“Many perplexing enigmas,” he muttered in his native Slovenian. “The very foundations of our assumptions tremble…”

As always, it’d been a wild encounter with their debilitated comrade. The thief had brought his best, mixing his backstreet skillset of stealth with stolen elements of The Strategy up against the kid’s completed weapon swap. The falcon before her expiration had played her part, too, directed to ambush spots around the map using coded whistles, which Z supposed The Cripple must’ve deciphered to snipe her on transit.

Extremely unexpected had been the pickup of a Legendary item. For context, in a healing trick and live-duel comedy routine, Z had distributed random chunks of bread, the people's favourite snack, around the tunnels, which his falcon'd nibbled on while he siphoned HP from her using the Beast Tamer’s . Well, hidden beneath one suspicious chunk, NOT planted by himself, he’d found Worldlurker. This astounding grab was one of the twelve Ortheerian blades, a dagger with an invisibility that couldn’t be detected by an opponent at any range or level – a priceless treasure for those who worked society's nightshift. Z had guessed it’d been laid out by Karnon; the trickster, in a reverse twist, had helped the heist by delivering him a genuine artefact after the fake ring.

Z still had Worldlurker, by the way. No one else had clued on to it yet, the burglar having slipped it in his sleeve after an identification by pure touch, avoiding any direct glances because of The Cripple’s gestapo spying through his vision. Its debut had been prevented by indecision due to a severe lack of instructions from the God. Z, perhaps overthinking the matter, had determined that the weapon was only his getaway. An offensive usage carried obvious troubles. At the moment of its activation, The Cripple would’ve whipped out his own Legendaries, ordered his troops to seal the tent, and flooded the interior with AOE spells in the manner of a cockroach fumigation, exterminating anybody stealthed or otherwise. As a getaway, however, Worldlurker could’ve substituted for the presumed getaway, Kaito-chan. This in turn would’ve freed the falcon for more aggressive manoeuvres, potentially catching his opponent off guard.

It'd been according to this gameplan that Z had fought the ending skirmish. However, the scheme had flopped. It'd been ruined by a surprise metamorphosis undergone by The Cripple’s weapon juggling during the heat of the climax. Openings that Z had documented over his week of opposition research—and which he’d been exploiting all throughout their duel—simply vanished. The technique seemed to have become faster, smoother, and more…complete. Evidently, the upper limits of their comrade's progression in his art had been kept tightly under wraps - hence, this over-guarded interrogation site.

Then, while Z had disengaged and fled to ruminate upon that mysterious upgrade, his falcon had died, bringing him to the present mess.

As for the next devious gambit, the burglar had none. The re-ignition of the lights informed him that he’d lost already. Whatever play he should’ve hatched had expired somewhere in the dark of the tunnels beneath. The heist was over.

But the people shouldn't lament for their fallen comrades. Kaito-chan would reincarnate. As for Z, this mugging had been low chance from the start. His other, primary mission had been cleared. He'd snatched a goofy catch-up with Tovariš Cripple and seized the opportunity to lecture him on betraying the revolution by becoming a fascist landlord supreme.

Z, searching for a finisher, recalling how that other fascist dog Vitharr had barked his last, snuck along the hilltop to a spot between a set of exit burrows. Camping the position, he summoned a shield and a spear, and he readied for a game of stab-a-mole if their slow-reflexed comrade climbed up. He did this with only a half-arsed vigilance - The Cripple had the easy option of waiting out the clock for a point victory; in which case, Z could be assured the kid’s gestapo would execute him.

After a couple swivels, he heard the tread of footsteps on grass, approaching from the map’s opposing side.

Over the crest of the hill, comrade Cripple soon appeared at a leisurely stroll. Accompanying was an entourage of floating weapons, pulsing from his inventory, bright and quick as spotlights hunting for a convict broken out of prison. The teen himself held a tall shield for soaking arrows.

Z, noticing a gap in the defence, dropped his shield, raised a blowgun concealed behind it, and spat a dart. The missile had been coated with . This Beast Tamer venom leeched health and applied a 50-millisecond mini-stun on damage.

The Cripple resorted to the hyper-genius IQ counter of doing nothing. The dart struck his thigh, and he froze for a blip. Then, taking one slightly quicker step, he caught back up with his advancing tools, which fluxed into a more aggressive configuration.

The kid laughed, highly amused at the stupid trick working. "Easy."

"Sranje!” swore Z.

In his fluster, he’d forgotten that the rest of his core combo had died with the falcon…

Whelp, that dumb move had wasted the last of his spare stamina pool. The remainder would be needed to fuel Worldlurker’s dazzling stealth escape.

Z backed away, drawing in the direction of the exit. Then, admitting that this latest rendezvous had culminated in his abject loss (except of course the gain of the Legendary dagger - stealing from The Cripple, stealing from a God, both were equally lucrative), he resumed his Kimura-san impression and gave the teen a bow of Japanese surrender.

“Tyrant-sama..." he mumbled with respect, "...it has been a game of great dishonour.”

As his head tipped forward in defeat, he a bullet-time and used the enhanced speed to blend together several actions. He kicked himself from the team interface of the officials. He slapped around his body six times, each whack destroying a monitoring spell attachment. In one of the slaps, he slipped Worldlurker from his secret wrist pocket into his grip and activated its effect. Simultaneously, his legs hopped and zig-zagged away, evading the arrows bound to carpet his original location.

But while the thief was leaping through the air in case of side attacks, he noticed, inspecting his slowed-down surroundings, that the guards above had—strangely—not kicked into action. Weirder, the Cripple’s eyes were tracking him as if he were still visible.

No, Z realised. Not as if. He was visible. There’d been no notification or effect from Worldurker’s activation.

Maybe Karnon had betrayed him, the Legendary as fraudulent as the ring.

The Cripple—having ordered his troops not to fire—performed through the molasses of hyper-speed a gesture of mockery, miming a blowgun and spitting a poisoned shot.

Z followed the trajectory to the dagger in his palm.

There, he discovered, with a stab of shock, that Wordlurker was missing. In the Legendary's place, of similar size and weight, twinkled a different blade, one whose handle had been decorated with a phoenix, the very mightiest of the birds, that mythological creature of the blazing return.

His eyeballs popped with existential horror.

This was...this was The Cripple’s dagger…

Z lurched out of his bullet-time in a stunned daze, as if he’d been suckerpunched in the stomach, all the pompous wind knocked out by a blow from an even greater demon of the heist, from his reincarnated granddaddy in scamming…

“Impossible…” he whispered, as had so many other challengers that day after being bested at their own silly game.

The Cripple desummoned his helmet and revealed an eyebrow raised in exaggerated confusion. “What’s impossible, Z?”

Z shook his head. His body swayed. Every fibre of his being twisted in aversion from the dreadful admission of reality. Many slights, a scoundrel might accept, including getting beaten in a zero-stakes joke duel, but not this…NEVER this…

“No…” the thief insisted. “You…you can’t…you can’t pickpocket…me…”

The Cripple popped his reserved eyebrow, doubling his perplexity. This imitation of bemusement not enough, he additionally made as if to rub his chin. However, when his fingers were about to caress the teenage jaw, they were obstructed by a newly-formed replacement helmet.

“Whoops,” said the teen, desummoning the intruding item and trying for a second rub.

But this attempt failed, too. His re-reaching hand smacked against a third helmet, condensing the moment of the former’s disintegration.

In one seamless transition, The Cripple had juggled his headgear from his inventory, just as he’d juggled a dagger into the thief’s wrist pocket at the instant of the unnoticed swindle.

“Through the weapon swap!” Z clutched his disbelieving mind. “The moral audacity...to pilfer through the juggle…tools stealing tools...property appropriating property…this…this…this is the very ideological distillate of unfettered monopoly capitalism...”

But how had this robber baron even known about Worldlurker? Could he detect its presence from the subtle changes in Z’s technique? Or a freakish, mole-like sense of smell to sniff the luxury perfume of Legendaries wherever they might hide? Or had he, not Karnon, planted it? The Cripple might've baited him. Parading the obscene accumulations of his landlord wealth by casually risking one of the most coveted criminal items for a pointless Tier-0 duel - this was certainly within the duellist's wheelhouse.

The Cripple, relishing the thief’s psychological implosion, ignored the massive plothole as to how a Legendary appeared in their fight. Instead, he delivered a closing rebuttal to a heated mid-duel political debate. After breaking character, they’d exchanged quips about whether his post-Cripple career as The Tyrant had been fundamentally distinct from the burglar’s. The Technocommunist bandit had argued that The Company represented, in both economics and aesthetics, a global heist.

“There is no mystery to your loss today, Z!” The teen opened up his response. “You’ve simply bumped against the upper limits of what can be acquired through your unproductive trade. Despite what you insist, you and I are not the same, neither in scale nor in essence.”

“HF wins!” declared the match official, ordered to continue tracking until the bout timed out for points – purely a decision for show, Z losing the moment he exited the group interface.

“Log it!” called The Cripple. “However, as with all proper duels, ours is to the death. As I was saying, Z, our occupations are categorically different. The dialectics of material that you peddle in, mockingly or not, are juvenile compared to mine. You are a child twelve thousand years after my departure, squabbling with your cousins over the distribution of a skeleton. Know that there is much in those bones you young ones fail to see. Before the vultures stripped the flesh, those left and right hands that you're tugging at weren’t always labelled Theft and Property. I, your ancestor in crime and law, wielded these inheritances in their more primaeval forms, as Death and Life, as Destruction and Creation. To one versed in these older names, 'Theft' becomes a minor whisper. Pinch a tool or two, my boy; it will not lighten grandpa's pocket. They've dug me up from pre-historic days, when men were first inspired to the infinity scam of labour, disassembling a poverty of fields, instruments, and people, and forging their worthless pieces back into the thousand, thousand, thousands of the present whose abundance feeds your parasite existence.”

"Bravissimo!" Z clapped, a genuine fan of the kid’s villain monologues. “Then, in your magnanimity as not a hoarder nor a landlord but…but a creator of wealth, the subtle distinction now made manifest, may I humbly beseech a donation of a dagger? A memento to remember this lesson by!”

The burglar donned his widest, most ingratiating grin. The Cripple mirrored the lovable rogue’s expression.

“I’ll give you a dagger."

Z, fighting in the open, lasted seven seconds. In an act of cruel and unusual symbolism, both his thieving mittens were amputated by a scimitar.

While bleeding from his stumps, he fought a sequence longer, swinging a sword clenched between his teeth. He did this on the off chance of divine assistance. But Karnon never intervened again. His opponent embraced his staggering body from behind and slapped the helmet from his head, the straps severed. The thief—with a caress of his chin to reangle, with a prick beneath the jaw—received his promised dagger, its point infiltrating up into his midbrain.

Immediately post-death, Z puzzled over the lack of further intervention from the God and wondered where he'd misplayed. The Cripple, strolling beneath his departing soul, answered that query like a narrator tying together the loose threads of a rushed episode. The main swindle had been granted: the arrangement of this early match. Z, a thief, not a duellist, had over-fixated on his mark at the neglect of his competitors. The Class and pet selection for his getaway scheme were essentially self-handicaps. These were beyond a non-duellist with his minor talents to compensate, and he would, in the goofiest of endings, have failed to qualify for tomorrow, eliminated via noob. It was thus only with a trickster's meddling that a reunion had been possible.

Due to the same poverty of skills, this match had been the thief’s one shot to swipe, the audience now waving sayonara to Kimura-san and bird. As for the moral lesson pondered during their farewell bows, each of The Cripple’s duels containing at least one, today’s had not been an injunction against crime but an encouragement. ‘Never Change for Others; Always Be Your Authentic Stealth’. In the end, victory had gone to the duellist who hadn’t altered his superior mastery of the shadows against a pissweak, trivial-to-scam non-rival.

Z, seething at the closing insult, dismissed the rest as trashtalk. However, the embarrassing prophecy would prove correct. The burglar continued through the tournament hoping for a rematch, but—between the other hidden veterans and a horde of newbie savants—he bombed his run with 6 losses out of 20 rounds.