The demolition spanned several days.

The Kolonian elder with the worm backstory shuffled on alone between crews, yesterday's characters already forgotten. Whereas the locals went home between their shifts, he slept in an on-site barracks. There, he'd been graciously assigned a room for himself after several complaints. Regular meals were couriered in from his mistress in the West Bank, with whom he conversed via Communication Stone about the latest decorations of their house. Her cooking, he let the various crews take without touching them. He meanwhile saved them from the putrescence of his salamander rations by climbing up the wall.

That spot from up high offered him a pristine view of the savannah reaching for Suchi’s unobstructed skyline. Whenever the Kolonian ate, he would gaze out nostalgically, hearing the creaking wheels of salvaged carts, feeling the muscles of his legs grow sore and heavy, tasting the sugary sweetness of thirst-enchanted waters, quivering at the lumbering colossi, tall as mountains, being lured off from the horde by their courageous wranglers.

Despite the foreign act he'd been putting on, he was, in truth, a fellow Slumdweller. The Kolonians were an international race, distributed throughout the savannahs of Kanaru and the jungle frontier of Yamalai, both of which they’d ruled until five centuries ago. That wasn't to say his time with the worm had been a lie. In his alley-crawling youth, he'd been a bit of a ratbag, which had eventually resulted in him shipping off on crusade to escape the troubles he'd stirred, replacing one danger with another. As for his return to Suchi, he’d taken up an offer of repatriation by The Company, who, after their seizure of The Empire, were resettling former exiles in exchange for loyalty and labour. Few after getting out of this dump would’ve accepted the deal, afraid as they’d be of outstanding reprisals or unwilling to forsake their cosier life abroad. For himself, however, well, let's just say he'd faced things that made these worries negligible.

Now and then, driven by nostalgia, he left the site to roam The Slums, inspecting the transformations of the Offworlder regimes. This was not advised for repatriates, especially those like himself who'd declined to undergo transmogrification - a Kolonian would never trust the procedure's gruesome bloodmagic. But he wasn't greatly concerned, since time and other things had made him physically unrecognisable.

A foreigner touring The Slums would perceive raw anarchy in its topography, the Sandfolk sections never fixed between Cleansings as alliances disintegrated and shuffled locations. But, for one born into this place of endless instability, each quarter had its distinctive characteristics. The Kolonian district, his home, was distinguished by yards strewn with finger-sized statuettes in the likeness of their thousand-god pantheon, by the moos of milkcows and the tink-tink-tink of smiths producing weapons for crusaders.

During a trip to this home, he crossed paths with a second cousin, carrying a chubby baby girl and followed by two sandal-wearing youngsters. Surprisingly, she recognised him at once through his physical wastage.

They whispered down an alleyway. Clearing up the assumption that he’d gotten killed, he simplified the past decade, saying that he’d fled the troubles by enlisting in the Sacred Scouts Corps. His cousin in turn gave him updates on the evolution of The Slums, the fracture and formation of alliances, the many births and marriages and deaths.

There were many deaths. His mother—technically a second aunt—was killed in a mugging. The birth mother that’d abandoned him had, fittingly, succumbed to a plague. Four of his six siblings were dead, too, while three extra younger brothers—unknown to him—had perished in a united push by the Kolonians and Aionians from Suchi’s in-land mines to their more favourable current location near the ports. As for his gang, they’d been wiped out in a raid, and the rivals who’d done them in had subsequently been massacred by King Ramiro’s mobs.

For livelier news, his old girlfriend had survived. However, his cousin apologised, his timing could not have been less fortunate. After many years single, she’d just relocated to the WBAE after marrying a foreigner.

The Kolonian—receiving all of this without surprise—made no mention of him being that foreigner. Through a lie of omission, he portrayed his visit as a temporary deal, allowing his cousin to assume, like most of the skilled labour shipped in for the festival, he’d eventually ship out. The question of him returning to The Slums was never asked, being neither a desire nor a possibility, even with his pursuers deceased.

Fascinatingly, she'd gotten married to an Enuchiban merchant. This astonished him. The scorpion fuckers of the northern desert, like the Abhayans, were active worshippers of The All-Mother. The erasure of this Goddess’s religion had been the Kolonian’s founding story, the holy wars triggering when the Cosmos-Scryers identified her as this Cycle’s 7th and latest reincarnation of The Eternal One, the hermaphrodite form succeeding King Jazeer’s Nameless Bane, The Deathless One, and The Redeemer, who’d purged all terrestrial record of the three most ancient avatars. Times during his absence had really changed if a woman could walk safely in public with a heretic’s half-brood.

“Must be a handsome lad!” he complimented her husband while stooping to examine her kids. “They’re not as grotesque as the usual desert stock! No demon wings, though there's time still to grow those in."

Despite the forwardness of these jokes, he did show some hesitancy, not playfighting with them as a Kolonian uncle normally would.

That hesitancy, however, wasn't due to any prejudice. While he had done in his share of Enuchibans, it’d been without the usual religious malice. His main reason for initiating in a gang had been a rebellion against the draft, and those seeds of disbelief had only been watered further by crusading in Yamalai. Down in the rain-doused frontier, he’d wrestled with many people and many animals but no gods. Their two race’s religions, like the salamanders and the pygmies united by a worm, struck him as sides of the same absurd coin. The one’s worship and the other’s hatred might’ve been manifestations of a single all-preposterous veneration for a dead god, their organs yet to fully purge the toxins from her parasitic reign.

Throughout their conversation, he could detect his cousin’s silent terror at his appearance, an inability to reconcile his dwindled state with the titan of their youth.

Most crewmates had been addressing him as an elder, misjudging him from his haggardness to be in his 50s. He was, though, only 35, at the launching point for what should’ve been his silver crusade, when his race's men disembarked again after receiving a first wife and children in reward for military merits. The mixup was especially unflattering because Slumdwellers, between the sun and the chronic famines, already had a reduced longevity. '50s’ thus translated to terminally ill. They looked upon him as one who'd not survive another migration, who'd very soon—in the Kolonian mythology—be advancing to the 'cosmic crusade', joining the immortal dead stalling The Eternal One’s next revival.

His cousin's reaction to his current state reminded him of the different terror with which they’d once looked at him, a terror of intimidation. A ‘hard man’ had been the most positive description of him by his kin, and even this was stated with a complicated quiver in the voice and eyes. Yet, now, this hard man incited merely pity.

The Kolonian, apologising for remittances unsent, apologising for everything, transferred her some of the profits of a Yamalai plantation, along with a request to dole it out at her discretion – or not. This gift instantly restored her estimation of him. The sum was of a quantity that, by the narrow local conception, could cure any rare ailment, whether diseased health or diseased reputation.

This charity raised his own spirits as the cousin departed with a lighter step and her children scampered sandal-footed on her trail. However small the effect, he hoped some portion of his soul would circulate through them like the pieces of the salvaged stadium, the labour minted in his coin translating into proper steel footwear and the potential for survival.

On his third day on the job, the Kolonian signed up for a crew already recycling the salvage. With four hundred timber-laden donkey wagons, with a Chayokan brigade, they travelled through the sleepless festival outside, transporting a fraction of the main stage of the tourney’s opening half to the main stage of its second.

His destination was the stadium where The Tyrant’s fifteen tournaments were scheduled. Last-minute repairs were needed on the site after it’d been assaulted by a random blizzard and a colony of acid-spitting frogs. There were fears of a third disaster, but many signed up anyway because of The Tyrant’s generosity. Hazard pay—and insurance pay—had been quadrupled.

The stadium had an unaesthetic ovoid shape. From afar, it looked like two flat-bottomed serving bowls, one placed upside down atop the other to seal the dish inside from interested bugs. A pie slice had been carved out of its northern slopes. The resulting gap exposed a view of the stage to a field for surplus fans who couldn’t squeeze into the venue. From this clearing, thick clouds of smoke and ash were presently fuming, teams of mages roaming through a repetition sweep to incinerate millions of dead frogs floating in puddles of blizzard melt.

The stadium’s interior was an architectural nightmare unimaginable to any but the impervious genius of an Offworlder. To amplify capacity, its seats extended not only to the rafters but along them. Rows of benches scaled the roof of the stadium’s inverted bowl in a mirror of the one below. Issues of viewing angle and gravity were solved by rope harnesses. Where the bowl flattened out, a dense network of walkways let the vertigo-immune watch from above.

To minimise this safety hazard’s weight, lighter wood had been employed. This choice created another hazard of fragility. When the Kolonian entered, pillars of sunlight were shining through several gaping rectangles of sky above. Around them, patch-up crews dangled from harnesses. The timber of these sections, corroded by acid, lay in piles on the ground roughly where they’d landed. Everything dripped. The mess of dead frogs—killed by less destructive means like arrows—was being cleaned up by a drove of pigs. These gluttons were assisted by monsters controlled by an on-site army of Chayokans and Company Offworlders. Throughout, cougars and lions sprang along the bottom half of the seating, and darting birds scoured the ceiling, flinging down the frogs for the oinking hogs beneath.

Some of the fallen rubble sprinkled the roof of a glass dome sheltering the stadium’s single battleground. Notably, there’d been no damage, the structure’s panes of an anomalous durability. As a glass construction, it was doubly strange, the material high up in the Clayfolk’s contraband. A supervisor welcoming the Kolonian's crew answered the mystery. The dome had been manufactured by the holiest of holy fingers, Pope Berbahaya shaping it himself in gratitude for The Company’s alliance. Thanks to this most sacred of gifts, The Tyrant could flaunt his art without concern of interference.

It took the Kolonian all his willpower not to spit on it.

As he set to work, many rounds of passed-on Kozosseg and parasite reminiscences followed. Flitting job to job, crew to crew, he did his minor part in the conversion of the old stadium. Its corpse became replacement benches, extensions for the field’s gates, bodegas stocking beer, projector frames for spectators too distant from the arena, and skeletons for spares of spare battlegrounds.

He was still labouring when the Offworlders began arriving for the tourney’s second half.

They scuttled in, dense and numerous as the crab spawn of The Uxaxa Archipelago in its thunder season. This human swarm—not clicking after a deshelling of its armour at the gates—settled on the field in camps with picnic gear and sun umbrellas. They climbed the stands to occupy the seats his crew were reinstalling. They crawled up into the precarious walkways of the ceiling, from which some youngsters leapt into safety nets beneath before the wardens growled them.

Thousands poured in thus, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, a noisy, banner-waving, face-painted horde permeating several kilometres yet still continuing to swell and swell.

Their numbers deeply unsettled the Kolonian. In his experience, a gathering of this bulk and excitability prognosticated only misery and bloodshed. However, he—and the mob—were kept sedated till the scheduled bloodshed by an orchestra playing tranquilising harmonies, by the distribution of concessions laced with tranquilising magic.

The day was officially commenced by the more personable of The Company’s twin leaders. CEO of Flaming Sun, Alex Wong, had volunteered for a dual role as master of ceremony along with competing.

Playing up the angle of succeeding his retiring partner, he arrived in a regal procession. The crowd were divided by marching troops and blustering trumpeteers. Atop a tamed rhinoceros encased in platinum armour, he rode in, an emperor bedecked in the plundered artefacts of his guild’s campaigns. Using those items, he’d breezed into the finale of several gear-unrestricted categories.

Welcomed on the stage by a choir of hymn-singing children, he gave a speech outlining the day’s fifteen-tournament itinerary. In his benevolence as their new uncontested global dictator, he’d personally modified the schedule to maximise the audience’s pleasure.

First, many were nursing hangovers - and by many, he meant himself. They'd thus start slow with the least popular categories, the trio half-squad and duos, running each through their Rookie, Standard, and Open-Gear sub-tournaments. (Three 3s and 2s, in pure coincidence, he’d not entered.) Next would come the 50v50s, in which a commander of some note would flex in miniature his once-famed expertise - CEO Wong here hinted at preparations of a secret counter weapon to ruin that. Penultimately—and the original concluding format—would be the 6v6, a test against the current best of Saana League’s professional squads. And last of all, elevated to the end by recent revolutions in technique, they’d finish with the highest, hype-est battles of the duels. (The final act of this and therefore the whole tournament, in another astonishing coincidence, would likely be CEO Wong himself, who’d used his artefacts to rank number two in yesterday’s Open 1v1s .)

As for his second dictatorial kindness, he’d solved the issue of competitors disheartened by staring up the bracket at their spoiler in the shadows. Between each stage, pairings would be selected at random. Moreover, to save the premature departure of their favourites, he would—inspired by the flexible, participatory, DIY democracy of Suchi’s homegrown events—exempt in every draw ‘A Champion of The People’. Through audience vote, one would be bestowed immunity from matching with the instant loss competitor. (Author's Note: this is not a set-up for participatory reader voting. He's just rigging things in his favour.) Of course, if the community ordained to pick himself, he would discount the venue’s jacked-up liquor until the next vote.

Thus, in an act of shameless despotism, CEO Wong placed his desire for the spotlight above the tournament’s integrity and all but guaranteed his progress to several grand finales.

The Kolonian, searching throughout this silly speech, caught the less showy arrival of The Company’s true leader. In the arena’s glass dome, a row of benches had slowly filled out with the gathering rookie trios. From various private boxes spread about the stadium, they were ushered through the crowd protected by retinues of smileless guards. The two members of The Tyrant’s group came without him, inciting much conjecture. But, three minutes before the selection lottery, He turned up. Saana’s little emperor solidified in an empty seat from out a gust of wind and laughed flatly at his puppet leader’s meddling - he didn't seem particularly attached to the tournament's integrity either.

Although there was nothing remarkable about The Tyrant's appearance, the Kolonian found himself gawking as most did on their first glimpse of him in the human flesh. In a way, the mundanity made it harder not to stare. One felt compelled to search his ordinary features for the visible signs that should've connected him to his larger, global body, for the thousands of gigantic limbs sprouting to control this stadium and the previous stadium, the Trading Posts, the medical laboratories, the salamander farms, the navies, the armies, the colonies, the conflagrated cities, the decimated fronts. Yet, the eye revealed no trace whatsoever.

CEO Wong blew his comrade’s cover by thrusting a finger and requesting a million cheers for yesterday’s dominant performer. The rabble in the stands, and the rabble on the field, answered with torrential boos, aggravated as they were by never witnessing the performance due to the censorship of matches. Their aggravation grew when The Tyrant, smirking at a cameraman filming in his face, pretended to count the number of tournament victories ahead with his fingers and then, finding his hands inadequate to cover all of them, lifted a shoeless foot.

Before a riot broke out, CEO Wong calmed everyone with assurances. This day, he promised, in his stadium—which he formally dubbed 'The New Tyrant Arena'—wouldn’t pass so confidentially. His succession, as they’d come to learn and celebrate, would be different. His tyranny, an enlightened tyranny, would be distinguished for its democratic input and a grave respect for press freedom.

The matches were both exciting and terrifying for the Kolonian tinkering in the background. Even the amateur Offworlders exhibited skills far beyond the soldiery. Although slow learners compared to his kind, their aberrant fearlessness, their ability to brute through the trial and error of fatal injuries, allowed them to access otherwise unobtainable extremes of speed, of coordination, of precision.

When The Tyrant, the apex of these immortal aliens, finally took the stage, the orchestra reawakened with an ominous tune. Its rhythm marched and stomped like the boots of an invading legion; its strings shrieked like the conquered widows. This music—his command to stop overridden by CEO Wong—accompanied him through his first blowout and through the subsequent blowouts. His team slaughtered the rookie competition, no opponent getting close to achieving contact with him as he slinked about the backlines in a stealth-healing role.

By his third round, the teenage emperor gave up the show of humility and false resistance. With a resigned humour, he examined the score before each match and began to synchronise his team’s movements, retreating in the adagios, massacring in the crescendos. Head after rookie head thus rolled with the roll of the drums.

Spectators and analysts began debating. Was this musicality another innovation like A Thousand Tools? Had The Tyrant tapped into the next-level future of the 3v3, which would incorporate a backup band as a strategical, tempo-setting third party?

The Kolonian—cobbling together replacement projector stands in the venue's backrooms—found this chatter funny. The extra rigidity impaired efficiency, and if The Tyrant could execute this stunt, it was due to the titanic gap between him and these infants.

He gave that assessment with complete confidence, for the half-squad had been his primary unit down in the jungles.

Because of that history, whenever the time came to vote for exemptions, he gave his support to a middle-of-the-pack team, who’d mirrored his own squad’s composition. They were a brother trio, two Cutthroat twins and an older sibling Earthfriend. The similarity stopped with Class, however. The Offworlder group, employing a fast-paced ambush style, seemed to be applicants for The Company’s assassination division. The Kolonian in comparison—as one might glean from his current occupation—had never been a direct combatant, at least not in Yamalai. His speciality had been infiltration sapping. His team all having a blend of Construction skills and invisibility, they would sneak along the frontlines, laying traps, undermining defences, restoring the bunkers of besieged allies.

Direct combat or not, it’d still been a dangerous business. The cast had shifted almost as quickly as with these Company oddjobs. Of the last configuration, the other two were gone. His fellow Cutthroat engineer got done in during their capture. Their Earthfriend medic, a vegetarian as many in the tradition were, did himself in after entering the camp out of abhorrence for the worm.

The assassination trio surprisingly reached the finale. Their Earthfriend leader, their mastermind, apparently exceeded his preliminary performance by utilising the foreknowledge of opponent pairings to customise several novel counter-openers. Most spectacularly, they pulled off an ambush in the cover-less Sand arena - the Earthfriend tanked for the twins while they stealthed, then he worked his own dastardly slip mid-melee.

Their run was very impressive. But, when they met the music of the maestro, the squadmates that he guided sniffed the invisible brothers out like the hounds of an Abhayan slaver. In their third round, the Cutthroat twins stepped out of the arena at the beginning. The older sibling—staying in and admitting his defeat with an Offworlder’s eccentricity—requested a 1v1 to the death.

"There'd be no greater honour," the young lad shouted across the ring, "than to choke on the shadow crusader's beautiful garotte!"

The Tyrant, in his benevolence, obliged. The challenger was finished in two minutes, a Silverback shapeshifting from behind him and snapping his neck between a flexed gorilla bicep.

A winner’s podium after switched the second place to the highest point of elevation. As the crowd chuckled, the stealth trio stood on it with embarrassment, torn between the insistence of the master of ceremony and the presence of the winner beside them. Their shyness, however, dissipated when they were awarded their silver medal, along with a deed to a tropical island. These were given to them by none other than The Company’s CHDO, its ‘Chief Human Dispatchment Officer’. With a wink of approval—and admission—from this sinister figure, the brothers beamed with jubilation.

As for the shadow crusader, who’d won with his gold a two-storey-tall portrait of CEO Wong, he responded to both the comedy and the glory with a flat, distracted shrug. His mind, it seemed, had flown elsewhere. Already, he concentrated on the higher fights beyond.