In the sleepy wake of the preliminary’s last match.

And so the tourney’s opening half concluded. The competitors logged out to rest, the majority until next season as the massive hand of contest sifted through their millions and emerged with a few prize grains still sticking to its palmlines. Fans and commentators also went to bed, dozing off to updates and arguments about predictions for tomorrow’s silver medals.

Deserted by these patrons for the night, most of the stadiums around the zone entered hibernation, too, their lights shut off, their stragglers ejected. The New Suchi Arena, however, remained an exception of activity. Through its gates, an army of builders were funnelling. With spades, hammers, and supply wagons, they arrived to enact upon the venue a climactic makeover.

Ah, The New Suchi Arena, what spectacular undertakings had been hosted in it since its completion a mere fortnight earlier! Its oversized, horizon-blocking walls had held The Tyrant of Saana's week of covert duelling training, his week-long duelling workshop. They'd held also his debut public death—how humiliating—and his reincarnation from this humiliation on the weekend stomping everyone.

And now this colossal stadium, anointed with eternal prestige by the spilt blood of this revolutionary god of the arena, was to be destroyed. On his orders. While poorer folk might protest and cling to such an expensive construct, The Tyrant no doubt snoozed upon his bed of gem-brocaded silk. The stadium's function to him had been served, the training that he’d wished from it finished, and thus he would coldly dispatch of it as he had so many other redundant things that could no longer benefit him. It was quite useless for tomorrow's finale, the venue, peculiarly, having had an anti-spectator design with seating for only a couple thousand in one corner, so that event would be held elsewhere, at a stadium commissioned by Alex Wong.

The demolition could not be delayed even for an hour. It was only the forerunner in a schedule of rushed jobs, as the region's handymen would henceforth race to strip the festival's developments before the month's end. Anything unremoved at that time would be consumed when the firestorms of The Cleansing washed on through.

As for the destiny of its broken-down material beyond The Cleansing, this had been a mystery since its walls were first erected, a sub-mystery beneath the greater puzzle of stationing the planet’s largest stadium in a slum. Initial rumours had been varied. Maybe the anonymous client planned to float its segments in the bay? Maybe The Empire, beholden to no laws, would've stolen it? Any conjecture, however, had ultimately been expunged like the local leadership by the unmasking of the owner. The Tyrant, almighty, all-wealthy, had options where others did not. His lumber could be dumped on Suchi’s autonomous West Bank, where he’d bought a high-price plot of land exempted from The Church’s arsony. From there, since the arena wouldn’t be rebuilt, its stores would be gradually recycled into local projects like the upgrading of shacks.

Thus, as the players left, the labourers of The Slums set upon the dying stadium, pouring through its gates like carrion beetles through a corpse's yawning mouth, eager to salvage its components before their wasteful destruction by the elements.

Half a kilometre from the entrance, one crew of ten were munching and slurping in the shadow of a wall segment they’d soon dismantle. With one communal bowl of Kozosseg stew between them, they sat on carpets amidst a medley of staples prepared by their Shackwives - millet bread, rice cakes, dried sardines, etc. These, they passed around for dipping in the stew. Through the comingling flavours of their heritage, the strangers amongst them introduced themselves. Most carried out this nomadic custom despite no real appetite, their hunger impaired by a quiet mood of apocalypse.

Not helping the atmosphere was one crewmember, an older-looking gentleman, who hovered afar at an antisocial distance. Panting in the heat despite his clothing’s cooling magic, he seemed ill. His muscles had shrivelled against a bulky frame designed for more. His skin, raisin-dried by the sun but still of pale complexion, was tattooed with scars. Like many sick folk, a permanent irritation creased his brow, hinting at a suppressed desire to curse the healthy.

“Father-Son of Mindobelli!” shouted an eating crewmate, a No’Are elder whose sun-bleached eyes identified the foreign loner’s race by complexion and scars – the Kolonians, fanatical crusaders, left injuries partially unhealed as a badge of honour. “Provisions or not, dear sir, you're most welcome to partake with our humble lot. A simpleton condemns the driftwood for its lack of supplies, while a sage contemplates its form and purpose. How might we slot you in our shack? And can you be tucked incognito in a sleeve?”

The Kolonian, deepening his frown, did not laugh at the humour, nor did he swear at the insult about poverty. They’d assumed him too pretentious to sit down with them.

“She warned me,” he replied, “that I’d be incourteous to bring no lunch again. I disagreed…but…well, here you go: my courtesy.”

Without taking one step of approach, he remotely summoned a block of Neeshifite cheddar to land amidst the crew. It’d been cured by a native mistress, he explained, who’d moved into his house on the West Bank almost as soon as he’d stepped ashore with The Company’s shipped-in workforce. He would not partake of it, the food tasting like a rancid dog carcass to him.

One of the crewmen nibbling the cheese became indignant. “You ungrateful gizzard! Did you grow up suckling the milk of a queen? Send that lass my way. I’ll fit her in my kitchen.”

Another taking a bite agreed. “Or to me. Don’t even need to see a portrait, my grey-haired friend.”

The Kolonian grumbled, exhausted at re-explaining himself at every job. “It tastes like a rancid dog carcass to me. Everything does. This tongue of mine,” he flicked it from his mouth in an odd, reptilian fashion, “it has been…altered by an acquaintance with the Sally Worm.”

Since none listening were versed in exotic rainforest diseases, the foreign elder then had to recount its details. It'd been acquired while on religious duty in Yamalai, where his people fought a thousand-year struggle to eradicate the scourge of the Abhayans, another southern pestilence. Dwelling in the jungles bordering their feud, The Three-Eyed Salamander Worm was an obligatory multiparasite whose reproductive cycle alternated between humans and monstrous salamanders, each species picking up the infestation through the consumption of the other’s tainted meat. In a demonic effect to assist communication, the worm manipulated the flavour profile of both hosts. It did so through a two-fold augmentation. Firstly, preferring to be eaten by a pre-infected secondary host for cross-colony reproduction, the worm spoiled the host’s flesh and organs, giving their meat an unpleasant stench. Secondly, it warped a host’s tastebuds to promote eating nothing but the spoiled meat, regular food inverted to acquire a mistaken rancidity. The pairing of these manipulations combined into a state of hyper-intensive mutual predation, infested hosts hungering exclusively for each other.

An apprentice engineer in the crew, continuing a blissful stuffing of the Kolonian’s cheddar, pointed at the fault in this disease’s design. “Where's the sustainability, venerable one? The bilateral hunting should culminate in a rapid extinction.”

“Aye, the worm should go extinct,” said the Kolonian, whose gaze during the telling had taken on a look of distance and confusion and alarm, as if he were peering once again into the tangles of the jungle dark. “Therein lies what might be called the genius of the parasite or the madness of their incubators. You see, both host species, the Sallies and the pygmies it natively infects, are pack animals. In the Sally case, the strongest of the pack, the chief Sally, has the first right of pickings and infestation from a hunt. In the triumph of his victory, he slithers through a paralysed tribe, sampling a bite of each pygmy, devouring those that tantalise his palate, and discarding the rest to his inferiors. Thereby, they, the uninfected, maintain access to the varied and more sustainable diets of lesser hunts; simultaneously, as a consequence of their subordination, they’re fixed in the general realm of the infected humans by their chief’s worm-bloated obstinance. Yet, one would err to say the weaklings are bound by the mighty glutton's rule. Observing the ferocity after he perishes with which his successors compete for a tainted pygmy, it seems that each pack member harbours in its primaeval soul a mysterious longing for the worm well preceding its incorporation.

"As for the pygmy packs, they are in many respects indistinguishable. They replicate the Sally habits right down to the live sampling – a directive of the worm, no doubt. The sole difference—and I’m not so sure there is a difference—is that the pygmies, bestowed a power of communication approaching the human, cultivate the infection amongst themselves with voluntary consciousness. From the day of their initiatory hunt, every child pygmy, boy and girl, is fascinated by the chief’s preference for the tainted meat. They learn in time to associate power with the stomach for and the privilege of filth. In them, mankind's universal quest for ascendancy attaches to the prospect of one day being gifted an adult's share of the spoiled flesh or, better, ripping it from their chief’s fingers and discovering for themselves the hidden delight in the banquet of contamination. ‘Uka Laq’unakan Duenyopa’, ‘Possessor of The Worm’ - this is the pygmy’s most sacred title, spoken with envy and salivation. And I'd wager, if we could decipher the hisses of the Sallies, their appellation of honour would ring with an identical...famish.”

After many retellings and countless more untold reflections, the Kolonian had a sudden epiphany as the truth coagulated from the jungle murk.

“I glimpse," he concluded, "beyond the last of the knotted vines. In these ideas of ‘difference’ and ‘identical’, I’ve clung too long to the false assumption of a separation. Salamander and pygmy may inhabit a different species form, yes, but they constitute a single organism, conjoined in one affliction by a three-eyed parasite. And..." He began to stumble with the entanglements beyond the worm. "...and it is, perhaps, not only them who share the unity of mutual infestation…but...but...but......but all?”

In the wanderings of his diseased mind, the Kolonian neglected to explain the origins of his case. His own infection stemmed from an Abhayan labour camp, to which he’d been sentenced after capture in the southern wars. Prisoners with skills too valuable to execute were enslaved using the worm’s nutritional dependency.

Eventually, the old man was returned to the present by the horror of the other labourers, shrinking back from him, contemplating whether to notify a supervisor of the plague-bearer amongst them.

"Be calm, you healthy ones,” he said. “Our ever-diligent employers have certified my cleansing of the worm, living and in egg. It is just this tongue that can’t forget her yet. Until my liberation from the aftertaste, The Company supplies me with a daily ration.” He produced a sealed package of salamander steaks, stamped with the logo of Flaming Sun’s medical division. “It is dosed with what they claim—and what I am accepting—to be an Alchemical synthetic reproducing the insidious taste.”

Without such a method, it would have to be farmed by feeding salamanders humans.

Upon a demonstrative opening of the package, a malodorous scent wafted towards the dining crew. It smelled as the Kolonian’s yellow-tinged flesh now appeared, like a well-decayed cadaver drenched in honey.

Despite his guarantee of safety, the team re-evaluated the sick man’s distance from their communal soup, and they found the separation appropriate. There were also no further takers of his mistress’s cheese besides their engineer, still chewing through the worm’s mechanics.

The Kolonian, sane enough to perceive the ostracism, encouraged it. Proximity carried the danger of picking up the details omitted from his story.

A modular design made the demolition breezy. The stadium’s wall consisted of semi-regular segments whose differences only took a few minutes to adapt to. Everything was schematised by The Company's nerds, down to the dumping process, every plank laid out in a pre-mapped grid for an orderly pickup by the transport crews.

Throughout, the labourers exercised as much gentleness as the schedule allowed. Nails were wriggled out like teeth from children’s gums, and the planks telekinetically removed landed softly in the dirt as on a cushioned bed of wool.

This special treatment reflected the extreme value of the material in The Slums arising from much of it being imported.

Resources from Suchi’s own mines and forests had less utility for the Sandfolk because The Church classified them as extensions of the land’s sacred bloodclay. A craftsman, at a fair price, could work and shape them but, critically, removal via export was forbidden. This limitation, paired with the Sandfolk’s migratory obligations, meant that all builds of local fabrication were essentially rented, refunded after a year to the soil as ash.

The Sandfolk’s ‘permanent’ supply, i.e. that which sourced their clothes and caravans, thus had to be acquired externally. It was purchased in prosperous times from foreign traders, harvested from driftwood in leaner times washed up from Chayoka, and logged in desperate times from the Imbahalaala-infested jungles east of Sokgyemant. To extend the life of the resources obtained through these difficult measures, the Sandfolk had become expert rehabilitators. Each plank would be recycled through a carousel of lives: in a cart, a stall, a cabinet, a cutting board, a patch in a shack.

In light of this scavenging, the imported carcass of this stadium represented an infusion of unfathomable wealth. Whatever extra tenderness the crews gave it now would prolong it, staving off its eventual disintegration by decades or centuries.

The crew with the worm-bearer had been gradually peeling away the wooden curtain, unveiling more and more of the peripheral lawlessness it’d held at bay. In their sector, the outside land stretched barren, unhealthy tufts of grass sprouting from the wheeltrack scars of plots recently abandoned. Those were left by the merchants who'd hawked commerce with the trainees and who'd already carted off their businesses.

The job’s simplicity minimised blunders, and what occurred sprang mostly from nerves and distraction. These nerves, though enhanced by the creepy ramblings of one member, had preceded it. Unlike the ever-cheerful Offworlders, they could not afford to be blasé about the series of disasters pursuing The Tyrant through his tournament. In this very stadium, a few days ago, several hundred folk had perished in his battle against a master elementalist. Many workers, stepping around the stains left by that massacre, shivered with trepidation, wondering if they might not also become a casualty in Karnon’s next amusing caper.

These fears had caused several members to quit already. Yet with their teams also being modular, replacements were slotted in without a fuss.

A driver in their hauling team was returning with an empty donkey wagon to their section, where the rest of the crew clung to the wall, some at its base, others halfway up its towering face. The assistant jostling on the back of his cart was another stranger.

"Gus, too?!" cried an abseiling carpenter from above. "Fucking hell. You think you know a guy for twenty years, but then you find out he's actually a little girl."

The driver shrugged. "'Is woman nipped 'is balls, she did. Usual hysterics. Said if The Azure One didn't send 'im off in a tornado, she would ‘erself. Out of 'er blanket, out of 'er shack, she did threaten to blow our Gus."

"I wish my bitch had that level of loyalty!" the carpenter cackled. "Get this: she told me she's praying Karnon will smite me twice for a double payout. No joke. After the insurers visit her, she'd probably waste the gold shipping off to Togavi as an honorary citizen. Thank you, Blessed Lord Of Laughs!"

A rigman handling the ropes from which the carpenter dangled had an epiphany. “That is true. Really. It would be…would be a blessing.”

“If you’re desperate, you might arrange a mishap without divine assistance,” whispered the newcomer hopping off the wagon, a mixed fellow with a tinge of Ibangua crimson in his features. “There are…services.”

This alluded to rumours that some labourers keen on insurance payouts had been hiring gangs to fake their deaths or even whack them for real. True or not, the claims were unverifiable in a shithole like The Slums. Here, everyone had enemies and assassinations happened multiple times an hour.

“Why seek these 'services'?” scoffed the No'Are elder from before, moving across the structure’s face with a metal rod imbued with a magnetic energy that stripped nearby nails. "You sealed your fate the moment you placed your family's destiny in another man's dubious benevolence. Haven't you learned a thing from this age of carouselling saints? Yesterday, we relied on the promises of one saviour. Today, we attend another’s while the former lurks in the alleyways, feasting on our orphaned innocence. Mark my words, tomorrow, we'll be hearing sermons from yet another saviour as this one vanishes to Nerin-knows-where - perhaps feasting on the Gods. For we impious ones, our salvation resides not in the lofty promises of cannibals but here." He slapped a forearm, muscular and knotty from decades of gruelling toil. “Your own strength, your own ability to tolerate hard labour – that's the only holy institution you should trust. Leave charity to the so-called saints and their wayward herd.”

A silence followed, none of the labourers refuting the elder. Many of the team were bankruptcies who had invested in Ramiro’s monetary system before its collapse. Trusting in The Tyrant could turn out similarly.

At the wall's base, the sickly Kolonian had been sitting cross-legged on a cushion with a palm against a rune formation glowing on the timber before him. His whole body shone, minuscule saws and hammers in continual exchange between him and the wall. Closed eyes envisioned the structure’s arcane skeleton.

He was employing engineering magic learned during his crusade. He'd tapped psychically into an in-laid runic anchor system. With this activated, he could stabilise the unravelling structure so it didn’t collapse during the removal of fastenings. He would also telekinetically float off chunks before the assistant engineer dismantled them further.

Listening to the crew's chatter from not only a physical distance but a mental one, he couldn't resist chiming in.

“Yet how does Nerin’s herd survive?” He paused, recollecting himself. “Your Nerin’s herd, where the prairie sprouts, they nibble. Where the mudholes swell, they drink. Much wisdom is there in this blend of opportunism and mobility. Fatten yourself in the comfortable seasons, and then move quickly to the next.”

His original point regarding the insurance fraud had been quite different.

The No’Are with his rod gave a nod of half agreement. “Such, indeed, is the profound wisdom of her goats, to discern when to feast and when to make a discreet exit.” Then, switching to a local language from The Company’s lingua franca, the elder addressed his compatriots, gesturing at the whole stadium unravelling to avoid the impending inferno, at the atmosphere of apocalypse. “Pay no heed to this senile, wormy hyena, lapping at our river from his kennel on the western bank. For we of the sand, this season is passing. As we prepare to migrate, let us not forget the essential virtue of keeping our bellies light. A sip, you may enjoy from the mudhole of this day's saint, but do not guzzle, for that sloshing load will spell your downfall, just as it shall for this decrepit curr when the fire’s spread consumes him.”

The sickly Kolonian—pretending not to understand—absorbed these insults without either a frown or smirk.